D.H. Lawrence - Apocalypse (1932)

 

Lawrence wrote Apocalypse, his highly personal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, on his death bed. It was his last great piece of writing and he made every word count, more or less reducing what he'd been getting at over previous decades to its clearest, most concentrated essence. You could call it religion or philosophy, although both are arguably misleading in this case. This is how Lawrence saw the world, or more precisely what he thought was meant by the term.

As an analysis of Revelation, Apocalypse somewhat reveals what might be deemed the contradiction at the heart of Lawrence's view of the world, specifically his shunning the methodical, scientific approach in favour of the intuitive. This might seem to foreshadow today's internet pundits with their apparent belief that facts may often complicate or unduly bias an issue. Lawrence, however, insists on there being two essentially incompatible ways of seeing, and he favoured the materialist approach, giving precedence to that which is seen, felt, or experienced over abstract rationalisation after the fact. Therefore, as with Etruscan Places in which he writes about Italian civilisation before the Romans through aesthetic consideration of their art and architecture, Apocalypse deals in what might be deemed poetic truth rather than the purely historical. While this might seem akin to Erich von Däniken finding flying saucers in Ezekiel's wheels - a proposal facilitated by conveniently ignoring existing interpretations of the symbolism - Lawrence's intuitive method is itself a refusal to impose established patterns or methods of understanding upon the material - in other words an attempt to unravel Revelation entirely on its own terms. This approach is validated, I would argue, by its refusal to view the texts as the poorly formulated mumbling of primitives - actually the opposite of Erich's methodology, such as it is - and is additionally validated by the clarity and conviction of his testimony. For what it may be worth, his testimony here also reminds me a little of A.E. van Vogt, who wrote about rockets and mutants but took a similarly intuitive approach.

As for what Lawrence actually says, the whole point of the book is that the discourse loses definition and even meaning when summarised or broken down into symbols, but the main theme is that pre-Christian religion was not religion as we understand it today, and because of this we have lost our way as a people. He sets out a convincing and coherent argument for this view as well, but - as with Point Counterpoint - you really need to read the thing to appreciate it.

All of this being said, Apocalypse remains very much a personal view - although Lawrence resisted the idea that any of his pronouncements should ever be taken as the final word on anything - so additionally revealing his blind spots; and it seems particularly sad given that he spent so much time in Mexico, engaging with adherents to a pre-Christian belief system very much in line with much of what is described in Apocalypse.

Even to the early scientists or philosophers, 'the cold', 'the moist', 'the hot', 'the dry' were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.

Yet, little if anything of this makes it into The Plumed Serpent with its fallen Indians performing a heavily befeathered summary of an actual living religion filtered through the grimmer aspects of Lawrence's Methodist upbringing. It was staring him in the face and somehow he missed it.

Nevertheless, for all the flaws one might find in Apocalypse, the strength of the main argument eclipses them to the point of irrelevance, and this was one hell of a swan song.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counterpoint (1928)

 

This is the fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel to which I referred a couple of weeks ago. I took another shot at it, and while I'd say chewy remains as good a description as ever, I got through it and even enjoyed it for the most part. Again we have a variation on previous Huxley novels such as Crome Yellow and Antic Hay amounting to a non-linear essay on the state of the world communicated through the dialogue of a large and thus occasionally confusing cast. However, this one is distinguished by at least a few of those characters being based on persons either of Huxley's acquaintance or otherwise of cultural significance around the turn of the century - notably D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, Baudelaire, and John Hargrave, advocate of the Social Credit movement which, although Utopian and authoritarian was vocally opposed to Fascism and later fought the BUF in the streets - which I mention mainly because Huxley's Everard Webley is often wrongly identified as having been based on Oswald Mosely.

Huxley appears in Point Counterpoint as Philip Quarle, himself a writer, and so the book approaches the fourth wall without quite breaking through in the form of notes and letters written by Philip Quarle referring to his own novel in progress:

The musicalisation of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia) But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven.  The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major Quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor Quartet.) More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems.

