1 00:00:11,880 --> 00:00:18,690 OK. Behold the man aged 21 in nineteen eighty six. 2 00:00:18,690 --> 00:00:28,860 And here we are over a century later, at the end of a line representing very crudely, according to my estimate, his popularity over time. 3 00:00:28,860 --> 00:00:34,150 Those of you I don't know if anybody did came to my George Eliot lectures last term, 4 00:00:34,150 --> 00:00:38,670 may remember I produced a similar graph for her reception history. 5 00:00:38,670 --> 00:00:46,350 As in this as in that case, the line is crude in that it doesn't distinguish between academic and popular opinion, 6 00:00:46,350 --> 00:00:55,920 between the popularity of the man and of his works, between different of his works with which he's been identified over time. 7 00:00:55,920 --> 00:01:03,780 And it's concerned only with his reputation in England, which has some correlation with that in the States, 8 00:01:03,780 --> 00:01:09,860 but far less so with that, for example, in China or Estonia. 9 00:01:09,860 --> 00:01:15,290 Both George Eliot and Lawrence had a mid century slump, 10 00:01:15,290 --> 00:01:24,860 although in Elliott's case it occurred slightly later in the early 1930s in Lawrences, it coincided with the war. 11 00:01:24,860 --> 00:01:30,350 The feminist criticism of the 70s gave a slight knock to George Eliot, 12 00:01:30,350 --> 00:01:36,050 who was contrasted to other writers are the female writers who were more solidly feminist. 13 00:01:36,050 --> 00:01:43,640 But it gave a swingeing blow to Lawrence, from which I would argue he still hasn't recovered. 14 00:01:43,640 --> 00:01:55,250 Still, in both cases, their reputation since 1980 has been gently on the rise, and new avenues of interpretation are still being opened. 15 00:01:55,250 --> 00:02:05,900 During his own life, his popular and critical success was limited, in part by the difficulties he had with the very publication of his works. 16 00:02:05,900 --> 00:02:15,650 The Rainbow was published on the 30th of September 1915 by Algernon Mathurin, who was then alerted that the chapter, called Shame, 17 00:02:15,650 --> 00:02:26,030 in which Ursula has a sexualised relationship with her schoolteacher, Winifred might fall foul of the eighteen fifty seven Obscene Publications Act. 18 00:02:26,030 --> 00:02:35,450 Matthew and therefore voluntarily withdrew the book and on November the third rendered to the authorities the remaining copies. 19 00:02:35,450 --> 00:02:40,970 This hit Lawrence very hard and contributed to the mood in which he wrote Women in Love. 20 00:02:40,970 --> 00:02:49,850 Its very title bites its thumb at the authorities, which defined representations of lesbianism as obscene. 21 00:02:49,850 --> 00:02:58,760 The irony, of course, is that the novel itself judges its lesbian relationship to be corrupt so that the novel Being the Rainbow. 22 00:02:58,760 --> 00:03:07,130 And here perhaps we have an example of that battle which has been fought in many times and cultures between those who show their disapproval of 23 00:03:07,130 --> 00:03:17,990 something by representing it negatively and those who show their disapproval by repressing its representation under any circumstances at all. 24 00:03:17,990 --> 00:03:21,980 The first version of Women in Love was completed in 1915, 25 00:03:21,980 --> 00:03:29,450 and Lawrence described it to his agent Pinker as a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel. 26 00:03:29,450 --> 00:03:35,960 You will hate it and nobody will publish it but that these things are beyond us. 27 00:03:35,960 --> 00:03:44,870 He was right. Nobody would publish it. He was trying to publish an unpatriotic apocalypse during the First World War. 28 00:03:44,870 --> 00:03:53,780 So his Ukrainian friend, Samuel Solomonov, Cuttle Jansky, suggested Russia as a possible place for its publication. 29 00:03:53,780 --> 00:03:58,010 And it's interesting to imagine how it would have been received in translation 30 00:03:58,010 --> 00:04:05,150 there a country which was far more obviously going through an apocalypse. 31 00:04:05,150 --> 00:04:14,600 My guess is that it would have been very well received. Birkins vision of a world cleared of humanity and nothing but uninterrupted grass and a hair 32 00:04:14,600 --> 00:04:21,020 sitting up is a moderate vision compared to what Russian avant garde artists were imagining, 33 00:04:21,020 --> 00:04:23,720 both before and after 1917. 34 00:04:23,720 --> 00:04:33,470 They created works of art which were not only meant to predict or advocate, but actually to take part in and constitute the apocalypse. 35 00:04:33,470 --> 00:04:42,830 In December 1913, the year in which Lawrence began work on the sisters, that sprawling work which he then split into the rainbow and Women in Love, 36 00:04:42,830 --> 00:04:50,240 the painter Malevich and fellow artists produced an opera called Victory over the Sun. 37 00:04:50,240 --> 00:04:58,580 It ended up with the on stage extinction of the sun, which represented history and nature. 38 00:04:58,580 --> 00:05:03,320 The actors then told the audience who had been forced to stand in the middle of the 39 00:05:03,320 --> 00:05:10,340 room wearing happy masks to go home to Russia in 1915 was an environment in which, 40 00:05:10,340 --> 00:05:14,360 if the paper could have been found for printing and that wouldn't have been easy. 41 00:05:14,360 --> 00:05:19,610 Women in love would have been welcomed as my guests, but it was never pursued. 42 00:05:19,610 --> 00:05:23,750 Instead, Lawrence rewrote the novel, the revised version, 43 00:05:23,750 --> 00:05:30,500 which is now that which is now published under the name of Women in Love, differed from what you can now read. 44 00:05:30,500 --> 00:05:36,380 And it's published under the name The First Women in Love in a number of ways. 45 00:05:36,380 --> 00:05:40,850 The latter version is more influenced by esoteric reading. 46 00:05:40,850 --> 00:05:47,990 It was more engaged with the wariness of what was the soon to be post-war generation. 47 00:05:47,990 --> 00:05:54,290 It was more ironic the sisters were more contemptuous of the common people. 48 00:05:54,290 --> 00:06:01,310 Crucially, its ending was less hopeful. The first version ended with the words, We needn't be like that. 49 00:06:01,310 --> 00:06:07,100 This is Burkin. All is not lost because many are lost. 50 00:06:07,100 --> 00:06:09,620 There's a First World War sentiment for you. 51 00:06:09,620 --> 00:06:20,200 Donald Carswell, Katherine Carswell, husband and a lawyer read this version and was concerned that it would be vulnerable to charges of libel. 52 00:06:20,200 --> 00:06:26,530 Lady Autoline morale compare with the visual description of her Maione in Women in Love. 53 00:06:26,530 --> 00:06:32,290 Lady Autoline morale read a typescript and was greatly hurt to see what she understood to be a portrait of 54 00:06:32,290 --> 00:06:40,090 herself in harmony with the usual irony in such cases that she saw that high minie represent resembled herself, 55 00:06:40,090 --> 00:06:46,390 but argued that she did not resemble her, meaning the art, as Lawrence called her, 56 00:06:46,390 --> 00:06:53,290 expressed her pain to many friends, and the affair caused a sensation in Bloomsbury. 57 00:06:53,290 --> 00:07:02,290 She had the sympathy of others who also felt that Lawrence had unfairly attacked them, including her on off lover Bertrand Russell. 58 00:07:02,290 --> 00:07:07,930 Lady Autoline and Lawrence were entirely estranged for 11 years. 