Kangaroo

D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo (1923)
This is one of Lawrence's leadership novels, as they've been called, although I've also seen the same cited as evidence of his fascism. I'm not sure leadership is quite the right term, and Kangaroo is as much a refutation of the notion that Lawrence suffered from a stiff right arm as anything, unless you regard fascism as everything which isn't actually Owen Jones. However, it can be said that it's one of his more transparently autobiographical novels, with details drawn from his flight from England and three months spent in Australia prior to sailing to the Americas. Central to Kangaroo is the rise of a popular nationalist party, some of which is doubtless drawn from what Lawrence witnessed in Italy during the rise of Mussolini, which is where the fascism supposedly comes in.

Kangaroo is the nickname of one of those dynamic leader types around which angry young men who just happen to love their country tend to cohere; and so far as I'm aware, the character wasn't really based on anything inhabiting the Australian political spectrum of the day. It's also interesting that he's Jewish - much like Bertold Goltz, leader of the paramilitary Sons of Job in Philip K. Dick's Simulacra. Kangaroo's somewhat dilute brand of fascism doesn't seem to go further than a not unreasonable distrust of labour unions, typically nebulous waffle about international banking, and some fairly mild racial stereotyping - at least mild for the twenties - and, politically speaking, he seems to represent revolutionary figureheads making the same mistakes as those whom they aspire to replace. His role in the novel, as with those of his supporters befriended by the itinerant Richard Somers, is seemingly as a screen onto which Lawrence projects his ideas about fascism, authority, and everything that was going on in the world, in order to provide a critique; so we're talking about ideas and beliefs which the author is examining rather than necessarily endorsing; and Kangaroo's eventual assassination during a failed coup of his own instigation doesn't suggest a whole lot of faith in the road trodden by Mussolini and others.

Unfortunately though, not all of the novel is as interesting as this may sound, and Somers' time spent with Kangaroo is mostly extended conversational circles about the possibility of love between a man who was never confused and another really strong man without any of the funny stuff getting in the way, which is fairly typical of Lawrence talking to himself and is difficult to imagine transposed to the lips of Nigel Farage.

Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones around our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers - look at those hibiscus - they don't want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned to stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy.

Huh! What a flipping Nazi!

I gather the philosophy which Lawrence eventually developed had some parallels with Buddhism, or at least the idea of there being nothing permanent but change, and it is expressed here at crippling length but without any coherent development, ideas being set down in whichever order they occurred to the author, Kangaroo being one of his semi-improvised works. The accusation of fascism seemingly comes from the discussion of those details already mentioned in combination with Lawrence's growing misanthropy, the contradiction of which he himself remained very much aware.

It's a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You don't like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back.

That being said, Lawrence's cynicism is given thorough account in the two painfully autobiographical chapters flashing back to Cornwall during the first world war. Lawrence had evaded the draft, having been declared unfit for active duty, but was treated with heavy suspicion, and harassed by the authorities beyond reason to the point of being effectively driven from the country; all because his wife was German and he wrote novels and was therefore presumably a bit weird. Anyone who can read these chapters and still attribute authoritarian tendencies to their author is an idiot.

So Kangaroo is some way down the list, but flourishes of poetic genius are to be found throughout, and chapters twelve and thirteen are amongst the most powerful written by the author.