Of course, on the surface of it this means we have four-hundred pages of people talking about stuff, with the stuff being the point of the novel and that which is communicated with the most vigour. It could have gone tits up but Huxley was always exceptionally good at this sort of thing, delivering complex arguments and observations, even those built up on layers of nuance with pinpoint, near scientific accuracy - as distinct from Lawrence's more impressionist, intuitive approach to narratives of equivalent purpose.

Point Counterpoint is about the modern world, as it was in 1928, and about where we were going wrong, and where we continue to go wrong. It's about notions of progress in the wake of Darwin and the industrial revolution, and the infusion of such ideas into the realms of art, literature, politics, religion, and society; and, as usual, the Hux was right about fucking everything, here demonstrated through the mouthpiece of his impressively faithful D.H. Lawrence stand-in

'Our truth, the relevant human truth, is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they've got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the non-human truth isn't merely irrelevant; it's dangerous. It distracts people's attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory.'

If it's chewy - which it is - then Point Counterpoint is justifiably chewy, its subject being that old chestnut everything ever, and it isn't difficult to see why some regard it as Huxley's greatest. I feel I should probably go into greater detail but it would be easier if you just read the thing.

D.H. Lawrence - Selected Letters (1950)

 

Well, it turns out that he did write his autobiography after all, albeit without intending to. Lawrence, it seems, was the self-involved trans-activist let loose on TikTok of his day in terms of correspondence, firing off letters to anyone and everyone, left, right and center, and usually in such entertaining spirit that even those who thought he was a bit of a dick kept his missives for posterity. If it's any indication of the sheer word count we're talking here, I also have the second of the two volume set of collected letters, covering the years 1921 to 1930, a period during which the lad apparently wasn't making so much use of the postal system as had once been the case. It's six-hundred pages of small type, which is why I went for this one on this occasion, spanning as it does Lawrence's entire life in just under two-hundred pages; and it's rivetting. Just about any accusation you could pitch against the man and his work is either refuted or otherwise undermined in this selection of correspondence, which is lively, funny, insightful, touching, and explains why he could be such an awkward bugger when the mood took him. If you feel you have yet to truly get to grips with the man and his work, it's all here, and is as such a testament to the probability of his legitimately deserving the accolade of genius.

D.H. Lawrence - This Mortal Coil (1971)

 

My to be read pile has been dominated by D.H. Lawrence for much of the past year because I picked up a whole bunch of his during my first flourish of enthusiasm - back in the nineties, would you believe - then never got around to reading them, mainly because there were so many and very few with spaceships on the cover. Consequently, now that I've made some headway, excepting one fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel, my to be read pile is all D.H. Lawrence; and I'm now onto those published posthumously.

This Mortal Coil is short stories, only one of which I recall having read before, and in a few cases collected for the first time for all I know. Lawrence never wrote a formal autobiography, possibly because his writing was already strongly autobiographical, which This Mortal Coil illustrates with short stories quite clearly drawn from his life reproduced in chronological sequence - from his youth in Nottingham, to Europe, and finally to his deathbed. Lawrence seems to have been a little embarrassed by a couple of these examples (hence my doubts about their having been published more than once while he was alive) presumably due to their juvenile quality - conversely meaning the earlier efforts are fairly breezy, predating the heavy fog of emotional symbolism in which he enveloped the later works. Of these earlier efforts, Adolf is particularly delightful as an account of his pet rabbit - so named before even the first world war should anyone be wondering. Indeed, the stories I enjoyed most were those recording details in the domestic lives of mining families around the turn of the century, these being short but substantial and benefiting from the kind of focus which suggests, at least to me, a sort of written analogy to the paintings of Walter Sickert, or other Post-Impressionists as Lawrence's fixation with flowering plants begins to make its presence felt.

'Your foggy weather of symbolism, as usual,' he said.

'The fog is not of symbols,' she replied, in her metallic voice of displeasure. 'It may be symbols are candles in a fog.'

'I prefer my fog without candles. I'm the fog, eh? Then I'll blow out your candle, and you'll see me better. Your candles of speech, symbols and so forth, only lead you more wrong. I'm going to wander blind, and go by instinct, like a moth that flies and settles on the wooden box his mate is shut up in.'

