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D. H. LAWRENCE'S
DISCOVERY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
A. BANERJEE
Lawrence believed that the distinctive quality of American literature was
not appreciated by the older English and European civilizations because
their readers were unable to respond to the native genius of the American
writer. According to him it expressed a new experience in an "alien" accent,
an accent which belonged to "the American continent and to nowhere else."
He discovered in American literature what even the Americans themselves
had missedthe "classic" quality which he thought had fled from his own
literature. He told Amy Lowell, "your classic American literature, I find to
my surprise, is older than our English. The tree did not become new, which
was transplanted. It only ran more swiftly into age, impersonal, non-human
almost. But how good these books are!"
Lawrence decided to write on this subject during the First World War
to provide a means of escape to America. He published eight articles on
American writers in Ford Madox Ford's English Review in 1917-18. He
failed to sell them to American periodicals, and he did not succeed in coming to America when the war ended. And when he eventually arrived in the
U.S. in September 1922 he decided to rewrite them. As he had previously
told his agent, J. B. Pinker, "I can't write for America here in England. I
must transfer myself." After "transferring" himself, he told his new American agent, Thomas Seltzer, that he was "doing Studies againAmericanising
them: much shorter." He fully revised the eight essays which he had been
working on and off for four years, wrote four new ones, and presented them
in book form. Studies in Classic American Literature was published in New
York in 1923 and in London the next year.
Lawrence's personal observations on life in America gave him a new and
more authentic perspective on the American people and their literature. He
had always believed that the positive vision of the writers had come to them
from their native American ancestors. In the opening chapter, "The Spirit of
Place," he explains that the content and the manner of a writer's work can
be directly related to the spirit of the place of his native birth and abode:
"Every continent has its ovra great spirit of place. Every people is polarized
in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places
on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what
you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality." Lawrence believed that the
spirit of the land instilled in the American writer a sense of "the unfulfilled.

2011 by A. Banerjee

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unrealized purpose," and be set out to seek it. The "invisible winds" around
bim inspired him to look into bis innermost self, "tbe deepest whole self of
man," aud to "realize" this pui-pose. He could do so only in America where
he would enjoy the "liberty to do wbat bis deepest self like[d]."
Lawrence did not believe tbat the liberty tbat tbe Pilgrim fathers sought
was religious or political. Tbey simply wanted the freedom to get away from
their European selves and to divest themselves of tbeir European ancestry, ideas, and ideals. They created their own American democracy through
which tbey undermined the ideals and politics of the older continent, and
their writers like Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman created their own distinctly American literature. Tbey saw life from a new perspective, one different from the European viewpoint, and this new vision turned out to be
of older vintage; it was elemental and viewed tbe human being as a natural spontaneous creature who was uninhibited by religious or rational constraints. Lawrence himself bad been nurturing sucb a vision, which may
at least partly explain bis fascination witb American literature; the studies
contained his "whole Weltanschauung," he said. He felt tbat tbe American
writers refiected tbe same vision tbat he himself bad been espousing, tbe
celebration of tbe older, natural, and spontaneous lifesomething similar
to wbat Montaigne had reported about the newly discovered life in Brazil,
which was marked by "original simplicity" and wbere the people were "governed by natural laws and were very little corrupted by our laws." In tbis
sense Lawrence the man and tbe writer is at the center of his evaluation of
American literature.
He begins discussing nineteenth-century American writers by claiming
that tbey took up "life wbere the Red Indian, the Aztecs, the Mayas and
tbe Incas had left off" They "touched and touched again, uncannily, unconsciously, blindfolded as it were" the spirit of tbe "dusky continent of the
Red Man." Lawrence's central thesis is that their writings embodied tlie
"aboriginal" Indian vision which combined the passional with the mental
in a single "whole." Though tbe writers imbibed such a view of life, tbey
were hindered from expressing it in their writings because of their mental
obeisance to tbeir European ancestors; tbeir Puritan background fmstrated
tbeir attempts to subscribe openly to the philosophy of the natives. Fortunately they could adopt the artistic strategy of indirect expression, wbicb
was, in Lawrence's words, "a sort of subterfuge." The artist says one thing
while be actually means something different: "The curious thing about art
speech is tbat it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells sucb lies. I suppose
because we always all tbe time tell ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies
art weaves the trutb." Tbe American writer adopted this artistic method,
and tbe danger was tbat tbe reader could easily miss the artist's real meaning. Therefore Lawrence's task in these studies is to save "the American
tale from tbe American artist, " to demonstrate the writer's "unconscious

