Another Book to Cross Off Your List 

 Another step in my effort to wash the taste of too much junk out of my mouth was to read (via audiobook) D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love. Long, long ago when I was a student (and before I took my sacred vow to always finish any book I started, I picked up the Lawrence book I was reading--I think iit was The Rainbow--and threw it against the wall. "I don't care if all of the characters in this book get run over by a bus!" I exclaimed. (Actually, it was worse than that: they were so arrogant and obtuse that I did wish, fictional characters though they were, would in fact get thrown under the nearest bus. At this remove I can admit it to my self.) 

I had read some Lawrence in the intervening decades: Sons and Lovers, which I found palatable but chalked it up to his being his first novel; and Lady Chatterley's Lover, which wasn't as dirty as I'd hoped it would be, but was virtuously short. And both of those had been a long time back. But Women In Love--aah, that was major league Lawrence. V.S.O.P.D.H. Would I feel like throwing it against the wall? (since it was on the iPod, I would probably not actually do it)--or would enlightenment was over me and I repudiate my callow intemperate former self? After all, on the one hand, I went from an opera hater to an opera fan; while on the other hand Ayn Rand is just as execrable as she had been when I was green in judgment.

The answer was actually complex, or I wouldn't be blogging on such a pompous subject. ("He's blogging on what? On who?")("on whom?") 

Sure enough, this time out, I got what I hadn't gotten before: that the arrogance and obnoxiousness of his characters was deliberate, and that we were supposed to feel there was something wrong with them. The principles they embody are partial, incomplete, and out of balance, and the argument of the book is the way they collide, change, bond and unbond. The hero of the book is the book itself, which is a moderately wonderful idea.

It might have been more obvious if the characters were less like people and more like cardboard representations, but of course that's Lawrence's point: this happens to people by people. And Lawrence is a fine observer. Gudrun and Ursula could very easily have spend some spare time over at an Agatha Christie mystery or paying a visit to Mapp and Lucia (which is about as close as I can come to saying that the milieu rings true) but Lawrence gives me a sense that I hadn't felt before, that there really is a gap between someone like me who, as an American, has fundamental egalitarianism scratched onto his bones, and these people who, while progressive and all that, were born and bred in a system that says you are different from them. There's very little that a modern reader can fault Lawrence for: he's sharply aware of social, economic, and class forces at work. And there's all the things in the book--sharp descriptions, nice phrasings, little insights--that make for what good writing feels like.

But as I was listening to the book, I felt irritation rise in my gorge (or somewhere near it) again. The characters were partial and incomplete, yes, but it wasn't that: it was that they were, how shall I put it--garish. their edges were hard and bright, loud and primary. One of the things that got under my skin was that Lawrence would describe an emotional state, saying, "She hated her." My reaction was (in best Arthur Dent voice) "Oh really? that seems to be a new meaning of the word 'hate' of which I was previously unaware." More to the point, it was not something the character herself would call hate--and since it was a description of her state, the convention was that it was a sort of interior monologue. He was doing it differently, which was interesting, but why was it so irritating?

What I came to realize was that Lawrence felt he had it all figured out. He had a vision of human nature and he was showing how the very forces worked, both intramurally and interscholastically. He had, I knew, strong interest and opinions on psychological theory--and of course Freud stood astride the era like a colossus. The thing that I was seeing was that Lawrence had thought deeply about the human psyche--but that what he displayed was a bunch of gears in primary colors clearly marked EROS and THANATOS, OEDIPUS and ELECTRA, ANAL and ORAL.

Now it wasn't that I disagreed with his theories. The problem was that he was so sure of it. His theory was complex and even subtle--but it was complete and conclusive--and that's when I reach for my gun.

What I was seeing were well-painted characters, moving and moved by their psychologies--but every so often a mathematical shape obtrude into the picture. This is what is really happening, Lawrence would say, and it made me want to argue with him about his own characters. 

It finally came to sententious life when I said to myself, "This book is not ignorant enough."

Lawrence is putting all his reasoning, all his observation, and all of his analysis into this book. the structure is magnificent, and the book is, in many ways, too. But over and over he grabs the reader and says "See? See? It's the anomie escarpment. Watch it go!"

We can see the most wonderful pictures in dreams, bright and heartbreaking and utterly magnificently wonderful. But we can only tell them after we've woken up and the colors have smudged a little and some part that you had the name of you have no longer. And that is good and right and proper.

I'm very happy that I read the book. I wanted a challenging book and I got one. I can understand why scholars gravitate to him. This is a mind at work with many things to say, and powerful ways of saying it.

However...in any of the great books I've read, there's always, close to the heart, a small window of bewilderment that lets the impossible light come through. A little whiff of the winds of mystery blowing over the face of the unlit waters, wondering whether to say something but deciding not yet. 

It's easy for lesser writers to paint with ignorance. It's the trap and the temptation of greater writers to fill all their space with knowledge, and all the more frustrating that they don't hear the bird on the windowsill saying "Wake up! Don't you see that you don't see?"

(and I'd better explain: the title of this post is a reference  to a previous post and the delightful book by Frederic C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex. It's a bunch of mock critical articles about Winnie the Pooh from vaious critical schools. On of my favorite pieces is supposedly written by a D.H. Lawrence scholar, who concludes that, since Winnie The Pooh isnot about mining in the Midlands, it has no literary merit whatsoever. And the essay is titled "Another book to cross of your list." Bwah ha ha ha ha.)