D. H.

Lawrence, An opportunity and a test: The Leavis Eliot Controversy Revisited

Brian Crick and Michael DiSanto

OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES the critical spirit of the times has grown more and more Emersonian or Nietzschean in the drive to overcome or expunge the irksome was1 so that the creative future can be brought about. Having now reached a point where writing about F. R. Leaviss and T. S. Eliots divergent evaluations of D. H. Lawrences merits might be dismissed as old hat, it may seem strange to call attention to this part of the history of criticism. However, because their differences have had a lasting effect on Lawrences reputation, especially where his detractors are concerned, the grounds of the controversy deserve a re-examination. Between 1920 and 1960 Leavis and Eliot had, whatever the received wisdom today, established themselves as the pre-eminent critical voices in England, if not the English-speaking world as a whole. Their quarrel over Lawrence is vitally important because it involves three of the great critics of the twentieth century, and their valuations of one another inform our responses to them all. An account of Leaviss and Eliots conicting assessments shows how extraordinarily difcult it is to do justice to an opponents argument when it attacks a position to which one is deeply committed. This applies not just to Leavis, Eliot and those who have commented on them, but to the critical practices of the present time. In the controversy between Leavis and Eliot over the literary remains of Lawrence, the questions regarding Lawrences intelligence, his treatment
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford 2005) p. 121. Nietzsches italics.

doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfp006 # The Author, 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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of human sexuality and the relationship between his life and work that came to characterise the subsequent scholarship are established: important truths about Lawrence are obscured by interest and credulity. Making sense of what happened between these two critics calls for a deliberate attempt to cut through the obfuscations and distortions that have built up over the years by drawing attention to issues that have been overlooked in order to recognise certain misleading matters of fact and inference in this critical history. Leavis framed his response to Eliot and Lawrence in the form of a dichotomy. In D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, he identied Eliot as the essential opposition2 in the struggle to get Lawrences greatness recognised. This mode of expression recurred in a lecture given in June 1960 in which Leavis speaks of the antithesis between Lawrences and Eliots conception of art.3 This pattern can be traced through to the Clark Lectures, later published as English Literature in Our Time and the University, the fth section of which is entitled The Necessary Opposite, Lawrence: Illustrationthe Opposed Critics on Hamlet. Leavis did everything he could to establish this judgement as a way of dening the modern period. For Leavis, Eliots very signicant antipathy to Lawrence was clearly genuine,4 but the evidence is more complicated than Leaviss account suggests. That it was Eliot, the critic Leavis most admired, who was condemning Lawrence accounts for the vehemence of Leaviss retorts. Eliots steadfast refusal to reply to Leavis probably exacerbated the situation. After Eliots death in 1965, Leavis tried desperately to persuade himself, on the slenderest of evidence, that Eliot had virtually confessed to the critical sins against Lawrence that Leavis had charged him with.5 At certain points in his defence of Lawrence, Leavis identies so completely with the injured author that he gives the impression that his antipathy to Eliot was shared by Lawrence. This is a sign of an argument taking on a momentum of its own beyond the writers control. That there are meaningful differences between Eliot and Lawrence on life and art is beyond dispute, but the essential opposition thesis is marred by Leaviss efforts to make it serve as a substitute for the debate Eliot deprived him of. Ultimately, his reiterated assaults on Eliot lack discrimination and perspective. Worse still, his employing Lawrence to do the job on Eliot involuntarily harmed the writer he was so committed to championing.
F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (Harmondsworth 1964) p. 383. Lawrence after Thirty Years, in G. Singh (ed.), Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays (Cambridge 1986) p. 106. 4 Ibid., p. 125. 5 English in Our Time and the University (London 1969) p. 139.
