A D. H. Lawrence Women in Love note dump with some more general observations - the struggle to get out

I meant to write some kind of D. H. Lawrence summary whatnot after my “Lawrence-influenced writers of the 1930s and 1940s” mini-series.  This, a little late, is that.  I made the mistake of reading some of my earlier writing about Lawrence, where I found that I already wrote most or all of what I wanted to write this time.  Reminder to myself: no one remembers or cares.

Half of my motive is found in the notes I took on Women in Love (1920) and never used, just amazing  things.  Some are single-sentence distilled Lawrence:

He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts.  (Ch. 8, “Breadalby”)

It was evident she had a strange passion to dance before the sturdy, handsome cattle.  (Ch. 14, “Water-party”)

Ursula was afraid that he would stone the moon again…  “Why should you hate the moon?”  (Ch. 19, “Moony”)

Many readers may well hate this sort of thing.  “’Was it hate?’” Ursula’s moon-stoning companion answers, a good question. 

But there is also some good nature writing, and some interesting aesthetic theorizing, sometimes combined:

The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses. (Ch. 9, “Coal-dust”)

A number of lines, as with that last phrase, feel like self-description, or even self-critique (“’Women and love, there is no greater tedium,’ he cried,” Ch. 30, “Snowed Up”).  Meta-fiction:

He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken. Whichever way one moved, if one were to move forwards, one must break a way through. And to know, to give utterance, was to break a way through the walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out.  (Ch. 14)

Sorry, I was wrong, there is lots of aesthetic theorizing, often explicitly that, like in the bonkers scene like where a group of nude men stand around a West African statue of a nude woman and baldly debate its status:

“Why is it art?” Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.

“It conveys a complete truth,” said Birkin.  “It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.”  (Ch. 7, “Fetish”)

That last line fits well with my own changing notions of Lawrence, and to be honest with art in general, that fussing much over whether I like or love or hate something is not interesting.  Following “the struggle to get out,” to express some kind of (personal and partial, not whole) truth, is of sufficient interest, even when the results violate good taste and good sense.

Lawrence sometimes writes well, and often badly*; sometimes likable and sometimes loathsome.  I take his greatest innovation to be the introduction of some unusual, even extreme, psychological states to English fiction.  The co-existence of love and hate is especially important, whether between lovers or parents and children.  Lawrence freed a number of later writers to represent more oddballs.  He made fiction broader.  Sometimes he seems to believe that his weirdos are typical, which can be exasperating.  His great “men versus women” theme brings out his best and worst ideas.  “Men, and love, there was no greater tedium” (see above).  I think one reason his writing about animals, in fiction or poetry, seems especially good is that even when it is about sex it gives him some distance.

Is this really any kind of summary?  Reading a lot of Lawrence has helped me understand other writers, and even his more dubious works have always given me something to think about.  Good enough.

* Lawrence sometimes uses rhetorical constructions that signify good writing to me, and often uses signifiers that I think of as “bad writing.”

“Kh-i-r-r-r-f! S-s-s-s” - Call It Sleep, a note or two

 

Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, 1934.  What a book.  One of the great novels in many categories – a list: immigrant novels, Jewish novels, childhood novels, New York novels, education novels, dialect novels.  It is also a genuine example of a “lost classic,” mostly ignored on publication but a bestseller – a big bestseller – in the 1960s, when there was, however unlikely it seems now, a mass audience for Modernist Jewish novels.

David, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, is five, and in Brooklyn, when the novel begins and eight, in the East Village, when it ends.  His father is a printer and then a milkman.  His mother only leaves the tenement apartment to buy groceries.  She is devoted to her sensitive son.  Her “overwrought, phobic, and dangerously imaginative little boy,” as Irving Howe described David in his 1964 review of the paperback.  The father, who has what we would now call “anger management” issues, often hates his son.  Call It Sleep is a Joycean novel in a number of ways, one of which is that it is A Portrait of the Artist as a Child, and another of which is that each long episode moves towards a stream-of-consciousness intensity, the last episode turning into this:

Poor little David, in search of the light of God, has suffered a terrible accident.  Everything in italics is his monologue, off in some other state, possibly near death; the dialogue is a chorus, mostly men from a nearby bar, in various dialects; “Kh-i-r-r-r-f! S-s-s-s” is the sound of a policeman resuscitating David.  It just takes a little work, is all I’m saying, to keep everything straight.  The content of the text, David’s thoughts especially, works through all of the thematic material developed in the previous four hundred pages.

I read Call It Sleep almost thirty years ago, and the real surprise to me was how little stream of consciousness and Joycean cacophony there was.  Much of the novel is plainer.  “Aunt Bertha would show his mother some day how to make a sponge-cake.”  I picked that randomly.  I didn’t take any notes, for some reason.  Aunt Bertha, fat, earthy, vital, what a great character.  The energy level rises whenever she is in the scene.  The rhetorical mode moves towards stream of consciousness as each episode intensifies and reaches its climax.  Five year-old David gets lost in Brooklyn, or, later, at cheder, has a genuine religious experience.  That sort of thing.  That’s when the consciousness begins to stream.

No, there was one other surprise.  I had not read enough D. H. Lawrence long ago; this time I could see how Lawrence had – influenced, I don’t know – freed Roth to write about his parents in a particular way.  I doubt Roth would have allowed the son to so openly fear the father, the father to so clearly hate the son, the mother to love them all so deeply, without Lawrence’s example.  I mean, maybe he would have, who knows.  Call It Sleep is also full of obscenities, all of the words that I thought were forbidden in American fiction of the time.  Sometimes they are hidden a bit by dialect, but they’re here.

D. G. Myers wrote about Call It Sleep, and took notes. He emphasizes the Jewish aspect of the father-son combat, the tradition of the Jewish stories.

The Yiddish is in standard English.  The English of the Yiddish-speakers is in dialect.  The English of the Poles and Italians and Irish is in other dialects.  The Hebrew is in Hebrew.  This is what I meant by saying it was a great dialect novel.  The cacophony is one of its themes.

When I read it again in thirty years maybe I’ll take some notes.

Tomorrow, more D. H. Lawrence, this time in Quebec.

