I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
I am heartily enjoying D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL), not because of the sex scenes (I haven’t gotten to anything too terribly explicit and not sure how much further they might go) but because of his writing style, and the engaging philosophical musings he shares.
In Chapter I, he introduces protagonist Constance Chatterley and her sister Hilda:
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And they had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological, and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests, of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and—above all—to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.
This passage is rhythmic and poetic, and uses more verbiage than it would seemingly need to, but it draws me in. He uses the onomatopeia “twang-twang!” for the guitar sounds. He uses words like “free” and “talk” more than one time to make his point.
And he evern circles back around later to these two ideas, the idea of freedom and the idea of talking:
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anticlimax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one’s privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connections and subjections.
And then he wraps this discussion up:
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another.
This captures my own experience of being an adolescent girl in love: the talk was the thing, and the physical intimacy secondary (though I eagerly sought it out). And it also captures my experience of a second adolescence in my forties when I sought out both talk and freedom, and only as a very far third priority, sex.
Lawrence’s writing style has been criticized, as in D.H. Lawrence, Our Contemporary by Barry Gewen, which responds to an (apparently no longer available) post by David Kelly which calls Lawrence’s book Women in Love overrated.
Gewen writes in support of the book, but acknowledges some issues with Lawrence’s style:
Any defense, however, has to begin by acknowledging the case for the prosecution. There are sentences in the novel of such awfulness that they would seem to disqualify their author from ever being considered major. When Lawrence writes of the physical in particular, he and his words can come clattering down the stairs: “The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs”; “She seemed to touch the quick of the mystery of darkness that was bodily him.”
Sometimes his syntactical rhythms are so idiosyncratic, so bizarre, as to exist beyond good and evil: “The first to run across the lawn was the little Italian, small and like a cat, her white legs twinkling as she went, ducking slightly her head, that was tied in a gold silk kerchief.” Little wonder that Anthony Burgess, in his book on Lawrence, said, “No potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model.”
I’m not sure it’s true no potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model; I find Lawrence’s writing far more to my taste and more likely what I would want to write, were I to write fiction, than, say, Tolstoy. But maybe I need to go back and re-read Tolstoy, who is widely respected for his style. Tolstoy writes with clarity and straightforwardness, or so people say. His novels are epic in scope and bring “a keen observation of detail, with a profound moral and philosophical depth, presented through a style that is both accessible and artistically sophisticated.”
I find myself once again regretting that in my youth, when I had so much opportunity to study great literature, I focused on more prosaic subjects: economics, philosophy, statistics.
Perhaps part of what I find so compelling in Lawrence’s writing is that he was tackling very modern subjects.
Gewen writes:
Lawrence is often considered an early apostle of the sexual revolution and that is not wrong — he advocated and practiced an honesty about sex that still needs to be heard in the F.C.C., the United States customs service and other American bastions of moral guardianship. But he also was among the first to see where the sexual revolution had gone wrong. The end of repression had not produced happiness. Relations between men and women were in a sad, distrustful state. “Love” was a word of uncertain meaning and ready abuse. The institution of marriage was so wobbly that it was easy to foresee the day when rich, powerful men who seemed to have it all would be seeking out prostitutes and young interns for satisfactions they couldn’t get at home. “Women in Love” opens with the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, conversing. Gudrun asks Ursula, “you don’t think one needs the experience of having been married?,” and Ursula replies, “Not really. More likely to be the end of experience.”
Lawrence understood that the traditional justifications for marriage had collapsed, and with them the traditional place of sex in people’s lives.
Reading Lawrence, and reading about Lawrence makes me realize how similar the 1920s were to modern times. There was a questioning of the social order, and there was war and its aftermath (and war coming in the future too).
As I continue reading LCL I will be on the lookout for overwrought prose and bizarre syntactical rhythms. But I’m sure I will continue enjoying the experience as I have so far.