Lawrence on a Low Budget
UNTERECKER, JOHN
Lawrence on a Low Budget By John Unterecker Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University LET US ASSUME you are one of the 150,000 people who have purchased Grove Press' handsome hardbound...
...It comes, astonishingly, in straightforward essays, in such travel books as Sea and Sardinia (Anchor, $.85), and such semi-anthropological studies as Etruscan Places (Compass, $1.25...
...Character and plot get in the way of what he has to say...
...And we can see the entire novel as groundwork for the still more satisfying Women in Love (Avon $.50...
...Frieda Lawrence remembered her husband always in terms of his energy, his drive...
...Lawrence can tell us in Sea and Sardinia, and it is like our closest friend talking as he goes on, "Now I know there is a great deal...
...You can even go on, like the diligent subway couple a friend of mine observed last week, to specialize in Lady Chatterley...
...Where should vou begin reading...
...You may feel that Lawrence has the bad habit of hammering home his ideas until the framework they were supposed to tack together has been splintered into matchsticks...
...For that matter, you can look up Lawrence's own ideas about censorship in Sex, Literature and Censorship (Compass, $1.25...
...These are magnificent...
...you will probably have under your belt just about all the long fiction you can take in one reading session...
...Though still a social critic in the last version...
...In his final version...
...and, praising the Etruscans for their "real desire to preserve the natural humor of life," he knocks the props out from under systems and systematized living...
...Lawrence complained always that he was called a genius yet was never credited for practical accomplishment...
...Sermons—essential ingredients of all his prose—always look a little out of place...
...Available both in Compass Books' sturdy and elegantly-printed text ($1.65) and Signet's considerably less expensive, but, alas, more blinding, edition ($.50), this consciously autobiographical account of the power of a hated father and a too-much-loved mother in shaping a sensitive son lets us see not only something of Lawrence's genesis as a writer but a good deal of his genius in the way in which he freed himself from parental domination by turning that domination into convincing fiction...
...But, ironically, a great deal of Lawrence's power comes finally from this grinding, dull restatement...
...The First Lady Chat-terley (Berkley, $.50) is quite different enough from Lawrence's final version (the "uncensored" third version) to justify your reading it...
...And because such ecstasy arose from awkwardness, awkwardness itself became a necessary framework for it...
...a task surely more worthy, and even much more difficult in the long run, than conquering the world or sacrificing the self or saving the immortal soul...
...Mellors and Connie in Lady Chatterley neatly split Lawrence's pessimist-optimist, male-female self...
...Perhaps in the essays he can be praised for both...
...Knowledge is an experience, not a formula," he tells us in Etruscan Places...
...That can come only from the individual himself and it can come only as he experiences a sense of communion with the world (say, in a flowering forest), with people (in the intense simultaneity of tender passion), or with things fa book, say, or a symphony...
...Armed with this sort of research, you should be ready at a moment's notice either to attack or to defend Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan's decision to rescind the postal ban against the uncensored edition...
...That feast comes, I hasten to add, neither in the Selected Poems (Compass Books, $.95) — though Lawrence is an interesting if spectacularly uneven poet—nor in such remarkably perceptive literary criticism as Studies in Classic American Literature (Anchor, $.75...
...For the preservation of the "natural humor" of life is (and how can we not be caught up in his eloquence...
...All too easily we see through them into the compound that is Lawrence...
...So much that it threatens life altogether...
...But there is no need to make life more painful than it already is...
...Yet each seems just a little pretentious in appearing to be separable from the other...
...I used to think there was no absolute evil...
...In the essays they can find a single voice...
...When human values replaced social ones as his central concern...
...But in the essays there is no need for pretension...
...And let us assume, as well, that vou have read no other Lawrence, that vou would like to, and that vour book purchases are necessarily confined to the paperbacks...
...The decision itself, incidentally, is reprinted in full in the current Evergreen Review—No...
...With these samples of late and early work behind you...
...It is simpler, neater, and—aside from its more conventional language—in many ways a more powerful book than the final one...
...If we can see the novels in this light, they become, I think, more comprehensible...
...Lawrence had to sacrifice some of that power for richer characterization, for his "tenderness" theme ultimately took over the novel and forced him to modify his originally class-bound characters...
...The intimacy between writer and reader can be almost complete...
...And yet those sermons are the real source of vitality for the books...