Huxley and the "pessimism of outlook" of the 1920s, with help from George Orwell and William Pritchard - twelve buttocks slabbily resounding

Brave New World (1932) was the first book assigned at the University of Kansas, long, oh so long ago, in a course naively titled “Western Civilization,” in theory the first book a student new to college would read.  I had not read it since then, thirty years ago, when it was used as a source of ethical questions, not really as a work of art, which suits it well, except, for example:

Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to  the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding.  (5.2)

I feel bad I did not file away “twelve buttocks slabbily resounding,” did not even notice it, apparently.  The magic word is “slabbily,” right?

I’ve read two other Aldous Huxley novels, Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), and boy were they eye-openers, exemplars of “the British novel in the 1920s.”  I was discovering what every read had discovered before me, the phenomenon George Orwell describes in “Inside the Whale” (1940), where what is nominally a review of a Henry Miller novel turns into a quick history of British literature, 1910 to the present, the books of Orwell’s lifetime.  After the war, he argues, major writers had “a certain temperamental similarity…  What it amounts to is pessimism of outlook” (italics Orwell’s).  Caused by, for example, anti-Victorian puritanism, the scientific attack on religion, fashionable philosophers, the war, or all of the above.  Mostly, really, the war.

His other helpful phrase, borrowed from Joyce, is that these writers “see through” all of the old received junk – King, church, country, family, art – or hope they do, or pretend they do.  The title to Robert Graves’s 1929 memoir is a perfect distillation – Goodbye to All That – no, really, all of it.  William Pritchard borrows the term for his 1977 book Seeing Through Everything: English Writers 1918-1940, which spends more time with Lawrence, Eliot, and Woolf, but leads off, more or less, with Huxley, because he is the one who really sees through everything and behind everything sees nothing.  He is, for the British 1920s, a nihilist.  “Antic Hay is the sort of book which might… provide a generation with the illusion that they were disillusioned” (Pritchard, 39).

Point Counter Point was particularly instructive, perhaps because it is longer and covers more topics – “first-rate material for cultural historians interested in how the English intelligentsia talk” (Pritchard, 32).  D. H. Lawrence is a character in the novel, functioning as the reasonable voice of unreason, the person who does not merely “see through” but sees something, who has beliefs and ideas and a purpose.  Often, with Antic Hay and Point Counter Point, I felt like I was reading books that were no longer quite alive, which has not been my experience with Lawrence, however exasperating he might be.

This has been the crushed-down version of an essay I have meant to write for two years, but have not, I suppose because it is just a rehash of Orwell’s masterpiece and parts of Pritchard’s fine book.  But I had wondered, how did the Huxley of the contemporary nihilistic London satire of Point Counter Point turn, in just four years, into the Huxley of dystopian nihilistic London satire or Brave New World?  Expressed like that, it does not seem like such a big change.  Just the one word.  I will turn to the less slabbily resounding parts of Brave New World tomorrow.

Random 1930s poetry in English - My wordy wounds are printed with your hair - Lawrence, Thomas, Wheelwright, Eberhart, Yeats

English-language poetry I read in April.

I’ve read a lot of D. H. Lawrence over the last few years, including all of his short fiction, all of his poems, and a few other books.  I have thought about some kind of Lawrence essay, since even at his worst he gives me a lot to think about and is worth reading.

Except for the books I read in April, Mores Pansies and Last Poems, both from 1932, a couple of years after Lawrence’s death.

Lawrence had created an unusual loose-lined form in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), a collection of poems that were full of his personality.  A perverse cuss, he then abandoned poetry for five years – in his life, an era – only returning to it in Pansies (1929) to, well, to complain.  To rant, whine, moan in doggerel, squibs, aphorisms with line breaks.  The second collection was titled Nettles (1930), which is about right.  Lawrence was sick and angry, and rightfully angry.  England had treated him badly, again and again.  But these are “books” of “poems” to be read, mostly, for biographical reasons.

The scraps in Last Poems show that Lawrence was also messing around with poetry.  It is a grim book.  He is looking directly at his own death.  This book is worth reading, or worth mining for a theoretical Selected Poems:

from The Ship of Death

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

***

Dylan Thomas, 18 Poems (1934), Thomas’s first little pamphlet or chapbook or whatever it is.  Thomas was criticized for his sonorous gibberish:

from If I were tickled by the rub of love

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me from her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

This poem has seven stanzas and is entirely based on slant rhymes – string / spring is an exception – so it is a bit of a virtuoso piece, and of course it is not really gibberish, although like many of Thomas’s early poems it must sound like it when declaimed in the appropriate pub setting.  The apple and flood are pretty big clues.  The poet is being shaped from Eve’s rub, I mean rib, or perhaps has merely been born like everyone else.  Running through 18 Poems is what may even amount to an idea about the biology of life and death and man as a creature of nature, smart stuff given that many of the poems were written by a teenager.

Still, they must be terrific fun at poetry karaoke night.  “My wordy wounds are printed with your hair” and so on.  Even though the principles are different, I thought about E. E. Cummings – “Those aren’t poems – he’s just screwing around with his typewriter!”  Yeah, sometimes.

***

John Wheelwright, Rock and Shell (1933).  A true Boston patrician turned Modernist poet.  Published three little books then was killed by a drunk driver, age 43.  This one has a superb, bitter tribute, if that is the right word, to Hart Crane.  A subject for future research.

***

Richard Eberhart, Collected Poems, the first ninety pages or so.  When I got to the war poems I figured I was in the 1940s.  Eberhart is a curious creature, a death-soaked American optimist.  Positive and light-hearted, and his signature poem is about the rotting corpse of a groundhog.  “The Groundhog,” 1934.  A superb poem.  Another subject for future research, meaning reading.

***

William Butler Yeats, New Poems (1938) and the poems from Last Poems and Two Plays (1939).  A great end to a great life.

           Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers, where he shovels out the slush - But I must confess how I liked him

I’ve been making notes on each book of D. H. Lawrence poetry as I have gone along.  I suppose I enjoy his poetry as much or more than anything he wrote.  It takes a certain approach, though, reading books of poems.  I am looking for the great poems, the great images, maybe just the great lines.  Well, that is how I read everything, so never mind.

