D. H. Lawrence, Music, and Modernism by Susan Reid

Abstract

 Reviews D. H. Lawrence, Music, and Modernism. By S R. (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature) London: Palgrave Press. . xvi+ pp. ISBN – –––. Susan Reid’s book is very useful in working on what has sometimes been noted, but never really developed: the significance of music to D. H. Lawrence and his writing. Her book performs an excellent service in gathering together musical allusions in Lawrence’s various texts, noting possible musical influences on them, and in a valuable appendix itemizing settings of Lawrence’s works. She gives a sense overall of what music might have meant to Lawrence, and how much it might have meant to him in Eastwood, even down to the ‘hymns in a man’s life’ about which he wrote so eloquently. In all these things, the study is definitive, and will stand as a sourcebook for any future research. It is also pleasantly unpretentious, though the author clearly knows music, especially the music of modernism, and speaks with considerable quiet force about it. Reid is incidentally very informative—on Bax and on Holst in relation to Schoenberg, for instance—though I would have liked more on Peter Warlock. roughout there are nice allusions: Lawrence liked Debussy (p. ), and so does Reid, evidently, on the basis of the informed way she writes about him; Lawrence wanted to hear Scarlatti (p. ); he declared in  that his favourite singer was ‘a Red Indian singing to the drum’ (p. ). Reid is cautious, however, about making big statements, and this is particularly so when discussing modernism, about which she makes few specific claims, though she is alive to dissonance and has an interesting quotation from Aaron’s Rod against harmonic progression in chords (p. ). She makes a nice connection of this novel with e Magic Flute (p. ). She assumes the negative importance of ‘decadence’ too easily, and despite giving its etymology does not investigate the question of who uses the term critically and who uses it favourably, as Pater does, for example, is is one area of the book where the writer holds herself in too much: the big terms are not defined enough, but small ones are, sometimes too much (for example, over-citing earlier critics who are not necessarily saying anything new). e same point holds with rhythm, a topic frequently adverted to but begging for more probing, because there is evidence that it is a key to modernist music (noted with regard to the magazine that Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry edited, Rhythm (p. )). Reid is aware of the controversial reception of Wagner, and traces this through e Trespasser, and has good things to say about Wagner’s impact on First World War thinking (p. ); but elsewhere she could be more emboldened, and some of her claims—Gerald as Siegfried, or Gerald as Tristan (pp. , )—seem forced. e book perhaps homogenizes modernism too much, as when Reid elides Lawrence with Joyce (p. ), where it might be wiser to show the oppositions between these two writers at anything other than a formal level. She writes interestingly on Stravinsky and includes Adorno’s opposition to him, but she could push further the argument that aligns Stravinsky to Futurism (pp. –), which might help clinch Adorno’s point about Stravinsky as regressive. In Fantasia of the MLR, .,   Unconscious, Lawrence writes that ‘modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness’, and readers would benefit from some enlargement on that. What might ugliness mean for Lawrence? Is it an essential value or a critical one, and how might it align with what is said about Primitivism? Finally, readers may wonder how traditional Lawrence is with regard to music. It is curious how the book leaves the question open. Reid does discuss Nietzsche, but she does not make him crucial to modernism. Yet with him, with Mann (from Buddenbrooks onwards), with Adorno, and with Mann and Adorno together (in Doctor Faustus) come many indirect helps which Reid might consider overmuch theorizing. Nonetheless , her enthusiasms deserve further complementing from those arguments about music’s diabolism, or its death wish, and its contradictory relation to the senses and escape from the sensuous—issues not...