Takeo Iida, ed. The Reception of D.H. Lawrence
Around the World. Fukuoka: Kyushu UP. 1999. Pp. xviii + 303. Y7200.
This book opens a series of windows on different times
and places in Lawrence's global reception and is guaranteed to offer
surprises to even the most informed readers. Consisting of 14 chapters
representing as many countries, it showcases Lawrence's multiplicity as
never before, catching it at a number of vantage points: here we see
Lawrence as critic, there as rebel, as "Yogi," as exegete, as
Westminster Abbey poet. The effect is much like that of the
International Lawrence Conferences from which the book developed. The
well-chosen writers are editor Takeo Iida, author of the
informative introduction and of an essay on the reception in Japan;
Peter Preston, on Great Britain; Ginette Katz-Roy, France; Simonetta de
Filippis, Italy; Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl, Germany; Fiona Becket,
Poland; Anja Viinikka, Finland; Keith Cushman, the United States; Arnold
Odio, Mexico; John Nause, Canada; Paul Eggert, Australia; Jungmai Kim,
Korea; Xianzhi Liu, China; and Sheila Lahiri Choudhury, India.
Unfortunately (or not), the essays are difficult to compare because they
do not take parallel approaches to their material. A majority of them
feature tight-knit surveys of scholarship, and readers will be impressed
by the magnitude of the tasks undertaken in these. For example, Lawrence
studies in the United States, set into well-drawn cultural contexts, fit
into 30 pages; British reception runs to even greater length in an essay
interspersed with useful, detailed timelines. Several pieces are
confined to particular aspects of Lawrence's reception, and others deal
with countries having shorter Lawrence traditions but posing problems of
their own. Becket, for example, found some Polish printed material had
vanished, apparently in hitherto unnoticed suppression; and Viinikka,
too, frequently dealt with scarce sources.
Lawrence emerges as "a philosopher's poet" in France,
where Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Gaston Bachelard, Jean Wahl, and
Gabriel Marcel have all engaged with him. In Italy, too, "Lawrence the
thinker" is often studied, as also in Korea and elsewhere.
(Surprisingly, the "discursive" or "speculative" Lawrence seems less
admired in Japan, particularly in poetry, despite the frequently close
ties between the Japanese and Korean scholarly traditions.) In Poland,
Lawrence the poet has appealed to a "very strong poetic tradition," as
also in India, whereas the short fictions, including St. Mawr and
The Man Who Died, have gained more acclaim in Finland. Performing
arts based on Lawrence's works have flourished in England in various
forms--for stage, screen, TV, and radio--especially since a 1967-8 Royal
Court season of his "colliery plays." The dramas have attracted
interest, too, in Italy, where class struggles, in the "comedies" and
elsewhere, are favorite themes and where de Filippis suggests a fruitful
comparison between Lawrence's working-class plays and Bertolt Brecht's
expressionist theater. These essays are greatly enlivened by the
panorama of world history that appears in the background--or foreground.
The stereotype of an authoritarian Lawrence, while not wholly absent, is
largely stood on its head, as Lawrence the liberator emerges in essay
after essay. In India, for example, where an anxiety of hegemonic forces
may affect him less than some of the more institutional English writers,
Lawrence was hailed in Bengali poetry of the 1940s as a kind of
freedom-fighter, the Englishman who strove with his own country's
strictures for personal liberty, a herald of the wind blowing a "new
direction" (quoted by poet Budhadev Bose from "Song of a Man Who Has
Come Through"). This reading coincides, notes Lahiri Choudhury, with
India's approach to its own independence from Great Britain (1947).
Similarly, as Finland resisted Russian domination in the '20s, Lawrence
attracted the movement "Torch Bearers" with its watchword "Windows open
to Europe!" In China, where the "open door" policy followed a repressive
so-called "cultural revolution," a "Lawrence-rush" began in the '80s,
attuned to his liberating voice.
Indeed, the fiftieth anniversary of Lawrence's death
(1980) and the centenary of his birth (1985) occasioned a more general
Lawrence "boom," as recorded in these essays. In that decade an
International Lawrence Symposium convened at the University of
Nottingham, and a memorial plaque was dedicated to Lawrence in the
Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey (near Tennyson); an International
Lawrence Conference took place at Tufts (Boston); a research group
formed at the University of Paris-X, where the journal Études
lawrenciennes was launched; Italy's "year of the Etruscans"
celebrated not just Lawrence's birth but also his long engagement with
Etruria; an International Lawrence Conference occurred in Shanghai, and
the Lawrence Society of China organized. In both Asia and Europe,
societies had been founded even earlier. Iida points out that the
pioneering D. H. Lawrence Society of Japan has met continuously since
1970 (founded in 1969) and that a Kyoto study group has published
collections of essays about Lawrence's novels since 1977. Korea, too,
has a large, well-established society, and another thrives in Australia.