Here is Ezra Pound on Lawrence’s first book of poems, Love Poems and Others (1913), from a review in the July 1913 issue of Poetry, pp. 149-51:

The Love Poems are “a sort of pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so” but the Others, the “low-life narrative[s],” are something else.  “[W]hen Mr. Lawrence ceases to discuss his own disagreeable sensations…  there is no English poet under forty who can get within shot of him.”  Pound singles out “Violets” and “Whether or Not” as “great art.”  Looking at my notes, linked for reference, I thought some of the other dialect poems were just as good, and wish I had a phrase in that post as good as “pre-raphaelitish slush.”

To be clear, Pound thinks Lawrence’s book is the best English poetry book of the year, and should win a big prize, even though much of it is junk.

Well, my survey of Lawrence, book by book, is easy enough to find.  By Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1922) – this is where I am going – he had shoveled out the slush but also dropped the dialect poems and written an entire book of purely Lawrentian free verse poems about the title subjects.  In matter, the poems resemble Rilke’s “Thing poems,” in that a poem called “Bat” or “Snake” or “Peach” is about that thing.  Also about Lawrence’s response to the thing – the poems have a lot of personality – but he is really looking around him, like a natural scientist, only a little more obsessed with the sex life of the tortoises he observes than a herpetologist would be.  Lawrence’s tortoises and kangaroos and bats are first going to be tortoises etc. before they become symbols of something else.

I suppose the most famous poem in the book is “Snake,” in which Lawrence encounters and fails to kill, or even want to kill, a poisonous Sicilian snake.

But I must confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
         at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of the earth?

The last line foreshadows Lawrence’s desire to mythologize the snake, as an underworld god.

A few pages earlier, in my favorite sequence, Lawrence finds his Romantic limit.  Snakes he can handle, but bats, no.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

Not for me!  (“Bats”)

Thus when, in “Man and Bat,” Lawrence finds a bat in his Florence hotel room, the result is seven pages of repetitive action.

And round and round and round!
Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at
      a corner,
At a wire, at a bell-rope:
On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in
     my room,
Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and
      increasing delirium
Flicker-splashing round my room.

“Man versus Bat,” but it works out all right.  The bat wins.  The man has a moment of imaginative sympathy with his enemy.

With a little work, I could have found less prosy examples of Lawrence’s poetry, but his free verse is pretty prosy.  Scrolling through the book, I see that I remember the animal poems fairly well but have forgotten everything about the plant poems.  The book ends with a series of New Mexican poems, Taos poems, which preview the crazier American Lawrence to come, except for the long one about his dog, which is some kind of classic.  “Bibbles.”  Lawrence named his dog Bibbles.

D. H. Lawrence's English short stories - It was horrible.

I find it easy to imagine a slightly different D. H. Lawrence, healthier, less weird, maybe a little less ambitious, who is happy to be the novelist of the northern English coal pits.  Maybe he still pushes the sexual boundaries of English fiction, maybe not as far as the real Lawrence did.  This Lawrence would have been a great writer, too, an important writer.  A smaller writer than the real Lawrence.

My imaginary Lawrence overlaps with the real one most clearly in earlier novels like Sons and Lovers (1913) and the short story collections The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) and England, My England (1922), especially the short stories which while distinctively Lawrence’s do not seem so far off from what James Joyce or Katherine Mansfield are doing with the short story around the same time.  Incremental innovation.

Although I am mentally contrasting these stories to the truly weird American stories Lawrence wrote in the mid-1920s, I know it is hard to “periodize” Lawrence.  The Rainbow is from 1915, and it is much weirder at the sentence level and in its reach for mythic meaning.  I mean, the prose – I last read this novel thirty years ago, but I can open it randomly and find my idea of pure Lawrence:

So eager was her breast, so glad her feet, to travel towards the beloved.  Ah, Miss Inger, how straight and fine was her back, how strong her loins, how calm and free her limbs!  (Ch. 12, “Shame”)

Maybe the formal control, even perfection, of the stories, is a commercial compromise, a concession to the magazine market.  The Prussian Officer includes a novella, “Daughters of the Vicar,” that is like a dry run of The Rainbow, with two coal-country sisters who love in different ways, written in more conventional language.  I am inspecting the most intense scene:

Then suddenly a sharp pang, like lightning, seared her from head to foot, and she was beyond herself…

And as if turned to stone, she looked back into his eyes.  Their souls were exposed bare for a few moments.  It was agony.  They could not bear it.  He dropped his head, whilst his body jerked with little sharp twitchings.  (Ch. 13)

But this is not the normal language of the novella.

The “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” in England, My England, one of Lawrence’s most famous stories, felt like it could be in Dubliners – at first.  A family – siblings – have finally run their father’s business into the ground.  They discuss their plans.  There is no indication, title aside, that the sister’s story is the real story.  For a while, Lawrence and I just watch and listen to the knucklehead brothers discuss their plans, and get angry because the sister will not discuss hers.  Those turn out to be a surprise, including a surprising shift in point of view.  The last third of the story is the classic Lawrence love scene, intense and deliberately unpleasant.

It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees.  It was horrible.  He revolted from it, violently.  And yet – and yet – he had not the power to break away.

It’s the gradual move towards the emotional moment, from a starting point at a great distance, that I find artful, less than the conclusion itself.

Some nightmarish D. H. Lawrence stories - a hatred of man's onward struggle towards further creation

The Citadel of Fear was the second Aztec “lost world” fiction I read in the last year.  D. H. Lawrence wrote one, “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925).  She, the woman, is riding away from her unsatisfying husband, looking for – and finding – a Mexican to assault and murder her.  In this case, in the form of a hidden civilization making a ritual sacrifice to the sun, to Quetzalcoatl.  “And all the eyes of the priests were fixed and glittering on the sinking orb, in the reddening, icy silence of the winter afternoon.”

I say “in this case” because around the same time Lawrence wrote at least two more stories in which American women, white women, are sexually assaulted by Mexican men.  “The Princess” is more realistic, like a crime story, where “The Woman Who Rode Away” is explicitly fantastic.  I don’t know what “None of That” is supposed to be.  An American woman falls for a famous, brutish toreador, and is punished for it.  This one seems as much of a revenge fantasy than anything else, Lawrence punishing someone in his life, or in his imagination.

