Dispatch from the Archives is a regular column about work previously published in Southwest Review. The magazine is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States, and its archives date back to 1915. This edition looks at an essay from volume 11, 2 by D. H. Lawrence.
A lonely strip of Central Texas road calls me forward. The live oaks sit low on the horizon line. They are unruly, sprawling, greedy with their reach. I turn off my music. In the car’s silence, I feel the drone of the tires, half expecting the oaks to join into the low thrum of motion, of time passing. If I drive fast enough, they will blend into one dark mess of branches, a never-ending streak of ancient life, a knotted portal straight to myth. If I listen hard enough, they will burble up a note from the bedrock.
D. H. Lawrence came to the American Southwest and listened for the same low, ancient thrum.
Southwest Review published Lawrence’s essay “Pan in America” in January 1926, in volume 11, number 2. It opens with Lawrence’s sweeping history of the (mis)interpretation of the Greek god Pan. Lawrence argues that the god of the untamed wilderness has been miscast as the god of all (pan meaning “all” in Greek). He traces the figure of Pan from ancient Greece to Christianity to the Romantic poets. And ultimately, Pan jumps to America. It is here in America where Lawrence seeks the true Pan of the wilds—the “fugitive, hidden among leaves.” In the American Southwest, Pan exists “as a tree still is. A strong-willed, powerful thing-in-itself, reaching up and reaching down.”
Lawrence’s essay is awesomely bizarre and wildly ambitious. He makes a large claim about the evolution of this literary reference, along with a commentary about the nature of societal disarray following the second Industrial Revolution (the rise of the machine and the turn away from the natural world).
He is also hilarious. At one point Lawrence invokes an out-of-touch anthropologist drinking hot milk and wearing lambswool slippers . . . and I can’t help but imagine Lawrence writing that sentence with mug in hand and slippers on foot, laughing at his readers, the bunch of fools. He takes an especially delightful dig at Walt Whitman’s self-importance:
Whitman sings the famous Song of Myself. “I am All, and All is Me.” That is: “I am Pan and Pan is me.”
The old goat-legged gentleman from Greece thoughtfully strokes his beard, and answers: “All A is B, but all B is not A.” Aristotle did not live for nothing. All Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt.
Funny guy, that D. H.
On my first read, I was quickly drawn into the mystery of Pan, into Lawrence’s confident and wry prose. Writing from his temporary home in Taos, New Mexico, Lawrence handled the landscape with a specificity that sometimes only an outsider can have. I wondered at how starkly different the early-twentieth-century American Southwest would look in comparison to the destruction of postwar Europe. At its core, the dis-evolution of Pan is about the role of the machine (guns? tanks?) in Lawrence’s post-WWI contemporary life. He argues that the human psyche has grown distant from a body/tree connection through abstraction via the machine: “The idea and the engine came between man and all things, like a death.”
Lawrence closely investigates American Indigenous culture as the pinnacle of connection to the natural world, and Native communities as the people closest to Pan. This intimate connection to the tree, to the mountain, to other animals is Lawrence’s counterpoint to machines and materialism and industrial expansion. Three-fourths of the way through this essay, I wrote in the margins: This is nearly an anti–manifest destiny argument? Is that right?
Well, no. In fact, below where I wrote this margin note, the essay undermines itself. What I’d started to read as respect for an Indigenous way of life turns sharply toward misogyny and racism. Lawrence includes this scene in which Pan rapes his wife: “Oh woman, do not speak and stir and wound me with the sharp horns of yourself. Let me come into the deep, soft places. . . . Oh, open silently the deep that has no end, and do not turn the horns of the moon against me.” And though Lawrence writes that “still, in America, among the Indians, the oldest Pan is alive,” he then states: “It is useless to glorify the savage. For he will kill Pan with his own hands, for the sake of a motor-car.”
Here is an obvious lesson in archives: historic literature can be both illuminating and harmful. Lawrence can clearly write a kick-ass sentence. He can be an environmentalist and a pacifist. But he also damages the power and agency of women and Indigenous people. And as I write this column, as I scan the list of literary giants we’ve published at Southwest Review, as I scroll through JSTOR and touch our shelves of back issues, I’m forced to also consider the outlet—the publisher.
This piece is such a strong reminder of the need to investigate our archives. To track an evolution of thought. To hold both the beautiful and the cruel. To consider a history and where you move forward from it. I’m sure I’ll continue to confront similar dark spots in Southwest Review’s archives. But too, I see this as an invitation to dig up counterexamples from our archives—writing that pushes back against these dark spots, that illuminates the dynamism of perspective and voice in the literary world.
And you know what, maybe Pan is alive here in the Southwest. Or maybe Lawrence’s Pan is some sort of other, ancient entity: the turning back of car tires, of time; the rhythm of nature’s language; the root systems of the live oaks braiding into the loam. If D. H. got it right with any claim in this essay, it is this: “I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree.”
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
Illustration: Sarah Sumeray
