Posted by Dr. C. Ravindran Nambiar
“Eudaemonism” is a word which has been widely discussed right from the days of Socrates. “Lawrence can be considered the personification of the search for the foundation of human nature”, says Alessandro Maurini, and adds that Lawrence’s philosophy of love and life led “to the utmost instinctive artistic creativity, to eudaemonism” (Maurini 9). Eu stands for “well”, “good”, and daimon means “spirit”. Live well and do well is the clarion call of these novelists in their fiction.
As novelists, D. H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell believe that culture is rooted in sex, and sex is at the root of all human miseries and ecstasies. These novelists try to equip their protagonists with proper wisdom and insight, so that they can lead a happy and peaceful life. In fact, Durrell started his literary career by following Lawrence’s fictional ideas. He never hesitated to admit that Lawrence was his literary mentor. He also felt that if death had not snatched Lawrence’s life at an early age, he would have given much more to literature. Sensing this incompleteness in Lawrence, and realising the direction in which Lawrence had been moving, Durrell felt the need to follow the same course in fiction, and to accomplish what his literary Guru could have done, had he lived a longer life. One simple example of Durrell’s honest attempt to work as an extension of his literary master can be noticed in his decision to take Lawrence’s character, Connie, and give her the central role in his Avignon Quintet, his intellectual autobiography, as he named it. He did so, in order to fully empower Constance, to make her realise her animal power, and to enable her to redefine her womanhood. Or, in other words, by following Lawrence’s enlightened views on sex, Durrell was trying to give Connie a new pattern, a pattern in which man is taught to realise that his role in a sexual relationship is only secondary, and that he has no dominant place in it. This paper examines the important novels of these two giant novelists to highlight how they serve as a pathfinder to readers in their search for a happy and blissful life.
Human history shows that reality gets frequently redefined or reinterpreted by artists and philosophers; with the result that man is now forced to believe that true reality is beyond his perception. To some extent, the greatness of Lawrence lies in his ardent crusade against his society which failed to uphold the real reality of womanhood. Realising that women generally experience an “Aching and cramped” life in their marital relationship, Lawrence creates events in his stories to show how his female characters can liberate themselves from such a miserable life. The initial part of most of his novels reveals the restlessness and the pain experienced by his protagonists, “the ache of unreality” (Rainbow 492), and then from such dejected situations, the novelist tries to liberate them into a free and happy life. The quest in his novels, therefore, is for the right man-woman relationship, because the novelist knows that only such a relationship can generate lasting peace and harmony: “The man should come from the infinite and she should hail him” (494). Lawrence’s female protagonists explore all ways and means to transform themselves from their social and temporal selves to a permanent self: “To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity”, feels Ursula in Rainbow (441). The ardent search for the right blood relationship enables the characters of these two novelists, Lawrence and Durrell, to examine their inner selves retrospectively in order to understand what had really obstructed them from achieving their basic desires when they were not mature enough to understand real life. Hence, the conflict in their novels crops up when the protagonists try to discover what stood in their way of leading a natural life. The conflicts, or the events leading to the conflicts, give the authors a chance for a critical examination of the social and political atmosphere in which their characters were forced to grow up.