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In the introduction and rst chapter of D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Leavis charges Eliot and The Criterion with a decided bias against Lawrence as evidenced in their publishing only adverse judgements on Lawrences work, or by decided neglect, such as refusing to print an obituary notice. Given Eliots offensive remarks on Lawrences want of education and culture, such claims once sounded plausible; however, there is good reason to question some of Leaviss objections. First, there is the matter of explaining how a substantial body of Lawrences work made its way into the pages of The Criterion: three short stories Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (October 1924), The Woman Who Rode Away (July 1925 and January 1926) and Mother and Daughter (April 1929) as well as two essays Market Day (June 1926, later included in Mornings in Mexico), and Flowery Tuscany I, II and III (October, November and December 1927). If Eliot was determined to withhold any and all favour (Leaviss word), from Lawrence, why publish him? Leavis, by the way, pointed to one of these stories in order to refute Eliots insistence on Lawrences lack of a sense of humour.6 The accusation Leavis makes against Eliot for using all his immense prestige and authority could do to make the current stupidities about Lawrence look respectable7 does not square with all the relevant facts. Lawrence was very pleased with the way he had been treated, and wrote to Richard Cobden-Sanderson, the publisher of The Criterion, to say how relieved he was to nd a publication that has some guts.8 Later that month, Lawrence directed his literary agent to send The Criterion anything it asked for, as the publisher had told him it would like something from him in every issue.9 Though Leaviss angry objections to Eliots derogatory remarks on Lawrences ction in the 1927 Nouvelle Revue essay on the state of contemporary English may be justiable, they do not support the accusation of consistent adverse commentary. For Eliot to charge Lawrence with being incapable of writing well, to declare his art barbaric in comparison to Virginia Woolf s rened performance, and to label his subject matter degenerate humanity (to paraphrase Eliots remarks), when he had published him on several occasions before attacking him and again afterwards, was to cast grave doubt on Eliots own editorial integrity and judgement. In this period, Eliots attitude to Lawrences art was not one of consistent antagonism, as Leavis contends, but of vacillating
D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, p. 13. Ibid., p. 22. 8 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 8 vols. (Cambridge 1979 2002), v. 181 (1 Dec. 1924) (hereafter Letters). 9 Ibid., p. 193 (10 Dec. 1924).
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valuations, and was to remain so for the next thirty years. This conclusion is supported by the remark Eliot privately made to his brother, who had asked him to comment on the very question he was to address so differently in his May 1927 essay Le Romain anglais contemporain: There is very little contemporary writing that affords me any satisfaction whatever; there is certainly no contemporary novelist except for D. H. Lawrence and of course Joyce in his own way who I would care to read.10 The regular acceptance of Lawrences work in The Criterion in these years might lead one to think this private praise more representative of Eliots attitude to Lawrence than the single instance of public denigration in his 1927 review. In defending Lawrence, Leavis tried to imply that Lawrence had an antipathy to The Criterion that accorded with his own attack in the following decade. The phrase, this classiosity is bunkum, but still more, cowardice11 applied not to Eliot, as Leavis and others have assumed,12 but to an essay of John Middleton Murrys.13 To the best of our knowledge, Lawrence made only one passing negative reference to Eliot as having an instinctive dislike for his writing, but the main target of this comment was Murry again. Eliot was very much a secondary target, lumped in with a catalogue of other editors and reviewers who shared Murrys views all the Lynds and Squires and Eliots and Goulds.14 Even Lawrences most committed admirers are unlikely to class any of the works published in The Criterion as among his best. Eliot may have had reservations about accepting Lawrences submissions which we know nothing about. That said, it isnt possible to massage the facts into a case of The Criterion, the journal Eliot edited, having it in for Lawrence. At the end of the 1920s Lawrences health was deteriorating rapidly. Lady Chatterleys Lover and Pansies had been suppressed. The exhibition of
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. i: 18981922 (London 1988) p. 617 (hereafter Eliot Letters). This surprisingly favourable judgement preceded the acceptance of the rst of Lawrences short stories by about eighteen months (31 Dec. 1922). For Leaviss objections to this particular essay, see D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, pp. 23 4. 11 Letters, iv. 500 (Sept. 1923). 12 Bernard Bergonzi uncritically adopted and reiterated Leaviss idea Lawrence had said that Eliots classiosity was bunkum: see Leavis and Eliot: The Long Road to Rejection, The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (Brighton 1986) p. 28. 13 In Eliots Classical Standing, Leavis asserts that Lawrence was thinking of Tradition and the Individual Talent: Lectures in America (London 1969) p. 31. Leavis cannot possibly have known what Lawrence was thinking. 14 Letters, vii. 294 (20 May 1929). When Edgell Rickword announced the closing of the journal London Aphrodite, he used a similar catalogue of literary journalism that included Eliot and Squire. See Letters, vii. 265.
