INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
33
something that would make my life nicer or bigger, although there
never was an author who consciously undertook to make life so
large. When I read Lawrence today it is to add to my knowledge of
him, not to my imagination of me, and this change might certainly
have its disconcerting personal implications.
But then, what do you read Lawrence for, Norman, you who
were so barely born the year he died? To learn about you? I doubt
it. The situation is as archeological for you as it is for me; there are
always these unfathomable reaches of History which you in some
subtle fashion put between yourself and anything that happened be–
fore
this
very instant. I'm talking not only of you, of course, or of
the things you've written, but of an anxiety about time which seems
to me to be common among your literary contemporaries: you all
have this sense of time as a kind of cultural bulldozer laying total
waste to the land with each flip of the calendar, you're as sensitive
to the shifts in decades as we were to the passage of a century. For
all of you an examination of yourselves as you were yesterday is like
an adventure into a lost civilization. It's what accounts of course for
your shared precocity, the speed and thoroughness with which you
leave your yesterdays behind you. But it's also what accounts for
your
schmerz,
the big hole at the center of your present which you
wait for the future to fill. You like to blame this emptiness on your
immediate culture rather than on a defect in your historical connec–
tion. Your refusal of any but your strictly contemporary experience,
a refusal which is implicit in your compulsive historicity-this is the
way it was in the '20s, this is the way it was in the '30s-is resistance
in
its essence, a rejection of the very idea of self-knowledge whose
core, after all, is a recognition that the human circumstance is not
one's own invention.
But to get back to my difficulties with Lawrence. It was surely
quite possible that I was reluctant to retrace my experience of so
personally involving an author. It had also occurred to me that per–
haps I had talked myself out: it always makes an interesting specu–
lation why an author is suddenly revived;
in
the last year or two
Lawrence has strangely reappeared in our conversational lives, people
seem to be clumsily edging up to the notion that perhaps here is a
man who still has something to say to us. But now I know this isn't
the explanation either, I've discovered what has really been troubling
