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Lawrencian sisters… co-editors Susan Reid and Catherine Brown<\/p>\n
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INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On November 28th, 2020, 8.00 pm UK time The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts<\/em><\/a>, co-edited by Catherine Brown and Susan Reid was virtually launched.<\/p>\n The recording of the event is here<\/a>\u00a0(if this link does not work with Safari, use any other browser).<\/p>\n Celebration and communion are different things online, of course, but a particular kind of togetherness \u2013 as many have discovered during this year of Covid \u2013 was made possible through the awareness of distance. Also, far more of us could attend than would have been the case had it been an in-person event. Contributors, their family and friends, and simply the interested, attended from locations including Minsk (Belarus), Tulsa (Oklahoma), New Mexico, Yekaterinburg (Russia), Durham (North Carolina), Uppsala (Sweden), New Orleans, Galway (Ireland), Athens (Greece), St Louis (Missouri), Canberra (Australia), Vannes (Brittany), Montelupo Fiorentina (Tuscany), Naples, and Edinburgh.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The running order was:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n JACKIE JONES\u00a0<\/strong>[from 4 minutes 20 on the recording<\/a>]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n explained the concept of the volume, and of the series (entitled X and the Arts<\/em>) of which it forms part. She said that she anticipated that this would be the first of many volumes about Lawrence coming out of Edinburgh University Press, as part of its excellent modernist listings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n LAURA MARCUS\u00a0 <\/strong>[from 9 minutes 44 on the recording<\/a>]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n opened by saying: \u2018Here there are many many old friends in small [Zoom frame] boxes. I wish we were all together – but given the circumstances it\u2019s great we can have this launch.\u2019 She praised the book as covering the \u2018widest possible range of topics\u2019 whilst, through its frequent cross-referencing, giving \u2018the reader the feeling of a conversation between authors\u2019. Moreover \u2018The focus in the volume on the individual arts \u2026 is intertwined with an exploration of the very categories of art and aesthetic, as these were both embraced and rejected by Lawrence.\u2019 Rather than presenting Lawrence as simply an anti-aesthete (the anti-aesthetic trend, as Isobel Armstrong has identified, \u2018leaves one without resources of analysis\u2019), he is presented in relation to a broadened concept of \u2018art\u2019, encompassing fashion, jewellery, dance, performance, historiography and the technological imagination. Another common theme (expressed in different terms in many chapters) was understanding of Lawrence as a writer of \u2018trembling balance\u2019 and provisionality of vision. One common theme of Lawrence criticism \u2013 the fall-out of the 1970s second-wave feminist critique of Lawrence \u2013 was hardly adduced, but instead Catherine Brown discusses the fall-off of Lawrence\u2019s popularity and prestige in the 80s and 90s in relation to the cynicism and determinism of that period, with its relative lack of interest in Lawrencian themes such as the quickness of the living body \u2013 as particularly exemplified in Lawrence\u2019s painting \u2018Dance Sketch\u2019, with its \u2018man, woman, and most excellent goat.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n SUSAN REID <\/strong>[from 16 minutes 55 on the recording<\/a>]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n reminded us that Lawrence loved parties. There are over 300 references to them in his works, and many more in his letters. Most often, he wrote about wedding and Christmas parties \u2013 sometimes combined, as, wonderfully and memorably, at the Marsh Farm in The Rainbow<\/em>. Like actual parties, he choreographs them carefully, bringing the right people into play, like an impresario; he therefore disliked surprise parties; he was irritated to be caught out by one organised for him in Sicily, at which he arrived in sandals. Moreover, in them he made many different arts work together (\u2018like a modernist version of Wagner\u2019). She noted that it was significant that Mr Noon was not a writer or painted but a musician and composer who aspired to orchestrate a symphony \u2013 and that the wide lens provided by the eponymous \u2018the arts\u2019 allows a far wider Lawrencian canon than Leavis\u2019s Great Tradition to be considered (the number of Lawrence\u2019s works in the index of the volume is greater than in any other book about Lawrence of which Sue is aware). Some have said that he dabbled too broadly across the arts, and created too much. But to do so was simply modernist. Joyce, Proust and Richardson wrote at much greater length; Ford, Mansfield and Pound were also musicians; Lawrence was as much a modernist as any of them, and modernist in his own way. Our volume celebrates him as an experimental and provocative writer. Just as a party\u2019s invitees can be chosen to generate creative friction, so were our authors drawn from a range of backgrounds, and for willingness to challenge myths about Lawrence \u2013 over three years ago, \u2018in a much sunnier time\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n CATHERINE BROWN <\/strong>[from 23 minutes 44 on the recording<\/a>]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m