Customer Reviews

St. Mawr & The Man Who Died

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4 star:		(3)
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This book kept me up until 3am one night because I just had to finish it.

'St. Mawr' is a very entrancing short story about a woman and her dissatisfaction with men as a whole. The heroine, a countrified gentile, has a wild imagination in this, and Lawrence describes her thoughts in terms of the horse's power and motion and ability. I got so caught up in this that I finished it in just over an hour. It's a very well structured read.

'The Man Who Died' has become my favourite contemporary version of the last days of Christ. It's an amazing and original story that leaves you asking questions. Many heavy handed Christians became infuriated by this story when it was published, and i'm sure many will continue to rail against it for the humanizing of thier idol.

At first glance, I wasn't aware that they were both seperate stories but, after reading 'The Man Who Died', I kept asking myself - Why are these two stories together like this? The only conclusion I could draw was, the fallibility of one and the infallibility of the other. Be advised though, D.H. does his best to derail your thinking here.

"St. Mawr" and "The Man Who Died," are two separate novellas brought together in this single book.

"St. Mawr" is the longer, and less interesting, of the two. While Lawrence uses his usual dramatic (and excellent) flair for describing landscapes and their reflections in personality of those looking outward at them, there's a lack of direction to this story. Even more than usual, Lawrence seems to suffer from a lack of cohesion with this story, but there's a worthy read in it anyway, for his character studies are, as always, sharp enough to draw blood. Put literally, "St. Mawr" is about two women, a mother and daughter, who upon finding a fine stallion with a wildness to it, realize that that wild natural je-ne-sais-pas is missing from all the men in their lives, leading them on an interesting - if continuity flawed - pilgrimmage.

"The Man Who Died," would get 5 stars from me on its own. This is an incredibly well written story of an alternate telling of the 3 days that Christ was dead. This is Christ as a human being, not a sacred figure, and as such, I can see why this story caused such a harsh discourse. Struggling to find meaning and reason for his tortures, Christ embarks on a three day journey after waking from the dead on the very same day he was entombed. I refuse to ruin any of the plot for you, but this retelling is magnificent, and a really in depth study of sorrow and suffering, and rebirth. You owe yourself a read of this, even if you skip "St. Mawr."

'Nathan

Not truly novels, St. Mawr and The Man Who Died seem to be experimental works in which D. H. Lawrence continues to explore the themes found throughout his longer fiction--the emasculation and dehumanization of men, the power and inscrutability of nature, the cynicism of post-war England, the difficulties in relationships and sex, and the potential of reinvention and resurrection.

Young Lou Witt, married, dispirited, weary, and bored, finds in the stallion St. Mawr the vitality the men around her lack. Although "some inscrutable bond held them together . . . a strange vibration of the nerves rather than of the blood," Lou's marriage to Rico enervates her. The relationship soon becomes Platonic, "a marriage, but without sex." The vital animal element of marriage "was shattering and exhausting, they shrank from it."

When Lou touches St. Mawr, she finds him "[s]o slippery with vivid, hot life!" His "alive, alert intensity" fires her emotions, which she realizes had died in the post-war era of facile friendships and fun. St. Mawr "seemed to look at her out of another world."

With her purchase of the stallion, Lou's perspective alters; "she could not believe the world she lived in." Although unreachable and unknowable, St. Mawr is more real to her than her husband, his friends, and even his apparent new love interest. For Lou, "all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard, let's-be-happy world." Rico becomes almost a caricature of a man, imitating his father's officiousness and righteous indignation without feeling them. Lawrence describes Rico's meticulous attention to his appearance in detail: ". . . he dressed himself most carefully in white riding-breeches and a shirt of purple silk crepe, with a flowing black tie spotted red like a ladybird, and black riding-boots." While Rico is decorative and transparent, St. Mawr is vital and mysterious.

Lawrence uses long swathes of St. Mawr to philosophize, often directly or through the Welsh groom, Lewis, who says, "But a man's mind is always full of things." St. Mawr has no plot, and the stallion himself disappears from the narrative before Lou decides to "escape achievement" in the desert of New Mexico.

In New Mexico, Lawrence finds the "wild tussle" of life, which is missing from the long-civilized England, where everything is fenced in and where "the labourers could no longer afford even a glass of beer in the evenings, since the Glorious War." The displaced New England housewife who precedes Lou, seeing beauty in the desert first, then struggle, may represent Lawrence's own perspective and evolution during his stay there.