The society based in Eastwood formed in 1974 and the D. H. Lawrence
Society of North America in the following year (an outgrowth of years of
previous national MLA seminars). All of these organizations and other
Lawrence groups, though individual entities, form the powerful network
that makes a collection like this one possible. While these chapters are
uneven at recording such details, a reader can piece most (not all) of
them together; Iida's introduction is helpful in this respect, creating
a sense of increased uniformity by giving (for example) a concise list
of the seven numbered international conferences that predated the book's
press deadline: Tufts (1985), Shanghai (1988), Montpellier (1990), Paris
(1992), Ottawa (1993), Nottingham (1996), and Taos (1998). (Outside the
volume's time frame, of course, the eighth was held in Naples in June,
2001, and the next is scheduled for Kyoto.)
Several of the essays gain from the fact that Lawrence
had traveled and lived in their respective countries. Understandably,
the travel books--all but one about Italian places--are popular in
Italy, especially Sketches of Etruscan Places. Referring to this
book (the newly-established Cambridge text, which she edited), de
Filippis tells conclusively how far Lawrence was from admiring Italian
fascism, which he pointedly condemns in "Volterra" and elsewhere. Like
de Filippis, Katz-Roy presents a comprehensive essay, examining
Lawrence's relation to France as well as his literary reception there.
Odio, with the most thematic of all the essays, deals only with The
Plumed Serpent and Mornings in Mexico but achieves a
completely new perspective on them. He shows that their innovative
departure from Eurocentric norms has been recognized, though largely
outside the English language. The new reading is based firmly on the
subsequent rise in Spanish America of the "magical realism" anticipated
by Lawrence's novel. (Carlos Fuentes, for one, acknowledged Lawrence's
direct influence.) Similarly limiting their topics, Jansohn and Mehl,
and Eggert, gain fine scholarly detail instead of composite breadth.
While critics have often wrangled over other aspects
of Lawrence's achievement, literary artists all over the world have
embraced his essential creativity. Comparisons between him and related
English-language fiction writers are perhaps too well-known to rehearse,
but to that group can be added others in whom influence and/or affinity
has been asserted: Sei Ito (Japan), Zhang Xianliang (China), Lee Hyo-suk
(Korea), Nobel Prize-winner Frans Emil Sillanpää (Finland), Fuentes
(Mexico), and more. Even more striking, perhaps, is Lawrence's presence
in poetry. In Korea, where his fiction is said to be preferred, the
first Lawrence published was a poem ("Giorno dei Morti") quoted in
translation by poet Yi Hayoon (1930). In Poland, the poet and Nobel
Laureate Czeslaw Milosz was one of Lawrence's translators; in Italy,
Piero Nardi; in France, Lorand Gaspar; in Finland, Katri Vala. His
poetry was adapted in India to local concerns by poets like Premendra
Mitra, who in the 1940s placed the Hindu gods in his translation of
"Give Us Gods." And Lawrence emerges as a major inspiration to poets
Dorothy Livesay, Al Purdy, Irving Layton, and Alden Nowlan in Canada.
Much the same kind of influence could be shown in the United States,
where poets from H. D. to Sylvia Plath, from the young Robert Frost
through Theodore Roethke, the "Beats," and the Black Mountain Poets have
all acknowledged Lawrence's impact.
Whereas many of the essays touch upon Lawrence as
"exile," England appears as the center of the "high" Lawrence tradition
without which the others could not stand alone. This tradition includes
F. R. Leavis's landmark book, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955,
1965), situating Lawrence in the "great tradition" as a guardian of
culture--"the great writer of our own phase of civilization," as Leavis
calls him. Not Lawrence's rebellion but his "life-enhancing" commitment
to society is in focus here. This "classic" line of criticism
intersected with modern cultural studies in England--through Raymond
Williams and Richard Hoggart--as with the Lawrence-related work of
writers as diverse as Mario Praz in Italy and Harry T. Moore in America.
As Cushman points out, today's definitive Cambridge Edition of the
Letters and Works of D.H. Lawrence is, like the Leavis tradition,
Cambridge-centered but international, with James T. Boulton (English)
and the late Warren Roberts (American) as general editors
(1979-present). (Its international character is demonstrated by the four
Cambridge editors who are contributors to this book--none of them either
English or American but German, Italian, and Australian. Preston
impartially recounts both praise and blame of the edition, concluding
that its enormous impact will continue to unfold in futurity. Another
Cambridge triumph, mentioned by several writers, is the authoritative
three-volume biography by John Worthen, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, and David
Ellis (1991-8), surpassing all others in composite length (including
even the massive three-volume Japanese biography [1992-4] by Yoshio
Inoeu). The University of Nottingham's D.H. Lawrence Centre and D.H.