If Connie’s search for the right man gives her author an occasion to expose the industrial society of Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Durrell devotes one full novel, named Livia, to highlight the nasty sexual relationships with which his characters were doomed to live during the pre-war days in Europe. The young men in Europe were fated to live “with the memory of some whore in mind, and the ever present worry of a dose”, says the narrator in Livia (Livia 329). Therefore, the general feeling among the young characters in this novel during those critical days was that “we are living out the fateful destiny of European man. We are taking part in this materialist funeral of the living man” (460). The author gives more space in the novel for narrating the sexual aberrations observed among the boys and the girls, because he realises that the attitude to sex in his society is mostly negative or hostile. This is how John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman writes about the Victorian reality: “you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds — a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two” (Fowles 211). These authors find that their characters were crippled altogether, both in their souls and in their feelings or find that they were “unliving”, because they were unable to know what sex really is, or what life really is. Without recognising this cruel fact, some critics, like F. R. Leavis, accuse Durrell of “throwing mud on literature” (Leavis 36). A new desire, a creative desire, emerges from the frustrating reality which tormented these writers — a desire to weave a realistic pattern, a new paradigm that can liberate women from their present maladies. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover entrusts Mellors with the task of liberating Connie from the world in which all the great, dynamic words like “love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband” were half dead or “were dying from day to day” (Chatterley’s Lover 51). Similarly, Durrell’s Constance gets a philosopher-cum-Yogi, named Affad, who rescues her from the war-torn world and enlightens her about the divine nature of sex. If Connie gets from Mellors the “soft rapture” she was seeking as a woman, or was enjoying his full phallic power; Affad, a reincarnation of Mellors, educates Constance that sex is a form of yoga in which both the man and the woman should surrender their egos. She learns that in a sexual yoga both man and woman should die into each other. She also realises that this new insight she receives is pre-Adamic, but was unfortunately lost during the course of history. Searching for the causes of the distorted sexual relationships and then discovering a paradigm to restore the lost happiness is mostly the running theme of the novels written by these writers: “Therefore, the novel properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life”, writes Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (86). In short, these novelists believe that the aim of a novel should be to help the readers in attaining real happiness.
The course of action the protagonists take for attaining happiness in their life may not be socially acceptable, because their hostility is normally to the intellect, to the “mechanized reason”. At the same time, whatever means they accept or whatever adventure they seek to reach their goal of happiness in life is always dictated by the ways of nature. As Terry Eagleton observed, “If Lawrence is an enemy of system, it is because he believes that Life is an absolute which will brook no constraint” (Eagleton 272). The opening remark in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is true even in this century: “Ours is essentially a tragic age… there is no smooth road into the future” (Chatterley’s Lover 1). Lawrence is not a pessimist. Immediately after reminding his readers about the present tragic state, he begins to assert his robust desire that man should lead a happy life: “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen” (1). Connie is aware of this. No matter what Clifford preaches, she boldly leaves his distressing world of “disconnection” to experience a “pure, sparky, fearless” life. She is adamant that she should live the way her female body demands. Her resolve to keep the torch of womanhood burning, in spite of the social will acting against her, is the unique quality of her character, and thus of the novel. Her determination echoes the words of Rupert Birkin in Women in Love: “When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old” (Women in Love 54). Durrell also maintains the same challenge in his novels, challenging the conventions which deny a man his inner peace. In Sebastian, the fourth novel of the Quintet, this point is emphatically stated: “We continue with this worn-out civilization of ours, it leads us nowhere….Why should man be the only animal who knows better but always fares worse?” (Sebastian 175). Durrell told Stephen Gray in an interview: “The message is always the same one: Live” (Gray 82). In short, live and let others live happily is the central message emerging from the novels of Lawrence and Durrell. They do not want to forfeit life for the sake of knowledge.
There is a parallel in the narrative style of these two novelists. As already noted, the first part of most of their novels reveals the events which reflect the restless world in which the protagonists find themselves trapped; it also includes the description of the social and cultural causes of their frustration, causes for their “savagely apocalyptic despair”, as Terry Eagleton puts it (Eagleton 277). These early events gradually develop into an inner conflict in the protagonist, mostly caused by the erroneous sexual relationships he or she experienced. Then, the narration moves on to expose to what extent man has deviated from the natural course of sexual act, or from this “primitive business of the sexual act”. The subsequent events in their stories are used to explain how a good man-woman sexual relationship can be established or restored, so that one can live with a sense of pure and chaste life: with “a strange conjunction…an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings-as the stars balance each other” (Women in Love 161). If viewed from a different critical angle, one can see that the early part of their novels depict certain hostile situations which lead to some hostile “patterns”, or to some conditioned patterns.
