"Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility," or, D. H. goes to parties

Considering how important he was to the first years of my consciously literary reading--the first year or so of college, say--I've not written that much about D. H Lawrence in the nearly five years I've been writing this blog. That's largely because, as I've joked before, Lawrence, for all his actual virtues, is one of those authors one tend to grow out of: as one's experience widens, the overwrought quality of his depictions of relations between men and women becomes apparent, starts to look less like a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the inevitable struggle of primal forces and more like a self-aggrandizing depiction of willed difficulty. Life and love, for the sane, are just not quite that tough.* I'm reminded of a scene from Harold Nicolson's diaries, collected in John Gross's indispensable New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, telling of a meeting with Frieda Lawrence at a party:

She says that Lawrence said, "Frieda, if people really knew what you were like, they would strangle you." I say, "Did he say that angrily?" She said, "No--very quietly, after several minutes deep thought."

Anthony Powell--whose relatively catholic literary tastes can be trusted to overcome what one would be right to assume would be his social and political dislike of Lawrence--described him well in a review of Lawrence's literary criticism written for Punch in 1956:

Lawrence was in a way too gifted; at least too lacking in self-discipline to control his gifts to their best advantage. Leaning heavily towards the state of being primarily a poet, he was chiefly, as it turned out, concerned with writing novels. As a novelist, with all his force, he is never wholly at ease with his medium. He himself is the only character who ever truly emerges.

Nonetheless, Lawrence and his work remain of interest, so when my coworker Joseph Peterson lent me Edmund Wilson's The Twenties, one of the volumes of his journals that FSG published in the 1970s, I was greatly entertained by Wilson's account of a party given for Lawrence in August of 1923 that Wilson, then twenty-eight, attended:

Terrific argument betwen John Macy and Lawrence about extent to which reviewers were prostitutes. Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility. . . . I found Lawrence's appearance disconcerting. He was lean, but his head was disproportionately small. One saw that he belonged to an inferior caste--some bred-down unripening race of the collieries. Against this inferiority--fundamental and physical--he must have had to fight all his life: his passionate spirit had made up for it by exaggerated self-assertion. (I have never seen this physical aspect of Lawrence mentioned.) On this occasion, he suddenly became hysterical and burst out in childish rudeness and in a high-pitched screaming voice with something like: "I'm not enjoying this! Why are we sitting here having tea? I don't want tea! I don't want to be doing this!" The Seltzers [the hosts], rather stodgy in their bourgeois apartment, sat through it and made no reply, and nobody else took any notice of it. . . . The furious fit soon passed, and he presently came over and began to talk to me in a conventional British way. I don't remember what he said except to ask me a question or two about myself. I had earlier been rather antagonized by his denunciation of Dante as a writer who had tried to intellectualize love.

After which I find myself wanting to turn back to Powell, who, elsewhere in the Punch piece quoted above, wrote of Lawrence,

[H]is whole approach seems largely inappropriate to the world of literature. Lawrence was a frustrated politician or preacher. He wanted power: to force people to do his will. He was temperamentally unable to understand that different people by their nature may require to live different lives; and, accordingly, to find their expression in different forms of art.

All of which, oddly enough, makes me think it may be time--after nearly twenty years--to revisit The Rainbow.

Fightin' words

Over at the Second Pass, the editors have assembled a post calling out canonical novels that they can't stand. The contributors issue merciless beatdowns to ten novels, from Victorian classics (A Tale of Two Cities) to recent sensations (The Corrections).

As should be the case in a fight-picking post such as that one, the writing is at its best when it hits a novel you instinctively want to defend, but suddenly, cringingly, find you can't. Like D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, about which I have many fond memories, but about which the anonymous contributor writes,

The book was yanked [from circulation] for ostensibly racy sex, but you won’t find much of that here. Instead, much of what it contains — redundant, stultifyingly interior, almost eventless — is reminiscent of nothing so much as the things an English prof endures on the way to getting into a sensitive student’s pants: the gushing, the journal reading, the unedited first drafts. Viz:

She could be very happy. And she wanted to be happy. She resented it when he made her unhappy. Then she could kill him, cast him out. Many days, she waited for the hour when he would be gone to work. Then the flow of her life, which he seemed to dam up, was let loose, and she was free. She was free, she was full of delight. Everything delighted her.