...Working through the major novels in this fashion, and using such a fine collection of short stories as Berkley's The Thorn in the Flesh ($.35) or those in The Portable D. H. Lawrence (Viking, $1.45) to remind you that Lawrence is not only a genius but a great technician as well, you should be prepared for the final feast...
...Though neither the world of machine nor that of myth proves in the long run satisfying to Kate (or to us), between those worlds—on the lake and in the novel Lawrence has so ingeniously fashioned around it—satisfaction lies...
...Almost any of them will do for a start, though my own recommendation is that you read The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (Berkley, $.35) and that you read the brilliant title story of the collection last...
...But all of his travels and all of his books drove toward a tender ecstasy...
...You have only to read one of his novels to realize that...
...it must always be experienced, be lost, and be searched for until it is experienced again...
...They are magnificent, it seems to me, because Lawrence's great achievement is an intensely personal, an intensely direct, communication with the reader...
...In that way you can go on from it to the closely related late novel, The Plumed Serpent (Vintage, $1.25...
...For his real concern is not with man and society but rather with states of the soul: with the soul out of grace and in communion with grace...
...Anxious men cannot experience joy...
...What is available to you...
...In pursuit of grace...
...And what else are the tightly-built late short novels, St...
...For his genius is the celebration of tender communion and his essays communicate grace—in this torn world a practical, even a necessary, accomplishment...
...Lawrence can, consequently, blame the world for making a state of grace next to impossible...
...That this sort of criticism of Lawrence's fiction is in some ways justified cannot be denied...
...You may, as a matter of fact, be a little disappointed...
...And if you need to be convinced that Lawrence can be a craftsman, nothing is more likely to convince you than the short stories and short novels...
...Joy, for Lawrence, comes in the vision of grace...
...Most readers, however, will probably be content with one Lady Chatterley...
...Signet...
...This sometimes-lumbering, almost-always-irritating masterpiece achieves, in spite of all its flaws, a great deal of the "communion of grace" its heroine Kate experiences as she crosses the lake that divides the real world of modern Mexico from the ideal world Lawrence's savior-heroes, Ramon and Cipriano, are trying to construct on its distant shore...
...It never can be legislated...
...Lawrence on a Low Budget By John Unterecker Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University LET US ASSUME you are one of the 150,000 people who have purchased Grove Press' handsome hardbound Lady Chatterley's Lover ($6.00), or one of the 4.5 million who to date have bought paperbound copies of the unabridged Lady (in editions by Dell...
...Lawrence scoured the earth and exhausted his friends and his readers...
...You may feel that Lawrence's themes are interesting, that his descriptive passages are beautiful, but that the novels—though powerful—are also dull...
...We can manage the disordered plot of The Rainbow (Avon, $.50) if we realize that its conglomerate frustration and waste are a necessary landscape on which Lawrence erects the opposing arches of spirit-church and flesh-rainbow...
...You can, of course, begin right where you left off—with the good lady herself...
...Aaron's Rod (Avon, $.50), one of Lawrence's few well-made novels, makes its best sense if we see it also in terms of this search for communion—in this work, between man and man...
...The reader who ploughs through all of Lawrence's work—or at least a great part of it—ultimately forgets the dullness of the restatement and remembers only the restatement itself...
...Like them, you can calculate the different impacts—pencil in hand to note down page references—of Signet's "Authorized American Edition" ($.50, the "censored" version), of Berkley's The First Lady Chatterley, and of any of the uncensored drafts...
...We should not, for example, be disturbed that he regularly raises the problem of how man should behave in an essentially chaotic society and regularly fails to answer it...
...Once we have perceived that it is this vision and not any tangible goal which Lawrence and his heroes pursue, we should be able to read his work with a good deal more pleasure...
...Pocketbooks and Pyramid Presses...
...But nothing that the world does can put man in a state of grace...
...Lawrence is always a little impatient with the novel...
...Mawr and The Man Who Died (Vintage, $.95), but an attempt to discover communion in wild nature and in the interwoven Christ-Osiris figure who, with returning spring, finds fulfillment in the virgin priestess of Isis, the "joy of being in touch," the consummation of spiritual and physical "contact...
...Perhaps the best second book for these readers is Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's third novel but his first great one...
...Lawrence found himself reworking his characters, trying to reveal them in all of their complexities...
...Lawrence criticized society in terms of believable persons...
...9, $1.00—a volume which, for quite other reasons, may once more bring Grove Press into the censorship-battling business...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 41
