Taking the clapper out of the bell makes no sense, but this is what we do too often with D.H. Lawrence. The writer who seemed to believe in dualisms - blindness over sight, blood over mind, pagan over modern, and so on - gets broken into two like a stable door. Readers, critics and biographers insist on splitting Lawrence into writer or preacher, dogmatist or poet. On the one hand, there is the marvellous animist, the quick, vital writer of physical descriptions - the poet, say, who sees a kangaroo with its 'drooping Victorian shoulders', or a mosquito moving like 'a dull clot of air'. On the other, there is the preacher, the tiresome Lawrence of hoarse doctrine, the bully of blood, the friendless hammer coming down again and again in the prose.

LRB 6 March 1997 | PDF Download