St Mawr

"There are a lot of fiction and non-fiction writers in the 20th century who started to feel the weight of this machine of civilisation. George Orwell wrote about it all the time, most famously in 1984 , as well as Huxley, Lawrence and poets like Robinson Jeffers and RS Thomas. All sorts of writers had the sense that we are living in a machine civilisation that we can’t control, and which has its own momentum. That expressed itself in a number of different ways in writing, whether essays about the dangers of technology or novels about the future. In St Mawr , Lawrence writes about wildness and civilisation. He always had the feeling that civilisation sucked the spirit and soul out of people. A lot of his books which people have assumed are about sex are not really about sex as such, they’re about the uncivilised wild urge within people that represents itself in a sexual urge. Lawrence had the idea that sex was one of the last ways you could be free in a machine civilisation. This particular book isn’t about sex, it’s about a horse called St Mawr. There is a very civilised and genteel family that lives in London and they buy themselves a wild, untamed Welsh stallion which comes with its handler, a lad from the Welsh valleys who is also untamed. The main character is a young woman called Lou Witt, who is about to marry a young, fashionable poet but is not quite happy with this. It takes the horse to awaken the uncivilised urges within her. She ends up moving to New Mexico in America with the handler, and they take the horse with them because they want to escape from the kind of society that wants to pin them down. “All sorts of writers had the sense that we are living in a machine civilisation that we can’t control, and which has its own momentum.” It’s a strange book because the story of the horse peters out towards the end. You realise that the horse is just a means of getting them to this place, and a symbol of what wildness remains. It becomes a long conversation about how you can survive civilisation and love, and what it’s like to be a human animal in these times. I don’t think it’s brilliantly successful as a piece of fiction and a coherent story, but like all of Lawrence’s books it’s lively and sparky, and makes you think about the issues that most novelists don’t want to tackle – the really big stuff. Lawrence is completely unafraid to be wrong, and unafraid of tackling the really huge issues that you can’t necessarily provide answers for."