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his paintings had been shut down and several copies of the book of reproductions of those paintings found at the gallery were destroyed. If there was ever a moment in which Leaviss remark that Lawrence was for The Criterion an opportunity and a test15 could be considered wholly justiable, it would have to be 1929, the nal year of Lawrences life. The way in which Leavis phrased the challenge that Lawrences canon presented to the editor of The Criterion suggests something of his own recent struggle to perform that literary task in the Minority Press pamphlet published in 1930. That Leavis soon realised how far short he had fallen in his effort to do justice to Lawrences achievement is clearly evident in his disavowal of the argument he had made in the prefatory remarks to his collection of early essays, For Continuity, in 1933. Eliot, of course, never republished After Strange Gods, but then, unlike Leavis, he continued to repeat the offensive personal charges against Lawrence made in this book. Leavis probably recognised resemblances between his own reservations, especially the aws he attributed to Women in Love, and both Murrys 1921 review of Women in Love and, more importantly, Eliots disapproval.16 The insistence and intensity with which Leavis repudiated Eliots efforts to discredit Lawrence may have been fuelled by an uneasy feeling of how close he had come to being complicit in such an opposition. Leaviss sense of himself as a literary critic rested on the test at issue, and this could only be realised by emphatically dissociating himself from Eliots judgements of Lawrence. The Criterion had published Mother and Daughter in the spring of 1929, but, far more signicantly, it had accepted a revised and/or extended version of Pornography and Obscenity,17 which Lawrence agreed to provide for the regular monthly issue of The Criterion or the series called The Criterion Miscellany.18 Lawrence agreed to send the essay, but, because of the furore aroused by Lady Chatterleys Lover and his sexually explicit paintings, he told Pollinger that they are almost sure to reject it.19 Three weeks later he was pleasantly surprised to learn of Faber & Fabers willingness to take the risk, provided he would remove a brief reference to Barrie and Galsworthy. The essay came out in November 1929, and within a month 6,000 copies had been sold. When Leavis used

D. H. Lawrence and Professor Irving Babbitt, Scrutiny, 1/3 (1932) p. 274. Bergonzi presents these resemblances as something he has uncovered and of which Leavis was utterly unaware (The Myth of Modernism, pp. 93 7). 17 A shorter version of this superb essay had been published earlier in the year in This Quarter, 2 (JulySept. 1929) pp. 17 27. 18 Letters, vii. 470 (8 Sept. 1929). 19 Ibid.
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the word opportunity, he had not considered the possibility of Eliots publishers, Faber & Faber, publishing Lawrence as an act of nancial opportunism. Richard de la Mere, the director of the rm, was so gratied by this resounding success that he immediately offered to publish the small collection of poems, Nettles, which Lawrence considered a sequel to the recently suppressed Pansies. They also published an essay by Jix (Lord Brentford), Lawrences arch-enemy in the censorship war, so they were not jumping onto the Lawrence bandwagon, but at least they were giving Lawrence his say, whereas Jix had done his best to silence Lawrence. Eliot, who continually expressed his disgust at Lawrences depiction of love and sex in his short stories and novels, kept mum on Lawrences defence of his practice in the essay Eliots own publishers had eagerly printed. As for Leavis, there is no mention anywhere in his attacks on Eliot of this crucial essay having appeared in the pages of The Criterion Miscellany. Had Lawrences health not collapsed, Leavis might have had to consider the implications of Eliot and Lawrence appearing side by side in the Poets on Poets series published by Faber. The negotiations between de la Mere, Pollinger and Lawrence took place in December when the agreement was reached for Nettles.20 If we consider Leaviss proposition that Lawrence was the test, then there is only one conclusion: regrettably, both Leavis and Eliot in different ways unked it. Perhaps there are few comparable moments in the history of criticism wherein critics of this stature so patently violated their respective principles and practices. The next round of hostilities was set off by Eliots approving review of Middleton Murrys Son of Woman in the July 1931 issue of The Criterion, and was further aggravated by the publication of Eliots 1933 Page Barbour Lectures as After Strange Gods in the following year. In the 1930s Leavis had done more than any other literary critic to establish Eliots reputation in the university world as the nest poet and critic of the age. New Bearings in English Poetry is heavily inuenced by Eliot, and there are many favourable references to Eliots Criterion essays. In his 1950 postscript to this book, Leavis speaks explicitly of the group who founded Scrutiny as having no doubts about The Criterion in the early 1930s.21 But, he adds, they were wrong.22 Leaviss doubts rst surfaced in a series of closely connected reviews in Scrutiny: D. H. Lawrence and Professor Irving Babbitt (December 1932),23 Mr. Eliot, Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence (September
