8
PARTISAN REVIEW
societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct-and societal repression
much more devastating. There is no repression of the sexual individual
comparable to the repression of the societal man in me, by the indi-
vidual ego, my own and everybody else's. I am weary even of my own
individuality, and simply nauseated by other people's."
Apparently "fulfillment" involves the satisfaction of other needs
of man's nature than his purely private sense of communion with the
darkness. In the posthumous
Apocalypse
Lawrence begins to make
a distinction between the personal and the collective man, but this
soon evaporates in a blast of red dragon's breath. Lawrence never
really faced the question, for it would have taken him right out of the
realm in which the assurances of the blood are sufficient. It would
have required intellectual evaluation and moral choice. But we may
consider the general solution that he came to offer for the relationships
involved in sex, society, and politics. This may be indicated through
an inaccurate analogy with the medieval doctrine of grace. Through
sex the separate individuals in any relationship are restored to an
organic union with the processesof nature; and through this experience
they are strengthened, in the best religious sense, both in themselves
and in their relations with others. At least this is the only meaning
that emerges through the banal conversations and tirades of
Lady
Chatterly's Lover,
which belongs late in the Lawrence canon.
Politically, of course, such a doctrine leads straight into the very
dark burrow of fascism. But it may be worth while to trace out
Lawrence's political development, if it may be called such, a little
more carefully. As a coal miner's son, as a suffering artist, and as an
intelligent observer of contemporary life, he could never have been
very sympathetic to the ideal of modern bourgeois democracy. All of
his work is an implicit, and much of it an explicit, criticism of mass-
production in ideas, emotions, and men. He was a revolutionist, there-
fore, in the sense that every Bohemian artist under the bourgeois
regime has been a revolutionist. But it does not follow that he could
have turned to the Fabian socialism of pre-war England or, later, to
Soviet communism. What he objected to in communism was its failure
to provide any ideal better than the one to which he had been opposed
all along: "The dead materialism of Marx socialism and soviets seems
to me no better than what we've got." In
Apocalypse
communism is
defined as a power-driven movement in which the proletariat is moti-
vated entirely by the desire for
revenge
on the ruling class. It is "the
old will of the Christian community to destroy human worldly power,
and to substitute the
negative
power of the mass....
In Russia, the
triumph over worldly power was accomplished, and the reign of saints
set in, with Lenin as chief saint." To Lawrence power, the only real
