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
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