D.H. Lawrence Books

The Trespasser is the tragic tale of Siemund, a music teacher with an unhappy family life, and his student, who becomes his lover. It isn't a worthless book, but your time would definately be better spent reading one of the famous Lawrence books - this is clearly the creation of a young, impressionable mind. For instance, Lawrence makes constant reference to Wagner's 'Ring' in the book, rubbing the reader's nose profusely in heavyhanded hints that Siemund is borrowed from the German composer's work.

Pretty much known as the Henry Miller of his time, D.H. Lawrence was a writer that lots of people were reading, but were ashamed to admit to. The sexually charged Lady Chatterly's Lover would have made him a wealthy man if he had lived a bit longer. Lawrence has too often been the victim of readers looking over his art to see the erotic elements. Jeffrey Meyers tries to present his subject as an artist who changed the times he lived in. Meyers pretty much fails.

Born into a working class family, Lawrence figured out early on that his mother was the one that made the decisions in the household, overriding his father, who was frequently drunk and abused his wife. As so often happens, this pattern would be repeated with DH's own marriage. After a couple of years of being a teacher, a job which he despised by the way, he met a woman somewhat older than himself who was married, and proceeded to fall in love. Much as Henry Miller's wife got him to quit his job and concentrate on his art, so too did Frieda. Eventually getting a divorce, Lawrence married her. Her love came at a price though. On their honeymoon, Freida had affairs with other men to prove her freedom.

Finding some fulfillment with Freida but still unable to feel complete, Lawrence set about writing a handful of novels about some semi-mystical state you could reach through sex. It was as though Lawrence felt so disconnected with the world and so alienated from women that he sought some cosmic answer in his books as to how they two sexes could be brought together in one being. Meyers also suggests that maybe as an alternative Lawrence sought for this union through affairs with men also.

In this biography I failed to see how anything about DH's and Freida's relationship was positive. She seems to be more a physical plaything that a loving wife. Every time you hear about DH and her, they seem to be yelling at each other and having actual physical fights. Probably because just like in his father's marriage, he is the passive-aggresive one who does not have the stamina to control Freida except in moments of anger when he hits her. The only thing she helped him with was sex. Meyers himself seems enamored of Freida, time and again saying how attractive she was when the pictures in the book make her appear just as Georgia O'Keefe comments upon meeting her, that she was "a chunky, gold-toothed, guttural-voiced woman". I still never figured out her supposed beauty.

I felt no connection with Lawrence. I don't know if it was the fault of the biographer or DH himself. He came off as a hypocritic man who tried to lord it over his friends. He never seemed to think they were good enough or smart enough to figure out what they wanted from their lives. He sacrificed many of his friends, such as that with Katherine Mansfield for his egomaniacal mannerisms. Some might say this is a symptom of genius. I believe that Lawrence was simply an above average writer, bordering on bad.

One of D. H. Lawrence's fable-like tales addressing gender roles and relationships, The Fox is developed based on the symbol of a female-centric farm beset by a "demon," a marauding male fox. Owned and run by two women, the "small, thin, delicate thing," Banford, and "the man about the place," March, the farm is remarkably unproductive. One independent-minded heifer refuses to stay put, and the women, afraid of birth and responsibility, sell the pregnant cow before she can produce a calf. Because "Banford and March disbelieved in living for work alone," it is clear that their farming venture, the nature of which requires commitment and hard work, is fated to fail.

Into this setting, where "fowls did not flourish," comes a fox, a symbolic male, that carries off not only the hens, but March's consciousness. As a male intruder in this female world, "he knew her." The imagery is deliberately sexual; "her soul failed her," and, too mesmerized to fire her gun, "she saw his white buttocks twinkle." Having encountered the male, she determines to hunt him down. "She was possessed by him."

Months later, March again threatens to shoot the real fox, a young man who comes to the farm from the outside world of men and war. As with the fox, the other male, "March stared at him spellbound." Again, the symbolism is not meant to be subtle; Lawrence writes, " . . . the boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise" and "she need not go after him any more."

The fox and the man change March, who in the man's presence becomes "pale and wan," anxious not to be seen, "a shadow in the shadow"--almost like a fox herself. Throughout the novel, the man, Henry, has the same effacing effect on her. She is no longer the "man" of the farm, but a shrinking, passive, mesmerized female, speaking in a "plangent, laconic voice" when the real man is around. In her dreams, the fox and the man are powerful sexual images that take away her ability to articulate; the fox "whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed this brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain . . . [She] lay trembling as if she were really seared."