Letters, vii. 585 (3 Dec. 1929). F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (Harmondsworth 1967) p. 187. 22 Ibid. 23 This essay was prompted by the publication of Lawrences letters edited by Aldous Huxley. Leavis used the letters to refute Eliots passionate moral
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1934), and The Wild, Untutored Phoenix (December 1937). Because Leavis considered only the second and third essays worthy of republication in The Common Pursuit, the following remarks are conned to those works. The earlier of the two, a critique of After Strange Gods, concedes more to Eliots position than the second, a review of Lawrences Phoenix. Not surprisingly, there are signs of a struggle, a reluctance on Leaviss part to turn against Eliot, whom he had so recently showered with praise. How could he do that without damaging his own reputation for sound critical discrimination? In the rst discussion, Leavis distinguishes between the Murry review which had in the past made him indignant, and After Strange Gods, in which he detects something much more like a critical attitude; there has obviously been a serious attempt to understand in spite of antipathy.24 In the closing paragraph he concedes, with reservation, Eliots complaint about Lawrences novels lacking moral struggle and insists that no one will suggest that in Lawrence we have all we need of moral concern.25 He even goes so far as to admit that for attributing to [Lawrence] spiritual sickness Mr. Eliot can make out a strong case.26 He is also prepared to see a world of difference between the unhappy past of the Murry review and After Strange Gods. While Leavis is prepared to set aside Eliots lapses of judgement in the past as something that would be ungracious to recall, he cannot put up with Eliots appealing to Wyndham Lewis to support his adverse remarks.27 This sparks in Leavis an acerbic charge that accords with later attacks on Eliot in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist: This equivocalness, this curious sleight of hand by which Eliot surreptitiously takes away while giving, is what I mean by the revealingly uncritical in his attitude towards Lawrence. It is as if there was something he cannot bring himself to contemplate fairly.28 In the later review, Leavis is far less inclined to nd anything worthwhile in Eliots argument. He appeals to the essays collected in Phoenix as denitive grounds for recognising Lawrence as the nest
condemnation of Lawrence based on Murrys dubious personal testimony (Scrutiny, 1/3 (1932) p. 273). Lawrence, Leavis argued, was a test (ibid., p. 274) that The Criterion failed to meet. Though Leavis claimed to respect intensely Mr. Eliots mind and personality (ibid., p. 277) he appealed to the religious quality of Lawrences writing as exposing Eliots theological incapacity and the pernicious effect of his religious preoccupations on his attitude to sex (ibid., p. 277). 24 F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London 1952) p. 242. 25 Ibid., p. 246. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 243. 28 Ibid., p. 245.

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literary critic of our time a great literary critic if there ever was one.29 His method for the rst six pages is to point to something he values in Phoenix and then to juxtapose his observation against one of Eliots adverse remarks, such as Lawrences lacking a sense of humour, or a capacity for self-criticism, or even the ability to think. The essay is brought to a close with a one-page coda in reaction to a recent, more respectful comment on Lawrence by Eliot. In the last paragraph, however, Leavis claims to be amazed that so distinguished a mind can so persistently discredit in this way a serious point of view.30 One can understand why Leavis is so preoccupied with Eliot, but to use Phoenix as primarily something to refute Eliots position is not the best way of showing anyone why Lawrence is a great critic. Such a procedure allows Eliots dubious criterion to stand as the basis for judging Lawrence, which is a grave mistake. Leaviss predicament unfortunately shifts attention away from where it truly belongs: Lawrences varied achievements in Phoenix. This particular review raises one further misgiving. The nal page of the essay conrms Leaviss alertness to any further comments from Eliot himself or any contributor to The Criterion, and yet he makes no reference to the review of Phoenix by Desmond Hawkins. If Eliot were responsible for waging a systematic campaign against Lawrence in the 1930s, surely it would have shown up here. Leavis suggests that the Study of Thomas Hardy is just the sort of writing Eliot would point to as evidence of Lawrences incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking.31 As it happens, Hawkins singles out the Hardy essay for special commendation as criticism of the highest order, a piece of sustained and uncanny insight which leaves nothing to be said.32 Leaviss comments on the Hardy essay are disappointing by comparison. He mistakes it for an early work,33 not something composed while Lawrence was working on the novels that Leavis identied as Lawrences greatest achievements. He brushes it aside as something he found difcult to read through because it is diffuse and repetitive, and Lawrence has dealt with the same matters better elsewhere.34 The problem of how to deal with Eliot distracts him from attending carefully to the wonderful range of material he could have
Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 239. 31 Ibid., p. 237. 32 Hawkinss essay came out in June 1937 ( pp. 748 52). See Bruce Steeles introduction to The Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (Cambridge 1985) p. xxxix. 33 The Common Pursuit, p. 237. 34 Ibid. In Genius as Critic, Leavis radically altered his valuation of Lawrences work on Hardy. What he had cursorily dismissed, he now declared
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brought forward to support the view of Lawrence he passionately believed in. Moreover, there is no alternative but to wonder whether Leaviss silence over Hawkinss review in The Criterion six months prior to his own is a case of avoiding evidence that conicted with his belief in an orchestrated campaign against Lawrence. Where Leavis speaks most dismissively of Eliots adverse critical remarks he focuses on what he considers the absurdity of Eliots appealing to the likes of Wyndham Lewis and Irving Babbitt to support his case. When he speaks of this feature of Eliots argument as odd or amazing he is probably speaking ironically. Nevertheless, he seems to be genuinely taken aback. Had Leavis learned that Eliot had written a lecture in 1933 in which he quoted this remark of Lawrences this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement which alone makes poetry today as having expressed exactly that at which I have long aimed at in writing poetry, how could Leavis or anyone at that moment not have been shocked?35 Even the most informed observer of the literary scene couldnt have predicted Eliots approving review of Murrys book, Son of Woman. The literary critical principles Eliot espoused in The Sacred Wood, such as the separation of author and work, the doctrine of impersonality or disinterestedness, and reading as detached contemplation, make Murrys psychoanalysis of Lawrences sexual life something Eliot would nd decidedly uncongenial. On the other hand, Eliot had been working closely with Murry during the latters tenure as the editor of the Athenaeum in the early 1920s. The preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood reminds readers that most of the essays in the collection were originally written for and published by that journal during its brief and brilliant life36 under the editorship of Murry, who had often suggested the topics. In fact, Murry had offered Eliot the job of assistant editor37 and, though he declined the position, Eliot did actively participate in editorial decisions and enjoyed a privileged access to publishing in the journal.38 At this point in Eliots life, his career was greatly helped by his relations with
Lawrences most sustained piece of constructive exploratory thinking (Valuation in Criticism, p. 118). 35 See Christopher Ricks, Eliot and Prejudice (London 1994) p. 37 n. Another passage from this lecture, English Letter Writers, turns up as the epigraph to the rst volume of Eliots letters with a note indicating that the text has not been preserved. 36 T S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London 1964) pp. . vii viii. 37 Eliot Letters, p. 276 (12 Mar. 1919). Murry and Eliot were ready and willing to take on the task of restoring the state of literary criticism. See ibid., p. 286. 38 Eliot Letters, p. 415 (23 Oct. 1920).

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Murry, whose journal provided him with a ready-made forum for his criticism. Lawrence was not so fortunate. His old friend Murry found all but one of his submissions unsuitable. Knowing this, maybe Eliots siding with Murry was not so odd or amazing as Leavis imagined. It wouldnt be the rst time a collaboration has worked in this way. After all, Murry had, in Eliots judgement, written on the whole the best review that The Sacred Wood had garnered.39 Such a claim would, of course, have to be regarded as no more than a plausible suspicion. Drawing attention instead to what Eliot thought in private of the brilliant editor he publicly attered, one has to backpedal in a hurry. Eliot needed Murry and made the best use of him, but, as early as the autumn of 1920, he found him impossible because his criticism is dictated by emotion and even when he is right, he is the victim of an emotion, and the rightness seems an accident.40 Because Murry never surrenders himself, but uses what he is talking about as an outlet for some feeling, Eliot rejects his irreverence for reason and identies him as an egotist who is hopelessly isolated from both persons and causes.41 The similarity of these remarks to Eliots public depiction of Lawrences sensibility would make it all but impossible to guess how Eliot would respond to Murrys book-length treatment of Lawrences entire published work as a naked confession42 of sexual failure.43 As soon as Murrys editorship ended, Eliot began to organise material for the rst few issues of his own journal, The Criterion. In this period Eliot explicitly encouraged Richard Aldington and Sturge Moore to write essays hostile to Murry.44 In June 1922 he told Aldington that he was counting upon him for the rst number, but as the publication date approached Eliot was more cautious about launching a campaign against Murry: I wish to be very careful especially at rst, not to appear to use the paper as a weapon.45 Thirty years later, Eliot accurately summarised his scattered comments on Lawrence as a tissue of praise and execration.46 Unfortunately, the admission came far too late to repair the damage done to Lawrence.
