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J Bryant
J Bryant
1 year ago

A really fine essay, imo. It almost tempts me to read Lady Chatterley, but I probably won’t because I failed miserably to get through The Rainbow years ago.

Kevin Gattey
Kevin Gattey
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Sorry. Can’t agree. The book is a good read but the essay on it is Downton Abbeyish pretending to understand what those people then were like. ‘Yonda is da castle of my Fadda’ earned Tony Curtis scorn and laughter, despite his knowledge and effort at Shakespeare, is the cruel obverse.
I can agree with DH Lawrence being portentous and wrong in his own era, not just the 60s or now. He it was who thought returned veterans in Australia, in ‘Kangaroo’, were the protofascists who this essay author swipes him secondhand with. Lefties didn’t like veterans because those old men knew weak schemers when they saw them, and the weak schemers did not like being called out for same.
All that cohort of veterans had to die before the feud was declared over and history re written in positive terms by later sort who crawled out to narrate the new history. DH Lawrence was just wrong. There are greater sins.

Kevin Gattey
Kevin Gattey
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Sorry. Can’t agree. The book is a good read but the essay on it is Downton Abbeyish pretending to understand what those people then were like. ‘Yonda is da castle of my Fadda’ earned Tony Curtis scorn and laughter, despite his knowledge and effort at Shakespeare, is the cruel obverse.
I can agree with DH Lawrence being portentous and wrong in his own era, not just the 60s or now. He it was who thought returned veterans in Australia, in ‘Kangaroo’, were the protofascists who this essay author swipes him secondhand with. Lefties didn’t like veterans because those old men knew weak schemers when they saw them, and the weak schemers did not like being called out for same.
All that cohort of veterans had to die before the feud was declared over and history re written in positive terms by later sort who crawled out to narrate the new history. DH Lawrence was just wrong. There are greater sins.

J Bryant
J Bryant
1 year ago

A really fine essay, imo. It almost tempts me to read Lady Chatterley, but I probably won’t because I failed miserably to get through The Rainbow years ago.

Caroline Watson
Caroline Watson
1 year ago

It is particularly ironic that the woman playing Lady Chatterley considers herself to be a ‘they’.

Matt M
Matt M
1 year ago

I looked it up on Wikipedia and its true. Hilarious! And they is too thin to play Princess Diana in the Crown in my opinion.

Last edited 1 year ago by Matt M
Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

Now this the grammatical tangle I get into, should it not be “they are”, but then the person is singular and the pronoun plural. If this person is a “they” is/are there two (or more) of her/them. Perhaps she is just schizophrenic.

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt M

Now this the grammatical tangle I get into, should it not be “they are”, but then the person is singular and the pronoun plural. If this person is a “they” is/are there two (or more) of her/them. Perhaps she is just schizophrenic.

Matt M
Matt M
1 year ago

I looked it up on Wikipedia and its true. Hilarious! And they is too thin to play Princess Diana in the Crown in my opinion.

Last edited 1 year ago by Matt M
Caroline Watson
Caroline Watson
1 year ago

It is particularly ironic that the woman playing Lady Chatterley considers herself to be a ‘they’.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

There’s no doubt that Lawrence has acheived mythical status, mainly due to two things that he couldn’t have envisaged: the Lady Chatterley trial and Philip Larkin’s encapsulating of it alongside “the Beatles first LP” as the point where sex became manifest in the public imagination as a tool (as it were) with which cultural shifts could be measured.

We see on a daily basis how, in the articles published by Unherd for instance, sexual politics continues to dominate both the public as well as the private realm. Within its scope, the endless interplay of human desires, successes and failures, dominance and submission (by both sexes) act both as a metaphor and a wellspring for human activity and agency in the wider world.

It’s been posited that the younger generation in the West are having less sex than their forebears. Is this a retreat from the battle? Is personal agency in the social media age suddenly too important to be put at risk by the loss of control that lies at the heart of a sexual encounter; the giving way to an abandonment of something that, even for a split second, is too uncomfortable to be abandoned?

This article, and both the original and current iterations of Lawrence’s tubercular imagination bring these questions to the fore, playing a vital role in allowing us to penetrate the political fog of sex and gender.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

The expression “having sex” is absurd and we should return to the former verbs, to copulate to fornicate etc.
I thinks you will agree they have an almost Biblical resonance about them?

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

Reply A: In certain circles, “having sex” could become an affirmative term for the sudden realisation during the act that one does, in fact, have a sex rather than the performative doubt popular among many of the younger generation. I wouldn’t knock it.
Reply B: F*ck that.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

Reply A: In certain circles, “having sex” could become an affirmative term for the sudden realisation during the act that one does, in fact, have a sex rather than the performative doubt popular among many of the younger generation. I wouldn’t knock it.
Reply B: F*ck that.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Nowadays the keeper would be a mixed race bi sexual Amazon delivery driver and Lady C would be some surgically enhanced wife of an insurance broker millionaire living in some vulgar Oast Heouse near Sevenoaks…

Iris C
Iris C
1 year ago

Lovely! So true!
It is good that popular literary novelists are now part of the Unherd output. I enjoyed the article on Compton Mackenzie too, having no idea about his long literary career..

