Abstract
Lawrence’s American literature studies stand high in current opinion, especially in America, where a flourishing school of mythic criticism is built on them.1 A related question, equally significant but seldom addressed, is how his reading of Melville, Hawthorne and others affected form and substance in his own novels. An exception to the general silence on this question, Richard Swigg, has shown how much Women in Love owes to precepts Lawrence gleaned from ‘classic’ American literature. 2 But after that novel, Swigg declares, Lawrence’s Old World intelligence resisted his New World irrationality, and after a season of ‘spurious victories’ culminating in ‘the disaster of The Plumed Serpent’, he recovered his balance, always exempt from the ‘touch of mental bitterness, of black disorder’ that plagued the American authors.3 On the contrary, Lawrence’s own ‘mental bitterness’ and ‘black disorder’ were the chief source of his affinity for these Americans. Nonetheless, judgements like Swigg’s continue to be repeated, generally arriving at the conclusion that Lawrence’s novels between Women in Love and Lady Chatterley‘s Lover are failures. 4
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Notes
Praise for Lawrence’s views on American literature began when his reputation as a novelist was still at a low ebb: see Edmund Wilson, The Shock of Recognition (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1943), and the growing swell in such works as Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960). For a summary of attitudes on the subject, see a review article by Michael Colacurcio, ‘The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D. H. Lawrence in Recent American Criticism’, American Quarterly, xxvu, 4 (1975) pp. 486–501. For an illuminating discussion of how Lawrence’s criticism deals with national distinctions between English and American novels, see Richard L. White, ‘D. H. Lawrence the Critic: Theories of English and American Fiction’, DHL Review, XI, 2 (1978) pp. 156–74.
Richard Swigg, Lawrence, Hardy, and American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) pp. 309-44. Swigg’s claim that The Rainbow was significantly influenced by The Scarlet Letter is questionable, depending as it does on inconclusive internal evidence. No record has been located to show that Lawrence read Hawthorne’s novel before January 1917 (see Letters, 111, p. 66).
Swigg, Lawrence, Hardy, and American Literature, pp. 360-1.
A list of works in this vein would be a long one, beginning during the revival of interest in Lawrence’s work with F. R. Leavis’s D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955) and including most of the major Lawrence critics. When not dismissed as ‘pure corn’ [Eliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1960) p. 69], Lawrence’s fictional creations of the period are often judged in termslike those of Julian Moynahan in The Deed of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963): that Lawrence wrote on the verge of desperation which in spite of flashes of insight brought him always to ‘a fundamental self-betrayal’ (p. 112). For exceptions to the general dissatisfaction, see Keith Sagar on The Plumed Serpent in The Art of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), Alastair Niven on Kangaroo in D. H. Lawrence: The Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) and John Worthen’s estimate of Kangaroo in D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979). Leavis revises his views to recognise that The Plumed Serpent is important, though still not successful, in Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (London: Chatto and Wind us, 1976). Brian Lee makes a beginning at analysing Lawrence’s long fiction of the middle years through his discoveries in American literature, but Lee’s conclusions are also aciverse: ‘Doubts about the validity of human society’ and ‘extreme Symbolic situations’ do not add up to novels: ‘America, My America’, in Renaissance and Modern Essays Presented to Vivian de Sola Pinto, ed. G. R. Hibbard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) p. 188. Lee recognises no distinction between novel and romance.
Separately collected in the two Phoenix volumes, these essays are now available in D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp. 149–55, 169–205. The last four of these were introduced by a preliminary essay on the ‘living interrelatedness’ of all things in painting, entitled ‘Art and Morality’. Lawrence felt that ‘the point was easier to see in painting, to start with’ (Thomas Hardy and other Essays, pp. xlviii, 163–8).
The origin of the term is traceable to Lawrence’s well-known letter to Witter Bynner in March 1928 (see Moore, II, pp. 1045–6).
Recent outstanding works in this area are Daniel Dervin, ‘A Strange Sapience’: The Creative Imagination of D. H. Lawrence (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Judith Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984); Daniel J. Schneider, The Artist as Psychologist (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1984).
D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (New York, 1923) p. 327; L. D. Clark, The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980).
Letters, II, p. 90. An extended treatment of this stressful period can be found in Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrmce’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, 1978). In the fiction, see the rejected ‘Prologue to Women in Love’, Phoenix II, pp. 92–108
Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and other Essays, pp. 7–128. Lawrence’s phoenix, in the shift from Law/Love to Power/Love, underwent a change of gender. It is female in ‘The Crown’, Phoenix II, p. 382, and male in Kangaroo, p. 201.