The rest of the events in the story are, therefore, intended to undo that condition, that unbearable pattern, in order to discover altogether a new one, a new paradigm, an ultimate unison for achieving happiness. Paul’s love with Miriam in Sons and Lovers fails to end happily, but he is able to discover that his family not only imposes great constraints on him, but it also ensnares him. He discovers that his father’s rough relationship with his mother led to his mother’s excessive love towards him, and ultimately, it ruined his love relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, he discovers this painful pattern a little late, and he does not possess the requisite wisdom or courage to replace it with a new pattern, a pattern which could help him in having a successful relationship with Miriam. Similarly, Darley in The Alexandria Quartet finds that his love relationships with Justine and Melissa in Alexandria did not give him the desired happiness, but he too discovers that it was his failure to know his real self that caused all the frustrations in his life. However, Connie succeeds in discovering a new kind of love experience in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; a pattern in which she finds two beings in a perfect union, each constituting the freedom of the other. This novel has a wonderful story, and it is also a beautiful work in which Lawrence fully succeeds in incorporating most of his sexual ideas and his creative talents. In this novel, he succeeded in gifting his female protagonist with a new pattern, a pattern which he had visualized in his essay named “Give Her a Pattern”. Lawrence liberates Connie from Clifford’s control and domination, from his assertive will. The new love, which Connie had longed for, is won purely through her own instinctive moves, through a passionate course she herself judiciously worked out: “A sense of rebellion smouldered in Connie”, says the narrator (Chatterley’s Lover 60). The word that frequently resonates in the first part of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is “nothingness”. On one page alone, Lawrence repeats this word about nine times (46). From this nothingness begins her resurrection; she grows adamant and begins to assert: “A woman has to live her life” (61). Thus, from that pathetic messiness she had found herself in Chatterley’s house, Connie, like a revolutionary, not only transforms herself, but also exposes the ridiculous state of her society; the society which has been thoughtlessly and arbitrarily shaping the patterns for women for centuries. At the end of the novel, the narrator sums up Connie’s past situation thus: “That is our civilization and education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out” (266). Lawrence dreaded this non-human civilisation which can only produce standardised human beings. Going a step further from this attitude, Durrell cautions that money is replacing sperm today; sperm consciousness is being replaced with money consciousness. Following Lawrence, many a novelist after him continues to seek a new pattern. Erica Jong in her book, The Devil Large, writes: “A new paradigm of the sexes is needed, one that sees women and men holistically rather than as battling armies” (Jong 222). But, the most difficult task is in undoing of the hostile pattern that is prevailing, rather than in churning out a new one.
The essay written by D. H. Lawrence, named “Give Her a Pattern”, can be taken as a basic document to understand the true nature of the female characters he created in his novels. He highlights mainly two types of attitudes among his women characters. One is the woman who is ready to adapt herself to men’s theories of women: to become “the noble woman, the pure spouse, the devoted mother” (Pattern), who lives with the belief that her body is for childbearing, and her flesh is only meant for the sake of gratifying men. In short, she is the woman who is “ready to prostrate herself before a man” (Women in Love 329). The second category is the one in which the woman tries initially to adjust her life with the “abominable pattern” offered to her by her male partner; but, simultaneously, she is on the watch out for inventing a new pattern that will give her the desired freedom and dignity: the kind of freedom “Where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other” (220). Such characters are perpetually on the lookout for a paradigm that will enable them to attain their natural female emotions in fullness. One must visit Lawrence’s last novel, The Man Who Died, to see what this new paradigm is really like: “… like the heart of a rose, like the core of a flame. She is making herself completely penetrable”, says the narrator (Man Who Died). Lawrence says in his essay that, unlike Dante’s Beatrice, a woman generally has her own logic of emotion. Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a fine example of this: “Something echoed in Connie: ‘Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body’”. (Chatterley’s Lover 62). She is hopeful of discovering a pleasant pattern, and is ready to wait for the arrival of a man who can offer that. For a woman like Connie, the “abominable pattern” must be crushed: “But in the end, the strange and terrible logic of emotion will work out the smashing of that pattern, if it has not been emotionally satisfactory”, says Lawrence in his essay (Pattern). The last sentence of the essay, “Give Her a Pattern”, makes Lawrence’s intention as a novelist clearer: “Bah! Men are fools. If they want anything from women, let them give women a decent, satisfying idea of womanhood — not these trick patterns of washed-out idiots” (Pattern). It is evident in the novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover that Clifford stands as a symbol of the “abominable pattern”; that he is cast as a “washed-out idiot”, and that Connie finally regains her female dignity through her sexual contact with Mellors. In short, the readers can easily see both the “abominable pattern” and the “satisfying idea of womanhood” skillfully worked out in Lady Chatterley’s Lover by the novelist.
