Geoff Dyer and Frances Wilson: D.H. Lawrence

[Applause] yes yes so three years ago i started to write a new life for d.h lawrence and during that time every time i told someone i was what i was up to rather than responding as i expected them to respond which is by snarling and spitting and saying something aggressive which is what i'm used to as a um as a female laurentian kind of educated in the 80s they responded very differently and their response has been a kind of a rather tender one and slight slightly kooky and slightly calming and slightly amusing they all say exactly the same thing and it's guarded and they put their hands up like this and say i know everyone asks you this i hate to ask you but have you read jeff dyer now when i say everyone has said this i mean everyone and i've spoken to so many people over the past three years and so your royalty statements must be really massive well that's curious yeah we have a representative of the of the publishers we'll be pressing charges later um but seriously the conclusion i've come to is that people don't read lawrence anymore but they read you and so you have single-handedly kept lawrence alive but the version of lawrence that you've kept alive is the version of lawrence that we really needed which is comic lawrence yeah well god i mean uh okay so we're right into it already but uh the thing is yeah there's i mean this is the thing we've got um simon winder from penguin here as a sort of uh who will say something i think about the difficulties of publishing lawrence but yeah there's comic laurence but i guess the point to stress is there are a huge number of lawrences but i think in some ways the i mean um i'm 61 you're a little younger than me you're significantly younger than me you're so youthful friend the lawrence that i was given and uh you know probably uh the same is true for many of you it's basically the the levis lawrence the lawrence of the great tradition that is to say uh it's lawrence the novelist it's sons and lovers as a book but really you know the two great books are the rainbow and women in love and even as a student really reading those books with those two books with great enthusiasm you know i had i sort of struggled with them really and it seems to me that uh lawrence is you know remains a really great important writer but there's a real problem for us with reading the books on which his reputation uh rests the canon has done him no favors at all the canonization of lawrence why do you think what happened that we got the lawrence the novels rather than the lawrence of the essays well i mean i think it's it's fair enough because um you know if you asked lawrence you know uh what were his you know greatest achievements he wouldn't say c and sardinia he would probably say it was uh you know the rainbow and women in love those are the books that uh where he's really doing something that has never been done before with the novel they're the books that weighed on them with this enormous psychic weight and of course then the story of their of the um uh the suppression of the rainbow you know this incredible thing which is sort of entered the in the realm of of myth where copies of the rainbow were were burned outside outside the royal exchange yeah you know an incredible thing to have happened and you know i think in one of his letters he says you know i'll never forgive england for what they did to the rainbow and then uh women in love of course can't can't even get published because it's uh well for all sorts of reasons i mean so those in a way uh the the canon is right they're the books where laura you know that's the stuff on which lawrence really to which he devoted himself um uh but i think something strange has happened really in that um a load of the stuff uh well i guess we also have to then add in lady chatterley because you know lauren's up until lady chatley was just another just another great writer and then he enters into this other realm with the you know the famous penguin case where suddenly lawrence uh a copy of lady chatterley's lover i mean i grew up in a house with no books at all and actually i really admire my dad for this there really weren't any books at all but my aunt across the road there were sort of two serious books in her house one was lady chatterley's lover the other interestingly was william shira's rise and fall of the third reich which i've recently read which is absolutely great but anyway so courtesy of lady chattel is lover you know he became the kind of he he enjoyed the sort of rushdie uh status that is to say he was known by people who had no interest really in reading the book okay so that's a that's a kind of different thing but it seems to me that a lot of the stuff that lawrence's reputation was based on contains a lot of what for us now is his very worst writing but and so for you you share my difficulty with the rainbow and women in love i completely agree with you about about the reorganization of the canon i feel that what you've done in um life with the capital l is give us a completely fresh lawrence and if lawrence is ever going to kind of have a second coming all he wanted because he saw himself as such a messianic figure then it will be with the help of this book in fact i was interested looking through the um essays that they begin jeff's done it in a brilliant way of doing the essays chronologically so um starting in 1912 with lawrence's uh lawrence's essay on christ in material so walking through the terror looking at the crucifixes and ending with the s the last um the last piece of writing he did before he died which was the introduction to um the grand inquisitor section of um karamazov and i thought god they're both about christ they're both about christ you've begun i thought this journey the journey he's taking us a journey you're taking us on through these essays is so laurentian we're going all over the place but we begin with christ and we end with christ and this will be his second coming great will well maybe this is we could actually it would be useful to hear from you simon because um i mean i'll just tell you and let's say a little