Losing Democracy: Politics and Poetics in Three of D. H. Lawrence's Postwar Novels

Abstract

Losing DemocracyPolitics and Poetics in Three of D. H. Lawrence's Postwar Novels Robert L. Caserio (bio) John Winthrop's vision of a "city on a hill" has been a byword for the utopian promise of American democracy. Yet, as Charles Olson's Maximus Poems laments, Winthrop's imagination "that men / cared / for what kind of … world / they chose to/live in" was broken within a few years: "you cld carry cinders in yr hand / for what the country was worth." We might now again be carrying cinders in our hands for what the country is worth. Perhaps the breakdown is only a cyclical inevitability; perhaps it has become a permanent dysfunction. What resources do we have for facing a possible permanence? One resource—fusing a politics and poetics of the future—might be discoverable in some of D. H. Lawrence's neglected novels. They have been neglected partly because they have been politically suspect. Current erosions of political democracy, elsewhere as well as in the US, seem to be catching up with the apparently dangerous postwar, anti-democratic cast of mind that Lawrence invented for his protagonist in Kangaroo (1923), one of his two novels about Australia. "We're pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling," complains the protagonist, Richard Lovat Somers. Having exiled himself from England, having escaped impressment into the armed forces, and having drifted to Australia, Somers (a virtual double for Lawrence) "could not stand" that "Demos was his own master" Down Under. The Australian Demos is strongly attracted to Marxism; but Marxism, Somers asserts, "appeal[s] only to the will-to-power in the masses, making money the whole crux … the only god." One alternative to Marxism—ugly from a pro-democracy point of view—is a fascist model of organization, to which Somers is open. He is impressed by Jack Callcott, the leader of a Populist group ("the Diggers") whom Somers considers the exemplar of "a new life-form, a new social form." That new social form turns out to be a cult of personality dedicated to the eponymous Kangaroo, whose [End Page 184] messianic political ideals are abetted by auxiliary phalanxes of thuggish Great War veterans, under Callcott's command. Somers's Populist-protofascist turn is all too dismally familiar to us in 2023. But Lawrence's novel doesn't make Somers end there. Somers parts company with Jack, and with Kangaroo; and for all his apparent hostility toward the head of the Australian Labour party, Willie Struthers, Somers "prefers" Struthers to the other leaders. Somers listens with uninterrupted attention to Struthers's eloquent speech (six pages long, and all pure Lawrence) on behalf of a global, color-blind working class. When the Diggers in Struthers's audience react violently to the speech, Somers's strongest desire is "to kill the [veteran] soldiers" who instigate the mayhem. "In truth," we are told, Somers "did love the working people." What he does not love is "All this political socialism—all politics, in fact." So Kangaroo the novel is not only pressuring the pot-bound state of democracy and democratic feeling. Somers's experience and thought pass through a gamut of political models as we know them historically—liberal, democratic, socialist, communist, fascist, anarchist. In the course of that passage, those governmental models are figured as pot-binding agents all. Somers and Lawrence are trying to think outside them. We cling to democracy, despite its increasingly superficial achievements under the pressure of the money-crux. Why not risk losing that model (and the others to boot)? It seems especially difficult—and reprehensible—to let that "democratic" model go. But, following Lawrence's lead, we can contemplate the possibility, and envision its character. We can do it with the help of what I think are Kangaroo's intrinsic companion novels, The Lost Girl (1922) and The Boy in the Bush (1924), the latter of which Lawrence cowrote with a young Australian, M. L. (Mollie) Skinner, but in which his voice predominates. The three novels equally express hostility to the established gamut of politics. But lest their assessments seem only the product of an outlier's crankiness, I first want to note a possible repository...