Underworld Troll

Tim Parks: Henrik Pontoppidan’s ‘A Fortunate Man’, 7 May 2026

A Fortunate Man 
by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated by Paul Larkin.
NYRB, 869 pp., £27, June 2025, 978 1 68137 927 2
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... crying: ‘Here’s a shot to herald the dawn of a new century.’ We are in the territory of D.H. Lawrence. All too soon Jakobe has to return to Copenhagen. Per travels to Rome, where he runs into Nanny. She is now married to a rising star in Danish journalism but already dissatisfied, and flirts readily with her sister’s fiancé. Caught up in the ...

Chicory and Daisies

Stephanie Burt: William Carlos Williams, 7 March 2002

Collected Poems: Volume I 
by William Carlos Williams, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan.
Carcanet, 579 pp., £12.95, December 2000, 1 85754 522 2
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Collected Poems: Volume II 
by William Carlos Williams, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan.
Carcanet, 553 pp., £12.95, December 2000, 1 85754 523 0
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... forms, and his energetic, almost disorientingly large output have elicited comparisons with D.H. Lawrence; when Lawrence died, Williams wrote a substantial elegy. Like Lawrence, he liked to think of himself as breaking society’s rules, and like ...

The Basic Couple

Benjamin Kunkel: Norman Rush, 24 October 2013

Subtle Bodies 
by Norman Rush.
Granta, 234 pp., £14.99, October 2013, 978 1 84708 780 5
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... by an interviewer from the Paris Review about his early influences, Rush first mentioned ‘D.H. Lawrence. Actually, a lot of Lawrence.’ He has probably been familiar for decades with the argument Lawrence made in the characteristically irresponsible and penetrating Studies in Classic ...

America Deserta

Richard Poirier, 16 February 1989

America 
by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Chris Turner.
Verso, 129 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 86091 220 5
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America Observed: The Newspaper Years of Alistair Cooke 
by Ronald Wells.
Reinhardt, 233 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 1 871061 09 1
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American Journals 
by Albert Camus, translated by Hugh Levick.
Hamish Hamilton, 155 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 241 12621 5
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... all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal transcription into the real.’ D.H. Lawrence, with Tocqueville perhaps the most intuitive of all foreign writers about America, was able in a work like St Mawr to see, as Baudrillard can’t, the actual pathos of American figurations of ‘desert’ and ‘space’, the pathos of desire that wants ...
... or ‘academic’, gives itself up to unconnected whimsies, velleities or spasms. At its best D.H. Lawrence, who did it best, characterised the genre as ‘the poetry of that which is at hand’, ‘the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment’ where ‘there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished.’ The genre can have its successes – we ...

I really mean like

Michael Wood: Auden’s Likes and Dislikes, 2 June 2011

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Vol. IV, 1956-62 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 982 pp., £44.95, January 2011, 978 0 691 14755 0
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... remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is Jeeves’s immaculate and unfailing ...

Touching and Being Touched

John Kerrigan: Valentine Cunningham, 19 September 2002

Reading after Theory 
by Valentine Cunningham.
Blackwell, 194 pp., £45, December 2001, 0 631 22167 0
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... as pure matter of touch,’ but the Romantic cult of touch as a medium of truth would lead to D.H. Lawrence, a writer with a number of disconcerting points of contact with Cunningham. Lawrence wrote superbly about the way touch gets under the guard of consciousness in such stories as ‘You Touched Me’ and ‘The Man who ...

What Life Says to Us

Stephanie Burt: Robert Creeley, 21 February 2008

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75 
California, 681 pp., £12.55, October 2006, 0 520 24158 4Show More
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005 
California, 662 pp., £29.95, October 2006, 0 520 24159 2Show More
On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay 
by Robert Creeley.
California, 89 pp., £12.95, April 2006, 0 520 24791 4
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Selected Poems: 1945-2005 
by Robert Creeley, edited by Benjamin Friedlander.
California, 339 pp., $21.95, January 2008, 978 0 520 25196 0
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... sensibility on recent jazz (he listened to Charlie Parker while composing) and his fiction on D.H. Lawrence, ‘my own mentor, finally the only one I can have’. Creeley later claimed that he picked up his sense of line from the mistaken assumption that Williams, when reading his own poems aloud, paused at every line end. But imitating Williams was not ...

