During his life, D.H. Lawrence was thought of as a pornographer posing as an artist. The novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright was, for a time, synonymous with purple prose and licentiousness. His novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was put on trial for obscenity. James Joyce found Lawrence’s writing filthy, and Virginia Woolf held him in the lowest esteem. Rebecca West, in an elegy published after Lawrence’s untimely death from tuberculosis in 1930, wrote of her discovery that what she’d always “put down to Lawrence’s persecution mania had a solid basis” in the numerous obituaries that denied him not only the homage due a deceased genius but also the “courtesy paid to any corpse.”
Nearly 90 years after his death, that unfair reputation remains tragically intact. So why has the New York Review Books Classics imprint brought out a new edition of his selected essays? Because there’s much more to Lawrence’s work than his detractors care to admit. There is his complex and vivid philosophy, based on following one’s primal drives into a more sensual engagement with life and a more honest sense of self. And there is, above all, the lush beauty of his language, prose that has a pulse and gives off heat.
The Bad Side of Books: The Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence provides readers a technicolor romp through Lawrence’s critical writing, essays, letters, and reviews. The subjects range widely, from a study of Thomas Hardy’s characters to letters on the state of interwar Paris to descriptions of Taos, New Mexico, to an evocative story about killing a porcupine while living on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains. The breadth of Lawrence’s interests is echoed in the range of places in which he wrote. He was constantly on the move, even while sick, living for extended periods in Germany, Sicily, America, Mexico, Australia, and France. This collection is not only a record of Lawrence’s thoughts but also a kind of travelogue, describing a life that West called “a spiritual victory” on the part of a man who truly sucked the marrow from the bone of his experiences.
For all the variety in The Bad Side of Books, these essays do have a central topic. It is the same topic that unifies everything Lawrence ever wrote: Lawrence himself. West again pointed out that even his most far-flung travel writing was really “about the state of his own soul at that moment,” which, human self-awareness always being incomplete, he could only render “in symbolic terms.” Such a high degree of solipsism might sound awful, but in the hands of an artist such as Lawrence, excessive sensitivity to the self is transformed into a wonderfully articulate sensitivity to the world. Take, for example, the opening paragraph of his short essay “Whistling of Birds,” from 1917:
“The frost held for many weeks, until birds were dying rapidly. Everywhere in the fields and under the hedges lay the ragged remains of lapwings, starlings, thrushes, redwings, innumerable ragged bloody cloaks of birds, whence the flesh was eaten by invisible beasts of prey.”
The description is, of course, so heavily colored by World War I that it might as well be a metaphor for Lawrence’s feelings about the conflict. This is what he does, circling events and places with incantatory prose until they become, through the intensity of his perceptions, symbols of his interior states. Of course, Lawrence took these internal states to be just as natural as lightning or puffer fish. In “Indians and Englishmen” (1922), he wrote about meeting Native Americans in New Mexico:
“What is the feeling that passes from an Indian to me, when we meet? We are both men, but how do we feel together? I shall never forget that first evening when I first came into contact with the Red Men … something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitter darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richness.”
Lawrence was a literary modernist, but much like William Faulkner, he smuggled more than a little old-fashioned Romanticism in with his experimental forms. But it is through these very forms that Lawrence tempered appeals to sublime communion with nature with his 20th-century cynicism. For instance, he wrote in 1925’s “Morality and the Novel” that “we find that our lives consist in … this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us,” but that “we shall never know what the sunflower itself is.” In other words, our consciousness is only ever given partial access to reality, but our engagement with the world, however fragmentary, is itself life in abundance.
Lawrence was in thrall to nature; one could even say he worshipped it, making a theology out of venerating the wild soul of the world. He used literature to rail against man’s abstract idea of nature as hopelessly cut off from the real thing. This was a form of hypocrisy, but a forgivable one that gave Lawrence’s writing its strange energy. Language, after all, is itself an abstraction, a complex series of symbols we use to comprehend the world. In the collection’s titular essay, published in 1924, he tried to square this circle by casting literature as a part of nature: “Books to me are incorporate things, voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn and visions that don’t blot sunflowers. What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.” Entertaining posturing, but unconvincing: If a Lawrence writes about a tree falling in the forest and no one is there to read about it, does it make a sound?
What redeems Lawrence is his feeling for our shared suffering. In “Christs in the Tirol,” the first essay of the collection and one of the strongest, we find Lawrence at his most open and perceptive. Describing the wooden statues of Christ that dotted the roadsides in Austria, Lawrence writes of the peasants who carved them:
“They are afraid of physical pain, it terrifies them. Then they raise, in their startled helplessness of suffering, these Christs, these human attempts at deciphering the riddle of pain … And so they try to get used to the idea of death and suffering, to rid themselves of some of the fear thereof. And all tragic art is part of the same attempt.” So was Lawrence’s, and this is reason enough to continue reading him.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
