and define the possibilities for love and action. Conrad never puts behind him the conviction that man is caught in a web of circumstances beyond his control. But he also believes in man's capacity to grow, to love, and to know himself. Conrad believes that, within an indifferent if not hostile universe, man's indomitable will enables him to survive despite setbacks and individual failures. Thus, he is not the nihilist and the prophet of darkness that he has been depicted as in much recent criticism.
Conrad's later work contains qualities that typify the work of many older artists: the revival of forms and themes of past artistic successes, references to earlier works, nostalgia for an earlier period of life, emphasis on turning points in life, and intermittent sensuality. But what is lacking in Conrad's later work is the creative rage of the older Yeats, the aging Monet's willingness to take a chance, the bold disregard for precedents of the Joyce who wrote Finnegans Wake, and the Olympian turning away from mere nominalistic details to focus on essential truths that characterize the later work of Matisse.
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D. H. Lawrence
FOR most of its history the British novel has been primarily a domestic melodrama about money and sex, and the modern novel is no exception. Nineteenth-century realism especially is an encyclopedia of entries on English class and gender anxieties, and on the links between them. There is, of course, another tradition of adventure and travel, rooted in the maritime imperialism of the British Isles. This tradition is also well represented by the modern novel, which often followed earlier travel-adventure narratives in providing a critical commentary on life at home. These three broad themes-money and class, sexuality and gender, and European civilization refracted against those alien to it-intersect with one another nowhere in British modernism more powerfully or disturbingly than in the novels of D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence displayed little of James Joyce's scrupulous concern for literary technique and the mot juste; he had no patience for the genteel humanism of E. M. Forster; and he was convinced that the inwardturning delineation of consciousness sought by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and fellow modernists was primarily a sign of Europe's death wish. But Lawrence's profoundly estranged vision, for all its obviousness, vulgarity, and narcissism, may represent the emotional and intellectual life of his time more immediately than does any other.
Lawrence was an individual at war with Western modernity itself-with its automation, industrialism, commercialism, militarism, imperialism, and dominion over nature (including the American taste for -715- indoor plumbing) as well as with its growing demand for social equality, democracy, and the rights of women. He cherished a 'free proud singleness,' yet yearned for a 'permanent connection to others' (in Rupert Birkin's words from Women in Love) that was organic and communitarian. The conflicts began amid the particular details of his own existence, where he sought remedies for what he believed to be cosmic disorder. Lawrence's writing is a tangle of contradictions, almost all of which have demonstrable roots in his family life. Yet these contradictions turn out to be inextricable from the larger cultural dilemmas of his age. About his first novel, Lawrence told his friend Jessie Chambers, 'I think a man puts everything he is into a book-a real book.' He rarely belied the remark in practice. His fiction, 'huge autobiography embroidered,' in Richard Aldington's apt phrase, cannibalized the people and events around him with a ruthlessness unmatched-even by Joyce or Proust-in the twentieth century. But Lawrence also maintained the conviction-it has been called both prophetic and Freudian-that in his autobiographical analysis lay the cure for all of modernity's ills.
If Lawrence is a biographer's dream, however, he is a philosopher's nightmare. For he adapts Nietzsche's view that rational thought, despite its pretensions to disinterestedness, is nothing more than unconscious memoir. In Lawrence, conscious memoir assumes the character of metaphysics returned to its atavistic sources. He half invites a reading of his fiction as one long rehearsal of psychological conflicts he never succeeded in resolving. But in the first chapter of his Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence stresses the opposition between 'two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.' His own mode of interpretion stands those American classics on their heads. Lawrence translates Benjamin Franklin's praise of utilitarian virtue as Franklin's way of justifying the white man's eradication of the Indian; he rereads Melville's white whale, not as a personal vision of good or evil but as the doomed image of white America. The personal was for Lawrence as inseparable from the philosophical and the political as it was from the novels themselves.
The obvious example of this imbrication of personal and public conflict is Lawrence's relationship to his parents. Lawrence was born in 1885, surrounded by the smoldering coal fields and shrinking pastures of Nottinghamshire. He was the son of Arthur Lawrence, a barely literate coal miner who had given dancing lessons in his youth and Lydia Beardsall, an acerbic mother with aspirations to gentility who worked -716- briefly and unsuccessfully as a student teacher before she married. Lawrence was deeply affected by the occasional violence of his father's anger, especially that aimed against his often bitter and disappointed mother. 'I was born hating my father,' he wrote to the Scottish poet Rachel Taylor just before his mother's death in December 1910; 'as early as ever I can remember, I shivered with horror when he touched me.' But he also saw his father, and miners in general, as exhibiting a natural nobility and a distinctly male sociality that were being suppressed by the forces of modernity-including willful, puritanical, and intellectually emancipated women.
Toward his mother, Lawrence recognized quite different affections and falsely assumed that she derived from a higher social class than had his father. 'We have loved each other,' he also wrote in the letter to Taylor, 'almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal.' But while this maternal relationship was central to his happiness at home, Lawrence felt early on that it was also «terrible» and 'abnormal.' The maternal woman paradoxically became not only a welcome path to higher cultural status; she was equally the troubling source of modernity's reliance on intellection, calculation, homogeneity, and spirituality, and of its repression of instinctual spontaneity, uninhibited sexuality, and a natural community of unique individuals. By the time Lawrence wrote his essay 'Education of the People' (1920), mothers had become the selfish instigators of modernity's debilitating self-consciousness. 'Seize babies away from their mothers, with hard, fierce, terrible hands… mothers of England, spank your wistful babies… and make men of them.' The essay ends with a call for a sharp distinction
