“The Right to Live”: D.H. Lawrence, Max Plowman, and the First World War

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

A writer profoundly engaged with relationships between people, and between humankind and the world, D. H. Lawrence’s writing must be read in its historical context. Lawrence was affected deleteriously and profoundly by the First World War: the banning of The Rainbow, his inability to find a publisher for his masterpiece Women in Love, and his ejection from Cornwall as a result of the suspicion aroused because of his marriage to Frieda. He was not against war, he proclaimed, but against this war, for him an extreme symptom of the ills of the industrial world. However, Lawrence continued to look to the positives that could be taken in war’s aftermath. In this paper I read Lawrence’s book of poems Bay (1919) in the context of the writings of Max Plowman: Lawrence read and was enthused by Plowman’s work late in the war, when his morale was at its lowest. Plowman was shell shocked on the Somme and, after his recovery, refused to return to his unit. Court-martialled and dismissed from the army without punishment, he then conscientiously objected to his reconscription. Drawing on Plowman’s writings of the latter part of the war, particularly his poetry collection A Lap Full of Seed (1917) and the pamphlet The Right to Live (1917), and also his coruscating post-war treatise War and the Creative Impulse, I argue that Lawrence saw in such shows of dissent the possibility of positive change.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Historical Modernisms
• Start Date: Dec 12, 2016
• End Date: Dec 13, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2023