I confess, it is not without a *slight* grin of mischief that I quote
the following, from
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051219crbo_books
"All his life, Lawrence seems to have endeared himself to people by
telling them just what was wrong with them."
Which is very true, perhaps more true than it intends, since the fact
is that DHL actually *did* endear himself to people - some people, at
least - by doing just that, like a doctor or shamanic healer (or
charlatan, of course; this is seldom altogether decidable). He could
speak eloquently to his own shortcomings, too.
What I am really taken aback by, in that article, is the quotations
from DHL himself, the force and strangeness of his prose:
"In his breast, or in his bowels, somewhere in his body, there had
started another activity. It was as if a strong light were burning
there, and he was blind within it, unable to know anything, except
that this transfiguration burned between him and her, connecting them,
like a secret power."
I reacted violently against that sort of language ("sloppy!
seat-sniffing! ridiculous!") when I first read it as a teenager, and
still react strongly to it now albeit in different ways. _The
Rainbow_'s mixture of biblical jargon and inchoate sensation is
notoriously disconcerting, hard to take. But what gets to me most is
DHL's ability to let himself be led forth (and, often, astray) by a
rhetoric of his own invention, to think with his pen. Even now, that
seems astonishingly brave and foolhardy - who today would risk
*embarrassing* themselves like that? And the risk pays off - he writes
things that no-one else could have written; sometimes noxious,
sometimes profoundly stupid, but often glowingly, gloweringly
beautiful and sensuously involved.
The article's suggestion that "no doubt his vitalism was a sick man's
dream of health", seems to me to be true of vitalism generally: life
is a sickness, as the saying goes. But that is why one cannot dismiss
DHL as diseased, or his imagination as febrile: what he was sick with
was the same sickness Shakespeare died of, and many readers of his
books have found it catching.
Dominic
--
Shall we be pure or impure? Today
we shall be very pure. It must always
be possible to contain
impurities in a pure way.
--Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
|