The novella St. Mawr, also from 1925, almost fits the theme.  An English woman falls deeply in love with a dangerous stallion, the title character.  Her husband is pretty masculine – quite masculine –  but not masculine enough, not an untamable stallion.  Near the end of the book, the woman, the horse, and a few other characters move to New Mexico to live a more authentic life.  She buys a little isolated mountain ranch.  The novella ends with a long history of the ranch, and the people who tried to make it work.  The protagonist of this section is an entirely different woman, one of the previous owners.  The stallion, all of the other characters, they vanish.

This section was outstanding, I thought.  I’m not sure what it is doing in the book.

And her love for her ranch turned sometimes into a certain repulsion. The underlying rat-dirt, the everlasting bristling tussle of the wild life, with the tangle and the bones strewing: Bones of horses struck by lightning, bones of dead cattle, skulls of goats with little horns: bleached, unburied bones. Then the cruel electricity of the mountains. And then, most mysterious but worst of all, the animosity of the spirit of place: the crude, half-created spirit of place, like some serpent-bird for ever attacking man, in a hatred of man's onward struggle towards further creation.

Look, there’s Quetzalcoatl sneaking in again.

What was Lawrence doing with these misogynistic, racist themes?  He seems trapped by them.  He would die a few years later.  Maybe he would have escaped if he had lived longer.  Or maybe he had been permanently poisoned.  He was always tempted to turn his stories about men and women into stories about Man and Woman, but his push for something mythic here takes him to some ugly places.

I read what seems to me like a lot of Lawrence over the last year, maybe eight books, a lot for a writer I don’t particularly like.  I used to be more concerned about whether or not a book was good, but over time it has become more important that a book be interesting.  I am not sure if this is a maturation or an abandoning of taste.

And man, Lawrence’s books are almost always interesting.

I want to poke at Lawrence for a couple more days.  At better stories and books.  I read these stories several months ago; who knows what I misremember.

The city corrodes out of sight - D. H. Lawrence wonders what it is like to be a seed

Prolific poets circa 1920 will I believe be my subject for the next few days.  Today: D. H. Lawrence’s New Poems (1918), his fourth book of poems.  The last two, in 1916 and 1917, covered, respectively, his engagement and his honeymoon, often written, the latter book especially, in an especially free free verse that was not afraid to sound absurd as part of sounding like Lawrence.

In New Poems, Lawrence is back in England, or perhaps he is back in the past a bit and has not yet left, and the poems are all in formal clothes – rhymes and so on.  Thus, in a magnificently Lawrentian gesture, the American edition of the book (1920) begins with an almost unreadable preface defending free verse.

This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit.  (v)

But in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment.  (viii)

And so on, ending with the admission that “[a]ll this should have come as a preface to ‘Look We have Come Through!,’” the previous book.  Hilarious.  When I turn to the poems, they look like this:

from Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning

The new red houses spring like plants
        In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
       Its square shadows.
…
Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand
        At random, desolate twigs,
To testify to a blight on the land
       That has stripped their sprigs.

Rhyme, rhythm, and an imagistic conceit that both has insight into how things actually look and is developed into a worldview, as if Lawrence is a Metaphysical Poet.

Lawrence tours the suburbs, London, and elsewhere.  Some of the poems form a rough sequence.  The mood is alienated:

from Parliament Hill in the Evening

The hopeless, wintry twilight fades,
    The city corrodes out of sight
As the body corrodes when death invades
    That citadel of delight.

The spread of the city lights is described as “verdigris smoulderings,” in case I had forgotten who I was reading.

Browsing the book, it is grimmer than I remember:

from Palimpsest of Twilight

The night-stock oozes scent,
    And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by:
All that the worldly day has meant
    Wastes like a lie.

Geez, David, the sun goes down every day, you know.

The red houses in the suburbs make an oblique return in “School on the Outskirts”:

How different, in the middle of snows the great school rises red!
    A red rock silent and shadowless, clung round with clusters of shouting lads…

This red building is a refuge in a wasteland, “this weary land the winter burns and makes blind,” to the few real students, “obstinate dark monads,” who cling to it, as Lawrence once did.

The season of the poems shifts, near the end of the book, from winter to – no, not spring, too cheery – to autumn, which is just as sad.  “Débâcle” is about, no kidding, the biological struggle of seeds – “all the myriad houseless seeds… \ Moan softly with autumnal parturition.”  They fall “bitterly,” and “Bitterly into corrosion bitterly travel.”  The word “corrosion” is repeated several times, as the angry seeds rot away, their little spark of life wasted, “committed to hold and wait… \ only forbidden to expire.”

Then, of course, some of them sprout, but that is outside of this poem.  For me, this kind of thing is Lawrence at his best, when he works through a conceit that seems crazy but in fact is based on a serious and complex understanding of the world around him.  The poem is full of Lawrence, but it is also really about seeds.  The secret, imagined life of seeds.

I am pretty sure that “Piano” is the best-known poem in New Poems (“I weep like a child for the past”), but I am always happier when Lawrence gets outside of himself a little.

sweet, printed books, / bright, glancing, exquisite corn - Lawrence writes sequences of poems in Look! We have come through!

Look! We have come through!, a 1917 book of poems by D. H. Lawrence, his third, but also his ninth book if I am counting right.  Four novels, short stories, travel, etc.  What a phenomenon.

Look! What a terrible title!  Lawrence’s poems are often beyond good and bad, and this book is more beyond than the previous two.  Plus it has more bad poems.  It is also a poetry book with a concept,

an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development, the whole revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself.  The period covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre of a man’s life.  (“Foreword”)

These are mostly honeymoon poems, when David and Frieda were wandering about Europe in 1912.  None of the poems are about the incident where he was arrested as a spy, unfortunately.

One representative bad bit, just for laughs:

A woman has given me strength and affluence.
Admitted!

All the rocking wheat of Canada, ripening now,
has not so much strength as the body of one woman
sweet in ear, nor so much to give
though it feeds nations.  (Manifesto I,” ll. 1-6)

I have long argued that All the Rocking Wheat of Canada (Neil Young & the Rocking Wheat, 1983) is the most underrated Neil Young album.  As a metaphor, though, it is pretty silly.  The “Manifesto” sequence is built on a series of hungers, including, in the third poem, for books, which is heartwarming:

man’s sweetest harvest of the centuries, sweet, printed books,
bright, glancing, exquisite corn of many a stubborn
glebe in the upturned darkness (III, ll. 6-8)

Then sex, the “hunger for the woman” (IV), and finally the “ache for being” (VI), ending with an apotheosis as men, free from hunger, become like angels and flowers, with emotions “like music, sheer utterance.”

