Modernism and Mobility

The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience

B. Chalk

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137439833
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Tracing the changing conceptions of nationality in the work of traveling writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and Claude McKay, Modernism and Mobility argues that the passport system is an indispensable segue into discussions of literary modernism.

C H A P T E R 1

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“I Am Not England”: D. H. Lawrence, National Identity, and Aboriginality

In a March 1921 letter to German publisher Dr. Anton Kippenberg, D. H. Lawrence responded to a proposal to create a “Biblioteca Mundi,” a world library to be marketed internationally.¹ In lieu of advice, Lawrence offered Kippenberg a spirited analysis of contemporary international sentiments:

Mentally, we are all cosmopolitan nowadays. But passionally, we are all jealous and greedy and rabidly national. For my part, I prefer to live abroad and escape as far as possible from the stigma of national interest . . . At the bottom of all European hearts a rabid, jealous nationalism of hate-your-neighbor is the basic feeling . . . the old internationalism of human interest, the old philanthropic internationalism is dead or gone quite silly. In its place is a fizzing, acid internationalism of detestation and spite: not even hatred, for hate is too grand a passion: but spite, jealousy, and acid dislike. (Collected Letters 679–80)

Differentiating between “mental” or superficial political outlooks and “passional” or deep-seated feelings, Lawrence expresses nostalgia for an older, humanistic model of internationalism, which values free intercourse between people of different cultures. In this letter, he dismisses the term “cosmopolitan” as a cover for the hostile contemporary dynamics of international relations. For Lawrence, cosmopolitanism functions simply as a liberal pose that masks “jealous nationalism,” or the pervasive and xenophobic reliance on nationality as a fundamental social heuristic. Given the recent attention to historical and critical cosmopolitanism in modernist studies, Lawrence’s comment is noteworthy for its emphasis on the inextricability of cosmopolitan outlooks and the national identities from which they emerge. His letter draws attention to the evolving biopolitical treatment of national identity in the context of war and the social transformations that followed. Though he says he “prefer[s] to live abroad to escape,” in the years leading up to 1921, Lawrence was prevented from escaping abroad due precisely to the state control of nationality; during the war and just after, he was refused a passport by the British government. His protracted bureaucratic ordeal clearly shaped his thinking about the oppressive nature of national identity, as this letter suggests, but it also affected his thinking about literary form and its implications.

Lawrence’s concerns about the ways in which modern subjects were conditioned to believe fiercely in national belonging appear throughout his prose in the postwar years.² Refused a passport and harassed by government authorities during and after the war, Lawrence’s stance toward national identity was not merely conceptual, but developed out of practical experience and deeply intertwined with his creative work. His work of the early 1920s, this chapter argues, forms a constructive response to the implications of his passport refusal even as it traces a path away from England and Europe. Lawrence’s feelings of entrapment in England have been much noted, but the relationship of these feelings to the biopolitical management of his national identity has been largely overlooked. In what follows, I argue that by considering Aaron’s Rod, his critically neglected novel of 1922, in the context of his wartime struggles with British authority and his contemporary criticism, one sees a rejection of place as generative of national identity and determinate of biopolitical power over the individual. It becomes clear, moreover, that Lawrence’s negotiations with national identity and his dissatisfaction with the conventional novel are related anxieties that underwrite his work of this period. Aaron’s Rod, which, I will argue, is structured as an inverse bildungsroman, attempts to unravel the form of socialization aimed for by both the traditional novel of development and the passport. Further, in progressively visionary ways, his travel book Sea and Sardinia (1921) and short novel St. Mawr (1925) sketch out alternative place-based definitions of identity to the national drawn from his notion of the “spirit of place.” The tension between singularity and collectivity that characterizes Aaron’s angst and which Lawrence symbolizes through the passport extends, in his later work, to the problem of place-based identity: oppressive when imposed by the state, vital and authentic when located in landscapes. In the concept of aboriginality, Lawrence locates a form of identity linked to origin, and yet one difficult to access for his modern, nationally defined characters. In form and content, these three works plot a move away from England and its controlling, claustrophobic atmosphere toward a more genuine experience of place, mobility, and identity.

I. Lawrence’s Wartime “Nightmare”

Lawrence’s language in his letter to Kippenberg resurfaces in the “Nightmare” chapter of his Australian novel, Kangaroo (1923), a fictionalization of his experiences during the war. The chapter, an extended recollection by the protagonist Richard Lovat Somers, details the refusal of his passport application and the indignities he suffered at the hands of the National Service, the police, and eventually his neighbors. While living in his beloved Cornwall cottage, clearly a version of the Lawrences’ home, “coast-watchers . . . had lain behind the stone fence, to hear what he and [his wife] talked about” (222). The chapter recounts his experiences being called up and deemed unfit for service three times, and the “whole intense life of spying going on all the time” that led eventually to an expulsion from Cornwall (231). After Somers and his wife are forced to move to London, the constant surveillance and harassment by the police results in a social atmosphere in which “everybody . . . was frightened . . . everybody who was not a rabid and disgusting so-called patriot” (Kangaroo 253). The details of the chapter are very close to the episodes Lawrence complains of in his letters and provide a disturbing account of the way in which the state’s persecution of him quickly and frighteningly developed into a generalized social harassment, demonstrative of the poisonous effects of nationalism.