bit about how this book came to uh came to happen um uh i'd wanted to do a well actually i knew that simon window was an editor at penguin so i would be sort of in touch with him from time to time mainly because i'm such a low life asking for free books but then i would intermingle those requests with this suggestion that it was time to publish a new edition of lawrence's essays because there hadn't really been one since i mean this is a book that i know people of a certain age will have you know these two editions of phoenix and then there was the selected there was a slimmer volume of selected essays and i believe that had been out of print for a long long while so i've just kept badgering simon saying come on you know we've got to have this is ridiculous there's no selected there's no lawrence selected essays but um he'd been so traumatized i think by sort of successive failures to sort of rehabilitate lawrence that it wasn't until i published a book with with simon as my editor the book about where eagles did which was great because then i had a legitimate reason both to up my rate of requests for free books and to re-intensify my lobbying for an edition of lawrence's essays and at some point he relented so i guess what i maybe you could say simon was there anything in the sort of zeitgeist that made this more viable yes now i mean oh is there a mic for him yeah this is turned into a sort of quaker meeting a revivalist thing and i've been at penguin i think for over 20 years and i can't remember a time before a period when i didn't get notes from jeff saying should we do a collection of uh lawrence's essays now we've done them uh my life has no further purpose or direction well i've got another uh suicidal idea for you um uh i mean the problem penguins always face is of course penguin is famously associated with lawrence for many years we published him exclusively before we went out of copyright uh we sold staggering numbers of copies of lady chatley but i mean the this appalling sense throughout my whole time at penguin of every year selling even less lawrence and so we'd look back now on the dreamy period 10 years earlier where we actually sold a reasonable quantity but has been a ghastly feeling that there's been no you know like like jeff i grew up on lawrence and i've worshipped the old that edition you know and uh gradually there's the collapse of the great tradition you know because it because i've been involved with penguin classics in various ways you know you can see the same happening with almost all of conrad and all of james you know it's a boggling collapse in new readers even though they're revered no one actually sort of reads them and so in the end i was able to own jeff so often that i thought a good way of clearing my entree might be to say yes but i was thinking in publishing terms it's the equivalent of the dying samurai throwing his sword [Laughter] but in fact the book's been doing extremely well and and indeed possibly this does show this is the way in which people could approach lawrence through your advocacy through the look of the book through the fact the way it's a sort of separate way of looking at lawrence so i mean so far it seems to be working look at this look at you it's good this is the entire print right yeah some of these appear to be dummies great well thank you can you tell us something jeff about your selection what you decided to include what you decided to exclude which is possibly more important yes yeah well um yeah we go back to my days as a student and of course you know there the focus was all on the fiction and then you would read some of the essays but only really as a way of um helping your uh study of the novel so it would be you know all of laurence's many essays on the novel or then his uh essays on uh obscenity and pornography all this kind of stuff so they were always just sort of stepping stones to to better appreciate the uh the fiction so there was there was that and then i mean when i was writing out of sheer age that's when i became really conscious that there is this lawrence that remains forever fresh i mean just so so contemporary and you know out of sheer age is one of the first of what is now a kind of quite fashionable uncategorizable category of books and it seemed to me that i was making a case for lawrence as one of the first writers whose greatness might lie outside of what was considered the only real field of competition that is to say the novel and there was so much of lawrence that was uh you know uh subsidiary for i mean because lawrence wrote so much i mean he died at 44. the amount he wrote was staggering and it seemed to me that really some weird inversion of the of the classic hierarchy of genre was taking place whereby oh yeah i quite like the stories which are of course in you know kind of generically inferior to the novels but i really loved the travel books i really really loved the essays and the sort of bits and pieces and then i loved the poems which were sort of not not even poems they were just sort of jottings really so okay and the idea was to find a way of bringing into one volume as wide a range of possible of lawrence's uh of lawrence's work and in the previous editions of of uh the essays they were always categorized but as you know any kind of categorizing with lawrence completely falls apart because an essay on one thing is always an essay on a load of other things and there's a wonderful comment by the lawrence scholar james t bolton he talks about the the essay called introduction to pictures which doesn't once mention mentioned pictures i remember it's mainly about um venereal disease uh yes exactly yeah yeah an amazing history of of western art seen in the light of this terrif this sort of terror of the body yes um so there was i mean there's so much and it starts really i mean there was um for example one of the times when i realized just how sort of wild lauren i mean i i don't know i like wild writers and i always come back to that um moment when uh what's his name um was writing the biography of um emerson and uh annie dillard said to him what you've got to realize bob