Even though I’m an English major, I just finished reading my first DH Lawrence novel. He was one of those writers that I always felt I should read, just like I’d always felt obliged to like Shakespeare. Moving into our foreclosed reclamation project/house in an area just east of the most eastward “improving” neighborhood, my husband and I were able to unbox and shelve the books that had been languishing in our parents’ homes for the years of dorm rooms and tiny apartments in South Hadley, Richmond, Dublin, NYC, and DC. So this past year I’ve been rediscovering the books I liked, or didn’t, or ignored, for the first two decades of my life.
I’ve realized that Shakespeare actually is the genius that other English majors idolize him for being. His unstruggled grasp of meter and precision on humanness are humbling; most poets resort to triteness, clumsy metric workarounds, and adjectives. And, I’ve realized Milton is just damn lazy. He has some great lines, but he has more where the meter collapses; the words weren’t rethought from the first draft; and he substitutes making his point with banging his readers over the head with it, simply because he’s too careless--or conceited--to put in the work.
I’ve also discovered that DH Lawrence isn’t actually a novelist--despite writing the 400+ pages in The Rainbow--but I’m sorry I’ve missed him for 30 years. He’s an imagist, mostly unconcerned with plot. With words just barely shy of too corpulent, he captures the confused mutability of “love” shared between any two persons. A stolid marriage is shown in its daily instability of mistimings, desires, urgencies, silences, cruelties, affections, and submissions. It is a little tedious to follow several generations of lovers/spouses working out how to negotiate themselves against each other, but I’m impressed that someone wrote it believably.
Even if a bit indulgently.
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