But . . . but . . . I sputter--then I find myself wondering whether the one novel that I had believed good enough to transcend the humorless self-importance that suffuses Lawrence's every word may actually be just as purple and melodramatic as the rest.

I was, after all, merely nineteen years old when I read it: some people, at that age, fall for Bukowski; others of us, nerdier, fall for Lawrence. {And, in the spirit of the Second Pass's post, I can't help but point out that at least us Lawrentians get over him eventually . . . }

Go check out the list, then register your complaints and/or approbation in their comments section.

"There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America."

{Etching for The Inferno by Gustave Doré}

So said D. H. Lawrence in a 1924 piece on Edgar Allan Poe. One would think that Lawrence ought to know a thing or two about vampires. He suffered from tuberculosis, the disease often thought to be at the root of a lot of vampire lore, and he was relentlessly concerned with issues of sex, power, the will, and transgresion, concepts that are central to vampire stories. Who knows--maybe Lawrence even was a vampire? Maybe I should ask Geoff Dyer what he thinks?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, was a determined skeptic, taking up the topic in a letter to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, in 1763:

If there is in the world one attested story it is that of the Vampires. Nothing is missing: proces-verbaux, certificates from Notabilities, Surgeons, Priests, Magistrates. The juridical proof is most complete. With all this, who believes in Vampires? Shall we all be damned for not having belived?

I found both the above quotes in The Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994), which is edited by D. J. Enright and, like any Enright production, is jammed full of endlessly quotable stuff. Sadly, it's out of print, but it's readily available used. I'll probably try to steal more from it between now and Hallowe'en, but for today I'll just give you Enright's rundown of some reported causes of vampirism:

The sins and misfortunes reckoned to lead to the condition have included some weird items: committing suicide, of course, but also working on Sundays, smoking on holy days, drinking to excess, and having sexual intercourse with one's grandmother; more innocently, those born on Christmas Day are doomed to the same fate in punishment of their mothers' presumptuousness in conceiving on the same day as the Virgin Mary.

Though I don't know any . . . ahem . . . grandmotherfuckers, a couple of other items on that list, if accurate, would lead me to conclude that there must be more vampires out there than I had previously thought.

Do you think that buzzing a vampire into the foyer counts as inviting him in? The Wikipedia is unhelpfully silent on the topic. Methinks I'll eschew the buzzer at least until Hallowe'en has passed. And regardless, I'm going to have to be more careful about whom I invite over to our baseball open house.

The past is another country; they do things differently there.

Thanks to Geoff Dyer, today I kept vaguely turning over the idea of someday rereading D. H. Lawrence, despite being fairly confident that the specifics of his personal philosophy--on which the whole of his work is hung--are likely to seem, on being re-encountered in adulthood, rather unconvincing. Then, while I was reading David Kynaston's Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 (2007) on the train, I came across the following description of one of the Labour Party's most prominent thinkers of the war years, Evan Durbin:

[Durbin] once remarked that his three greatest pleasures were "food, sleep and sex" but accused D. H. Lawrence of "shallow abstractions" in relation to "freedom in sexual relations."

That is more or less how I remember Lawrence's position, too: a vague positing of sex itself as a primary liberating experience, a crucial step towards a truly free life. Heady stuff at the time, presumably, but quickly sounding silly these days unless taken in small doses.

Ultimately, the problem with Lawrence's novels, from what I remember, is the problem that plagues any writer who knows the way people ought to live: the novel--which as a form thrives on growth, discovery, and above all openness--is warped by the character (or narrative voice) who doesn't need to change, doesn't need to learn, because he already sees through the illusions that bind those around him. Speech and incident become didactic demonstration, drama becomes melodrama, and despite some very powerful passages, the whole is rendered false. In his journal for 1987, Anthony Powell (who, incidentally, agrees with Dyer that Lawrence's letters are great reading) puts it more succinctly:

The reader [is] always, so to speak, tripping over the Lawrence self-image, which at once reduces conviction, much of novel being in any case ludicrously melodramatic.