is that emerson is wild and it seems to me that lawrence is just so wild and the the wild lawrence i first encountered was in his study of thomas hardy yes and whereas for a while uh i think books like twilight and italy you know they're sort of available in penguin i think study of thomas hardy has been really uh out of print except for those very expensive cambridge university press yes scholarly editions so the idea really was to make available again as much of this really kind of crazy stuff as possible including i mean so there's all yeah there's of course i include you know some of the essays on the novel but there's loads of wonderful autobiographical writing and there's loads of this really kind of um very little known stuff such as i mean it's interesting whenever anybody would send a book to lawrence basically hoping for a blurb uh let's say the way that happens now one of two things would happen either lawrence would rewrite it as he did with molly skinner didn't he or if you asked him later on in life to write an introduction to apocalypse he'd write his own book about apocalypse and then i mean perhaps you could explain about the the other thing that's sort of a huge thing that grew completely out of control uh the the port the amazing 80-page is it essay that he writes on magnus's the introduction to memoirs of uh the foreign legion yes yes so you you explain about it so this is the um this is the creme de la creme for me of this collection is that at last we have an easily available accessible copy of the memoir of memoirs of morris madness which has been otherwise impossible to find and i've had the copy out of london university library for four years and i had to take it back now but i could return it because i've now got it here and what's what's extraordinary about this essay and i am absolutely obsessed with it is how funny it is and how completely unclassifiable it is and how mischievous it is and totally totally wrong and what it's wrong in what sense that what lawrence behaved so badly in writing this piece so what it's about is maurice magnus is one of the um the strange characters who kind of wander into lawrence's life and he's um and he's homosexual although lawrence will never mention this but lawrence's obsession with him is his homosexuality and um and he's on the run from the police which fascinates lawrence because lawrence is also on the run when he meets him in italy in 1919 and he's escaped from the french foreign legion and he's very theatrical and he's completely broke and he starts to borrow money from lawrence and lawrence is very very complicated about lending money and is that remember that poem about money said you never i never ever lend anyone a fiver without it killing me inside and and maurice madness kind of bleeds money out of lawrence and lawrence is kind of sucked into morris magnus's kind of personal chaos and frieda's going why have you picked up this complete loser and lawrence can't let him go and then maurice magnus kills himself and he leaves behind him um for lawrence to publish his memoir of the french foreign legion and morris and lawrence says in order to clear magnus's debts which have been tremendous he'll publish this but only with his own introduction and in his introduction which we've got reproduced here lawrence completely destroys morris magnus's character he talks about him and it's very very funny the way he destroys his character he destroys him and then he builds him up again and then he destroys him again but in the meantime he describes his friendship with uh with maurice magnus and with magnus's friend norman douglas almost like a kind charlie chaplin film that maurice madness walks in his mincing little steps he looks like a tom titt dressed up to look like a sparrow something he's got um every for every one of laurence's strides morris magnus has ten little steps and he's so evidently lawrence is so evidently inspired by silent movie which he claimed movies which he claims to hate but i think he sees the whole thing in terms of a kind of of a silent film and i do think when i read i mean no one's ever sort of written about maurice magnus is it me but i do think when um when i read that essay with so and i always get so much pleasure from it why isn't this at the center of what we think about when we think about lawrence with this man who was just a he was a brilliant mimic days before television that's apparently all you could do to entertain yourself just mimic people and if lawrence was here now he'd be taking off me and he'd be taking off jeff and you'd all be hands and knees laughing about it because he was a complete parrot wasn't he yeah about fantastic company allegedly well i guess this is the i mean fantastic company for a while and i think this is that um scenario you've described with with morris is so typical throughout laurent the pattern is repeated endlessly in lawrence's life from his first meeting with all of the people at garsington such as bertrand russell you know they meet lawrence they think oh my god this you know this minor son is just this incredible genius well he always said that he was only called a genius because he was a minor son because he lacked that incomparable advantages and always and then of course lauren's always he's always hatching up grand schemes you know the grandest of which was uh destined never to happen you know to fan this community ran on him and i love the way that lawrence designed the badge for this i know i mean you know and then the pattern would always be there would always be the fallout i uh lawrence comes crashing into people's lives and i think that the famous episode with bertrand russell really exemplifies this they then form an allegiance to you know to try to uh bring to you know to to stop the first world war and bertrand russell of course is a pacifist and lawrence you know famously says tomorrow the only reason you're a pacifist is because your deepest desire in life is to bury an axe in somebody's head and russell said that this uh insight into his character made him contemplate suicide until he realized that lawrence as everyone