Thought-adventurers and the ‘great puzzle’
PUBLISHED in Vanity Fair, June 1924, DH Lawrence’s essay On Being a Man asserts: “Man is a thought-adventurer.” However, “real thought” isn’t slick intellectual trickery, with rules, like chess. Rather, “it begins with a change in the blood”, a slow convulsion within the body, bringing “a new reality in mental consciousness”.
One risks physical engagement with life, then confronts the effect on the mind. “Little David” tackles the “giant of life,” bodily, before enduring the consequences. Soldiers surviving the Great War often daren’t face themselves afterwards, Lawrence observes.
We’ve two selves – a “vulnerable” body, whose immediate sympathies, desires, passions, may defy the rational mind.
Then our ego – the self we “KNOW” we are.
The body’s an “unknown jungle” of “strange attractions and revulsions”, an “unseen” self, “like a black panther”, eyes glowing “green” at night. Our kindly, sensitive “known” self approves its “good intentions”, understanding the outside world through vibrations in blood and nerves.
People marry through sympathetic connection. However, “real blood contact” may reveal a “delightful” man as “a son of the old and rather hateful Adam”. An “angel of loveliness and desirability” becoming a fiendish “daughter of the snakefrequenting Eve”.
Solving the “great puzzle”, the “sphinx-riddle” of marriage, requires thought-adventure. There’s risk, suffering, but the great experience changes the blood. One becomes a man, rather than a personality, psychically deranged within the ego’s armour. A man knows, though scarcely sees, his wife, if fearful to explore “the snake-infested bushes of her extraordinary Paradise”. His “spurious emotions” feel real. He lacks “the eternal touchstone” of false/true, good/evil, having “a ghastly little white tombstone” he’s created. He dares anything, “except be a man”. “Harmlessness” displaces “manliness”. While men “of living red earth” survive harsh weather “into new springtime”, he’s “slowly, malignantly undermining the tree of life”.
Soldiers surviving the Great War often daren’t face themselves afterwards, Lawrence observes
■100 YEARS AGO,
on March 3, 1924, Lawrence advises Mollie Skinner their jointeffort, The Boy In The Bush, is “in the printers’ hands”. Mollie’s due “one-half of all receipts in England and America” (after deducting 10 percent agent’s fee), plus half the £100 “advance”. He’s “anxious” the book succeeds, Mollie receiving “money as well as fame”. She may “quarrel a bit with the last two chapters” but it seems to Lawrence “more immoral” if a man cares “for two women...suddenly to drop all connection with one of them, than to wish to have two”. But “one day we shall laugh things over, I know”. On the 4th, he tells “My dear Schwiegermutter” they’re posting Nusch’s parcel “today.” Lawrence will pay her £4 “each month.”