Lawrence as Critic
Dupee, F.W.
WRITERS and WRITING Lawrence as Critic D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. by Anthony Beal. Viking. 435 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by F. W. Dupee Associate Professor of...
...he was too impatient of the usual disciplines of criticism...
...A dogmatic finality was a necessity of Lawrence's nature...
...and Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne and the rest have never been the same since Lawrence turned them upside down and shook the secrets out of them...
...Lawrence, it is true, did not especially fancy himself as a literary critic...
...Beal includes as much of this material as will conveniently fit in the category of literary criticism...
...It is actuality, but it is not 'life' in the living sense...
...Beal's material has, however, been extensively quoted from, reprinted or anthologized before and is now apt to be familiar to the general reader...
...Oh, sure—essentially...
...The French are essentially critics of life, rather than creators of life...
...It stems from the London Times Literary Supplement and reads: "In this book as a whole, as in Lawrence's work as a whole, is a meaning more important than any that has been uttered in our time...
...On the idols of the studios, from Goethe to Joyce and Proust, he is really no good, unless his insults are to be relished for their own sake...
...Beal includes much that is first-rate...
...But Lawrence often sounds tired of almost everything and eager to hit almost anybody...
...One can, therefore, follow the development of Lawrence's mind from the early 1910s, when he hopefully declared that the work of demolishing old values had already been accomplished by Ibsen, Flaubert and Nietzsche, to the later 1920s, when he returned to the labor of demolition with a vehemence at which Ibsen, Flaubert and even Nietzsche would perhaps have trembled, especially since it was also at times applied to them...
...The balance between the murderer and the woman is gone entirely...
...Here he is barely restraining his impatience with Dostoyevsky: "When the man in Crime and Punishment murders the old woman for sixpence, although it is actual enough, it is never quite real...
...and he sprinkled his personal letters with comments on writing and writers...
...Like many other artists, he thrived on memory...
...For the rest, Lawrence is probably most readable when he is dealing with figures who do not, or did not at the time, belong to the literary aristocracy as it was defined by Bloomsbury circles...
...Look who's talking...
...Much of it is also, as I say, dreary, inhuman stuff: the gripes and groans of a sorely afflicted man...
...The acid portrait of Magnus has its relevance to literature and the literary life, besides being one of Lawrence's best performances...
...it is only a mess...
...He was a perpetual inquisitor...
...Reviewed by F. W. Dupee Associate Professor of Literature, Columbia University, author, "Henry James" A reader may greatly admire D. H. Lawrence and still stare rather hard at the estimate of him which blazes from the jacket of D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism...
...When an artist says MY WORK, the flesh goes tired on my bones...
...He is also fond of pairing historic figures in a disdainful and baffling way, as when he refers to "people like Rousseau and Diderot...
...Lawrence seems to care no more for the actualities of Crime and Punishment than he does for Raskolnikov's name or for the reference of his own pronouns or for the make-sense of his own distinctions...
...There are no other people like either Rousseau or Diderot and they were not like each other...
...Trust the tale...
...and a volume which confines him to that role, rather than exhibiting him as a general essayist, a role at which he excelled, is bound to look anomalous...
...Beal excerpts more than a hundred pages, he attends seriously to the older American writers, at a time when they did not rate very high in England...
...Or was Lawrence himself essentially an ass...
...He wrote admirably about Corvo, Verga, Dahlberg and Hemingway (as of 1927...
...Again, in the midst of some talk about Poe, he suddenly remarks that "Blake, too, was one of those ghastly, obscene 'Knowers,'" meaning poets who give themselves to "the search for final KNOWLEDGE...
...The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it...
...he published one full-length volume of criticism called Studies in Classic American Literature...
...I especially liked the writings of Lawrence which were more or less autobiographical...
...And in his Studies in Classic American Literature, from which Mr...
...Francis—Michael Angelo and Leonardo—Goethe and Kant ?Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Louis Quatorze...
...when he says MY WIFE, I want to hit him...
...Lawrence has the same way with whole cultures and peoples...
...In the main, however, it was the bottom dogs of literature that aroused him to his best efforts...
...We all know what Proust and Wilde did, but it was news to me about St...
...Naturally...
...Yet Lawrence wrote a number of book reviews, prefaces and literary articles...
...The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, a killer...
...They are not printed in chronological order but they are all carefully dated...
...Francis and Kant...
...In this instance, at least, he was remarkably the critic...
...You might begin with a Roman —and go on to St...
...and he had a peculiarly light and lyrical touch as a writer of reminiscences, whether the subject was the hymn-singing and Bible-reading of his childhood, the events of his early years as an author, or the travels of his later years...
...But he made an exception of the eminent Thomas Hardy and was very penetrating on the subject...
...Much of Mr...
...Any" is a big word...
...He meant it, too...
...Every day was an auto-da-fe...
...Beal has drawn on all these sources and arranged his selections in interesting patterns...
...It was in these pages that Lawrence announced his program as a critic: "Never trust the artist...
...He wasn't, but it is no great service to him or to letters to preserve and cherish his feebler ravings...
...Byron—Baudelaire —Wilde—Proust: they all did the same thing, or tried to...
...He might have stretched a point and given us Lawrence's memoir of Maurice Magnus, the unfortunate friend who wrote Memoirs of the Foreign Legion...
...Who doesn't...
...but those who can remain calm in the face of this provocation, and can disregard some savage nonsense from Lawrence himself, will find Anthony Beal's volume rewarding...
...Here he is proposing a big one to Aldous Huxley: "Your idea of the grand perverts is excellent...
...and, so far as I know, it has long been out of print...
...Of course, Mr...
Vol. 39 • November 1956 • No. 51
