EXTERIOR TREATMENT
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE, by Harry T. Moore; Allen and Unwin. English price, 25/-. R. MOORE belongs to the school of thought that holds that a critic of Lawrence "fulfils (his) Aeepest obliga(continued on next page)
BOOKS (Cont'd.) (continued from previous page) tion to both reader and subject by permitting Lawrence, as often as possible, to speak for himself." He claims in a foreword to offer "information, interpretation, and evaluation’; but how the second of these functions can be fulfilled without relegating Lawrence’s view of Lawrence to the background, or the third fulfilled at all by one who holds that "Lawrence . . . has little resemblance to any other author,"’*is not clear. One would have thought that evaluation involved comparison and therefore characteristics in common with other authors. In short, the book suffers from the specialist’s fallacy, the idea that it is enough to know everything about something; both Dr. Moore’s commentary on the works and his style show regrettable signs of insufficient acquaintance with the best of English literature. What his book does contain, however, is a fuller account than any yet given of Lawrence’s youth, in particular of his school-teaching years, and a very complete analytical commentary on all his publications. This. commentary, in spite of occasional banalities and lapses of _taste, is a useful introduction for those who have not read enough Lawrence to get an over-all impression of his achievement. The most illuminative of Dr. Moore’s biographical discoveries is an
A estimate of him by his supervisor at the teachers’ college at Nottingham: in it the brilliant young man, "well-read, scholarly and refined . . . fastidious in taste . . . emphatically a teacher of upper classes .. . (tending) to teach the best pupils exclusively," suddenly comes to life as he does not in Dr. Moore’s more laboured prose. The transition from the typical young artist to the sex-ob-sessed prophet of doom unfortunately remains comparatively obscure, owing to Dr. Moore’s exterior treatment of his
subject:
D. M.
Anderson
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 670, 9 May 1952, Page 10
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330EXTERIOR TREATMENT New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 670, 9 May 1952, Page 10
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