Lawrence & Comedy

ELT 41:1 1998 novel by reference to social class and disjunctions in family aspirations. Though I might quibble with Sanders's view that the narrator always views Walter Morel from his wife's perspective, and that this perspective uniformly paints Morel as "disgusting," I appreciate that these essayists draw our attention to the matrix of historical circumstances. Tony Pinkney and Paul Delany widen the sphere of discussion to include the notion of "Englishness" itself. Pinkney's linking of the linking word and to English realism/humanism, and the wish to "only connect" (Forster's phrase), is particularly interesting; his convincing demonstration of the disjunction (rather than the conjunction) between this aspiration and its achievement illuminates the hard, economical style of the novel in tension with the passionate, deeper forces that it struggles to contain. Each of these essays has been previously published, but in selecting and arranging them—not to mention pointing out their commonalities and developments, and making suggestions by category for further reading—the editor has created a new text informed by his own understanding of Sons and Lovers. His understanding, in the largest sense, seems very appropriate to the times; especially when used in conjunction with the earlier Casebook, the volume dramatically illustrates the ways in which the times they are a-changin'. The collection is appropriate to the undergraduate classroom for an additional reason. Students often feel that after reading one or two works by Lawrence they've got him pegged in terms of his attitudes toward women, to take one example. A work like this Casebook contains within itself, in the disparate points of view of Martz and Millett, for instance, a necessary though unsettling corrective to the notion that Lawrence can be captured so quickly and easily. Given the recent publication of the restored Cambridge edition, which none of these essayists could have used, one can only look forward as well to the new perspectives on Sons and Lovers that will be fostered by the lengthened and altered text, and to a new New Casebook volume some thirty years hence to supplement this useful compendium. Judith Ruderman ________________ Duke University Lawrence & Comedy Paul Eggert and John Worthen, eds. Lawrence and Comedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv + 216pp. Cloth. $49.95 114 Book reviews EVEN LEAVING the impact of the scholarship of F. R. Leavis aside, D. H. Lawrence is not considered a comic writer by many of his readers. Indeed, Lawrence described himself to Edward Garnett as a "religious, earnest, suffering man." In Lawrence and Comedy, editors Paul Eggert and John Worthen try to change this perception through a series of nine essays. Whether the essays are persuasive is questionable. Eight of the essays are originals and the ninth is a "much revised" version of a piece published in the D. H. Lawrence Review in 1988. Besides the essays there is an introduction and an index; each of the essays includes end notes, but there is no bibliography. Eggert notes in his introduction that this is the first volume devoted to the subject of Lawrence and comedy. He goes on to say that the editors' intent is to pay special attention to Lawrence's writing from the 1920s to show that this period of the author's career produced works that are more than "poor relations of the 'great' works of the 1910s" and to open possible lines for further scholarly inquiry. From this perspective Lawrence becomes a "passionate impersonator, committed disrupter and tensely-comic deflator." The pivotal point in Eggert's argument is the publication of Mr. Noon in 1984, for this novel presents elements not previously found in Lawrence's writing: the "narrator's new self-consciousness , the facetious play with his audience, the badgering wit, the flippant rhetoric, the mock-heroic stances in his poems." Four of the essays which follow deal with individual novels written between 1916 and 1925, another is an historical treatise on the relationship between drama and Lawrence's writing, one is concerned with his Australian novels, his poetry is discussed in one, and in two his letters are drawn upon for evidence of his attitude toward comedy. Worthen provides a biographical account in...