59 00:07:07,930 --> 00:07:13,930 In 1917, the same Algernon Mathurin, who had published and then recalled the Rainbow, 60 00:07:13,930 --> 00:07:19,360 accepted the new version of Women in Love before in December 1917. 61 00:07:19,360 --> 00:07:25,240 Revoking that decision again, Sir Lawrence set about changing it again, 62 00:07:25,240 --> 00:07:31,000 notably in response to a threat of libel action from Lawrence's friend Hasseltine. 63 00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:40,360 He changed the characters of Haliday and the Possum to disguise their resemblance to the actual hasseltine and his on off mistress, 64 00:07:40,360 --> 00:07:45,010 the model Minnie Channing nicknamed the Puma. 65 00:07:45,010 --> 00:07:52,180 So he called the person Minett, and he turned her from a brunette, which is what the puma was into a blonde. 66 00:07:52,180 --> 00:07:55,840 And he made Haliday dark and slim, which he wasn't. 67 00:07:55,840 --> 00:08:04,270 These changes have been reversed in the Cambridge edition, which is why you are presumably all familiar with the dark bobbed possum and a plump, 68 00:08:04,270 --> 00:08:10,900 pale haliday lady afterlives husband threatened legal action but didn't proceed with it. 69 00:08:10,900 --> 00:08:19,570 So finally, in November 1920, it was published, but not in England in the States by Thomas Seltzer, 70 00:08:19,570 --> 00:08:24,010 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took out an action against it, 71 00:08:24,010 --> 00:08:31,130 but Seltzer won the case and Martin Secours Edition came out in England the following year. 72 00:08:31,130 --> 00:08:42,270 In both countries, but especially America, the novel was a moderate popular success, and it changed his financial fortunes for the rest of his life. 73 00:08:42,270 --> 00:08:49,380 The third and last novel, which had major problems with publication, was, of course, Lady Chatterley's Lover. 74 00:08:49,380 --> 00:08:58,560 He wrote three versions of this, not only because he wanted to make changes, but because the first two versions were rejected. 75 00:08:58,560 --> 00:09:02,310 He even had difficulties getting it typed. Same is true of Ulysses. 76 00:09:02,310 --> 00:09:08,550 Of course, his typist got up to a certain point and then refused to go on. 77 00:09:08,550 --> 00:09:13,770 So Catherine Caswell stepped in to type the secretary to take the rest of the first half. 78 00:09:13,770 --> 00:09:18,210 And Maria Huxley, wife of Aldous Huxley, typed the second. 79 00:09:18,210 --> 00:09:27,210 In the end, Lawrence got the third volume sorry, third version of his novel, privately published by Florentine publisher O'Rielly. 80 00:09:27,210 --> 00:09:34,260 And then soon afterwards, a French publisher came out with a cheaper edition and then there were many pirated editions. 81 00:09:34,260 --> 00:09:41,250 By nineteen twenty nine, British authorities were seising copies at the English ports, 82 00:09:41,250 --> 00:09:50,780 the same year in which Lawrence gave the first and only exhibition of his paintings at Warren Gallery in Mayfair. 83 00:09:50,780 --> 00:10:01,430 After a member of the of the public complained police seised 13 of the 25 paintings and held them in a police cell. 84 00:10:01,430 --> 00:10:07,570 Lawrence was only able to recover them by undertaking not to show them in England again. 85 00:10:07,570 --> 00:10:15,550 In the following year, he died, the obituaries, predictably, were mixed. 86 00:10:15,550 --> 00:10:23,890 Then in the next year, 1931, John Middleton Murray published his psycho biography of Lawrence, son of Woman. 87 00:10:23,890 --> 00:10:31,420 I mentioned this towards the end of the lecture on Lawrence and Christianity, but I didn't have then have time to say much about it. 88 00:10:31,420 --> 00:10:36,730 It shouldn't be assumed that because this book was considered by Lawrence's friends to be an 89 00:10:36,730 --> 00:10:42,970 act of betrayal that is in their eyes and Laurentian critic necessarily disapprove of it. 90 00:10:42,970 --> 00:10:49,510 I think it's one of the most interesting and at times perceptive books about him that's ever been written. 91 00:10:49,510 --> 00:10:54,610 But it is about him rather than his writings on their own terms. 92 00:10:54,610 --> 00:10:59,680 His works are interpreted entirely as extensions of himself. 93 00:10:59,680 --> 00:11:08,380 Lawrence is therefore the white peacocks, Cyril and Aníbal, and conversely, Aníbal is the key to Laurence. 94 00:11:08,380 --> 00:11:15,370 The Psycho biographical biographical thesis is that Lawrence had an extraordinary capacity to love, 95 00:11:15,370 --> 00:11:22,630 but he was frightened by this capacity and so he ran away from it and denounced it. 96 00:11:22,630 --> 00:11:30,210 It also argues that Lawrence was physically frail and therefore unable to meet Frida's sexual demands. 97 00:11:30,210 --> 00:11:39,160 It is rumoured that Freeda wanted to or did have an affair with Murray when she briefly returned from New Mexico to England on her own. 98 00:11:39,160 --> 00:11:52,990 For both reasons, Murray argues, Lawrence's love turned to hate of himself, the world, sensuality, and especially women of women in love. 99 00:11:52,990 --> 00:12:00,040 He Murray writes, I believe that Lawrence changed while Women in Love was actually being written, 100 00:12:00,040 --> 00:12:07,150 that he really did mean to reject the way of sensuality and dissolution and that he succumbed to it in spite of himself. 101 00:12:07,150 --> 00:12:15,930 He confused the two. He finds Fantasia of the unconscious to be Lawrence's greatest book, 102 00:12:15,930 --> 00:12:24,420 but to be a high point that he couldn't hold, quote, at bottom, he was not concerned with art. 103 00:12:24,420 --> 00:12:29,340 This fits with several Critics' comments during his life that he was not really a novelist, 104 00:12:29,340 --> 00:12:37,830 he was a philosopher and or a poet, a point which was also made by contemporary critics of Emily Bronte. 105 00:12:37,830 --> 00:12:44,340 So amongst Lawrence's novels, Murray views values Arun's Rhod most highly because in it, 106 00:12:44,340 --> 00:12:50,730 Lawrence demonstrates some self-knowledge, including of his desire for a male partner. 107 00:12:50,730 --> 00:12:56,040 From this point on, according to Murray, the power urge takes over. 108 00:12:56,040 --> 00:12:59,820 This opinion in particular has been highly influential. 109 00:12:59,820 --> 00:13:09,090 He denounces the stories the princess and the the woman who rode away as very bad stories in the plumed serpent, he says. 110 00:13:09,090 --> 00:13:17,580 Lawrence rises again as Arama Rahman Carrasco and Lady Chatterley's Lover is Lawrence's creeping, 111 00:13:17,580 --> 00:13:22,230 creeping back into the womb with a return to his old problems, 112 00:13:22,230 --> 00:13:33,450 including precisely the mentalising version of sex which he tried so strongly to denounce in his response to the escaped cock or the man who died. 113 00:13:33,450 --> 00:13:36,540 He pits Lawrence directly against Christ. 114 00:13:36,540 --> 00:13:46,380 As I mentioned before, he says that Lawrence had nothing to teach people about how to deal with death and bereavement, whereas Jesus did. 115 00:13:46,380 --> 00:13:53,340 Lawrence gradually disintegrated his own integrity and to recreate a quotation I gave before he 116 00:13:53,340 --> 00:13:59,610 became the anti type of the man who is from the beginning and will be to the end his veritable hero, 117 00:13:59,610 --> 00:14:11,940 Jesus Christ. Correspondingly, only Jesus can judge Lawrence because he loved, as Lawrence did, but overcame whatever fear he felt through Lawrence. 