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The Illusion of St. Mawr: Technique and Vision in D. H. Lawrence's Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
St. Mawr has generally been treated as if it were a story about a symbolic horse, as if the other characters in the novel had obviously been intended to be subordinate to him, and as if his disappearance seven-eighths of the way through were an indication of Lawrence's inability to concentrate or of his ineptitude in constructing a novel. More than anything else in the book, St. Mawr's failure to cross the finish line has upset critics and has led even so able a commentator of Lawrence as Father Tiverton to describe the novel as “bi-valvular,” because near the end of the book Lawrence “forgets all about the horse-hero, St. Mawr himself, and becomes absorbed by New Mexico.” It is a matter for regret that Lawrence gave his novel the title he did, since it has been instrumental in leading critics into a new variant of the intentional fallacy: the titular heresy, which has made many besides Father Tiverton regard St. Mawr as a structural failure. In fact, the mystery of St. Mawr is bound up with the entire problem of the novel's organization, since the fuss about the horse is only symptomatic of the more profound frustration with what a recent critic has termed the “essential inchoateness of the book.” Therefore the fundamental problem involved in reading St. Mawr, which is one of the book's formal integrity, requires the exploration of the techniques Lawrence employed to shape his work; this problem solved, it then becomes easy not only to understand why the horse is dropped so casually from all notice, but also to see what vision of life the book as a whole means to communicate.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964
References
1 Father William Tiverton, D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (New York: Philosophical Lib., 1951), p. 75. See also William York Tindall, ed., The Later D. H. Lawrence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. xiv, 4, and Eliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence, The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1960), p. 163. It is a curious fact that most of the casual references to St. Mawr praise the book, while the extended critiques are in general negative. The most noteworthy exception to the latter group is F. R. Leavis' highly laudatory chapter in his book, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956). The fairest case against the book is Graham Hough's in The Dark Sun (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1956), the most thoroughgoing is Eliseo Vivas', and the most vituperative Robert Liddell's in “Lawrence and Dr. Leavis: The Case of St. Mawr,” Essays in Criticism, iv (July 1954), 321–327. One should also consult the letters in answer to Liddell's article, in the “Critical Forum” of Essays in Criticism, v (January 1955), 64–80, which are on the whole in praise of Lawrence's novel.
2 See Lawrence's letters to Curtis Brown (30 September 1924) and to Catherine Carswell (8 October 1924) in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, 2 vols. (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), ii, 810, 814, in which he says that he would have no objection if the novel were called “Two Ladies and a Horse” or “Two Women and a Horse.”
3 Vivas, p. 162.
4 St. Mawr, p. 131. I have used the most readily available edition of the novel and the only one now in print: St. Mawr and The Man Who Died (New York: Vintage Books, 1959).
5 Hough, p. 183.
6 The difference between Lou and the narrator of the novel consists mainly in his ability to articulate what she can only partially express. His angle of vision is hers, but his perceptiveness is greater, for, as in so many of Lawrence's novels, the narrator is more intelligent, or at any rate more intellectual, than the characters. In the early stages of the book, Lou is still too unaware to give cogent form to her feelings (“Dimly in a woman's muse, Lou realized this” [p. 75, my italics]), while, in its later stages, she grows away from the intellectual life and into more instinctive modes of perception. Lawrence's problem is how to make apparent Lou's attitudes to the world around her without himself obviously intruding on the scene and preaching to his audience in propria persona. In St. Mawr he makes use of a narrator who sees more but not at any point much more than his heroine, and who in fact grows along with her in understanding and perceptiveness. Consequently, one is never aware of a radical difference between them; their thoughts tend to merge and blend, with the result that St. Mawr is free of the awkward intrusiveness one finds elsewhere in Lawrence's work.
7 See Hough, p. 182, where he speaks of St. Mawr as “too obvious and unmodulated a symbol of primitive energy.”
8 For Lawrence's famous discussion of the horse as a “dominant symbol” of man's imagination, see Apocalypse (London: Martin Secker, 1932), pp. 109–112.