Letters, m, pp. 301–3.
Ibid., p. 522.
Ibid., II, pp. 526–9.
Lawrence first began to conceptualise the need to escape woman’s possessiveness in revising earlier Italian essays and writing new ones for Twilight in Italy, finished in October 1915 and published in 1916. One compelling reason the Italian men have for migrating to America is to free themselves from female domination at home
Letters, 111, p. 156; The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, ed. George Y. Zytaruk (Montreal: MeGill-Queen’s University Press, 1970) p. 219.
D. H. Lawrence, The Symbolic Meaning: Uncollected Versions of ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’, ed. Armin Arnold (Fontwell, Arundel: Centaur Press, 1962) pp. 25, 27, 39, 57.
Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, p. 19; Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Seeker, 1924) p. 24.
Richard Swigg calls the period of writing Women in Love ‘that point in Lawrence’s life when the disaster of the War, the sense of civilization’s imminent collapse, were interpreted through his vision of the American precedent in downfall’ (Lawrence, Hardy, and American Literature, p. 332
Some of the affinities Lawrence found between his work and that of the Italian Futurists enter into the symbolism of the Hardy essay (Thomas Hardy and other Essays, pp. 75-6). He felt, moreover, that the early American authors were direct ancestors of the Futurists, saying of Melville, for instance: ‘He was a futurist long before futurism found paint’ (Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 146). For Lawrence’s negative comments on contemporaries writing in English, see ‘The Future of the Novel’, Thomas Hardy and other Essays, pp. 149-55; Letters, III, pp. 166–7.
The full story of Lawrence’s writing and rewriting of his American ‘studies’ may not be deciphered for some time, though the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of these essays (being prepared by Harold Shapiro) is expected to assist considerably in solving the problem, since the Smith papers that came to light in 1979 can be taken into account in this edition: Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 526–8. From August 1917 until at least September 1920, Lawrence reshaped these essays several times: Letters, III, passim. A great deal more might be known about the links between the symbology of the American essays and that of such earlier works as the Hardy study and ‘The Crown’ if the lost ‘At the Gates’ and ‘Goats and Compasses’ were ever located. ‘At the Gates’ may have been returned to Lawrence by J. B. Pinker, the literary agent, in early 1920, but if so it has since disappeared [see E. W. Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1948) p. 89].
Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, p. 126.
Ibid., p. 124.
Letters, II, pp. 182–3.
Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, pp. 127-8.
Ibid., pp. 130, 137–8.
Ibid., pp. 124–5; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novels (New York: Library of America, 1983) p. 149.
Letters, III, p. 481; cf. pp. 479–80.
Ibid., pp. 431–7, 488, 498; Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, But the Wind ... ’(New York, 1934; reprint Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.:Southern Illinois University Press, 1974) p. 107; cf. the opening pages of D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia.
D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) ch. 7. The style of the ‘Indian’ passages in this novel is often closely patterned on Cooper’s, especially that of The Last of the Mohicans
Lawrence, The Lost Girl, p. 48.
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 7.
Lawrence, The Lost Girl, p. 162.
Ibid., pp. 306, 315.
Ibid., pp. 335–9.
Letters, III, p. 521.
Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection, p. 90; Letters, III, pp. 513–22.
It is commonly taken for granted that Lawrence is imitating a narrative voice from earlier English fiction. By far the most likely source is the classic Americans. He had not read any of the English classics for quite a while, the classic Americans absorbed his analytic attention at the time, and they were the only writers he considered worthy of serving as models in fiction.
Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976) p. 23.
D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) pp. 124–5.
Ibid., p. 226.
Ibid., pp. 208–9, 221, 227–8, 267.
Ibid., pp. 276–7.
Ibid., pp. 290–2; cf. ‘New Heaven and Earth’, Complete Poems, pp. 256–61.
Lawrence, Mr Noon, pp. xxxii-xxxiii.
Earl and Achsah Brewster, D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence (London: Seeker, 1934) p. 243.
Letters, III, pp. 726, 728, 732; D. H. Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, ed. Gerald Lacy (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976) p. 35.
D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod (New York, 1922) p. 29; Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Library of America, 1983) p. 795.
Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, p. 213.
