THE LAWRENCE MYTH
to describe what it was to which his confused mass of writings may be
related. What is here suggested is a view of Lawrence based on the
view that he finally came to take of himself, the view of himself as a
kind of contemporary reincarnation of the dying god.
Such an approach may seem far-fetched; but no other enables us
to reconcile so much of what is admirable and silly, sincere and false,
profitable and dangerous in the Lawrence "case." For example, the
formlessness of his writings, to which the purely aesthetic critic in-
variably turns his attention, is immediately seen as not so much a
technical deficiency as a function of his role. "They want me to have
form," he complained, "that means, they want me to have
their
per-
nicious, ossiferous, skin-and-grief form." Or, as he put it in
Fantasia
of the Unconscious,
"As soon as I have a finished mental conception,
a full idea even of myself,
then dynamically I am dead." How such
a dynamic view of the self is to be related to the practice of an ob-
jective art is of course the question; and the answer that Lawrence
giveselsewhere is unsatisfactory: "One sheds one's sicknesses in books
-repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them."
But as an artist one successfully masters one's emotions only by giving
them aesthetic form and Lawrence has already had his say about
form. In his handling of the allegory perhaps, he most clearly reveals
his predicament; for, if this is the inevitable vehicle for revelation, it
also requires the most deliberate manipulation of concepts. But since
Lawrence will have nothing of concepts, most of his novels, from
The
Rainbow
to
Kangaroo
are allegories whose morals are either confused
or postponed. When, in
Lady Chatterly's Lover,
he does for once
keep to a simple anel consistent pattern the result is significantly the
deadest writing of his career. He is at his best when he is most faithful
to his role-in the -apocalyptic passages of the novels, in the "Osiris-
cries" of his successive resurrections, in his sermons on the mount. In
The Man Who Died
he wrote a moving and terrible story because
he turned from allegory to myth-to the one and only myth to which
he had been conforming all along. All of his formal vicissitudes are
traceable to the intellectual difficulties in the way of being at once
a functioning divinity and a practitioner of the arts. He was not a
religiouspoet, as someone has said, but a self-induced earth god who
sometimeswrote verse.
Both in his life and in his works Lawrence illustrates what Nietzsche,
in his well-known analysis of the Dionysius myth, calls "the ~gony of
individuation." This will have an unpleasantly metaphysical sound to
modern ears; but it must be recalled that to the generation to which
Lawrence belonged life still presented itself in terms of metaphysical
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