Lawrence Durrell’s novels are equally forceful in rejecting the industrial civilization. In Monsieur, the first novel in his Quintet, Akkad states that “the universe has got cancer, it is evil” (Monsieur 143). He is of the belief that “we need purer and purer definitions to keep us from being coarsened by values which world imposes on us and we must try our best to refuse it” (167). This Gnostic way of rejecting the material life is a common feature in Durrell’s novels. Darley’s adventure in The Alexandria Quartet is, in a way, an attempt to detach himself from the memories of his beloved city, Alexandria, the city which “precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own” (Quartet 17). When Darley retrospectively looks at his love relationships he had experienced in this historical city, he realizes that he was fooled by his lovers, or fooled by the city which once seemed to be his beloved. In most of the cases, he was duped as a lover. What Darley observes in his relationships with his women in Alexandria can be compared to what Connie discovered in Clifford and his friends. Lawrence’s Connie and Durrell’s Constance resurrect themselves from their past experience of nothingness and leave behind them a new pattern of life. They gradually realise that the key to human happiness lies in sex; “in sex we have our basic, most elemental being, most elemental contact“, as Lawrence explains in Fantasia of the Unconscious (Fantasia 27). If the experiencing self in Lawrence’s novels is a woman like Ursula or Connie, with the exception of Paul Morel; in Durrell it is mostly a male character like Darley, with the sole exception of Constance in Constance.
Though The Alexandria Quartet is Durrell’s magnum opus, it is in The Avignon Quintet that he carries forward the Lawrentian ideas on sex and womanhood. Durrell, as a novelist, has a wider canvas. In the Quartet, he displays verities of love relationships; with the result, the novel is generally called an investigation into modern love. The story in the Quartet shows that so long as one is unwilling to surrender one’s ego to one’s beloved, one’s love is bound to be a failure. The novel justifies the statement made by Denis de Rougemont that “happy love has no history in European literature” (Rougemont 4). In the last novel of the Quartet, Clea, the protagonist begins to learn that the sex act is a psychic act, and not merely a physical act. This is further asserted by the author in his Quintet and also in his interviews. He told Kenneth Young: “But in the last volume [Clea], I am trying to develop that the sexual act is our ‘knowing machine’” (Young 45). As Durrell wrote his novels fifty years after the publication of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his job as a novelist was made easier. Lawrence had already killed shame: “She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died”, declares the narrator in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (219). Therefore, Durrell’s Constance is in a better position, though she too could not experience happy sex in her youth. So, all that Durrell had to do, as a novelist, was to subject his character, Constance, to a new sexual experience that can make her experience the actual womanhood, the ultimate womanhood. The new experience also should give her a new insight. In order to achieve this, he heavily relied on the Tantric philosophy. He gives more importance to Yoga, and sees the sexual act as a form of Yoga, sexual Yoga. The main difference between Lawrence and Durrell here is that Constance gets a dominating role in sex, whereas Lawrence’s Connie finds Mellors superior to her.
