#dh lawrence
“Peach blossom has a beautiful sensual pink, far from vulgar, most rare and private. And pink is so beautiful in a landscape, pink houses, pink almond, pink peach and purply apricot, pink asphodels. It is so conspicuous and so individual, that pink among the coming green of spring,”
D.H. Lawrence, from Sketches of Etruscan Places; “Flowery Tuscany,” (x)
“From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
“From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
bir nesnenin değerini belirleyen, o nesnenin ne işe yaradığı değil, o nesnenin etrafını çevreleyen duygusal çağrışımlardı.
alain de botton - romantik hareket
I remember reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in High School.
Some parts of it I thought were dumb, like the way the lovers wove flowers into their pubic hair.
But what did I know, and who was I to judge, and who am I to remember this now.
I would never have described D.H. Lawrence as a writer who was important to me, I have only read one of his books, I remember that sometimes French people would go into ecstasies about “the perfection of his style” and I think I found the style the most annoying thing of all, and I’ve forgotten almost everything about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and yet there is one thing about it I always remember, or think I remember, and therefore I think this book has been incredibly influential to me, and even though I’ve forgotten almost everything except for what I thought was wonderful and perhaps I have exaggerated or distorted what has become for me a signal part, well I think it is incredibly important to me, and maybe D.H. Lawrence is as great as they say, even if I’ve totally failed to see the greatness in him that other people see, and have mistook for his greatness something that I made up, and maybe what I’ve made up by mistaking it for something I saw in D. H. Lawrence is as valueless as anything else other people can’t see, or as priceless, or maybe this is only it, the very same thing that other people do see, and now we can all be friends!
I was working at an antiquarian bookstore, I think it was the summer before sophomore year. My work in this bookstore and the owners of this bookstore and just the existence of this bookstore, all of these together were the most powerful, the most influential, and the strongest medicine the good lord saw to send to me in those dreamy, shitty adolescent days.
How’s it going with Lady Chatterley’s Cate would ask me in a voice both mocking and affectionate. She was one of the two owners and I feared and adored them both, because not only did they know everything, but they were so sweet to me, and I had decided that greatness and totality should be both cruel and largely unintelligible, like the tomes of modernism say, or like my father’s dead face, so it took me some time not to tremble even from their good humor and kindness.
Anyway the part of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that I always think about is the part when the lover, I forget his name, he’s from the working classes, and he and Lady Chatterley have just fucked, and he says that he wishes that the men would all wear tight pants with red stripes and loose open shirts that would show their beautiful bodies, and I forget if he said how he envisioned the women should dress, but the men shouldn’t be hidden in black and their bodies and the joy of their bodies should not be hidden, and that the men and women should work just enough to give pleasure to their bodies and food to their bellies and rooves for them to sleep under and should otherwise have plenty of idle time to make music and swim and play and fuck and share their love.
I am always surprised and not surprised to think again of this part of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I read in high school because I had read somewhere else that it was scandalous, I think I read in some old copy of the Evergreen Review or something that D.H. Lawrence was a visionary of sex and class and that his ideas were not merely pornographic but revolutionary, and I always think about the difference between revolution and pornography, and how the latter has had a way of stealing the former.
I think about it whenever I’ve fallen in love, and I thought about it yesterday fucking in the vestibule of the building I live in, that I always love to see people who love each other sporting all over the place. There are varieties of lilies here that I have never seen. A month ago I saw varieties of irises that I have never seen. I think about people and their work hours and the real meaning of slavery and how I hate to see anybody under the yoke of any man, and how surprised I am again and again that what people consider pleasure is something they are willing to pay somebody else to take the lion’s share of, while they, the horde, watch.
Energy crisis and financial crisis, these crises of dearth that have nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with the serving of dead masters, the worship of dead ideas, the terror of an order that might be other than the order of a master whose star’s only mystery is how much we are willing to pay him to keep on being, keep on seeming, what he is for us, what we need for him to seem.
For example, it is not a sexual revolution for all of the sex to be on the internet, and it is not a sexual revolution for a genius of sex to become a film star of sex. We geniuses of sex are supposed to fuck the world, not steal the sex of the people and take their money. I think this is what is supposed to have been revolutionary about D.H. Lawrence? I can’t remember. Maybe this is what is revolutionary about me.
