Aaron’s Rod by D H Lawrence

Aaron’s Rod by DH Lawrence is a perplexing novel. It seems to represent two quite different aspects of the writer’s creativity. One side has him reflecting on working class life in the English midlands, whilst in the other he is very much the sophisticated traveller and philosopher. These apparently reflect his own origins and reality. The book’s duality is not surprising, when one considers the fact that the early part of the book dates from 1918 and represents an abandoned project. Only three years later did Lawrence return to the work and write the second, more substantial part.

First, the title needs interpretation. Aaron’s Rod, historically, refers to the sacred staff carried by the brother of Moses. It was Aaron who persuaded the flock to worship the golden calf. The rod was used as both symbol of office, and as a means of summoning spiritual power. In the novel, the term is used to refer to the flute which is played competently and professionally by the principal character, Aaron Sisson. Frankly, and in keeping with Lawrence’s preoccupations, it is also a sexual reference to the character’s maleness.

The first part of the book describes Aaron Sisson’s background, upbringing an early life. Thus, rooted in a working-class English midlands mining town at the turn of the twentieth century, Aaron’s aptitude for music makes him stand out, makes him at least seem to have rebelliousness in him. He marries locally. Children come. Love goes. Perhaps desire dies not, however, as this passage illustrates. “…sometimes when she put down her knitting, or took it up again from the bench beside him, her fingers just touched his thigh, and the fine electricity ran over his body, as if he were a cat tingling at a caress.” He leaves his wife and his home area to travel first to London, then to Italy.

It is in London that he meets Lilly. Lilly is the surname of a man, Rowan Lilly. The character features large throughout the rest of the book and might be seen as expressing some of the writers own ideas. He starts by nursing Aaron and back to health after an illness and then departs on his travels. On his invitation, Aaron follows, despite not having much money. On arrival, he finds that his friend Lilly has absented himself.

Life in London had been interesting, both professionally and socially. Aaron pursued his music and even found time and funds to go to the opera. His working-class origins allowed him to make fun of the audience. “Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began…” As a musician, he explores music that such fashionable audiences might shun. There is evidence that Lawrence intended thus to place Aaron on the outside of ‘middle-class society’. When he is asked, later on, about his musical preferences, Aaron expresses his liking for Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, which at time of the book’s writing had received only one London production.

Eventually, Aaron ends up in Florence, where the book really comes to life. Aaron is befriended by an upper-class family, and he meets a countess, who has a suppressed love of music. They make music together, without any really real commitment from either of them, except to their individual needs. Having regained contact with Lilly, Aaron and a group of acquaintances analyse their lives, their estrangement from wives they no longer love, from a past that the Great War has seemed to render irrelevant and estranged.

Eventually, an anarchist’s bomb destroys the front of a café where Aaron is seated, taking out the front windows and destroying the coat rack at the entrance., His flute was in the pocket of the coat and is ruined. Aaron himself survives. But what is he now? He is both penniless and his source of employment is destroyed. Where can a man go when his rod is taken from him?

It is the almost constant reference to the effects of the Great War that is the enduring impression of the novel. Unlike many writers, Lawrence does not appear to take sides. He is probably against war, per se, but he does not slip into a common trap of identifying those who benefited from the conflict and contrasting them with those whose lives were destroyed. For Lawrence, it seems, everyone has suffered. War only destroys, as do all acts of violence, as does the final act of violence, perpetrated for political ends. It achieves only destruction. War also changes social relations, as evidence by the passage “…what should you like to drink? Wine? Chianti? Or white wine? Or beer?” The old-fashioned “sir” was dropped. It’s too old-fashioned now, since the war.”

A reader starting Aaron’s Rod must bear in mind that the book’s opening chapters do not reflect where it will take you. Eventually, it is a thoroughly challenging and complete experience for the reader. Its enduring message that the only things that drive human existence are love and power is itself powerful. It is a complex relationship, however, between the two, because to seek love is often to exert power, and that power can often be controlled, but can also be associated with violence, which is only destructive. It is, say several of the characters, a power exerted primarily by women.

Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino by Samuel Butler

In Alps and Sanctuary Samuel Butler walks various alpine passes, visits many small towns and villages, comments on art and architecture, and drinks considerable amounts of wine. The author wrote this travel book in 1882, but this was not an account of a single stay in the region. On the contrary, Samuel Butler regularly makes it clear throughout the text that he is referring to his previous visits to many of the places on his itinerary. He thus records changes in the fabric of the buildings, transformations in the lifestyles of the inhabitants and sometimes refers to memories of those previous trips. This makes the text much more than a simple description of a journey.

But Samuel Butler, like many British authors abroad, cannot resist the occasional pontification. Many of these positions entail the assertion of Protestantism above Catholicism, and here and there the reader can almost feel the author biting his tongue so as not to cause disagreement with an acquaintance.

And what about this for someone who, on the face of it, observes and seeks explanation of natural phenomena? “Reasonable people will look with distrust upon too much reason. The foundations of action lie deeper than reason can reach. They rest on faith – for there is no absolutely certain incontrovertible premise which can be laid by man, any more than there is an investment for money or security in the daily affairs of life, which is absolutely unimpeachable. The funds are not absolutely safe; a volcano might break out under the Bank of England. A railway journey is not absolutely safe; one person, at least, in several millions gets killed. We invest our money upon faith mainly. We choose our doctor upon faith, for how little independent judgment can we form concerning his capacity? We choose schools for our children chiefly upon faith. The most important things a man that has are his body, his soul, and his money. It is generally better for him to commit these interests to the care of others of whom he can know little, rather than be his own medical man, or invest his money on his own judgment, and this is nothing else that making a faith which lies deeper than reason can reach, the basis of our action in those respects which touches most nearly.”

Unlike many authors, Samuel Butler regularly alludes to music to provide background, impression, explanation and quality to the experience describes. These are always fully notated and could cause many readers to panic. The author simply assumes that all his readers also read music. In 1882, it might have been true of his largely middle-class readers, who probably had been taught to play the piano from the age of five.

Samuel Butler makes no excuses for his conservatism, nor for his no doubt sincere Christian faith. But for the modern reader, the consequences of his belief structure, formed around the assumptions of Victorian England, might be perceived as stuffy, bigoted or even racist. For instance, he criticizes natural phenomenon phenomena when they refuse to conform to human preconceptions. Birds, for instance, know not one iota of public-school discipline. “People say the nightingale’s song is so beautiful; I am ashamed to own it, but I do not like it. It does not use the diatonic scale. A bird should either make a no attempt to sing in tune, or it should succeed in doing so. Larks are Wordsworth, and as for canaries, I would almost sooner hear a pig having its nose, ringed or the grinding of an axe. Cuckoos are all right; they sing in tune. Rooks are lovely, they do not pretend to tune. Seagulls again, and the plaintiff creatures that pity themselves on moorlands, as the plover and the curlew, or the birds that lift up their voices and cry at eventide when there is an eager air blowing upon the mountains and the last yellow in the sky is fading – I have no words with which to praise the music of these people.”

But it seems that in the 19th century, there already existed British tourists who find themselves less than appreciated at destination, because they take their assumptions with them. In one place, “…there was an old English gentleman at the hotel Riposo who told us that there had been another such festa not many weeks previously, and that he had seen one drunken man there – an Englishman – who kept abusing all he saw and crying out, ‘Manchester is the place for me’.” Samuel Butler largely did the same.

But if anyone chooses to dismiss such procedural niceties of the nineteenth century as old-fashioned nonsense, spare a thought for the fifteenth century inhabitants of the monastery at S. Michele who had to follow the dictates upon their work issued by their boss. These can be found at length in Appendix II of Butler’s work.

A Month in Yorkshire by Walter White

A Month in Yorkshire by Walter White is a superb book. First published in 1861, it was one of the first travel books designed for a new kind of leisure, which we now called tourism. Railways had already been around for long enough for the experience of travelling on them to become commonplace. Here, Walter White regularly uses the train in order to embark on a point-to-point walk, just like a modern fell-walker might do. In this sense, this is unlike the volumes that originated in the experience of the Grand Tour which, as an exercise, produced an experience that was only available to the wealthy. Here we have a least the potential for mass tourism, where the writer even makes recommendations to those readers who might follow his footsteps. Perhaps this is the key. The writer of a Grand Tour was surely most interested in personal responses, whereas Walther White seems to direct the experience towards the reader.

