The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1933-11-29
A Ne,U Critical Study
of d. II. Lawrence
BY oBED BROOKS

PILGRIM OF THE APOCALYPSE:
A Critical Study of ID. H. Lawrence,
by Horace Gregory. The Viking
Press, New York. 1888. S100,
There is in the work Of D. n. Law
renee a vitality, a generatiYe fire
70 use his symbol Of the Phoenix
fame-that is irreducible to form or
substance. In this he is Almost alone
among the great bourgeois writers of
his period. With men like Proust and
Joyce we can feel that process has
worked itself out to a conclusion.
What they give us is valuable as
experience, but its premises and con-
illusions we know in advance. In their
Sterility they have lost the power to
influence us, to change us. But the
querulous and insistent demands that
Lawrence made have an active
strength. He himself could not salts
fy them; they cannot be satisfied at
all in our present society. But they
awaken q response. We recognize
their validity.
Because of this assertiyeness, be-
cause Of the success with which he
made his life symbolic, most Of the
people trying to reveal the essence
Of Lawrence's character have merely
revealed their own instead. That is
why 1t is disappointing, if one is in
terested in Horace Gregory's devel-
opment, TO find that he has, in a
sense, rejected this challenge in Pill
grim of the Apocalypse. Gregory says,
in introduction, that since Lawrence's
personality threatens to obscure his
literary intentions, it is important TO
examine his work rather than his
life, and deal with it ''as one might
deal with the remains of any other
major Romantic poet" He describes
the young writer breaking out of the
calm pastures Of Georgian verse, but
finding successful expression for the
fragmentaIy and highly personal i'm
pulses Of his early verse only in the
novels. Then at the end Of his life,
after periods of preaching and BIT
terness, Lawrence attained in his last
poems "the strength Of complete i'm
personality salvation through
the mere act Of creation" Gregory's
purpose is primarily Qualification Of
this progress, a relation Of the parts
to the whole, an attempt to find po-
etc conference in a very protean
career. AS such the book is a valuable
guide for those who have read or are
going to read most of Lawrence's
work.
But 1t is impossible, OF course, even
in such terms, to give neutral treat
ment of a man like Lawrence. Greg
cry's position is here implicitly what
it was explicitly in his recent article
on Shelley and Romanticism in the
New Republic. Gregory prizes Law
renee for his "reassertion of mans
creative spirit" and for that reason
makes Lawrence's Apocalypse a docu-
ment of first Importance. In the
article in the New Republic Gregory
said Of Shelley, 1.-THE instrument that
he used was poetry which reasserted
at every step the ndestructability of
the human spirit, which in itself is
the means of exciting revolutionary
action" And he complained at the
end that "by ignoring the creative
functions Of poetry, critics from the
Left have joined with the extreme
Right in an effort to drive this
branch Of literature into a far
corner"
I think this attitude toward Ro-
manticism is dangerous one, and
that Lawrence is good case in
point. Admittedly Romantic poets like
Shelley and the younger Wordsworth
are important to us. Their poetry was
not separate from their moral and
political convictions, but was inte-
grated with them in what was, for
the time, q revolutionary message.
Their ideals of equality, fraternity,
creative individualisrn, are still &C
ceptable goals, and q challenge to
the bourgeois society that used them
as theological weapons in its rise to
power. But we know that these ideals
can be realized only in a classics So
ciety, that to make them central at
the present time is utopian, and in
practise reactionary. In the dialectic
of proletarian struggle different val