D. H. Lawrence

by Stephen Bailey & Chris Nottingham

[gleanings:literary biographies,universality-of-themes-in-fiction]

D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928]-an unexpurgated story of passion between an upper class woman and her husband’s servant.Perhaps it was the forerunner to permissive liberalism in the sixties: sexual revolution, Beatles, Hippies, Marijuana & LSD.

Marginal Comments
A couple of decades ago when the Movie ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover‘ starring Sylvia Kristel was screened at Savoy Cinema,Wellawatte, an Englishman was baffled at the sight of exceedingly long queues of movie goers therein. He seemed to have been puzzled to witness such a fan base, such a great following for the novelist D. H. Lawrence in this underdeveloped little island far away from England.
Well, let me explain. That was a time, unlike today, adult movies [soft as well as hard] were hard to come by. Now, you know – I don’t have to complete my sentences. bunpeiris

D. H. Lawrence: Universality-of-themes-in-fiction

D. H. Lawrence was an ambitious writer; although he used ‘regional settings’, he was always more than what is usually understood by the term ‘regional authour’. D. H. Lawrence was at one with Ezra Pound, a colleague in the modernist circles of The English Review, in feeling ‘A Man who asks favours [sic] for his work because it is written in some particular place appears to me to be not patriotic but merely pusillanimous'[ *1]. D. H. Lawrence aspired to address a universal audience, to operate at the frontier of insight and sensibility. The critical attention he still inspires suggests that he succeeded.
[page 13]

Universality-of-themes-in-fiction: modernist

Although D. H. Lawrence was always a modernist, recognising that the scale of his ambition and the vitality of his inspiration demanded novelty in form, he is rarely laboured or obscure. D. H. Lawrence‘s style, particularly in the earlier novels and stories, has an engaging directness, and his obsessions-sexuality, gender, landscape under threat and the Spiritual emptiness of modernity-remains live concerns. Even if contemporary readers might disagree with some of his prescriptions, they can recognise a writer with a sharp insight into the spirit of his age, and a notable contributor to an agenda that would long outlive him.

As both man and writer D. H. Lawrence denied anyone who encountered him the possibility of ambivalence. One travels with him or one does not. He would probably be surprised by the volume with him or one does not. He would probably be surprised by the  volume of posthumous attention that he has received but, one suspects, delighted by the polarisation.

He remains  for us both, since our first encounter with him fifty years ago, eternally fascinating. His passion for life, his vivid language, his love of the natural world, his hatred of war and industrialization, and his total commitment to recording his insights, no mater how inconvenient to himself or others, more than compensate for his flights of mysticism and his preaching.
[page 16]

[ *1] pusillanimous:lacking courage and resolution, marked by contemptible timidity

This is the source of the Gleanings herein.

White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence: damage associated with mismatched marriages

D.H. Lawrence: Triumph of failure

One hundred years after publication of his first novel –The White Peacock-in 1911 D. H. Lawrence remains one of the most significant and controversial figures of modern English Literature. His defenders remain as vehement and personal as his opponents. Geoff Dyer, in a work which matches its subject’s talent for vituperation, dismisses the professional disparages of D. H. Lawrence as ‘wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off’. There can be few other novelists who have had worked so extensively praised and banned, lauded and derided. The fact that D. H. Lawrence can still provoke strong feelings, more than eighty years after his death in 1930, is a tribute to the singularity of his vision, his determination to record experience truthfully without regard for any upset it might provoke, and the brilliance of his best writing. moreover, it is a rare achievement to be successively unpopular with working-class puritans, upper class prigs and chattering class pundits.

By comparison with today’s high-earning celebrity novelists, D. H. Lawrence was a failure in financial terms. At that time notoriety did not inevitably turn into cash. Although D. H. Lawrence was able to live off his writing for the last dozen years of his life he was never well off. While some editors, notably Ford Madox Ford and Edward Garnett, quickly spotted his genius, his only real commercial success was with the privately printed edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which bought him a decent sum in the late 1920s.
[Page5]

D. H. Lawrance in a nutshell Source: Wikipedia”

“David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour. D. H. Lawrence‘s unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his “savage pilgrimage.” At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.” Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence’s fiction within the canonical “great tradition” of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists object to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works.

D. H Lawrence Quotes

Also read https://www.bunpeiris.org/thomas-hardy/, if you are in search of a post in same grain-universality-of-themes-in-fiction.

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