Katherine Anne Porter (92 page)

Yet, where can it end? The gamekeeper, in spite of a certain fragility of appearance, seems to be the fighting-cock sort, wiry and tough enough, and he certainly runs through a very creditable repertory of sexual styles and moods. Yet he is a man of physical limitations like any other. Lady Chatterley is the largish, slow-moving, solid sort, and we know by her deeds and her words she is not worn down by an active mind. Such a woman often wears extremely well, physically. How long will it be before that enterprising man exhausts himself trying to be everything in that affair, both man and woman too, while she has nothing to do but be passive and enjoy whatever he wants her to have in the way he wants her to have it? It seems to me a hopelessly one-sided arrangement, it places all responsibility on him, and he will be the loser. Such a woman could use up
half a dozen such men, and it is plain already that she will shortly be looking for another man; I give him two years at the rate he is going, if sex is really all he has to offer her, or all she is able to accept. For if sex alone is what she must have, she will not abide with him.

Jean Cocteau has told somewhere a terrible story of a priest in a hotel, who hearing the death-rattle of a man in the next room, mistook it for animal noises of a successful intercourse and knocked censoriously on the wall. We should all be very careful not to make the same mistake.

Lawrence, who was prickly as a hedgehog where his own privacies were concerned, cannot in his mischievous curiosity allow to a woman even the privacy of her excremental functions. He has to tell her in so many words just where her private organs are located, what they are good for, and how praiseworthy he finds the whole arrangement. Nothing will do for him but to try to crawl into her skin; finding that impossible, at last he admits unwillingly a fact you would think a sensible person would have been born knowing, or would have learned very early: that we
are
separate, each a unique entity, strangers by birth, that our envelopes are meant as the perfect device for keeping us separate. We are meant to share, not to devour each other; no one can claim the privilege of two lives, his own and another’s.

Mr. Schorer in his preface hails the work as “a great hymn to marriage.” That, I should say, it is not, above all. No matter what the protagonists think they are up to, this is the story of an “affair,” and a thoroughly disreputable one, based on the treachery of a woman to her husband who has been made impotent by wounds received in war; and by the mean trickery of a man of low origins out to prove he is as good as, or better than, the next man. Mr. Schorer also accepts and elucidates for us Lawrence’s favorite, most pathetic fallacy. He writes:

The pathos of Lawrence’s novel arises from the tragedy of modern society. What is tragic is that we cannot feel our tragedy. We have grown slowly into a confusion of these terms, these two forms of power, and in confusing them we have left almost no room for the free creative functions of the man or woman who, lucky souls, possess “integrity of self.” The force of this novel probably lies in the degree
of intensity with which his indictment of the world and the consequent solitude of his lovers suggest such larger meanings.

If Mr. Schorer means to say—he sometimes expresses himself a little cloudily—that the modern industrial world, Lawrence’s pet nightmare, has destroyed, among a number of other things, some ancient harmony once existing between the sexes which Lawrence proposes to restore by uttering of short words during the sexual act, I must merely remind him that all history is against his theory. The world itself, as well as the relationship between men and women, has not “grown into confusion.” We have never had anything else, or anything much better; all human life since recorded time has been a terrible struggle from confusion to confusion to more confusion, and Lawrence, aided by his small but vociferous congregation—for there remain in his doctrine and manner the style of the parochial messiah, the Chapel preacher’s threats and cajolements—has done nothing but add his own peculiar mystifications to the subject.

