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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 It never occurred to me to ask whether he had a following or not. I read him from 18 to 23. Then I went to rehab and was detoxified. There are Lawrence Anonymous meetings. They are held, appropriately, in LA. I began with a strong dose: The Plumed Serpent. The literary equivalent of Vicotin when you're 18. Then got a maintenance habit: Women in Love, what are the names of the others...Sex and Sensibility? You read enough of this guy's novels, you want to emulate Klingsor the sorcerer in Parsifal and emasculate yourself. As for Lady Chatterbox...fuck it. Is the term succes de scandale? Harold Robbins writes screwing at least as well, though give DH credit: he pretty well invented how to describe sexual activity. Or was that Anthony Trollope? Okay, it's 2:10 AM, I've been to the opera, had a terrible trip home, and I cannot get overly excited by any Lawrence issues. Blah blah, sexist pig, proto fascist, wife-beater (and abused husband in his turn) ho hum. He's dead. Why waste the ink? I come back not to his tedious, royal-purple prose novels--suited for a teenage boy with a perpetual erection--but to the poetry. "Piano" is one of the great poems in English of the last 100 years, the poems written around his impending death are enduring and brave. ken ---------------------------------------- Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com 39. Not observing the imperfections of others, preserving silence and a continual communion with God will eradicate great imperfections from the soul and make it the possessor of great virtues. --St. John of the Cross, Maxims on Love (The Minor Works)