The New Compass: A Critical Review
“I
still have a little photograph of him in one of my studies”:
Two
Recent Books on D.H. Lawrence
Richard Lansdown
J. C. F. Littlewood. D. H. Lawrence: The Major Phase. Studies in
Tradition and Renewal. Ed. William Shearman.
Gary Adelman. Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers
Speak Out. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2002. 181
pages. $34.50
The
appreciation of a major writer always involves making a claim of some kind or
another: claiming him or her for oneself, first of all; and claiming a space
for him or her in the attention of other readers, later on. As Kant saw two
centuries ago, these ultimately unarbitrable claims
are at the core of aesthetic experience. Frequently, too, these acts of
appreciation will be acts of reclamation: claiming your admired object
from the claims of others you believe to be more ignorant or undiscerning than
yourself. Not all great writers are equal in this regard. Shakespeare, Austen,
and Dickens seem to be churches broad enough to contain multitudes of critical
responses and differences of opinion. D. H. Lawrence, by contrast, has been a
site of vigorous contestation practically from the moment he appeared on the
English literary scene a little before World War I. Is that why so many claims
on and for him have been made in the course of the twentieth century? And is
that why—if Gary Adelman’s book is to be
believed—we’ve recently begun to grow weary of making and responding to them?
These
two books could hardly be more different in their approach to this issue. The
first was drafted at various times and in various forms from the early 1960s
until the author’s death (aged 55) in 1984. The writer was a lecturer in
English at the University of Bristol, a contributor to Scrutiny in its
latter days, and one of F. R. Leavis’s most cherished
students-cum-lieutenants at Downing College. For Littlewood,
it follows, the acts of claiming and reclamation I’ve described take place in a
particular context. For him, Lawrence “is part of our glorious national
heritage” (215); what is required in his case, therefore, is an act of
literary-critical glasnost, clearing away the compound follies of (say)
Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode, John Carey, Clive James, e tutti quanti. (Where James is
concerned, Littlewood reveals a genuine line of Leavisian wit: “effortlessly au fait with everything
under the sun and in the mind of man … cheaply ironic about Lawrence’s thought
and confidently obtuse in his expositions of the thought,” he writes (237):
“interested not in his subject but in his own sparkling act, tremendously
impressed by some of Lawrence’s phrases and utterly untouched by any of
Lawrence’s meanings.”) Gary Adelman looks out on an
entirely different landscape: a post-diluvian
America, where the tectonic intellectual redistributions brought about by
post-structuralism have left Lawrence a living concern and enthusiasm among
imaginative writers, but high and dry in academic circles. (Adelman
speaks about readings of Lawrence “defaulting to gender studies,” for example:
imagine how horrified, but also how ultimately unsurprised, Lawrence, Leavis, and Littlewood would be
to see this term from operating software leaching into the realm of literary
experience.)
Littlewood’s study is
emphatically a work of literary-critical evaluation; Adelman’s
greatest value lies in the material he has collected and collated, not only
from the forty novelists and sixty poets he has corresponded with (American and
British), but also from his earnest and praiseworthy efforts in offering a
semester-long course on Lawrence to American students. Teachers reading about
this course will admire Adelman’s pluck or
commiserate with his foolhardiness: he set (in this order, with the aim it
seems of dispatching the grossest offenders early on) not only Studies in
Classic American Literature but some of the early versions of those essays
published as The Symbolic Meaning, Fantasia of the Unconscious, Women
in Love, “The Princess,” “The Woman Who Rode Away,” St Mawr, The Man Who Died, Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, The Rainbow, and Look, We Have Come Through! Anyone,
you’d have to say, would need a cup of tea and a long lie-down after that.
Students were asked to keep a reading-diary of their experiences, and not suprisingly these veer from outright rejection to
disbelief, and from intermittent excitement to long stretches of boredom.
(“Lawrence is such a one-noter,” as one of Adelman’s novelists economically puts it; 42.) Worse was to
come: Adelman’s students gave the course a grudging
pass in evaluations, and wrote comments that would make the most placidly
complacent lecturer blench:
angry, angry,
an inflamed irritation—complaining about the syllabus, rudeness (my shouting
and interrupting), unclear objectives; there was too much to read; they had no
idea how to study for an exam; I should try to remember that they were only
twenty-one years old. One called me “creepy.” (114-5)
Who was
being evaluated here, one might ask: teacher or subject? No wonder Adelman compares himself (77) to “a stage villain
soliloquizing myself into a motive for some dastardly deed.”
As
I say, it is the commentary Adelman reproduces by
these means that gives his book its value. In one chapter he pitches in
manfully to a discussion of Lawrence’s American novellas, and he also comments
at length on Women in Love (as, of course, does Littlewood).
