I've been reading a little Anthony Burgess on D.H. Lawrence (who features in our Hampstead walk) and came up with a couple of killer quotes I just had to blog here.
D.H. Lawrence cuts a fascinating and difficult figure. Literary London was impressed by his early potential but he rejected them and society in his single-sighted ambition to 'break himself off from his fellow man and write about instinctual senses, which took him away from the land of chill winds, boiled puddings, and coal mines for countries where lizards basked in the sun, where he hoped natural man - naked, uninhibited prevailed. He traveled with a restlessness that ought to have killed him and eventually did (at 44).' (Anthony Burgess)
He had a severe hatred of England and couldn’t wait to get away. He was forced back during the war and due to his wrath for his country, he was suspected of being a spy, and was kept under surveillance. He felt that (in the words of Burgess again), ‘England had betrayed herself. She turned herself into a pewing, dribbling monster of sanctimonious commercialism. England had been a lion among nations, a roaring beast, the England of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of Fielding and William Blake; had become dead mutton.’
D.H. Lawrence cuts a fascinating and difficult figure. Literary London was impressed by his early potential but he rejected them and society in his single-sighted ambition to 'break himself off from his fellow man and write about instinctual senses, which took him away from the land of chill winds, boiled puddings, and coal mines for countries where lizards basked in the sun, where he hoped natural man - naked, uninhibited prevailed. He traveled with a restlessness that ought to have killed him and eventually did (at 44).' (Anthony Burgess)
He had a severe hatred of England and couldn’t wait to get away. He was forced back during the war and due to his wrath for his country, he was suspected of being a spy, and was kept under surveillance. He felt that (in the words of Burgess again), ‘England had betrayed herself. She turned herself into a pewing, dribbling monster of sanctimonious commercialism. England had been a lion among nations, a roaring beast, the England of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of Fielding and William Blake; had become dead mutton.’