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genius." He thought that by doing so he was being "a midwife to the unborn
homunculus."
Lawrence's book does not purport to be academic criticism, nor is it written in a hterary style. It is a deeply subjective work and is largely confined
to novelists. But it was hailed as a pioneering book when it was first published. On its publication H. J. Seligman called it "the foundation for a new
American critical literature," and Stuart Pratt Sherman, the editor of the
first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21), frankly acknowledged Lawrence's role in the recognition of American literature by heading
his review "America is Discovered." In 1943 Edmund Wilson would include
the whole of Lawrence's Studies in The Shock of Recognition in which Wilson aims to chronicle "the progress of literature in the United States." He
praises Lawrence's Studies as "one of the few first-rate books that have ever
been written on tlie subject." American hterar)' critics, especially in the
1950s and 60s, regarded Lawrence's book as a seminal work from which
many of them derived their own ideas. For example Leslie Fiedler declares
that among all the critics who had written about "American books" Lawrence came "closest to the tmth." As late as 1971 Quentin Anderson claimed
that "the serious study of American literature began in D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature. "
Lawrence's discussion of Hawthorne's "duplicitous art" in The Scarlet Letter, for example, has become the standard critical approach to the
novel. Lawrence demonstrates that despite Hawthorne's Puritan exterior
the writer in him struggled to express his deeper vision. He did this principally through Hester Prynne. Commenting on Hawthorne's description of
Hester's "rich voluptuous oriental characteristica taste for the gorgeously
beautiful," Lawrence says that "the aboriginal American principle [is] working in her, the Aztec principle." She is "the Mother of Maculate Conception," a worshipper of "Astarte, the Magna Mater, the mother of physical
fecundity." She falls in love with the saindy preacher Arthur Dimmesdale,
but she soon discovers that he is driven to hide his sensual self under the
guise of spirituality. So "the woman in Hester Prynne recoils, [and] turns
in rich lurid revenge" to destroy the "spiritual fornicator and liar" in her
lover. Lawrence believes that this vision of Hester and what she symbolized
grew out of Hawthorne's own personal torments: "Openly he stands for the
upper, spiritual, reasoned being. Secretly he lusts in the sensual imagination,
in bruising the heel of this spiritual self and laming it for ever." In Lawrence's opinion this is almost the exact paradigm of the novel too in which
Hawthorne's "art-speech" betrays his true self beneath his pious homage to
Puritanism. The reader therefore has to recognize and unravel "the duplicity" in Hawthorne's art. Few of his contemporary critics were equal to this
task, divided as they were about the moral content of the novel. Evert A.
Duyckinck declared that the "spirit of his old Puritan ancestors, to whom

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be refers in his preface, lives in Nathaniel Hawthorne." On tbe other hand

Orestes Augustus Brownson was outraged to discover that Hawthorne had
written a "deeply interesting and highly pleasing" tale about an adulteress
but failed to make ber "suffering excite the horror of bis readers."
For Lawrence, James Fenimore Cooper, though he "loved the tomahawking continent of America," started with "gentlemanly" enthusiasm for
European sophistication. But Cooper soon tumed to the deeper call within
him. It was only tbrough bis imagination that he could enter tbis world and
render it superbly in his later writings, especially the Leatherstocking Tales.
These bad traditionally been seen as rollicking tales of adventure, but Lawrence regards them as serious novels in which Cooper successfully creates
the myth in which the white man Natty Bumppo establishes the ideal link
witb tbe native red man Chingachgook. Tbey together establisb a "communion between tbe soul of the white man and the soul of the Indian."
Cooper could reach this optimistic vision of the future of America only after
he was able to transcend imaginatively the false world of the Effinghams of
bis "White Novels." He presents tbis vision backward in his Leatherstocking Tales, from The Pioneers (1823) to The Deerslayer (1841). The earlier
novels depict Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook coming to Cooperstown
only to decline and die there; the succeeding novels take them to their early
lives, culminating in their youth. According to Lawrence, Cooper creates
the mythical world of their youth in The Deerslayer. "The worldthe pristine world of Glimmerglassis, perhaps, lovelier than any place created in
language: lovelier than Hardy or Turgenev, lovelier than the lands in ancient
poetry or in Irish verse. And the spell must lie in the luminous futurity
which glimmers as a plasm in all the landscape." Cooper tlius transcends
the materialistic world around him and projects a vision of "luminous futurity." Even T. S. Eliot, no admirer of Lawrence, was moved to exclaim (in
his To Criticize the Critic) that Lawrence's was "probably tbe most brilliant
of critical essays on [Cooper]."
Lawrence was also among the first to recognize Melville's genius. He
untangles Melville's "art-speech" and shows that Melville was drav^Ti to the
physical side of man which his "white psyche" had suppressed. After having
been disillusioned witb humanity, he goes to the South Seas; in Nukuheva
(Typee) he is delighted to discover that the aboriginal tribes there lead a
natural, spontaneous, and sensual life, untainted by Western civilization.
There, in the Pacific Ocean, wbich is "aeons older than the Atlantic or the
Indian Oceans," Melville encounters life from "unknown ages back" where
tbe native people still continue to live, dreamlike, the natural uncomplicated
life ofthe "Stone Age," unaware that the Western world has far "advanced."
Initially he is horrified to find that he has landed among uncultivated savages, but be discovers tlaat the people there are gentle and hospitable. He
quickly overcomes his initial reservations about tbeir lack of "morality," their
"wild methods of warfare," and even their cannibalismthe last Decause

