Apocalypse

David Trotter

  • The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes
    Cambridge, 672 pp, £55.00, March 1989, ISBN 0 521 22869 7
  • D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World edited by Peter Preston and Peter Hoare
    Macmillan, 221 pp, £29.50, May 1989, ISBN 0 333 45269 0
  • D.H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading by Peter Balbert
    Macmillan, 190 pp, £27.50, June 1989, ISBN 0 333 43964 3

That E.M. Forster gave only two cheers for democracy, but three for D.H. Lawrence, on the occasion of Lawrence’s death, is well-known. Forster was upset that the lowbrows Lawrence scandalised had joined forces with the highbrows he bored to denigrate ‘the greatest imaginative novelist’ of his generation. A bored highbrow, T.S. Eliot, at once protested that he didn’t know what was meant by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ or ‘novelist’. Twenty years later, F.R. Leavis was still having to contend with Eliot’s insistence that Lawrence had been severely handicapped by his lack of ‘intellectual and social training’. Lawrence probably scandalises more highbrows than lowbrows these days, but not as many as he bores.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

[1] As does the Cambridge Edition of the Letters, edited by James Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, which has now reached Volume V (686 pp., £45, 10 August, 0 521 23114 0). This covers the period between March 1924, when the Lawrences arrived in New York en route for Taos, and March 1927, by which time they were in Italy, Lawrence having completed the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

[2] Another context might be that of Fin-de-Siècle writing. Lawrence’s name crops up once or twice in Ian Fletcher’s elegant and informative introduction to his anthology of British Poetry and Prose 1870-1905 (Oxford, 560 pp., £21.50 and £8.95, 22 January 1987, 0 19 254186 2).

[3] In The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain, Volume VIII: The Edwardian Age and the Inter-War Years, edited by Boris Ford (367 pp., £19.50, 8 June, 0 521 30981 6). Berthoud contributes a lucid essay on literature and drama to this helpful survey of the period. There are also contributions by Wilfred Mellers, Rupert Hildyard, Simon Pepper, Michael Kennedy, Richard Cork, John Beer, John Summerson, Neil Sinyard, Gillian Naylor, Frank Whitehead and Ford himself.