would do eventually is it was just a lunatic so then having built this friendship alliance there's then the inevitable bust up and that just goes through every relationship lawrence has catherine mansfield john middleton murray um but as with all people who are um and then of course you've got this other thing i think we all have this thing in our relationships you know uh you like the husband not the wife you like the wife not the husband there's frieda in the mix as well the terrific problem of freedom they're huge but also kind of a great thing because i mean yeah we i mean we'll talk about that but uh one of the things that um uh united uh frieda and lawrence is that neither of them them were sulkers yes you know so lawrence with his famous temper you know uh he you know there was all those anecdotes that one moment you know he'd be seen trying to strangle frieda the next minute they'd be cooing and talking about macaroni cheese and then so lawrence has all these fallings out with people and then but he's always happy to sort of pick it up again you know there's no lifelong falling out with anybody that i can think of except that people like catherine mansfield die before uh before but you know uh before it's got a chance to to revive so yeah i just i feel that you know as a result everybody anyone who met lawrence for more than five minutes has written a memoir of their time with him yes and maybe i could ask you this friend rather rudely given that you know i was here about 10 years or more ago with john worthing to talk about his full-length biography of lawrence which came out after his uh the the segment of the three-part biography he'd done uh david ellis who wrote part three of the cambridge biography he also did another uh smaller book about lawrence there's the great brenda maddox biography are you really writing another biography of lawrence who needs it okay well i um i am um and i'm not i i think that well for me the the live there are so many lives of lawrence as you say and they're completely unsatisfying as far as i can see i think they're very very boring oh i so disagree i think they're nearly i mean i think the standard of lawrence biographies is so high i love that three-parter although i know that's a bit more it's a source book it's not a it doesn't get inside lawrence like you get inside lawrence and out of sheer age that's the only book about lawrence that really gives you a sense of what it was like to be in the room with lawrence otherwise i see the biographies as extended wikipedia wow what about uh i mean i i worry that i'm now generating potentially generating revenue for brenda maddox rather than me but i i really felt that her biography the married man although it's slightly dubious as a as um in terms of documentary i felt that gave a real sense of what it was like to be with lawrence i'd completely disagree wow okay is she in the room tonight she recently died that what you thought i just said that was a strange collective hallucination and that book disappointed me because it's the only life of florence by a woman otherwise it's and it's extraordinary isn't it that every other biographer has been a man and so i wanted yeah i wanted to have something of how controversial lawrence's for women in that book but there was there was nothing at all but what i think the biographies of um what i think they've done is they've hammered lawrence down and made him into a much more conventional person than he is and i think i i like you i like the wildness of him i like the madness of him i like the fury and i'm completely when you describe as you did so well lauren's falling out with people all the time my question is why why was he so angry and why did he fall out with everyone i don't need it to be repeated for me in every biography they all are the same book and then he met him and you fell out with him when he wrote him up in this book and then he met her i fell out with her and i wrote from that book i want someone to get inside him and say okay were there two lawrences was the lawrence one and lawrence two everyone said everyone who met lawrence said there are two of whom that's the really engaging charming man who knows the names of every flower in the woods and is just wonderful company and then there's a tannoy system who this and when the tunnel system comes into the novels in the form of rupert burkin and women in love he destroys his own art and lawrence doesn't seem to recognize that he's got this self-destructive streak he doesn't seem to recognize everyone else recognized it but he couldn't in the same way that he couldn't recognize that he was a crap painter yeah he thought his paintings were as good as his poems well he thought his paintings were the sort of culmination of the western art tradition well it's so interesting i think that he couldn't tell when he he couldn't see his own genius and so he couldn't really see himself at all i think because he had so little interest in himself as a maker of art he had much more interest than you described this in out of she arranged had much more interest in himself as a maker of cupboards as a diy man and he took his um he took his genius for granted but what he didn't take for granted was is the fact that he saw himself as prophet and that's where it all seemed to go wrong i think and that's what frieda made him feel there's lawrence before frieda and lawrence after frieda and i don't like what any of the biographers have done with frieda i don't think anyone i mean they describe her as a swamp i mean that is literally the term they use it's sort of the swamp of a woman the immovable fact of freedom and i think freedom is half of lawrence yeah i mean she was she is responsible for a lot of what's bad in lawrence in that she is the conduit through whom he got in touch with all of these fashionable german psychoanalytic ideas and so forth and of course lawrence isn't it wonderful i mean this would be interesting to hear from simon you know lawrence wrote these two books fantasia of the unconscious and psychoanalysis of the unconscious would it be true to say they're not in print well it's more