Ibid., p. 447 (21 Apr. 1921). Ibid., p. 422 (30 Nov. 1920). 41 Ibid. There is another equally scathing sketch of Murrys nature which Eliot sent to his mother by way of explaining why he needed to break his connection with the Athenaeum on pp. 432 3 (22 Jan. 1921). 42 John Middleton Murry, Son of Woman (London 1931) p. 73. 43 Ibid., p. 88. 44 Eliot Letters, p. 474 (3 Oct. 1921); Aldington: ibid., p. 518 (3 Apr.); Moore: ibid., p. 520 (10 Apr.). 45 Ibid., p. 537. 46 T S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (London 1965) p. 24. .
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Also, there is a quality of evasiveness and equivocation about the way in which Eliot phrases his retrospective overview. The praise and execration comment is qualied by the words seem to, and the subsequent acknowledgement of contradictions is modied by the word apparent. The contradictions, real or apparent, Eliot claims he cannot account for. He fears his mind will always waver between dislike, exasperation, boredom and admiration.47 The design Eliot gives to the catalogue of his responses to Lawrence certainly implies something other than an assured judgement or a balanced one. Though Eliot is unable to account for his critical ambivalence, he explains why he revisits an antipathy grounded on what seems to me egotism, a strain of cruelty, and . . . the lack of a sense of humour in Lawrence.48 (He doesnt feel a comparable need to revisit the admiration.) The foregoing discussion was meant, Eliot instructs readers, to remind ourselves, in discussing the subject of literary criticism, that we cannot escape personal bias, and that there are other standards besides that of literary merit, which cannot be excluded.49 Should the strain between the two halves of the sentence be regarded as sheer muddlement, justication of moral or spiritual standards, or a clumsy confession of personal bias? There is little indication here of someone genuinely troubled by his past execrations or, for that matter, making a serious effort to understand them. How could he have had the nerve to write the foreword to D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence, in which he called for a serious criticism of Lawrence that would take us beyond books by those who knew him, and who thus failed to do the job because they couldnt set aside the attraction (or attraction and repulsion) they felt for his personality?50 Considering all Eliots offensive remarks on Lawrences family, lack of culture, education and tradition, why did he simultaneously venture this bafing remark: Does culture require that we make (what Lawrence never did, and I respect him for it) a deliberate effort to put out of mind all our convictions and passionate beliefs about life when we sit down to read poetry?51 It was these very beliefs and convictions that Eliot had been deriding. How could he pretend to respect what he despised? In 1951, having reiterated the usual charges against Lawrence of a want of ratiocinative powers and a decided propensity to write very badly, he
47 48

Ibid. Ibid., p. 25. 49 Ibid. 50 See the rst paragraph of the foreword to Martin Jarrett-Kerr, D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (London 1951) p. 9. 51 T S. Eliot, The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism (London 1933) p. 97. .