We shall not look before and after.
We shall be, now.We shall know in full.
We, the mystic NOW.  (VIII, last lines)

That is the kind of D. H. Lawrence poem I read with a lot of skepticism.

“Manifesto” is a kind of sequence poem, which is the great innovation of Look! We have come though!  There is a set of Bavarian poems, a set of “night” poems,” a set of “rose” poems.  Single poems become stronger as parts of longer arguments.  Wild roses found on a walk, where the “simmering / Frogs were singing” (“River Roses”), suggest a comparison the next morning while watching his wife bathes, that the parts of her body are roses (“her shoulders / Glisten as silver, they crumple up / Like wet and falling roses,” “Gloire de Dijon”), then, picked, reappear on the breakfast table where “their mauve-red petals on the cloth / Float like boats on a river” (“Roses on a Breakfast Table”).  Individual poems can be minor, individual images banal, with the theme-and-variation creating most of the meaning.

At this point the sequences are more likely to be semi-formal, rhymed and so on.  Not true of the “tortoise” sequence, a few years in the future, although one poem in the “night” sequence, “Rabbit Snared in the Night,” sounds like the tortoise poems.

What are you waiting for?
What are you waiting for?
What is the hot, plumb weight of your desire on me?
You have a hot, unthinkable desire of me, bunny.

Oh Lawrence is so weird.  I mean, the bunny is in some sense Frieda, I know.  Still.  I read Look! We have come though! as much in anticipation of, preparation for, the poems Lawrence would soon write as for those he actually was writing.

Let it explain / Me its life - the best books of 1916, in a sense

I usually do not mess around with a “best of a hundred years ago” post, however fun it might be, because I am too ignorant to make basic judgments.  To the best of my knowledge, for example, I have read no more than four novels from 1916: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sholem Aleichem’s cheery Motl the Cantor’s Son (I think just the second half, Motl in America, is from 1916), Gustav Meyrink’s well-titled Bats, and L. Frank Baum’s Rinkitink in Oz.  However easy it is to pick out the best book from this group – Rinkitink is awesome – I do not have a good sense of what other novels are in contention.

But this year I have been reading a lot of English-language poetry from 1916 – eight or ten books depending on how I count – plus, recently, plenty of individual poems from French, Italian, German, and Russian from various collections, so I thought I would pull some of them together.  Maybe just the books, to make my task easier.

It is the ferment that is so exciting, the variety, the movement.  On the one hand, Robert Graves, in his first chapbooks Over the Brazier and Goliath and David, sounding like Housman or Hardy, skilled but not radical:

from The Shadow of Death

Here’s an end to my art!
    I must die and I know it,
With battle murder at my heart –
    Sad death for a poet!

The old forms are good enough for war poetry.

Then there’s Lustra of Ezra Pound:

from Further Instructions

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops
You do next to nothing at all.

Which is not really how it seems, reading the poems and their mixture of ancient Greek, classical Chinese, and now.

H. D. wants her songs to do something.  In Sea Garden she strips them down more than Pound, merging the Maine coasts with ancient Greek myths to create her new voice:

from Sheltered Garden

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

Make it new, make it new, as explicitly as possible, in this year of the birth of Dada.

Even for Pound, though, “newness” was less a goal of its own than a search for a voice, which is closer to what I see in 1916.  Many poets, not all but many, found the old poetic modes inadequate, at least not them, thus all the improvisation, innovation, and flailing about.  What, in Amores, is D. H. Lawrence trying to do that is new other than express himself?

from Restlessness

But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good.
There is something I want to fell in my running blood,
Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain,
I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain
Me its life as it hurries in secret.

I am not sure that is good, but is it ever Lawrence.  Their flavors are not as strong as Lawrence’s, but H. D. is working on a similar problem; so are Isaac Rosenberg (Moses) and Conrad Aiken (The Jig of Forslin, A Symphony and Turns and Movies).  Edwin Arlington Robinson (The Man against the Sky) has already found a strong voice. Robert Frost is only on his third book, Mountain Interval, but it feels as if he had been Frost forever.  Maybe I should have started this post with Frost.  What a confident poet.

from The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

And, I remind myself, I have heard poets singing just as loudly in Russian, German, Italian, and French.  The list is long; the idea of “best” becomes moot.

Clamorously falling / Into gabbling incoherence, never resting - good D. H. Lawrence poetry

Sometimes the interest of a D. H. Lawrence poem is the subject – the sexual longing of an engaged couple, parents arguing, a mother dying – and sometimes it is the sheer overwhelming Lawrenceness of the thing, but often he is just doing what good poets do, although maybe not as often as most good poets.  Doing things like describing the sounds of bells:

from Week-Night Service

The five old bells
Are hurrying and eagerly calling,
Imploring, protesting
They know, but clamorously falling
Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,
Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping
In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.

It is like a children’s poem for adults (and also children), full of imaginative personifications, not just of the bells:

The wise old trees
Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt,
While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh…

Barely a hint of a human, a poet, but the exhilaration as “the old church sobs and brags” as well as the contempt when “the poor bells cease” must be his, really.

“Week-Night Service” comes early in Amores amidst other energetic poems of sound and movement.  It would also fit at the end of the book, as part of a sequence of five night poems.  Or maybe seven, but the longer, ambitious “Blue” I don’t understand, and the longer, ambitious “Snap-Dragon” is another of the “no sex before marriage” poems; the former begins on a “dark sea” and ends in “The Darkness,” while the latter ends with repetitions of the word “dark” before a harvest moon appears, so you see my confusion.

Anyway, the last five begin with “In Trouble and Shame,” where the “swaling sunset” and the poet’s shame lead him to yearn for death, a trip “Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.”  Then “Elegy” – grief, “small sharp stars,” a white moon.  Then “Grey Evening,” “Firelight and Nightfall,” and “The Mystic Blue” – so that earlier “Blue” poem must be part of the sequence.

None of these are among Lawrence’s most famous poems, but they are a good argument for reading Amores rather than a selection of poems.

“Grey Evening” in particular is a beauty.

When you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?

Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that he golden daylight yields.

Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,
And little stars come rolling from their husk.

And all the earth is gone into a dust
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, pale with must,
And all the sky has withered and gone cold.