modestly would it be true to say they're not his best-selling titles in a crowded field yeah i mean but yeah there's that yeah so i think there's that whole kind of swirl of kind of uh avant-garde you know uh thought which finds its way into the uh into the uh well into um uh the rainbow and women in love yes but i love that crazy german streak in him and it comes straight from otto rang because you say frieda's kind of frieda's engagement in that extraordinary moment of um german kind of anarchistic philosophy of the at the turn of the century and i think that lawrence on the unconscious is really interesting and i like the fact that he sees the unconscious actually as a physical organ like the liver you know it's a it's not a kind of a it's not sort of something abstract it's something that's properly there sitting in the body the mysterious part of the body which always seems to move around in lawrence the loins yes i think it would be really good to just map a body this is laurentian body and here's the loins and here's the unconscious kind of kidney shapes or liver shapes and his and another i mean what you described really well in out of sheer age by impersonating it and reenacting it is the contra i mean all the contradictions in lawrence and so the book is laurentian because you become all those contradictions and the biggest contradiction in lawrence no biographer has done anything with this as only you have is um the fact that he he was an entirely intellectual man who only believed in the body as the center of thought but his body was dying and his body had failed him since the day he was born and he never ever admitted to having tuberculosis but and his own analysis of tuberculosis was that it was and he puts this in his books on psychoanalysis and i ran this past a new age friend of mine who said she thought it was brilliant and must have talked to me laughter and he said that his mother gave him tb by making him excessively loving and it's the pressure of love on it's the pressure of love on the kind of the sternum which presses down into the lungs and um i said god isn't he murdered about the body and she said no it's absolutely right about tuberculosis well but there's on the other hand there's you know you could go through lawrence lawrence comes up with two dozen explanations about what is wrong with him quite quite often he says oh you know i'm feeling ill but i know it's well first of all it's never the lungs it's always the bronchials yeah or the stomach anything but the thing it really is it's only about two weeks before his um uh death that he finally says something like you know i think one of my lungs is a bit tubercular the scale of the denial is incredible so he'll blame it on the nerves uh or on a kind of uh quite often you'll blame it on rey the rage induced in him by england and europe yes and there's a rather brilliant uh passage in the brenda maddox book where quite often she says after a certain point lawrence is maintaining his altitude like a like a pilot whose plane is in trouble just trying to get maximum glide from it to find a climate that suits him and of course lawrence famously falls out not just with people but with places and he never ever will forgive a place that he gets ill in yeah so i mean you know he just turns his back on so you know of course that's why he hated sri lanka where he got unbelievably ill but um yeah uh where were we fran just remind me uh illness this kind of stuff uh the contradictions the denial that's right oh yes and frieda yeah so on the one hand i feel that uh she's responsible for a lot of the things that work to the detriment of lawrence's lawrence's and she didn't have to deny i mean lawrence was in denial about his tb but so was frieda oh yes yeah yeah and the huxleys were outraged yeah sort of nursing care but i think also weirdly i mean it's such a complex relationship because i feel that nobody has summed up what we still today love in lawrence better than freda when she says something like to me it was just so wonderful his immediate communication with his immediate immediate bond with everything flowers trees all this kind of stuff with no kind of mediation via theory just that kind of uh this that kind of instantaneous kind of rapport he had and what i really love about that is that it's so close to what one of laurence's sisters said about lawrence's dad who of course lawrence famously said he was born hating and one of the sisters says about the dad oh yeah he knew the names of flowers and birds and that yes uh and that is what is so valuable in lawrence and i find that really it's i mean what i liked about this um one of the reasons i felt the only way to arrange this book was chronologically is because of the mad scatter of it and really whatever lawrence is writing whether it's a big book the rainbow uh some little postcard that he's sending to somebody or a poem you just never know when there's going to be the next outbreak of just such incredible genius i mean you know there's just uh loads of examples but you know i mean i think oh um no i was looking at the moments of incredible genius just when he's writing about um yeah in this you included a couple of his reviews which are always lawrence as a reader is just so exciting isn't he and this is him on um on hemingway and he says mr hemingway's sketches are so excellent they're like striking a match lighting a brief sensational cigarette and then it's over it's just remarkable that lawrence reviewed hemingway he reviewed as well and but and then you know i some i think back to uh because part of this i mean i'm really now that i'm sort of in my 60s i sort of find myself thinking all the time about those formative years when you you know when you discover lawrence and yeah lawrence's reputation was still very much intact you know when i was 17 18. and i can so remember just reading that poem song of a man who has come through and out of nowhere there's this line in it when he just says a fine wind is blowing the new direction of time it's wonderful yeah i mean what uh what just and then it just goes on something else a little bit load of