Lawrence Professorship (held by Worthen) take their place at the heart
of Lawrence studies, as does, in the United States, the D.H. Lawrence
Review (founded in 1968 by James C. Cowan). If Preston introduces an
institutional Lawrence tradition, he is also alive to the popular, even
doing justice to Eastwood tourism and festivals. From him, for example,
we learn that the number of visitors to the birthplace museum first
exceeded 10,000 a year in 1990-91.
In varying degrees, the book forms a reflection on the
nature of transmission and reception, as (for example) in Eggert's
focused anatomy of appropriation, centered on the Australian novels. The
extraordinary number of extant early reviews (138) of The Boy in the
Bush (co-written with Mollie Skinner) allows the novel to be handled
especially well as a "multifarious object" that was hailed for its fine
realistic verisimilitude while also being despised for its
unrecognizable "nightmarish country." Key to such discrepancies is the
fact that Lawrence (through his protagonist) seems to turn his back on
the growing "Europeanized" civilization--the "reality" and pride of
English-descended readers whose standards were formed by the British
Empire--and "responds far more deeply to the alienness of the
landscape," a stance appealing to Australian centrism and suggesting
today's considerations about what is unique to the continent. In India,
where the Empire is shown to form a kind of time-barrier, the
postcolonial approach distinguishes recent studies from earlier ones,
casting many foreign texts into a new light; interestingly enough,
however, Lawrence remains the "favorite novelist in the university
syllabus" and a popular choice, too, of "the common Indian reader." In
Mexico, as in Australia, Lawrence's gaze below the European/US facade of
the country to an indigenous foundation may have been a shock to
English-language readers, but Odio points to a more knowing response in
Mexico, especially in pace with increasing Mexican Indian nationalism.
Closely related to these aspects of appropriation is
the role of translation in Lawrence's reception. Delavenay complained in
the '80s that some French translations were "doubtful"--"even execrable"
and meaningless--and Katz-Roy shows that prefaces as well could be
misleading and "not even unpolitical." Becket shows how the translation
gap was overcome in Poland by the publication of a dual-language edition
of selected poems (1976), but in the same country Sons and Lovers
(for instance), reissued in Polish in the '80s, faces a mighty challenge
just to convey the Midlands mining milieu to an audience with no
cultural counterpart. Especially instructive is Jansohn and Mehl's
careful examination of correspondence from and to Lawrence's chief
German publisher, Anton Kippenberg of Insel-Verlag as he vigorously
sought good translations, hoping to place Lawrence among world
"classics" in German. But Lawrence himself complained of the German
Rainbow (1922)--his first foreign-language novel--that it "wasn't me
at all," with its "horrible, pompous-commonplace spirit" (see L
vii 572). (This translator, Franz Franzius, proved to harbor moral
biases about Lawrence's "erotic" work, feeling "nausea" at his desirous
women and calling his men "asses.") Yet another translator acknowledged
that he cut "extensive passages" from St. Mawr because they were
"somewhat mystical," and therefore unnecessary, and objected to the
attribution of "phallic properties" to a pine tree. Kippenberg's efforts
ended several years after Lawrence's death, and here Jansohn and Mehl
fall silent, wondering how Lawrence would have fared in Germany if the
prestigious publishing house had continued to promote him as faithfully
after 1933.
Of course, this date corresponds roughly with the
appearance of some politicized interpretations of Lawrence by idealogues
whose concern was not at all for accurate translation; in the '30s and
'40s, too, came dismissals of him elsewhere for possessing "something
basically Germanic" (in the words of Georges Mounin in France in 1945).
One would like to see a study (as thorough and scholarly as this one and
related writings by Jansohn and Mehl) on the later period when, without
his own living voice and without his vigilant German publisher, Lawrence
was inherited by his "admirers." (Bibliographies by Otmar Allendorf, in
DHLR 4.2 [210-20], and by Jansohn herself, in DHLR 28.3
[55-74], should be pertinent.) Ideally, such a probe should reveal
interconnections among reprints and re-translations in the commentaries
of several languages and should be fully cognizant of the way a text can
be refracted through unfamiliar lenses by translation, partial
quotation, paraphrase, and association.