The author starts on the banks of the Humber and then goes up the East Coast as far as the Tees with an occasional trip inland. He then takes in the Pennines up to the borders with modern Cumbria and wanders the Dales. He approaches the industrial West Riding with trepidation, because he is clearly a rural rambler rather than a lover of cities, despite the fact that he himself lives in London. Notwithstanding, there are some truly interesting passages in the book that describe industrial processes in Saltaire, Batley and Sheffield. He does regularly comment on the grime and smoke of the industrial towns, but he is sympathetic to the people who labour in the factories and mills, even though he sometimes finds it hard to communicate with them.

Walter white does have opinions. For instance, he finds Hull dull. “Half a day exploration led me to the conclusion that the most cheerful quarter of Hull is the cemetery.” His view of language north of Coventry is mildly patronizing. Like many English writers, he resorts to gobbledygook in his attempts to render a Yorkshire accent. Such writers, never - I repeat, never! - write “air hair lair” in order to convey the sound of a Lah-Di-Dah “hello”. But they often resort to the most ridiculous spellings to convey what is simply another way to pronounce words in a language that has no concordance between the written and the spoken. The author does, however, offer an interesting and refreshing comparison. “Journeying from Hull to Beverly by market train on the morrow I had ample proof, in the noisy talk of the crowded passengers, that Yorkshire dialect and its peculiar idioms are not ‘rapidly disappearing before the facilities for travel afforded by the railways’. Could I fail to notice what has before struck me, that taken class for class, the people north of Coventry exhibit a rudeness, not to say coarseness of manners, which is rarely seen south of that ancient city. In Staffordshire, within 20 miles of Birmingham, there are districts where baptism, marriage, and other moral and religious observances considered as essentials of Christianity, are as completely disregarded as among the heathen. In some parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, similar characteristics, prevail; but manners do not necessarily imply loose morality. Generally speaking, the rudeness is a safety-valve that lets off the faults, or seeming faults of character; and I prefer rudeness to that over refinement prevalent in Middlesex, where you may not call things their right names, and where, as a consequence, the sense of what is fraudulent, and criminal, and wicked, has become weakened, because of the very mild and innocent words in which ‘good society’ requires that dishonesty and sin should be spoken of.” The north might be coarse, but the south is dishonest! Things don’t change!

There are some surprises of vocabulary along the way for the modern reader. Did you know, for instance, that a ninnycock was a young lobster? He does, however, find the banter of people in at least one industrial city rather objectionable. “I had often heard that Sheffield is the most foul-mouthed town in the kingdom, and my experience unfortunately adds confirmation. While in the train coming from Barnsley, and in my walks around the town, I heard more filthy and obscene talk than could be heard in Wapping in a year.”

Walter White does largely steer clear of British supremacy and racism. He does, however, make some things clear. On Wickliffe’s Bible, for instance, he praises the translator as one who “opened men’s hearts and eyes to see and understand the truth in its purity; cleansed from the adulteration of priestcraft; stripped of all the blinding cheats of papistry”. He also has time for Puritans, as he makes clear in a description of Haworth where “…the church is ugly enough to have had a Puritan for an architect”. On his walks he regularly sups ale in public houses and is not a fan of the temperance movement. “…in my wanderings, I have sometimes had the curiosity to try the Temperance Hotel, and always repented it, because experience showed the temperance meant poor diet, stingy appliances, and slovenly accommodations”.

But Walter White is real traveller. Thought he does prefer to wallow in the poetic Romanticism of an England perhaps already gone, his respect for working people is such that he finds things and people of interest wherever he lands. True experience, however, is by brook or fall. “Let me sit for an hour by the side of a fall, and watch the swift play of the water, and here it’s ceaseless, splash and roar, and whatever cobwebs may have gathered in my mind, from whatever cause, our sweat clean away.”

Walter White is clearly one of the first tourists in the modern sense, and the quality of his writing makes this book a joy to read.