nonsense but these these kind of wonderful lines are just uh cropping up any all over the place and one of laurence's great gifts i think was his i mean i always think of kerouac in a way that he has this freedom from self-editing i mean he became a kind of um apostle of you know he became famous for let's get let's uh you know let's get rid of our inhibitions but i think one of his great strengths also was that he was so uninhibited as a writer and didn't really care if he was writing a lot of nonsense although of course he was a complete a compulsive rewriter of his own stuff i forgot to say also that one of the problems we have if we're going to make the claim for lawrence the novelist then we have to really uh you know then you're saying what you know the plumed serpent aaron's rod kangaroo i mean these are uh uh as a apart from lady chatterley's lover after uh women in love lawrence is a as a novelist is really pretty well over with uh well there are accounts of what it was like to be lawrence while he wrote the books yes they're not they're not about anything else and in that sense they're they're very very interesting but i think all all the essays here are accounts of what it's like to be lawrence well you wrote the essays well yeah indeed and that's the the really interesting thing in the the travel writing i mean he was you know he was um he wrote these wonderful travel books uh you know the ones about italy and then there's the mexico ones lot and then the essays about new mexico and it's that this famous sort of thing is is he just responding with unbelievable sensitivity to what's going on and the most famous example i guess is when he goes to that letter from germany uh from is it 1923 or something like that and he's in the black forest and he says oh i can feel something he's you know he's just all he's doing is describing the weather he says something is brewing here something that is coming from far further back than the christian ear and it's going to result in fine wind is flowing you know yeah i said this is uh the opposite this is uh not the nude it's sort of blowing us backwards and you say oh my god did is he intuiting uh the rise of nazism even though there's nothing really about politics in it uh and similarly when he goes to australia and he gives that you know you think oh my god he's only been here two weeks and he's got a sense of the dream time of the song lines you know other times as um you know as this is what rebecca west says in the essay oh etc and it's included here oh that's me telling me that's time to start oh that's so yeah can you just say something about rebecca west because it's very very funny yeah and it's this story which uh it seems to me she says you know it's um uh she's in lawrence sorry she's in florence to meet norman douglas who rather snoozily says oh lawrence is here and i bet if we go around to his crummy hotel room he'll already be writing an article about florence and they go around there and they can sort of hear him writing his piece i think he's a typewriter and she they go in and they say what are you doing and he replies i can't do the accent because incredibly there's no audio at all of lawrence it's very surprising actually given how famous he was and he says he's writing about florence and of course rebecca west thinks this is both hilarious and really stupid because he doesn't know the first thing about florence but of course he's always eager to earn money and of course he's staying in a really crummy hotel because in brenda maddox's great uh great phrase he was to say the least very uh careful about money anyway and then lawrence dies and rebecca west famously says in this essay she says god i realize that actually all lawrence ever wrote about was the state of his own soul and at that moment florence was as good a good a symbol as as any other i just want to say just before we have questions something about how rebecca west is a superb critic of lawrence everything she says about lawrence is right but women always are and what's very interesting in what have in the lawrence trajectory is that the people who first wrote about lawrence so well were all women oh like catherine carson catherine carswell and um mabel dodge luhan i think it's absolutely brilliant her book lorenzo in towns oh it's superb and so every woman that lawrence knew wrote about him astonishingly well and the women were there the women had no problem with lawrence until kate millet and then when kate millett came along the women had a huge problem with lawrence from which he's never recovered from which she's never recovered you know it was his death sentence and i and we haven't ever put him on the shitty many literature lists and he's and he's never come off um and that's what i wanted brenda maddox to do something with but that's what you're doing well it's funny it's what i thought i was doing when i first started writing about him but in fact i'm so uninterested in what lawrence has to say about sex so i can hardly be bothered to yeah yeah yeah but we haven't mentioned it once have we no we really [Laughter] all i would add is uh in terms of women on lawrence uh the most amazing there's this just wonderful little glimpse of uh lawrence in italy i think it's i've got i'm not sure which way around it is it's either virginia woolf on a train in italy seeing lawrence at a station or the other way around she's on the platform and lawrence's train pulls in anyway and she sees lawrence and she sees him looking pinched and penetrated what a description of lawrence of course he's being eaten away by you know by the by the disease that he but by the disease that he refuses to name but also sort of by life actually yeah pinched and penetrated yes yes so if anyone is in the room who knew lawrence uh please yeah we can have some sort of questions now or statements of position yes please i think there's a microphone for you i was just struck by the fact you both um touched on frieda but like and you seem to have quite differing opinions on her and i wondered if you could both say a bit more about your estus frida yeah what's your line on friday well i