As the story continues and Henry and Banford vie for March's attention and loyalty, it is easy to see Banford and March as a lesbian couple, incomplete in the way the French writer Colette viewed such relationships. Henry, the man, carries the gun, hunts, and watches; he is "most free when he was quite alone." With Henry's arrival, Banford becomes more stereotypically female, strong-willed but physically weak, querulous, and manipulative. March is in the middle, the man to one, the woman to the other. Banford says of Henry, "He's a boy like you are." March is always indistinct to the soft-spoken, courteous Henry, who wishes to dominate her and to bring her into focus. When Henry kills the fox, March dreams of burying Banford wrapped in the fox skin--a thought that leaves her with "tears streaming down her face." She does not want to let go of either woman or man, or the feminine or masculine in herself.

Events and choices leave March with "nothingness at last"; having hunted for the fox and reached for happiness, she is left with a "realisation of emptiness" that can be resolved only by being "alone with him at her side." To be female is to sleep, a form of death, while to be male is to keep awake, know, consider, judge, and decide. In The Fox, as in other Lawrence novels, the man-woman relationship is one of strain between masculine values of dominance and possession and feminine desire to "stay awake" and for autonomy and self-determination.

Unpolished, repetitive, obvious in its imagery, and blunt about its messages, The Fox is flawed and pales beside Sons and Lovers and Women in Love. As a short study of the ideas surrounding gender, roles, and relationships that predominate in Lawrence's fiction, The Fox is worth the attention of both Lawrence student and aficionado.

Diane L. Schirf
8 December 2007.

The author's aim is to explore the way T. Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and V. Woolf push out the boundaries of the novel, moving fiction away from the relatively realistic and social concerns of nineteenth-century fiction into unknown regions of the universe and of hte psyche. But these three authors are by no means the only ones of their time to have shown an interest in either the workings of the unconscious and/or the plotless narrative.

Sumner suggests that modernist fiction reflects the fact that the more the novel is concerned with the life of the mind, the greater the risk of fragmentation. The writers' exploitation fo the relation of consciousness ot the external work adds another dimension of complexity to the form of the novel. But the way in which this relationship functions is often misinterpreted. For instance, in the first chapter of The Return of the Native, Hardy does not suggest that "humanity no longer feels in harmony with mild and gentle landscapes", but that the destruction of nature constitutes a menace to human consciousness, as it works as its reflection.

The comparison between Hardy and the Surrealists in chapter 3 tends to overlook the influence of the classical form of Greek tragedy on Hardy's construction of his plots. Therefore, the use of "chance", whatever Roy Morrell may say in Thoams Hardy: the Will and the Way (1965), has probably more to do with careful plot construction than with openness, even despite Hardy's real interest in experimentalism. The comparison with Karl Popper's Indeterminism and Human Freedom, though suggesting, is not fully accounted for. The final quote of Richard Rorty is not even accompanied of the necessary bibliographic support at the end of the book or in the body of the main text.

The comparison with Lawrence acknowledges both authors's gift for characterisation. Even though their characters may be considered to partake of an extent of Indeterminacy, or inconclusiveness, the same cannot be said of the "endings" of Hardy's novels. When Hardy offers two alternative endings at the end of The Return of the Native, he is not denying the reader "the comfort of a single meaning", but challenging hisown personal capacity to ascertain the workings of the real as the result of the confrontation of a variety of wills. "Those with an austere artistic code", says Hardy, referring to the initiated readers, "will manage to discern which ending is the true one".

In my opinion, Hardy's interest in innovation and experimentalism in form has to be understood alongside his reliance on the tragedy as a structural form.

While analysing Woolf, Sumner concludes that what unites these authors (and separates them from Joyce) is their interest in non-human things. While she goes on to mention Einstein and quantum theory as a philosophical background to their writing, she has forgotten to mention such relevant works to this study as Woolf's essay "The Novels of Thomas Hardy", in The Second Common Reader (1932), and Lawrence's "A Study of Thomas Hardy". Amazingly, these do not appear in the bibliography at the end of the book. Her final dismissal of Joyce on the grounds that "he only cared about human things" makes his own trend of modernism more appealing, in the light of everything that has gone to make up the description of the others.

This is the first biography on D.H.Lawrence I have read and I enjoyed it very much. Having not read anything else on him I can't say whether it is gossipy or not. I did not get the impression of it being mean spirited but I think she was less kind to Frieda in the second half of the book. I feel the author did a great job of paralleling the author's life and work. Overall, I feel this was a good book for me start to learn about D.H. Lawrence and his amazing albeit short life.

