The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence: New Essays

217 Pages·1987·18.246 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Meyers (eds.)

THE LEGACY OF D. H. LA WRENCE
THE LEGACY OF
D. H. LA WRENCE
New Essays
Edited by
J
effrey Meyers
Professor of English
University of Colorado
Palgrave Macmillan
Editorial matter, Introduction and Chapter Four ©jeffrey Meyers 1987; Chapter One
©john Bayley 1987; Chapter Two ©james Gindin 1987; Chapter Three © William
M. Chace 1987; Chapter Five © Roberts W. French 1987; Chapter Six © Eugene
Goodheart 1987; Chapter Seven © Kingsley Widmer 1987.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1987
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly & Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1987
ISBN 978-1-349-08310-7 ISBN 978-1-349-08308-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08308-4
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Legacy ofD. H. Lawrence.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930-Influence.
2. English literature-20th century-History and criticism.
3. American literature-20th century-History
and criticism. I. Meyers,jeffrey.
PR6023.A93Z655 1987 823'.912 8&-6591
ISBN 978-0-312-47804-9
FOT Francis King
Contents
Acknowledgments
IX
Notes on the Contributors
X
Introduction Je.ffrey Meyers
LAWRENCE AND THE MODERN ENGLISH
NOVEL John Bayley 14
2 LAWRENCE AND THE CONTEMPORARY
ENGLISH NOVEL James Gindin 30
3 LAWRENCE AND ENGLISH POETRY
William M. Chace 54
4 LAWRENCE AND TRAV EL WRITERS
Je.ffrey Meyers 81
5 LAWRENCE AND AMERICAN POETRY
Roberts W. French 109
6 LA WRENCE AND AMERICAN FICTION
Eugene Goodheart 135
7 LAWRENCE'S CULTURAL IMPACT
Kingsley Widmer 156
Notes 175
Index 200
Vll
Acknowledgments
The editor is grateful for the generous letters from and interviews
with many of the writers considered in this book: Robert Bly,
Melvyn Bragg, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Durrell, Allen
Ginsberg, Graham Greene, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, the
late Christopher Isherwood, Galway KinnelI, Doris Lessing,
Norman Mailer, the late Bernard Malamud, Karl Shapiro,
Alan Sillitoe, Gary Snyder, Sir Stephen Spender, David Storey
and Keith Waterhouse.
IX
Notes on the Contributors
John Bayley is Warton Professor of English Literature and
Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford University. He is the
author of The Romantic Survival (1956), The Character of Love
(1960), Tolstoy and the Novel (1966), Pushkin (1971), The Uses of
Division (1976), An Essay on Hardy (1978), Shakespeare and Tragedy
( 1981) and Selected Essqys (1984).
William M. Chace is Professor of English and Vice Provost for
Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University.
Author of The Political ldentities of E;:;ra Pound and T. S. Eliot
(1973), Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics (1980), editor of
JamesJoyce: A Collection ofCritical Essays (1974) and An Introduction
to Literature (1985), he has also written essays on a wide variety
of modern authors.
Roberts W. French is Professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts. He has published essays in College English, The
Nation, Massachusetts Review, Mitton Quarterly and Walt Whitman
Review. His chapter on Lawrence and Whitman appeared in
D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, edited by JefTrey Meyers (1985).
James Gindin, Professor of English at the University of
Michigan, has won Fulbright, National Endowment for the
Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships. He is the author of
Postwar British Fiction (1962), Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of
Compassion (1971), The English Climate: An Excursion into a
Biography ofJ ohn Galsworthy (1979) and John Galsworthy's Lift and
Art (1986).
Eugene Goodheart is the Edytha Macy Gross Professor of
Humanities at Brandeis University. He is the author of The
Utopian Vision ofD . H. Lawrence (1963), The Gult ofthe Ego: The Self
in Modern Literature (1968), Culture and the Radical Gonscience (1973),
x
Notes on the Contributors Xl
The Failure of Criticism (1978) and The Skeptic Disposition in
Contemporary Criticism (1984-).
Jeffrey Meyers is Professor of English at the University of
Colorado and Fellow ofthe Royal Society ofLiterature. He is the
author or editor of 22 books, including biographies of Katherine
Mansfield (1978), Wyndham Lewis (1980) and Ernest
Hemingway (1985), U)1ndham Lewis: A Revaluation (1980) and
Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (1982), several books on T. E.
Lawrence and George Orwell, Fiction and the Colonial Experience
(1973), Painting and the Novel (1975), A Fever at the Core (1976),
Married to Genius (1977), Homosexuality and Literature (1977), Disease
and the Novel (1985), The Crafl of Literary Biography (1985), D. H.
Lawrence and the Experience of Italy (1982) and D. H. Lawrence and
Tradition (1985).
Kingsley Widmer is Professor of English at San Diego State
University. Among his several hund red publications are eight
books ofliterary and cultural criticism: The Art of Perversity: D. H.
Lawrence's Shorter Fictions (1962), Henry Miller (1963), The Literary
Rebel (1965), The Ways of Nihilism: Herman Melville's Short Novels
(1970), The End ofCulture: Essays on Sensibility in Contemporary Society
(1973), Paul Goodman (1980), Edges ofE xtremity: Problems ofL iterary
Modemism (1980) and Nathanael West (1982).
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
Wha t his great forefathers did.
Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben"
Every masterpiece is the cry of aprecursor,
and rallies beyond time, in the black frost of
eternity, its companions yet to come.
Lucien Daudet