DID LAWRENCE HAVE NIETZSCHE IN HIS POCKET?

This is a corrected version of Marylyn Valentine's article on Nietzsche and Lawrence first published in Rananim Issue No11, Vol 1, 2003, in which the endnote numbers were omitted from the text during the editing process.

 

There was a writer, who was also a poet and philosopher. He believed the rainbow was a symbol for a new era; the intuitive life the clue to wholeness. Childless, he had at one time wanted to marry a girl called Lou. He envisaged a utopian community of friends living together. Teaching was his profession until ill health forced his resignation. His health problems, which stemmed from childhood, led him to seek relief in changes of climate, countries and altitude. Weird and wonderful diets, remedies and regimes were tried until his writing life ended at age forty four. The music of Wagner and Schumann were early loves; in fact he wrote music. The teaching of his religious upbringing was soon questioned but he never forgot the language of the bible. His writing is said to be repetitive, contradictory, and excessive at times. Nevertheless he sometimes likes to address the reader directly and is not always serious.

This man is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (FN); but also describes D.H.Lawrence (DHL). They were born forty years apart, Nietzsche sinking into madness in 1889 never to write again.(1)

In Rananim (Vol 5 No 3) Colin Pearce explores the characters in Kangaroo and asserts that Friedrich Nietzsche is the key to grasping the interplay between the main characters. He says that Lawrence rarely mentioned Nietzsche and 'covered up his traces.'

As well as the many fortuitous parallels between the lives of Lawrence and Nietzsche there are many similarities in their thoughts and ideas which give the feeling that perhaps Lawrence carried a slim volume of Nietzsche in his pocket. We do know that Lawrence had a very good memory. Here we will be only touching the surface of some of the influences and echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche in the work of D H Lawrence.

There were several works by Nietzsche in the library at Croydon and Lawrence mentions Nietzsche in the manuscript of 'A Modern Lover' in 1909. Around this time Jessie Chambers tells us that Lawrence subscribed to the magazine The New Age, which was edited by A R Orage who was interested in new ideas and had published a little book of extracts and explanations called Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism.

It is intriguing to imagine the meaning of the note which Lawrence made in 1910 on the back page of the manuscript of 'The Saga of Siegmund' (later The Trespasser): 'Nietzche, [sic] Lamp and cock'. The word Lamp in Lawrence's note could be referring to the significant section 125 in Nietzsche's The Gay Science where Nietzsche announces the death of God: 'the madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours ran into the market place' seeking God.

'Where has God gone?…..God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him.
How shall we, the murderers of all murderers console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us'.
The madman throws down the lantern and it smashes to pieces.
Many years after making the note Lawrence writes:

'Where is He now? Where is the Great God now? Where has he put his throne? We have lost Him. We have lost the Great God.'(2)

The significance of the word cock in Lawrence's note could also be found in The Gay Science (section 340) called The Dying Socrates. Plato at the end of Phaedo tells of the downing of the hemlock by Socrates and his last words, 'O, Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster', or translated thus: 'Will you remember to pay the debt? I owe a cock to Asclepius'. Nietzsche interprets this as meaning that Socrates wanted to thank the god of healing for curing him of his life. For Socrates the continuing life of the soul after death was the goal of life on earth. As much as Nietzsche admired Socrates' courage he was dismayed that life for Socrates was an illness; 'Socrates, Socrates suffered life!' Lawrence agreed. He wrote, 'With the coming of Socrates and "the spirit", the cosmos died. For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heaven hereafter.'(3)

In his novella The Escaped Cock, which came to be called The Man who Died, the cock becomes for Lawrence a symbol of earthly life. In the story the cock has been confined, but its zest for life enables it to break its tether and it flies into the arms of the 'man who has died', the man who has moved the stone from his tomb and emerges to gain strength and a new life. The man saw 'The short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest' … 'the bird was full of life'. We know that the story was suggested by a toy, a rooster escaping from an egg, seen in a shop window in Volterra when Lawrence was with his friend Earl Brewster. Lawrence writes that he has written a 'story of the Resurrection, where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more - so cuts out - and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven - and thanks his stars he needn't have a "mission" any more.'(4)

According to Nietzsche the Pre-Socratic philosophers represented the golden age of philosophy. As a classical philologist he had read the Greek texts and it was Heraclitus who was greatest of all. 'For the world forever needs the truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus'(5). Lawrence was also impressed by Heraclitus and his theory of the constant state of flux of all things. In July 1915 he wrote to Bertrand Russell, 'I shall write out Herakleitos on tablets of bronze'; and to Ottoline Morrell, 'I shall write all my philosophy again. Last time I came out of the Christian Camp. This time I must come out of these early Greek philosophers'.