The Man Who Died begins with a peasant's acquisition of a cock--perhaps the one that crows three times before Peter realizes his three denials of Christ. Like the cock, the man who died (or, more accurately, didn't die and therefore didn't rise again) is tied "body, soul, and spirit" by "that string," his commitment to mankind to die and to be resurrected. "The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life."

Having survived his promised destiny, the man who died again renounces his godhood to become a man, this time permanently and with no agenda. His near death drives him to seek life, but not the "greed of giving" or the "little, greedy life of the body . . . he knew that virginity is a form of greed . . . he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take . . ."

In his new situation, "the presence of people made him lonely." He believes he has fulfilled his mission and is beyond it: "My way is my own alone . . . I am alone within my own skin, which is the walls of all my domain."

Also alone is the virgin priestess of the temple of Isis, patiently awaiting the return of Osiris. Like Lou and many other female characters in Lawrence, she senses the superficial sexual appeal of men, but even to the great Anthony, "the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in the shadow of frost, for all the flooding of his sunshine." An old philosopher tells her, "Rare women wait for the re-born man" and that the lotus responds to "one of these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more," dismissing Anthony as one of the "golden brief day-suns of show."

The consummation of the relationship between the virgin god and the virgin priestess, in a temple surrounded outside by suspicious, vindictive slaves, is beautiful and moving. "It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose!" Instead of being a mere part of the "little life of the body," sex (and procreation) becomes a deeply spiritual experience, "the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire."

In both St. Mawr and The Man Who Died, Lawrence is rarely subtle or restrained, covering pages with repetitious expositions of his favorite themes, sometimes reveling too much in the variety of expression. In spite of their flaws, both works are inventive, imaginative, and stirring. For anyone who is familiar with Lawrence primarily though his more well-known novels and stories, these two works are worth a read.

St. Mawr is one of the wisest books I've ever read. In it you can find insight and answers to some of the toughest questions you may ever encounter. What is it that brings men and women together? What is it that drives them apart? What exactly is it that we are doing to each other? What does it mean to be civilized? To be savage? What does it actually mean to be human?

D.H. Lawrence creates a world with very few words. These characters, though at times stereotypes or archetypes, are extremely real.

This book changed the way I look at the world, deepened my understanding of myself and of those around me.

There's a need for writers to gain a measure of life's seasoning in order to have something relevant to say. This is not to claim that younger writers don't have a perspective on life worth sharing - but it does imply that life experiences of the young tend to pander to the superficial level of understanding, rarely allowing readers to experience anything of life beyond said young writer's ego.

Literature is at its basis an educational device - one in which a story is told in a way allowing readers to identify with life at multiple levels. Such experience in literature is almost always an isolated, discrete one - a specific person or incident. This is for good reason: limiting literary experience keeps the reader from being overwhelmed by life's panorama.

But...and here my point leaves most younger writers in the dust...a story told skillfully enough to be considered literature will lead the reader to experience the deeper significance of the story, and this almost always leads to something we might call a word-driven mystical experience.

I don't think I'm being too high-flown here - literature at its best should be a meme for something religious folks call spiritual experience. And this experience is essentially a unifying one - an experience that makes all discrete experiences seem part of some (tangible or intangible) whole.

D.H. Lawrence wrote The Man Who Died late in his altogether-too-short life. Writers, particularly those with the poetic bent Lawrence displays in his work, seem to be able somehow to divine the future, and perhaps this book was his way of peering into his own after-life.

His story is one of Jesus of Nazareth, the central icon of Christianity, and I should digress for a moment: Lawrence seems to have two writerly urges here.

First, he takes a rather incomplete story - Biblical depictions are vague on details regarding Jesus' death, his burial and his rising after three days (How, exactly, was he buried? Where was the cave? How was the large stone rolled into the cave's entrance? What transpired, other than what Biblical scripture depicts, inside and outside the cave, during the three days? How did Jesus feel upon rising: was he physically tired, psychologically wan?). Such gaps, whether you consider them of history or myth, are irresistible to writers, and Lawrence surely felt drawn to fill these gaps in his own way. His strategy was to treat Jesus as more of a human than a sainted personality. He depicts Jesus in this story as a man living within a plausibly human context - something that clearly went (and goes) against the grain of the prevailing Christian mythos.

And second, he surely wondered: if I'm to portray Jesus as a human here, how must I treat his divine side? Lawrence's plan was to have Jesus travel to Egypt and to meet a priestess of Isis - the goddess of Egypt's Old Kingdom.

