Ah: a couple of my colleagues 'met' over DHL, & have co-editied a
collection of essays on his work. For him a 'liberation' from a failed
& bad marriage; I'm not sure for her, but they sure seem happy
together.
I read him a lot back in the day, but feel little desire to do so
again....
(Back when I also read The White Goddess: geez, I sure bought into a
lot of the zeitgeist then....)
Yet....
Doug
On 16-Dec-05, at 2:54 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> Complete agreement about the novels. Some of the short stories, and
> the poems, stand up considerably better.
>
> Lawrence still has a following, which is surprising. Though in his own
> time and for a few decades thereafter a lot of men and women too found
> him a liberating figure, and his novels a paradigm shift. When I was a
> kid I ran into numerous Lawrence fanatics in their 50s through 80s.
> Beyond the masturbatory lushness of the language I never got it.
>
> Mark
>
> At 02:59 PM 12/16/2005, you wrote:
>> DHL is (for me anyway) an infuriating writer. I read Women in Love
>> quite
>> recently, and found it an enraging novel: full of crap about the dark
>> god of
>> sexuality, the brutal, bitter, lonely (and ultimately self-pitying)
>> Destiny
>> of masculinity, the dark, passive power of the Feminine, &c&c, and of
>> course
>> also the racism, which stretches past anti-Semitism to Asians and
>> Africans
>> (so perhaps might be seen as general misanthropy - he hates the
>> English as
>> well, though he's hardly free of a conviction of English superiority)
>> - he
>> gets so many things so _wrong_. But the other thing is that sometimes
>> he is
>> _almost_ right. He's very good also on certain kinds of middle class
>> English
>> bitterness and loathing, the repressed sexuality that seeks to
>> destroy life
>> when it sees it, out of envy and hatred. And how his writing can segue
>> without notice from glorious, inimitable passages (especially, as
>> that essay
>> notes, about the natural world and sensual experience) to passages
>> which
>> seem just plain silly. Kangaroo is full of those bewildering switches.
>>
>> I suppose what one admires is the gamble. It's there, in your face,
>> in all
>> its impossible desire, inevitably exceeding its grasp. Yes, brave and
>> foolhardy, which might perhaps be synonyms -
>>
>> Best
>>
>> A
>>
>>
>> Alison Croggon
>>
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
the precision of openness
is not a vagueness
it is an accumulation
cumulous
bpNichol
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