Introduction
7
There is some debate as to whether or not Lawrence’s short stories
should be considered Modernist. Dominic Head, for instance, argues that
Lawrence’s “work in the genre is distinct from the modernist short story
proper” because it draws upon the more traditional plotted narrative of
the previous century.24 However, this view applies techniques used by
other Modernist writers to evaluate Lawrence’s stories rather than
considering the significant contributions of Lawrence’s own innovations
to the diversity of Modernism.25 As Gregory Ulmer argues, Lawrence’s
approach was “a radical, informed effort to convert modernism to his own
personal ethic of art” and thus to criticize Lawrence for perceived
conservatism denies “Lawrence the recognition he deserves as a
contributor to the vanguard theory of his day”.26 Thornton explains that
Lawrence rejected certain techniques associated with Modernism such as
Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness because he felt it identified “the self
with the mind’s conception of the self”.27 Lawrence advocated a different
understanding of consciousness that expresses its physical vibrancy and
mutability. In this sense Lawrence might be considered as a writer who
presents a distinct challenge to the predominantly visual medium of film.
In fact, Lawrence appears to have been quite resistant to the emerging art
of moving pictures, which marks a rare point of agreement between the
author and many of his Modernist contemporaries.
Modernists on film
The majority of authors and critics of the Modernist era generally viewed
contemporary film, which at that point in time tended towards the
populist melodrama, as rather crass and no substitute for the refined arts
of literature or theatre, which they feared it would desecrate.28 Cartmell
24
Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992,
34-35.
25
Fiona Becket explains that “Lawrence is central to our understanding of modernism
although many view him in practice and temperament as a figure at a distinct remove
from intellectuals and practitioners like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Virginia
Woolf, who themselves embodied radically different approaches to their historical
moment” (The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence, 14).
26
Gregory L. Ulmer, “D.H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Worringer and the Aesthetics of
Modernism”, D.H. Lawrence Review, X/2 (Summer 1977), 165-81, 179.
27
Thornton, D.H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction, 52.
28
This book adheres to Michael Bell’s view that Modernism’s “peak period in the AngloAmerican context lay between 1910 and 1925” (“The Metaphysics of Modernism”, 9).
8
Film Adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s Short Stories
and Whelehan explain that such views were partly elitist in nature
because the cinema was perceived as entertainment for the masses.
Indeed, in 1911, 78% of the cinema-going audience consisted of the
working classes with the middle classes “voting with their feet, refusing to
morally or intellectually contaminate themselves by attending ‘the
pictures’”.29 Even writers who wrote for the cinema during the Modernist
period, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley
and Joseph Conrad were described as having done so “out of avarice and
with self-loathing”.30 One of the most notable Modernists to have decried
the cinema was Virginia Woolf who thought that it was degrading with
readers replaced by “savages of the twentieth century watching the
pictures”.31 Surprisingly, she was invited to contribute to the journal Close
Up, an early periodical (1927-33) devoted to serious film criticism.
Unsurprisingly, she declined. A columnist from the same journal ventured
that it might also be a good idea to approach Lawrence for an amusing
contribution to their monthly. Writing to the editor she wryly suggested,
“You know that Lawrence loathes films? Foams about them. I’m sure he’d
foam for you.”32 Like Woolf, Lawrence never wrote for Close up either and,
in fact, considering how much he wrote about everything else that was
happening around him in early twentieth-century culture, he wrote very
little on film. Yet, much has been written about Lawrence’s hostility to
this fledgling art form.33
29
Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 48.
30
Ibid., 44.
31
Virginia Woolf, “The Movies and Reality”, New Republic, 1926, 309.
32
Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008, 322.
33
See Henry T. Moore, The Priest of Love, London: Heinemann, 1974, 527; Neil Sinyard,
Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation, London: Croom Helm, 1986, 86; James C.