'Isn't it an ignis fatuus you are flying after, at that rate?' she said.

I've quoted this passage because I enjoy how it describes what Dave was trying to do with both his writing and his life, at least in the later years, while simultaneously presenting a criticism of the same; and which additionally accounts for why the last three or four in the collection are perhaps a little too chewy for their own good, at least in comparison with Adolf, Rex, The Miner at Home and others. Nevertheless, in sheer stylistic scope this may be the broadest collection of Lawrence's short stories that I've read, and accordingly one of the most satisfying.

Justice League of America #228-261 (1987)

 

I gave up on comics at the age of fourteen, having discovered punk rock and decided that I was all grown-up. Specifically I started buying Sounds music paper on a weekly basis, which meant I could no longer afford to keep up with 2000AD comic, which, in any case, seemed to be treading water at the time. Five years later I made the acquaintance of Charlie Adlard and Garreth Roberts* while taking a fine art degree at Maidstone Art College. I was intrigued by the fact that both of them still read comic books, and even American comic books which seemed way beyond anything which could be excused by what turned out to be my first experience of nostalgia for something I'd enjoyed a few years earlier. Just when I thought I was out, as Al Pacino laments in the third Godfather movie, they pull me back in.

Anyway, just like junkies hoping to share their addiction, Garreth attempted to stem my uninformed guffaws by lending me a few things to read, notably the Frank Miller version of Batman, an issue of Micronauts, and Justice League of America #257, from which point on I was hooked, albeit not to those specific titles. The Dark Knight Returns impressed the shit out of me, and I was vaguely familiar with the Micronauts having once been obsessed with the toys, but the Justice League book was bewildering. I had no idea who any of the characters were, and the story, if it was a story, took place in a strange metaphysical landscape inside Zatanna's head - whoever she might be. I spent decades wondering what I'd read in that book, and curiosity eventually got the better of me - nearly forty years later - and what we have here is a complete run of the Justice League of America in their final incarnation before Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis hit the reset button, at least in publishing terms. The fact that this run of the comic seemingly remained almost universally reviled even years after its passing, combined with whatever the hell had happened in issue #257, appealed to my sense of mystery.

The point of the Justice League as I understood it from a distance, was to have Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all your faves in the same comic. Growing up in England and being therefore more familiar with Marvel, this didn't hold much appeal for me. I've since developed an appreciation for the DC aesthetic, when it's done right, which differs significantly from the legacy of Stan Lee, but for many years it seemed dated, stuffy, square, and lacking the dynamism of Marvel; and so my impression of the Justice League would be Superman and his pals up against a guy wearing a giant purple top hat with a question mark on the front who cackles and very much enjoys being the bad guy - more or less Enid Blyton in spandex. Without having read any of the comics, for better or worse, the form struck me as limited.

The comic book hadn't yet quite pow! grown up back in 1984, but I get the impression that DC at least wanted to move the Justice League on from confrontations with anyone wearing a question mark, and so Gerry Conway shook things up, replacing most of the team with characters no-one had heard of. Len Wein had done it with Marvel's X-Men ten years earlier, replacing the perky apple-polishing college freshmen with a menagerie of previously unknown sideshow attractions. If this didn't directly serve as inspiration for the revision of the JLA, it was at least a good argument for what rewards might be reaped from a thorough shake up. Accordingly I'd expected to notice a few more parallels with the X-revision in this run of the Justice League, but Vixen doesn't really have much in common with Wolverine, and Gypsy echoes Kitty Pryde only in being young, and the rest can be attributed to their both being superhero books.

