Officer! He's in Again! One Wonders What Lawrence Would Do With Mother Goose

Officer! He's in Again! One Wonders What Lawrence Would Do With Mother Goose

In Studies in Classic American Literature,* D. H. Lawrence, red-bearded British apostle of the ultra-moderns, discusses such revered literary figures of America's past as Franklin, Cooper, Poe, Melville, Whitman.

In the first place, Mr. Lawrence does not think much of the present advertised American Literary Renaissance. At present, he considers, " all that is visible to the naked European eye, in America, is a sort of recreant European." But with Hawthorne, Poe, etc.. American literature came to " a real verge." " It's high time now that someone came to life out of the swaddled infant of truth that America spawned some time back," he remarks with naive condescension. So he fires away 264 pages of verbosity, besprinkled with large capitals, cryptic exhortations, capital I's.

"Old Daddy Franklin ... set up the first dummy American."

"Two monsters loomed on Cooper' s horizon.

"MRS. COOPER MY WORK

"MY WORK MY WIFE

"MY WIFE MY WORK

"THE DEAR CHILDREN

"MY WORK!!

"There you have the essential keyboard of Cooper's soul."

"That blue-eyed darling, Nathaniel [Hawthorne] knew disagreeable things in his inner soul."

"Poe -- doomed -- died wanting more love and love killed him. A ghastly disease, love."

Such are a few of Mr. Lawrence's more consecutive pronouncements. He proclaims with some justice Melville's Moby Dick the greatest book of the sea ever written. But he says of Whitman: "Walt's great poems are really huge, fat tomb-plants, great, rank, graveyard growths"; and then: " Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds." He is even able to read the darkness of acute sensual passion into the Leatherstocking Series.

An almost incredible performance by an author who has written one superb novel/- and done work that is both interesting and fine in other literary fields--very nearly the most puerile book pretending to deal with America yet written by a visiting European. S. V. B.

*Seltzer ($3.00).

Sons and Lovers.