Adelman says (24) that “students were bothered by
Lawrence’s preoccupation with incest and anal sex” in that novel, and he, too,
discusses Birkin’s requirements of Ursula in this
regard. Many readers will remember Birkin’s desire
for “a strange connection” with Ursula in the chapter called “Mino,” but if anal sex was what Birkin
had in mind it’s news to me; either I’m naïve, or the teacher was making a rod
for his own back on this occasion. His novelists and poets, as one might
expect, make critical comments of all kinds of value and uselessness. Lynne
Sharon Schwartz, for example, makes the thoughtful suggestion that “Lawrence is
a ‘hot’ writer,” whereas “our tastes are ‘cool’”:
After
the political and social upheavals of the century, we live by irony, skepticism,
disillusion, a distrust of earnestness that is expressed as scorn. I am not
fond of the extreme “coolness” of some of our younger writers, but I do think
Lawrence’s heat has earned our distrust. (42)
Margaret
Drabble makes much the same point: that “the mood of the 80s and 90s has been
so hard-edged, so determinist-defeatist in some ways, so merciless, in others,
and above all so cynical” as to produce “a world in which DHL does not fit”
(44). At the other extreme, Richard Ford makes the airy remark about one of his
studies quoted in my title.
More
than a whiff of cordite from old battles hangs about J. C. F. Littlewood’s study. I have already mentioned his waspish
dismissal of Clive James, and his editor, too, takes us back to the era of Leavis agonistes. What we
have here is a most loving effort of retrieval, not only by William Shearman
and his publisher, but also by one of Littlewood’s
Bristol students, who first sought (in “peculiarly difficult personal
circumstances,” apparently; x) to make sense of Littlewood’s
various drafts after his untimely death. (There is material here previously
published in the Cambridge Quarterly and Essays in Criticism, but
also written-up lectures and final drafts. So the reader must put up with a
certain amount of repetition, and some variance in authorial register.) The
publisher, Shearman tells us (vi) “well knew that the … venture would be
extremely hazardous,” which makes us think he was in danger of being placed
under a fatwa or something of the kind. Similarly, one of the book’s
dramatic sub-plots is the nefarious attempt to “supplant or bury the
real criticism” (xiii) made by certain Lawrence scholars of bygone ages who
overlooked the originality of Littlewood’s
contribution to our understanding of the Prussian Officer stories in
relation to The Rainbow. (Interested readers can consult an essay from
the same publisher on this subject: Brian Crick’s The Story of the “Prussian
Officer” Revisions: Littlewood among the Lawrence
Scholars.) When the editor wonders whether “there still exists at least a
small remnant of the reading public to whom Littlewood
was always concerned to address his work” (xxvi), readers may have cause to
fear they are in for large amounts of Downing rechauffée.
They
should be encouraged to read on, however. It is true that the reprinted
material about “Lawrence scholarship” and the migraine-inducing appendices
relating to it might with advantage have been left on the cutting-room floor;
but the life and soul of the book—about what Littlewood
calls “The Lawrence who Matters”—is very well worth the reader’s time. Nor are
the arguments delivered there of the clenched and adversarial kind made out in D.
H. Lawrence: Novelist. (More Leavis-without-tears,
then, than Leavis-and-soda.) For Littlewood
the Lawrence who matters involves Sons and Lovers, certainly, but most
of all the artist who got beyond the impasse that novel represented in
personal and artistic terms alike: its inablity to
resolve the web of issues relating to his parents and to Mrs. Morel and Miriam,
and its dependence on Victorian realism as practised
(in differing ways and degrees, to be sure) by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
Thus Littlewood’s theme is “the interrelations of
life-learning and book-learning and of originality and tradition” (5) in the
phase that takes us from Sons and Lovers to Women in Love, and he
has many interesting things to say about Lydia and Walter Lawrence, and about
Jessie Chambers and Frieda Weekley; still more
interesting things to say about Dickens, Hardy, the Brontës,
and George Eliot. (Lawrence, he says, had “a more magically re-creative touch,
and a more urgent creative end” than Eliot, which is a typically
thought-provoking comparison.)
Strong cases are made, therefore, on
Sons and Lovers, and on key tales from the Prussian Officer
collection; and the discussion of The Rainbow (which with the short
stories constitutes Lawrence’s “first breakthrough”) is similarly to the point.
