Lawrence Whole and Shredded

ELT 37 : 1 1994 one can and will be corrected and challenged-----that revision is always possible and necessary" (12). Thus, when I criticize Sororophobia for its omissions, I hope to be speaking in terms of correctabUity. The most powerful and engaging aspect of Michie's work is her doubling of herself as critic and activist, as theorist and woman. Although I know that Michie specifically declines "biographizing [her] position" (12), I wish she had explored her own critical "sistering" with Gallop and her relationship with the two women to whom she dedicates the work, her mother, Gladys Michie, and Colleen Lamos, whom she thanks for having "taught me the pleasures and pains of negotiating difference between women" (14). But it is in the touching and (of course) inconclusive final inter-chapter that Michie effectively fuses the personal with the political and makes the crucial shift from theory to ferninist praxis. Vara Neverow-Turk Southern Connecticut State University Lawrence Whole and Shredded David Holbrook. Where D. H. Lawrence Was Wrong about Woman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992. 380 pp. $55.00 Elaine Feinstein. Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. 275 pp. $27.50 THESE BOOKS by David Holbrook and Elaine Feinstein offer a curious contrast between male and female responses to a modern British author long associated with patriarchal posturing. The woman novelist and critic looks on Lawrence's life and work with compassionate understanding ; the male critic and novelist rips his life and work to shreds. The time has arrived, apparently, when men must take their stand against this phallogocentric impostor·—and when women can afford to be more lenient. Holbrook is in fact emboldened by previous ferninist attacks against Lawrence—notably by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1969) and by HUary Simpson in Z). H. Lawrence and Feminism (1982). But as his odd title indicates, he is not especially sensitive to feminist issues himself. When one male writer proposes to show us where another went wrong about women, he exhibits one of the more brazen forms of male entitlement —and Holbrook is as brazen as we male critics come. Indeed, he not only knows what's right about women, and what they need and want, 114 BOOK REVIEWS he also knows how to convey that knowledge to the "ordinary" men and women whom the lower-class Lawrence had come to despise, in his elitist progress toward self-deification. Further, Holbrook seeks not only to correct and deflate the arrogant Lawrence, he also hopes to destroy him as a danger to all who would love and live in the sane, normal, and four-square British way for which he—and not Lawrence—speaks. He hopes to save the body politic, then, by exposing Lawrence as a false "Priest of Love," a false modern prophet of sexual salvation. That's what the subtext of this bizarre book implies: if Holbrook can destroy Lawrence, or rather F. R. Leavis's Lawrence—the British prophet of supposedly "normative" love—then he wül emerge himself as the leading love-guru of our time. He wül replace Leavis/Lawrence with his own judicious wisdom about sex, love, and marriage; and he wUl incidentally repay both predecessors for duping and betraying him in his more youthful and credulous days. A scholarship boy himself, and hence from a lower economic order, Holbrook wholeheartedly embraced Leavis as his early mentor and Lawrence as his early culture hero: two morally serious avatars of "the great tradition" who between them might save the modern world. By the early 1960s, however, when Holbrook began to read post-Freudian psychoanalysts like Harry Guntrip, Abraham Maslo, Melanie Klein, Rollo May, D. W. Winnicott, Victor Frankl, and Leslie Färber, embarrassing doubts emerged. Once Leavis had retired and began to lose his widespread cultural authority, once Lawrence too began to lose his midcentury clout through repeated assaults by post- and anti-Leavisites, feminists, and deconstructionists, Holbrook shifted his allegiance to these new mentors. Over time, by wise and gradual persuasion, they helped him to convince himself that Lawrence was a psychopathological sex-obsessed schizoid pervert...