The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Tremulation on the Ether: Versions of Instinctual Primacy in the Essays of D.H. Lawrence: Difference between revisions

The catchy title for the book duplicates the title of a short essay from that is included in the volume, in which Lawrence composes a variously poignant and dyspeptic introduction to a meticulous bibliography of his own works compiled by Edward D. McDonald. The piece reveals evidence of Lawrence’s impatience about the bureaucracies of publication and the inane emphasis by some collectors on first edition markings. More importantly, it provides anecdotal reiterations of his own fraught relation to his parents. Thus The Bad Side of Books functions as a resonant signature for the entire collection and for the essay, for both provide an accessible window into Lawrence the writer and the often misunderstood and besieged son.

::</blockquote>''If I think of my childhood, it’s always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, which we moved and had our own real being. My father loved the pit. He was hurt badly more than once, but he never would stay away. He loved the contact, the intimacy, as men in war loved the intense male comradeness of the dark days. (455)''</blockquote>

 

ether” (“Why the Novel Matters,”254). In a critical section of that essay, he

make the whole man alive tremble” (255). Lawrence’s commitment to his visionary emphasis on the “gleam” in life extends even to inanimate objects.

trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead

It is a short distance from the God-flame of immanence radiating from inanimate objects to Lawrence’s instinctual imperative. The following words are from “The Novel and the Feelings” (1925), and again they conspicuously prefigure Mailer’s own existential perspectives: “We’ve managed to keep clear of the darkest Africa inside us, for a long time. . . . But there it is, a strange dark