The practices of pro-war nationalism recalled in Kangaroo bear out Foucault’s claim that biopolitical power results in “the law operat[ing] more and more as a norm” (History of Sexuality 144). Governmental initiatives ranging from the passport to the Defense of the Realm Acts (DORA) shaped and directed the policing behavior of civilians.³ That Frieda Lawrence was German and Lawrence’s anti-war stance was well known, of course, contributed greatly to his ostracization. Hugh Stevens argues that his dealings with state authorities “brought his sense of his own Englishness and his intense identification with the English nation into crisis” (49–50). Lawrence’s denunciation of nationalism was also motivated in part by multiple upsetting personal experiences during the war.⁴ Ford Madox Ford, who had “discovered” Lawrence and published his first work in The English Review in 1906, produced one such episode. He visited the Lawrences for the last time in late summer 1915, ostensibly “on behalf of the Ministry of Information (he said) to see if he could do anything to stop Lawrence from being persecuted for being pro-German” (Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence 225). Ford’s own relationship to national identity was immensely complicated: the child of a famous artistic English family, in 1909 he attempted to become a German citizen in order to obtain a divorce.⁵ Though his German citizenship was never official, he nevertheless publically declared his affiliation with the country numerous times, only to be later rendered insecure by the anti-German sentiment in England and write propaganda materials during the war (Jain 165).⁶ While Ford contended, then, that the visit was solicitous, Frieda maintained that Ford and Violet Hunt spent the unpleasant visit expressing their own anti-German sentiments (Mizener 282). Mark Kinkead-Weekes argues that the visit was indeed in an official capacity, but not to help Lawrence; rather, it was potentially to “investigate his former protégé who had married a German,” a motivation bound up with Ford’s discomfort with his own national identity and how it was perceived (225). As is well known, after the war, in 1919, he changed his surname from Hueffer to Ford in order to appear less German.⁷ Ford’s proved the first of many betrayals relating to the question of national identity and polluting its meaning for Lawrence.

Also in 1915, for the sole purpose of obtaining passports for himself and his wife, Lawrence traveled to Battersea Town Hall under the Derby Scheme to enroll as eligible for the military.⁸ John Worthen notes that “he had to queue up to attest: that is, swear the oath of allegiance as a military recruit . . . something in which Lawrence simply did not believe” (Life of an Outsider 166). Disgusted by the display, he left the line, saddened by his sense that “the men were very decent, and that the slumbering lion was going to wake up in them” (qtd. in Life of an Outsider 166). Lawrence equates the authorities and their specific practices with the glorified symbols of the nation, which work with coercive force on the individual. Mark Wollaeger reads Lawrence’s angry reaction in his letters as “catalyzed . . . not so much by the men’s capitulation to the bogey of mental consciousness as by their ‘spectral submission’ to the untruth associated with war propaganda. The real enemy is not Germany but, as Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses, ‘the priest and king within’ ” (4). In this compulsory collective performance of national identity, Lawrence sees the internalization of a blind and dangerous patriotism.⁹

Lawrence’s feelings toward the British government and its loyal citizens only worsened over the course of the war, culminating in his and Frieda’s expulsion from Cornwall in 1917 due to accusations of spying. This measure was taken under the auspices of the DORA, which Fussell discusses as institutionalizing “Englishness” as a restrictive and inclusive category. Of Lawrence specifically, Fussell claims: “There is no doubt he was put upon more than most during the war, and hardly any British citizen could equal him in intensity of perception, emotional violence, and the conviction that he had been deeply wronged” (11). These feelings, ostensibly, led to his angry declaration in Sea and Sardinia, “I am not England. I am not the British Isles on two legs” (50). Authorities hounded the Lawrences and interrogated their friends, with whom their relationships were becoming increasingly strained, about the couple’s activities. Goaded to the point of fury, Lawrence wrote to Amy Lowell, “People write letters of accusation, because one has a beard and looks not quite the usual thing: and then one has detectives at one’s heels like stray dogs, not to be got rid of. It is very hateful and humiliating and degrading. It makes me mad in my blood: so stupid and unnecessary” (Collected Letters 190). Lawrence felt betrayed by both his government and his neighbors, who accused him of spying for Germany in ridiculous and creative ways.¹⁰ Despite their bureaucratic impetus, the biopolitical practices implemented under the DORA and the passport system extended to and, to a point, relied on the deep-seated feelings of individuals schooled in an exclusionary, “hate-your-neighbor” model of patriotism.