think on the one hand you know it was such a libera she was such a liberation so there's you know uh lawrence is this sort of you know horny young man at the uh at the sort of turn of the century always trying to get these let's you know these sort of uh women to have sex with him who for very for various reasons uh have reservations about it and then of course he bumps into the he meets this uh you know german woman who according to um brenda maddox's famously unreliable account within about 20 minutes of meeting him says do you want to come upstairs because ernest my husband is out at the library at the moment she completely misses the point of that had she not decided to invent that scene she might have said something really interesting about what happened in the 20 minutes that lawrence met frieda because during that conversation they just you know the deal was done it had nothing to do with sex and if she hadn't put that in we might have been able to think seriously about what what they you know what really connected them uh which was well i think they both describe what happened i think so lawrence turns up to see his tutor it's very important to lawrence that frieda is married to his tutor of course you know of course that's significant he turns up to see his tutor to get a letter of recommendation to a university in germany he's just had his second very serious illness and he's kind of you know he's despairing he can't find anyone to have sex with him as um jeff said and he comes into this house and christ there's this extraordinary woman there i mean she's astonishingly beautiful and kind of huge bosoms and blonde and full of kind of and she's already um involved with a couple of men in german she's just had a big affair with otto rank and another of her lovers who's a german anarchist is currently in prison so she's been needing this kind of double life for a long time and she doesn't really want to stay being a bourgeois housewife and the minute she sees lauren she evidently starts telling him everything about her life and he starts telling her everything about his life and they talk frantically like we're talking now they kind of pour it all out because they're waiting for you know earnest weekly to come down the stairs and then they've got to have lunch and frieda said well we talked about oedipus and as far as lawrence was concerned ediplus was the play running in the nottingham playhouse as far as frieda was concerned oedipus was a complex which she'd heard all about in germany and so she brought that to the deal and lawrence said oh god he was in the middle of writing sons and lovers and he just you know he left that day saying you know i've just met the most wonderful woman in all of england and um and he meant it was an extraordinary meeting and the fact that brenda maddox says you know they arrived and they went upstairs and had a shag and then came downstairs and had dinner it just seems i don't know i just think that's i think that's um such a misreading of who lawrence was he was such a prude he would never have behaved like that with his tutor's wife in the house you know and also i mean he was he made himself out to be sexually liberated he was the most uptight man in the world on the other but as a sort of parable i mean so but you've sort of conceded that compared with the women that lawrence had met before she was this enormous kind of sexual force yes um yes she was so there was a promise of sex yeah yeah yeah which is always better than and then of course then it becomes very interesting because late you know she's older than him and then several uh people who encountered them in mexico mexico commented oh god you know there's this uh you know this big german woman seems more like his mum than his than his wife you know given how abnormally close to his mother he was it all gets very very interesting i think it mattered to lawrence a lot that frieda was a mother that frieda it was really important to lawrence that frieda left her children for him and his behavior about her leaving her children was unspeakable that he refused to accept that she'd lost anything here now so when she'd cry about to when she ran away with lawrence she didn't know she would never see her children again and lawrence was going oh god they're better off without you i mean every child needs to be without its mother mothers can only destroy your life he said all these things don't say no i do actually miss them and i'd like to see them and that was one of the reasons why lawrence would then beat her up oh and get beaten up back and get beaten up god she could swing it yeah anyway so that's those are i mean yeah uh that's our thoughts on on frida the other thing to say is you know she was nothing if not up for it in that you know after um after they're stuck in cornwall during the first world war at the moment they're allowed to travel they embark on this just incredible life of traveling the world always on the cheap always third class of just a life of um yes it was uh you know it was a very very demanding life for her and very different to lauren who of course for a big chunk of each day is just their writing you know where is what what did frida do all day yeah well because he did the cooking and the cleaning and grew the vegetables and washed the sauce and he made her breakfast in bed and we know she smoked a lot which she hated so she and she smoked in his face because she had tv and so she i mean she seemed to do and then he wrote a couple of novels i mean she took him six weeks to write a novel so he was incredibly busy and getting thinner and thinner and thinner and she was very very lazy and getting fatter and fatter and fatter and see and he had an agenda in moving around the world and she had no agendas there was this kind of aimless egotism to her which i think is really interesting yeah and i don't think i think frieda is fascinating and um and i don't think you really get what's going on in lawrence's head until you've got frieda because she just their trip switch went when he met her and the writing changed but also he changed and she's always marginalized in