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singled out Lawrence for the distinction of having written the most brilliant of critical essays52 on Cooper. A collection of all Eliots scattered remarks on Lawrence, made over a period of four decades, would not amount to the length of a typical academic essay. Nothing in the whole output faintly resembles a detailed examination of a single one of Lawrences important short stories, novels, poems or critical essays. The portrait of Lawrences character, temperament or sensibility is supposedly derived from Lawrences writing, but the evidence from the texts for Eliots disdain or dislike is never forthcoming. Frankly, it is difcult to tell whether Eliots read much of Lawrence at all. If this is so, how can one make a case for taking Eliots chastisement of Lawrence seriously, especially when Eliot settles for assertions instead making arguments? No commentary from Eliots admirers or detractors forms a basis for thinking him a rst-rate critic of the novel form. Leavis certainly did not think so. In 1955 he called the past quarter-century a disgraceful chapter of English literary history dened by the long unchecked prevalence of misrepresentation and malice53 suffered by Lawrence. What is odd about the way that Leavis went about setting things right is his unwillingness to go to the source of the malice and misrepresentation, Murrys Son of Woman. Leavis claimed he was unable to nd an adequate English word to describe the book.54 (Nietzsches French usages, rancune and ressentiment, would have done the job nicely.) Instead, Leavis stepped round Murry to get at what he considered Eliots endorsement of Murrys animus-driven account of Lawrences life and literature. Murry is worth engaging with in Leaviss discussion of Keats in Revaluation, but beneath notice where Lawrence is concerned.55 Perhaps Leavis refrained from criticising Murry because, in some of his own early writings on Lawrence, he echoed or reiterated Murrys specic objections to Women in Love. In a 1930 essay from the Cambridge Review, Leavis opened with a ourish of repentance for his past critical mistakes, and then claimed that he wasnt as unintelligent in his writings about Lawrence as E. M. Forster, Murry or Eliot. Whereas, in fact, Leaviss condemnation of a specialized vocabulary of terms and of characterisation that disintegrates into swirls of conicting impulses and emotions that make it difcult to keep them apart56 are indistinguishable from Murrys judgements in the Athenaeum review published in
52 The lecture, entitled American Literature and Language, was delivered at the University of Washington in July 1953. See To Criticize the Critic, p. 53. 53 F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, p. 22. 54 Ibid., p. 11. 55 F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (London 1936) pp. 242 3, 2623, 2667. 56 D. H. Lawrence, in Valuation in Criticism, p. 20.

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1921 and reprinted in Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence.57 Writing of Lawrences characters, Murry complained that to [Lawrence] they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same. And yet Mr. Lawrence has invented a language.58 He dismissed Lawrences language and thought as completely and utterly unintelligible.59 Leavis did not expose Murry because he was too close to him; he would have had to attack himself. Also, Leavis later named Women in Love Lawrences greatest achievement. Eliots contentious remarks are something other, and more disturbing, than an endorsement of Murrys attack of Lawrences reputation. There is a striking difference between Eliots and Murrys dealings with Lawrence. Murry writes as Lawrences erstwhile friend. He frequently quotes from their correspondence to enforce his judgements. He also discusses at length almost all of Lawrences considerable literary output. There is, however, an alarming correlation between the conclusions Murry reaches and those Eliot expressed throughout his lifetime, not just in his review of Murrys book. While Leavis worried over Eliots ability to inuence public opinion, he did not, or would not, recognise Murrys deleterious inuence on Eliot. At every stage, the Lawrence Murry relationship was a troubled one, and it ended in complete estrangement. For the last ve years or more of Lawrences life he repeatedly rejected Murrys attempts to renew their friendship. The following letter from Lawrence, one which, needless to say, Murry didnt use in Son of Woman, is representative of the severity with which Lawrence repudiated such overtures: you rot your own manhood at the roots by stirring your nger in your own vitals.60 Even the most detached observer is likely to consider such a retort cruel; Murrys responses in Son of Woman and Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence were intended to show the world the fact that Lawrence could be cruel as no ordinary man can be cruel.61 In the same passage, Murrys rhetorical ourish who of his real friends would care to remember the fact was meant to discredit Catherine Carswell, who had defended Lawrence.62 But Murry himself did it extensively in both of his books. The strain of cruelty63

57 John Middleton Murry, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (London 1933) pp. 220 3. 58 Ibid., p. 220. 59 Ibid., p. 223. 60 Letters, v. 170 (17 Nov. 1924). 61 Murry, Reminiscences, p. 166. 62 Ibid. 63 To Criticize the Critic, p. 25.

