Poetry: No one likes poems with a "palpable design" on the reader, according to Keats. As readers of D.H. Lawrence will know, many of his poems don't just have a palpable design on us, they sound like they'll be waiting outside for anyone who disagrees with them, writes David Wheatley
Pomegranate, from Birds, Beasts and Flowers, begins: "You tell me I am wrong./ Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?/ I am not wrong". Amit Chaudhuri wants to tell previous Lawrence critics they've been getting him wrong, and in D.H. Lawrence and "Difference" he does so with no little originality and aplomb.
As his admirers will be the first to admit, Lawrence's poems are uneven. Many are untidy, sprawling, heedless of the niceties of the well-behaved lyric. Rather than apologise for this side of Lawrence, Chaudhuri places it at the centre of his case for the defence in an energetic vindication of the poems and their "alternative aesthetic". As D.J. Enright wrote in 1964: "If these poems are lacking in craftsmanship, then so much the worse for craftsmanship."
This is an apposite moment for Chaudhuri's study, for several reasons. The first is the almighty slump in Lawrence's stock in recent years. Lady Chatterley's Lover saw off the censor in 1962 but took a battering from Kate Millett's Sexual Politics in 1970 from which its author has never really recovered; as Gary Adelman showed in a recent survey for the Southern Review, many 20th-century fiction syllabuses in American universities now omit him altogether. A few anthology favourites aside, such as Snake and The Ship of Death, Lawrence's poetry was always a few steps behind his fiction, and so has suffered twice over.
Another reason is how poorly Lawrence has been served by some of his most admiring critics, principally F.R. Leavis. At the centre of Leavis's admiration, monotonously hammered home for half a century, was a mystical but obscurantist cult of Lawrence as the embodiment of "life". In an ingenious but devastating reversal of Leavis, Chaudhuri reads the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers as a puppet show of masks and props circulating from poem to poem so that " 'life' is a presence forever outside the text". In Lawrence's "jazz-like" chain of imagistic substitutions, a tortoise's mouth is first a mouth, then a beak, then a pair of pincers, then the wedge of a "mountain front". All is collage and embroidery rather than a seamlessly unfolding organic whole.
One side of Lawrence that people either love or have their stomachs turned by is Lawrence the prophet, the wild-eyed ranter and celebrant of the dark gods. In his reading of Lawrence's last book, Apocalypse, Chaudhuri manages to bolster his case by confessing frankly how daft and unconvincing the interpretations are of St John's nightmare visions; what is important, he insists, is Lawrence's embrace of the "riotous, playful textuality where sign is added upon sign in a picture, in rich and confused multiplicity". He responds to the text, in other words, as a piece of mythographic collage, much as Joyce did to the fantastic nooks and crannies of the Book of Kells.
Chaudhuri is excellent on Lawrence's encounter with non-European cultures, as in Mornings in Mexico, but also on simplistic attempts to recuperate him as the noble savage of modernism. Chaudhuri's Lawrence does not identify with the "other", but exposes the patronising ethic on which such Romantic identifications are made and celebrates the other's unknowability instead. Copious use is also made of Derrida and Foucault, whose incursion into Lawrence studies may provoke desperate measures from any lingering members of Dr Leavis's New Critical Home Guard. But even without the assistance of that Gallic pair, D.H. Lawrence and "Difference" succeeds in making us appreciate how much more there is to Lawrence than we know, or think we know. Writing on Lawrence in The Criterion in 1930, T.S. Eliot convicted him of "ignorance" of the basic function of education, "to develop a wise and large capacity for orthodoxy". The great merit of Chaudhuri's book is to make Lawrence's "ignorance", if that's what it is, look so effortlessly preferable to any amount of Eliot's orthodoxy.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
D.H. Lawrence and "Difference": Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present. By Amit Chaudhuri, Clarendon Press, 220pp, £20