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It reads as both a scenic excursion and a neurotic record of sustained searching and sleuthing about his complex subject. Dyer’s selection of thirty-six essays of varying length and subject matter spans Lawrence’s career from 1912 to 1930,ranging from “Christs in the Tirol” to the “Introduction to the Grand

Inquisitor,” published in the year of his death.  

   

The essay is especially memorable for its understated depiction of the depressing reactions of Lawrence’s parents to the publication in 1911 of his first

book, The White Peacock: “I put it into my mother’s hands when she was

shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! An ‘tha’s never done a

dog’s hard work in thy life’”(208). {{sfn|Lawrence|1911|p=208}}

and Lovers, has long dissipated, and in “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside” he contemplates him with knowledgeable empathy and a powerful

metaphor:

::</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) {{sfn|Lawrence|1929|p=455}}''</blockquote>

Thus amid this livid darkness—acutely real and symbolic at the same time—

Lawrence finally recognizes that he shares with his father comparable patterns of love and hurt: it is their unspoken form of secret sharer.

A major reason for the success of this eclectic volume resides in Dyer’s decision to forgo the customary organization of an anthology by thematic categories. The essays are arranged in a straight-line chronological order, so

with his snide comments is the last person to provide persuasive evaluation

of Lawrence’s work, and especially of Women in Love.

Many of the essays recapitulate, in different ways and with varying urgency, Lawrence’s visionary perception of life. Dyer pertinently quotes a

family, friends, acquaintances and countries, his edgy evaluations of works by Tolstoy, Hemingway,Verga, Hardy, Flaubert and Joyce, as well as his lyrical ruminations on flowers, trees, animals, landscapes, and even inanimate

objects.

Lawrence’s essential cosmology insists that the world is “open” to be engaged by one’s unfettered instincts and unrepressed emotions, and that such

her inertia by my change, that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I

might as well love a pepper-pot” (357). {{sfn|Lawrence|1925|p=357}}

To avoid “change” for Lawrence is to risk sentimentality, a pernicious

is really honest. And it explains a great deal of sentimentality. When a thing

has gone to hell inside of you, your sentimentalism tries to pretend it hasn’t. But Mr. Hemingway is through with sentimentalism. ‘It isn’t fun anymore. I guess I’ll beat it.’ And he beats it, to somewhere else” (“Review of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway,”1927,303). {{sfn|Hemingway|1927|p=303}}  

Within this context of sentimentalism and its inherent opposition to

he traded. One sees the trick working all the way through the Legion book”

(“Memoir of Maurice Magnus,”1921–22,355). {{sfn|Lawrence|1921-22|p=355}}

The essays demonstrate Lawrence’s insistence on the value of instinctual

primacy and its ultimate connection to what he variously calls “the fourthdimension,” involving a transcendent perception of “tremulations on the ether” (“Why the Novel Matters,”254). In a critical section of that essay, he privileges the genre of the novel for its intrinsic ability to embody such relevant synthesis of immanence and transcendence, and thus the novel for him is “the one bright book of life,” for only “the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble” (255). {{sfn|Lawrence|p=25{{sfn|Lennon|2018|p=25}}5}} Lawrence’s commitment to his visionary emphasis on the “gleam” in life extends even to inanimate objects. The following passage remains too easy to caricature, but it represents Lawrence’s unqualified adherence to the perceptions of instinct and the messages of tremulation:

::</blockquote>''We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead; it doesn’t even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, alas, is dead. (“The Novel,”1925,141)'' </blockquote>

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

continent that we do not explore, because we do not even allow that it exists. . . .Yet unless we proceed to connect ourselves up with our own primeval

sources, we shall degenerate” (262,263,264 respectively).

Lawrence’s notoriously pungent reviews of other writers—included

people throbbing inside the glow and the glamour like motes in a sunbeam”

(“Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga,”1927,339).

Lawrence excoriates several much-admired writers for what he regards as intrinsic failures of characterization, texture, and power, inadequacies that he discusses, of course, in the context of his own stipulations about fiction. While recognized as a brilliant and unorthodox literary critic, Lawrence at times overstates his personal biases in ways that too cavalierly diminish the works under consideration. Although he praises the complex artistry of Thomas Mann, he criticizes Death In Venice because the work has “none of the rhythm of a living thing” (“Review of Death In Venice by Thomas Mann 1913,14), and he faults Madame Bovary because he discerns a major problem with its “realistic method,” arguing in an Aristotelian manner that “individuals like Emma and Charles Bovary are too insignificant to carry the full weight of Gustave Flaubert’s profound sense of tragedy” (Gesualdo,332). {{sfn|Lawrence|1913|p=332}} In “The Future of the Novel” (1922-23) he gleefully attacks two modernist exponents of radical fictional techniques because he believes the works are boring and overrated. Here he uses an elongated trope of fabric and mummification to turn consensus notions of their talent and importance virtually inside-out. In effect, he “dresses” them to take them apart: “Through

Novel” (1925) he maintains that War and Peace is marred by Tolstoy’s unpersuasive valorizing of “the fat fuzzy Pierre” (246), a character whom Lawrence regards as a “domestic sort of house-dog” (246). Such a caustic assessment is related to Lawrence’s belief that the portrait of Pierre denies the

fundamental necessity of any character in fiction: Tolstoy “wasn’t true to his own character” (246).What is such “truth” to Lawrence? He returns to a version of the tremulation metaphor and the doctrine of change: “Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, flickering in a strange world” (246). {{sfn|Lawrence|1925|p=246}}

Throughout the essays there are moments of luminous insight by

the personal and the scenic with the mythical nuances of literary history. I

urge you to read through the essays to find more of the same:

::</blockquote>'' In early April I went with my wife to Syracuse for a few days, with the purple anemones blowing in the Sicilian fields, and Adonis-blood red on the little ledges, and the corn rising strong and green in the magical, malarial places, and Etna flowing now to the northward, still with her crown of snow. The lovely, lovely journey from Catania to Syracuse in the spring, winding round the blueness of that sea, where the tall pink asphodel like a lily showing her silk. Lovely, lovely Sicily, the dawn-place, Europe’s dawn, with Odysseus pushing his ship out of the shadows into the blue. Whatever had died for me, Sicily had then not died: dawn-lovely Sicily, and the Ionian Sea. (117)''</blockquote>