THE LAWRENCE MYTH
throughout is something that no church father would have any dif-
ficulty in calling by its .right name.
"My great religion," Lawrence wrote, "is a belief in the blood,
the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect." This sums up so com-
pletely his attitude toward nature that we can .pass to his actual
handling of the problem of individuaiity. None of the so-called indi-
vidualistic writers of recent generations, it may be said, projected the
problem with the same deliberation and insistence. "Insofar as he
[man] is a single individual soul, he
is
alone-ipso facto. Insofar
as I am I, and only
r
am I, and I am only I, insofar I am inevitably
and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to
accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self-knowledge." This
is typical of any number of pronouncements on the subject. In the
brilliant
Studies in Classic American Literature
the attack is con-
sistently directed against what Lawrence believed to be mankind's
reprehensible passion for "merging." All of the novels, as a matter of
fact, are object-lessons in the consequences of losing self-identity. In
Sons and Lovers
spiritual love, in most of the other early novels up to
The Rainbow
sexual love, and in
Women in Love
and
Aaron's Rod
friendship between men are successively examined and rejected as a
possible means of individual fulfillment. Beginning with
Kangaroo,
however, we get a new and more positive note.
For if Lawrence through his heroes is so jealously defensive of
what he calls his "life-form" he exhibits all along an equally strong
counter-impulse toward just that sort of "merging" which he con-
demns in others. The character Aaron replies to the statement in the
above paragraph: "But-I can't stand by myself in the middle of the
world 'and in the middle of people and know I am quite by myself,
and nowhere to go, and nothing to hold on to. I can for a day or two.
But then it becomes unbearable as well." This dialogue between Aaron
and Lilly, who represent the two poles of Lawrence's nature, objecti-
fiesthe conflict by which he was tormented from begining to end and
which was the real source of his astonishing energy. The other side of
his eccentric individualism is seen in his life in the febrile quality of
his personal relationships and in his numerous projects for a model
colony-in Florida, Cornwall, Sicily, Mexico, and again in England.
It
is interesting that the latter desire seems to have been more powerful
than his judgment, for he had been annihiliating in his ridicule of the
Brook Farm experiment in the book on American literature. Law-
rence'ssocial need was so intense that it is not only the main theme of
his
Letters
but the motive-power behind them-the reason that he is
one of the great English letter-writers. But nothing could be franker
than the following confession to Dr. Trigant Burrow: "What ails me
isthe absolute frustration of my primeval societal instinct ....
I think
7
