D. H. Lawrence: 'Bombardment'

In Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence remembers watching a Zeppelin raid on London during the Great War. He had seen the Zeppelin 'high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one might imagine the Holy Ghost far, far above.' The metaphor's provocative pairing of the deadly and the divine prepares the way for T. S. Eliot's bizarre and (to my mind) wholly inappropriate attempt, in 'Little Gidding' two decades later, to Christianise the Blitz: a German bomber begins as 'the dark dove with the flickering tongue' before metamorphosing into a 'dove descending' which 'breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror'. The fires of the Blitz become the fires of purgatory, so that 'tongues of flame' are ecstatically 'in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.' 'Little Gidding', as I have argued elsewhere, cannot bear very much reality. For all that it inspires a po-faced High Church sobriety in many of its readers, the transubstantions are a conjuror's trick.

Lawrence succeeds where Eliot would later fail. Eliot's 'dark dove' will be whitewashed into the Holy Ghost descending on the people; Lawrence invokes the Holy Ghost only to point out how tiny and seemingly irrelevant (although potentially destructive) it would seem if it were visible. And in 'Bombardment', the 'dark bird' stays dark and predatorial, hunting out the 'creatures' which it would devour. No opportunity for mystification spiritual communion here, just random and violent death for scuttling, bug-like humanity.

Bombardment

The Town has opened to the sun.

Like a flat red lily with a million petals

She unfolds, she comes undone.

A sharp sky brushes upon

The myriad glittering chimney-pots

As she gently exhales to the sun.

Hurrying creatures run

Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower.

What is it they shun?

A dark bird falls from the sun.

It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast

Flower: the day has begun.

Disappointment as Wilfred Owen Fails to Last the Pace

T. S. Eliot has been declared the nation's favourite poet. Apparently, he is 'full of classical elusions', an insight so inadvertently brilliant that it deserves to stand uncorrected.

Wilfred Owen, the only soldier-poet on the (entirely random) shortlist, finished out of the medals in fourth place, having led for much of the race. Judith Palmer of the Poetry Society explains that voting for Owen had been 'fuelled by a rise in the number of soldiers being killed in Afghanistan over the summer, when the number of British fatalities topped 200 for the first time.' So we like Owen more when our soldiers are being killed. Between Eliot and Owen came the unlikely pairing of John Donne and Benjamin Zephaniah. Which is proof, if any were needed, that these polls are harmless additions to the jollity of life.

Pimps, Prostitutes and Lady Typists: A New Source for The Waste Land?

'The Fire Sermon', the third part of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), famously describes an assignation between a 'typist' and a 'young man carbuncular' who comes to her home as the 'expected guest':

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

After her 'lover' has departed, the typist expresses her relief: '"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."'

Lawrence Rainey, in his invaluable annotated edition, points out how rarely typists featured in 'serious' poems prior to The Waste Land, although he goes on to identify seven realist novels between 1910 and 1922 which explored this new subject. In four of them, he notes, 'the heroine engages in what would now be termed consensual premarital sex'.

Even so, the fact that sex in 'The Fire Sermon' is premarital and consensual remains subsidiary to a more important consideration which complements the poem's larger patterning of motifs: sex (at least for the typist) seems utterly devoid of joy. What is her motivation, what the quid pro quo for making herself available to 'Exploring hands'? Regarding that mystery, Rainey's typist-novels (which he offers as parallels, not sources) are silent.

The poem's description of the 'departed lover' is, of course, ironic: the transaction between typist and young man carbuncular has nothing to do with love. The manuscripts of The Waste Land reveal that originally the poem had opened with a brothel scene in which Myrtle, the procuress, tells the male narrator that he is too drunk to have one of her girls. Prostitution, then, lurks in the peripheries, alongside various kinds of sexual violence, barrenness and dysfunction. The poem does not state that the typist receives money for her services, but her absence of sexual pleasure causes the reader to wonder in what ways she is compensated. We are not told that she is a prostitute; nor are we told that she is not.

A previously unnoticed source for this most musical and allusive (and musically allusive) of poems brings typist and prostitute into comic relation: the Great War song, 'I Don't Want To Be a Soldier'.


I Don't Want To Be a Soldier

I don't want to be a soldier,
I don't want to go to war,
I'd rather stay at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a lady typist.
I don't want a bayonet in my belly,
I don't want my bollocks shot away,
I'd rather stay in England,
In merry, merry England,
And fornicate my bleeding life away.

The phrase which stands out is 'lady typist'. Rhythms, rhyme patterns, and the logic of the sense require something else: something which rhymes with 'war'... What could be purer than a 'typist'? A 'lady typist'. And yet the phrase is a comic substitution for 'whore'. (Another version of the song refers, just as knowingly, to living off the earnings of a 'high-class lady'.) Even living off immoral earnings is better than going to war. See Gurney's 1917 poem 'Servitude': 'To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor / Of filthiest hovels, were noble to compare / With this brass-cleaning life [soldiering]'.

The lady typist, like her successor in The Waste Land, both is and is not a prostitute. She is the substitute, and simultaneously the equivalent. Eliot chose his protagonist's career wisely: we know her as (wink, wink!) a 'typist'.