There was a blank of insentience.' Clifford's unquenched ambitions are channeled, however, into writing 'clever, spiteful, and yet… meaningless' stories. Indeed, this writing appears to suggest the elite literary modernism of Joyce and Proust that Lawrence had rejected. 'The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.' Like a tormented sublimation of his destroyed sexual response, Clifford's stories are everything Lawrence opposed in the literature of his time.
Later, Lord Chatterley abandons his writing in pursuit of something even more sterile. Like Gerald Crich before him, Clifford turns to the mines that his father had left him; urged on by the maternal Mrs. Bolton, he displays a childlike fascination with modern technology 'as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry.' In the wake of this Mephistophelian bargain with technology, Clifford sits 'with a blank entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind,' listening to the radio, 'to the unspeakable thing.' The trajectory of Clifford's slide to imbecility is hard to miss-from hereditary nobility to war, to impotence, to modern literature, to -737- technical treatises 'more interesting' than literature, and finally to that ultimate simulacrum of organic life, the 'idiotically velveteen, genteel sort of voice' that bellows forth from the radio. In one stroke, Lawrence connects the desiccated pretensions of elite modernism with the infantile banalities of popular culture, effectively making them two sides to the same valueless coin and the same impotent man.
Against the artificial psychology of Clifford's stories and the simulated voice of his radio, Lawrence opposes Oliver Mellors. Mellors is the final Lawrentian trespasser-simultaneously gamekeeper and 'poacher,' in the words of Connie's half-admiring father. Like Lawrence, he is the son of a miner, self-educated yet finally disdainful of acquired culture. He leaves his wife to become a lieutenant in the overseas empire that both enraged Lawrence and fed his imagination. Yet Mellors chooses on return a social position lower than his father's, reaffirming with a vengeance his sense of place, nature, and instinct and renouncing material gain. He has effectively rejected women and society when Constance Chatterley enters his life. Mellors's reawakening of, and with, Lady Chatterley-who must learn all over again to be submissive after weaker lovers like Michaelis-is then also Lawrence's final attempt to reawaken the English to the 'vast importance of the novel. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead.' Even as 'one England blots out another' in continuing modernization, Lawrence affirms his faith in the restorative potential of the genre, 'properly handled.'
Connie winds up pregnant in the fall, though Clifford is unwilling to grant her a divorce, while Mellors must avoid her for six months while his own divorce is settled. Reunion and new life will come in the spring. The concluding statement, a letter to Connie, belongs to Mellors. It is in part a social critique, reflecting on the dire fate of the deadened workers-'there's a bad time coming!' — and on their inability to look past immediate commercial interests to an artisanal, «pagan» community. But it is also a song of reconciliation with this enforced separation-'I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking'-and of hope for even more «brilliant» sexual pleasure to come.
At the end of his last significant novel, facing his own physical destruction by tuberculosis, in all likelihood impotent, sterile, and afraid of death, Lawrence voices once again the conviction that had animated his life's work. The 'little forked flame between me and you,' -738- writes Mellors-'my Pentecost'-remains the natural, bodily fire beyond conscious will, unextinguished by modernity's winds. But the 'unnamed god' shielding that flame is not quite as prodigious as before. Mellors's abstinence seems almost a relief, a Schopenhauerian escape from the incessant pull of the blood; and the flame that remains is less the igniting spark of a new communal life than a votive candle threatened-as were Lawrence's own writings-by endless storm. Following a long string of English Romantics before him, Lawrence finally eases his public alienation through the idealized and poignantly deferred hope of private affection; like the lovers on Keats's urn, Mellors and Connie are at last suspended in a desire frozen in time. It is Mellors's unidealized parting shot-a comic, vulgar invocation of his drooping phallus-that makes Lawrence, if nothing else, more honest than the tradition that preceded him.
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Isherwood, Huxley, and the Thirties
PERHAPS the first issue to be resolved when dealing with any aspect of the 1930s is to determine when they actually occurred. History tends not to proceed in neatly defined decades, and despite the chronologically unambiguous beginning and end points asserted by the term, it is worth examining whether the thirties happily fit into the ten-year envelope reserved for them.
As it happens, Hitler cooperated with chronology to fashion the end of the thirties by launching the invasion of Poland on the morning of September 1, 1939. Two days later Britain declared war on Germany, and suddenly the anxieties that had pervaded the thirties-the specter of war abroad, the poverty and unemployment at home, a decaying social structure and the lack of perceived connection with a nourishing past-transformed themselves into a nation's preparation for its struggle for survival. Mobilization announced the beginning of a new era.
While the outbreak of World War II clearly demarcates the end of the period, it is not clear that anything particularly noteworthy occurred on January 1, 1930, to initiate it. Indeed, although assigning a distinct character to the thirties, as opposed to the twenties, has its justification, it also makes sense to see both decades as constituting a single large period standing between the end of one war and the start of another. The frenetic partying and brittle cynicism that we associate with the twenties' attempt to numb the horror of the First World War's bloody slaughter grow naturally into the thirties' despairing recognition that it is all about to happen again. Although the tone of the two -740- decades is admittedly different, it is important to realize the extent to which the apprehensions of the one have their roots in the forced gaiety of the other.
The single text that perhaps most powerfully exemplifies the connection between the two decades is Evelyn Waugh 's Vile Bodies, published in 1930. Spinning wildly out of control (a central event in the novel is in fact a chaotic car race) as they make their way from party to party, Waugh's Bright Young Things work full time to anesthetize themselves to the absence of meaning in their lives. They lack stable identities and access to their own feelings as well as to traditional sources of belief or pleasure of any kind. As one character quips after spending a night with the man she ostensibly loves: 'All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.' Waugh's merciless-and wildly funny-depiction of these lost, isolated souls of the twenties concludes with a broken car stuck in the mud in the middle of 'the biggest battlefield in the history of the world' while a catastrophic war rages around it. The prescient ending brings together into one stunning image the two strains of feeling which E. M. Forster thought distinguished the decades: 'The twenties react after a war and recede from it, the thirties are apprehensive of a war and are carried towards it.'
In suggesting the way in which the thirties can usefully be thought of as beginning in the twenties, with the