Powell, who had recently re-read Women in Love, also notes,

Red-hot emotions as usual much overdone, tho' I suppose could be argued people to some extent behave like that nowadays, breaking up marriages because sexual relations not for the moment absolutely ideal. That would, in fact, have greatly disturbed Lawrence himself.

Powell's letting his grouchy conservative side show, but Lawrence isn't the only person who would have been disturbed--and here I return to where I started this post, Austerity Britain, from which learned today that even in 1948, two decades after Lawrence's death, a Gallup poll revealed that only 27 percent of British citizens thought that divorce by simple mutual consent should be allowed. To broaden the picture, Kynaston, as he does throughout the book, turns straight to the actual words of the people, revealing a batch of their responses to related survey question, "How do you feel about divorce?"

It depends on the people. If either is to blame they should have a divorce.

Well, I mean to say, it's a good thing if the couple are unhappy.

No. A man takes a wife for better or worse, doesn't he?

I wouldn't grant divorce. They should get on with it.

I feel very sorry for the kiddies. It's very hard on them but if Mother and Father can't agree it only makes the children suffer worse--they suffer inwardly.

I think it's an awful thing to happen to anyone--everyone turns away from a divorced woman.

Better to divorce than live unhappily.

I don't like the idea of a divorce--all the publicity and scandal.

In some cases, yes. Marriage is a gamble anyway.

Austerity Britain is rich with moments like that, phrases that give such direct, authentic access to the past that they pull you up short. A gamble . . . scandal . . . everyone turns away. Even though at points 1947 can feel very familiar, it was a very different time; a well-crafted work of history, like Kynaston's, works to make sure we never forget that.

And though Powell's probably right that Lawrence would have disapproved of free-and-easy divorce, he surely would have approved of the context in which public opinion was changed and the stigma lost--a gradual but dramatic expansion of an individual's right to freely make decisions about his or her life. That's the side Lawrence was fighting for, after all, and despite his occasional silliness, like everyone who plays a part in shifting the terms of the debate, he deserves to be remembered well for it.

So maybe I will reread The Rainbow someday after all.

I can't go on, I'll go on

It's entirely appropriate that, while I meant to write about Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (1997) yesterday, I got distracted and ended up putting it off. For that's what the gloriously titled Out of Sheer Rage is all about: Geoff Dyer putting off writing a "sober, academic study" of D. H. Lawrence.

He's been meaning to write the book--he's told his agent he's going to write it--but he's also thinking about writing a novel, and he can't quite figure out how to get started, and, well, the result is a 230-page tour through Dyer's psyche that at various points takes the form of autobiography, rant, and, despite his worst intentions, even a study of D. H. Lawrence.

Dyer is a betwixt-and-betweener, a hither-and-yonner, constitutionally unable to seize contentment wherever he is and deciding instead that he needs to be somewhere else--where, upon arrival, he instantly begins cataloging all that was good and irreplaceable about the location he just left. Here he is early in the book, having just signed a year-long lease for the apartment he's been occupying in Paris:

I was ecstatic. For about five minutes. Then I realised I had taken on an awesome, not to say crippling responsibility. And far from solving the problem of where to live I had actually put a lid on it so that now my uncertainty was boiling away under pressure, threatening to blow me apart. The one thing I could be sure of was that I had to leave this apartment, where I had never known a moment's peace of mind, as soon as possible. If I stayed here, I now say, I would fail to write both my novel and my study of Lawrence. That much was obvious. The trouble, the rub, was that I had to give three month's notice and therefore had to predict how I would be feeling three months hence which was very difficult. It was all very well deciding today that I wanted to leave but what counted was how I was going to be feeling three months from now. You could be perfectly happy today, I would say to myself, and three months from now you could be suicidal, precisely because you will see the enormity of the mistake you made by not renouncing the lease three months earlier.