We kick off with a war between Earth and Mars in #228, the stretched point of which is that it might have been a bit less of a clusterfuck had the absentee Superman found time in his busy schedule to lend a hand in punching their big green faces all the way back to their home planet. Therefore the Justice League, despite having won, has let everyone down and we all need to go back to the drawing board. With the League's orbital space station in ruins, they move into a disused factory complex in Detroit - actually a super technological secret headquarters - specifically in one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods. This is where we meet Vibe, a young streetwise Latino with powers of er… vibration, who enjoys breakdancing and probably even smokes whenever Chuck Patton is drawing someone else. We also meet Steel - an angry cyborg, Vixen - an African supermodel with animal powers, and Gypsy - who is never quite explained but just seems to show up. We also meet half the neighborhood, and thus get issues where - in the absence of anyone wearing a purple top hat with a question mark on the front - Steel hunts down some kids who nicked a packet of Toffos from Mr. Papagaulos' corner store while Vixen helps Old Mother Windom find a treasured spoon - a family heirloom - which she could have sworn was in the cabinet in the hallway. Of course, neither of these tales happened, or at least not on screen, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise from the letters pages of subsequent issues. I guess this was the point at which the ratio of regular kids to comic book obsessives reading these things switched, arguably for the worse, to the latter.

The letters were a mix of positive and negative - those enjoying the changes against those who had paid good money for tales of Earth's greatest heroes and now found it very interesting that the same were conspicuously absent from the book and would therefore like to speak with your supervisor - although a substantial minority of the angrier letters would also have liked to know why DC comics were suppressing the deluge of hate mail directed at Vibe, Vixen, Steel and Gypsy, pretending that it didn't exist when it definitely did and was in fact the biggest mountain of complaint in the history of moaning.

Did DC really owe these people yet another fucking title with Superman or Batman punching the purple top hat off that guy's head yet again, given that this was still happening in every other book they published? I don't know, but having read a couple of the earlier issues - and the occasional interlude issues of this run bringing the familiar faces back presumably for the sake of pacifying the worst of the fandom taliban - this version of the JLA was a lot more fun for my money, and a lot more engaging by virtue of the restoration of mystery in characters which could still surprise us. Sure, Vibe was corny as hell in places and Gypsy dressed like Cyndi Lauper, but this was a comic book, not Crime and Punishment, and these were arguably hypocritical objections coming from those demanding the restoration of a rigorously traditional flavour of corn. Was it not enough that they still had to fight an android named Amazo?

For what it my be worth, I'd say Gerry Conway, Chuck Patton, and particularly Luke McDonnell did a great job on this run of comics, keeping things interesting, moving everything along, and without resorting to crowd pleasing clichés; and by the time our guys have to save the world from a three-eyed Godlike alien named Despero, it really begins to feel as though the wrinkles have been ironed out and we've found our feet, and it was as good as anything you would have read in - off the top of my head - an X-Men comic of the time.

Yet it was not to be, which I assume came down to sales. Gerry Conway - who had really shown that he knew how to write this stuff - was suddenly and abruptly absent without even the customary letters page farewell, and J.M. DeMatteis was brought in to perform what felt like a wack job, albeit a poetically loquacious one. Vibe was killed fighting another android built by the guy who created Amazo - thus inadvertently foreshadowing Poochie from that episode of the Simpsons - then Steel was next, with the other two deciding to take long holidays elsewhere as the remaining cast did a huge boo hoo and pretended they couldn't hear the joyful hooting and hollering of the fandom taliban.

The next month's issue was the first of the revival by J.M De Matteis and Keith Giffen, which was great, and which somehow kept the wankers happy without inserting Superman into every other panel or pretending it was still 1956. It's an ill-wind that blows no good, but I still don't see that there was anything wrong with this version of the Justice League; and if there was an ill-wind, it was surely the crowing of a new, profoundly unpleasant generation of comic book fans celebrating the death of a character they didn't like because they'd never heard of him. If it's occurred to you that we can no longer have nice things, I'd say that's one reason why right there.

*: Not to be confused with the former author of Who stuff, as should be obvious from the unusual spelling. Garreth was one of my very best pals for the duration of those art college years, and I have no idea how we managed to lose touch, aside from that he was always a bit on the flaky side. Whenever Charlie and I get together, we always have the inevitable whatever happened to Garreth? conversation.

