Why I Broke Up With D.H. Lawrence
May. 26th, 2018 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraMemorial Day weekend! Traditionally the beginning of summer no matter how hard the calendar tries to argue differently.
Yesterday I was out on the running trail by 10. In the garden weeding and watering by noon.
But I’m gonna have to be out a helluva lot earlier today since it’s forecast to hit 90° by 11.
###
In the long hot hours of the afternoon, I worked after a desultory fashion and watched an indifferent BBC miniseries about Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant called Life in Squares.
In my own 20s, I was obsessed with Bloomsbury! And also with the life of D.H. Lawrence who was more-or-less their contemporary and certainly their thematic counterpoint.
Note that I was obsessed with the Bloomsbury lives. Apart from John Maynard Keynes, I had and have very little interest in their actual cultural contributions. I understand what Virginia Woolf is doing with language, but I always find it a major chore to read her.
I’d majored in economics as an undergraduate, though, and I’d always been impressed that Keynes was the only economist to predict the effects that reparations would have on the Weimar Republic. In retrospect, such a no-brainer!
Who knew that Keynes was such a Bohemian? And that like a seahorse, he could change his sexual orientation in midlife?
###
The best Bloomsbury book ever written is Michael Holroyd’s magnificent three-volume biography of Lytton Strachey. One of the reasons I was drawn to it, of course, was that Lytton Strachey was a dead ringer for Reed __________, one of the fourposts in the romantic parallelogram that dominated my early 20s.
Strachey was a weird presence whose chief social accomplishment seemed to be the growth of an incredibly ugly, reddish-tinged beard that made him look like one of the eminent Victorians whose lives he chronicled. In 1916, he insulted a young painter named Dora Carrington at a house party; she decided to get her revenge on him by sneaking into his bedroom early the next morning and cutting off his beard while he slept.
But Strachey woke up while she was straddling him and stared at her, and thereafter Carrington – she was always known by her surname – was in thrall. Despite the fact that Strachey was exclusinvely homosexual in his gender preferences.
One of those moments of soul transfer? (They do exist.)
###
The lives of the members of the Bloomsbury circle were filled with moments like these, and it seemed to me, that this was the right way to live, surrounded by friends who were cosmic littermates with whom one tussled and argued and had sex and created art. I spent my 20s and the first part of my 30s trying to put together an equivalent group of friends in my own life, but alas! it was impossible. So eventually I gave up and got married.
###
The second great biography that had a huge impact on me was Edward Nehls’ composite biography of D.H. Lawrence.
D.H. Lawrence was one of my very favorite writers growing up, but I had to break up with him once I realized that not only was he a fascist and a racist, but that he actually hated women and that try as I might, I was never gonna have an orgasm from penile penetration alone. Never! I mean, I don’t doubt that there are women who have orgasms from penile penetration, but I am not one of them. So, what was it gonna be? A lifetime of lying, “Yes, yes, the earth moved, the colored lights came on?” or breaking up with D.H. Lawrence?
Easy choice!
Nehls’ biography was pretty extraordinary in that except for footnotes and chapter introductions in tiny print, he did not write a single word of it. Instead, he culled impressions of Lawrence from the enormous number of extant letters, diary entries, semi-autobiographical fictitious accounts etc. and edited this source material into a coherent narrative. Lawrence apparently was a man of singular charisma; love him or hate him, he always made an impression.
This collage technique is beloved of the so-called “new journalists” who poured into the cultural scene at the end of the 1960s (for an excellent example, see Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography), so much so that I’ve always wondered whether Tom Wolfe came across Nehls’ Lawrence biography as an undergraduate.
Since hardly anybody writes letters or keeps diaries anymore, it’s going to be difficult to write biographies in the future. I mean, can you imagine a bio of President Spanky composed entirely of #therealdonaldtrump tweets?
Yesterday I was out on the running trail by 10. In the garden weeding and watering by noon.
But I’m gonna have to be out a helluva lot earlier today since it’s forecast to hit 90° by 11.
###
In the long hot hours of the afternoon, I worked after a desultory fashion and watched an indifferent BBC miniseries about Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant called Life in Squares.
In my own 20s, I was obsessed with Bloomsbury! And also with the life of D.H. Lawrence who was more-or-less their contemporary and certainly their thematic counterpoint.
Note that I was obsessed with the Bloomsbury lives. Apart from John Maynard Keynes, I had and have very little interest in their actual cultural contributions. I understand what Virginia Woolf is doing with language, but I always find it a major chore to read her.
I’d majored in economics as an undergraduate, though, and I’d always been impressed that Keynes was the only economist to predict the effects that reparations would have on the Weimar Republic. In retrospect, such a no-brainer!
Who knew that Keynes was such a Bohemian? And that like a seahorse, he could change his sexual orientation in midlife?
###
The best Bloomsbury book ever written is Michael Holroyd’s magnificent three-volume biography of Lytton Strachey. One of the reasons I was drawn to it, of course, was that Lytton Strachey was a dead ringer for Reed __________, one of the fourposts in the romantic parallelogram that dominated my early 20s.
Strachey was a weird presence whose chief social accomplishment seemed to be the growth of an incredibly ugly, reddish-tinged beard that made him look like one of the eminent Victorians whose lives he chronicled. In 1916, he insulted a young painter named Dora Carrington at a house party; she decided to get her revenge on him by sneaking into his bedroom early the next morning and cutting off his beard while he slept.
But Strachey woke up while she was straddling him and stared at her, and thereafter Carrington – she was always known by her surname – was in thrall. Despite the fact that Strachey was exclusinvely homosexual in his gender preferences.
One of those moments of soul transfer? (They do exist.)
###
The lives of the members of the Bloomsbury circle were filled with moments like these, and it seemed to me, that this was the right way to live, surrounded by friends who were cosmic littermates with whom one tussled and argued and had sex and created art. I spent my 20s and the first part of my 30s trying to put together an equivalent group of friends in my own life, but alas! it was impossible. So eventually I gave up and got married.
###
The second great biography that had a huge impact on me was Edward Nehls’ composite biography of D.H. Lawrence.
D.H. Lawrence was one of my very favorite writers growing up, but I had to break up with him once I realized that not only was he a fascist and a racist, but that he actually hated women and that try as I might, I was never gonna have an orgasm from penile penetration alone. Never! I mean, I don’t doubt that there are women who have orgasms from penile penetration, but I am not one of them. So, what was it gonna be? A lifetime of lying, “Yes, yes, the earth moved, the colored lights came on?” or breaking up with D.H. Lawrence?
Easy choice!
Nehls’ biography was pretty extraordinary in that except for footnotes and chapter introductions in tiny print, he did not write a single word of it. Instead, he culled impressions of Lawrence from the enormous number of extant letters, diary entries, semi-autobiographical fictitious accounts etc. and edited this source material into a coherent narrative. Lawrence apparently was a man of singular charisma; love him or hate him, he always made an impression.
This collage technique is beloved of the so-called “new journalists” who poured into the cultural scene at the end of the 1960s (for an excellent example, see Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography), so much so that I’ve always wondered whether Tom Wolfe came across Nehls’ Lawrence biography as an undergraduate.
Since hardly anybody writes letters or keeps diaries anymore, it’s going to be difficult to write biographies in the future. I mean, can you imagine a bio of President Spanky composed entirely of #therealdonaldtrump tweets?