One trouble with him, always, and it shows more plainly than ever in this book, is that he wanted to play all the roles, be everywhere and everybody at once. He wished to be the godhead in his dreary rigamarole of primitive religion as in
The Plumed Serpent
, but must be the passive female too. Until he tires of it, and comes up with a fresh set of rules for everybody. Mr. Schorer cites a passage from a letter Lawrence wrote to someone when his feelings were changing. “The leader-cum-follower relationship is a bore,” he decided, “and the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men, and between men and women.” He gets a good deal of himself into these few words. First, when he is tired of the game he has invented and taught as a religion, everybody must drop it. Second, he seems not to have observed that tenderness is not a new relationship between persons who love one another. Third, he said between men and men, and men and women. He did not say between women and women, for his view of women is utterly baleful, and he has expressed it ferociously over and over. Women must be kept apart, for they contaminate each other. They are to be redeemed one by one through the sexual offices of a man, who seems to have no
other function in her life, nor she in his. One of the great enlightenments of Lady Chatterley after her experience of the sentimental obscenities of her gamekeeper is to see other women clearly, women sexually less lucky than she, and to realize that they are all horrible! She can’t get away fast enough, and back to the embraces of her fancy man—and yet—and yet—

True marriage? Love, even? Even really good sex-as-such? It seems a very sad, shabby sort of thing to have to settle for, poor woman. I suppose she deserves anything she gets, really, but her just deserts are none of our affair. The pair are so plainly headed, not for tragedy, but just a dusty limbo, their fate interests us as a kind of curiosity. It is true that her youth was robbed by her husband’s fate in the war. I think he was worse robbed, even with no way out, yet nobody seems to feel sorry for him. He is shown as having very dull ideas with conversation to match, but he is not more dull than the gamekeeper, who forgets that the lady’s aristocratic husband was not born impotent, as Lawrence insists by way of his dubious hero, all upper class men were. At this point Lawrence’s confusion of ideas and feelings, the pull and haul between his characters who go their own dreary way in spite of him, and the ideas he is trying to express through them, become pretty nearly complete. It would take another book to thread out and analyze the contradictions and blind alleys into which the reader is led.

Huizinga, on page 199 of his book,
The Waning of the Middle Ages
, tells of the erotic religious visions of a late medieval monk, and adds: “The description of his numerous visions is characterised at the same time by an excess of sexual imagination and by the absence of all genuine emotion.” Lawrence used to preach frantically that people must get sex out of their heads and back where it belongs; and never learned that sex lives in all our parts, and must have the freedom of the whole being—to run easily in the blood and nerves and cells, adding its glow of life to everything it touches. The ineptitudes of these awful little love-scenes seem heart-breaking—that a man of such gifts should have lived so long and learned no more about love than that!

O
F
all fine sights in the world to me, the best is that of an artist growing great, adding to his art with his years, as his life and his art are inseparable. Henry James’s and W. B. Yeats’s careers occur to mind first as spectacles in which I took delight, and Edith Sitwell, with
The Canticle of the Rose
, the collected volume of her work of more than thirty years, joins them. The true sign of this growth, in all alike, is the unfailing renewal, the freshness of every latest piece of work, the gradual, steady advance from phase to phase of increased power and direction, depth of feeling, and virtuosity, that laurel leaf added to technical mastery. Decade by decade, the familiar voice adds other notes to its range, a fuller tone, more sustained breath: an organic growth of the whole being.

Miss Sitwell’s early work belonged to youth—it had the challenging note of natural arrogance, it was boldly experimental, inventive from a sense of adventure, full of high spirits and curiosity as to how many liberties the language would suffer to be taken without hitting back. There was sometimes also a certain artifice, the dew upon the rose turned out to be a crystal bead on a mother-of-pearl petal. Yet it was the work of a deft artificer, and a most ornamental rose, meant to amuse and charm, never intended to be mistaken for a natural flower.

It was the shimmer, the glancing light of this wit, this gaiety, one found so refreshing, for they were qualities markedly absent from the serious poetry of that long grim generation of censorious poets who were her contemporaries or later. Hardly anyone knew how to laugh, and those who did hardly dared to; it was no time for frivolity, and laughter was frivolous in such a murderous time. Miss Sitwell dared: she laughed outright whenever she felt like it, and the reader laughed too: for plainly this laughter was not levity nor frivolity, it was the spontaneous merriment of a vital spirit, full of natural courage
and confidence. The idea of death, which has paralyzed the humanity of so many poets for more than a century, affected her very differently. In the old robust way, she set out to make hay while her sun still shone. One felt this quality in her then, one is reassured of it now: “My poems are hymns in praise of the glory of life,” she writes without any shade of apology for such an antique point of view. This praise is as clear in the early “Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone,” or “Hornpipe,” as it is in “Still Falls the Rain,” written during a night raid in 1940.