The violent disease of nationalism reared its ugly head most viciously and obviously, however, in the context of Lawrence’s inability to travel. Refused passports repeatedly throughout the war, he felt that his personal mobility and cultural interests were greatly compromised by the deeply etched xenophobia produced by nationalism. His correspondence reflects the direct and severe effect this particular technique of biopolitical control had on his understanding of national identity. He rants in a letter to Robert Mountsier:

I am glad the British lion, which you have always held such an admirable beast, has pawed you about a bit in its bestial and ugly fashion: now you will know the enemy, and where he lies. These ancient nationalities are foul in the extreme. I have written to a man to ask him to help me to get passports renewed for America . . . I will try every way to get out. (Collected Letters 70)

Like Pound, Lawrence repeatedly references the governmental appropriation of seemingly timeless symbols of collective identity to appeal to and control the masses in discussions of the passport. The “slumbering lion” that he had detected in the queue for conscription, and which appeared on the cover of the British passport, not only sought to turn individual men into cogs for the machinery of the British army, but also functioned to entrap them physically and ideologically.

Nearly every letter Lawrence wrote in January of 1917 dwelt obsessively on getting a passport and departing England.¹¹ He appealed repeatedly to his friends in high positions for help in getting out of England; Edward Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, informed him that there was a possibility of obtaining passports, but he would need to provide sufficient evidence of his need to reside in America. Lawrence felt that his writing and health might convince authorities that such a move was necessary, but the applications were denied on the basis of “the interests of the National Service,” which dealt specifically with those who attempted to evade military service.¹² He wrote to Catherine Carswell concerning this “new deviltry, this National Service . . . I can’t live in England. I can’t stop any more. I shall die of foul inward poison. The vital atmosphere of the country is poisonous to an incredible degree: to me at least. I shall die in the fumes of their stench. But I must get out” (Collected Letters 92). Lawrence describes bureaucracy in metaphorical terms similar to the slumbering British lion, a malodorous force poisoning him internally. His letters suggest the ways in which Lawrence conceived of his body and mind as directly affected by the documentary regulations of the British government, and particularly the way in which external, state-directed imperatives were internalized by individuals.¹³ The physical and spiritual entrapment he experienced, hounded by fellow citizens and prevented from acting on his desperate desire for mobility, coalesced in his struggles with the newly restrictive passport system.

In his correspondence about his passport problem, Lawrence also complains of the restrictions on his artistic productivity caused by his continued presence in England: “One needs to be free body, soul, and spirit- there is no chopping about with freedom. One must cast off the old—absolutely cast it off, as a seed casts off a parent-tree. I admit the parentage—gladly. But the homogeneity, never” (Collected Letters 80). For Lawrence, a relation to one’s country of origin remains central to identity, but should not constrict and delimit the individual to a set of fixed, stereotypical traits. In Lawrence’s fictional and critical work of this period, the vast leveling function of the passport system and the obligations of national identity continually surface as acute anxieties. The compulsory form of social and national identity constructed by the passport, in which one necessarily “make[s] [one]self substitutable in order to make [one]self recognizable” (Butler 37), also serves for Lawrence as a core problem for the modern novel, which by its generic restrictions represents life as a telos, hampering both transformation and mobility. Aaron’s Rod, despite its flaws and bad reputation, is shaped by the nexus of these concerns. Indeed, as its central metaphor and sole explanatory moment, the novel employs the skewed logic of identity and categorization upon which the passport operates, and Aaron himself represents the psychosocial effects of the system and its implications as an oppressive, leveling governmental apparatus.

Lawrence had major difficulties composing Aaron’s Rod, spending intermittent periods of time on it from 1917 to 1921, and frequently warning acquaintances that they should not expect an entirely pleasurable read. The trial of The Rainbow in 1915 had left Lawrence disillusioned about his relationship to his novels, readers, and the forces defining and governing so-called morality. On the effects of the censorship of The Rainbow, Richard Aldington recalled, Lawrence “lost all chance of earning anything [in England] for those three years of work . . . he was publically stigmatized as ‘obscene’; and his name was made so notorious that publishers and periodicals for a long time avoided using his work” (qtd. in Meyers 196).¹⁴ His artistic influence and ability to support himself and his wife were severely undermined by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Modernism’s Passport Problems
• 1  “I Am Not England”: D. H. Lawrence, National Identity, and Aboriginality
• 2  An Independent Bureaucrat: Classification and Nationality in Stein’s Autobiographies
• 3  “Sensible of Being Etrangers”: Plots and Identity Papers in Banjo
• 4  A “Mania for Classification”: Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction
• 5  Itinerancy and Identity Confusion in The Berlin Stories
• Conclusion: W. H. Auden, “Old Passports,” and New Borders
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index