Lawrence and Class Conflict

the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man-alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science or any other book-tremulation can do" (p. 195). He also explains (performs?) why he needed to rewrite the Bible in such diverse works as The Rainbow and The Man Who Died (1929; it was originally Õ iublished under the title The Escaped Cook): "The novel is the book of life, η this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man-alive. . . . Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone at Moses' head" (p. 195). In a sense, Lawrence spent his life trying to write a body of fiction—a New New Testament—which would undermine the Christian hierarchy of values, a hierarchy that privileges mind over body, chastity over sexual gratification, reason over passion, and community over individual self-fulfillment. It is appropriate to consider the question of the potential importance and usefulness of eccentric works of non-fiction that few readers besides Lawrence specialists will read from start to finish and only then for the clues they yield about his philosophy. While one can argue—as I recently did in ELT (28:3) when reviewing Vol. Ill of Lawrence's letters—that letters reveal an anterior reality in which the author lived and thus can be somewhat privileged as more real than fiction if only because they usually were meant to define something that seemed true to the writer, can we make the same claims for a writer's non-fiction—particularly works which eschew conventional expository and discursive methods? Wilde (De Profundis) Yeats (A Vision), and Lawrence wrote what might be called fictional non-fiction that expressed their visions and philosophies. These works not only have to do with presenting what most of us would regard as an anterior world, but use techniques which are more performative than mimetic. But these literary oddities provide imaginative evidence to complement and qualify what we know from the fiction, even if they can make no pretenses to contribute to a factual understanding of the historical contexts in which the writer wrote. Yet, because these works are moral and psychological gestures of the author whose presence defines the imagined space of the fictional world, we must take them seriously. Certainly, in Lawrence's case they are very much part of his effort to define himself through his writing. In their very metaphoricity and hyperbole, in their emphasis on process not stasis, in their vatic tone and extravagant selfdramatization , do not the essays in the volume under review point both toward the fictional works and to the creative presence that informs them? Daniel R. Schwarz Cornell University 6. LAWRENCE AND CLASS CONFLICT Peter Scheckner. Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D. H. Lawrence. Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press; Cranbury, NJ, London, and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985. $24.50 In the rather sketchy introduction to his short book, Peter Scheckner asserts repeatedly that despite the importance of class conflict in Lawrence's life and works, critics have heretofore generally overlooked this issue or subordinated 328 it to psychological, reUgious, or sexual matters. The only attempt at substantiating this claim is a paragraph singling out Scott Sanders' D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Five Novels (1973) as standing "alone in the vast canon of Lawrentian criticism" in its attention to "many of the social and class conflicts that so fascinated Lawrence" (p. 13); Scheckner then proceeds to dismiss Sanders' study summarily for imposing the thesis that in his later fiction Lawrence retreated from history into the mythic realm of sex or blood consciousness," a thesis which Scheckner says oversimplifies the novelist's views and "does not give [him] enough credit' (p. 13). Scheckner is scarcely the first critic to resort to the straw-man strategy, but his gratuitous twitting of Sanders is ultimately ironic in that the charge leveled applies in spades to Scheckner's own book. Scheckner argues, laboriously, that Lawrence's class origins were the dominant Ereoccupation of his life and writing...