Exploring the Works of D.H. Lawrence

Sometimes man makes more sense to man when he looks like an animal-or another man, or a woman, or just anything other than himself. The human being is the strangest of all animals, because of the phenomenon called thought. Reaching beyond our personal capsule of life might make us completely free. Such is the manic truth, the reflection of himself, that D.H. Lawrence thrusts forward in the collections of essays entitled "Phoenix" and "Phoenix II." The processes of his mind invite inquiry. To Lawrence, conversation with a person is seldom the best way to know that person. Rather, we come to know a person more fully by a process of reading him-absorbing the subtleties of his life, and extrapolating these into a portrait of his mind. In his writing, Lawrence grants the opportunity for us to read him, in the very literal way, so that we might come to know his own mind more fully.

In "On Coming Home," we see a rare instance of Lawrence practicing something near autobiography, recounting a personal experience. On the deck of a ship, near landing on the shore of England, he feels the famous words of Sir Walter Scott "explode into his chest" (II 250): "Breathes there a man with soul so dead/ Who never to himself hath said/ This is my own, my native land" (250). Without, it seems, a moment of reflection, and cutting off Scott's words in his own mind, Lawrence exclaims: "With a vengeance!" We begin, quite confused, anticipating the impetus for such a startling reaction. Lawrence does not disappoint. At the moment the British arrive on deck to land the ship, his senses register a subtle but important atmospheric shift: "All is strangely still. . . England is on board . . . curiously quiet and withheld-everything has fallen silent" (251...

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...idden motives and pains. His remedy for us, then, is bound up with his own powers of thought and writing. His uncanny power of perception in writing implicitly invites us to turn such a perceptive eye inward, toward our very souls, so that we might un-domesticate our emotions and begin "listening-in to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body, from the God in the heart" (I 759). Our power to overcome, then, lies not in fear, self-denial, or repression. It lies in the inward-looking intuition that separates us from the animals-the same uniquely human energy that fuels the engine driving Lawrence's own thought.

Works Cited

Lawrence, D. H. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking, 1968.

Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking, 1968.