And so I sit and scan the book of grey,
Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding
With wounds of sunset and the dying day.

Nothing to cheer you up like a good book.  This particular poem gives no hint of what grief the poet may be suffering, although other poems in Amores present plenty of possibilities.  “You” in the first line could refer to a death, a lover, or the sun, which could make the lines about the book amusingly literal.  But no, the poet’s happier if fantastic thoughts turn back to a troubling reality, even if it is thickly covered with metaphor – the shift from the harvested field to the harvest in the sky is wonderful.  The poet peers into Nature, which is almost unreadable.

Sexy D. H. Lawrence - Now I am all / One bowl of kisses

D. H. Lawrence’s Amores (1916) is the book I have at hand.  It’s his second collection of poems, but his Nth book.  He already has four novels behind him, including Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915), along with other kinds of books.  And he is thirty years-old.

Based on the contents of Amores I would guess much younger, but no, he is a mature poet writing sexual poems against some serious constraints about subject matter – constraints which he ignores – that make him sound more adolescent than he really is.  In the first poem, “Tease,” he imagines that a woman is his housekeeper, caring for and exploring “All the chambers of my soul”:

You have fingered all my treasures,
    Have you not, most curiously,
Handled all my tools and measures
    And masculine machinery?

“Virgin Youth” is about masturbation, likely from a woman’s perspective, which is bold:

Then I tremble, and go trembling
Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body,
Till it has spent itself,
And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself…

I had to include that last line, which is hilariously bad, an example of the way Lawrence’s poems sometimes fling themselves into grotesqueries and bad taste.  In my notes I see that I only labelled two entire poems as “terrible,” but I could pick out plenty of lines that made me laugh.  Not that I care.  I know who I am reading here, and I am happy to push beyond my dull notions of taste:

from Mystery

Now I am all
One bowl of kisses,
Such as the tall
Slim votaresses
Of Egypt filled
For a God’s excesses.

By the sixth stanza, this poem has turned pornographic (“Comingled wines / Of you and me”), and where else could that marvelous, bonkers opening go?  This guy’s girlfriend would need a sense of humor, as do the readers of certain of his poems.  In “Mating,” Lawrence turns into Cole Porter.  “Birds do it, anemoNES do it”:

 Round clouds roll in the arms of the wind,
The round earth rolls in a clasp blue sky,
And see, where the budding hazels are thinned,
         The wild anemones lie
In undulating shivers beneath the wind.

The birds (ducks) are in the next stanza, with a drake preening over his harem.  This poem is a good example of how Lawrence’s insightful observations of nature get pulled into his other concerns.

Ah love, with your rich, warm face aglow,
What sudden expectation opens you
    So wide as you watch the catkins blow
        Their dust from the birch on the blue
Lift of the pulsing wind – ah, tell me you know!

Not everyone finds the windborne distribution of pollen so sexy.  This poem ends graphically, too, although with an additional cry – why “do you call it evil, and always evil?”

My understanding is that Lawrence’s next collection of poems, Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) has plenty of poems from or about Lawrence’s honeymoon, so I expect more of the same but with the frustration removed, or displaced.  No room for a surprising poem like “Hands of the Betrothed,” where the poet’s crazed desire for his fiancée makes him too handsy,

She puts me away, like a saleswoman whose mart is
Endangered by the pilferer on his quest.

She keeps tight control over her “Two wild, dumb paws in anguish,” “suppressed in the folds of her skirt,” holding back “the pain that is her simple ache for me.”

Some of these really looked like new kinds of poems.  I see I haven’t gotten to the ones I thought were especially good, so I’ll spend one more day on Amores.

An' a fork an' a spoon an' the moon an' the moon - D. H. Lawrence's first book of poems

D. H. Lawrence’s first book of poems is Love Poems, and Others (1913).  I read the 1915 edition, the copy at the Princeton Library, which was a bequest of Hamilton Cottier, class of 1922.  Cottier, or someone, added a handwritten note on what the scan calls page iv, that the book “add[s] to the interesting, but far from satisfying, impression of Love that Lawrence gives” and is “Of minor interest and no importance as poetry.”  Ouch!  I have little temperamental sympathy for Lawrence, but I liked it more than that.

Sometimes, certainly, a poem falls into Lawrence kitsch, like a self-parody:

        If only then
You could have unlocked the moon on the night,
And I baptize myself in the light
Of your love; we both have entered then the white
        Pure passion, and never again.  (from “Reminder,” p. 29)

Specifically, the “white / Pure passion” is what I am calling kitsch, but there are surely too many moons in this book.

Having said that, his voice is already original, truly his own, and he is thinking in terms of imagery that is his own:

I slept till dawn at the window blew in like dust,
Like the linty, raw-cold dust disturbed from the floor
Of a disused room: a grey pale light like must
That settled upon my face and hands till it seemed
To flourish there, as pale mold blooms on a crust.  (from “Coldness in Love,” 21)

It took me some effort to understand that this sentence followed ordinary grammatical rules.  The speaker does not sleep until dawn!  Well, he does, but the sentence has other business.  My point is more that this stanza could be plopped into a Lawrence novel with minor changes.

Sometimes Lawrence is playful in the way of poets.  Assume a bee, a rose, a “you”:

Wait among the beeches
For your late bee who beseeches
To creep through your loosened hair till he reaches,
    Your heart of dismay.  (from “Song-day in Autumn,” 35)

Lawrence also experiments with loose long lines, long for English, with six or seven feet, if I am counting right, which I doubt (this is a complete poem):

A White Blossom

A tiny moon as white and small as a single jasmine
        flower
Leans all alone above my window, on night’s wintry
        bower,
Liquid as lime-tree blossoms, soft as brilliant water or
       rain
She shines, the one white love of my youth, which
        all sin cannot stain.

This poet really loves the moon.

Aside from the love poems, Love Poems contains a section of narrative poems in dialect, the highlight being “The Collier’s Wife,” where the title character is told her husband is injured and is in response almost too practical.  It is a different kind of love poem:

An’ a fork an’ a spoon he’ll want, an’ what else;
    I s’ll never catch that train –
What a trapse it is if a man gets hurt –
    I s’d think he’ll get right again.  (76)

The book ends with three poems under the heading “The Schoolmaster,” a glimpse of Lawrence’s frustrations (“I am sick, and tired more than any thrall,” 88) from his short time as a schoolteacher.  The poems are a mix of the concrete and Lawrence weirdness:

But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light
Have shone for me like a constellation of stars,
Like full-blown flowers dimly shaking at the night,
Like floating froth on an ebbing shore in the moon.  (from “A Snowy Day in School,” 82)

Maybe this is also a love poem.  It uses the same language as the rest of the book.

