Alan Friedman
THE OTHER LAWRENCE
With a writer as unsettling as Lawrence, it's best to start
with the worst.
His
repetitions, his tone-deaf prose,
his
hysterical
vagueness, the amateur sexual comings and goings-on, the rhetoric
of prophecy and the theology of fascism, all that irrational mystical
bombast he foisted on the novel- a fog - murk between the
reader and
his
experience of fiction. So I once thought. And
Lawrence's clamorous fans I cynically imagined I understood: sexual
politics had distorted the judgment of otherwise intelligent people.
TIllngs look different to me now. Lawrence is getting better
all
the
time. It's taken time and it's clear why. I had been exhorted by the
tradition of the English novel which culminates in F. R. Leavis to
look in the novel for what the novel can give.
This
is still a delimit–
ing expectation and an honorable aesthetic. But I have learned to
look for more. I've come to expect, perhaps to demand, and some–
times I
think
to crave for what the novel as a kind of prose narra–
tive cannot reasonably be expected to give readers. And I've come
to understand - each time I venture into Lawrence again it's the
same story of my impatience followed by my reluctant rediscovery -
that where I was once disturbed by the roughness of the writing (I
still
am), I am now also disturbed, and
in the same passages,
oy the
kind of illumination that goes beyond what the art of the novel,
aspects of the novel, the rise of the novel, the great tradition of the
novel, the craft of fiction, the rhetoric of fiction and the forms of
fiction, together or singly, can provide.
"
"They haunted the back of the common day," he wrote in a
striking line from
The Rainbow.
The phrase locates
his
fiction foc
us. The great tradition of the English novel haunts the front of the
