Two on Lawrence

31:4 Book Reviews India', (Prentice-Hall, 1970). Bloom's two collections of critical essays on one of our most significant modem authors are idiosyncratic rather than central and reliable and should be used with caution by the audience for whom they are evidently intended, student specialists in English literature at both the undergraduate and the graduate level and perhaps the intelligent general reader . Frederick P. W. McDowell University of Iowa TWO ON LAWRENCE D. H. Lawrence. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Ed. Michael Herbert. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. $69.50 Harold Bloom, ed. D. H. Lawrence's 'Women in Love'. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. $24.50 The first of these reprints, the Cambridge edition of Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, includes twenty-three essays written between 1915 and 1925 and published in the English Review, Athenaeum, Adelphi and Vanity Fair. Seven of the essays appeared in the original edition of Reflections (Philadelphia: Centaur Press, 1925)—though "The Novel," from that volume, is not included; two are from Assorted Articles (1930); twelve first appeared in Phoenix (1936) and one in Phoenix II (1968); "Clouds" (1919) is previously unpublished; there are an additional three and one half pages in "On Being A Man" and ten pages of new fragments. Michael Herbert's introduction is competent but rather dull. And the elaborate scholarly apparatus—is the preferred reading "systole diastole" or "systolediastole "?—is not justified by the contents of the book. Though the explanatory notes are meticulous, the editor does not mention that "the snowball of his own accumulation begins slowly to roll back on him" (221) alludes to Sisyphus and "fought the great fight" (222) to I Timothy 6:12. My Midland paperback edition of Reflections (1963) was $1.95; this edition is $69.50. The complete forty-volume Cambridge edition of Lawrence's works, at an average of $75 a volume, will cost about $3000. Most of the essays—with titles like "Love," "Life" and "On Human Destiny"—are abstract and dense with biblical allusion. The two longest ones—"Education of the People" and "The Crown"—are rambling and ranting. David Garnett, a friend and admirer of Lawrence, said "The Crown" was "awful unreadable stuff; another critic called it "a monstrous forest of obscurity, verbosity and repetition." No wonder Lawrence and Murry's little magazine The Signature, which published "The Crown," expired after only three issues in 1915. In a prefatory note, the disillusioned Lawrence recalled the cosy setting: 489 31:4 Book Reviews [We had] weekly meetings somewhere inLondon—Ihaveno idea where it was—up a narrow stair-case over a green-grocer's shop: or a cobbler's shop. . . . We scrubbed the room and colour-washed the walls and got a long table and some Windsor chairs from the Caledonian market. And we used to make a good warm fire: it was dark autumn, in the dark unknown bit of London. Then on Thursday nights, we had meetings: about a dozen people. ... I knew then, and I know now, it is no use trying to do anything—I speak only for myself—publicly. It is no use trying merely to modify present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. Though the essays are generally tedious, there are some beautifully cadenced natural descriptions: "Even whilst we stare at the ragged horror of birds scattered broadcast, part-eaten, the soft, uneven cooing of the pigeon ripples from the outhouses, and there is a faint silver whistling in the bushes come twilight." This disturbing conjunction of death and life recurs in one of the striking personal passages that erupt from the monotonous prose. For the tubercular genius had an intensely poignant response to the Pauline belief in the corruption of the body: "We must know that we, ourselves, are the living stream of seething corruption ... as well as the bright river of life." The consumptive, penurious Lawrence observes, in passing, that the Rubensian Frieda is "about twenty pounds heavier than I am," and that poverty "isn't any such awful thing, if you don't care about keeping up appearances. There is no cure for this...