going to be talking about how this book came into being. So let me take you back to the summer of 2017, when many of us here today were physically together in London for the 14th<\/sup> triennial International DH Lawrence Conference<\/a>. Just before the conference I was approached by Jackie Jones, who had apparently been redirected to me by Lawrence\u2019s biographer David Ellis (thank you David!) to edit The Edinburgh Companion to DH Lawrence and the Arts<\/em>. I have to say, I was over-busy and exhausted at the time, as I directing that conference. But I was also excited and interested in the idea. And, just as the conference had been an intensely collaborative event, one of my first thoughts was \u2013 if I\u2019m to do this, I would like a co<\/em>-editor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So I approached Sue Reid, who is editor of Journal of DH Lawrence Studies<\/em> \u2013 who better than someone who edits all the time? \u2013 and to my delight she said yes. That the volume we are celebrating today is not, as far as we\u2019re aware, riddled with errors, that we have not put EUP in breach of copyright law with our use of images, and that our contributors are as diverse and distinguished as they are, are largely due to her expertise, her experience, and her Lawrencian address book. I\u2019m so grateful to her for being such a delight to work with, and for teaching me so much.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of course, our first task was to be fishers of men and women, and to bring together the group of 27 fine contributors that we have. With your help \u2013 and I\u2019m gesturing here towards the other 25 \u2013 we put together a proposal. And where you weren\u2019t able to get back to us in time, as occasionally happened, we made up the kind of thing that we would <\/em>say if we <\/em>were writing your chapter, knowing that we wouldn\u2019t bind you to this.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Or would we? Isn\u2019t a version of binding someone else to one\u2019s own, inevitably less expert, take on a subject, part of what being an editor is? And what\u2019s more, to expressing it in something approaching the kind of style, vocabulary, syntax, that we would have used if we were expressing it?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To some extent yes; and I\u2019ve learned a lot from Sue over the last three years on where to strike the balance between ensuring parity of approach and style across the volume, and being obnoxiously dictatorial on the other. I\u2019m not saying I always got this right \u2013 any of my students out there, there are distinguished critics in the room who know how you feel\u2026 We\u2019ve certainly asked a lot of our contributors in terms of shaping their chapters to make a coherent volume, we\u2019re very conscious of this, and you have been very patient in working with us. We have not forgotten Lawrence\u2019s own responses to being edited.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When he complaining about the editing of his novels by Ford Madox Ford and others in 1913 he referred to: ‘those damned old stagers\u2019 who \u2018want to train up a child in the way it should grow, whereas if it\u2019s destined to have a snub nose, it\u2019s a sheer waste of time to harass the poor brat into Roman-nosedness\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There was one contributor whose response to our comments on his second draft were particularly memorable. And I hasten to make clear that I have his permission to quote him; it was just a gloriously honest and even Lawrencian response, that got to the heart of why we do what we do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI [am not] aware of any recent criticism that I wish to cite or refer to; this (of course) because I don\u2019t read Lawrence criticism any more.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In this way, of course, I am perfectly aware that I am going against good academic practice, and incur the criticism that what is needed is something clearer and better referenced.\u00a0\u00a0But I\u2019m not, I am afraid, capable at this stage of my life of producing such a thing.\u00a0\u00a0WYSIWYG, I fear \u2012 and if you don\u2019t in the end like what you get, then the answer is very simple: leave the essay out of the volume.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019m quite serious about this.\u00a0\u00a0You both did your best for it, you really did: you gave me all the advice that was necessary, in the way this book needs.\u00a0 But I am no longer academic: I go my own way.\u00a0That was the risk you incurred when you suggested that I do a piece\u2026\u00a0You really don\u2019t need my piece, anyway, with essays coming in like that on the plays.\u00a0\u00a0By your standards, I fear, my piece is always going to remain vague and undefined (undefining, too).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But it\u2019s actually no skin off my nose if it never gets published.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ve had some fun with the writing of it and if that\u2019s the end of it, who minds: I won\u2019t, for sure.\u00a0\u00a0(The way my memory works now, I will have no recollection of it or of any possible disagreement over it in twelve months\u2019 time, anyway.\u00a0\u00a0You think I am exaggerating?\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m not.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Enough said.\u00a0\u00a0I shall remain good friends with you both, whatever.