Before we get to Lawrence, once again I must digress. A dream last night. I am with my parents. I am sitting; they are standing. My mother has just returned from taking her final classes. She says: “What do you think I should do next? Work for the government as a prosecutor? Or work for a law firm as a defense attorney?”

My response: “Mother. You are 113 years old. No one your age starts a new career.”

Now to our main topic.

Last night, for the second night in a row, we watched a movie based on a D.H. Lawrence novel. The night before last, it was the new Netflix film, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”. Last night, it was “Kangaroo”.

You probably have not read “Kangaroo”, a novel written by Lawrence during the three months or so that he and his wife Frieda spent in Australia in 1922. While “Lady Chatterly” was a novel of erotic emotion,
“Kangaroo” is primarily a political novel. And although it is, for the most part, pure fiction, you know that the lead couple, a young British author escaping the mess that is Europe after the first World War and his German wife, are stand-ins for the Lawrences.

Australia is the new country, a virtual new world, that they are looking for. But what type of country will develop in this remote and rough-looking landscape? In 1922, Australia was a British colony experimenting with self-government. But the Australian colonial government hardly appears in the novel. There are other political movements afoot.

The novel centers on a proto-fascist leader, Benjamin Cooley, known as Kangaroo. His vision is a strong Australia, led by a brotherhood of military-trained believers called the Diggers, who worship him as a great leader. Sound familiar? His opposition? A socialist/Marxist leader of the working class, looking to replicate in Australia what had recently happened in the Russian Empire. Each of these movements would like young pseudo-Lawrence, a relatively well known English writer, to become their publicist; neither is successful in winning him over and, after a public clash between the Diggers and the workers, leading to death and destruction, the young writer and his wife decide that Australia may not be for them, and they decide to try the United States.

In 1922, Europe was trying to find itself, the war behind it, the Versailles treaty provisions bearing down on defeated Germany. Hitler had yet to appear (the Munich putsch took place in 1923), but Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, and is referenced in the novel. And, in 1922, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was only five years old; Lenin was still alive, and Communism on the upswing in many places.

“Kangaroo” is a very good book (it even has some relevance today) and I recommend it. The 1987 film – not so. Skip it.

One more thing about “Kangaroo”. In the book, but interestingly not in the film, Kangaroo himself is Jewish. He isn’t a religious man, and he doesn’t appear to be part of a broader Jewish community, but he is Jewish. An unanswered question is why D.H. Lawrence made Kangaroo Jewish – was it a sign of antisemitism on Lawrence’ part? Or what?

I wanted to explore this a little and, surprisingly, found an article from Commentary Magazine in 1970 – by, of all people, Berkeley biblical scholar Robert Alter. Alter’s article looked at two authors – D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, both of whom had written about Jews. He examines the Jewish Kangaroo and other writings by Lawrence and decides he was not antisemitic; he reaches a very different conclusion about Eliot. Why, then, does Alter think Lawrence decided to create a Jewish Kangaroo? He posits that Lawrence wanted to show a fascist as a father figure and God is a father figure and in western civilization, whether you are Christian or Jewish, you look at God as being Jewish. (Is that really what Alter said? It was a convoluted argument, to be sure, and I may have misunderstood it completely, though I don’t think so. Alter, of course is still around. Should we ask him what he meant? If he still thinks this? If he even remembers that he wrote this article? But, again, I digress.)

That’s it for today. Temperatures falling. Staying home two days in a row. Today waiting for a stranger coming at 11 to figure out what is wrong with our dishwasher. We shall see.