A lot of people nowadays dislike D. H. Lawrence’s classic books such as Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The Rainbow and Women in Love. I have read all four of them. Indeed the imagery can get rather heavy-handed and downright idiotic at times. His basic point, that humans should get out of their civilized shells enough to get in touch with their primal and of course sexual nature, is good enough for me, but he can be pretty ham-handed with the way he goes about hammering this point into your head. Also his paragraphs can go on and on. And as far as erotic literature goes, it’s isn’t even very dirty by today’s pornographic standards, but I think it’s enough to at least turn’s women Romance-novel aware minds on. I took a class once on D. H. Lawrence. It was all women except for me and one other guy. Well, it was paradise. The women in the class were turned on enough by Lawrence’s prose. I remember one very beautiful young woman, maybe 27 years old, often sat next to me. We were talking about one of the books and she was basically saying how she was getting so turned on reading them that she couldn’t wait for her husband to get home (he was off on some trip). But I would like to point out, just for a moment, one thing often overlooked about Lawrence: what a great stylist he could be. Here is a passage from one of his classic travel books, Sea and Sardinia:
Cold, fresh wind, a black-blue, translucent, rolling sea on which the wake rose in snapping foam, and Sicily was on the left: Monte Pellegrino, a huge, inordinate mass of pinkish rock, hardly crisped with the faintest vegetation, looming up to heaven from the sea. Strangely large in mass and bulk Monte Pellegrino looks and bare, like a Sahara in heaven: and old-looking. These coasts of Sicily are very imposing, terrific, fortifying the interior. And again one gets the feeling that age has worn them bare; as if old, old civilizations had worn away and exhausted the soil, leaving a terrifying blankness of rock, as at Syracuse in plateau, and here in great mass.
Oh! Man that is nice!
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