118 00:14:11,940 --> 00:14:20,820 Then we learnt to know ourselves. Murray argues in a way in which men have never known themselves before. 119 00:14:20,820 --> 00:14:28,480 If he was crucified as she surely was, it was for us that he was crucified. 120 00:14:28,480 --> 00:14:36,610 The terms on which one agrees or disagrees with Murray will be large scale and will, of course, include ones attitudes towards Jesus. 121 00:14:36,610 --> 00:14:42,700 But most critics today would argue that Murray made certain mistakes of interpretation and that he made several 122 00:14:42,700 --> 00:14:49,600 perceptive points in the former category would be his assertion that Lawrence had no sense of humour and his 123 00:14:49,600 --> 00:14:58,030 interpretation of Birkins demand for separateness as a demand for cold sensuality in the latter category would 124 00:14:58,030 --> 00:15:05,980 fall Murray's understanding that Lawrence imaginatively endured the war and that it saturates his writings. 125 00:15:05,980 --> 00:15:13,960 Some might also agree with his argument that Lawrence confused his own needs with general necessity. 126 00:15:13,960 --> 00:15:19,930 Murray candidly states that his relationship with Lawrence was ultimately a painful failure. 127 00:15:19,930 --> 00:15:26,200 He says that he set up the Adelphi magazine for Lawrence to take over from him, 128 00:15:26,200 --> 00:15:34,290 but that when Lawrence returned from Mexico, his first words to Murray at the station were, I can't bear it. 129 00:15:34,290 --> 00:15:42,750 He tried to convince Murray to go back to Mexico with him in order to found Rantanen there, but he returned to Mexico without him. 130 00:15:42,750 --> 00:15:48,120 Their friendship over the book as a whole is very Laurentian. 131 00:15:48,120 --> 00:15:53,430 He uses some of Lawrence's Lexus and he takes them entirely seriously. 132 00:15:53,430 --> 00:15:59,370 Unlike some contemporary and subsequent critics, he does not mock. 133 00:15:59,370 --> 00:16:07,020 He ends by saying this betrayal he puts it in inverted commas, was the one thing you lacked. 134 00:16:07,020 --> 00:16:12,480 The one thing I had to give that you might shine forth for amongst men. 135 00:16:12,480 --> 00:16:17,120 The thing of wonder that you were. 136 00:16:17,120 --> 00:16:30,110 T.S. Eliot called the book brilliant and definitive and said that the victim and the sacrificial knife are perfectly adapted to each other. 137 00:16:30,110 --> 00:16:38,890 Part of the background to this is that Murray and Eliot have been enemies running the rival journals, Adelphi and Criterium. 138 00:16:38,890 --> 00:16:47,530 Elliott delighted to see his former enemy turn against his own former idol, someone he had always disliked. 139 00:16:47,530 --> 00:16:56,080 Indeed, when E.M. Forster, in his obituary of Lawrence, had called him the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation. 140 00:16:56,080 --> 00:17:04,690 Elliot asked him to explain what he meant in that phrase by each of the world's greatest imaginative and novelist. 141 00:17:04,690 --> 00:17:11,020 Faustus reply to this is a riposte, perhaps, to keep up your sleeve in the case of being similarly defeated in an argument 142 00:17:11,020 --> 00:17:15,400 when you nonetheless remain convinced of the rightness of the opposition. 143 00:17:15,400 --> 00:17:25,390 He argued that Elliott had entangled him in a web, but that on such occasions he would prefer to be a fly than a spider. 144 00:17:25,390 --> 00:17:35,020 In a sense, Murray's book or did almost as much for Lawrence's reputation as harm to it by provoking others to leap to his defence. 145 00:17:35,020 --> 00:17:43,780 One of these others was the young F.R. Leavis, who in any case thought that he discerned digs at him in this book. 146 00:17:43,780 --> 00:17:48,130 Leavis had been had been a disciple of Elliotts, 147 00:17:48,130 --> 00:17:54,370 but now he turned against him and along with a group of his fellow Cambridge students sympathetic to Lawrence, 148 00:17:54,370 --> 00:18:03,880 set up a new journal as a rival to Elliotts Criterion. Some of the students wanted the title to be Phoenix, the Christian symbol of resurrection, 149 00:18:03,880 --> 00:18:09,730 which Lawrence had adopted as his own in 1914 and repeatedly sketched. 150 00:18:09,730 --> 00:18:14,440 But in the end, the title Adult adopted was less narrowly Laurentian. 151 00:18:14,440 --> 00:18:21,280 It was scrutiny. In this journal, Leavis defended Lawrence with vigour. 152 00:18:21,280 --> 00:18:30,550 Here was a man with the clairvoyance and honesty of genius whose whole living was an assertion of what the modern world has lost. 153 00:18:30,550 --> 00:18:38,500 He particularly admired Lady Chatterley's Lover and the short stories, but was lukewarm about the rainbow and women in love. 154 00:18:38,500 --> 00:18:42,930 In part, he was still Elliot's disciple. 155 00:18:42,930 --> 00:18:51,390 The other defence came from Kathryn Carswell, who published The Savage Pilgrimage in 1932, like son of a Woman and indeed, 156 00:18:51,390 --> 00:18:59,400 like much discussion of Lawrence in the 1930s, it was concerned less with Lawrence's art than with his soul. 157 00:18:59,400 --> 00:19:08,310 It bravely vindicated Lawrence's sexual prowess and negatively praised the plumed serpent as his greatest novel. 158 00:19:08,310 --> 00:19:12,210 If that sounds eccentric, she was not alone in this opinion. 159 00:19:12,210 --> 00:19:19,600 E.M. Forster had made the same judgement in a radio broadcast two years before. 160 00:19:19,600 --> 00:19:29,020 In the same year, Lawrence's late best friend, last best friend, Aldous Huxley, came out with an edition of his letters Leavis. 161 00:19:29,020 --> 00:19:33,490 This, in reviewing these letters, commented that they showed that Lawrence was normal. 162 00:19:33,490 --> 00:19:45,070 And this is a favourite of mine saying to the point of genius. This he also said that Lawrence was the greatest literary critic of his time, 163 00:19:45,070 --> 00:19:52,090 this unnamed bullet was meant for Elliott, but he also made explicit attacks. 164 00:19:52,090 --> 00:20:00,880 He said that Lawrence offered serious classicism as opposed to Elliotts classy osity, that Lawrence was life affirming. 165 00:20:00,880 --> 00:20:05,030 T.S. Eliot was life denying. 166 00:20:05,030 --> 00:20:14,810 In 1934, Frida's memoirs of Lawrence, made up largely of extracts from his letters, came out under the title Not I, but the Wind. 167 00:20:14,810 --> 00:20:21,180 This is worth reading, particularly for its moving portrayal of Lawrence's death. 168 00:20:21,180 --> 00:20:28,020 And in 1935, Jesse Chambers's memoirs came out, D.H. Lawrence, a personal record. 169 00:20:28,020 --> 00:20:34,890 This is a useful complement to Frida's book because it covers the early years before he met her in the 30s. 170 00:20:34,890 --> 00:20:41,940 Also saw many posthumous writings come out, particularly non-fiction, poetry and plays. 171 00:20:41,940 --> 00:20:49,290 They included Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, sketches of Etruscan places and other Italian essays, 172 00:20:49,290 --> 00:20:54,060 last poems, more Pansy's Fire and other poems and the plays. 173 00:20:54,060 --> 00:20:57,810 The Fight for Barbara and a Collier's Friday night. 174 00:20:57,810 --> 00:21:06,090 A lot of non-fiction, including a study of Thomas Hardy, was collected in a volume called Phoenix in 1936. 