Matrioshki

Craig Raine, 13 June 1991

Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life 
by Richard Garnett.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 402 pp., £20, March 1991, 1 85619 033 1
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... his cuffs trimmed with scissors’; H.G. Wells, vigorous but ‘a bit vulgar, you know’; D.H. Lawrence, protesting, ‘Mrs Garnett says I have no true nobility – with all my cleverness and charm. But that is not true. It is there, in spite of all the littlenesses and commonnesses’; Tussy Marx; the Webbs; Yeats poor enough to black his heels where they ...

It’s the plunge that counts

Heathcote Williams: Waterlog by Roger Deakin, 19 August 1999

Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain 
by Roger Deakin.
Chatto, 320 pp., £15.99, May 1999, 0 7011 6652 5
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... With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like D.H. Lawrence, Deakin is happy, in the end, to remain mystified by the secret of that invigorating power. He quotes Lawrence’s poem ‘The Third Thing’: Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third ...

Hillside Men

Roy Foster: Ernie O’Malley, 16 July 1998

Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual 
by Richard English.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 01 982059 3
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... excoriated by Yeats. O’Malley tells his story in cadences influenced by the early Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and American writer friends like Hart Crane, but with a dry assurance all his own. The heroics come through all the more powerfully in his highly-polished but economical style. The supreme example can be found in the closing paragraph of the book. It is ...

Buckets of Empathy

James Wood, 30 March 2000

On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Yale, 294 pp., £18.95, October 1999, 0 300 07991 5
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... not only of Tolstoy, but of Chekhov and the great peasant stories of Giovanni Verga, whom D.H. Lawrence rightly called Homeric. Such writers see life as their characters would, yet combine a proximity to them with a detachment from them. Perhaps the most obstructive fact for Josipovici’s argument is not that such combinations can be achieved, but that a ...

Teacher

John Passmore, 4 September 1986

Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson 
by A.J. Baker.
Cambridge, 150 pp., £20, April 1986, 0 521 32051 8
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... become quite dry or expand into immense floods; we shared that sense of precariousness which D.H. Lawrence noted in Kangaroo. Our economy was one which wholly depended for its survival on a flow of exports to bring fresh imports flowing into it. It might, even so, be hard at first to think of a chair or a table as a complex system of activities. But we had ...

Allendistas

D.A.N. Jones, 5 November 1992

Death in Chile: A Memoir and a Journey 
by Tony Gould.
Picador, 277 pp., £15.99, July 1992, 0 330 32271 0
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Some write to the future 
by Ariel Dorfman, translated by George Shivers and Ariel Dorfman.
Duke, 271 pp., £10.95, May 1992, 0 8223 1269 7
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... we talked about books,’ he reports, ‘which in Cambridge at that time meant F.R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, whom we both admired.’ Huneeus was much impressed by Nostromo, Conrad’s disheartening novel about political excitement and hopelessness in South America. ‘Good God,’ Huneeus exclaimed. ‘I mean, the man hardly touched land ...

A Sort of Nobody

Michael Wood, 9 May 1996

Not Entitled: A Memoir 
by Frank Kermode.
HarperCollins, 263 pp., £18, May 1996, 0 00 255519 0
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... The Classic; The Art of Telling; History and Value; An Appetite for Poetry and books on D.H. Lawrence and on Wallace Stevens. He retired from his Cambridge chair in 1982; was knighted in 1991. Not Entitled takes us through a grim but not unhappy childhood in Douglas (‘It as a world in which everybody was more or less ill. Heart, stomach, nerves were ...