There’s never been a School of Lawrence unless you count Norman Mailer Alan Sillitoe and some of the Fifties angry young men
Posted in General on 10. Aug, 2010
There’s never been a School of Lawrence (unless you count Norman Mailer, Alan Sillitoe and some of the Fifties angry young men), any more than there’s been a School of Joyce; but his influence is there in dozens of autobiographical novels and in scores of poets, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath among them. There has also been the seven volumes of Letters (an eighth is in preparation), and numberless academic studies, some in Leavis’s sternly pietistic vein, some tackling the summit and its updrafts with the latest theoretical ice picks.”Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage,” he once said Certainly readers have reacted, furiously and devotedly. Last year there was Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (Little, Brown 1997), a funny and acute book about why he was not going to write his long-meditated study of the master. Harry T Moore’s The Intelligent Heart (1955) lists about 50 memoirs he consulted, and studies have continued to pour out since, from Martin Green’s The von Richthofen Sisters (Weidenfeld 1974) – “The triumphant and the tragic modes of love” – and Brenda Maddox’s The Married Man to Kate Millet’s groundbreaking Sexual Politics (1974), which put the feminist case against Lawrence’s sexual crusade. Almost everyone who knew him, from Jessie Chambers to Lady Cynthia Asquith, Middleton Murray to Mabel Dodge Luhan, and literally dozens of others, has committed their memories to print.
He preferred wooden architecture to marble or stone, hymns and folk songs to symphonies, flowers to philosophers, frost on the edges of grass blades and oak leaves to the pomp of city culture. When Birkin gets out of the train at London, in Women in Love, he says to Gerald: “Don’t you feel like one of the damned?” – this four or five years before Eliot’s “unreal city” loomed out of The Waste Land.Long before Bruce Chatwin unearthed good copy in faraway places, James Fenton faxed himself off to war-zones, and travel editors hunted down the great good place, Lawrence was doing all this and more in his brilliant impromptus, as well as in the big set-piece novels, offering up dithyrambs on everything from the “stupendousness” of New World vistas to “Flowery Tuscany” or Cezanne’s amazing apples, while engaged in a never-ending round of intense friendships and daily chores, such as keeping house, Frieda and the Zeitgeist up to the mark.The Cambridge biography is just the latest in a long line of books sparked off by Lawrence’s fiery passage through 20th-century life and letters. LITTLE NOW REMAINS of Victorian Birmingham, but by happy chance (and the benefits of lottery money) there are two permanent monuments to 19th-century art and culture in the city centre. “He’s got such an extraordinary imagination: he draws on quite unusual sources, which are amazing to bounce off He was really supportive – which was great.
The figures ought to have been three times bigger, with firmer outlines They look like stencils. I was sorry to learn that Spero did not execute this work herself. It was done by assistants whom she instructed via fax from America. The impression is of a somewhat casual involvement with the Ikon. Perhaps Spero was confused by its mixture of modern and Victorian architecture.
In any case, we won’t know its full potential before we see a genuinely good and committed artist in Oozells Street.Ikon Gallery: 1 Oozells Sq, Birmingham B1 (0121 248 0708) Starr & Spero to 24 May.. DISTINGUISHED veteran poet Michael Horowitz recently put the Today programme in turmoil; it sounded as if they practically had to drag him off, declaiming Byron at the top of his voice. He was very angry about all the attention and money being lavished on Murray Lachlan Young, a new young poet who, according to Horowitz, is a hopeless fraud, a disgrace to poetry’s fair name, etc. True enough, there has been a lot of coverage for Master Young of the isn’t-he-hot, isn’t-he-big, isn’t-he-young, isn’t- he-the-cool-crossover variety.
Well, now the whole nation can join in this Poetry Society debate and come to its own conclusions, because, bearing out Horowitz’s worst fears, here is Young appearing in a Virgin Atlantic commercial. He certainly looks the part of the pop/poet crossover, as surely as Scaffold did in the 1960s and John Cooper Clarke did in the 1970s: long hair, long face and body, aristo-London, 1968-revival, velvet clothes.
And his concerns, judged on this tasting, are very metropolitan and media- ish. The ad is selling the cool entertainment package in Virgin Atlantic’s economy class – as distinct from the limos-and-legroom concept in Upper Class pitched by grown-ups like Helen Mirren and Terence Stamp. So Lachlanisms like “Personal audio-visual sensation, plug yourself in to the pleasure machine,” seem pretty good ways to dignify a screen in the back of the seat ahead. “Position yourself on the sensory surfboard, then wait for the wave of the digital daydream … multi-digi-psycho-senso-maxo-pleasuronomy,” he says (which, handily enough, rhymes with “Virgin economy”).It isn’t exactly “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, but then nor was Clarke’s “Ten Years in an Open-Necked Shirt”. And it has to be said that Murray Lachlan Young appears to be telegenic, right for the product and for the marketplace.