The Living Novel by V.S. Pritchett

Author:V.S. Pritchett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1946-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sons and Lovers

What of the writers who came out of World War II? D. H. Lawrence—can he tell us anything; how does he seem now? A great influence, like Wells was, on ordinary conduct; a whole generation dropped the puritan tradition and made love after the fashion of Lawrence’s new puritanism. The cult of sex was also a protest against the ignoble atmosphere of city life. Wells supplied the blue print for free-love; Lawrence replied with the content. It was a new content for marriage. Free-love awakens Lawrence’s irony; he admires the restlessness of it but sees that it is governed by the law of diminishing returns. Like Wells, too, Lawrence is one of the journalist-novelists. He writes a novel a year about his travels and the mistakes of his friends, a religious journalist where Wells is political. Has Lawrence had any influence on contemporary writers? Yes, he is responsible for the fact that no living writer has any idea of how to write about sexual love. Lawrence’s phallic cult was a disaster to descriptive writing. The ecstasies of sexual sensation are no more to be described than the ecstasies of music which they resemble. The realism of the Chinese Golden Lotus, for example, makes Lawrence look silly. But above all, it was fatal for imitators of Lawrence to pick up his contagious manner and leave the beliefs that did so much to create the manner; on the other hand, no one could possibly believe what Lawrence believed, and Lawrence hated people if they tried, because he believed in the inviolable, personal contradictions. One day when Lawrence and Frieda were out riding in Mexico, Frieda cried out, “Oh, it’s wonderful, wonderful to feel his great thighs moving, to feel his powerful legs!” “Rubbish, Frieda,” Lawrence shouted back. “Don’t talk like that. You have been reading my books. You don’t feel anything of the sort.” Quite rightly and consistently Lawrence allowed no one to believe what he believed. All the same, Frieda persisted; she did feel like that! Certainly she wanted to feel like that. Lawrence’s teachings are interesting because they are a compendium of what a whole generation wanted to feel, until Hitler arose, just after Lawrence’s death, and they saw where the dark unconsciousness was leading them. Seen in this light, Lawrence represented the last phase of the Romantic movement: random, irresponsible egotism, power for power’s sake, the blood cult of Rosenberg. And Lawrence was representative, because tens of thousands of people in England and Europe were uprooted people, like himself.

Still, that was only one of the lights in which Lawrence could be read. The man of genius is a melting-pot and everything that came to the surface in the English soul between 1910 and 1940 can be found in Lawrence. We are interested now not in what he taught—if it was teaching—but in his disposition: and that is vivid the moment we pick up any of his writings. First of all, the whole of England, before and after the last war, acted upon Lawrence’s imagination.

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