Not only did it dash all hopes of returning to Italy, but also of living happily with Frieda, or of having his novel published. The war damaged his very belief in his country and his age. During this, he might seem farsighted: how could one believe in a civilization responsible for such wickedness and carnage as the war would generate?
It took him years to understand quite what had happened to him in 1914. But he was one of the first to grasp what an extraordinary moment it was. He would write a good deal about war in Aaron’s Road and eventually, would compose a version of his experience, in the account he added to his novel Kangaroo. It would be wrong to imagine him realizing anything very definitely in August 1914; he simply knew that he was desperate. But what was at stake seems to have been his very belief in English civilization.原文请+QQ3249'114优.文^论,文'网
Up until 1914, he had written with largely unspoken and in many ways nineteenth-century self-assurance that what he wrote addressed the deepest needs of his society, and he had felt that he was, with his subversive perspective, in a unique position. 毕业论文http://www.youerw.com/
I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people.
I do write because I want folk- the English folk- to alter, and have more sense. (D. H. Lawrence 151)
What the war destroyed, in the end, were his certainty that any such alteration was possible, as well as his belief that he could do anything about it.
Lawrence was still busy revising his novel (The Rainbow) and had also become interested, in reaction to what he saw as the massive and monstrous inhumanity of the war, in the idea of a small community of chosen people living a simple but intense life of cooperation and communication. It was an idea which was to haunt him throughout his life, though his commitment to it varied sharply at different times.
The writer who had up to now believed in the development and utterance of ‘the great racial or human consciousness, a little of which is in me’, who wanted people to read his fiction and be made ‘alert and active’, to alter their relationships, to realize their desires.
He also started to comprehend, more sharply, the extent to which he was an outsider, not only in the literary world but in the smoothly function middle-and upper-class worlds of politics and government.
When he lived in Greatham, it was here that Lawrence came into direct contact with the so-called Bloomsbury circle, that group of writers, artists and thinkers based mainly in London who dictated the tone of intellectual life in London in the years immediately following the war.
Then Lawrence joined the anti-war line, here, he and another man planned a series of joint lectures on social reform and urgent contemporary issues. At this time, Lawrence was an advocate of comprehensive nationalization and social security.
The horror of war and the impossibility of an early end to it were beginning to take an increasing toll of Lawrence’s energy and spirits. He had completed The Rainbow and intended to write a sequel using much material already written but not worked into the final draft. His agent had already made some minor alterations but his publishers wanted Lawrence to make more, which he refused to do expect for two deletions. His adamant refusal to pay the costs of the divorce had brought the threat of legal proceedings and bankruptcy very close.
To add to it all, Lawrence’s health was worsening. ‘So it is the end, our world is gone and we are like dust in the air.’(A Preface to D. H. Lawrence 44)
1.5 Isolated and Independent
Nothing would have prepared the Lawrence for their eviction from Cornwall, where they felt rooted, but it was also a disaster financially. The cottage was cheap, because they lived next to a farm and grew their own vegetables, they also had cheap food. In London, they had no money to pay for accommodation. For the first time in their life together, they were homeless. They had to rely on friends.
They were also still being tracked by the police. The authorities sent constables around to check up on them anyway. And two lain-clothes police officers listening at the door of his friends’ flat, visiting his mother’s flat, even Ernest Weekley was questioned, they opening Lawrence’s mails. All this, made Lawrence felt hateful and humiliating and degrading.原文请+QQ3249,114优.文^论,文'网
This kind of life had increasingly become a killing experiment in isolation, there was exhausting. Lawrence had been growing strange. ‘God, I don’t want to be so sane, as men are counted sane’.
The relationship with William Henry Hocking had been another sign of how far beyond his old self he was now prepared to go, and how much he was prepared to ignore Frieda, and she claimed:
Not because his relationship with Hocking was sexual, but because it consciously did what previous relationships with men had not done. (D. H. Lawrence 194)毕业论文http://www.youerw.com/
It was in 1917, when Lawrence’s love for Frieda had been the most important thing in his life. He now felt that his job as a writer was to be concerned with