<\/p>\n And thank you for all your work in what was perhaps a fruitless exercise.\u00a0\u00a0This old dog . . . \u2012\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Needless to say, his chapter is a glorious contribution to our volume. And I\u2019m delighted to say that he will be speaking to us later.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With regard to the later-stage minutae of editing, one thing I\u2019ve learned is that whatever style guide a publisher gives you, it\u2019s inadequate to all the cases that arise. How were we going to spell Lawrentian, out of the four available ways, if we were even going to permit this adjective at all? (we did and it ends \u2018cean\u2019). If the Cambridge University Press edition of Lawrence\u2019s letters uses an m-dash without spaces either side, as Lawrence so often did in his handwriting, were we going to reproduce that even though if conflicts with EUP\u2019s style guide (the answer was absolutely). And so on.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Sue and I are different people, and didn\u2019t always feel identically, notably about the use of commas \u2013 which it turns out is one of the major stylistic variables between writers. Nor, more importantly, did we take the same intellectual approach to all chapters, inevitably, given our different areas of interest \u2013 and this was where the benefits of co-editing became most obvious. She picked up on things that I didn\u2019t and vice versa. Though this does actually induce the thought experiment the question of what would happen if there were an infinite number of editors? Would the chapters become infinitely big, in response to our demands for expansion, or infinitely small, in response to our criticisms? Or perhaps we would all cancel each other out and leave it exactly as it was \u2013 infinite editing as no editing at all\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But editing does not just concern intellectual content. I had a particular amount to learn from Sue when it came to copyright. Now whatever its intrinsic rights and wrongs \u2013 and I\u2019m conscious we have many published authors in the room who have an interest in this question \u2013 it does impose considerable administrative and financial burdens on anyone who wants to reproduce anything protected by it. Thanks, therefore, to all our contributors for telling us how many words<\/em> you quoted from each of the volumes of the CUP Lawrence. But the real challenges came with the images. I hope you agree that it was worth it, we have in our book 38 colour plates, 22 black and white \u2018figures\u2019 and 2 \u2018musical examples\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Several took quite a lot of two and fro, but there was one artist that necessited a veritable email odyssey. Dorothy Brett. Dear Brett, a wonderful person and at her best a great artist, I based my whole chapter on one of her paintings \u2013 the double portrait of Lawrence as Pan and Christ \u2013 and we wanted another, Lawrence with a halo, for our front cover, since it\u2019s a relatively unknown one, and has something to say.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We located the paintings, at the Harry Ransome Institute, University of Texas at Austin, which, for a fee, could supply high res copies. But they were very clear that they were not the rights holders. Who then was? Few other people had reproduced Brett in Lawrence books before, and when they had done so it was without attribution as to rights. Texas thought that the University of New Mexico might know. New Mexico didn\u2019t, but thought that a couple of gallerists in Taos might know. The gallerists didn\u2019t, and there the trail ran into the sand.<\/p>\n EUP would definitely not allow the images without explicit permission, especially<\/em> as we wanted to use one of them on the cover. I was ready to give up, when amazingly the thread started again when we were negotiating about different images with the National Gallery.<\/p>\n Someone there passed us on to someone else who passed us on to someone called Christopher Esher. He is Dorothy Brett\u2019s great-nephew, and sofar as he and we know, the sole rights-holder for her paintings. Thank you to him for saving my chapter and our cover.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The cover, for what it\u2019s worth, occasioned protracted discussion between Sue and me.<\/p>\n I, whose soul inclines that rather serious way, wanted the whole thing blown up big, so the portrait filled the whole cover, and the words would appear above it. Sue, not wishing to be oppressed by Lawrence\u2019s rather fervid look in this portrait, and with her greater respect for artistic integrity – given that given the dimensions of the painting are not the same as those of the book itself – wanted the whole painting, plus a border \u2013my solution would have involved cutting off some of the stars. Having reached deadlock, we appealed to our respective husbands. And I think<\/em> that they both sided with Sue, which is why the cover looks as it does.<\/p>\n But I asserted myself over the colour, and so we went with my choice of night-blue, which I hope no one is oppressed by; it allows the moon \u2013 so important to Lawrence \u2013 to shine all the more clearly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So here it is. It\u2019s been a big project and it\u2019s taken a lot of time. And over that time lots has gone on, in the 27 lives most directly involved in this project, as well as in the world as a whole. It\u2019s to the credit of EUP that they haven\u2019t been slowed down by the pandemic.