Cowan, “Lawrence and the Movies: The Lost Girl and After”, in D.H. Lawrence and the
Trembling Balance, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, 114; Neil
Taylor, “A Woman’s Love: D.H. Lawrence on Film”, in Novel Images: Literature in
Performance, ed. Peter Reynolds, New York: Routledge, 1993), 105; Linda Ruth Williams, Sex
in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D.H. Lawrence, Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1993, 1-15; Nigel Morris, “Lawrence’s Response to Film”, in D.H. Lawrence:
A Reference Companion, ed. Paul Poplawski, Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1996, 591-603;
David Ellis, The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998, III, 440; Jane Jaffe Young, D.H. Lawrence on Screen: ReVisioning Prose Style in the Films of “the Rocking Horse Winner,” Sons and Lovers, and
Introduction
9
Lawrence’s perceived view of film and the cinema has been pieced
together from various biographical accounts, the opinions voiced by the
characters in his fiction and a couple of poems and essays. According to
David Ellis’ biography of Lawrence, a cinema provided warmth and
shelter between trains for Lawrence and his friends Earl and Achsah
Brewster when they were travelling through Strasbourg in October of
1928. They saw Fred Niblo’s 1925 adaptation of Ben Hur and the results of
this visit have been reported in numerous accounts of Lawrence’s attitude
towards film because they are seen to epitomize Lawrence’s extreme
revulsion to the cinema experience:
Lawrence did not much like films (especially when they involved closeups of kissing), but he was usually tolerant of them. On this occasion, he
was so nauseated by what Achsah Brewster describes as the “falsity” of the
action (“doves fluttering around baby-faced dolls, brutal Romans accursed
with hearts of stone, galleys of inhuman slaves”), and the way the openmouthed public accepted it all as true, that he had to leave after half an
hour.34
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the specific examples provided here
do not refer to the medium of film per se but to the affected melodramas
that plagued the cinemas in the early years and the guileless response of
the masses therein.
In several of Lawrence’s fictional works such as the short story “Tickets
Please”, the novels The Lost Girl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the
poems, “When I went to the Film” and “Let Us Be Men”, the characters and
narratives bemoan aspects of film and cinema such as its mechanical
lifelessness and inadequacy and criticize its pornographic appeal to the
eye, its intrusion into real physical relationships between real people, its
condescension, its Americanism, its stock characters, stereotypes and lack
of sophistication and its alarming ability to mesmerize, pacify and
idiotize. In the essay “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, Lawrence
responds to the accusations of pornography levelled at his novel by
Women in Love, New York: Peter Lang, 1999, 5-6; Louis F. Greiff, D.H. Lawrence: 50 Years on
Film, Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 2001, 1-3; Marcus, The Tenth Muse, 83-84; Sean
Matthews, “D.H. Lawrence Cineaste”, in The Screen Lit Festival, 29 June-5 July 2009
(Broadway Cinema and Media Centre, 2009).
34
Ellis, The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, 440.
10
Film Adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s Short Stories
countering that it should be the “counterfeit emotion” of film which is
considered pornographic.35 He even goes as far as to denounce the “Closeup kisses on the film”, as exciting “men and women to secret and separate
masturbation” in his essay “Pornography and Obscenity”.36
Neil Sinyard describes the hostility Lawrence felt towards mechanized
mass entertainment, “which he saw as symptomatic of the mass
industrialisation of society which he so opposed in his novels” and goes on
to propose that “One should not be surprised if Lawrence’s work in some
way was not simply un-cinematic but anti cinematic”.37 Indeed, an
argument could be made that much of Lawrence’s work resists a purely
audio-visual representation because his prose is not only so inward
looking but also loaded with references to bodily sensations – touch is a
recurring and central theme in much of his writing. In stories such as
“Odour of Chrysanthemums” (1914), “The Blind Man” (1918), “Hadrian [You
Touched Me]” (1920) and “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” (1921), for
example, the physical contact between the key characters, and their
internal spontaneous responses to it, forms the pivotal moment of the
tales. However, to argue that the feelings conveyed by Lawrence’s work, or
those of any other great writer, could not be filmed is to reduce film to its
descriptive audial and visual components. Anyone who has ever been
moved by a film will know that film is much greater than the sum of its
parts just as a great work of prose or poetry is much more than the words
on paper. In fact, film, and especially cinema, is a highly visceral medium
that can transport the viewer beyond the perceived sound and vision
through the skilful synthesis of them, which for a period of time immerses
her/him within the reality of the unfolding story using an array of
cinematic techniques, which will be discussed in this book.
George Bluestone has argued that Modernist literature in general is
less frequently adapted because it “has tended to retreat more and more
from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from
social to psychological realities”.38 Bluestone’s views on this have
undoubtedly contributed to the prevailing notion that the works of high
35
The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol III, eds James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 312.
36
Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980, 670.
37
Sinyard, Filming Literature, 47.
38
George Bluestone, Novels into Film, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957, 46.
