A feather! A very feather upon the face!

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling, 6 January 2000

The Unforgiving Minute 
by Harry Ricketts.
Chatto, 434 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 7011 3744 4
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... poet (in English prose) of the shifting meanings of the colonial universe. The caveat that D.H. Lawrence once issued in another context is apposite here: ‘We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children’s books. Just childishness, on our part.’ Apposite, because the stories so often undermine what Kipling holds to be true or ...

Dark and Deep

Helen Vendler, 4 July 1996

Robert Frost: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Constable, 424 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 09 476130 2
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Collected Poems, Prose and Plays 
by Robert Frost, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson.
Library of America, 1036 pp., $35, October 1995, 9781883011062
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... by disappearing. Meyers adds: ‘If he wanted to kill himself, why did he not do so in Canton or Lawrence, where it would have the maximum impact?’ The question is naive: a youth fleeing the collapse of his hopes might go – often does go – far away. I make the point only because Meyers argues that he, rather than Thompson, gives the ‘real (rather ...

How far shall I take this character?

Richard Poirier: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Bellow: A Biography 
by James Atlas.
Faber, 686 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 14356 3
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... mother. Bellow’s feelings would also find echoes in another writer he greatly admired, the D.H. Lawrence of Sons and Lovers, a book he sometimes taught. There, the young Lawrence figure, Paul Morel, long at odds with his father, also feels when his mother dies an irresistible relief from emotional smothering, even though ...

My God, they stink!

Seamus Perry: Wyndham Lewis goes for it, 5 December 2024

The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: ‘Time and Western Man’ 
edited by Paul Edwards.
Oxford, 566 pp., £190, November 2023, 978 0 19 878583 5
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... skin contributing its message of porcine affront.’‘They stink! My God, they stink!’ D.H. Lawrence summed up Lewis’s attitude towards his subject matter. The anti-hero of ‘A Soldier of Humour’ is no less cheerfully disgusted by his own odour: ‘This forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned gut-bag, with its two bright rolling marbles with which ...

Bitten by an Adder

Tim Parks: ‘The Return of the Native’, 17 July 2014

The Return of the Native 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Simon Avery.
Broadview, 512 pp., £9.50, April 2013, 978 1 55481 070 3
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... his sight, excuses for renouncing a path that seems too hard, too strenuous, too frightening? D.H. Lawrence thought so. Here he is on Eustacia and Clym: Eustacia, dark, wild, passionate … loves first the unstable Wildeve, who does not satisfy her, then casts him aside for the newly returned Clym … What does she want? … some form of self realisation ...

Buffed-Up Scholar

Stefan Collini: Eliot and the Dons, 30 August 2012

Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. III: 1926-27 
edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden.
Faber, 954 pp., £40, July 2012, 978 0 571 14085 5
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... lead him to break with Eliot. Aldington had submitted a wayward, impressionistic essay on D.H. Lawrence, to which Eliot responded, apologetically though firmly, that ‘I do not think that it falls in with the general position of the Criterion.’ This, he went on to explain, might be thought of as ‘the consensus of opinion of the people who attend the ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... and ‘popular’ literature became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular market become higher still, especially as represented ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... of outsider art, somewhat comically, to artistically unschooled violon d’Ingres types like D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Schoenberg, Winston Churchill and Prince Charles – talented amateur painters, possibly, but not exactly what you would call marginal or psychically alienated figures. Euphemistic, in turn, because once again the sheer intransigence of outsider ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to ...

Tickle and Flutter

Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge, 3 July 2008

... of the career and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers – D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind – Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among them. Such difficult wishing may be far more deeply implicated in artistic ...

Mrs Webb and Mrs Woolf

Michael Holroyd, 7 November 1985

... she hated what she regarded as the sexual anarchy of the Twenties, and the novels of D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley struck her as being almost subhuman. For she feared the power of the sex instinct. Her affair with Joseph Chamberlain had been unforgettably painful, suggesting perhaps that, far from being an integrated character with no divisions of ...
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen 
introduced by Angus Wilson.
Cape, 782 pp., £8.50, February 1981, 0 224 01838 8
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Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation 
by Hermione Lee.
Vision, 225 pp., £12.95, July 1981, 9780854783441
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... of her time who strike this Bowenesque theme were anti-Bloomsbury: I have in mind, of course, D.H. Lawrence and that great writer (and I mean great – if you doubt it try to think off-hand of six other great comic novelists in the entire history of fiction), Evelyn Waugh, even though he did from time to time get entangled in the golden folds of his ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
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Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
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... and cynical race’. From Taormina in Sicily, where he was renting the house in which D.H. Lawrence had lived, he wrote to a friend: ‘Italians are just niggers at heart.’ Portofino, where he spent the summer of 1953 with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy, was no better: Everything became too social – and I do mean social – the Windsors (morons), the ...
... mal and Madame Bovary, not to mention the more recent legal judgments concerning James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov. Why is it that these ‘shocking’ writers, these transgressive authors, are also now labelled the most important? Foucault suggests an answer: Texts, books and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralised ...

Ivy’s Feelings

Gabriele Annan, 1 March 1984

The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov 
by John Carswell.
Faber, 216 pp., £10.95, November 1983, 0 571 13135 2
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... of a fan letter), she wore a specially borrowed ‘tailor-made’ with an embroidered shirt: ‘Lawrence was from the people himself,’ she remarked, ‘and however neatly and nicely his sisters dressed, the one thing they would never have had at that time was peasant embroidery. That was the monopoly of the intelligentsia.’ The fan letter to ...