After her sexual contact with Affad, Constance learns that, once upon a time, the sexual act was treated as a divine act, and not as an act of sin. In the course of history, not only the importance of sex was lost, but also it was condemned as a sinful and a shameful act. Another difference between Lawrence and Durrell in their attitude to sex is that while Lawrence wanted to create phallic consciousness, Durrell tried to go a step further to generate sperm consciousness, so that with healthy sperms, a healthy future is made possible. Pointing out the difference between Lawrence and Durrell, James R. Nichols writes: “Connie is dominated by Mellors and his masculinity… Connie needs one man with the power to allow and enable her realization… Durrell’s Constance, on the other hand, has a history. She is neither alone nor desperate and her path is not so much toward a new frontier as toward a new rediscovery of a lost world” (Nichols 455). Nichols could not explain what exactly that “rediscovery of the lost world” really is. The “rediscovery” is extensively discussed in my article, “The Spirit of Tantric Maithuna in The Avignon Quintet”, published in Deus Loci, and in my book, Indian Metaphysics in Lawrence Durrell’s Novels. The third chapter in my book is an analysis of these two writers’ metaphysical views on womanhood. A relook at the keen interest these two writers had shown in Tantrism, in order “to rediscover the lost world”, can certainly enrich the argument here.
Metaphysically, Lawrence and Durrell have found much in Tantrism, which is already a proved fact. Lawrence gives only a hint in his novels about his interest in Indian metaphysics. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the narrator says that Mellors “From India… may have picked up certain tricks” (Chatterley’s Lover 57), and in Durrell’s Quintet, Affad admits: “Ah been in India a while now and ah’ve learned a new science” (Sebastian 24). Durrell not only confessed his deep interest in Tantrism, but also tried to raise this old philosophy to a scientific level. The insightful character in his Quintet, Affad, says, “Enstein’s non-discrete field, Groddeck’s ‘It’, and Pursewarden’s ‘heraldic universe’ were all one and the same concept and would easily answer to the formulations of Patanjali” (Sebastian 28). The novel, Sebastian, is full of the wisdom and insight that Durrell borrowed from Tantrism and Yoga. Lawrence and Durrell were attracted to Tantrism mainly because they found its rich definition of life quite sensible: life as a reservoir of joy, happiness, and bliss. This idea was found as a unique philosophy by some of their literary contemporaries, particularly Aldous Huxley.
Rupert Birkin’s metaphysical ideas also have a little Tantric resonance. When he talks about the wonder of existing not as oneself, but as a new “paradisal unit”, a “consummation of my being and her being in a new one”, in a “superfine bliss”, which is “regained from the duality” (Women in Love 414), it smells of Vedanta, smells of the philosophy of Vedantic non-dualism that can be seen embedded in the Tantric philosophy. According to Alan Watts, Tantric love is a “contemplative love between mutually dedicated partners” (Watts 162), and as Henrich Zimmer points out, “The Tantra appropriated the solemn formulations of Vedantic philosophy and the marvelous psychological experience of yoga practiced for thousands of years” (Zimmer 12). Therefore, the “tricks” that Mellors smuggled from India, or the “science” Affad learned from India are both Tantric, and they can be put in the words of Rupert Birkin, “in the perfect One there is the perfect silence of bliss” (Women in Love 414).
Mulk Raj Anand was quick enough to detect Lawrence’s keen interest in Tantrism. In his book, Conversations in Bloomsbury, he recalls what he told Catherine Carswell: “In the man-woman union, the Tantra seeks to lift the relationship above egos of the couple. Of course, Lawrence is questing in his own way” (Anand 60). A comparative study of Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious and the principles embodied in Tantrism can reveal to what extent he has borrowed from Tantrism to evolve a new pattern in man-woman relationship. He says, in “sex we have our basic, most elemental being, most elemental contact.” This is precisely what Tantrism also believes. An ardent Tantric believes that the “highest of all values is love, and the fountain is the body. The worship must start with the body of man. In the mortal frame resides the immortal” (Mishra 45). T. N. Mishra asserts this fact in his book, Impact of Tantra on Religion and Art. But, these are also the words resonating in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is imperative here to quote again from Lawrence’s Fantasia to prove his total faith in Tantrism: “There is a threefold result. First the flash of pure sensation and real electricity. Then there is the birth of an entirely new state of blood in each partner. And then there is the liberation…. And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex” (Fantasia). These three stages are precisely what one finds in Tantrism as sat, chit, and ananda, or satchitananda. Bliss is the ultimate goal for Lawrence and Durrell. Gerald Doherty’s Oriental Lawrence: The Quest for the Secrets of Sex (2001) and “Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H. Lawrence’s Use of Kundalini” by Thomas H. Miles are also very useful in understanding Lawrence’s dependence as a writer on Tantrism and Yoga.