I can’t fall in love without wanting to see everyone in love and fucking. When it’s spring and summer, I don’t want to see the sticky depakote eyes of the boys who spooge more with their laptops than they ever have their whole lives any other way. And it hurts me to see women who fuck themselves through their own mirrors so hard, and hate themselves so hard through their own mirrors, and try so hard with their fashions to please god look fuckable today that they never, ever, ever learn how to make love.
If you are in love, do not memorialize your good sport only for porntube, I pray ye. Bless the land of your terrible fathers, your mean mothers, your charming and indifferent neighbors, bless them with the ointments of your loins.
We’ve got to live no matter how many skies have fallen.
- D. H. Lawrence
—Anne Fernihough, “Introduction,” The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (Penguin, 1995)
I didn’t have room to quote the above in my essay, just published yesterday, on Lawrence’s The Rainbow, but you can take it as my epigraph. In my treatment of the subject, I first suggest that a paradigmatic female modernist like Woolf, insofar as she was a modernist, was no less a partner in this “suppression…of political movements” (and the same goes for Stein, Barnes, Moore, Loy, and more, to varying degrees all non-leftists or even in some cases rightists). Then I go so far as to defend the instinct that won out here: the higher politics of the aesthetic over the low politics of mass movements with their designs on state power. Needless to say, this is a very timely prior instance of the same decoupling of bohemian from activist, of aesthetics from militancy, that we see today.
Speaking of all that, while mainstream elite culture is having a D. H. Lawrence moment, I’m surprised he’s not more present in the online extremist countercultures. He has that same Mishima quality, anticipating extremely-online male social outcasts, of being somehow perfectly poised between trans and Nazi, now dipping toward one side, now to the other, but somehow always keeping a precarious balance, in the art if not the life, the would-be mail-fisted fascist as tremulous adolescent girl. I think of how John Carey, in his roll-call of modernist fascism The Intellectuals and the Masses, pauses to exonerate Lawrence of his more troubling tendencies on the grounds that he was, in the end, just a sensitive soul who read Neech too early:
It must be stressed that Lawrence, for all his Nietzschean debts, was not like Nietzsche. The range and subtlety of his imagination went far beyond Nietzsche’s. The Nietzschean warrior ideal, and countenancing of cruelty, could only have seemed disgusting to Lawrence, who turns his characters not into warriors but into flowers. […] To cite such passages—and there are hundreds of them in Lawrence—and to contemplate the impossibility of Nietzsche having written them, is not just to emphasize that Lawrence was a poet and that Nietzsche was in some respects a desperately restricted and unfulfilled human being. It is also to contend that, for Lawrence, the stance of natural aristocrat, with its presuppositions of isolation and alienation, was adverse to all the promptings of his sympathetic imagination, which taught him to fuse and integrate.
The Rainbow is too long, but someone please make the NEETs read “Medlars and Sorb Apples” or “The Prussian Officer” at least. (Why does Mishima get all the attention? Strange that even fringe culture is dominated by the annoying presumption that if it’s translated it must be better.) In my essay I quote this passage from The Rainbow:
She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave those who had made her guilty. If he had said to her, “Why, Ursula, did you trample my carefully-made bed?” that would have hurt her to the quick, and she would have done anything for him. But she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things. The earth was to walk on. Why must she avoid a certain patch, just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk on. This was her instinctive assumption.
Here is my official comment, perhaps too Bloomian in its excited swoop through the canon:
Here we remember that Lawrence is the Englishman who put the gnostic-individualist literature of American Romanticism on modernism’s map. Ursula might be the daughter of Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab, her adventures chronicled by a prose Whitman.
My unofficial comment is that this is possibly my favorite paragraph from the novel because it expresses (I confess!) exactly how I felt as a child.
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— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“We, Freida and I, both send our love, for the New Year, the Year 1 of the new world. The Old year had to die.” -D.H. Lawrence
Moodboard: Name - Nerissa.
Requested by: Anonymous.
❝The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone.❞
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Conceit
It is conceit that kills us
and makes us cowards instead of gods.
Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal!
we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important, fatally entangled in the Laocoön coils of our conceit.
Now we have to admit we can’t know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.
And I am not interested to know about myself any more,
I only entangle myself in the knowing.
Now let me be myself,
now let me be myself, and flicker forth,
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.
_ D. H. Lawrence
“Very early she learned to harden her soul in resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden herself upon her own being.”—D.H. Lawrence,The Rainbow