175 00:21:06,090 --> 00:21:15,180 The fact that the the Laurentian Erva itself was changing affected how the works previously published were read. 176 00:21:15,180 --> 00:21:18,600 In particular, the non-fiction was used to understand, 177 00:21:18,600 --> 00:21:27,330 perhaps also to forgive aspects of the fiction which had been found incomprehensible or rebarbative. 178 00:21:27,330 --> 00:21:36,430 The truth is the war. Lawrence had plenty to say about mechanical destruction, militarism and the First World War, 179 00:21:36,430 --> 00:21:42,160 but not in a way that spoke to many people, it would seem, during the second. 180 00:21:42,160 --> 00:21:46,540 He was also accused by some of Proteau fascism, for example. 181 00:21:46,540 --> 00:21:56,370 But Bertrand Russell, who in nineteen fifty three claimed that Lawrence's writings had led, quote, straight to Auschwitz. 182 00:21:56,370 --> 00:22:07,860 Having said this, Lawrence did have the support of certain prominent left wing cultural figures, including Ordon Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly, 183 00:22:07,860 --> 00:22:15,990 during the war itself, resistance to Lawrence Moore took the form of marginalisation, then attack. 184 00:22:15,990 --> 00:22:24,420 The 1950s was the take off decade for Lawrence kicked off by Richard Eddington's biography of him in 1950, 185 00:22:24,420 --> 00:22:32,310 Hyneman produced the Phoenix edition of The Complete Works, complete insofar as they were known across the 50s. 186 00:22:32,310 --> 00:22:39,450 These red cloth covered towns are still to be found knocking around in college libraries. 187 00:22:39,450 --> 00:22:45,960 This is the place to go for the blonde minett, the Slim Haliday and the Lady Chatterley's Lover, 188 00:22:45,960 --> 00:22:53,440 for which I flipped through for the most interesting parts when I was about 12 and wondered what the fuss could have been about. 189 00:22:53,440 --> 00:23:00,670 More importantly, a rather older Leavis emerged as the St. Paul of the Laurentian Gospel in his 190 00:23:00,670 --> 00:23:06,610 articles for scrutiny and is nineteen fifty five book D.H. Lawrence Kolon novelist, 191 00:23:06,610 --> 00:23:14,410 which reprised and built on a number of those articles. For those of you who don't yet know Leavis, you do. 192 00:23:14,410 --> 00:23:19,180 He has entered the bloodstream of Anglophone literary criticism and Flo's even, 193 00:23:19,180 --> 00:23:24,340 or perhaps especially in those people who most most particularly repudiate him. 194 00:23:24,340 --> 00:23:31,360 He taught at Downing College, Cambridge from 1927 to 62 and wrote nine major books. 195 00:23:31,360 --> 00:23:37,330 His criticism combined new critical attention to language with Protestant moral seriousness 196 00:23:37,330 --> 00:23:43,930 and the largest possible claims for the importance of literary criticism as a subject. 197 00:23:43,930 --> 00:23:54,010 Indeed, he thought of English as the central subject in any university from people from which people can then go out to become doctors, 198 00:23:54,010 --> 00:23:54,970 prime ministers, 199 00:23:54,970 --> 00:24:07,960 solicitors, farmers, or perhaps best of all, schoolteachers of English and do this job better and live better by virtue of that education. 200 00:24:07,960 --> 00:24:13,140 The fact that I sympathise with this view is one of the reasons that I do what I do. 201 00:24:13,140 --> 00:24:20,040 He profoundly affected two generations of students who went on to become school teachers and to send their students, 202 00:24:20,040 --> 00:24:25,290 many of them, to study English at Cambridge, preferably at Downing. 203 00:24:25,290 --> 00:24:29,780 And the modern novelist whom he most championed was, of course, Lawrence. 204 00:24:29,780 --> 00:24:40,500 His book on Lawrence followed the great tradition of 1948 in which he had argued, and I quote, The great English novelists are Jane Austen, 205 00:24:40,500 --> 00:24:49,500 George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad to stop for the moment at that comparatively safe place in history. 206 00:24:49,500 --> 00:24:56,220 In the last few pages, he added that Lawrence was probably Conrad's successor. 207 00:24:56,220 --> 00:25:02,070 Then, seven years later in D.H. Lawrence, novelist, he goes on to confirm this. 208 00:25:02,070 --> 00:25:09,210 He argues that, quote, Lawrence belongs to the same ethical and religious tradition as George Eliot, 209 00:25:09,210 --> 00:25:17,670 both of them provincial Protestants, nonconformists, and that Eliot would have approved the opening parts of the rainbow. 210 00:25:17,670 --> 00:25:23,880 However, where Eliot is ethical, Lawrence is religious. 211 00:25:23,880 --> 00:25:30,120 He has neither working class resentment of the upper classes nor snobbery. 212 00:25:30,120 --> 00:25:35,280 Leavis is still in this book fighting his battles against Eliot, who, of course, 213 00:25:35,280 --> 00:25:40,590 was still alive, I repeat, with, if possible, even greater conviction. 214 00:25:40,590 --> 00:25:48,450 What I have said before, Lawrence has an unfailingly sure sense of the difference between that which makes for life. 215 00:25:48,450 --> 00:25:52,410 This is very much the literate vocabulary of Leavis and of his time, 216 00:25:52,410 --> 00:26:02,460 that which makes for life and that which makes against it of the difference between health and that which turns away from health. 217 00:26:02,460 --> 00:26:07,920 It is this that makes him so much better a critic than Eliot, whose major value judgements, 218 00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:17,360 when he risks them, especially in the contemporary field, have nearly always been bad, often disastrously bad. 219 00:26:17,360 --> 00:26:23,510 So rather than rejecting the terms in which Eliot and Murray had criticised Lawrence, 220 00:26:23,510 --> 00:26:36,440 he reverses them and argues for Lawrence's spiritual health and normative tea leaves, also argues that you have to choose between Lawrence and Joyce. 221 00:26:36,440 --> 00:26:40,490 And he encourages, of course, to choose Lawrence as the healthier, 222 00:26:40,490 --> 00:26:47,210 the more truly creative, even though he had less obvious influence on subsequent writers. 223 00:26:47,210 --> 00:26:55,130 Quote, It is true that we can point to the influence of Joyce in a line of writers to which there is no parallel issue from Lawrence. 224 00:26:55,130 --> 00:27:05,990 He identifies a switch in Lawrences mode after sons and lovers when he became a most daring and radical innovator in form method technique. 225 00:27:05,990 --> 00:27:16,340 As far as the canon is concerned, he now places women in love at the peak just above the rainbow, both of which he called astonishing works of genius. 226 00:27:16,340 --> 00:27:27,170 He also says that the large body of short stories and nouvelle are as indubitably successful works of genius as any the world has to show. 227 00:27:27,170 --> 00:27:39,400 He decisively dismisses the plumed serpent. Many subsequent critics, if not the general public, have followed him in these relative rankings. 228 00:27:39,400 --> 00:27:48,430 Penguin Books responded to the Leavis driven rise in Lawrence's popularity and over the course of the 50s, reprinted many of his works. 229 00:27:48,430 --> 00:27:55,390 By nineteen fifty nine, they got around to publishing an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover. 230 00:27:55,390 --> 00:28:02,260 In May 1960. They decided to republish it in a reprise of the incident with the typist penguins. 