the lawrence studies and frida was there frida was literally never there i mean wherever he was she was i mean they were never they were lauren hardy sorry it's never not there they were laurel and hardy together they were great yeah okay um are we okay for another question oh if there is one all right this may be a sort of niche interest but um i'm a primary school teacher um have been for a long time and i'm conscious that lawrence is the only major novelist or writer that i know of who was a primary school teacher and i love the rainbow and find women in love really difficult but one of the reasons i love the rainbow is as a chapter in the rainbow has a better description of the experience of beginning teaching than than any novel i know [Music] and my my thought that goes from that about lawrence is that um one of the um pleasures of being a primary school teacher is you can get interested in anything and everything one of the dangers of being a primary school teacher is you can ramble on and on and on because the children probably won't stop you so i'm just that's that's my reflection i'm just thinking of lawrence as a primary school teacher an ex-primary school teacher who rambled on and on yeah thank you that's so interesting it hasn't occurred to me but you're right he got his training as a teacher and that he must have taken that training into his writing but he saw himself completely as a teacher didn't he well yes as a as a teacher who could heal the kind of uh you know teacher and savior i mean all those uh elements that you've quite rightly said we find rather unpalatable now but i guess one thing we should add is that i mean uh my um uh father-in-law is is re-reading uh volume five of henry james's letters and i remember thinking god on earth is he why is he doing that and then i realized oh i've just re-read volume seven of lawrence's letters and one of the lovely things in lawrence's letters is towards the end there is this um i mean he still gets he's still kind of going completely berserk about things but there is a kind of lovely gentleness in some of those letters or rather a sort of accommodation that he makes with things and there's far less sort of ranting and raving i mean there's a lot of sort of business letters but the the kind of lyricism that is there and the just sort of sort of gentleness when he you know and by then he's completely abandoned his idiotic uh belief in a sort of uh you know in the sort of fascist cult of the leader you know he's not no longer saying things like um you know i believe in i don't believe in democracy i believe in the inherited right of kings and he's not saying things like the cornish people are so worthless they should just be used as slaves i mean he's becomes around to a much nicer kind of uh social democratic view of the world let's say wherein does his greatness lie for you i said um what why now why lawrence now what does he have to say to us now i think it would be this thing of the the um the the crucial thing the elevation of forms of work which have traditionally been regarded as as lower down and also just the the immediacy of some of his writing without any rhetoric without that tannoy that we use uh so for for me that's where it is and also as you mentioned as a critic you mentioned those reviews but for me i mean you know if i was asked to choose you know lauren you know what what is the one lawrence book to take away i'd be sorely tempted to choose studies in classic american literature i agree um because it's great on uh you know melville whitman all this kind of stuff and it's also completely nuts yes yes i think one of the things that makes him so relevant today is that he invented auto fiction oh yes yeah indeed and there was no one had um no one had described as lawrence had described no lawrence turned autobiography into novel it's very indistinguishable and um canal scarred and rachel cusk would not exist without lawrence tonight uh cusk is a very big uh she's a big lawrence fan yeah she anyway yeah um grew up in nottingham and i i knew that lawrence had become unfashionable but um i would like to put in a few words for his for the great what i consider the great novels because i read them first when i was a school girl in nottingham and you know knowing what miners lives were like and understanding just a little bit perhaps a little bit more than we would today of the um you know the ghastly degradation and poverty that he must have grown up in and knowing his house and the little sculpted coal coal things that he made which glisten it was those were the only shiny things in the house and i thought i thought and still think that those novels are definitely worthy of reading and definitely worthy of understanding of how you escape from a life like that because you know would the world have taken a slightly different turn he might have become a minor and just followed in his father's footsteps but you know he had a little chance with education a little chance with the people he knew and did amazing things with it so i'd just like to sort of put that put that point that to feel that those novels are not worth reading yes that's really important would be a shame because i think i personally enjoyed them and enjoy rereading them now that's a very useful corrective the only thing i would say is that i feel that that dimension of experience for me is uh presented more powerfully in sons and lovers yes um that could be that thank you and i'm glad we've ended actually with that yeah that uh with that corrective because it would be kind of it would be unfortunate if the takeaway from this was to say don't bother reading lawrence's novels yeah that's right yeah that would be dementing the takeaway should be that there's so much more yeah there's always another lawrence essay always another lawrence poem we haven't even begun with lawrence no and the short stories the short stories of moscow yes yeah um thank you very much jeff thank you francis round of applause please you

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Length: 54min 44sec (3284 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020