Just finished Sons and Lovers... What does /lit/ think of DH Lawrence?
He wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Sons and Lovers was pretty steamy for a book that came out in 1913.
>>7494428
I't the only book I've read by Lawrence, and I loved it. The part at the hospital where Baxter admits why he started fight with Paul was filled with pure feels.
>>7494428
Always surprised to see how few responses DH Lawrence threads get. I haven't read Sons and Lovers yet, but I recently read Women in Love and well, I was exhausted by it. It was basically about re imagining love and about Lawrences being a homo. I would sum the moral of the story as: Fuck Women, be gay. Regardless, your love will always fail. There's no such thing as this pure perfect love that Lawrence imagined. Women in Love had moments that were brilliant and beautiful. It had some parts that dragged on. I am looking forward to reading his other works but I just needed a break. But yeah, this was one gay-ass dude.
I like his poetry. I never see it talked about though.
I like Lawrence a lot but his bibliography is intimidating. And it's really hard to find a good conversation about Lawrence because no one's read the same things.
loved Sons and Lovers, Kangaroo, and most of his short stories, though. The Woman Who Rode Away and The Prussian Officer are GOAT
Prussian Officer I privately believe is based upon Wozzeck
he pulled Moby-Dick outta the muck
>>7494428
I enjoyed Lady Chatterly's lover but was surprised how reactionary he could. The radio seemed to be a sign of the decline of civilization to him. The thought of coal miners having too much money to spend on flashy clothes also seemed to alarm him a great deal. While I realize consumerism is hollow at the core, surely little luxuries for the miners wont end the world, DH.
>>7495404
DH seems like he was almost completely isolated from his times except in what he said and wrote directly about his contemporaries
He's an alien
>>7495404
I think he had some nostalgia about these mining towns that consumerism was tainting. I know he grew up in a town like that. He was fascinated in Women in Love with getting the potential efficiency of these communities
>>7495416
Didn't DH and Joyce take some shots at one another. If I remember correctly he called Ulysses shit and Joyce refused to mention any of his works
>>7495426
wouldn't surprise me. Lawrence's writing must have seemed archaic or forced to Joyce and Joyce must have seemed too self-indulgent and ridiculous for Lawrence
>>7495426
“Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character of Mr. Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. . . . Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr. Joyce and Miss Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woolliness.
It’s awful. And it’s childish. It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious.
(Lawrence, Criticism 114-115)
>>7495416
DH was completely in tune with Modernism in terms of fiction embodying the fracturing of perspective & time common with post-war trauma. But stylistically he was on some William Blake shit.
>>7495426
Joyce said that Lawrence was an awful man with words. Which wasn't too far off the mark. Lawrence was a good observer and a decent novelist but he couldn't put words together very well.
To be fair, both of them wrote equally shitty poetry
>>7495451
What a dreamy man, so afraid of himself that he had to write about dying miners and live everywhere.
>>7495471
All it takes is reading Lawrence's works to realize how shitty a person he probably was. I wouldn;t go as far as saying he was a bad writer though.
>>7495480
it must be said that Lawrence is a dream of a psychoanalytical study, I bet he had disassociative personality disorder or something.
>>7495495
lol I agree... the suppressed homosexuality too
for a DH Lawrence conversation on /lit/, I must say i'm pretty impressed
He wrote an interesting essay on Moby Dick. You should be able to find it online. He was one of the people whose interest helped spark a revival of Melville's reputation in the early 20th century.
my favorite Lawrence poem, 'Song of a Man who is Loved,' or as I call it, 'Bury Me Holding My Wife's Tits'
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me space and fear, but the fourth side rests
Sure and a tower of strength, 'twixt the walls of her breasts.
Having known the world so long, I have never confessed
How it impresses me, how hard and compressed
Rocks seem, and earth, and air uneasy, and waters still ebbing west.
All things on the move, going their own little ways, and all
Jostling, people touching and talking and making small
Contacts and bouncing off again, bounce! bounce like a ball!
