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The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence
You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.
492 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2019
41 people are currently reading
565 people want to read
About the author
D.H. Lawrence
2,058 books4,115 followersDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 19, 2022
The vast, unexplored morality of life itself, what we call the immorality of nature, surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play, with its queer frame of morality and its mechanized movement; seriously, portentously, till some one of the protagonists chances to look out of the charmed circle, weary of the stage, to look into the wilderness raging round. Then he is lost, his little drama falls to pieces, but the stupendous theatre outside goes on enacting its own incomprehensible drama, untouched.
This has been a beautiful reading experience. I’m not sure why I decided that my first exposure to Lawrence (apart from a novel read so long ago I can’t remember which one it was) should be these essays, when I never read essays. But I’m glad I decided to trust NYRB on this one. After months of dipping into and out of them, I feel I know the man. And I have underlined great swathes of the book.
Lawrence needs to come with a disclaimer. He rants on and on, and often he’s just dead wrong about whatever it is. He’s a man of strong, wild opinions. For me, the beauty of the essays was less whatever argument he was advancing and more just the sheer creative energy and originality of him, his way with words, his total inability to stick to the brief.
The inability to stick to the brief is maybe the best thing. So an essay on Thomas Hardy, that begins by going through Hardy’s works one by one and analyzing his characters, has later on become some sort of impassioned shriek about the body and spirit of men, the body and spirit of women, the consummation of the two. “Notes on the Death of a Porcupine” sways wildly from its description of a porcupine “squat, like a great tick, it began scrappily to creep up a pine-trunk,” to ranking of life in different creatures “Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly. Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator” (also, unpleasantly, life is apparently more vivid in Lawrence than in a Mexican), building up to one of his fever pitches:
“We are losing vitality: losing it rapidly. Unless we seize the torch of inspiration, and drop our moneybags, the moneyless will be kindled by the flame of flames, and they will consume us like old rags… burn us to death, like sheep in a flaming coral.”
Many essays begin unpromisingly and then are transformed by a lick of the unexpected, and of transcendence. “You never know, in Lawrence, when or how the next flash of genius will manifest itself,” writes Geoff Dyer in the introduction and this is true. Pages and pages of descriptions of flowers will suddenly blossom into an excavation of life, death and tragedy. Lawrence is prone to great sweeping statements. He does not care to present evidence, and we don’t care much that it’s lacking.
He’s also prone to generalizations, to drinking his own kool-aid, to a host of bizarre, sometimes unpalatable opinions. In one essay he traces stuffy modern morality back to the Elizabethans and their fear of syphilis. Syphilis is where it all went wrong. But never mind, Cézanne began the process of saving us by painting some apples, Cézanne did battle with centuries of cliché, he failed, but he failed less than others! No, me neither. But in the reading, something kindles in you, enthusiasm, contempt, madness. The man had a life force. He was, in his own words “man alive.”
Wonderfully selected and introduced by Geoff Dyer, and featuring the wonderful “Elegy” by Rebecca West in closing. She quotes Catherine Carswell, facing off against the Lawrence nay-sayers:
In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and lifelong delicacy, poverty that lasted for three-quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and that he was right. He painted and made things and sang and rode. He wrote [books], of which even the worst pages dance with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s.”
I have left the essay and moved on to Lady Chatterley, but I find the echoes of the essays everywhere in it. It is easier to bear the excesses of the fiction when you understand the man, and I feel like Lawrence and I are old friends now.
This has been a beautiful reading experience. I’m not sure why I decided that my first exposure to Lawrence (apart from a novel read so long ago I can’t remember which one it was) should be these essays, when I never read essays. But I’m glad I decided to trust NYRB on this one. After months of dipping into and out of them, I feel I know the man. And I have underlined great swathes of the book.
Lawrence needs to come with a disclaimer. He rants on and on, and often he’s just dead wrong about whatever it is. He’s a man of strong, wild opinions. For me, the beauty of the essays was less whatever argument he was advancing and more just the sheer creative energy and originality of him, his way with words, his total inability to stick to the brief.
The inability to stick to the brief is maybe the best thing. So an essay on Thomas Hardy, that begins by going through Hardy’s works one by one and analyzing his characters, has later on become some sort of impassioned shriek about the body and spirit of men, the body and spirit of women, the consummation of the two. “Notes on the Death of a Porcupine” sways wildly from its description of a porcupine “squat, like a great tick, it began scrappily to creep up a pine-trunk,” to ranking of life in different creatures “Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly. Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator” (also, unpleasantly, life is apparently more vivid in Lawrence than in a Mexican), building up to one of his fever pitches:
“We are losing vitality: losing it rapidly. Unless we seize the torch of inspiration, and drop our moneybags, the moneyless will be kindled by the flame of flames, and they will consume us like old rags… burn us to death, like sheep in a flaming coral.”
