I have not done much in this relatively new formant which I like to think of as the equivalent of the short poems Lawrence wrote when he was too ill and tired to do anything else ('Pansies' he called them because that English word is derived from Pensées). Not that standard he set would be easy to reach! Some of these blogs have been posted on the website of Wordsworth Classics and others were written with members of the D. H. Lawrence Society in mind. But mainly they are for anyone who has happened to wander in my direction. They are not all about literature. One that is relatively recent, for example, deals with the problem of money in sport and is called 'Local heroes' (see under 'Musings') . In 'Texts for our Times' there is a blog with the self-explanatory title 'Boris, Byron and the 2019 general election' and another that considers the relevance of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to our condition today (in 2020).

Bergheil!

Bergheil!

The chairman of the Lawrence Society has very kindly sent me a copy of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, as a gift.  A defect in my sensibility means that, when I was an undergraduate, I developed techniques for skipping any landscape description in 19th century novels that threatened to go on too long, but even I can see that this is a quite remarkable book.  It records Shepherd’s long frequentation of the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland with exceptional precision and reveals an ability to communicate the nuances of one individual’s relationship to her natural environment, in a variety of climatic conditions and taking fully into account all the surrounding flora and fauna, that is only possessed by the most gifted of writers, and is frequently reminiscent of Lawrence.

         Shepherd’s dealings with her favourite mountains are so physical and sensuous that they cast light on an aspect of Lawrence’s relation to his non-human environment that might otherwise seem puzzling.  There is a striking example of what I mean towards the end of Kangaroo when his alter ego Somers, who in Australia has had a series of what have ultimately proved to be disappointing human contacts, takes a walk on the beach.  There he `communes with Nature’ in a manner which is plainly erotic, just as it is when Birkin rolls naked in the long grass in Women in Love.  That this is a tendency which Lawrence has given his fictional characters but did not himself possess is belied by those essays in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine that describe his experiences on the ranch in New Mexico.

         For both Lawrence and Shepherd, Nature could clearly be on occasions an all-in-all yet, as far as mountains are concerned, there are major differences.  Whereas she appears always contented to be among them, whatever the weather and however hostile to human endeavour they may sometimes appear, they can create in him a deep ambivalence.  I am not so much thinking here of the death of Gerald Crich but rather of that impressively sardonic exercise in black humour called `The Captain’s Doll’.  As all Lawrentians will remember, the conclusion to this novella is an excursion into the Austrian mountains taken by the story’s hero, Captain Hepburn, and his former mistress, Hannele, in the course of which they try to establish what their future together might be.  For those who can discount the traces of an uncharacteristic anti-Semitism, this trip is brilliantly described with Lawrence showing the same keen eye Shepherd has for all the different kinds of wild flowers which manage to flourish in such apparently hostile surroundings.  But the further up the two characters climb, the less happy Hepburn is and Lawrence communicates through him a discomfort which is quite alien to the author of The Living Mountain.

         Part of Hepburn’s unhappiness has nothing to do with the mountains themselves.  The chief goal of the trip is a well-known glacier which has become a major tourist attraction and there are therefore buses to carry visitors up the lower slopes and hotels along the way.  After he and Hannele have reached that part of the journey which has to be tackled on foot, they become more aware of individual members of the mountaineering fraternity with their bare knees, sun-burnt complexions, open-necked shirts and lederhosen.  `Bergheil!’ some of these healthy young people shout, a greeting to which Hepburn sourly refuses to respond.  Yet it is less this aspect of the excursion which he finds upsetting than a sense that the peaks which tower above and around him represent a challenge and are intimidating.  This is what makes him declare to Hannele, in defiance of her combined scorn and amusement, that he is bigger than they are.  When the two of them finally reach the foot of the glacier, Hepburn insists on walking on it, even though he is wearing the wrong kind of boots, as if to demonstrate symbolically that it is man who is the measure of all things.  A sentiment of which Dr Johnson himself would have approved.

         `The Captain’s Doll’ was written before Lawrence went to America.  By the time he came back those around him were convinced he was tubercular and in need of mountain air.  But he was never entirely convinced that being in the mountains was good for him and particularly resented that when he was `perched’ (as he sometimes put it) there were no level places where he could at least stretch his legs.  In Dying Game I tried to describe a particularly uncomfortable period he spent in a spa hotel which was on the side of a mountain in a village called Plättig in Bavaria.  It wasn’t in this instance his own health which had taken him and Frieda there but that of his mother-in-law.  He was disgusted by the way she insisted on staying in Plättig instead of the three of them all going back down to Baden-Baden where there was more chance of avoiding a cold wind which Lawrence describes as cutting his chest, and he painted a grotesque picture of the 78-year-old woman determined to outlive her ailing son-in-law and fighting viciously for anything that would keep her going a little longer.  He was particularly irritated by her insistence on standing in the roadway greedily gulping in the cold air and declaring `Es gibt mir Kraft, es gibt mir Kraft’.  When I wrote about this belief of Lawrence’s mother-in-law that breathing in cold air gives you strength I had forgotten that, as Hepburn and Hannele are on their way to the glacier in `The Captain’s Doll’, she is described as shouting `“Wonderful! Wonderful!”’ and taking `great breaths in her splendid chest’ (while the `high air’ is biting into the chest of Hepburn `like a viper’).  And that then, only a few sentences later, there is:

`Wonderful, wonderful, to be high up’, she said, breathing great breaths.

`Yes’, he said.  `It is wonderful.  But very detestable.  I want to live near the sea-level.  I am no mountain topper’.

It would seem from all this that well before Lawrence might have been inclined to dislike mountains because they were associated in his mind with a disease he refused to acknowledge he had, he already entertained (quite unlike Nan Shepherd) grave doubts about them.  But what these words also suggest is that there must have been certain respects in which one could apply to Frieda that old phrase, `like mother like daughter’.

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