231 00:28:02,260 --> 00:28:09,340 Normal printers refused to fulfil the contract. So another print was found. 232 00:28:09,340 --> 00:28:15,280 But Penguin was cautious and gave a police officer a dozen copies of the novel and said that 233 00:28:15,280 --> 00:28:20,920 they would hold back further release indefinitely until it was cleared for general sale. 234 00:28:20,920 --> 00:28:28,420 As Penguin feared, they were charged by the Director of Public Prosecutions at Bow Street Magistrates Court. 235 00:28:28,420 --> 00:28:36,490 Obscene publication formerly known as obscene libel, has been a common law offence in Britain for centuries. 236 00:28:36,490 --> 00:28:42,490 In 1857, it was codified under Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act. 237 00:28:42,490 --> 00:28:50,710 This had a major effect on subsequent Victorian literature because lending libraries such as Moodies refused to stock certain works, 238 00:28:50,710 --> 00:28:55,900 for example, by George Moore and Thomas Hardy out of fear of prosecution. 239 00:28:55,900 --> 00:28:59,200 It was because of this act that the rainbow was recalled, 240 00:28:59,200 --> 00:29:08,380 was because of this act that Ulysses was forbidden until American courts cleared it in 1933 and British courts decided to quietly allow it. 241 00:29:08,380 --> 00:29:12,040 After the Second World War, there was a wave of prosecutions for obscenity, 242 00:29:12,040 --> 00:29:17,020 and it was thought that that might it might be time for a reform of the law. 243 00:29:17,020 --> 00:29:22,600 In nineteen fifty nine, a new Obscene Publications Act was passed. 244 00:29:22,600 --> 00:29:31,730 It was milder in its definition of obscenity, was tighter, and it demanded that a work be considered as a whole, not just in terms of its parts. 245 00:29:31,730 --> 00:29:36,040 It allowed that certain material might be fit for adults and not children. 246 00:29:36,040 --> 00:29:39,340 It made a distinction between art and pornography, 247 00:29:39,340 --> 00:29:48,280 and it allowed a defence in terms of the public good penguin elected for trial by jury at the Old Bailey. 248 00:29:48,280 --> 00:29:53,590 They had really been testing out this new act in the publication that they'd done. 249 00:29:53,590 --> 00:30:00,130 The trial began on the 20th of October nineteen sixty before Lord Justice Byrne, 250 00:30:00,130 --> 00:30:08,440 the first counsel to the Crown and chief prosecutor was Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Griffith Jones, 251 00:30:08,440 --> 00:30:13,970 who had already led the prosecution for the British at the Nuremberg trials. 252 00:30:13,970 --> 00:30:20,390 Incidentally, his son is the reverend and valiant master of the temple. 253 00:30:20,390 --> 00:30:25,460 So if you ever happen to visit the Temple Church in the ends of court in London and find a man who 254 00:30:25,460 --> 00:30:31,640 looks like that he is happy to discuss his father's and indeed his mother's role in this affair, 255 00:30:31,640 --> 00:30:36,980 since he thinks that his father was very much influenced by his wife's reaction to the novel. 256 00:30:36,980 --> 00:30:46,820 The defence was led by Mr. Gerald Gardner QC, who went on to become a reforming Lord Chancellor from nineteen sixty four to 70. 257 00:30:46,820 --> 00:30:53,030 This was the period in which homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 were legalised, for example. 258 00:30:53,030 --> 00:30:56,900 The trial was six days long, but these days were not consecutive. 259 00:30:56,900 --> 00:31:01,880 There was some debate as to the circumstances under which the jury were allowed to be able to read the novel. 260 00:31:01,880 --> 00:31:07,550 It was decided that they should not be allowed to take it home because then other people in their households might be able to read it. 261 00:31:07,550 --> 00:31:10,880 So they had to sit in the jury room and read it day after day. 262 00:31:10,880 --> 00:31:17,660 It's like sitting in the Bodleian until the slowest person was done. There were nine men and three women. 263 00:31:17,660 --> 00:31:25,040 Their task was to decide whether the novel had a tendency such as the deprave and corrupt persons who were likely to read it, and if so, 264 00:31:25,040 --> 00:31:34,460 whether it was nevertheless in the public good in terms of science, literature, art, learning or anything else to publish it. 265 00:31:34,460 --> 00:31:37,700 The prosecution called no witnesses. 266 00:31:37,700 --> 00:31:45,980 The defence called witnesses, many of whom had already read the novel in a smuggled copy, of course, they would have to have in order to defend it. 267 00:31:45,980 --> 00:31:53,600 They included Dame Rebecca West, E.M. Forster, S. Day Lewis, the bishop of Woolwich, 268 00:31:53,600 --> 00:32:00,050 and three other prominent Anglicans and Oxford's own Helen Gardner. 269 00:32:00,050 --> 00:32:05,690 Crucially, Mr Norman's son John Stevens, who draughted the nineteen fifty nine Obscenity Act, 270 00:32:05,690 --> 00:32:09,500 said that I would not say that it was the best book Lawrence ever wrote, 271 00:32:09,500 --> 00:32:16,700 but I think it is a very well written book and is a contribution of considerable value to English literature. 272 00:32:16,700 --> 00:32:25,790 The chief parliamentary sponsor of the Obscene Publication Act, Roy Jenkins, also said that the novel was literature. 273 00:32:25,790 --> 00:32:36,320 Leavis, however, was not there. He refused to stand and defend what he called an inferior work by Lawrence and indeed, 274 00:32:36,320 --> 00:32:42,530 most of the witnesses who came for the defence admitted that there were bad passages in the book. 275 00:32:42,530 --> 00:32:50,210 Griffith Jones famously asked the prosecution, would you approve of your young son's young daughters reading this book? 276 00:32:50,210 --> 00:32:58,440 Is it a book you would wish to have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife and your servants to read? 277 00:32:58,440 --> 00:33:03,810 This raised a titter from the jury, the first of several which he was to raise in his opening speech, 278 00:33:03,810 --> 00:33:10,260 he said, but members of the jury, when you've seen this book, making all such allowances in favour of it as you can, 279 00:33:10,260 --> 00:33:18,750 the prosecution will invite you to say that it does tend certainly that it may tend to induce lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it. 280 00:33:18,750 --> 00:33:25,710 It goes further. You may say it sets upon a pedestal promiscuous and adulterous intercourse. 281 00:33:25,710 --> 00:33:32,400 It commends and indeed it sets out to commend sensuality almost as a virtue. 282 00:33:32,400 --> 00:33:39,900 It encourages and indeed even advocates coarseness and vulgarity of thought and of language. 283 00:33:39,900 --> 00:33:47,940 Later, he says, the book abounds in bawdy conversation, even a description of the girl's father, a royal academician, 284 00:33:47,940 --> 00:33:57,330 has to introduce a description of his legs and loins and members of the jury, even the old nurse who is eventually employed to look after her husband, 285 00:33:57,330 --> 00:34:02,290 the heroine's husband, without any point to it whatsoever, without adding anything at all, 286 00:34:02,290 --> 00:34:08,700 you may think to the story has to have her breasts felt by him while she is looking after him in his bed. 287 00:34:08,700 --> 00:34:19,020 Members of the jury, not only that type of background, but words, no doubt they will be said to be good old old Anglo-Saxon four letter words. 