Ibid., pp. 85–6, 88, 95, 97, 102, 216–17.
Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, pp. 86–7, 107–12.
Unpublished manuscript entitled ‘Studies in Classic American Literature (XIII)’ on one line and ‘Whitman’ on the line below as sub-title. This manuscript is among the Smith papers (see Roberts, Bibliography, 2nd edn, Item E382.b). This may be the version of Lawrence’s Whitmari essay that he sent in a complete manuscript of Studies in Classic American Literature to Benjamin Huebsch, shortly after 10 October 1919. The overt references to homosexuality were perhaps the reason for Lawrence writing ‘The essay on Whitman you may find it politic not to publish .... The rest are unexceptionable’ (Letters, III, pp. 400, 405).
Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, p. 174. See also Robert Hogan, ‘The Amorous Whale: a Study of the Symbolism of D. H. Lawrence’, Modern Fiction Studies, v, 1 (1959) pp. 39–46: one of the few published attempts to relate the fiction of Lawrence’s middle years to early American fiction.
Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, chs 18 and 19; Symbolic Meaning, pp. 136–7. Hawthorne does not give the nationality of Pearl’s rumoured husband, reporting only that letters from her reaching the New World came ‘with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry’ (Hawthorne, Novels, p. 343).
Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ch. 20.
Ibid., ch. 21.
Letters, I, p. 503.
Worthen, D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, ch. 8.
James B. Reston Jr, Our Father Who Art in Hell (New York: Times Books, 1981).
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932) p. 25. Compare Lawrence’s ‘getting stuck’ in two other pilgrimage novels, Aaron’s Rod and Mr Noon (Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, p. 39). At least in Aaron’s Rod and Mr Noon, the obstacle to composition arose just where the male protagonist feels frustrated in efforts to live beyond woman.
Lawrence, kangaroo, pp. 199–200, 202.
Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, p. 44. Textual differences exist between the English and American editions (see Roberts, Bibliography, 2nd edn, pp. 70–1).
Melville, Moby Dick, pp. 946, 1102.
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923) p. 215.
Ibid., p. 92; Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, pp. 90, 98; Letters, III, p. 41.
Unpublished letters to Robert Mountsier, 7 July and 17 July 1922.
Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, p. 35.
Clark, The Minoan Distance, ch. 11.
Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, vol. II (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958) pp. 136–9.
Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1979) pp. 130–1.
Letter to Mollie Skinner, Letters, IV, pp. 495–6; Nehls, A Composite Biography, vol. II, pp. 217–l74.
Harry T. Moore, ‘Preface’, The Boy in the Bush by D. H. Lawrence and M. L. Skinner (Carbondale and Edwardsville, III.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971) pp. vii–xviii; Charles Rossman, ‘The Boy in the Bush in the D. H. Lawrence Canon’, in D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, ed. Robert J. Partlow, Jr and Harry T. Moore (Carbondale and Edwardsville, III.: Southern IUinois University Press, 1980) pp. 185–94.
Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, p. 115.
Nehls, A Composite Biography, vol. III, p. 109; Lawrence, Kangaroo, ch. 10. In ‘The Fox’ Henry is familiar with the American frontier novels of Thomas Mayne Reid.
Dorothy Brett, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (Philadelphia, Penn.:Lippincott, 1933) pp. 81, 253–4; Nehls, A Composite Biography, vol. II, p. 416.
Lawrence, Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, p. 111.
Lawrence, The Boy in the Bush, chs 5, iv; 7, ii; 11, i; 20, iii.
Ibid., cbs 19; 22, iii; 23, ii, iii; 26.
Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and other Essays, pp. 151–5.
Ibid., pp. 169–209.
Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, p. 134; James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. I (New York: Library of America, 1985) p. 877.
Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago, III.: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 148.
A. N. Kaul, The American Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963) pp. 308, 321.
Hawthorne, Novels, pp. 149, 352, 633.
Bell, Development of American Romance, p. 16.
Hawthorne, Novels, pp. 149, 150.
Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and other Essays, p. 182.
D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (London: Seeker, 1926) chs 18, 21,25
Ibid., ch. 23.
Ibid., ch. 27.
Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969) p. 3; Lawrence, Symbolic Meaning, pp. 102–3.
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Clark, L.D. (1989). Making the Classic Contemporary: Lawrence’s Pilgrimage Novels and American Romance. In: Preston, P., Hoare, P. (eds) D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09848-4_12
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