WICKES
05-08-2015, 03:42 PM
How highly do you rate Lawrence? I was listening to an arts show today and an intellectual/ writer whose opinions I respect said "the two greatest novels written in the last hundred or so years are Joyce's Ulysses and DH Lawrence's Women in Love" (I'm assuming he meant written in the English language). I know Larkin revered him and said he made his knees shake, while Anthony Burgess thought he was one of the few genuine visionary and prophetic 20th century writers. But is he up there with the greatest novelists of the last 200 years? Does he deserve to be placed alongside Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Dickens etc? Would he be more highly regarded if he hadn't held such extreme political views (against votes for women and the working classes, in favour of mass steralisation and even of mass killings!).
The general view seems to be that he was "obsessed with sex", which is ridiculous. I have read Lady Chatterley and The Rainbow and it is clear to me that Lawrence was not obsessed with sex at all. Sex was a part of Lawrence's central concern, which I take to be alienation. So far as I understand him, he thought modern man was sick and that this sickness came from our over-refined, over-rational consciousness. We are unbalanced, cut off from nature, from the rhythms of life, from the body, from 'reality'. There is a great passage somewhere in which he says "this is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and the wind and the stars"...or something like that. I do find him a bit oppressive and overbearing at times. And I'm not sure I'd enjoy living in a society based on his ideas. But I admire his anger. Like Blake he has this keen, intuitive sense that something is not just wrong but fundamentally wrong.
The general view seems to be that he was "obsessed with sex", which is ridiculous. I have read Lady Chatterley and The Rainbow and it is clear to me that Lawrence was not obsessed with sex at all. Sex was a part of Lawrence's central concern, which I take to be alienation. So far as I understand him, he thought modern man was sick and that this sickness came from our over-refined, over-rational consciousness. We are unbalanced, cut off from nature, from the rhythms of life, from the body, from 'reality'. There is a great passage somewhere in which he says "this is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and the wind and the stars"...or something like that. I do find him a bit oppressive and overbearing at times. And I'm not sure I'd enjoy living in a society based on his ideas. But I admire his anger. Like Blake he has this keen, intuitive sense that something is not just wrong but fundamentally wrong.