D. H. Lawrence: A Loose Canon
I CAN REMEMBER quite clearly how I first encountered D. H. Lawrence as a writer of something other than fiction. We were studying Hamlet at school, reading the expected lit crit by A.C. Bradley, G. Wilson Knight and, more fashionably, Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary). But my teacher also nudged me towards a strange piece of writing by Lawrence called “The Theatre,” about going to see a production of Hamlet, which he published in Twilight in Italy. Wanting to reduce the piece to exam-directed utility, I didn’t know what it was or how it was meant to be read. Obviously it was about Hamlet (a “statement of the most significant philosophic position of the Renaissance”), but it was also a kind of story, a re-creation of an actual experience and place. The critical essays I had read up to that point all seemed like more diligent and accomplished examples of what I was reading them for, i.e. homework. There was no suggestion of homework or compulsory diligence about “The Theatre,” and while this had an obvious appeal, it also raised doubts as to the legitimacy and value of the piece.
On reflection what I missed, I think, was the valorizing dullness that pervaded so much of the criticism that came to define the study of English at university. The gap in enjoyment between the novels or poems and the stuff we were expected to read about them was so huge. Until, that is, during the week devoted to Thomas Hardy, when Lawrence came crashing in again and suddenly there was no gap. One moment he was pointing out, in his rather homely way, that Hardy’s characters “are always going off unexpectedly and doing something that nobody would do,” and for the light it shed on Hardy, but it was also a revealing expression of who it was by: as much mirror as window. Up until then nonfiction existed either as a wholly distinct discipline (history, say) or as a kind of stepladder to help one better get to grips with poetry and novels. These pieces by Lawrence represented the first glimpse of a more labile relationship between criticism and fiction, between the necessary restraints of academic discipline and the vagrant life of the mind. (Lawrence famously went further, rejecting the limiting life of the mind in favor of “a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.”)
