In 2000, Gary Adelman, a D.H. Lawrence scholar, wrote an
essay for Triquarterly about the strange death of D.H. Lawrence’s reputation in
the academia and among readers at large. Adelman uses two sources for probing
into the cultural discontent with Lawrence. One was the responses of the
students to a course he taught on Lawrence; the other was the responses he
gathered from a letter he wrote to 110
novelists, asking about their own past and present reading of Lawrence. The
students, Adelman writes, ended up hating Lawrence. The writers gave a more mixed response. Some,
like Doris Lessing, claimed that the idea that D. H. Lawrence is “not important”
is purely ideological. Lessing claims that at least two of Lawrence’s novels (Sons
and Lovers and The Rainbow) are among the greatest novels of the twentieth
century. On the other hand, Ursula LeGuin had a lot of sympathy with the
antipathy expressed by the students, especially for the change in the character
of Ursula from The Rainbow to Women in Love. Adelman notes, parenthetically,
that even his students loved The Rainbow.
Only in the context of being fed all things Lawrence did they turn on
it.
My own sense is that Lawrence suffers now fromm having been elevated
by Leavis and similar critics in the 40s to the status of Great Britain’s great
20th century novelist. At the same time, this crew beat down
Virginia Woolf, whose pathologies they emphasized and whose styles they
derided. Woolf looks to me like she has ridden out that storm, and that
Lawrence, in comparison, has suffered from having his pathologies elevated and
his style – for mostly, he had one style – derided.
But what Lawrence tried to do with the novel is, I think,
very much alive. Lawrence liked to have a number of romances at the center of
his novels in order to show, firstly, the greater social contract that pushed
upon these supposedly private passions, and secondly, to show how the greater social
contract was being catalyzed through these romances. It is the second function that
lent these romances a mythic power, which Lawrence often translated into terms
that are a bit misleading and inadequate: that is, the terms of “man” and “woman”.
The inadequacy of any person representing these vast categories is at the heart
of the critique of essentialism.
Nevertheless, essentialism is the grid through which most popular
critics today operate, figuring out how, for instance, young women “are”
through the characters in “Girls” or even “Broad City”, etc. Of the drawing of
conclusions about the greater social contract, there is no end, even as what
categories are highlighted and which ones are subdued is an historical
variable. There’s little talk, for instance, about the class of characters on
TV today. Class has become unfashionable. This has definitely had an effect on
the reading of D.H. Lawrence, who grew up in class-ridden England and never
for
I’m thinking of Lawrence not because I am reading him, but
because I am reading Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, which is built upon
the Lawrentian dialectic of romance and the social contract. Shirley Hazzard
is, I think, much more intelligent than Lawrence – she has the kind of
intelligence that Lawrence so often rejected, the kind that analyzes as well as
synthesizes. Hazzard died this past December. When I read of her death, I felt
a pang not so much of grief but of guilt. I have long known I should read Shirley Hazzard, but for
some reason I thought that it would be an effort. So I took up the novel that,
it is generally agreed, is Hazzard’s masterpiece. And the effort – as in all
great reading – is aided and then overwhelmed by the tidal flow of the
thing. It has, whether Hazzard thought
in these terms or simply absorbed them, the Lawrentian lineaments of a thing both monumental
and living – of history tested by sensibility. I want to say something fuller
about it in some future post. But the thing to say about it in this one is:
read it.
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