Undisputed Classic 4

Classic Short Stories. Known for his novels, Lawrence also wrote almost 70 short stories.

A Modern Lover & Other Stories – D.H. Lawrence

I’ve been reading DHL since about 1975, my sophomore year at Michigan State. At that time college students felt that they had missed out on the party of the Sixties. So Lawrence‘s encouragement to live life with passion was especially appealing. Burn, baby, steam and smoke. Go for it, do it till you’re satisfied. To students wearing leather, denim, and flannel and listening to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, Lawrence's message to be natural was totally acceptable.

In my middle age living life hotly became less feasible and attractive. I slowly realized how prone to weariness, how slow to recover from overindulgence our aging stomachs and brains are. I couldn’t help but marvel that somebody with Lawrence‘s health challenges found the strength and stamina to be so fierce and so prolific. I mean, writing novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, and literary criticism and painting and incessant travel and dealing with legal battles and constant money worries. Not to mention the action-packed marriage.

Nowadays as I gulp in wonder at middle age being in the rearview mirror, I catch up with DHL’s awesome suggestion “O build your ship of death.” I’m pretty sure Lawrence was no Stoic but it’s a poem about looking at death and coming to conclusions.

Anyway, this collection presents stories from the early and late stages in his all too short writing career. Lawrence As Sage: he is a model wise man that looks at the beauty of the world, really sees the glow of the world, the is-ness of Creation.

A Modern Lover is an example of the You Can’t Go Home Again story. A young man returns to the old hometown, a mining place, from London where he hasn’t been exactly setting the literary world on fire. The young man is ready to pledge his love to the old GF but finds her new BF too. And though she still loves our hero, a woman in the 1910s has to be careful about choosing a man because being poor and female is hard yakka anywhere. This gives a sense of how modern young people in the early 20^th century had to feel their uncertain way in romance and marriage and bills in the Edwardian era when Victorian certainties and customs were falling by the wayside.

The Old Adam.  A story bursting with nature – colors, flowers, lightning and thunder. And guys brawling because even in seemingly over-civilized people latent are anger and aggression, all provoked by nothing much. A three-year-old is wonderfully described as a force of nature, spontaneous and unpredictable.

Her Turn. Who knew he had it in him? Everybody but me, apparently.  Dave does domestic comedy as a miner’s wife learns her hubby a rough lesson in that constant subject of marital discord – money. The story feels genuine, these were people he grew up with, he knew well enough to love them and yearn to get away from them.

Strike-Pay. Well yeah with money tight at home, whaddaya do with strike pay but collect it at the church (which the miners built themselves but it’s falling down because they’re miners, not construction guys) and go on a spree, drinking beer and watching futbol? And then come home only to be yelled at by a mother-in-law who gets off on fussing and fighting. A great story, closely observed grit and washing on the line.

The Witch a la Mode. Young intellectual drops in on old GF on his way home to see his fiancée. They’re both kind of awkward, him being a natural man and her being properly repressed and constrained. But her place has these two-foot high statues:

Both were nude figures. They glistened under the side lamps, rose clean and distinct from their pedestals. The Venus leaned slightly forward, as if anticipating someone's coming. Her attitude of suspense made the young man stiffen. He could see the clean suavity of her shoulders and waist reflected white on the deep mirror. She shone, catching, as she leaned forward, the glow of the lamp on her lustrous marble loins.

“Fools in love,” sang Joe Jackson a long time ago now, “gently tear each other limb from limb.” One gets the distinct feeling in this ungentle story that the hero is correct when he observes, “You know, Winifred, we should only drive each other into insanity, you and I: become abnormal.”

New Eve and Old Adam is a story of a bitter argument between two married people. How can people have a modern marriage when these half-witted wives just won’t submit to their manly men and their entitled whims? I have no idea if the reader is supposed to take sides in this story or if DHL really was such a dudebro like he comes off here, but the marriages of other people are so mysterious that I always assume no outsider can understand enough to judge who is on the side of angels.

Mr Noon is a novel supposedly written in 1920 and 1921 and then abandoned. I had feeling that it was indeed a draft, material he wanted to get out and then return to for revising. I’m glad I read this fragment because although the characters were as nutty and wayward as we’ve come to expect for his characters, there was a lightness of touch that I found surprising in DHL. He actually addresses the readers directly, kind of shaking his finger at us, telling us not to impose our expectations on what actions his characters should get up to. Such an old-fashioned device – like Trollope, for the love of Mike. Also giving a post-modern feeling that I did not expect, he winks at us readers by using their own words to satirize suburbanites, cliche Edwardianisms like “plain as a pikestaff” and “happy as a dog with two tails.”