The Best Books of 1913 - Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare / On, on upward thro' the golden air!

This was a strange year for anniversaries.  It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern).  Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts.  Austen and Proust both have industries around them.

Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives.  It is one of the great novels of the century.  Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity.  At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb.  Yet it is a cult novel in English.  I have no idea why.  It is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels.

If you polled readers or critics fifty years ago, asking them which novel would get the most attention at its centennial, Swann’s Way or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, I wonder if Lawrence would not top the poll.  How he has fallen.  Or how Proust has risen.  Some of both.  Sons and Lovers is doing all right for itself.

Perhaps a French reader can let me know if Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes has gotten much centennial celebration in France, where it is as well-known as, I don’t know, its titular cousin The Great Gatsby.  In English, another cult book.

I am never sure if I should do a Best of 191X post.  For the 19th century, I have read more of the books I am mentioning, so I know what the books are, not just how they are known.  In 1913, I see Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I have not read (nor have I read the Lawrence novel).  I just started the Cather, out of a sense of shame.

1913 was a deeply interesting year for poetry.  It produced a crop of first or second books by major poets, a number of which may well not be major books themselves – see above, haven’t read them – but remind me how quickly poetry was changing.  Maybe not as quickly as painting, but close.  D. H. Lawrence, again, Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, Guilliame Apollinaire’s Alcool, William Carlos Williams.

Subscribers to the hot new magazine Poetry would read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” alongside (more or less) Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd   :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough    .

(for those who do not know it, that’s the entire poem) and Vachel Lindsay’s rather different “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”:

Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

You’re supposed to sing this, accompanied by bass drum and banjos.  Pound and Lindsay support Kilmer’s argument, since neither poem is as lovely as a tree, although they have other virtues.  There is another line from the Lindsay poem that I was tempted to use as my title: “But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.”  That was the poetry of 1913.  And the music.  And the painting.  And some of the novels, too.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Transformed Dream, picked almost at random from a superb year of paintings, can be seen free of charge at the Saint Louis Art Museum.  How interesting, André Breton owned it for a long time.

Nobody has muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter - Lawrence's Hawthorne - My father hated books

How about one more rummage through D. H. Lawrence’s little book.

A couple of years ago I puzzled over a strange book by William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925), an obscurely written historical counterpart to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).  Although Williams and Lawrence only directly overlap with chapters on Franklin and Poe, and despite Horace Gregory insisting that Williams’ book does not resemble Lawrence’s (p. xiv), I now see that the Williams book is highly derivative of Lawrence.

WCW briefly turns to Hawthorne, to attack him,  in his Poe chapter, for his realism (“his willing closeness to the life of his locality in its vague humors; his lifelike copying of the New England melancholy,” 228) and his traditionalism (“by doing what everyone else in France, England, Germany was doing for his own milieu, is no more than copying their method with another setting,” 229), meaning that Williams chooses to badly misread Hawthorne (and to give the highly original Poe too much credit for originality).  His misreading was, and perhaps still is, a common one, taking The Scarlet Letter as a treatise on Puritan thought and The Blithedale Romance as an investigation of the Brook Farm utopia and so on – heaven knows what the realist crowd thinks is going on in The Marble Faun – when he is really – I will turn to Lawrence:

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes romance.

And what’s romance?  Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it’s always daisy-time.  As You Like It and Forest Lovers, etc.  Morte D’Arthur.
Hawthorne obviously isn’t that kind of romanticist: though nobody has muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter, either.  (Ch. 7, 88)

What on earth is Forest Lovers?  A bestselling 1898 historical novel by Maurice Hewlett, a writer with a style distinctive enough to earn him a parody in Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland, a great honor.

Romance, Hawthorne, Morte D’Arthur – this sounds familiar for some reason.  Perhaps because Lawrence stole it from a post I wrote three years ago!  Reading Studies in American Literature has been a disheartening experience.

Lawrence takes The Scarlet Letter as a parable of sin, primal Adam and Eve stuff.  “Hester Prynne was a devil” (100), but the men are worse, and the elf child Pearl will likely be worse than the men.

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe.

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.  (103)

“[O]ne of the greatest allegories in all of literature” (106), Lawrence judges.  That sounds about right.

Listen to this bit.  It is in the Scarlet Letter chapter.  It is a surprising digression. What is it doing here?:

My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing.

My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour.  Her sons must have something higher than that.

She won.  But she died first.  (92)

I almost forgot to mention that Jessica at so very very recently read a later (earlier?) version of Lawrence’s book, which inspired me to read it for myself.

"Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses" by D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence pulls out the strangeness in the writers he covers in Studies in Classic American Literature, even in writers not commonly considered to be strange, like James Fenimore Cooper.

Five years – can that be right? – five years ago I spent a week writing* about The Deerslayer, launching off of Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” into a treatment of Deerslayer as a heroic fantasy novel, albeit one which ends in genocide.  At one point, just as an example, a lady in the lake gives the hero a magic rifle.  The novel is fascinating, although Cooper’s actual literary flaws, not the amusing ones invented by Twain, are real enough that I have not quite been inspired to try another Cooper novel.

Lawrence does what I did, but at greater length and depth.  He read all of Cooper as a child, so he goes as far as devoting a tangled chapter to “Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels” (The Spy and Eve Effingham and so on), before turning to the Leatherstocking novels, Cooper's attempt to use the new-fangled novel to create myth, a big new American myth.

How often in his own novels is Lawrence working on a similar problem?  He was doing it in The Rainbow (1915), with his earth mothers and archetypes and so on, I can see that now even at the distance of 25 years.  I sure did not see it then.

Lawrence sees Cooper groping towards this idea, with the five novels moving in “a decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of beauty” (55), although he still calls the first one, The Pioneers, “[a] very lovely book.”  “The most fascinating Leatherstocking book is the last, Deerslayer” (65).  I just wrote that up above.  Lawrence is always ahead of me.

