Another picture of Lawrence, the one I always hoped to come across in bookshops, the one that I had seen when I was seventeen, showed him — if I remember rightly — standing towards the edge of a vast horizontal landscape. Clouds streamed across the sky. I forget which book I saw it in all those years ago but I remember thinking that the caption — ‘A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time’ — had been chosen so perfectly that the picture seemed less a photograph of Lawrence (a tiny figure in the corner, recognisable only by his beard) than an illustration of this line. At the time I did not know where it was from: a quotation from Lawrence, presumably, but beyond that I had no idea. I wanted to track that quotation down — or, to put it more passively and accurately, I hoped to come across it — and the prospect was intriguing precisely because there was nothing to go on. From the start, in other words, I read Lawrence in order to make sense of — to better understand — a photograph of him.
The urge to discover the source of this caption also explains my pleasure in reading Lawrence’s letters in what might seem to be the ludicrously complete Cambridge edition. Or, to make the same point the opposite way, perhaps my pleasure in reading Lawrence’s letters is the culmination of an urge, the first pulse of which was felt twenty years ago when I saw what I later discovered was a line from ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’. From that moment on, part of the incentive to read Lawrence was to discover the source of this line, to read it in the original, as it were, without quotation marks. I came across it in the Penguin Selected Poems (the edition that I still had with me in Rome, the one that I didn’t take to Alonissos) but my satisfaction was qualified (or so it seems to me now) because everything in a ‘Selected’ format comes in tacit quotation marks: those provided by the editor’s choice of material. When we read a ‘selection’ we are, so to speak, in the realm of massively extended quotation. When we read the author’s work in definitive or collected editions, however, we are there: nothing comes between us and the writer (the often cumbersome editorial apparatus serves, paradoxically, to facilitate the intimacy between reader and writer). Like this I can read Lawrence unquoted.
‘You mustn’t look in my novel for that old stable ego of the character. . the ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond — but I say “diamond, what! This is carbon”.’ Those lines, even if we read them in the collected edition of Lawrence’s letters, seem like a citation. Their true context is in a book about Lawrence — this one, for example! When we see them in Volume 2 of the Collected Letters it almost seems as if Lawrence lifted them from one of the hundreds of critical studies of him. And so much of my early reading of Lawrence came in quotation marks. At a very early stage ‘doing’ English became synonymous with reading criticism, most of it by academics. Go into any university bookshop and you will see stacks and stacks of books on Lawrence by academics. Such books form the basis of literary study in universities and none of them has anything to do with literature.
In my final year at university there was a great deal of fuss about course reform. Instead of ploughing through everything from Beowulf to Beckett, academics like Terry Eagleton were proposing a ‘theory’ option. I didn’t know what theory was but it sounded radical and challenging. Within a few years ‘theory’, whatever it was, had achieved a position of dominance in English departments throughout Britain. Synoptic works of theory were pouring from the presses. Fifteen years down the line these texts still appear radical and challenging except in one or two details, namely that they are neither radical nor challenging. One Christmas when I was about ten my parents gave me a Beryl the Peril annual which included some of Beryl’s answers to difficult exam questions. Asked to construct a sentence using the word ‘discourse’ she wrote ‘“Discourse is too hard for me,” said the golfer.’ How quaint! Twenty years on she would probably have no trouble coming up with a whole paper on ‘The Self and its Others’. In no time at all theory had become more of an orthodoxy than the style of study it sought to overthrow. Any lecturer worth his weight in corduroy was fluent in discoursese, could signify-and-signified till the cows came home.
Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson. I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on ‘Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider on ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D. H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on. Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off. Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad. I thought about getting Widdowson’s phone number and making threatening calls. Then I looked around for the means to destroy his vile, filthy book. In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.
I burned it in self-defence. It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches. That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch. I recently met an academic who said that he taught German literature. I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke. Rilke! Oh, it was too much to bear. You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke! You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust. Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves. I was beside myself with indignation. I wanted to maim and harm this polite, well-meaning academic who, for all I knew, was a brilliant teacher who had turned on generations of students to the Duino Elegies. Still, I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands: how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?
Now, criticism is an integral part of the literary tradition and academics can sometimes write excellent works of criticism but these are exceptionaclass="underline" the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of books by academics, especially books like that Longman Reader are a crime against literature. If you want to see how literature lives then you turn to writers, and see what they’ve said about each other, either in essays, reviews, in letters or journals — and in the works themselves. ‘The best readings of art are art,’ said George Steiner (an academic!); the great books add up to a tacit ‘syllabus of enacted criticism’. This becomes explicit when poets write a poem about some great work of art — Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ — or about another poet: Auden’s elegy for Yeats, Brodsky’s elegy for Auden, Heaney’s elegy for Brodsky (the cleverly titled ‘Audenesque’). In such instances the distinction between imaginative and critical writing disappears.