Many essays begin unpromisingly and then are transformed by a lick of the unexpected, and of transcendence. “You never know, in Lawrence, when or how the next flash of genius will manifest itself,” writes Geoff Dyer in the introduction and this is true. Pages and pages of descriptions of flowers will suddenly blossom into an excavation of life, death and tragedy. Lawrence is prone to great sweeping statements. He does not care to present evidence, and we don’t care much that it’s lacking.
He’s also prone to generalizations, to drinking his own kool-aid, to a host of bizarre, sometimes unpalatable opinions. In one essay he traces stuffy modern morality back to the Elizabethans and their fear of syphilis. Syphilis is where it all went wrong. But never mind, Cézanne began the process of saving us by painting some apples, Cézanne did battle with centuries of cliché, he failed, but he failed less than others! No, me neither. But in the reading, something kindles in you, enthusiasm, contempt, madness. The man had a life force. He was, in his own words “man alive.”
Wonderfully selected and introduced by Geoff Dyer, and featuring the wonderful “Elegy” by Rebecca West in closing. She quotes Catherine Carswell, facing off against the Lawrence nay-sayers:
In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and lifelong delicacy, poverty that lasted for three-quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and that he was right. He painted and made things and sang and rode. He wrote [books], of which even the worst pages dance with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s.”
I have left the essay and moved on to Lady Chatterley, but I find the echoes of the essays everywhere in it. It is easier to bear the excesses of the fiction when you understand the man, and I feel like Lawrence and I are old friends now.
May 22, 2023
This collection of essays (including one whole book among the essays) edited by Geoff Dyer is a labor of love. To such an extent, that I am planning to read more D.H. Lawrence within the coming months, particularly his novels, short stories, poems, and travel essays. The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence contains a good selection, particularly of the travel essays and literary and biographical essays.
There is a simplicity and directness to Lawrence's writing which lends itself to being memorable:
There is a simplicity and directness to Lawrence's writing which lends itself to being memorable:
What is alive, and open, and active, is good. All that makes for inertia, lifelessness, dreariness, is bad. This is the essence of morality.And:
But it's nice to think that all the gods are God all the while. And if a god only genuinely feels to you like God, then it is God. But if it doesn't feel quite, quite altogether like God to you, then wait a while, and you'll hear him fizzle.The longest single piece in the collection is Memoir of Maurice Magnus, a book-length tale of Lawrence's dealings with an amiable sponger who is in deep financial trouble from unpaid bills and kiting checks. It is also one of the best pieces in the collection, as it shows Lawrence to be far superior to me in being charitable toward a notorious freeloader.
October 19, 2020
I thought as I read this collection of essays that the Lawrence I expected was here, the Lawrence I wanted to find. Or at least a Lawrence I thought better than the novelist. I was reading this while still reading Women in Love and think the essays more seasoned and mature. Admittedly, most were written after the early novels. What I like best in this selection is the travel writing, especially the pieces on the American Southwest. That he was most comfortable there shows, just as his discomfort in Britain is evident, though his nostalgic look at his roots in "Nottingham and the Mining Countryside" is a pleasant enough recollection. The large block of essays forming inquiries into the nature of the novel and its influence on moral values are full of insight. By far most of these essays were written after the Great War which Lawrence rarely mentioned yet felt deeply. The mankind he saw in Australia and New Mexico was a kind of portal into the elemental primitiveness connected to a nature he saw as a remedy to man's baser attributes unleashed by the war. He saw in primitive society links to governing principles of nature to rival his own ideas of the female principle creating a kind of divinity. Nevertheless, his vision seemed always tinged by tragedy such brighter inspirations or his meditations on birdsong couldn't dispel. This is where the fundamental Lawrence can be found.
November 28, 2024
lorenzo! ❤️ this book has come with me seemingly everywhere over the last year and a half, which feels right, given the wide-ranging nature of lawrence's mind and his everlasting wandering across the earth. he's just fantastic. i'm amazed at how severely underrated his essays are, he's right up there with woolf as an essayist and a thinker, and we have geoff dyer & frances wilson to thank for resurrecting him all of these many years later. so grateful to them for showing us a new and unexpected side of the great lor :~)
(as a lawrence evangelist i must insist that you go read their out of sheer rage and burning man. you won't regret it 😌)
(as a lawrence evangelist i must insist that you go read their out of sheer rage and burning man. you won't regret it 😌)
September 1, 2020
Don’t know why I think of Lawrence as if he wrote with an ink-dip quill hundreds of years ago. He was a modern! Probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve never read him before. That and in my mind’s eye his work is picturesque rural bodice-rippers. How wrong I am. This collection of essays, though hit and miss for me, is like a series of memoirs on the man, his life and passions. Jeez, will I have to read Lady Chatterley‘s Lover now?