Iris C
Iris C
1 year ago

Lovely! So true!
It is good that popular literary novelists are now part of the Unherd output. I enjoyed the article on Compton Mackenzie too, having no idea about his long literary career..

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

The expression “having sex” is absurd and we should return to the former verbs, to copulate to fornicate etc.
I thinks you will agree they have an almost Biblical resonance about them?

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Nowadays the keeper would be a mixed race bi sexual Amazon delivery driver and Lady C would be some surgically enhanced wife of an insurance broker millionaire living in some vulgar Oast Heouse near Sevenoaks…

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

There’s no doubt that Lawrence has acheived mythical status, mainly due to two things that he couldn’t have envisaged: the Lady Chatterley trial and Philip Larkin’s encapsulating of it alongside “the Beatles first LP” as the point where sex became manifest in the public imagination as a tool (as it were) with which cultural shifts could be measured.

We see on a daily basis how, in the articles published by Unherd for instance, sexual politics continues to dominate both the public as well as the private realm. Within its scope, the endless interplay of human desires, successes and failures, dominance and submission (by both sexes) act both as a metaphor and a wellspring for human activity and agency in the wider world.

It’s been posited that the younger generation in the West are having less sex than their forebears. Is this a retreat from the battle? Is personal agency in the social media age suddenly too important to be put at risk by the loss of control that lies at the heart of a sexual encounter; the giving way to an abandonment of something that, even for a split second, is too uncomfortable to be abandoned?

This article, and both the original and current iterations of Lawrence’s tubercular imagination bring these questions to the fore, playing a vital role in allowing us to penetrate the political fog of sex and gender.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Alan Jackson
Alan Jackson
1 year ago

D.H.L spent much of his his artistic life seeking to re-understand and redirect his parents’ marriage: since the parents were representative of two different sets of values-the barely literate, working-class, father still retaining intuitive sensitivity and the upward looking mother pushing her children on into education and middle-class respectability that remains an important balancing act. . Understanding this balance took massive readjustment by her brilliantly capable son who has to realise his genius is derived more from his father’s qualities than his mother’s. The writer here downplays the genius to overstate the wild preaching and so-called misogyny (not obvious in a writer who in tale after sides with the heroine to seek what is best for them/)..Lady Chatterley is a very weak novel disabled by-as the writer hints- Lawrence’s ill-health. But do not let us minimise the greatness of the art, of The Rainbow and Women in Love and of the short stories from the revised Odour of Chrysanthemums on and the invincibly sane intelligence of much of the criticism. He is also one of the greatest letter-writers in the literature. One wonders if the writer has even read Leavis and without understanding of the positive case for Lawrence he is not going to see him very clearly.

Claire D
Claire D
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Jackson

Don’t forget his poetry, eg, The Snake, https://poetryfoundation.org/poems/148471/snake-5bec57d7bfa17 wonderful.

Last edited 1 year ago by Claire D
Claire D
Claire D
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Jackson

Don’t forget his poetry, eg, The Snake, https://poetryfoundation.org/poems/148471/snake-5bec57d7bfa17 wonderful.

Last edited 1 year ago by Claire D
Alan Jackson
Alan Jackson
1 year ago

D.H.L spent much of his his artistic life seeking to re-understand and redirect his parents’ marriage: since the parents were representative of two different sets of values-the barely literate, working-class, father still retaining intuitive sensitivity and the upward looking mother pushing her children on into education and middle-class respectability that remains an important balancing act. . Understanding this balance took massive readjustment by her brilliantly capable son who has to realise his genius is derived more from his father’s qualities than his mother’s. The writer here downplays the genius to overstate the wild preaching and so-called misogyny (not obvious in a writer who in tale after sides with the heroine to seek what is best for them/)..Lady Chatterley is a very weak novel disabled by-as the writer hints- Lawrence’s ill-health. But do not let us minimise the greatness of the art, of The Rainbow and Women in Love and of the short stories from the revised Odour of Chrysanthemums on and the invincibly sane intelligence of much of the criticism. He is also one of the greatest letter-writers in the literature. One wonders if the writer has even read Leavis and without understanding of the positive case for Lawrence he is not going to see him very clearly.

Brett H
Brett H
1 year ago

The crippled, impotent aristocracy versus the virile, physical, potent world of the gamekeeper. Isn’t that similar to the working man of today who lives his life under the dead, suffocating mind of the technocrat?
Edit: I think a modern interpretation could be made of this book, and the sex would not be necessary, as the film apparently focuses on. The sex is a metaphor for the physical, ecstatic joy of life. That itself would be a radical aspect of a contemporary version of the book.

Last edited 1 year ago by Brett H
Brett H
Brett H
1 year ago

The crippled, impotent aristocracy versus the virile, physical, potent world of the gamekeeper. Isn’t that similar to the working man of today who lives his life under the dead, suffocating mind of the technocrat?
Edit: I think a modern interpretation could be made of this book, and the sex would not be necessary, as the film apparently focuses on. The sex is a metaphor for the physical, ecstatic joy of life. That itself would be a radical aspect of a contemporary version of the book.

Last edited 1 year ago by Brett H