A number of writers in this book note that Lawrence's
works were appropriated by the sexual revolution in ways that he (and
his translators and publishers) would not have chosen. He became
something of a cult hero to the international "hippie" movement. In
England, the United States, France, and elsewhere, films of some of his
works were charged (variously) with being sensationalized and "tamed
down." In Korea, during a moral crisis that attended the Korean War, Cho
Kyoo-dong translated The First Lady Chatterley (1952) "to purify
our sexual relationship at a high level," serving "as a sharp knife to
cut off the rotten, lax part of our society." (Kim doubts that this
therapeutic purpose was the only reason that the book was read during
this troubled period.) Similarly, the courageous Japanese publisher
(Hisajiro Oyama) intended Sei Ito's unexpurgated translation of Lady
Chatterley's Lover (1950) as a moral corrective; but
he was prosecuted and bankrupted by the novel's Japanese obscenity
trial.
Commentary on Lady Chatterley's Lover forms
almost a book-within-the-book. The famous trials--effectively acquitting
the novel of "obscenity" in the United States (1959), England (1960),
and Canada (1962)--were preceded by the much more protracted Japanese
trial (1951-57). This one went against the book (though the ban has not
recently been enforced). In Poland, Lady Chatterley's Lover was
the first Lawrence novel introduced (1932) and was immediately seized by
the public prosecutor. Of course, it attracted such major figures to its
publication and defense that Lawrence studies ultimately profited as a
result. In France, André Malraux wrote an important preface (1932) that
was soon in wide translation. In Japan, novelist Ito, translator of both
the expurgated novel (1935) and the unexpurgated (15 years later), gave
lifelong support to Lawrence, an initiative carried on by his son Rei
Ito. In Canada, notes Nause, the well-known dean-of-law and poet Frank
R. Scott conducted the trial defense, and leading novelist Hugh
MacLennan was an expert witness, asserting in an article that Lawrence
was under attack not really for "dirtiness" but for "the challenge of
his morality." Yet Lawrence is still chiefly known in some places (as in
Finland) as the author of a scandalous book--one that, however, went
through 15 Finnish printings before 1991.
Nothing has yet been said about feminist criticism of
Lawrence, but it thrives, as attested by dozens of female Lawrence
scholars (and creative artists) who appear throughout these pages, many
of them with central feminist concerns. The Kate Millett variety, long
recognized elsewhere for its crude scholarship, was nonetheless
seriously damaging to Lawrence, especially in America; but this appears
a more culture-specific phenomenon than one might have thought (Simone
de Beauvoir in France was far more judicious). Sandra Gilbert, Judith
Ruderman, Holly Laird, Carol Siegel, Linda Ruth Williams (in England),
Jungmai Kim (in Korea), and many others have continued an informed
feminist dialogue. Lawrence is studied, too, in terms of l'écriture
féminine and of Lacan, Deleuze, Bakhtin, Derrida, Said, and the
cultural studies which Cushman expects to gain added importance in
future American work. Rare only a few years ago, such highly theorized
contemporary studies are increasingly the norm, often spiraling back in
some way to earlier readings of Lawrence but--as in his own theory of
cyclic time--on a new level.
A "Lawrentian" touch in unexpected places affords
occasional comic relief to the book's readers. One learns that a comic
strip was inspired by Lawrence's life with Frieda, as reported in a 1954
French newspaper under the title "Pauvre D. H." ("Poor D. H."), and
another was based on Lady Chatterley's Lover, as
illustrated and written by cartoonist Mieko Kawasaki in Japan (1996). In
A. S. Byatt's British novel Babel Tower (1996), a divorce lawyer
traces the heroine's Lawrentian expectations of marriage and understands
all: "Ah, D. H. Lawrence. . . . You felt that." And a recent
Hollywood film, G. I. Jane (1997), features a Lawrence poem
prominently, as shouted by no less than a U. S. military drill sergeant.
Such pervasive allusiveness argues that the writer is deeply embedded in
the life of various cultures and seems to belie a stated worry (by a
small minority of contributors) that his standing could be poised for
precipitate decline.
The fact that the essays in this book differ in kind
can easily lead to rather unfair comparisons, for it can be shown that
every single one has weaknesses in relation to some other. Why is
Lawrence's influence in American poetry unmentioned, for example,
whereas in Canadian poetry it is highlighted? Why don't all essays have
the architectonic success of Cushman's or Iida's? Why don't all have the
newsmaking thrust of Odio's contribution, the arresting political frame
of Liu's or Lahiri Choudhury's, the inclusiveness of Preston's, or the
concentration of Eggert's? Quite simply, they cannot do everything at
once; but in combination, they do a great deal and should be in every
university library. (Some of us may need to prod the libraries to order
the book.) This would also be a good resource to keep on one's desk as a
"loaner" to graduate students. Its legacy should be the increasing
sophistication and internationalization of Lawrence studies--and perhaps
(and paradoxically), its greater humanization, for one remembers from
these essays not only the learned critics but also the general readers
who "knew" no better than to love the poetry for its own sake and the
crowds that thronged Eastwood and Nottingham Castle for centenary
events.
(Virginia Hyde,
Washington State University)
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