No one told us about the poems and stories the letters the
Posted in General on 10. Aug, 2010
“No one told us about the poems and stories, the letters, the travel sketches There you find a more delicate and likeable writer. There’s a problem of genres; he never stands still or stays within boundaries – the poems are not quite poems, the fiction turns into an essay or vice versa. I always think there’s a slightly Germanic cast to his big novels, all those abstract adjectives, like Thomas Mann I care about him a lot. He’s our last link with modernism, which mid-century English fiction turned its back on.”For that classic debunker of modernism, Kingsley Amis, Lawrence is “one of the …
great missionaries the English send to themselves to tell them they are crass, gross, lost, dead, mad and addicted to unnatural vice. I suppose it is a good thing that these chaps continue to roll up …”. There speaks middle England, “chaps” and all, which shrinks away from Lawrence’s apocalyptic heat and light. Seamus Heaney once noted that Hughes likewise “gets back from that middle-class school the enmity he implicitly offers”.Lawrence praised Forster’s A Passage to India for its anti-imperialism: “King Charles must have his head off Homage to the headsman”.
He was also penetrating about those who are eaten up with “the bugbear of ‘caring’” while keeping a close eye on their own bank balance. Still it’s not easy to see how the Hopi snake dance, or his preternatural feeling for the well-head of life bubbling up in flowers and animals and landscapes, translates into a usable politics, nor indeed how the lifelong call for a new and tender relationship between men and women squares with the phallocentric dance on the grave of Sir Clifford.Rilke once said Tolstoy turned life into a dragon so that he could dress up as a hero and do battle with it. There’s a touch of St George, perhaps, a streak of fiery patriotism, in Lawrence’s non-conformist diatribes and quixotic tilting at the windmills of the sex war. If you wanted to be Dr Ruth (as Lorenzo himself often did) you could say that the late work, including the three versions of Lady Chatterley, was Lawrence’s proxy or fantasy love life, dreamed up when he had ceased to have an actual sex life of his own; and that phallic consciousness is merely the zeal of the convert rebounding from Eastwood’s chapels and Bloomsbury’s self- worship.Young Lawrence wrote that “The essence of things is stored in books” but the older one, confronting his peers, sounds like Christ clearing the money-changers out of the temple: “Flaubert … stood away from life as from a leprosy.” Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev are “so very obvious and coarse”. Wordsworth is full of “nasty anthropomorphic lust”, Keats so maudlin that “one sympathises with Fanny and understands why she wasn’t having any”.
“I can’t forgive Conrad for being so sad and giving in.” Life is used as a cudgel to whack art over the head, just as darkness is offered up as a corrective to the false consciousness of reason.His literary and other essays often sound like a cross between a high- class music-hall act and a new psalmody, loaded with knowing dithyrambs about the unknowable. “I’m like Carlyle, who, they say, wrote 50 volumes on the value of silence.”Irony will only take one so far, however, into Lawrence country. One of his great virtues is the insistence that we stop dividing ourselves up into rational and instinctual bits and throwing away whatever doesn’t fit into these neat paradigms. In it, Hornby perfected his ability to write about male feelings in a way that both sexes can identify with – the men marvelling that someone has found a way to describe their most vulnerable and unappealing moments without quite abandoning them as pathetic, the women giving jeers of recognition that sometimes even give way to understanding.About A Boy is novel number two then, and as such it suffers from what the lead character in High Fidelity would recognise as Second Album Syndrome.