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he realizes that it is no different from Christian transnbstantiation: in both

cases the eating of bodies is jnstified as a part of their respective "sacred
ceremonies [which were] awe-inspiring." Soon he comes to enjoy his new
world, and it is "Paradise" to him. According to Lawrence, Melville "insists
on it. Paradise. He conld even go stark naked, as before tbe Apple episode.
And his Fayaway, a laughing little Eve, naked with him, and hankering after
no apple of knowledge, so long as he wonld just love her when he felt like it.
Plenty to eat, needing no clothes to wear, snnny, happy people, sweet water
to swim in: everything a man can want."
He soon loses his enthnsiasm. However mnch he hates the civihzed commnnity, his mind belongs to it; his white psyche resists this new life and he
yields to the call of "Home and Mother." Having retumed to America, Melville, now a "civilized" man, moves away from the begnihng sensnality of the
savages and directs his energies to finding perfect love in his native home.
Bnt he cannot be satisfied with the Western way of hfe. In his next book,
Omoo, he depicts life in Tahiti, where he leads a reckless Epicnrean life for
some time before he is pnlled back to his home again.
Melville gets married, bnt, after a brief period of bhss, his hfe is nothing
bnt "fifty years of disillnsion." In Lawrence's reading, Melville's personality
is split. He can neither stay on in tlie vibrant sensnal tropical islands, nor
can he get nsed to the mundane life of mind and materialism of an ordinary
American at home. He has an inner nnderstanding of what is missing in the
white man's conception of the ideal man-woman relationship. As a white
man he had "looked for a perfect marriage" where he conld achieve "the
lovey-doveyness of perfect mntual nnderstanding" and "the perfect fulfilment of love." Bnt his experiences in those exotic islands had nnconscionsly
changed him. He had gathered "the savage mysteries" and had become
"prond and savage" in his soul. He became keenly aware that a "prond and
savage-sonled man doesn't really want any perfect lovey-dovey fnlfilment in
love." The ideal was that "two people can jnst be together fairly often, so
that the presence of each other is a sort of balance to the other. . . . There
mnst be tme separateness as well." Bnt these remained abstract ideals for
him. He was haunted by the discrepancy between the ideal and the actnal in
his own hfe. This led to his being disillusioned and "crazed."
Yet Melville maintained artistic sanity in his writings and continned to
project imaginatively his deeper feelings abont the possibilities of life which
lay beyond his own reach. He symbolized bis vision in Moby-Dick, wbich
Lawrence describes as "a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of
the sea ever written." In it Melville depicts, with frightening concentration,
the collapse of the white psyche dnring its attempt to destroy hnman sensnality, as symbolized by the giant whale. Lawrence describes the whaling ship
Pequod as "the ship of the white American sonl [i.e., mental conscionsness],"
and the whale Moby-Dick as "the deepest blood-being [sensnal self] of the
white race." The monomaniac. Captain Ahab, the white man, has enlisted