288 00:34:19,020 --> 00:34:23,100 And no doubt they are. But they appear again and again and again. 289 00:34:23,100 --> 00:34:29,790 These matters are not voiced normally in this court, but when it forms the whole subject matter of the prosecution and we cannot avoid voicing them, 290 00:34:29,790 --> 00:34:34,320 the words [INAUDIBLE] or [INAUDIBLE] occur no less than 30 times. 291 00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:39,570 I have added them up, but I do not I do not claim to have added them all up. 292 00:34:39,570 --> 00:34:51,390 [INAUDIBLE] 14 times balls 13 times [INAUDIBLE] and arse, six times a piece, cock four times, [INAUDIBLE] three times and so on. 293 00:34:51,390 --> 00:34:57,090 Gerald Gardner said, Do you know of any civilised country in which the unexpurgated book, 294 00:34:57,090 --> 00:35:04,770 the subject matter of this prosecution, cannot be bought except Lawrence's Commonwealth countries? 295 00:35:04,770 --> 00:35:12,180 On day five, he said Lawrence lived and died suffering from a public opinion caused by the banning of this book 296 00:35:12,180 --> 00:35:18,660 that he had written that he had written a piece of pure pornography called Lady Chatterley's Lover, 297 00:35:18,660 --> 00:35:20,400 and if this case is done, nothing else. 298 00:35:20,400 --> 00:35:26,460 It is enabled for the first time, this book to be dragged out into the light of day so we can see it for what it really is. 299 00:35:26,460 --> 00:35:30,420 And so those who are qualified to judge can express their opinion about it. 300 00:35:30,420 --> 00:35:33,900 The slur was never justified all the time. 301 00:35:33,900 --> 00:35:39,990 This book was a passionately sincere book of a moralist in the Puritan tradition 302 00:35:39,990 --> 00:35:47,160 who believed he had a message for us and the society in which we live, whether we agree with this message or not. 303 00:35:47,160 --> 00:35:53,850 Is it not time we rescued Lawrence's name from the quite unjust reputation which this book has always had and allow our people, 304 00:35:53,850 --> 00:35:58,230 his people to judge for themselves its high purpose? 305 00:35:58,230 --> 00:36:05,730 Members of the jury? I leave Lawrence's reputation and the reputation of Penguin Books with confidence in your hands. 306 00:36:05,730 --> 00:36:11,670 You rejected the suggestion made to Penguin Books that the novels Purple Passages be replaced by asterisks, 307 00:36:11,670 --> 00:36:16,510 pointing out that this would, quote, make the thing just a dirty book. 308 00:36:16,510 --> 00:36:26,700 Griffiths Jones specifically countered the defence of the novel's puritanism as it had been made by the bishop of Woolwich, something sacred. 309 00:36:26,700 --> 00:36:34,470 The bishop said, in the real sense, as an act of Holy Communion, that was the quotation of the bishop. 310 00:36:34,470 --> 00:36:42,510 Do you think that is how girls working in the factory are going to read this book as something sacred in the real sense of an act of Holy Communion? 311 00:36:42,510 --> 00:36:45,210 Or does it put my Lord Bishop, with all respect to him, 312 00:36:45,210 --> 00:36:51,570 wholly out of touch with a very large percentage of the number of people who are going to buy this book at around three and sixpence? 313 00:36:51,570 --> 00:36:56,730 He goes on to quote from the novel Beauty What Beauty? 314 00:36:56,730 --> 00:37:06,810 A sudden little flame of new awareness went through the unspeakable beauty to the touch of the warm living buttocks, 315 00:37:06,810 --> 00:37:15,690 the life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness, and the strange weight of the balls between his legs. 316 00:37:15,690 --> 00:37:21,180 That, again, I assume you say is puritanical answer. 317 00:37:21,180 --> 00:37:29,190 It is puritanical in its reverence. I say, what reverence to the balls, reverence to the weight of a man's balls. 318 00:37:29,190 --> 00:37:37,890 Answer indeed. Yes. Towards the end of the trial, he cites the passage, which strongly suggests anal sex should be remembered, 319 00:37:37,890 --> 00:37:45,120 that in nineteen sixty anal penetration between a man and a woman was still punishable by imprisonment for life. 320 00:37:45,120 --> 00:37:50,580 The defence had specifically stressed that there was no perversion in the book. 321 00:37:50,580 --> 00:37:58,590 After quoting the passage, Griffiths Jones relies heavily on the rhetorical device of a Perea pretended indecision. 322 00:37:58,590 --> 00:38:02,490 I do not know what it means. You will have to think. 323 00:38:02,490 --> 00:38:08,130 I do not know. I do not suggest there is more than one reading which you can put to those two pages if you want to take offence. 324 00:38:08,130 --> 00:38:12,870 Who knows what is the effect on the young man or woman reading these two pages? What is she going to think? 325 00:38:12,870 --> 00:38:16,230 Is it going to be a good influence? What is the tendency of it? 326 00:38:16,230 --> 00:38:20,880 What again is the good that a book can do in any book which contains a passage such as that? 327 00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:28,680 But it crucially will not name anal sex in court, perhaps because of the very sense of obscenity on which the prosecution is based. 328 00:38:28,680 --> 00:38:38,280 Had he done had the defence had to deal with this charge, then the outcome might have been different. 329 00:38:38,280 --> 00:38:42,570 The summing up of Judge Justice Byrne leant towards the prosecution. 330 00:38:42,570 --> 00:38:48,810 The jury were out for nearly three hours, after which they came back with the unanimous verdict of not guilty. 331 00:38:48,810 --> 00:38:54,750 The judge never asked whether their verdict was obscene, but justified or not obscene. 332 00:38:54,750 --> 00:39:00,630 So this is not known. There was clapping and cheering in the public gallery. 333 00:39:00,630 --> 00:39:08,610 Gardner immediately applied for costs because he said the defence had been expensive and the novel was being used as a test case for a new law. 334 00:39:08,610 --> 00:39:14,940 The judge, who was clearly disappointed by the verdict, made no order as to costs Lawrences. 335 00:39:14,940 --> 00:39:25,710 One surviving brother, George, who was then 88, said, I have followed the case with interest but disagree with the verdict. 336 00:39:25,710 --> 00:39:33,060 I don't think this book is fit for young people. These books that introduce a lot of sex I don't like. 337 00:39:33,060 --> 00:39:38,800 I had more than one argument with him, but I did not manage to persuade him. 338 00:39:38,800 --> 00:39:46,450 So here we have a smiling Sir Allen Lane, chairman of Penguin Books, during a press conference at the company's offices in High Hoeben, 339 00:39:46,450 --> 00:39:51,380 when he announced that it would be another week before the public could buy the book. 340 00:39:51,380 --> 00:39:53,030 And this is the second of November, 341 00:39:53,030 --> 00:40:01,460 nineteen sixty Leicester Square people waiting for the stroke of 12 when they would be able to buy the book for the first time. 342 00:40:01,460 --> 00:40:08,390 This is Stan Buckel, a window cleaner who bought a copy of the book in Leicester Square before going back to work. 343 00:40:08,390 --> 00:40:16,520 Of course, the case was an important precedent. Fanny Hill, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 344 00:40:16,520 --> 00:40:22,130 which was written in seventeen forty nine, was brought out in nineteen seventy without difficulty. 