Lawrences

Over the  years I have given quite a lot of time to Lawrence, as revealed by a quick perusal of previous blogs. See references 1, 2 and 3. Perhaps the interest is weakening with years. Mostly D. H. Lawrence, but also T. E. Lawrence, the St. Lawrence River and others.

Various mentions of the biography of D. H. Lawrence by Brenda Maddox. A fat, no less than two inches of it, but a rather cheaply produced biography, which last was a pity, at least in so far as I am concerned, being sensitive to such matters. I don't particularly mind a book being printed on cheap paper, but I do mind poor design. I do like the production of the book to be good of its kind, to have made the best of whatever the circumstances or budget might have been.

This book I read rather more than a year ago and at the time I found it good to learn something about a famous writer whom I still read from time to time. And about whom I had known very little, apart from his Huxley period (with Maddox being a bit down on the Huxley connection for some reason). All part of my drift away from the books of my youth to the books about those books, something I rather looked down upon at the time - or, in the words of Lawrence himself at the top of reference 2, 'never trust the artist. Trust the tale'.

So, regularly ill from youth, with his first bout of pneumonia at sixteen. Maddox treats us to lots of consumption yarns.

His uncle killed his son in some squabble about who got the last egg for breakfast, and Lawrence also was prone to occasional, sudden and violent rages.

He euthanased his mother, to whom he was devoted, when she was near dead of cancer. A more relaxed time in such matters in some ways than it is now, despite what we might like to think.

He was good around the house. He liked sweeping and dusting. Fixing shelves. Doing things in the garden. Good with children – to the point where we might be a bit uncomfortable in these days of child abuse. On a good day, very good company. An excellent mimic and very funny in other ways too. Very good at working a party.

He spent some years living as  a lodger in a terraced house – along with a couple and their children. All very promiscuous and claustrophobic compared with what I have been used to, more or less for all of my life. Excepting only a short period – a few years – between parental home and marital home.

Lawrence partook of the common hobby of the early 20th century of copying paintings, in his case doing it by squares. He believed, and I agree with him, that you can learn a lot by copying, Or, for that matter, by doing jigsaws. Despite what some arty types say to the contrary, banging on about the value of so-called original creation.

Lawrence was quite quickly successful as a writer, and after his years as a teacher in Croydon, say less than five, never had any trouble making his living at it. And he was quickly taken up by arty types, by the literary lions of his day, as a genuinely proletarian writer - including that well known translator from the Russian, Constance Garnett.

And so it went on. But the biography was marred by being too long and by too much rumination about the seamy side of Lawrence's growing up and of his married life. I associated to the cartoon strips of Bretecher of the eighties, strips which I did not care for at all, although BH rather liked them. See reference 4.

With the result that I was left sensitised to that side of things, and when glancing at the book the other day with a view to cull, I almost immediately had an adverse reaction and settled for cull. It is now in a large sack of books in the garage, awaiting my next visit to the large paper and cardboard receptacle at our local tip. The current view being that attempting to recycle my cast offs in some more respectable way is not worth the bother, with too few people still reading the sort of stuff I am chucking out. If the book has strong associations of one sort or another, it is composted in the decent privacy of the back garden - otherwise, the tip.

The result of all of which being, that while I still own quite a lot of (printed) books by Lawrence, I now own few if any about him.

PS: I dare say Lawrence would not be best pleased to know that he is now best liked for his tales of the Nottinghamshire of his youth, any more than Hardy was best pleased for being best liked for feeding our nostalgia for a vanished - and largely invented - past of bucolic bliss.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lawrence.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lawrence.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lawrence.

Reference 4: http://www.clairebretecher.com/.