The real goal of the heroic adventure, be it that of Birkin’s or Mellors’ or Darley’s or Affad’s, is to impart true sexual knowledge to the opposite sex, to show where life really is, where happiness really lies. That is the reason why it is repeated with emphasis in this paper that the novels of Lawrence and Durrell deserve to be classified as eudaemonistic. According to the dictionary, it is a system of ethics that evaluates actions in terms of their capacity to produce happiness. The characters like Mellors and Affad are modern heroes, they are the boon bringers, and they fit into Joseph Campbell’s definition of a modern hero, as is explained in his book The Hero with A Thousand Faces. In short, the quest in the novels of Lawrence and Durrell is for the attainment of a chaste life that can bring lasting happiness for both man and woman through their unadulterated sexual relationships. It is the “sensual reality that can ever be transmuted into the mind content”, the narrator in Women in Love says (358). The stress is to live and do well, by fully realising the acute need of a woman. The novelists honestly believe that life is posited in the female sex: “The female was the principle of renewal and repair in the cosmic sense“(Constance 273). Their novels also teach us that no one can seek happiness in sex without sharing similar happiness with the opposite sex. At the same time, successful sharing is impossible without surrendering one’s ego. Refining the self with insightful wisdom, intuitive wisdom, is the only sensible way to attain happiness. “Indulge but refine” is the message that can be churned out of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Connie says, “The life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind” (Chatterley’s Lover 207). Similarly, at the end of The Alexandria Quartet, Darley declares that “Life is to be lived out, not thought out” (Quartet 772), and he is confident that “we might rediscover in sex the key to a metaphysical search” (760). His words echo Connie’s, when he says “culture means sex, the root knowledge” (762). The search for the key to happiness lifts the novels of these writers to a metaphysical level, and at times, they look like a discourse or a treatise on sex and life. Balthazar states in the Quartet, “This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp” (667). In short, Lawrence and Durrell worked sincerely as novelists to endow their protagonists with metaphysical wisdom.
To repeat once again, happiness, the ultimate happiness, is the thematic thrust of their novels. The novelists who use novels to guide their readers for achieving ultimate happiness in life deserve to be placed under a new literary classification. In fact, they must be grouped under a categorisation in order to help the students to identify the creative intention of the authors. That is the tradition in literature. What makes the protagonists of Lawrence and Durrell unique is their ardent pursuit of insight, intuitive wisdom, individuality, and inner happiness. In other words, Eudaemonism is the essence of most of the stories Lawrence and Durrell have written. Eudaemonism is a word which has been widely discussed right from the days of Socrates. “Lawrence can be considered the personification of the search for the foundation of human nature”, says Alessandro Maurini, and she adds that Lawrence’s philosophy of love and life led “to the utmost instinctive artistic creativity, to eudaemonism” (Maurini 9). Eu stands for, well, good, and daimon means spirit. Live well and do well is the clarion call of these novelists in their fiction. Durrell insists that a novel should be “bliss side up”.
However, the word “happiness” can cause confusions. Therefore, what kind of happiness the protagonists of Lawrence and Durrell desire to achieve requires a clearer understanding. Though Lawrence creates several episodes in his novels to convey his idea of happiness, the stone-throwing event in Women in Love, in which Birkin breaks the round stillness of the moon in the pond, gives his readers a direct message: “To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness”, says Birkin (Women in Love 280). Lawrence Durrell is more explicit in his novels in asserting the word “bliss”, or what he calls the “celestial amnesia”. But, a closer study about his views will show that Durrell borrowed most of his metaphysical ideas from Lawrence.