The glory of life—the force of the affirmative passion of love in this poet, the feeling for glory in her, are the ground-virtues of her art, twin qualities almost lost for the present in the arts as in all human existence; as in her youth it sharpened her wit and her comedy, in middle life her sensuous celebration of the noble five human senses, in age her spiritual perceptions. This is such a progression as makes life and art worth practicing.

Her early poetry was, for me, associated, for all its “modern” speed and strepitation, with the old courtly music of Lully, Rameau, Purcell, Monteverdi, that I loved and do love: festival music, meant to be played in theaters, at weddings, christenings, great crystal-lighted banquets; or in the open air, in sweet-smelling gardens and the light of the full moon, with the torches waving their banners under the trees—gay music, serious great music, one can trust one’s joy in it.

So with Edith Sitwell’s poetry in those days between two wars, and so it is still. I am tempted to pick out here and there a few lines from some of those early things, but they do not take well to it. They are in full flight, it would be like plucking feathers from a bird. Pretty feathers, but they do not sing. Every word, every syllable does its part toward the final effect—her country songs are fresh as country mornings; her kitchen songs are a welter of sooty pots, hard cold early light and tangle-haired sleepy girls fighting with early cook-fires that will not catch. The beggar maid is “that pink flower spike full of honey.” Rain is rain in these poems, it rains on the page and you can smell it and feel it. There are “horses as fat as plums”—of course, I have seen them. When witches are on the prowl, one “. . . hears no sound but wind in trees;/One candle spills out thick gold coins,/Where quilted dark with tree
shade joins.” Who does not remember “. . . the navy-blue ghost of Mr. Belaker/The allegro Negro Cocktail shaker?” asking, at four in the morning, his violent, unanswerable question, “Why did the cock crow? Why am I lost?” “The gaiety of some” (of her poems) “masks darkness,” writes Miss Sitwell.

Large numbers of the public felt lost, too. It all sounded horridly novel and they hated it. Miss Sitwell did not have an easy time of it. The story has been told by her brother Sir Osbert Sitwell in his memoirs, so we need not go into it here. After all these years, Time having brought it about that Miss Sitwell is now being called “classic” by the younger generation, she being famous, a Doctor of Letters, at last she has time to sit down and explain what she was doing in those days and why, and what she meant by it.

She chooses many poems, those which caused the most disturbance when they were new; line by line, syllable by syllable, sometimes letter by letter, patiently she threads out meanings and makes a design of them. It makes good sense—that good sense the artist can always make of his intentions and methods after he has done the work. It is an endearing habit artists have, and I find nothing so enthralling as to hear or read a good artist telling how he does it. For practical purposes he might as well try to communicate his breath for our use. For example, Miss Sitwell chooses words not only for their meaning, but for sound, number of syllables, color, shape, texture, speed or slowness, thickness, thinness, weight, and for the shadow they cast upon the words near them. “Said King Pompey” is built on a scheme of R’s for very good reasons. It is also “a poem about materialism and the triumphant dust.”

Her introduction to
The Canticle
is good reading, and you can see, by the passages she cites, that whether or not it was so deliberate a thing as she now believes, she got her effects by just the means she says she did; a good deal more than most artists can prove. Beginning poets should be warned that this is not a ready-made technique, a bridge to anywhere. The live, inborn instinct for language, for the mother-tongue, must first be present, and whoever else has it to anywhere near this degree, will not get anything from Miss Sitwell except the pleasure of reading her poetry and an incitement to get on with his
own work. This is about all that one artist can do for another, and it is really quite enough.