Introduction
11
Modernism resist filmic adaptation, a view supported by the fact that pretwentieth-century works are much more commonly adapted.39 However,
it could be argued that to suggest Modernism is un-filmable is just
another manifestation of prejudice towards film, which is deemed
incapable of tackling the most literary of literature, high Modernism.
Instead, it could be countered that Modernist works are less frequently
adapted because, as Eisenstein suggests, the evolution of the story-telling
conventions of film and the realist novel are more closely aligned.40 There
is no reason why an imaginative filmmaker should not be able to find
ways to convey a character’s sensations or thoughts or even certain
stylistic traits of the source-texts through the multi-track medium of film.
This is a point that Bluestone himself concedes when he explains that film
“through the process of editing, [has] discovered a metaphoric quality of
its own”, which can be used to convey the inner states of characters and
even evoke certain aspects of literary style.41 In fact, despite the challenges
presented by literary Modernism and what Sinyard believes are
Lawrence’s best efforts to make his work un-filmable, it has been filmed,
and many times over.
Lawrence’s apparent disdain for film and the cinema reflected the
timbre of his times and Lawrence’s characteristically oppositional
attitude, which is so frequent in his rhetorical style. Jaffe-Young reports,
rather hopefully, that there were a few unguarded moments when the
author shows that he was not ignorant of the young medium’s potential or
completely dismissive of its effect on the literature of his time. She cites
his review of John Dos Passos’ experimental novel Manhattan Transfer,
which Lawrence admired for its “affinities with cinema, describing the
work as being ‘like a movie picture with an intimacy of different stories
and no close-ups and no writing in between’”.42 Furthermore, much of
Lawrence’s own work could often be described as “cinematic” as will be
illustrated throughout this book. For example, the opening of “Odour of
Chrysanthemums”, which surveys a sweeping vista of a blighted pastoral
39
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996, 6.
40
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today”, in Film and/as Literature, ed.
John Harrington, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977, 135.
41
Bluestone, Novels into Film, 24.
42
D.H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, eds N.H. Reeve and J. Worthen, London:
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 309-10.
12
Film Adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s Short Stories
landscape in the manner of a long tracking shot, and then cuts to the
main character, Elizabeth, the signalled subject of the tale. Similarly, the
intercutting between parallel scenes of the chief protagonists in “The
Horse-Dealer’s Daughter”, which reaches its dramatic peak when they
come together in the same frame. The climax of “The Rocking-Horse
Winner” is rendered in the same way as a film might use dramatic tension
between the audial and visual as the mother of the tale seeks to find the
source of a mysterious sound, which is only revealed to the character and
the reader, to be her son on a rocking-horse, when she turns on the light
to illuminate this pivotal scene.
As this brief overview suggests, Lawrence’s short stories were highly
significant not only in terms of the author’s contribution to literary
Modernism but as a significant quantity of his literary output and the
films it prompted. It is thus surprising to find them so frequently
subordinated to the longer works in both the criticism of his prose and the
film adaptations.43 There is little reason to believe that this situation has
changed significantly in recent years, since among three recently
published collections of critical essays only one discusses the tales.44
Similarly, the criticism of Lawrence on film has tended to focus on the
longer feature-length films, while ignoring the short films and television
adaptations despite the fact that half of all the screen adaptations of
Lawrence’s life and works are non-feature-length films of short stories.45
This is because most of the short film adaptations of Lawrence’s works
remain unreleased and unseen. It is hoped that this book will play its part
in beginning to address this situation by bringing to light a number of rare
short Lawrence adaptations, discussing them as invaluable contributions
to the critical discourse on the author.
43
All of the following critics agree that within Lawrence criticism, his short stories remain
secondary to the novels: Cushman, D.H. Lawrence at Work, 76; Harris, The Short Fiction of
D.H. Lawrence, x; Gavin, “Marginalization and Colonization”, 136.
44
Of the following three new books on Lawrence, only the first contains a chapter on the
short stories: New D.H. Lawrence, ed. Howard J. Booth, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009; Windows to the Sun: D.H. Lawrence’s ”Thought-Adventures”, eds Earl G.
Ingersoll and Virginia Hyde, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2009; Terra Incognita: D.H.
Lawrence at the Frontiers, eds Virginia Crosswhite Hyde and Earl G. Ingersoll, Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson, 2010.
45
The appendix to this chapter lists 28 films of Lawrence’s short stories, which are less
than an hour long compared to 15 feature-length adaptations of novels.