9 Leavis, p. 281.
10 To Mr. Liddell, the passages Dr. Leavis admires are “a poor, bedraggled bit of writing” (p. 324). The same complaint is made more cogently and in more detail by Professor Vivas. His first objection derives from an examination of a section early in the book (p. 27): “It is not entirely clear,” he writes, “that the passage is a report by Lou of her feelings and her reactions as she experienced them” (p. 159). The relation of Lou to the narrator has been described above (see fn. 6): it is not (as Vivas maintains) a question of Lawrence describing Lou's feelings; it is the narrator who is doing that, and since his level of awareness is at no point in the book far from Lou's, the distinction Vivas makes is not a real one. Lawrence's role, on the other hand, is to establish an air of unreality about the whole scene. This he does through the simple and slangy style he has both his narrator and Lou use, a vernacular style with suggestions of the fairy tale. The clichés one encounters constitute Lawrence's ironic comment at the expense of the society his narrator is describing and even partly at the expense of Lou. Professor Vivas then goes on to ask of Lou's reactions whether Lawrence “can convey their inexactitude, their fuzziness, by using imprecise and fuzzy language” (p. 159). This point is more telling, and it must be admitted that Lawrence is occasionally vague, that he sometimes underlines the obvious, that he is capable of producing irony that is flat. Nonetheless, the style is generally casual without being sloppy, colloquial without being vulgar, quietly and effectively ironic in what Vivas calls its “‘iconic’ transcription” of Lou's reactions.
11 Collected Letters (5 June 1914), i, 282.
12 Compare Lawrence's statement in “Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover,” reprinted in Sex, Literature, and Censorship, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1959), “Compass Books Edition,” p. 85: “Even if we can't act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us at least think sexually, complete and clear. ... A great many men and women today are happiest when they abstain and stay sexually apart, quite clean: and at the same time, when they understand and realize sex more fully. Ours is the day of realization rather than action.”
13 Widmer, “Our Demonic Heritage: D. H. Lawrence,” in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1959), p. 22.
14 Widmer, “The Primitive Aesthetic: D. H. Lawrence,” JAAC, xvii (March 1959), p. 344.
15 See Lawrence's description of the comparable experience in his own life in “New Mexico,” Phoenix, ed. Edward D. Macdonald (New York: Viking Press, 1936), p. 142: “It certainly changed me for ever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development. ... In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.”
16 The latter is what the New England woman had done. According to Widmer (“The Primitive Aesthetic,” p. 352), her struggles show how man is let down when he tries to live by nature; according to Leavis, her efforts represent a triumph of the spirit. But isn't Lawrence, though treating her with sympathy, indicating an essential error in her desire to master and civilize the world around her? As Lawrence writes in “Pan in America,” Phoenix, p. 31, “Once life has been conquered, it is pretty difficult to live. What are we going to do, with a conquered universe?” Lou, who will try to struggle onward, is wise enough not to equate the triumph of the machine with the triumph of civilization.
17 William York Tindall in D. H. Lawrence & Susan his Cow (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), p. 79, claims that Lou at last “finds polarity not with man but with mountains, flowers, and trees,” while Middleton Murry in Son of Woman (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931), p. 315, feels that Lawrence's “feverish desire to escape backwards to the pre-mental.. . weakens and vitiates the whole of this story.” Both comments misunderstand the purposefully unresolved ending of the novel.
18 Leavis, p. 304.
19 Compare with Jesus's final statement the letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lady Chatterley trails off. In both of these books hope is symbolized by the pregnancy of the women. The unborn children of the priestess of Isis and of Constance Chatterley present a hope not to be contradicted because not yet realized. (The small children at the conclusions of Forster's The Longest Journey and Howards End serve a comparable function.) In a recent review (“The Longest Journey: D. H. Lawrence's Phoenix,” Critical Quarterly, iv, Spring 1962, 82–87), Timothy Longville discusses the nature of what Lawrence is affirming, the better world he hopes to see replace the modern society he detests. “Lawrence's vision of the world as it ought to be,” Longville writes, “is of a recreated prelapsarian Eden” (p. 82). This vision Longville finds unreal, ultimately indistinguishable from oblivion; therefore the journey on which so many of Lawrence's heroes and heroines embark “has no end” (p. 83), becomes in fact an end in itself. These criticisms apply to much of Lawrence's work, to Lady Chatterley and The Man Who Died, among others. But Lawrence is a dangerous writer to generalize about, and Longville's remarks do not apply to St. Mawr, for in that work Lawrence himself anticipates possible objections. Neither the ranch nor the new life that Lou may one day find suggests Eden: the hope for that life is convincingly dramatized in the novel, but Lawrence makes no attempt to articulate a symbol for the prelapsarian state itself. (The false note alluded to above may be the one exception.) The experience of the New England woman, Lou's own hesitancies, and her mother's final remark all serve to qualify severely the notion of a paradise regained. The question of whether this paradise is real is not, therefore, one that in this book at least need be entertained. If the journey has no end, that is more than we are in a position to know, since Lou is only just ready to enter on the last stage of her voyage as the novel closes.
20 Collected Letters (12 February 1915), I, 320. In its context, Lawrence's statement has economic implications, but it is a good index to his attitudes in general.