It is a gem of a book.  Or a bit of perfect paste.  And myself, I like a bit of perfect paste in a perfect setting, so long as I am not fooled by pretence of reality.  And the setting of Deerslayer could not be more exquisite.  Lake Champlain again.  (66)

Lawrence is way off there.  Lake Otsego.

Of course it never rains: it is never cold and muddy and dreary: no one has wet feet or toothache: no one feels filthy, when they can’t wash for a week.  God knows what the women would have really looked like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel  They breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same and supped the same.

Yet at every moment they are elegant, perfect ladies, in correct toilet.

Which isn’t quite fair.  You need only go camping for a week, and you’ll see.

But it is a myth, not a realistic tale.  Read it as a lovely myth.  Lake Glimmerglass.  (66)

*  The link is included as a reference, and is not really meant to be followed.

Lawrence searches for the strange - The great Americans I mention just were it.

Why do I read?  To remind myself that any good idea I might have is not original to me, as when D. H. Lawrence begins Studies in Classic American Literature:

We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children’s books.  Just childishness, on our part.  The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and nowhere else.  But, of course. so long as we insist on reading the books as children’s tales, we miss all that.  (Ch. 1, 7)

Well, he actually begins with a kind of rhapsody on America, in which Americans reject their own literature as unreal, by which they mean “tinned meat, Charlie Chaplin, water-taps, and World-Salvation, presumably” (3), even though the best American writers “seem to me to have reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Artzibashev reached a limit on the other side” (4).  I love lists like that.  Nobody reads Nabokov or Fulmerford anymore.  Where was I?

The European moderns are all trying to be extreme.  The great Americans I mention just were it.  Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day.  (4)

Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman.  The fact is, and I knew this from the act of reading them, not reading about them, that the first great generation or two of American writers form as odd a crew as can be found anywhere in world literature, even in France.  I am also including Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, perhaps Emerson at his most peculiar, and the truly insane Jones Very, a weird bunch of weirdos if I ever saw one.  Lawrence never mentions Thoreau, which is strange, and perhaps telling, or Dickinson, probably less strange.  The post-Civil War generation – James, Twain, Alcott, Howells, Jewett, and Chopin – seem to be, whatever else, they might be, sane.  That earlier crowd can make you wonder.

Hawthorne – I am digressing – is the odd man out.  In life, he was thoroughly normal and sane, but what a strange imagination he possessed.  So he goes in with the oddballs.

What Lawrence is doing is discovering the strangeness of these writers.  He is doing what Modernist writers and critics were doing all over the world with all sorts of older literature.  Thus, for example, the Melville Revival, the return of the strangest of the strange.  Lawrence anticipates Viktor Shlovksy and his dictum to “make it strange” – that was in 1925, I think.  Lawrence is looking for strangeness.  Everyone is looking for strangeness.

I hardly know Lawrence’s work.  At the time of the publication of Studies, he had written nine novels, if I am counting correctly, along with many other books – short stories, poetry, travel, essays, translations.  I feel like I am misreading his bibliography.  How on earth did Lawrence write so much?  My actual point is that Lawrence likely is making an argument about his own work’s strangeness, too, but  someone else will have to fill me in.

Lawrence spends a couple of early chapters on Benjamin Franklin and Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, eighteenth century writers.  He does not find them to be strange.  How Lawrence hates them (“And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin,” 24).  He loathes the Enlightenment.  That sounds like the Lawrence I know, even if I admit I do not know him well. 

He wanted his ideal state.  At the same time he wanted to know the other state, the dark, savage mind.  He wanted both.

Can’t be done, Hector.  The one is the death of the other.  (36)

There he is, there’s Lawrence.

He isn't quite a land animal - D. H. Lawrence's Melville

Guess who this is?  D. H. Lawrence launching into Herman Melville in Chapter 10 of his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature:

Melville has the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness.  He isn’t quite a land animal.  There is something slithery about him.  Something always half-seas-over.  In his life they said he was mad – or crazy.  He was neither mad nor crazy.  But he was over the border.  He was half a water-animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships.  (139, 1977 Penguin edition)

So this is one highly distinctive writer on another, one eccentric stylist enjoying another.  The book is uncompromisingly Lawrentian, I will say that.  Did Lawrence have any insights into Herman Melville, or any other American writers, or were they just subjects for his riffs?  Yes, lots of insights, some of which are now so commonplace as to be almost invisible.  But, yes.

This is the end of the same chapter.  You can see why I raised some doubts:

Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.

Perhaps, so am I.

And he stuck to his ideal guns.

I abandon mine.

He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc.  The guns of the ‘noble spirit’. Of ‘ideal love’.

I say, let the old guns rot.

Get new ones, and shoot straight.  (152)

Literary criticism by means of metaphor, with Lawrence himself right up front.

Lawrence gives Melville two of his twelve little chapters, a favor he also grants to Cooper and Hawthorne (so, yes, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville are, by weight, half of the American literature that interests Lawrence).  The first chapter covers Typee and Omoo, Melville’s first two books, fictionalized accounts of his adventures in the South Seas, and he really did have one crazy adventure.  The second chapter in on Moby-Dick.  No “Bartleby,” no poetry, no Billy Budd, which would not be published for another year.  Melville’s name had survived, to the extent that it had, as a kind of travel writer, so those first two titles were the ones that were still read.  Only a few connoisseurs knew about Moby-Dick.  Lawrence was one of them.

His chapter on Moby-Dick is largely an extended, oddly inflected plot summary, with long quotations from the novel.  Lawrence cannot assume that any of his readers have read the novel or have any real idea of what is in it.  So that fills his space.  Lawrence was writing at the very beginning of the Melville Revival, so  Studies in Classic American Literature is part of the revival, part of the reason Moby-Dick is now a famous book.  Thus, the obviousness of many of the insights – yes, everyone knows that now.

The strangest thing is that Lawrence had not read the entire novel.  The English edition was originally published without the last page, which is also the short last chapter.  That last bit does explain a thing or two.  Lawrence seems to have known only this mangled version.  The ship sinks, dragging an eagle-angel down into the sea with it, and:

So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism.  It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness.

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written.  It moves awe in the soul.  (168)

I hope that, after Classic Studies was published, one of Lawrence’s American friends was able to supply him with that last page.