Remember Rananim!

THE mass insanity which ensued following the onset of war in 1914 so horrified DH Lawrence that he longed to create his own community of like-minded souls where the seeds of a new civilisation might be planted.

Named Rananim, this utopian colony of selected trusted friends had numerous prospective locations. It might have been in Florida, on a citrus plantation owned by composer Frederick Delius, who admired Lawrence. But it wasn’t. This new “little society”, where people could “consider the big things”, almost found accommodation at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire. But didn’t.

The Lawrences moved to Cornwall, near to Land’s End. Zennor was “the Promised Land”, Lawrence felt, where “a new heaven and a new earth would take place”. Friends arrived. Then left again. Rananim never materialised on Sicily either.

Lawrence planned to buy a ship and sail the seas with a few kindred spirits, looking for an island home. The scheme foundered. There was good company, simplicity, nature, on Ceylon. But heatstroke debilitated him. Maybe Australia? In that “weird, unawakened country”, with “a dozen people, perhaps, and a big piece of land of one’s own”? Yet it couldn’t be done. Nor in the New World of America. Or Mexico. Lawrence was offered free land near Guaymas for his commune, in 1924. He declined. Too much “like living on Mars”. Yet there was Taos, with one loyal disciple, artist Dorothy Brett.

Aldous Huxley who, contrary to his customary intellectual caution, agreed to join Lawrence in Florida in 1915, said that “up to the last” Lawrence “never ceased to dream” of his “colony of escape”. Sadly, Huxley felt “it was better it should have remained, as it was always to remain, a project and a hope”.

However, his travels kept his quest alive. Lawrence remained his own one-man Rananim, he and Frieda a one-couple colony! ■■ 100 years ago, on January 14, 1922, Lawrence told his “dear” friend Kot that he, too, often thinks of their Christmas 1914 party at the Buckinghamshire cottage, and sometimes lulls himself with “Ranane Sadihkim Sadihkim Badanoi”, the Hebrew version of Rejoice in the Lord, O ye Righteous (first verse, Psalm 33), which Kot sang so soulfully. Lawrence feels “eight years older, and a thousand years more disconnected with everything, and more frustrated” than back then, when he resolved to found an Order of the Knights of Rananim, their badge “an eagle, or phoenix argent, rising from a flaming nest” above their motto “Fier” (Proud), their flag “the blazing ten-pointed star” scarlet on black. “Remember Rananim!”