My flesh is weary with bounce and gone again! -
My eyes are weary with words that bounce on them, and then
Bounce off again, meaning nothing. Assertions! Assertions! stones, women and men!
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me chaos and bounce, but the fourth side rests
Sure on a haven of peace, between the mounds of her breasts.
I am that I am, and no more than that: but so much
I am, nor will I be bounced out of it. So at last I touch
All that I am-not in softness, sweet softness, for she is such.
And the chaos that bounces and rattles like shrapnel, at least
Has for me a door into peace, warm dawn in the east
Where her bosom softens towards me, and the turmoil has ceased.
So I hope I shall spend eternity
With my face down buried between her breasts;
And my still heart full of security,
And my still hands full of her breasts.
he started the huge trend of emotional mama's boys thinking they can write because theyre sensitive
>>7495611
Proust wrote at the same time as Lawrence, he's much more a momma's boy
>>7495605
Mom's tits*
>>7495621
proust wasn't a creep, just gay
>>7495627
Lawrence was just as gay
>>7495627
talent sprung to Lawrence in a way it took Proust decades to cultivate, though. Literally all Proust had was his sensitivity and his mastery of written french
>>7495625
kek
lawrence gets his lactations where he can find them
>http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_11
here is his Moby-Dick essay for anyone who wants to czech it
>>7495631
He never actually came out, did he?
>>7495661
I don't think so but look at his character Birkin in Women in Love (he was modeled after Lawrence himself) He wanted this perfect love that was only possible between two men. Plus they had a hawt nude wrestling scene. Also I kind of remember a Lawrence quote saying that he finds it odd how all the greatest men in the history of the world were homosexuals. And God knows he thought he himself was one of the greatest men ever
>>7495673
but what about Frieda, allegedly his wife
For such psychological complexity, Sons and Lovers had some real fucking boring prose. You don't get more "generic 1910s English prose" than that.
>>7495680
Yeah I realize he was married, but gay dudes can marry women.
>>7495693
>tfw no morally-evolved three-way with Lawrence and his wife
sweet ass beard
>>7495673
i think he romanticized homosexuality, but was not a homo
if he was, he probably would have been so more openly
>>7495682
do check out the story The Woman Who Rode Away
a wonderful journey in clear, captivating language
some of his best exposition
>>7495682
>not enjoying the coal miner speak from papa
>>7495703
>reading Lawrence for exposition
>>7495706
you can read Lawrence for a lot of things and there's /so much/ Lawrence to read. and his short fiction is absolutely great for low-investment reading
>>7495703
I second this. The Prussian Officer collection of short stories is pretty good too.
>>7495704
The dilogue was generally fine, mainly due to the characters it was attached to.
An almost criminally taken for granted writer
bymp
>>7495372
His poetry is severely underrated. I think with time he will get the recognition he deserves.
My favorite poem of his
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness
of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread
blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of
white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-
blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps
give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on
blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted
September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense
gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
>>7496711
The formatting got fucked up..
there's still hope for /lit/
i have a friend who looks exactly like him
I have a book of his stories called 'The Prussian Officer' which is really cool. I have a big hardback book with like four or five of his novels in it but just haven't got around to reading it yet
>>7494428
It's pretty badly-written. The "Sons" part is the best part of the novel and quite interesting (speaking as a mummy's boy myself), especially in the first couple of chapters in his childhood, but I found the "Lovers" part tedious and meandering with women who weren't well fleshed-out.
>>7498612
I think he's always took flack for misogyny and also being a bit of a boring writer. Sons and Lovers isn't badly written though. The guy is pretty interesting psychologically you can see it in his seminal works
>>7498635
>Sons and Lovers isn't badly written though
Go back and count how many times Lawrence writes "he hated her/she hated him". The repetition really annoyed me.
>The guy is pretty interesting psychologically you can see it in his seminal works
Yeah I have The Rainbow on my to-read list, which based on what I've heard I'm looking forward to.
I think part of the problem with Sons and Lovers is that Lawrence's trademark mysticism is only in genesis and isn't expressed very well through the novel.