Heraclitus was a lonely philosopher, Nietzsche thought. 'To walk alone along a lonely street is part of a philosopher's nature'. Nietzsche, also lonely, writes in the Foreword to The Anti - Christ, 'This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet'. And in Ecce Homo, 'My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously'. In a letter to Overbeck (1885) Nietzsche says, 'If a man like me sums up his deep and hidden life it is only for the eyes and conscience of the select few'. Lawrence also wrote for the few. In Fantasia of the Unconscious the Foreword says, 'The generality of readers better leave it alone….I don't intend my books for the generality of readers'. 'As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.'

Instinctive knowledge was the surest way to know the world for both men. 'I speak only of things I have experienced and do not offer events in the head.'(FN6) Of men of his day Lawrence thinks, 'all that happens to them, all their reactions, all their experiences, happen only in the head.'(DHL7)

'We are afraid of the intuition within us. We suppress the instincts and we cut off our intuitional awareness from one another and the world.'(DHL8)
'You say "I" and are proud of this word. But greater than this - although you will not believe it - is your body and its great intelligence which does not say "I" but performs "I" …..There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.'(FN9)
Lawrence and Nietzsche felt that their writing came from this deep intuitive awareness.
'The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen'… They 'are pure passionate experience.'(DHL10)
'I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.'(FN11)

Science was not to be trusted.
'A "scientific" interpretation of the world might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. It is measuring the richness of existence with "square little reason".'(FN12)
Lawrence finds 'scientists just like artists, asserting things they are mentally sure of, in fact cocksure, but about which they are much too egoistic and ranting, to be intuitively and instinctively sure.' (13)

The theme of water is then taken up: useless 'the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.'(FN14) 'H2O is not water, it is a thought experiment derived from experiments with water.'(DHL15) Lawrence often writes on this theme and his 'Introduction to These Paintings' contains a passage which science teachers have read to their classes to explain the concept of H2O and water.

'There has been only one Christian and he died on the cross', said Nietzsche who had given up his theological studies early with conflicting feelings as his beloved father (and many others in his family) had been pastors. A crisis of conscience was also experienced by Lawrence as shown in his letters to the Reverend Robert Reid. However, Lawrence never forgot the bible readings and hymns of the Congregational Chapel. E M Forster described Lawrence as the only modern novelist 'in whom song predominates, who has the rapt bardic quality'. Nietzsche's writing has the cadences of Luther's bible. He enriched the possibilities of expression in the German language.

They were both great writers and Friedrich Nietzsche was a great philosopher, something which Lawrence wanted passionately to be. In March 1915 he wrote to Bertrand Russell, 'I feel very profound about my book The Signal - Le Gai Saver - or whatever it is. It is my revolutionary utterance.' Le Gai Saber was provençal for the art of the troubadours in the early 14th century, and thus the title of Nietzsche's Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, The Gay Science. Nietzsche himself writes, 'I thought only of the gaya scienza of the troubadours - hence also the little verses'. Then in April 1915, Lawrence in a letter to Ottoline Morrell writes, 'Today I have begun again my philosophy - Morgenrot is my new name for it.' Named of course after Nietzsche's Morgenröte (Dawn).

Lawrence and Nietzsche thought that the world needed changing. The war had depressed Lawrence very much and he felt that 'the whole great form of our era will have to go'. 'There is still nothing to be "done". Probably not for many, many years will men start to "do" something.' And even then, only after they have changed gradually and deeply.'(DHL16) Nietzsche puts it more succinctly, 'If a goal for humanity is still lacking is there not still lacking - humanity itself.'(17) Sometimes they became more strident: 'I am not a man, I am dynamite……Europe will need to discover a new Siberia where it can exile the originator of these experiments in valuation.'(FN18) 'I should like to see a few decent men enlist themselves just as fighters, to bring down this old regime of dirty, dead ideas, and make a living revolution.'(DHL19)
Perhaps a better solution was to find a world of your own:
'I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony.'(DHL20)
'What about Rananim…We are going to found an Order of the Knights of Rananim. The motto is "Fier".'(DHL21)
'California or the South Seas, to live apart, away from the world, a monastery, a school - a little Hesperides of the soul and body.' (DHL22)
Nietzsche writes: 'And then we shall create a new Greek Academy ….. a monastic and artistic community. We shall love work and enjoy for each other - perhaps this is the only way we can work for the whole.'(23)

Throughout the works of Lawrence and Nietzsche, we find advice about the treatment of our neighbour:
'You love your neighbour: Immediately you run the risk of being absorbed by him; you must draw back, you must hold your own.'(DHL24)
'No person is responsible for the being of another person. Each one is starrily single, starrily self-responsible, not to be blurred or confused.'(DHL25)
Nietzsche devotes a section in Zarathustra to 'Of Love of One's Neighbour' and a verse in The Gay Science (Prelude no. 30) reads:

I do not love my neighbour near.
but wish he were high up and far.
How else could he become my star.

The flame and the phoenix are recurrent images in the works of Lawrence and Nietzsche. In 1888 Nietzsche signed himself phoenix, and for Lawrence the phoenix was to be the emblem for the badge of The Knights of Rananim.