Why Isis? There are parallels with the treatment of Jesus at the end of his life with the story of Osiris:

This Egyptian god was, according to prevailing myth, stuffed into a box by his brother Set, the box thrown into the Nile. Osiris' wife, Isis, recovered the box and brought Osiris back to life via a certain spell. Thus, Osiris became the Egyptian god of the afterlife, or of resurrection (coincidentally, the Egyptian religious cults were resurrectionist, not reincarnationist, as is Christianity).

Lawrence's writing, beyond the scandalous histrionics gathered about his stories, was essentially about resolving sexual polarities in human culture, i.e., how do - or can - we humans resolve our need for and emotional attachments to those of the opposite sex? In keeping with this bent, Lawrence brings Jesus - who remains in something of an emotional funk following his crucifixion and is still physically ailing - into a liaison with this priestess of Isis.

Something about the priestess' physicality seems to salve Jesus' wounds, and he goes on as a man - a wanderer - ever in search of peace as a human.

This story, then, has to do with treating Jesus as a single, human entity, then implying mythic connections with an Egyptian god of similar traits, and leading the reader to some deeper sense of meaning regarding this fictionalized portrayal. In so doing, Lawrence hoped, I think, to have the reader understand something of the divine in human experience, no matter how tragic.

Commentaries on this story depict Jesus' human afterlife as viewing humanity's collective state of mind as one in deep need of psychological and emotional healing, as ego-driven, as desperate to reconcile individual needs with collective needs.

Part of the genius Lawrence displays here is in treating these dichotomy-driven emotional states, not through didactics, but purely through a sweetly told story.

This was my first experience of reading D.H. Lawrence, and I was surprised how clearly and understandably these two short works of around eighty years ago spoke to me. Unfortunately, he seems to be another of those great writers of the past who are neglected today because of their very familiarity. And, it seems likely that some of his ideas may not fit current prescriptions for political correctness. Though I recognized elements in these stories, particularly "St. Mawr", which I regarded as imperfections, they earn the highest rating from me by virtue of the powerful impact of their symbology and supporting imagery.

These separate stories, I believe, illuminate different aspects of the same problem of human existence, as Lawrence saw it. That problem is the defilement or stunting of the pure natural life force in man by an opposing and blighting force. This life force, manifested uniquely in each individual, must be allowed to fulfill itself in each person for that life to have any joy or real meaning to that person. In that way, the individual, though separate unto himself, participates in and has the proper relationship to the life force of the world as a whole.

In Lawrence's very Gnostic vision, there has been intervention or interference by an evil force, sort of an implied Demiurge, that manifests itself, in "St. Mawr" as sentimentality. This sentimentality, posing as genuine feeling, has led to an empty politeness which has weakened and degraded the character of mankind, but from which over-civilized modern man does not know how to escape.

There is an astonishingly vivid portrayal of the primal life-force as portrayed by a remarkable stallion who is the namesake of the story. The image of the conflicted spirit of this captive stallion foreshadows the drama about to unfold for its human characters. Two very liberated women, mother and daughter, give expression, through their personal quests for fulfillment, to the opposition of the cosmic forces, although the drama takes place on a naturalistic plane.

In "The Man Who Died", the degrading force manifests itself as pettiness - overmuch attention to words, regulations, status, money - and the resultant evils of malicious jealousy and harmful intent. It is the blocking of the vision of the greater world of the life force by the smaller world which most of humanity lives in.

In an extremely bold exploration of this theme, which has no doubt been unsettling to many, Lawrence places the resurrected Christ as a protagonist who, upon awakening from the dead, realizes his former mission had been mistaken. He sees that his efforts to make people obey a compulsion to love one another was, after all, a manifestation of the smaller world and a hindering of the purity and self-truth of the life-force.

Again, the human drama is foreshadowed by an animal whose life-force is thwarted by an exterior restraining influence - in this case, a freedom-loving gamecock, or rooster, whose hobbled leg keeps him captive. After freeing the cock, the arisen Christ embarks on his own experience of the life-force through his relationship with a priestess of Isis. Though this might sound seamy, there is nothing at all sordid in the way this story is presented, although many would consider it blasphemous.

To my mind, there are passages of strange beauty as well as potent impact in these stories. Do you or I have to agree with Lawrence's vision? Of course not. But if you are able to abide what might be disturbing elements in these works, you might feel your imagination kindled, as I did mine.

St. Mawr & The Man Who DiedI bought this book in order to share Lawrence's vision of the Christian tale with a friend. It brings together universal resurrection imagery from diverse traditions in the moving, incendiary provocative intensity Lawrence is noted for.