D. H. Lawrence Archives

“For whatever sedates us is shuffling us off towards the greater sleep of death. Art, on the other hand, is a persistent wake up call, the setting off of a quiet siren in the heart.” Steven Heighton

In Reynolds Price’s introduction to James Salter’s novel, A Sport and A Pastime, Price alludes to the famous Grove Press lawsuit against the NYC postmaster. In 1959, Grove Press re-published unabridged editions of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The postmaster was confiscating mailed copies of the books. Grove won the suit, paving the way for a new freedom with respect to sexual content in American publishing. Price says this:

While slow degrees of freedom had previously been gained in the manner of sexually candid prose, Grove’s early-1960s victory became a significant milepost for serious American writers. At last we were free to publish what we wished, or needed to write in the description of human desire and its various enactments”

All hail freedom! I haven’t read Lawrence in a long time, but what I remember of his sexual prose seemed timid compared to Salter. (Much less to, say, any episode of reality TV shows. Paris H., you still have my number, right?) Salter fills his text with ‘big C’ words (cock, clitoris and cunt, among many others) but his sexual scenes are hardly pornographic. They are wonderfully written and full of imaginative drama. Characters are having graphic sex right there on the page in beautiful, literary images. Thank the muses that we live in an age of such freedom of expression. We retain unfettered access to language and the expression of…What? I can’t say what? Who is this? I can’t say clitoris?

Court Merrigan recently forwarded this article to NC about the removal of unabridged copies of The Diary of Anne Frank’from libraries in Virginia. The offending passages come from the ruminations of the teenaged diarist as she tries to understand the anatomy of her genitalia. The word ‘clitoris’ apparently upset enough parents of Virginia high school students that libraries began removing copies of the offending books.

The saddest part about posting this article on NC is how common such censorship is today. Listen to Bill Maher’s humorous take about the new publication of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the new editions, the clearly offensive but still artist-intended word, ‘nigger’, is removed from Twain’s original text. Two-hundred and nineteen times. (Read a longer article here from the University of Virginia newspaper.) One wonders what other words will eventually be erased from other books, or how such redactions will trickle into the already entertainment-saturated bloodstream of our sedated, consumerist culture. A cultural sedation, by the way, which Steven Heighton warns us about in his essay “The Admen Move On Lhasa.” (Quoted above and referenced several times on NC by yours truly, including here.)

Freedom of expression, sadly, remains as tenuous and threatened today as it was fifty years ago.

In a final, hot-off-the-presses example from today’s (Jan 19th) L.A. times, Smithsonian director, Wayne Clough, has come under fire for issues of censorship. Clough recently pulled a video by artist David Wojnarowicz (see video at bottom of post) from a gay-themed exhibit set to go on display at the National Portraits Gallery. Clough relented to governmental pressure over a perceived anti-Christian bias in the work: ants can be seen crawling atop a crucifix.

In spite of the progress artists have made over the centuries, censorship continues to plague the free and honest exploration, exchange and expression of ideas. From Salman Rushdie to, apparently, Anne Frank. As publishing houses fall and media conglomerates merge (As we speak, NBC and Comcast are being fused) it’s hard not to wonder what the future holds for works by the likes of Twain, Lawrence, Frank and Salter. Or perhaps we should all endeavor just to let go and watch American Idol? Who needs books anyway?

— Richard Farrell

I was just looking through Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy.” It had never occurred to me to think of it as a poem about the aftermath of a fight with your significant other, the massive, hugely depressive feeling you get when things go south in the kitchen or the bedroom and the person you thought was your nearest companion turns out not to have the faintest clue about your inner being and no sympathy whatsoever. But, of course, that couldn’t be what the poem is about, right? Compare with D. H. Lawrence’s “Kissing and Horrid Strife” discussed in an earlier post.

I love the train of poisonous medicaments in the opening stanza, the piling up of death. This appeals to the baroque and macabre side of my nature which, as you know, doesn’t come out much.

Over the weekend I read Michael Slater’s tiny 104-page biography of Charles Dickens. In the same mail delivery, I received Peter Ackroyd’s 1144-page biography of Dickens. I spent a lot of time just looking at the two books side-by-side on my bed (where I read) wondering about the disparity between the two. I haven’t finished the Ackroyd book yet (check out his novel Chatterton). I also read Theodor Adorno’s essay (in his books of essays called Prisms) on Kafka which was brilliant as usual and made strange sense out of Kafka’s desire to have his papers burned and to remain obscure. And then I read a dreamy, odd, surprising William Faulkner story “Red Leaves” about Indians (probably Chickasaws), slaves and human sacrifice. (For an interesting thematic variation, see D. H. Lawrence’s human sacrifice story “The Woman Who Road Away.”) I had earlier read something about this: the Chickasaws were one of the Five Civilized Tribes forced to move to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson in the Trail of Tears episode (as in how America invented Ethnic Cleansing). The Chickasaw had African slaves which they took to Oklahoma with them. After the Civil War and Emancipation, the Chickasaw refused to give up their slaves since they believed they weren’t governed by American legislation. If I remember correctly, the actor Don Cheadle had an ancestor who was a Chickasaw slave. This is mentioned in Henry Louis Gates’s book In Search of our Roots.

I finished reading D. H. Lawrence’s story “None of That” which Kenneth Rexroth mentioned in his introduction to the selected poems. What’s interesting about the story, other than the fact that Ethel reminds me of someone I used to date, is the narrative setup. There is a first person narrator who is solely an interlocutor, not a character in the story at all. And he meets an old acquaintance in Venice who tells him in dialogue the story of Ethel and the bullfighter Cuesta. (I love Lawrence’s impish directness–e.g. the male orgasmic “spurt of blood” as Cuesta stands over the dying bull.) This second narrator is involved in the story but mostly as an observer and a go-between. In effect, the text is all telling and in dialogue and the narrators are nested. If you look at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you’ll see it’s similar. There is a first person narrator who’s barely mentioned who is listening to Marlow tell the story. This is a really difficult narrative structure to carry off nowadays, difficult because it’s hard to achieve immediacy–or maybe none of us is good enough to write it.

I was almost asleep, then made the mistake of reading Robert Wrigley’s poem “Thatcher Bitchboy” which I thought was going to be something about gay s&m but turned out to be about a boy watching his beloved chicken-stealing dog being led off to die. Obviously, I couldn’t sleep after that and had to read some comforting Lawrence death poems. E.g. “Kissing and Horrid Strife”

I finished reading the essay last night. A touch of hopefulness at the end.

“In a world or brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one [life] and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity.”

I too am admirer of decadence, of mixed form, parodies, anatomies and Menippean satires.

Now I am reading Lives of the Animals by Robert Wrigley, a book of poems mentioned by Cheryl Wilder in her graduate lecture at the last residency. The epigraph is from D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Ghosts.”

“And as the dog with its nostrils tracking out the fragments of the beasts’ limbs, and the breath from their feet that they leave in the soft grass, runs upon a path that is pathless to men, so does the soul follow the trail of the dead, across great spaces.”