From Nietzsche's The Gay Science (Prelude no. 62) a verse reads:

Yes, I know from where I came!
Ever hungry like a flame,
I consume myself and glow.
Light grows all that I conceive,
Ashes everywhere I leave:
Flame I am assuredly.
'Life - that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and
flame.'(FN26)

Lawrence writes to Ernest Collings (Jan 1913):
'I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed into the things around us. And I am not so much concerned with things around: - which is really mind; - but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing…. and being itself.'

The Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, was on Lawrence's mind after he had corresponded with Frederick Carter about Carter's book The Dragon of the Apocalypse. Reading the Apocalypse of St John of Patmos Lawrence called it the work 'of a second rate mind'. 'The second half of the Apocalypse is flamboyant hate and simple lust, lust is the only word, for the end of the world.'(27) Nietzsche called the Apocalypse of St John of Patmos 'the most desolate of all the written outbursts which vindictiveness has on its conscience'. It was a 'book of hatred'.(28)

Most people remember Lawrence for Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence published it privately knowing it would not pass the censors. But he considered it a very serious endeavour: 'Years of honest thoughts of sex, and years of struggling action in sex will bring us at last where we want to get, to our real and accomplished chastity, our completeness.' 'Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.'(DHL29) Many years before this Nietzsche had written: 'Every expression of contempt for the sexual life, every befouling of it through the concept impure, is the crime against life - is the intrinsic sin against the holy spirit of life.'(FN30)

It has been said by Graham Parkes (31)that Nietzsche qualifies as 'one of the most powerful ecological thinkers of the modern world'. He had an 'intimate personal relationship to the natural world'. His Zarathustra lives with nature and wants to give 'meaning to the earth'. The thrust of Nietzsche's philosophy is the recognition of humanity as being part of nature. 'Stay loyal to the earth' says Zarathustra. Lawrence was always completely attuned to 'the spirit of place'; even his worst books are rescued by his descriptive passages. He would often sit under a tree to write or go to the pine woods near the Villa Mirenda where birds would approach as he sat writing. Nietzsche liked to walk (always with his notebook) in pine forests often for six hours at a time. They both used the sun, moon, stars and high mountains to represent the emotions of their characters and to give feelings of awe and reverence.

For Nietzsche a little ship on a wide sea was a symbol of courage, the leaving of solid ground, a free spirit venturing into new ways of thinking. In his verse Towards New Seas he writes:

into the vast
Open sea I head my ship.
All is shining new, and newer,
Upon space and time sleeps noon;
Only your eye - monstrously,
Stares at me, infinity!
Lawrence prepares his 'Ship of Death' for 'the longest journey' into the 'deepest longest of seas' into the 'unknown and oblivion'. He must pull 'the long oars of a life-time's courage'.

They were both looking for a new future for mankind. 'There must be a new world', Lawrence writes to Cynthia Asquith about the message of The Rainbow. In Kangaroo the rainbow is 'a pledge of the unbroken faith, between the universe and the innermost'. Nietzsche's rainbow bridge was to lead to 'the great noontide' the coming of new values and ideals. Friedrich Nietzsche has influenced philosophy right up to the present. D H Lawrence has influenced our ways of looking at sex. Both men have shown great courage in speaking the truths that they considered so important. Their influence continues.

M VALENTINE

END NOTES

1. The two Lous were Louise Burrows and Lou Salomé. Readers may wonder at Lawrence's music: it was the music he wrote for his play David. Arranged by Bethan Jones, it was first performed 20th April 1996. Nietzsche wrote songs which have been recorded by Dietrich Fischer?Dieskau and piano music which is performed in Europe by Elena Letanova.
2. Phoenix Part Two. On Being Religious.
3. Apocalypse. CUP p96
4. Letter to Earl Brewster May 1927.
5. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
6. Posthumously Published Notes.
7. Phoenix II Assorted Articles: On Being a Man.
8. Phoenix Part Two: Introduction to These Paintings.
9. Thus Spake Zarathustra.
10. Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious.
11.Posthumously Published Notes.
12. The Gay Science Book 5 sect. 373.
13. Phoenix Part Two: Introduction to These Paintings.
14. Human all too Human sect. 9.
15. Apocalypse p135
16. Phoenix II Note to the Crown.
17. Zarathustra
18. Ecce Homo
19. Letter to Henry Savage June 1914.
20. Letter to William Hopkins Jan 1915
21. Letter to Koteliansky Jan 1915
22. Letter to Cynthia Asquith Jan 1917
23. Letter to Erwin Rohde Dec 187024.
24. Apocalypse p 148
25. Phoenix Part Two: Education of the People sect. III
26. The Gay Science Preface 2nd Edition sect. 3.
27. Apocalypse p 80.
28. Genealogy of Morals Essay 1 sect. 16.
29. Phoenix II A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
30. Ecce Homo.
31. Nietzsche's Futures ed. John Lippitt.