345 00:40:22,130 --> 00:40:26,870 More previously unpublished. Lawrence came out in the 60s 62. 346 00:40:26,870 --> 00:40:32,300 The Letters 60 for The Complete Poems. Sixty five. The Complete Plays 68. 347 00:40:32,300 --> 00:40:40,900 Phoenix too, which is mainly essays. By the end of the decade, Sons and Lovers was accepted onto the school syllabus. 348 00:40:40,900 --> 00:40:48,280 Lawrence's popularity also rose because he was working class and because that decade saw a sudden expansion in higher education, 349 00:40:48,280 --> 00:40:54,550 which meant that more men from the working classes were entering the professions, the newspapers and so on. 350 00:40:54,550 --> 00:41:04,270 The message of Lady Chatterley's Lover and indeed, if you like, of his own life, was that male sexual charisma could overcome class barriers. 351 00:41:04,270 --> 00:41:07,060 Raymond Williams, interviewed in nineteen seventy seven, 352 00:41:07,060 --> 00:41:16,330 said that if there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war to the point of caricature, it was Lawrence. 353 00:41:16,330 --> 00:41:21,100 He was someone to be, not just someone to admire. People, men, war. 354 00:41:21,100 --> 00:41:26,820 Lawrence, beards. But as has been repeatedly pointed out by Lawrence critics, 355 00:41:26,820 --> 00:41:35,430 the Association of Lawrence with the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s implicates Lawrence as a very largely unwilling partner. 356 00:41:35,430 --> 00:41:41,070 After all, in psychoanalysis and the unconscious he had written, our important moral standards are, 357 00:41:41,070 --> 00:41:46,740 in my opinion, quite sound and offer no serious bars to anybody. 358 00:41:46,740 --> 00:41:52,080 And sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. 359 00:41:52,080 --> 00:41:57,420 There must be the great purpose of inspiration, always present. 360 00:41:57,420 --> 00:42:04,680 That is why, as he said in studies in classic American literature of Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne and Sue Brideshead, 361 00:42:04,680 --> 00:42:08,610 these women are never satisfied till they have shattered the men who responded 362 00:42:08,610 --> 00:42:13,620 to them because sex is the most important thing they have in their lives. 363 00:42:13,620 --> 00:42:22,230 Wronski was wrong to resign his commission in the Army when he starts his career with Anna because it leaves him sex orientated. 364 00:42:22,230 --> 00:42:27,390 Lawrence responded to Russell's accusation that he was sex obsessed with the retaught. 365 00:42:27,390 --> 00:42:38,850 I'm not. But mind yourself, Bertie. In his essay on John Galsworthy, he specifically repudiated self consciously rebellious sex. 366 00:42:38,850 --> 00:42:45,090 Indeed, in his 1964 book The Quest for Love, the critic David Holbrook tried to present Lawrence, 367 00:42:45,090 --> 00:42:52,240 as did many of the witnesses in the Lady Chatterley trial, as a corrective to sexual looseness. 368 00:42:52,240 --> 00:42:58,450 From this point on, because of the very large amount of time I've spent getting from 1913 to 70, I'm going to speed up. 369 00:42:58,450 --> 00:43:03,610 But we are now entering critical territory, which in any case is probably more familiar to you. 370 00:43:03,610 --> 00:43:08,680 Lawrence's great popularity came to an end with feminist backlash. 371 00:43:08,680 --> 00:43:14,860 Kate Millet's 1970 excellent and important book, Sexual Politics, 372 00:43:14,860 --> 00:43:22,480 attacked Lady Chatterley's Lover not always convincingly as misogynist and phallocentric. 373 00:43:22,480 --> 00:43:27,820 She turned the previous Lawrence on his head into a dealer in death. 374 00:43:27,820 --> 00:43:35,200 She overlooked hetero, glossier or convicting voices in Lawrence's fiction, for example, Ursula's resistance to Burkin. 375 00:43:35,200 --> 00:43:42,100 That's to say it's an extremely important work of feminism. But as criticism of Lawrence, I think it often misses the point. 376 00:43:42,100 --> 00:43:50,140 This blow struck Lawrence's reputation hard. What has helped it to rise thereafter, like a phoenix from the ashes, 377 00:43:50,140 --> 00:43:56,050 was increasing recognition of an obvious fact that had been overlooked by Leavis and militar like that, 378 00:43:56,050 --> 00:44:02,260 Lawrence's works, as I've tried to stress, are full of contradiction and change. 379 00:44:02,260 --> 00:44:08,590 Certain post-structuralist critics decried Lawrence as naive and locker centric in his use of language. 380 00:44:08,590 --> 00:44:16,480 But others amongst them recognise that precisely by virtue of his opposite applications of the same word like ideal, 381 00:44:16,480 --> 00:44:23,770 conscious, absolute inhuman, he had opposed structuralist sense of languages instability. 382 00:44:23,770 --> 00:44:32,050 Gender theorists made a far more subtle assessment of gender and sex in Lawrences works than had the early 70s feminists. 383 00:44:32,050 --> 00:44:39,010 In 1980, Carol Dix's D.H. Lawrence and women argued that Lawrence was in fact spiritually female. 384 00:44:39,010 --> 00:44:42,280 Others have argued him to be androgynous. 385 00:44:42,280 --> 00:44:53,530 He came off well from some 80s and 90s critics who found his theories of race to be more egalitarian than than was typical of his time. 386 00:44:53,530 --> 00:45:04,270 The expanding field of eco criticism is finding much to work with in his anti industrialism and in the ongoing vogue for interdisciplinarity. 387 00:45:04,270 --> 00:45:10,930 That's benefited an author who wrote in so many genres, Anglophone academia is now increasingly aware, 388 00:45:10,930 --> 00:45:16,660 although not aware enough, of Lawrence's reputation around the world. 389 00:45:16,660 --> 00:45:22,720 Before we finish, I just want to mention two books from the nineties, which I find particularly interesting. 390 00:45:22,720 --> 00:45:26,140 The first is Mychal Bell's D.H. Lawrence language. 391 00:45:26,140 --> 00:45:34,870 And being of nineteen ninety two, it starts with the argument, quote, Lawrence's fiction is inescapably philosophical. 392 00:45:34,870 --> 00:45:42,370 It explores modes and qualities of being and consciousness of those modes and qualities. 393 00:45:42,370 --> 00:45:49,120 He stresses that the philosophy which is relevant to Laurence is German and contemporary with him, not French, 394 00:45:49,120 --> 00:45:59,320 and subsequent in particular, he considers Lawrence in terms of the Heideggerian shift from epistemology to ontology. 395 00:45:59,320 --> 00:46:03,220 He argues that both Heidegger and Lowrance independently developed their thought 396 00:46:03,220 --> 00:46:08,890 through nature and made some of the same criticisms of his theories of power. 397 00:46:08,890 --> 00:46:17,080 They also shared a sense that primitive man had cosmic sensibility with no division between human and natural life, 398 00:46:17,080 --> 00:46:22,010 and that the separation of human and non-human worlds took place over time, 399 00:46:22,010 --> 00:46:27,550 along with a destructive rise in self-consciousness on the part of humanity. 400 00:46:27,550 --> 00:46:35,050 Bell describes Lawrence's mode of characterisation as competing forces rather than autonomous entities, 401 00:46:35,050 --> 00:46:43,810 and this determines his conception of impersonality, which is very distinct to its conception of impersonality. 