Maddox's biography of Lawrence provides a thorough, engaging and thoughtful analysis of the artist's life and work through a lens trained on his relationships with his wife and the other women and men who figured prominently in the shaping of his personality and, by extension, his literary legacy. While revealing the warts-and-all ugliness of Lawrence's frequent rages and his verbal, physical and fictional abusiveness toward those near him, the narrative reaches for and often achieves a tenuous balance that simultaneously acknowledges and deflects (or dampens) criticism of Lawrence, leaving us with a portrait of a very conflicted human when one could just as easily see a monster. In that regard, the book is rich in detail, but one has to wonder about the scale on which the facts are weighed and measured, particularly in light of such breezily passed over statements as "Frieda and Ravagli bought a house near Galveston, at Port Isabel, Texas . . ." when those two cities are about as close to each other as Boston is to Baltimore. From a great height, perhaps one could view Lawrence as Maddox does, but if one had to put on shoes and walk the same path, similar conclusions are doubtful.

First reader got it right: this is just a gossipy fluff from the distored view-point of the (early) polit. correct dogma. Both Lawrence and Frieda were far more complex and brilliant (naturally troubled also, but which real marriage isn't!), individually and as a couple. For the best portrait of Lawrence, and through him the marital rollercoaster ride with the great Frieda, read Richard Aldington. That's one of the best biographies ever. Of course, his best novels offer a wealth of insider clues to their stormy, larger-than-life marriage. What an amazing couple! To think that Frieda, from one of the most famous German aristocratic families, left behind her loveless marriage, with three kids, and eloped, head over heels, with the stubborn, war-resisting nearly penniless miner's son who will incidentally turn into the greatest writer of the 20th century!

This book won the Whitbread prize in the U.K.-and deservedly so. It is a thoroughly researched, vivid and well written portrait of a brilliant miner's son writing against a death sentence he would never acknowledge-tuberculosis. After assisting the death of his all-important mother, Lawrence was supported by a wife whom he stole from another man (actually, she had him in bed within 20 minutes of meeting him, in her then-husband's house, too.) Freida was highly sexed and also almost compulsively unfaithful to him. They had dreadful fights, but somehow never actually split up. Brings alive the hothouse intellectual atmosphere of the Fabians, Freidians and Edwardian England, and the awful (and for Lawrence personally humiliating) cultural oppression of both Britain and America in the teens and twenties. You also get to travel around the world with the couple-Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Taos N.M., and Mexico, meeting the famous and infamous as you go. And with many well-chosen excerpts from Lawrence's letters, poetry and novels, you get a level of understanding of where his books came from which is very helpful in appreciating them. And him. I made the mistake of taking this book to Las Vegas. I didn't do any gambling.

This is a second rate, sometimes mean-spirited, gossipy book. Not for someone interested in the intricacies of Lawrence's real marriage.

This was Lawrence's first published novel in the UK, and represents the writer's early experiment in the quest for an established style.

Far too much descriptive detail, and too little narrative, to be considered an enjoyable read. It is however interesting to note the early appearance of themes that were to dominate later Lawrence works. In particular, the nature-civilisation dichotomy, which became a Lawrence trademark, is apparent here in the relationship between the cultured, educated narrator and his best friend, the raw-boned but affable farmer, George.

Readers wishing to introduce themselves to Lawrence would be better advised to start with the book published two years later, and that marked the beginning of his literary reputation: "Sons and Lovers"

There are only 3 good stories. thats all , at least the book is soft cover so i can take it with me to bed when i cant fall to sleep.

Macrobiotics has worsened considerably my long term weight problem.

It's true that my medical condition is rare and it took a loooong time to find out but I was eager to belive in macrobiotics, even when it should be obvious that it was doing me no good. Although I followed the advice of many self-proclaimed experts I was getting sicker and heavier... until I decided to listen to my body.

I had the help of a conventional doctor and now follow a mostly vegetarian diet with the occasional small amount of fish. I drastically reduced the amount of grains in my diet and now eat huge amounts of uncooked salads and fresh fruit everyday, fruit and vegetable juices daily, organic eggs and cheese about twice a week. Despite of all these changes being a macrobiotic no-no I feel and look better than ever.

Read it if you want... but believe first in your body and only then in the "experts".

David Trotter is one of the most intellectually adventurous literary historians going. But if he wants to conceal that fact to the rest of the world, he should certainly continue to publish with Oxford at that price.