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s to the credit of all our contributors who have suffered personal setbacks during their work, that they have nonetheless gone on to complete their chapters, just as Lawrence, however ill, in whatever turmoil, wrote nonetheless.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Catherine Brown introducing Howard Jacobson:<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Howard Jacobson is amongst other things a cultural critic. I\u2019m going to mention that first.<\/p>\n He is a long-standing columnist at The Independent, where he functions as a cultural and political critic on a wide range of topics. He has presented on television on literature, art and religion and society. He is one of those literary figures to whom I think it would do us all a lot of good if we listened.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He\u2019s also a literary critic. He studied English under FR Leavis at Cambridge, spent the first part of his career in English academia in Australia and England, and has published literary criticism – notably Shakespeare\u2019s Magnanimity<\/em> (1978), co-written with Wilbur Sanders.<\/p>\n Here is the balance that can be found within a couple of sentences in \u2018Hamlet\u2019s Sanity\u2019 in Shakespeare\u2019s Magnanimity<\/em>: \u2018Hamlet\u2019s public display of private grief is no better than the drank no-grief-at-all of his mother. But it is no worse. A mature wisdom directs this scene: not a sad recognition of human frailties [\u2026] we are not to doubt that Hamlet\u2019s sorrow is genuine because it is conceited.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But he is also a distinguished novelist. Booker-Prize-winning (for his 2010 The Finkler Question<\/em>), he has described himself as \u2019the Jewish Jane Austen\u2019 (in response to being called \u2019the English Phillip Roth\u2019).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n His latest novel is the 2019 Life a Little<\/em>, about a nonagenarian love story in North London.<\/p>\n Before that was the 2017 Pussy<\/em>, a satirical fable against Donald Trump, and the 2016 Shylock is my Name<\/em>, a novelistic reworking of The Merchant of Venice<\/em> set in the present.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before then, of those I know and particularly love, are Kalooki Nights<\/em> (2006) (of which The Independent <\/em>said \u2018For its near reckless bravery it deserves some kind of literary VC\u2019), and The Finkler Question <\/em>(2010). His first novel, 1983, Coming from Behind<\/em>, was a campus novel based on his own experiences of teaching at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Howard is visiting professor of English at my College, and at a recent talk to our students he explained how through this novel he broke free of the tyranny of Leavis, whose influence had kept him as a critic, and delayed his beginning as a creative writer. Welcome, Howard.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n HOWARD JACOBSON <\/strong>[from 39 minutes on the recording<\/a>]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [not quite word-for-word, but near-enough, I hope..]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018This is a wonderfully glamorous and compendious volume about Lawrence. But Catherine\u2019s mention of the Booker Prize makes me wonder whether he would have even made it onto a longlist. Imagine, had he won it, at the awards ceremony Camilla Parker-Bowles would have said \u2018I thoroughly enjoyed your novel Mr Lawrence\u2019 and – I wonder what he would have said\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Catherine and Sue\u2019s introduction opens with a statement Lawrence made to Eastwood Debating Society in 1908 when he was 23. It is chastening enough that a small mining town had<\/em> a debating society; but imagine any 23 year-old nowadays talking about art giving access to \u2018primordial silences\u2019 in which truth resides \u2013 in Eastwood or anywhere else\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Seeing John Worthen and David Ellis here today reminds me that I\u2019m with people I was at Downing College Cambridge with. We all had the enormous honour of having been taught by Leavis. I don\u2019t only say that because I\u2019m worried because what John Worthen and David Ellis might say – though I am <\/em>worried about what John Worthen and David Ellis might say. (That is the nature of being a Leavisite – that you\u2019re terrified of your fellow Leavisites).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A better-known statement by Lawrence about art, from Studies in Classic American Literature<\/em>, opens the first chapter, by Michael Bell: \u2018never trust the artist, tell the tale.\u2019 As a reader and a teacher of literature, I\u2019ve lived by those words – and as a writer and teacher of literature, I live by them still. In fact, we humans must have known it to have been true before he told us so in those words. Poet\u2019s aren\u2019t the sole cause, if any at all, of the words that they speak.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And Lawrence\u2019s two statements about art could in fact have been written on the same day. Art can\u2019t be rationally comprehended, and one can\u2019t simply decide<\/em> to create it. Lawrence\u2019s suspicion of artists is one of the things that makes him not a Romantic. But untrustworthiness goes beyond artists. We always tell lies to ourselves and each other \u2013 all the time. So never mind never \u2018trust the artist\u2019, \u2018never trust anyone\u2019. Artists\u2019 falsity lies not in their being artists, but in sharing the common human subterfuge.