December 25, 2019
Rounding up, because it is Christmas. I have not read anything else by Lawrence, so I cannot say if this is representative of his novels. But I’m glad I read it. Some of it was repetitive, but it was interesting to see the consistency and development of some of his ideas, and a few of the essays (most especially the one about a financially sponging frenemy) are a delight to read.
December 4, 2019
November 2019 NYRB Book Club Selection
Equal shares insightful, maddening, impenetrable, stunning, obtuse, cynical, bloated, hilarious, critical, sardonic, and intelligent, with a dose of racism, colonial leaning, and gender essentialism. Some of these essays I could not make either heads or tails of, others I liked until I didn’t, others I just liked. Would I have read this if it were not a book club selection? No. Am I glad that I did? Maybe. I’ll get back to you on that.
Equal shares insightful, maddening, impenetrable, stunning, obtuse, cynical, bloated, hilarious, critical, sardonic, and intelligent, with a dose of racism, colonial leaning, and gender essentialism. Some of these essays I could not make either heads or tails of, others I liked until I didn’t, others I just liked. Would I have read this if it were not a book club selection? No. Am I glad that I did? Maybe. I’ll get back to you on that.
May 5, 2021
I haven't read Lawrence's fiction and picked this up because it was sent to me as part of the NYRB Classics book club. It is a long series of non-fiction essays written between 1912 and 1930.
Many of the essays are very interesting. Lawrence had strong feelings about the novel as an art form and his essays discussing the novel are among the best in the book. I also liked his vivid descriptions of the natural world. Lawrence did a great deal of traveling and his descriptions of the places he visited are lovely to read. He also viewed mankind and the earth as component parts of a larger living being and his views on what makes life worthwhile make for some compelling reading.
Some of the other essays went on and on and I eventually gave up on a few. His writing on Pornography and Obscenity becomes unintentionally hilarious as it degenerates into a lengthy rant on the evils of masturbation. Really? I thought. DH Lawrence is as anti-masturbation as any priest you'll meet. I guess we all have our borders. There was also a fair amount of sexism and ethnic stereotyping in the book, perhaps typical for the times in which he lived, but disappointing nevertheless. His description of a visit to Germany was a bit disquieting, as it accurately anticipates the horrors that came about a decade later.
A plus is that you are unlikely to read anything like this. Lawrence has a unique, passionate, entertaining style, which is definitely a good thing.
Many of the essays are very interesting. Lawrence had strong feelings about the novel as an art form and his essays discussing the novel are among the best in the book. I also liked his vivid descriptions of the natural world. Lawrence did a great deal of traveling and his descriptions of the places he visited are lovely to read. He also viewed mankind and the earth as component parts of a larger living being and his views on what makes life worthwhile make for some compelling reading.
Some of the other essays went on and on and I eventually gave up on a few. His writing on Pornography and Obscenity becomes unintentionally hilarious as it degenerates into a lengthy rant on the evils of masturbation. Really? I thought. DH Lawrence is as anti-masturbation as any priest you'll meet. I guess we all have our borders. There was also a fair amount of sexism and ethnic stereotyping in the book, perhaps typical for the times in which he lived, but disappointing nevertheless. His description of a visit to Germany was a bit disquieting, as it accurately anticipates the horrors that came about a decade later.
A plus is that you are unlikely to read anything like this. Lawrence has a unique, passionate, entertaining style, which is definitely a good thing.
November 3, 2024
Some of the essays in this collection, such as ‘Christs in the Tirol’ and ‘Whistling of Birds’ were very approachable for a reader unfamiliar with Lawrence. I struggled with some of the passages of literary commentary: it’s difficult to parse these essays when I’m not familiar with the work being discussed. Overall it was a good collection and I would be interested to read more from Lawrence, but I need to disclose that I skipped up to 20% of this book, mostly the literary commentary.
August 21, 2021
I picked through bits of this, really loved his writing style and his candid way of looking at the world. Some really beautiful observations. Some observations that do not stand the test of time. I feel like I need to go back and read one of his novels now.
Just one of a few books I'm browsing to see how writers write about writing.
Just one of a few books I'm browsing to see how writers write about writing.
May 14, 2023
That one scene with Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider... I get it now
March 20, 2024
The Magnus remembrance is too esoteric for me. Everything else bangs. What a truly fun, engaging critic he was. Lawrence revival, 2024...je le veux.
August 5, 2025
“For while we live we must live, we must not wither or rot inert.”
January 22, 2020
Really liked his essay about the moocher and the complexities of caring for moochers
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews