Thursday, December 15, 2005

Lawrence Redux

Following the link from A&L Daily:

The New Yorker has a review this week of a new biography of D.H Lawrence. Opinions of Lawrence seem to follow a similar line of the comments following the Hoagland poem. "People talking about Lawrence sound like his own quarrelsome couples: they hate him, they say, or they love him, or both."

Other quotations from the article.

Henry Miller: “Lawrence hits so directly at our weaknesses that we rush to the attack upon his weaknesses.”

Martin Amis: "When I reflect that D. H. Lawrence, perhaps the most foul-tempered writer of all time (beater of women and animals, racist, anti-Semite, etc., etc.), was also, perhaps, the most extravagantly slapdash exponent of language, I feel the lure of some immense generalisation about probity and prose.

The article concludes his weakness as a person led to his strengths as a writer.

2 comments:

Rachel said...

I think one of the things I always get from Lawrence is how precisely he describes the soul-sucking nature of the modern worker, seperated from what I consider to be a more normal way of living; i.e., waking when you want and moving about freely during the day instead of stuck in someone else's building, doing their work, for pay that will never justly compensate you for your time.

Unknown said...

a la Melville's Bartelby crumpled against the wall.

Is this in Chatterly or other works by Lawrence?