Lawrence’s dislike of a city like London has to be viewed in the light of his metaphysical ideas. London, for D. H. Lawrence, stands as a metaphor for an arid world that denied him all forms of creative inspiration. His “madness for the country” is more personal; it is also closely related to his concept of human happiness, or his idea of what human life should be. In other words, the life he found in London was not synonymous with the metaphysics that molded his thoughts and writings, and his literary mission, as already observed, was to save humanity: “London seems to me like some hoardy massive underworld, a hoary, ponderous inferno”. Rupert Birkin echoes the same sentiments, when he says, “I always feel doomed when the train is running into London (Women in Love 1). Lawrence’s “madness for the country” is rooted in his love for the world of nature. London is a “ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure” (Rainbow 193), where the continuity is not organic; where man has lost touch with the substantial and vital world. Lawrence Durrell is also equally vehement in his dislike of England. In fact, his first novel, The Black Book, is a portrayal of the life in London which he calls “the English death”. He told Stephen Gray that his disgust for London is worse than that of Lawrence’s: “worse than that….The truth is I’ve been rather hard on England and hard in a rather nasty way” (Gray 80). In an interview with this writer, Mulk Raj Anand, a literary friend of Durrell in their younger days in Europe, says, “Thus, Durrell’s quest to himself and into society around him followed the struggles of D. H. Lawrence towards emancipation of human beings from the code of Victorian morality” (Nambiar 176). The depth and intensity of these two writers, D. H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell, will surely continue to attract more and more critical studies, but, the ultimate focus will certainly be on their emphatic insistence on human happiness, on eudaemonism.
Works Cited:
Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury, Delhi: Vision Books, 2011.
Catherine Brown, “London in D. H. Lawrence’s Words”, https://catherinebrown.org/london-in-d-h-lawrences-words/
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces, London: Paladin, 1988.
Gerald Doherty, “Connie and the Chakras: Yogic Patterns in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in The D. H. Lawrence Review 13 (1980): 79-93
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, London: Faber and Faber, 1983.
Constance or Solitary Practices, London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Livia or Buried Alive, The Avignon Quintet, London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Monsieur or the Prince of Darkness, London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Sebastian or Ruling Passions, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, New York: New American Library, 1970.
Stephen Gray, “Investigating a Nightingale”, Lawrence Durrell: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1998)
Erica Jong, The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller, New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1994.
D. H. Lawrence, “Give Her a Pattern”, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qUqFeDkwZJWUor5Y7ux5ZFK4ZnuM_Jpbnm3WssGW_qOF6g9dn1Knq-5YLDG/view.
Fantasia of the Unconscious, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20654/20654-h/20654- h.htm#CHAPTER_XV, 27
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2007. Rainbow, London: Penguin Books, 1970.
The Man Who Died, https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700631h.html
Women in Love, London: Penguin, 2007.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, London: Penguin Books, 1948.
Alessandro Maurini, Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters, Lexington Books, 2017.
Thomas H. Miles, “Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H. Lawrence’s Use of Kundalini”, in DHLR 9 (Summer 1976): 194-212. Ravindran Nambiar, Indian Metaphysics in Lawrence Durrell’s Novels, London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, 2016. “Lawrence Durrell’s Recreation of D. H. Lawrence’s Constance: Restoring Woman’s Cosmic Place”, Lawrence Durrell: Borderlands & Borderlines, Confluences (numero 2), Presses Universitaires de Paris 10. 145-152. “The Spirit of Tantric Maithuna in The Avignon Quintet“, Deus Loci, Special Issue, NS 10, 2006-7, 167-178
James R. Nichols, “Ah-The Wonder of My Body; The Wandering of My Mind: Classism and Lawrence Durrell’s Literay Tradition”. Twentieth Century Literarture, 33, Vol 4 (Winter 1987).
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, translated by Montgomery Belgian, New York: Facet World Library, 19.
Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Mentor Books, 190.
Kenneth Young, “A Dialogue with Durrell” in Encounter, December 1959, Vol 13,62.
Henrich Zimmer, Artistic Form and Yoga in Sacred Images, translated by Gerald Chappel and James P. Lawson. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.
c20ajournal.com 