D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period (review)

Reviewed by: D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period Robert Calder Ronald Granofsky. D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. 212 pp. Virginia Woolf once said of her contemporary D.H. Lawrence "that Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness, but hours of something very different." While many readers will disagree with Woolf's proportions, few would argue that, more than almost any other important author, Lawrence's work ranges from the magnificent to the absurd, from skilful and articulate narration to confused and nearly incomprehensible blather. How, one asks, could the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love write something like Kangaroo or The Plumed Serpent? Conceding the great unevenness in Lawrence's work, but valuing the best of it, Ronald Granofsky sets out "to solve the puzzle of where and how this sometimes wonderful, sometimes enraging, but always achingly honest writer went so wrong" (10). To do this, he closely examines what he calls the literature of Lawrence's "transitional period," the works that lie between the writer's "marriage" phase, most notably The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (published in 1920 but written in 1916), and his "leadership" novels, Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926). Beginning [End Page 220] in 1919, says Granofsky, "this most exploratory of British novelists began a house-keeping of his fiction that ended by about 1922 in a radical rebuilding" (4). There, in the evolving narrative strategies and recurring imagery of the novels The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod; the novellas The Fox, The Captain's Doll, and The Ladybird; and four of the short stories—"England, My England," "The Blind Man," "Hadrian," and "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"—might be found the reasons for Lawrence's remarkable des-cent into the misogyny and seeming fascism of some of his later work. Underpinning D.H. Lawrence and Survival's analysis of this transitional period is what it identifies as Lawrence's awakened interest in Darwin's evolution theories, which, strangely for an intellectual author of his period, he had previously ignored. Granofsky explains this surprising silence as the response of a frightened man to a theory of natural selection by whose criteria he, never in vigorous good health, was condemned not to survive. Deeply shaken by the trauma of the Great War, however, and concerned by his failing health, the difficulties of his marriage, and his loss of readership in England, Lawrence suddenly turned to Darwin as a means by which he could rid his writing, if not himself, of weak and undesirable elements. In fact, says Granofsky, quoting Roger Ebbatson, Lawrence was affected by the theory of evolution "at the deepest imaginative level" (26). This reliance on biographical argument to explain literary development may trouble some readers, and Granofsky employs it in a number of places. Indeed, he takes Stephen Vine to task for not recognizing the author's life and anxieties about gender and gender relations in his Introduction to Aaron's Rod. Lawrence uses The Ladybird's Clariss Houghton, according to Granofsky, to undermine the power that mothers held in his own mind, but, at the same time, her hypochondria is a manifestation of his anxiety about his own hardiness and ability to survive. The hostile treatment of cinema in The Lost Girl, we are told, is a reflection of "where Lawrence feels most threatened in a personal way" (99). In general, though, Granosky uses Lawrence's biography and commentary judiciously, and it should be noted that in Lawrence, one of the most autobiographical of fiction writers, the line between the man and his fiction was frequently indistinct. Granofsky is right to remind us that Lawrence once wrote that "one sheds one's sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them" (8), though one might argue that "sicknesses" here appears to be meant metaphorically rather than literally. [End Page 221] Earlier scholars have failed to recognize the influence of Darwin on Lawrence, argues Granofsky, because of its embeddedness, especially in his narrative strategy; Lawrence in fact applied aspects...

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