Daleski's Lawrence

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 Americans-lack of communication, especially emotional, even among family members," and he may well have had in mind a passage such as this from Jimmy Breslin's World Without End, Amen (1973): Dermot and his wife, like so many others from the same background , were unable to discuss sex. Many times they went two weeks without sex. And immediately after that, two or three more weeks. . . . Once they went for seven weeks without sex. There was no way for them to handle the subject in conversation . It always came out to be a fight over wallpaper or weak coffee. Fanning here makes no large claims for the literary merit of most of his selections, although there are some exceptions, notably the Martin Dooley pieces of Finley Peter Dunne, with whom the anthology ends and who is the one writer whose name students of American literature are likely to recognize. Still, this collection and Fanning's forthcoming major study will open up vast territory for students and scholars of America's longest-lived ethnic literature. Robert E. Rhodes Professor Emeritus __________________________________State University College at Cortland DALESKI'S LAWRENCE H. M. Daleski. The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. $30.00 The Forked Flame, originally published in 1965, was the first of H. M. Daleski's five books of criticism, and is probably the best known. Indeed, despite the many changes in critical fashion over the last twenty-three years, not to mention the torrent of scholarship on D. H. Lawrence, Daleski's book stands as one of a sparse handful of indispensable general studies of Lawrence's career as novelist. One of Daleski's distinctions, as Daniel R. Schwarz pointed out recently in these pages (29:3), is being the first critic to direct attention to the importance of the Study of Thomas Hardy (written in 1914) in Lawrence's development. By focusing on this seminal work of creative self-exploration, Daleski provides a consistent set of ideas that help to give a relatively clear, plausible shape to his account of Lawrence's novelistic career. Since the Study has now appeared in the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's Works (1985), the reissuing of Daleski's book is particularly timely. Although Daleski himself has reviewed the new edition of the Study in the D. H. Lawrence Review (19:1), he chose not 113 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 to revise his analysis of it in The Forked Flame. Instead he provides a brief retrospective note reaffirming his belief in his book's general argument and indicating only two changes he would make if he were writing it today: he would begin his account with The White Peacock instead of Sons and Lovers and with an emphasis on the initial influence of George Eliot instead of Hardy; and he would substitute The Ladybird tales for Aaron's Rod, which he now believes does not merit the detailed analysis he gave it in 1965. The fact that essays on The White Peacock and The Ladybird tales do appear in Daleski's recent book Unities: Studies in the English Novel (1985) suggests that he may have considered actually making these changes but thought better of it. Daleski follows other critics in seeing dualism as the keynote to Lawrence's outlook. More precisely, he finds the opposition between the male and female principles as defined in the Study of Thomas Hardy to be central to Lawrence's creative vision. The male and female principles are seen as nodal contraries which contain and generate others, such as spirit/ flesh, love/ law, time/ eternality, flux/ inertia, multiplicity/ oneness, knowledge/ being, intellect/ senses; and a host of associated images including light/ dark, stalk/ root, centrifugal/ centripetal , the Son/ the Father (30-31). For Lawrence the contraries exist always in a state of dynamic opposition. They are not fused but, ideally, are brought into a relation of complementary balance which validates their separate identities while also affirming the essential connection between them. In Lawrence's thought these oppositions coexist on several levels. They are found within a single psyche, between the partners in a marriage...