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the help of an intemational crew of the white, black, and brown races with
the single purpose of subduing the sensual beast. In this Lawrence finds the
symbol of man's fear of his sensual self. This leads to "the maniacal fanaticism of [the] white mental consciousness" that tries to destroy the "hotblooded sea-bom Moby-Dick." The beast becomes the object of' his fanatic
pursuit, but he and his crewmen are all "doomed, doomed."
Lawrence beheved that Whitman also based his vision of the future on
the elemental principles of life. He was "the first white aboriginal," who was
aware of his complete undivided self, which repudiated the conventional
morality that separated mind from body. His morality was aimed at changing the blood rather than the mind. In this he differed from Hawthome and
others whose mental allegiance to the "old morality" crippled their sensual
selves. Whitman tried to strike a balance between Ijody and soul, and Lawrence described this process in his characteristic forthright manner:
Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was
the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man
is something "superior" and "above" the flesh. Even Emerson
still maintained this tiresome "superiority" of the soul. Even
Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic seer
to seize the soul by the scmff of her neck and plant her down
among the potsherds.
"There!" he said to the soul. "Stay there! Stay there. Stay in
the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the befly. Stay in the
breast and womb. Stay there, O soul, where you belong."
This being Whitman's faith, Lawrence says, "the whole soul speaks at once"
in his poetry. Lawrence believed that "Whitman's essential message was the
Open Road. The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his
fate to her and to the loom of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine
man has ever proposed to himself" Carefully avoiding the risk of personiJ
disintegration, he sets out on the open road where the soul can live "her
life along [its] incarnate mystery." But he felt that, like Cooper in his early
years. Whitman was beguiled by his country's democratic and ethical ideals.
Lawrence chastised Whitman for not "keeping to his open road," for talking of merging and charity. This was "Whitman's mistake," because merging
involved the obliteration of his own "integral single self," leading to disintegration and death.
As a writer Lawrence was greatly impressed by Whitman's poetry. He
generously acknowledged that "Whitman, the great poet, has meant so
much to me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way aliead. Whitman, the
one pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French." What
drew him to Whitman was his "aboriginal" vision. Other writers and critics
of his time thought otherwise. The Saturday Review, for instance, warned its

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audience tbat if "tbe Leaves of Grass should come into anybody's possession,
our advice is to tbrow tbem instantly behind the fire." But before long more
thoughtful critics began to see positive things in Whitman's "primitivism."
D. H. Lawrence most forcefully argued tbat not only Whitman but several
other major American writers of tbe nineteenth century derived tbeir inspiration from native sources by responding to tbe "ultimate savage" within
them. Henry Seidel Canby was perhaps the first American critic to point out
this enduring element as early as 1936, and be praised Lawrence for bis prophetic insight: "Tbere was mucb laughter when years ago D. H. Lawrence
in bis 'Studies in Classic American Literature' described an Old Indian
Devil wbo was always plaguing tbe great Americans witb sudden fiushes of
paganism, great resurgence of sex, and obstinate adjustments between their
European souls and their unfenced continent. It is not so funny now, for
some devil, Indian, Marxian or psycho-analytic, has surely been torturing
tbe best American writers of our era. Tbey squirm, tbey lasb, they spit out
filth and imprecations, tbey wbine, they defy. Tbey are not at ease in this
Zion of our ancestors."
Canby is principally speaking of Thomas Wolfe (1900-38), but some
subsequent American writers, such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and
Allen Ginsberg, have shown clear symptoms of such haunting obsessions.
Perhaps Lawrence was also bebind tbe dichotomy between tbe "Paleface
and Redskin" in American literature tbat Philip Rahv saw in 1939.

PERSON OF THE DRAMA

STANLEY KAUFFMANN AS THEATER CRITIC
BERT CARDULLO
Altbougb best known today for bis film criticism, Stanley Kauffmann (bom
1916) was also a drama critic for a time, for tbe New York Times and the
Saturday Revieiv, among otlier publications; and some remarks on tbis role
of hisamong bis others as a playwright, novelist, trade-house editor, book
reviewer, and professorare in order. But, before discussing Kauffmann's
work as a drama critic, I want to point out the difference between criticism
and reviewing when the theater is concerned. Such a differentiation is snobbish, indecorous, perhaps even quixotic. But it seems to me tbat we are
never going to get out of the miasma of deceit, self-pity, and wishful thinking that emanates from tbe theater in tbis country, as it does from no other
medium, unless we begin to accept the distinctions that operate in actuality
2011 by Bert Cardullo

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