402 00:46:43,810 --> 00:46:49,480 On the other hand, he also points to the continuity between Lawrence's novels and those of the Victorian period, 403 00:46:49,480 --> 00:46:54,790 arguing that the transformation of the moral sentiment tradition in the Victorian novel 404 00:46:54,790 --> 00:47:00,310 made it a particularly delicate and inward instrument for the study of emotional life. 405 00:47:00,310 --> 00:47:07,750 No one was more alive to this achievement and the particular value of the novel to the life of feeling than Lawrence. 406 00:47:07,750 --> 00:47:11,110 On the subject of language which he's got in his title, 407 00:47:11,110 --> 00:47:16,420 he points to the reflections which Lawrence's narrators and characters themselves make about language 408 00:47:16,420 --> 00:47:22,990 and the interaction between the narrative and the way in which language is discussed within it. 409 00:47:22,990 --> 00:47:28,000 This tells us how we should read Lawrence's statements of position. 410 00:47:28,000 --> 00:47:33,850 Quote, When Lawrence talks about philosophy, that philosophy is not central. 411 00:47:33,850 --> 00:47:37,330 It's like the foam on water. 412 00:47:37,330 --> 00:47:49,430 The point at which being Capital B is apparent is also at the point is also the point at which intellectual formulations are Ottos or banal. 413 00:47:49,430 --> 00:47:58,790 The other book of the 90s I want to mention is Anfernee Huff's D.H. Lawrence Aesthetics and Ideology of the following year 93. 414 00:47:58,790 --> 00:48:07,430 This is the first book length study of Lawrence's writing about aesthetics as opposed to the aesthetics of Lawrence's writing, 415 00:48:07,430 --> 00:48:14,420 although, as she points out, he would not have accepted the designation designation aesthetics because this is the term 416 00:48:14,420 --> 00:48:20,870 itself concentrates on sensation and on being divorced from the object which you contemplate. 417 00:48:20,870 --> 00:48:30,740 She argues there are two kinds of organism in. Lawrence was influenced by contemporary German folkish theories and can be connected to fascism. 418 00:48:30,740 --> 00:48:34,670 That's one of the things will be considering next week. 419 00:48:34,670 --> 00:48:42,920 The other kind of organism which she identifies is a fragmented and idealistic organic which fits better. 420 00:48:42,920 --> 00:48:51,020 Many of his works, like Béliveau Fernyhough, considers his strong links to nature like Bel's. 421 00:48:51,020 --> 00:48:55,250 This book is published by Cambridge University Press. 422 00:48:55,250 --> 00:48:58,490 Leave US Philco Laurentian ism. 423 00:48:58,490 --> 00:49:06,290 His legacy lives on in Cambridge, even though Lawrence only visited the place once and had nightmares about beetles afterwards. 424 00:49:06,290 --> 00:49:13,760 In 1979, the University Press started publishing the Cambridge edition of The Complete Works of Lawrence. 425 00:49:13,760 --> 00:49:21,320 It's still not finished. Crucially, the poems are yet to come out, but they are the standard works of they. 426 00:49:21,320 --> 00:49:25,610 They are the standard edition of his works. There's a note about those editions on your hands out. 427 00:49:25,610 --> 00:49:29,450 Unfortunately, they are extremely expensive to buy, 428 00:49:29,450 --> 00:49:34,310 but they have sold the rights of some of the texts to Penguin, who are publishing them in much cheaper editions. 429 00:49:34,310 --> 00:49:37,010 The crucial thing is that you look at the beginning and see whether or not 430 00:49:37,010 --> 00:49:41,390 it is the Cambridge text because that is now the standard scholarly edition. 431 00:49:41,390 --> 00:49:50,180 It's even got in the Cambridge version line numbers, which I don't know of anybody using and is rather on Laurentian. 432 00:49:50,180 --> 00:49:57,170 I've put on your hand out a summary of works which have been most esteemed and by whom when. 433 00:49:57,170 --> 00:50:04,760 The one observation I would make is the Lawrences later works were most esteemed before the Second World War. 434 00:50:04,760 --> 00:50:12,800 Since the war, their admiration has overwhelmingly fallen on the early works up to and including women in love. 435 00:50:12,800 --> 00:50:19,490 The poems have a committed following, but are not widely argued to be Lawrence's best work. 436 00:50:19,490 --> 00:50:23,420 The stories tend to be placed on a par with the rainbow. 437 00:50:23,420 --> 00:50:29,810 Women in Love, Sons and Lovers is is also pretty high in standing, 438 00:50:29,810 --> 00:50:34,600 but is also Loren's for people who don't like Lawrence, if you want to recommend Lawrence someone he doesn't like. 439 00:50:34,600 --> 00:50:43,850 And it would be that the non-fiction now tends to be read pretty much exclusively by Lawrence specialists and of interest in terms of the fiction. 440 00:50:43,850 --> 00:50:49,790 But I would say that they are independently interesting and and for some of the same reasons. 441 00:50:49,790 --> 00:50:59,750 Lawrence's place in the canon is secure, although he's critical and and general popularity is not what it was at an English faculty drinks party, 442 00:50:59,750 --> 00:51:05,510 I was tracked down by Professor Stephen Gill, emeritus professor of English literature here. 443 00:51:05,510 --> 00:51:13,970 He had wanted to know who the Dr. Brown, who was giving that many lectures on Lawrence Wilson, was very surprised to find out that he was a woman. 444 00:51:13,970 --> 00:51:20,420 Aficionados of Lawrence, like me, joined societies. That is the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America, 445 00:51:20,420 --> 00:51:28,640 which publishes the DH Lawrence Review and the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia, Japan, South Korea and of course, of eastward. 446 00:51:28,640 --> 00:51:33,920 It's set up a journal inelegantly titled The Journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society. 447 00:51:33,920 --> 00:51:41,960 This holds monthly meetings and makes occasional pilgrimages to places such as the school where Lawrence taught in Croydon. 448 00:51:41,960 --> 00:51:49,190 There is also an international online Loren's discussion society touchingly named Rantanen, 449 00:51:49,190 --> 00:51:54,740 where everyone from Lawrence Biographer's like John Wazzan, in other words, 450 00:51:54,740 --> 00:52:01,250 the foremost Lawrence critics of the world to people who have just read one Lawrence poem and liked it, 451 00:52:01,250 --> 00:52:08,810 can voice their views and ask and answer questions. The atmosphere of this group is friendly and supportive. 452 00:52:08,810 --> 00:52:15,170 People have different perspectives, levels of education, grasps of English and knowledge of Lawrence. 453 00:52:15,170 --> 00:52:20,000 But no one is ever strident in their disagreement with anyone else. How? 454 00:52:20,000 --> 00:52:26,990 Unlike Lawrence the Lawrence who would take his best friend's chambers, Russell Murray, 455 00:52:26,990 --> 00:52:35,240 Hasseltine morale, Mansfield freeda by the metaphorical throat and tell them how they ought to live. 456 00:52:35,240 --> 00:52:39,980 He doesn't know us, so we are out of reach of his direct attack. 457 00:52:39,980 --> 00:52:45,920 But a significant number of people still think it's worth hearing what that attack was. 458 00:52:45,920 --> 00:52:58,100 Or in addition, they are interested in his kind of romantic modernism or his spiritual ontology or his appreciation of Batz men's children and God. 459 00:52:58,100 --> 00:53:06,892 Thank you for being sufficiently interested to come.