Lawrence’s trek to the stars
THE sudden disappearance of Fungie, the friendly, fun-loving dolphin from Dingle Bay, County Kerry, sent shockwaves around the world and stunned the community his charisma had transformed for 37 years.
Last seen with several humpback whales, this legend brings to mind some rapturous descriptions of these telepathic lords of creation in the poetry and fiction of DH Lawrence.
His poem, They Say the Sea is Loveless, summons dolphins leaping “round Dionysos’ ship, whose masts have purple vines”. It’s “up they come with the purple dark of rainbows. . .and, flip! they go! with the nose-dive of sheer delight”. Lawrence says “the sea is making love to Dionysos in the bouncing of these small and happy whales”.
There’s a magic moment in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when Admiral James T Kirk, inspired by George and
Grace, two humpback whales he’s saving, recites the opening of a Lawrence poem: “They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all”. Dr Gillian Taylor recognises the work – “Whales, Weep Not!, DH Lawrence!”. Thus Lawrence helped save the whales.
Recovering from a near-fatal bout of malaria in 1925 Lawrence dictated a story, The Flying Fish, to his wife Frieda. Central character Gethin Day is sailing from the Gulf of Mexico, heading for his ancestral home in Derbyshire.
The “running tip of the ship” cleaves the “frail green waters”, lifting “vivid wings” of “white pinion-spray”. Flying fishes are a revelation to Gethin’s soul, “brilliantly twinkling” as they flutter “translucent wings” in “ecstatic clouds” above the waves. He is looking into the beautiful, pure, lovely “Greater Day”.
On the third morning a school of porpoises leading the ship offer an epiphany – a “spectacle of the most perfected joy he had ever seen... .many lusty-bodied fish enjoying one laugh of life”. He feels man “a pale and sickly thing in comparison” and asks “What civilisation will bring us to such a pitch of laughing togetherness, as these fish have reached?”
On November 4, 1920, Lawrence wrote from Sicily to Dr Anton Kippenberg of Insel-verlag accepting £35 per book for the “faithful translation” of his work into German, suggesting Sons And Lovers and The Rainbow are “best suited”. Secker is “bringing out another novel of mine this month, The Lost Girl”. He tells sister Ada, her son “Jackie”, with “Peter” – sister Emily’s Pekinese – look “a rackapelt couple”. And advises Thomas Seltzer that he thinks Women In Love, due out in February, still “the best of my books”.