Aaron's Rod

D.H. Lawrence Aaron's Rod (1922)
Aaron's Rod has been broadly characterised as one of Lawrence's lesser novels but—you know—screw you. He never wrote a minor novel. It is, however, one of his more freewheeling efforts - improvised in terms which can't be said of acknowledged greats such as The Rainbow or Women in Love. It therefore tends to get lumped in with The Lost Girl which was similarly improvised and draws pseudo-autobiographical inspiration from the same period and events of the author's life, namely meeting his wife, then her family and their move to Italy. As with The Lost Girl, he began writing, gave up, then finished the thing off a few years later on the continent. However, where The Lost Girl feels very much like two novels bolted together - one of them apparently written for Will Hay - this holds together very well. The first eleven chapters - amounting to the early material - could just about have worked as a novella in their own right, and if there follows a degree of subsidence, maybe a little coasting, it all pulls together with surprising elegance towards the end.

Aaron was the brother of Moses in both the Torah and the Old Testament. His rod was a staff with reputedly magical properties, a symbol of authority and fertility. Here it's Aaron's flute and possibly also his hampton to some extent, the instrument which informs his progress, the course of his life and, significantly, a means by which Aaron communicates without reducing everything to the vulgar codification of words. This is a theme which really comes to the fore in The Plumed Serpent, and Aaron's Rod accordingly reads a little like a dry run.

'Ay, all right then,' said Aaron. 'But there isn't anything wonderful about it. You talk as if you were doing something special. You aren't. You're no more than a man who drops into a pub for a drink, to liven himself up a bit. Only you give it a lot of names, and make out as if you were looking for the philosopher's stone, or something like that. When you're only killing time like the rest of folks, before time kills you.'

Similarly, in Aaron's Rod we find Lawrence's pastoralism beginning to develop a more philosophical dimension.

Much that is life has passed away from me, leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing.

Of course, it is this current of mysticism which has led to Lawrence being denounced as proto-fascist in recent times by those who tend to prefer their complex arguments reduced to the black and white narrative of a Star Wars movie; but it's frankly fucking bollocks and primary colour politics are dismissed over and over in this novel, written, lest we forget, immediately in the wake of the first world war. Lawrence deals with the individual, usually himself, and never has much to say about larger pictures.

'Who threw the bomb?' said Aaron.
'I suppose an anarchist.'
'It's all the same,' said Aaron.

Here he's dealing with himself, using the characters of Aaron and Lilly as a dissection of his own confused relationship with Middleton Murry - a love-hate deal wrapped up with D.H. feeling the need for a submissive male disciple, someone in which his own philosophical leanings might be echoed and hence justified. Nevertheless, this is as much a novel about marriage to the endlessly polygamous Frieda as anything, and the Lawrence-Murry metaphor only works up to a point. While the thoroughly yappy, opinionated Lilly doubtless resembles the author in many respects, the brooding, ever reticent Aaron seems to capture what the man wished to become; and it's difficult to avoid reading him as the principal author stand-in.

Minor novel, my arse.