The Lawrence Mob
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING The Lawrence Mob By Stanley Edgar Hyman MANY WRITERS bore and repel me, but there are only two important ones whom I detest. They are Edgar Allen Poe and D. H. Lawrence: Poe...
...in "Mutilation...
...BUT THERE is one more Lawrence...
...Lawrence is worse, because of the cultists...
...Tarzan rewrote the Young Lady's "Virgin Youth," a girlish poem about Lawrence's "beautiful, lonely body," to be the "Virgin Youth" of Collected Poems, an amazing cultic hymn in the worship of Lawrence's penis...
...At least seven different Lawrences wrote verse, six of them in various degrees objectionable...
...Nor is the Hedge Preacher's verse any less prosy when he is in favor of something...
...The Young Lady is a constant female voice in the poetry: speaking as the bride in "Wedding Mom...
...Furthermore, he appears in the verse from first to last, although he is the author of no more than perhaps 20 of the I ,OOO-or-so poems and drafts in The Complete Poems...
...In Rhyming Poems, the end of the revised "Wild Common" is beautiful, as is the reference to "the ermine moth's/Twitching remark" in "The Yew-Tree on the Downs...
...He concludes "Figs": "What then, when women the world over have all bursten into self-assertion?/ And bursten figs won't keep...
...There are lines of real poetry even in the juvenilia, written before Lawrence was 26, notably in "Reading in the Evening...
...in "Next Morning," or prays "Oh God, to be mutilated...
...there is one real poem, "The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through...
...The scholarly labors of the editors deserve the highest praise...
...I think that it and the less ambitious "Swan" and "Andraitx-Pomegranate Flowers" are deathless masterpieces...
...It is Bertie who rewrote the honest "The Piano,' in which the trained singer drowns out the memory of Lawrence's mother singing, into the dishonest "Piano," in which, much more conventionally, the reverse happens...
...In the later poetry Tarzan inflates the self to monstrous proportions, and eventually he writes with absolute seriousness in "AutoDaFe": "But the day they burn my pictures they burn the rose of England...
...Amazingly, he is a poet, a true poet...
...I cannot say as much for their critical opinions (what could Pinto mean by "poetic" in his statement in the introduction that "Lawrence's poetic genius finds its fullest expression in prose works...
...Spiteful Ted is not limited to the Nettles volume...
...Last Poems has its share of triumphs...
...His specialty is a monotonous and boring affirmation of the male self...
...The collection published posthumously as More Pansies, in the midst of all the nonsense, has one poem of the greatest beauty, "Andraitx-Pomegranate Flowers...
...speaking as a bereft girl in "Ballad of Another Ophelia...
...Snake" is a powerful and impressive poem, and "Turkey-Cock" shows the sort of craftsman's skill that rarely interested Lawrence, introducing the colors of steel-slag in describing the cock's wattles, then using them to produce a strong phoenix image at the end...
...It might be useful to disentangle the mob...
...He preaches against lesbians, against money, against flat-chested women, against "our brightest young intellectuals," against Chekhov's "wimblywambly wet-legs,' against police spies, against anything in fact that displeases him...
...He says in the preface to Collected Poems (1928), of the first two poems he wrote: "Any young lady might have written them and been pleased with them...
...The rest of the mob were using the pen...
...I did not name her, Lawrence did...
...After a while, one is no longer disconcerted when a poem begins, as the effective "Casualty" does: "As I went down the street in my rose-red pelerine.' Where the Young Lady does not write openly as a woman, she is a remarkably girlish male voice...
...proclaiming, "And we've made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will-perverted, ego-perverted love...
...She begins "Mystery," ludicrously, "Now I am all/One bowl of kisses,' and continues in the same vein: "And down my slim/White body drips/The moving hymn.' It is she who addresses the rabbit as "bunny" in "Rabbit Snared in the Night," or writes in "Little Fish" that "their little lives are fun to them...
...In the fleshy wastes of Look...
...The Peepshow Barker exhibits himself nuzzling Frieda's great breasts in "Song of a Man Who Is Loved," or kissing her invaluable orifices in "Seven Seals...
...The most vulgar of the Lawrences, who develops out of young Tarzan, is the Peepshow Barker, who wants to show us his wife's bellybutton or tell us how great the Lawrences are in bed together...
...If I had the humorless fanaticism of Maxwell Geismar, I would write a book against Lawrence and the Lawrentians...
...he compares amorous bruises with Frieda in the morning in "A Bad Beginning," and boasts of how vigorously she responds to his love-making in "One Woman to All Women...
...The Hedge Preacher concludes "Shades": "For I have told you plainly how it is.' He ends "Frost Flowers": "for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart must they need to root in...
...How to explain the fact that Lawrence could write magnificent poetry but so rarely did...
