-----Original Message-----
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, December 17, 2005 10:16 PM
Subject: Re: Article on David Herbert Lawrence

I think the disappointing thing about Lawrence, re Joyce, was his attack -
with Rebecca West - on Ulysses as an "obscene" book. It seems hard to
defend, given his own experiences with censorship;

Well I wouldn't attempt to defend it, Alison. It was irrational, but I
hardly think that would have helped as an answer to the censorious D H
Lawrence.

And thinking of the late essay on pornography, he would not have
extrapolated from wrong-headed censorship to the idea of censorship being
wrong-headed. What puzzles me is not the demand for censorship but the
demand for censorship there and then. Why didn't he just let it all
collapse, as he expected it to, and as things largely did. Sort of. ? To
build his new state with censorship in the constitution

I never found Lawrence erotic. He was talking about the erotic, but he
didn't satisfactorily manage it or not consistently. And the more preachy he
got, the *less erotic the writing. The Penguin trial nonsense has forever
made that _dirty books_ link; but he was a long time dead by then

There's a story of him with - I think - Aldington, looking at some Etruscan
picture. Aldington said something like I wouldn't mind getting off with her;
or maybe it was a remark about some part of her body - anyway, Lawrence hit
the roof and condemned him for, I don't know, doing the dirt on sex
probably. Whatever .it was he found in Etruria, I think Aldington's implicit
take on the culture (that we are all much the same whenever / wherever) was
the better guess.

Lawrence believed in paradise and the world kept disappointing him. Starting
the search in West Penwith wasn't exactly a good beginning.

He didn't have a coherent abstractable set of moral ideas to do what
increasingly he tried to do - so, for example, he was never going to be able
to do anything in the way of Middlemarch though he may have had it in him.
(Not that one wants a repeat - I am suggesting that as a novel of the kins
he started out with in which moral judgement is strongly present)

And yet... There's also the problem of not knowing what we didn't know once
we know it... and some of his insights have just become part of our
background. The much quoted flow and recoil of sympathy has never been so
well expressed, I think. The _insights_ are not sound biteable; it is more a
way of seeing people; not quite an earthquake paradigm shift but enough to
rearrange somethings

Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow remain strongly in my mind. Better read
Women in Love again before I say anything..And so many stories and so much
poetry that does come off

>But good point on Yeats. Do you know David Lloyd's wonderful essay on him
in
Anomalous States?

I don't. But I'll try to get it. Thanks

Something associating in my mind - Writers Forum is on the point of
publishing a 98 essay by Alaric Sumner on "extremeness in writing and
performance" - "I want the excesses in the works to expose themselves to an
analysis that slides the rational into the irrational. Some of the works
discussed are mundanely excessive, overworking their extremeness to mere
sensation. Some of the works seem sensational, but offer other disturbing
perspectives when you get your hands dirty with them."