D. H. Lawrence and the coronavirus

In a blog on his website (torpedo the ark) Stephen Alexander points out how relevant to our present situation is that brief conversation about illness between Birkin and Ursula in chapter XI of Women in Love.  It might seem especially relevant to Lawrentians in that its author would soon have had experience of what it was like to be in the middle of a pandemic.  The influenza outbreak of 1918-1919 is reputed to have cost 40 million lives worldwide, and 150,000 in Britain.  One assumption is that its effects were so devastating because, in Europe especially, the virus attacked a population, both combatant and non-combatant, already debilitated by deprivation and stress.  Given the difficulties Lawrence himself experienced during the First World War, and his `underlying medical conditions’, most of which were associated with his lungs and bronchial tubes, it seems something of a miracle that he survived.  Self-isolating in a cottage his sister had found for him in the Peak District, he spent several weeks in bed with the so-called Spanish flu, one of many occasions, before and after, when (as the expression is) he nearly died.

         Ursula says that being ill makes her feel ashamed, that `illness is so terribly humiliating’.  Most readers can respond to this at some level but unless one has led a life of wild and careless dissipation, it seems strange to blame oneself for falling sick.  In Birkin’s view however, one is ashamed because one knows `one’s life isn’t really right, at the source’.  It would take a specialist in theology to work out how certain human beings came to believe that their own welfare, good or bad, was entirely in their own hands.  On a collective level, the note Birkin strikes here has been heard recently in those who attribute the emergence of the coronavirus to the way we have been mistreating the planet.  They may be right in a general way, the same way in which they could hardly ever be wrong, but the causal links are hardly strict and while we can accept the blame for our misfortunes, as Birkin does, it is not easy for individuals to work out what they could have done about them, what measures they themselves could have taken not to feel humiliated by illness and that they deserve to be sick.

         The peculiarity of the corona virus is that its victims are mainly if not exclusively the old, which was not at all true of the 1919 influenza epidemic.  From an Old Testament or Nietzschean point of view (one has always to remember that Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor), this could be regarded as providential.  Preceding and no doubt succeeding the present crisis is one that is demographic.  In countries like Japan especially, the old outnumber the young so considerably that there is anxiety that the increasing strain to pay their pensions is bound to lead to a conflict between the generations.  A statistician on the radio the other day somewhat cold-bloodedly suggested that half of those who have at present died from the virus would have soon been dead anyway, or at least in the next year or two.  Although one measure for estimating a country’s degree of civilisation may well be how it treats its old, it is not difficult to imagine this kind of thinking going on in various centres of government: in the White House particularly, one might have said, had its principal occupant not himself been over seventy.  Certainly, it would not have seemed foreign to Lawrence who was in some ways (as Stephen Alexander points out) such a convinced Nietzschean, and who always tended to favour the young against the old.  Most of us remember that great scene at the end of The Virgin and the Gipsy when the old Mater, who has been such a blight on the life of the heroine, is being swept from the Rectory by the purifying flood and desperately claws at the bannister rail with `one purple hand’ while the gipsy, who is watching the scene from above, observes `Not good enough!  Not good enough!’

         Ursula is described as being `rather repulsed’ by the appearance of Birkin, who has been ill, and Stephen Alexander endorses that feeling as healthy and natural.  He associates her repulsion with Nietzsche’s remarks about the danger the weak and diseased represent for the fit and healthy.  In his view, this is not so much on account of the fear of physical contagion but rather because those who are diseased `invariably make miserable and undermine the natural gaiety that’s in life’.  There are two motives here which, in any given situation, might prove difficult to disentangle.  Lawrence clearly learnt from this strain of thinking in Nietzsche and is good at showing how the weak can manipulate the strong by exciting their pity; and in his essay on Whitman, he makes clear how repulsed he was by the vividly described episode at the end of Flaubert’s La Légende de St Jean l’Hospitalier where the saint in question lies naked on top on a hideously disfigured leper in order to warm him back into life.  `The soul is a perfect judge of her own motions’, he writes, `if your mind doesn’t dictate to her.  Because your mind says Charity! Charity!, you don’t have to force your soul into kissing lepers.’  Lawrence omits to mention that at the conclusion to this tale, the leper is transformed into Jesus Christ who then ascends to heaven with St Julien in his arms.  But then he is clearly aware that the range of feelings against which he as inveighing, by making subtle distinctions between the sympathy we might have for others and a desire to merge with them, have their origins in Christianity.  Both he and Nietzsche spent a good deal of their energy struggling against aspects of a religion they knew so well.  But in these hard times we might be grateful, if we are unlucky enough to be struck down, that there is still quite a bit of Christian charity, and of charity tout court, around.