Locked down with D.H. Lawrence? Yeah, nah
- Written by Naomi Milthorpe, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania
Are we, finally, post-COVID?
Reading Lara Feigel’s Look! We Have Come Through![1], it feels like we are.
The emotional consequences and aesthetic ramifications of the pandemic will continue to ripple through culture, changing our way of seeing the world, even as we begin to weary of the change. Writers who seemed outmoded or alien to a pre-pandemic worldview will suddenly have new relevance, helping us to understand the emotional landscape of a world riven by disease and crisis.
Review: Look! We Have Come Through!: Living with D.H. Lawrence – Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury)
Look! We Have Come Through! offers this idea as a take on literary criticism. Feigel is the author of four books of non-fiction and one novel, all of which combine cultural history, biography and literary criticism. Her latest book is an account of isolating in Oxfordshire with D.H. Lawrence (or rather, with his books) during the locked-down months of 2020. Subtitled Living with D.H. Lawrence, it is a bibliomemoir that places Feigel’s immediate experiences inside the frame of criticism.
Close Up Kiss – D.H. Lawrence (1928).
Feigel’s project to invigorate literary criticism with the personal is admirable, but I was not fully gripped by her memoir. I can understand her wish to preserve privacy for herself and her children, but her accounts of love affairs, divorce, custody disputes, even friendship, lack the meaty, overpowering sense of revelation Lawrence worked so hard to achieve.
Less convincing also is Lawrence as a guide to contemporary living. Lawrence on sex? Maybe, though really only if you’re heterosexual. Lawrence on community? He definitely had theories about how to live with others in ways that counteracted the alienating effects of modernity, but he seems to have been kind of a jerk to the people he actually lived with.
But Lawrence, the anti-democrat, on politics? Lawrence on climate change? Technophobia and nature worship can’t fix fossil fuel dependence, and refusing to participate in political action won’t save us from 21st century despotism.
Lawrence’s dread of mechanical civilisation might be relatable and nostalgic on those days when we worry our kids are having too much screen-time. But we need to remember that advanced scientific knowledge and technological infrastructure have also enabled the rapid development of life-saving COVID vaccines. Lawrence is, as Feigel often admits, an unreliable prophet.
The two exclamation points in its title, borrowed from Lawrence’s 1917 book of poems, suggest urgency, even vanguardism. The book has appeared later than other recent attempts to revive Lawrence: Cusk’s Second Place and Frances Wilson’s biography Burning Man (2021). Though the genre-bending between memoir and literary criticism is an interesting experiment, Look! We Have Come Through! is ultimately not as satisfying as these earlier books. Its publication feels belated for a book that is, in part, about how to live through the extremity of COVID.
Feigel is a sensitive critic, sympathetic to Lawrence’s style and the substance of his novels. She makes a generous case for what his prose makes possible. I’m not sure I would ever want to live with Lorenzo, but I might let him stay for a very short visit.
References^ Look! We Have Come Through! (www.bloomsbury.com)^ Ninety years on, what can we learn from reading Evelyn Waugh's troubling satire Black Mischief? (theconversation.com)Read more https://theconversation.com/locked-down-with-d-h-lawrence-yeah-nah-196935