As Littlewood sees Women in Love very much as Lawrence”s second breakthrough and climactic fictional
effort, however, his treatment of its prequel shows some signs of neglect. “In
the last few chapters of The Rainbow,” he writes, “while seeming to be
offering us there a critique of the modern industrial world … Lawrence
actually gives us little more than a protest against it” (161). This
seems to me a half-truth generated by admiration for the later novel. I am by
no means convinced that anywhere Lawrence intended in The Rainbow the
kind of generalized analysis undertaken in Women in Love: rather he
wanted eventually to outline the choices available to Ursula as a
representative modern young woman, by comparison with her mother and
grandmother. In so far as she is free to make her own life, well and good; in
so far as she has had obscured for her the kinds of noumenal
intuitions her predecessors received from their sexual partners, the prospect
darkens. So to say that her boyfriend Anton Skrebensky
is “another weakling in the Will Brangwen mould”
(132) seems to me greatly erroneous, as Ursula’s father re-implants in Ursula
an idealism that is a crucial Brangwen characteristic
and a vital counterpoint to her mother’s lapse into domesticity.
It is Women in Love,
therefore, that is Littlewood’s favourite
child, and readers must consult his discussion to make up their own minds about
it. With all its strengths—and it has many—it in part re-presents the very
problems the novel itself does. Certainly Lawrence’s book gets much better as
it goes along, but for a lengthy period at the beginning the preponderance of
discussion over what Leavis would have called
“dramatic presentment” is profoundly wearisome. (Compare “Class-room” in the
later novel with “The Man’s World” in the earlier one, for example: see how the
children quite disappear from authorial view when Birkin
and Hermione enter the classroom to inaugurate one of their tedious rounds of
bickering.) And Birkin’s role as semi-annointed, self-appointed Jeremiah, which is irksome enough
to be sure in the novel’s first half, simply crumples once he establishes
himself in the once-derided state of domesticity with Ursula. (Littlewood makes a lengthy comparison of Birkin with Hamlet, as men who have both “seen death” and
criticize society accordingly: a comparison that, starting with a false
premise—what “death” has Birkin seen, exactly?—ends
up in the idea that Hamlet supposes “corruption is something occurs only in
other people” (205), which is demonstrably untrue.) These things make us wonder
about Littlewood’s loyalty to Lawrence’s belief that
“in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a black tom-cat that pounces on the white
dove of the word … there is a banana-skin to trip on: and you know there is a
water-closet on the premises” (164). Arguably one of the things that makes Sons
and Lovers (with all its faults) so prodigious, and The Rainbow so
majestic, is that in these novels the water-closet on the premises really has
to be confronted and incorporated within the analytic project the novelist
undertakes. In them there are things you “damn well have to see,” as Joyce
would say; in the later book there are things you damn well have to talk
about—repeatedly. Women in Love “is the seeing of a seer,” perhaps
(170); it may be that “there has never been a more vivid representation of the
human being’s self-encasement” (206) than that novel offers us—though I doubt
it: but I am sure there has rarely been a more vivid representation of
individuals’ capacity to escape that condition than in certain parts of The
Rainbow.
Meaningful
response to literature always involves intensity. That intensity originates in
works of literature themselves, no matter how apparently indifferent to their
readers, and is channelled by readers and teachers
alike. There is no substitute for the force and beauty of its process, as Henry
James would say. In Leavisism in particular,
intensity was, as often as not, both an enabling and a disabling condition: it
underwrote the social, intellectual, and pedagogical project, but it also made
that project hard to deliver to any but the chosen few; and when members of the
flock turned away, that intensity turned on them with redoubled intransigence.
What we see in these two books is an odd and unexpected congruence, despite the
intellectual acreage which divides them. In his way, Gary Adelman
is as earnest a proselyte for Lawrence as one of FRL’s
“hearties” at Downing. He might agree with Littlewood,
for example, that “It’s the disturbing depth, subtlety and power of Lawrence’s
presentment of human nature that is the main obstacle to the comprehension of Women
in Love” (185), whereas some of us will feel this to be an egregious case
of special pleading. Being scornful about earnestness, in the style described
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, is no solution, however. A better avenue of
exploration where Lawrence is concerned might be a book that Adelman fails to mention, though it was published five
years before his own: Geoff Dyer’s incendiary and unapologetically
anti-academic Out of Sheer Rage. There, the world of Lawrence studies is
simply turned upside-down; for Dyer it is in the letters, ultimately, that “the
essence of Lawrence’s art is most nakedly revealed.” “The fact that Lawrence
wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, he concludes, “means next to nothing to
me; what matters it that he paid his debts, made nice jam and marmalade, and
put up shelves.”
Lansdown,
Richard. “‘I still have a little
photograph of him in one of my studies’: Two Recent Books on D. H. Lawrence.”
Rev. of D. H. Lawrence: The Major Phase, by J. C. F. Littlewood,
and Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers Speak Out, by Gary Adelman. The New Compass: A Critical Review 1 (June
2003) <http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2003/lansdown.html>