D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

 

As I said when writing about John Thomas and Lady Jane, the previous draft of Lady Chatterley, I had the wrong idea about Lawrence's final book, having read somewhere that it had been written in anger with Dave, somewhat weary of his novels being described as pornography, deciding to give his critics an extended letter to Fiesta as a sort of fuck you. This may even have come from Lawrence's own letters, in which case he was clearly joking. As we all know, the book was subject to charges of obscenity, which - as I now appreciate - says plenty about the mid-twentieth century and not very much about Lady Chatterley's Lover. Where Lawrence made use of medical terminology such as fuck, cunt, shit, and arse, it appears in short agricultural bursts limited to a few moments of conversation, then back to the kind of language of which my wife's aunt would approve for the next three chapters. That said, there's a whole lot of nobbing going on, most of which is described in Lawrence's usual terms, mapped by means of emotions, symbols of the same, plenty of stuff about flowers - notably woven into pubes at one point - but it really isn't about the sex, or at least it's about a whole lot more than just the sex.

All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.

'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'

I've a feeling that may have been the passage (no pun intended) which made everyone angry. I'm sure there's been a bongo magazine called Secret Openings at some point but I doubt it could have been easy to find at your local WHSmith.

Anyway, to get to the point, Lady Chatterley's Lover is more or less the same novel as John Thomas and Lady Jane. The same encounters involve the same people, albeit with minor variations, but the emphasis is much expanded. Lawrence was approaching the end of his life to the point of his existence having become defined almost entirely by its termination. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality, as Clifford writes in a letter. Where the previous version was concerned with class, the relationships between men and women, and the law of diminishing social returns - as were most of his novels - Lady Chatterley imagines a world without the author, that which was to come after his passing and how much worse it would be.

They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing coal, where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines.

In places, it's the closest Lawrence came to writing science-fiction - which is admittedly not conspicuously close. Brave New World was still four years away, but it seems likely that he'd been discussing some of his concerns with Aldous Huxley.

'I do think sufficient civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities,' said Clifford. 'All the love-business for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in bottles.'

As with John Thomas and Lady Jane, it's written with a clarity and sense of focus which he seemingly developed during those last five or so years. His arguments are clear without sacrificing the poetry to the kind of pedantic analysis he despised, which is why this novel gets away with doing so much, even breaking new ground for Lawrence; which is why its reputation is so well deserved - here referring to the literary achievement rather than its potential as erotic testimony.

Yet for all its qualities, I still prefer John Thomas and Lady Jane, which is more typical of what Lawrence did, but arguably nails it like no previous book, possibly excepting Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow - neither of which have anything like the concision. Additionally, this retelling closes with a number of letters exchanged between the main characters, which feels a little hurried. Nevertheless, as yet another account of why everything used to be better than it is now - or was in 1928 - it remains difficult to disagree with Lawrence's main objections, and hard to fault his foresight.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Ralph Blum - Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974)

Where vintage UFO literature is concerned, I tend to prefer the weirdly implausible to droning lists of moving lights seen in the sky which, while doubtless unnerving for those who saw them, don't necessarily make for interesting reading. So I'll make exceptions to my preference for the writing of John Keel or Brad Steiger where the author actually claims to have been taken to Venus, but that's about it. Until now, for this was recommended by a person on facebook as dealing extensively with the Pascagoula encounter wherein an angler found himself forcibly interviewed by things which looked like this:

Happily for me, it turns out that Ralph Blum was a legitimate journalist before he was a believer, who came to this subject having been commissioned to write about flying saucers for Cosmopolitan, of all things. So beyond the obligatory cover reference to von Däniken - and its use of the font which launched Eric's shabby efforts - we have a well-written, beautifully argued, and entirely sober account of what happened to Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, extending into a much broader examination of the saucer phenomenon and what it meant in 1974. Blum doesn't bother with any of the overly defensive stuff about how so-called scientists will mock, or - on the other hand - dismissing everything as having been Venus seen through swamp gas; and so we have an account and its analysis which seems very much consistent with present times, given that the US Air Force can no longer be bothered to pretend it ain't happening. The tone is closer to that of political biography than to that of most UFO literature, making allowances for sake of argument and taking the rest from there yet without going full Brad Steiger. I'm inclined to wonder whether a few more of those published taking this approach might have brought about the thawing of officialdom a few years ahead of schedule.