Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [272]
—from the New York Evening Post Literary Review (March 19, 1921)
EVELYN SCOTT
Women in Love is not pure as an art form, but it is because art is too limited for Lawrence’s conviction of reality. Lawrence’s poetry seemed out of place in the Imagist Anthology. A number of his contemporaries express finely the delicate nostalgic emotions of neo-classicism, the emotions of nuns. The Parnassian muse, though she speaks of orgies, is a virgin. Lawrence is aesthetically unchaste. His genius has consorted with life and has acquired mystical imperfections, nail-prints in the palms.
—from The Dial (April 1921)
JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY
Mr. Lawrence is set apart from the novelists who are his contemporaries by the vehemence of his passion. In the time before the war we should have distinguished him by other qualities—a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of natural beauty, for example, or an understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite human beings, or an exquisite discrimination in the use of language, based on a power of natural vision. All these things Mr. Lawrence once had, in the time when he thrilled us with the expectation of genius: now they are dissolved in the acid of a burning and vehement passion. These qualities are individual no longer; they no longer delight us; they have been pressed into the service of another power, they walk in bondage and in livery....
Women in Love is five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another. Their creator believes that he can distinguish the writhing of one from the writhing of another; he spends pages and pages in describing the contortions of the first, the second, the third, the fourth. To him they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same. And yet Mr. Lawrence has invented a language, as we are forced to believe he has discovered a perception for them. The eyes of these creatures are ‘absolved’; their bodies (or their souls: there is no difference in this world) are ‘suspended’; they are ‘polarized’; they ‘lapse out’; they have, all of them, ‘inchoate’ eyes. In this language their unending contortions are described; they struggle and writhe in these terms; they emerge from dark hatred to darker beatitudes; they grope in their own slime to some final consummation, in which they are utterly ‘negated’ or utterly ‘fulfilled.’ We remain utterly indifferent to their destinies, we are weary to death of them.
At the end we know one thing and one thing alone: that Mr. Lawrence believes, with all his heart and soul, that he is revealing to us the profound and naked reality of life, that it is a matter of life and death to him that he should persuade us that it is a matter of life and death to ourselves to know that these things are so. These writhings are the only real, and these convulsive raptures, these oozy beatitudes the only end in human life. He would, if he could, put us all on the rack to make us confess his protozoic god; he is deliberately, incessantly, and passionately obscene in the exact sense of the word. He will uncover our nakedness. It is of no avail for us to protest that the things he finds are not there; a fanatical shriek arises from his pages that they are there, but we deny them.
—from Nation and Athenaeum (August 13, 1921)
ARNOLD BENNET
No finer work has been done in our time than Lawrence’s finest. He is not yet understood, even by the majority of his admirers. But he will be; and meanwhile his work must accept injustice. In the future no first editions of present-day writers will be more passionately and expensively sought for than Lawrence