The Flame into being is a phrase one comes across only on reading a well-known novel by an equally well-known novelist named D H Lawrence (1885 – 1930). The title of the novel is Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A general reader may not know how the term had been framed by Lawrence, but a well-known biographer Anthony Burgess tried to rediscover in the form of a literary biography the novelist and his works using the title as Flame into Being.
As Burgess explains, this brief book (running to 18 chapters and 211 pages) had its origins in the intentions to write a book even briefer – a centennial tribute to David Herbert Lawrence which should be a sort of payment of a debt. Furthermore, the contents may serve to introduce the man called Lawrence and his writings inclusive of his poems to those who know nothing of either the personal creative process and the personal lifestyle of the creator. As the biographer Burgess underlines, Lawrence was the only great British writer to celebrate a centenary in 1985.
Trials and tribulations
A year devoted to musicians and most of all to Handel who was born in 1685. At the outset, the reader comes to know that the intention is a broad perspective not meant to be a mere profile presentation but an interpretation and analysis of the works and the background experiences that have gone into it. As such the work as a whole has to be considered as a peep into the creative process via the experiences encountered by Lawrence, from childhood, in a collier’s village, the gradual bringing up as a scholar, the personal trials and tribulations such as romances to his journeys into various countries inclusive of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).
Burgess tries to present in the best possible manner, the social ideology that Lawrence held as a young scholar in the creation of his first novels, White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
As such, the work could be regarded as a creative investigation into the creation and the creator. Burgess tries as far as possible to be closer to Lawrence when he states that Lawrence died in March 1930 when he was just 13 years old and too unliterary to notice. He stated that at that time he had read Juvenile Shockers in bed with torchlight. In this manner, he had managed to come across Lawrence via a periodical named ‘Boy’s Magazine’.
It had been the prevailing generation gap according to Burgess that had prevented him from knowing intimately who Lawrence was and what he had contributed as a creative narrator and a poet of a lesser fame. As such, he confesses that having discovered James Joyce, he was not at first eager to read Lawrence. He comes to know that in 1960 after court case of some length and much fatuity, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was no longer a banned book.
Controversy crisis
So he notes that the lifting of the ban after a long controversy goes to prove not only the integrity of Lawrence, the writer but also the crisis within the living conditions itself. As such, Lawrence ceased to be a subversive writer.
Burgess writes: His [Lawrence’s] fangs were drawn and he became a mild classic, meaning a writer wrapped in his period. Lawrence had, in a sense, done his work, of bringing about a sexual liberation. But did the society in which Lawrence lived accept his ideology as profound? But the point encircled the concept of rationalism. If Lawrence was irrational, it was because he recognised how small a part reason plays in the business of living. The Centre of his response to the external world was the solar plexus, not the cerebral cortex.
Most sensitive poetic visions of Lawrence is embedded in the chapter The Prophecy is in the Poetry. As Burgess states, one of the major achievements of the postwar exile of Lawrence was a series of poems eventually published under the title Birds, Beasts and Flowers. They are denoted as poems because of the intense sensibility they disclose and the emotive and the descriptive daring of the language. But they could as well as fragments of essays, jottings, in a notebook digressions in a story or a novel.
Ezra Pound, the well-known scholar and linguist, saw these jottings as the essence of literature, meaning poetry. The poetry of Lawrence is regarded as simple and sensitive.
Burgess comes to a conclusion by stating that Lawrence accepted the concept of belonging in a manner which his detractors have always been unwilling to understand. As such, Lawrence’s grief was that cosmos and human society had alike been brought low. Lawrence seems to ask: where were the raging lions and the soaring eagles? Only in his poems could be the response.
Disappointing Ceylon
In chapter Eastward, Burgess records his trip to Colombo.
Lawrence had got to Colombo in March 1922. By the beginning of April, Lawrence was ready to dismiss the East as silly. He had said: “I don’t like it one bit, I don’t like the silly dark people or their swarming billions on their ‘hideous’ holy places.” He was perhaps referring to the upcountry pageant or perahera which he had seen with a lack of informative knowledge on the cultural background.
It seems that Lawrence had branded himself as a noble savage. The underlying meaning and vision are quite mythical. While preferring the most naturalistic way of the humans, he detested at times the torture that emerges via manmade rituals for the sake of achieving a higher state of living. Lawrence, according to Burgess, was not limited to one sphere of creations. He tried his hand at the painting which he cultivated as a self-expression. Then comes his essays which are collected as Apocalypse.
They are more random jottings on varied subjects ranging from aesthetics to love and sex. As noted by Burgess, Lawrence died midway between his 44th and 55th birthdays.
Too young? An absurd question, but only if we consider that life is a quantifiable substance and that we all have a right for it?
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