...With the announcement, in "Man Reaches a Point-," that "desire has died in me,' the Hedge Preacher takes over...
...It is the Barker who complains in "Last Words to Miriam" that her frigidity "broke/My craftsman's nerve," and who wrote, even more disgustingly, in an earlier draft of the poem that her failure to respond darkened his "eternal fame...
...Lawrence for his shrill hysterical voice...
...They are Edgar Allen Poe and D. H. Lawrence: Poe for his cold mechanical hand...
...The first is the Young Lady...
...Ted is the author of the shrill Nettles, properly called by Richard Alding-ton "about the worst and most trivial thing he ever published...
...speaking as the rejected girl in "Forecast...
...We Have Come Through!, but his voice is heard in every volume...
...The worst of all Lawrences is Spiteful Ted, the surly and mindless streetcorner tough...
...Mardarsed" is from "The Collier's Wife,' and "Mardy' seems to have been Lawrence's childhood nickname-"mard" being Nottinghamshire for "petted...
...The Enkindled Spring" and "Fire-light and Nightfall" are fine poems...
...The Hedge Preacher speaks in weak prose rhetorical questions and exclamations, which he prints as verse...
...The Lawrentians proclaim that Lawrence is the most ruthlessly honest of writers, but Mard-Arsed Bertie is sly and dishonest in just this have-it-both-ways fashion...
...I name him "Tarzan" because he writes in "Scent of Irises": "you, woman, and me, man...
...He is a master of the ruinous ending...
...Reading a Letter" shows masterful economy...
...Amid all the hysteria of Pansies there is one superb poem, "Swan,' and some of its quality carries over into two sequels, "Leda" and the final stanzas of "Give Us Gods.' It is hard to imagine Lawrence being funny and engaging on the woman question, but a little pansy called "It's No Good!,' imaging women as volcanoes, miraculously is both...
...The Hedge Preacher proclaims that "philanthropy and benevolence" are "Just a bad smell," and calls down malediction on "foul equality" and "still more foul human perfection.' He writes most of Pansies (Lawrence's odd version of Pensees i: asking, "why have a financial system to strangle us all in its octopus arms...
...Several more Lawrences remain to be noticed...
...she stayed around to write verse all his life, as his friend Anais Nin recognizes, in D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, when she talks of the "androgynous" quality of his writing...
...Birds, Beasts and Flowers displays Lawrence's sharp eye in "Bat" ("Wings like bits of umbrella"), and a rare, delightful humor in "Purple Anemones" and "Man and Bat...
...complaining, "Why don't you know what's what, young people...
...One is MardArsed Bertie, the son of a Nottingham coal miner, who rose in the world...
...We Have Come Through...
...warning, "Beware, 0 my dear young men, of going rotten...
...another, "Name the Gods!," rises to magical eloquence in its final lines...
...Snap-Dragon" has great power and tension, and had them even in first draft...
...He contributes all the sadistic violence that led Cecil Gray to call Lawrence "a potential Hitler...
...The Peep-show Barker wrote most of Look...
...Instead, considering in the bowels of Geismar that I might be wrong, I have just read through the new two-volume The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, Viking...
...that is god...
...speaking as the dancing girl in "Tarantella...
...WRITERS&WRITING The Lawrence Mob By Stanley Edgar Hyman MANY WRITERS bore and repel me, but there are only two important ones whom I detest...
...1,072 pp., $15.00...
...The Greeks Are Coming...
...Best of all is the deservedly famous "Bavarian Gentians,' which Pinto's introduction accurately calls "the greatest of his mythological poems...
...is effective and lovely until the last stanza, when it turns into Masefield's "Cargoes.' "The Body of God" is masterful in its bold pun on incarnation in the line, "And becomes at last a clove carnation: lo...
...The second voice is obviously what the Freudians call a "reaction-formation" against the Young Lady...
...Ted wants to blind clever women, to crush the bourgeoisie "like sickening toadstools" ("Kick them over, the toadstools,/Smash them up"), "to pee in the eye of a police-man," and so on...
...It was MardArsed Bertie who used to write Lawrence's friends on crested notepaper, explaining: "My wife's father was a baron, and we're just using up old note paper...
...Bertie is the author of a series of pansies which, in the guise of warning the working class of all they lose by rising out of their class, actually boast of Lawrence's climb to social eminence...
...It is Tarzan, somewhat soured, who asks "why am I in hell...
...He is entirely preoccupied with his physical and emotional self, and when he considers another person, as in "Wedlock," it is in purely selfish terms: "Suppose you didn't want me...
...speaking as a mother rejoicing in her baby in "Baby Songs" and "Baby-Movements...
...Americans," which is a long awful poem in defense of the American Indian, says lyrically: "He is far too few to cause any apprehension in any direction...
...The Young Lady did not immediately disappear, as Lawrence thought...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