And so on. Perpetually dithering and uncertain, Dyer travels from Paris to Rome to Sardinia to Oxford to Taos, accompanied by his surprisingly tolerant and sane girlfriend, simultaneously following Lawrence and bowing to the whims of his neuroses, whining all the way. Sometimes, for example, he has to eat seafood, which he hates:

[S]ea-food is vile filth which I will eat under no circumstances. My favourite foods are all variants of bread, food you can chow down with no effort, without even a knife and fork, food that requires virtually no preparation and little expenditure of money or energy. At the other extreme there is food that you have to fiddle around with, food that comes in shells that you have to prise open, food that you have to prepare for hours and pick the bones out of and pay for through the nose: sea-food, in short, and here we were in a sea-food restaurant. The first course arrived: not any old sea-food (i.e. not simply inedible) but the ultimate sea-food (i.e. there was actually nothing to eat): sea urchins, blackened conker shells with a tiny strip of (presumably) slimy, salty, orange gristle in the middle.

Take that passage and expand it to book-length, and you'll get a sense of Out of Sheer Rage: cranky, unapologetic, utterly self-involved--yet hilarious and impossible to put down. The small difficulties of life wind Dyer up to such a pitch of worry, frustration, and anger that it's hard not to sympathize, even as you're laughing and groaning and realizing that, if you were his long-suffering girlfriend, you'd have to stab him through the eye. Every morning. Instead, she notes his inadequacies in her journal: "G. had a fit, as usual."

Somehow, in the midst of obsessively recounting his travails, Dyer also tells us a lot about Lawrence, delivering a lively and interesting larger critique that one could imagine, after mummification, comprising the sober study he's so utterly failed to write. He's particularly good when writing about photos of writers, and here he is on another topic that fascinates me, the draw of a writer's unfinished or unpublished work:

As time goes by we drift away from the great texts, the finished works on which an author's reputation is built, towards the journals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, jottings. This is not simply because, as an author's stature grows posthumously, the fund of published texts becomes exhausted and we have to make do not only with previously unpublished or unfinished material but, increasingly, with matter that was never intended for publication. It is also because we want to get nearer to the man or woman who wrote these books, to his or her being. We crave an increasingly intimate relationship with the author, unmediated, in so far as possible, by the contrivances of art. A curious reversal takes place. The finished works serve as a prologue to the jottings; the published book becomes a stage to be passed through--a draft--en route to the definitive pleasure of the notes, the fleeting impressions, the sketches, in which it had its origin.

Dyer is intentionally overstating the case, but he's essentially right about the draw of a writer's extraneous material: the thrill of peeking into a favorite writer's letters or diaries is of a different character from that provided by their work, but it can vie with that work in power. And through his consideration of interesting portions of Lawrence's letters, notebooks, and journals, Dyer managed to renew my interest in Lawrence, a writer whom I'd half-consciously decided I was unlikely to enjoy as much as an adult as I did when I was twenty. Maybe he'll even get me to re-read The Rainbow--which he himself regrets re-reading. Of course.

Ultimately Dyer's life on tenterhooks is for me like a dispatch from an alien race: I can't even imagine living in such a welter of dread and regret. I'm lucky enough to be as near the opposite as possible: contentment seems to be my natural state. The grass is never greener, and even if it might temporarily appear that way, I know deep down that thoughtful analysis will prove it to be at best a light brown, relatively.

That easy satisfaction can become a fault, of course--and the same contentment that keeps me from deciding to move to New York or hop from job to job also keeps me from having much ambition at all beyond reading through the perpetually renewing stack of books. So to come up against someone like Dyer who is constantly wrestling with his desires and regrets--and who can turn that struggle into a funny, insightful, compelling narrative--is a treat, a powerful reminder of the glories of difference, of the near-infinite ways one can choose to approach this life.

By the end of the book I'd developed real sympathy for Dyer--even admiration. For even though he knows that he is going to regret and second-guess any decision he makes, any effort he puts forth, he doesn't let that stop him. He keeps moving:

[S]ince the only way to avoid giving into depression and despair is to do something, even something you hate, anything in fact, I force myself to keep bashing away at something, anything. . . . It is a simple choice: work or succumb to melancholia, depression, and despair. Like it or not you have to try to do something with your life, you have to keep plugging away.

The horizon and its certainty are always going to be far away; we might as well keep walking. Dyer, knowing that, makes himself good company for the journey.