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To say that Lawrence was not impressed by us humans is not to say anything new. Nor was it just the War that made him horrified by the mass of humanity. Even in Sons and Lovers<\/em>, one finds him using words such as \u2018conglomeration\u2019 and \u2018mass\u2019, in negative application to humans. At the centre of it is Paul\u2019s struggle to his escape intermingling first with his mother, then Miriam. \u2018Authenticity\u2019 was a catch-word when I was growing up in the sixties. Yet now I am troubled more by an indistinctness of being that prohibits our grasping what is outside ourselves, and our individual perspectives. In Sons and Lovers<\/em> there is a scene where Paul and Clara are going through Nottingham Castle grounds, irritate. They impose their cheerlessness on the scene \u2013 and this makes them, as it were, bad painters. Because looking is a mode of making. Then a clock strikes and breaks their perspective; cheerfulness returns \u2013 the landscape gets back its individuality, its separateness from them. We need to be forgetful ourselves. Never trust the seer, trust the seen. In his sourer moods, Lawrence imagines a landscape without us in it – Birkin\u2019s vision of a world without humans, just a hare sitting up.<\/p>\n Whatever else we make of that hare – and in my years as a teacher it has caused more dissension than anything else I can think of – it is not a liar. And so Lawrence\u2019s maybe-too Whitmanesque exhortations to us to purify ourselves, at end of Studies in Classic American Literature<\/em>. What stands between us and art? We do. There is, of course, something contradictory in Lawrence\u2019s hectoring us not to hector. But myself, I don\u2019t mind that in the least. It\u2019s part of the inchoate, always-provisional nature of Lawrence\u2019s thinking. No-one has ever better articulated what art is – what it\u2019s for – and how little we amount to without it.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n QUESTIONS TO HOWARD <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n How might Lawrence fare as a candidate for the Booker prize?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018The great novel for me is Women in Love<\/em>, one of the greatest novels ever written (though I don\u2019t necessarily agree with Leavis\u2019s reading of it). He was too good. Very good writers are divisive. He would have divided a panel. With one very good reader – David Ellis, John Worthen, me, or Leavis – he might have done alright. With the decision being made by a panel, as it is, there is every chance he would not have won it. I like to think he would not have cared at all. After all, people were reading him anyway. Today, it\u2019s very difficult for a serious novelist to be read, unless they represent a particular interest set. So I am encouraged by the grandeur of the enterprise of this book; for many years it seemed to me that Lawrence had vanished, but this book suggests that maybe there is an overdue rehabilitation.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How can he be made better-known?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018As a teacher (like John Worthen said earlier), I\u2019m long out of it. It needs good teachers to talk about Lawrence at university, to escape the ideological nonsense that we allowed literature to succumb to for decades.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How is Lawrence\u2019s socialism expressed in his essays?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sue passed this question to Howard Booth, who presented Lawrence as having grown up in an environment of socialism, and influenced by Edward Carpenter; this is apparent in his paper delivered to the Eastwood Debating Society. But after that, though his awareness of working class concerns never disappeared, the picture becomes more complicated; he is furious not just at industrialization, but also as socialism, which \u2013 being a label, like \u2018Christianity\u2019 \u2013 can actually be as much part of the problem as the solution.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Was visual art a lesser medium than writing for Lawrence?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018He is a very interesting painter, but not great. He is a great writer, and he knew that. The fact that he could do other things than writing is extraordinary, but they were<\/em> \u201cother things\u201d\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Catherine Brown introducing John Worthen<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He is also an elder statesman of Lawrence studies. Sometimes the word \u2018Pope\u2019 comes to my mind, and though that implies notions of singularity and dictatorial capability which I am sure he would reject, he assumes this aspect for me particularly when he gives his famous Lawrence walking tours. I will never forget being taken by him round an unEnglishly-hot Hampstead in July 2017, in pursuit of the Lawrences\u2019 house and their friends\u2019 houses and his character\u2019s houses. Still less will I forget being taken round an Italianly-hot Gargnano by him in the summer of 2014, and being shown the plaza where the spinner sat and talked to Lawrence. He is a performer, and wrote our chapter on Performance. So I would now like to call upon him to perform.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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