I think Lady Chatterley is one of Lawrence's worst novels. Not as jaw-droppingly bad as The Plumed Serpent, but bad enough. But I do think Lawrence was a brave writer.
I also don't remember the Kinsey Report being banned in the '50s. I remember it being a best seller. It was certainly talked about enough.
Maybe it was banned in Boston.
ReplyDeleteIt was banned in US Army libraries in Europe.
ReplyDeleteRichard Rodriguez on Lawrence:
ReplyDeleteThe other writer, I think, I was reading at the same time I began writing seriously in my own voice, was D. H. Lawrence. . . . The drama in my life between the working class and the middle class is the great drama of my life, much more so than ethnicity or any other aspect of my life. And that connection to a voice like Lawrence -- what Lawrence brings into my life -- he gives me permission to essentially free myself of the inhibition, the middle class inhibition that I taught myself. I taught myself, in some sense, not to be working class. Not to [talk] with my mouth full, but also to take a bath every day, to brush my teeth. I'm speaking seriously; there is a kind of middle class propriety that one learns, and you learn it from watching your classmates, and you learn how to talk at dinner, something you're not taught in the house, and so forth. I think what Lawrence gave me was the opposite permission, in some sense -- to go back to the sensuality of my life. And in the short stories, particularly, and then Sons and Lovers (which is, I think, his greatest novel), there is a possibility of using writing as a way of engaging again those emotions that you repress as a child, becoming a reader and moving away from both the brutality and the sensuality of your childhood. Lawrence is so much in awe of and horrified by his father, that it just reminds me very much of my relationship to my own family.
From an interview: "Talking to the Dead: Richard Rodriguez on D.H. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, and Writing as a Conversation with the Past"
http://www.pitt.edu/~nidus/archives/winter2004/current/rodriguez.int.html
I hope I didn't give the impression that I do not like D.H. Lawrence. I think Richard is correct about Sons and Lovers. But I think his best work is to be found in his short stories and, yes, his poetry. I also think Apocalypse is wonderful. At his best -- and he is often at his best -- he is a great writer. At his worst, he is bad in the way that only a great writer can be.
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ReplyDeleteHere's what I know: Henry Miller couldn't finish his biography of Lawrence. That tells me something -namely that while Lawrence's content was unexpectedly modern, his structure was frustratingly old. Miller could never reconcile this divergence - and neither can I.
ReplyDeleteI think that is certainly true of his fiction (and when he tries to deviate from that -- as in Chatterley -- the result is lamentable. But it is not true of his poetry. He is maybe the only really successful follower of Whitman. Also, his nonfiction prose really is modern.
ReplyDeleteStudies in Classical American Literature is practically criticism-as-prose-poem.