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Eliot claimed to detect in Lawrence merely reiterates Murrys thesis in an abstract, impersonal manner. When Murry isnt representing himself as the friend Lawrence had cruelly injured, he poses as an analyst writing a case study of a tormented patient. Their literary quarrel over how Dostoevskys ction should be read is served up as the raw material for the following diagnosis: That which he felt he had to kill in himself he projected onto me, and denounced.64 A clear illustration of the doctrine of transference, one is supposed to conclude. On a wide range of personal and literary matters Murry set out to reveal Lawrence as a man beset by self deception.65 Eliot cleared away all the duplicitous context of Murrys psychosexual analyses and informed the reader of After Strange Gods, in that peculiarly nicky manner he cultivated, that Lawrence . . . does not appear to have been gifted with the faculty of self-criticism.66 Eliot, with much assistance from Murry, set out to instruct the world on the subject of Lawrences inadequacies. Leavis responded to remarks Eliot had excerpted from Murry, whose writing Leavis couldnt be bothered to expose, as if the change of speaker and style had somehow transformed Murrys selfjustifying fakeries into Eliots graceless prescriptive character sketches and thus, for Leavis, into the gravest of threats to Lawrences literary standing. Sadly, the unrelenting attention Leavis gave to combating Eliots dissemination of Murrys original ndings or ctions backred, contributing to their ongoing circulation. In writing D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Leavis was not puzzled by the seesawing described above; instead, he set out to repudiate Eliot and vindicate Lawrence. Arguably, his praise of Lawrence would have been far more effective without this squabble.67 In the one instance where Leavis directly addresses Murrys Son of Woman his manner reveals none of the personal edge that characterises his treatment of Eliot. Leaviss tone is measured and he effectively disposes of Murrys ludicrous claim that none of Lawrences writing could be considered art68 by means of a detailed commentary on Women in Love. Leavis had no idea that Murrys
Reminiscences, p. 85. Ibid., p. 75. After Murry left Lawrence in Cornwall, Lawrence wrote a letter saying, Murry and I are not really associates. How I deceive myself. I am a liar to myself, about people. Letters, ii. 617 (19 July 1916). 66 T S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York 1934) p. 64. . 67 In his review of D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, anonymously published in the Times Literary Supplement, Murry also stated that too many pages of the book are spent on unnecessary polemic. Richard Rees (ed.), Poets, Critics, Mystics: A Selection of Criticisms Written Between 1919 and 1955 (London 1970) p. 83. 68 Murry, Son of Woman, pp. 172 3.
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discussion of Lawrences sheer detestation of women, his leadership and power urges or his tortured and repressed homosexuality would become the staples of numerous academic studies of Lawrence.69 Probably the single most offensive of Eliots remarks on how Murry had treated Lawrence was that The victim and the sacricial knife are perfectly adapted to each other.70 This neat and condent stroke was picked up by Leavis in the introduction to D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, but it was Lawrence who understood the full implications of this impulse. In St Mawr, one of the best of his later works, he identies the diseased state of contemporary life in the infernal stink of human psychology: Always the same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other peoples motives.71 This outburst of anger is followed up by the characterisation of two of the major gures, Mrs Witt and Rico, as a pair of psychologists. With the prescience of genius, Lawrence realised how destructive psychology could be once it becomes the medium of peoples everyday interaction with one another. His powerful objection to vivisecting the human psyche constitutes a repudiation of exactly the kind of thing Murry was to do to him shortly afterwards. Murry certainly read it because he quoted two words from the paragraph in question in this sentence: love in him [Lawrence] presupposes a corpse.72 That should tell readers all they need to know about Murrys critical integrity. As indicated earlier, Leavis erred in continuing to refute Eliots condemnations of Lawrence for his morbid and perverse representation of love and sexuality. At times, Leavis allowed himself to use such accusations by turning them back on Eliot, who remained silent throughout the affair.73 In the end, this tit-for-tat exchange carried Leavis to the point of
Ibid., pp. 212, 222, 233 4. Eliots comment and Leaviss retort are quoted from D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, p. 11. 71 D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr and The Man Who Died (New York 1955) p. 30. 72 Son of Woman, p. 256. Murry dismisses St Mawr as The long and feeble story . . . since the central conception is incoherent, the story itself is futile ( p. 337). Febrile and sentimental in temper, unstable and incoherent in substance, it is a monument of Lawrences disintegration ( p. 338). 73 For instance, in T. S. Eliots Inuence, posthumously published in Valuation in Criticism, Leavis savages Eliot, asserting that he is incapable of sustained thought and suffers from attitudes of disgust and cynical (sophisticated) rejection-cum-nostalgia expressing emotional disorders that disable intelligence in him ( p. 123). Leavis does go on to record another good (in a clinical sense) illustration of a manifest and humiliating weakness that betrays deep-seated malady lurking beneath the cover of urbane equivocation ( p. 126).
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declaring Eliot a case. Even without Murrys dubious analyses, these refutations inadvertently contributed to establishing the discussion of Lawrence in terms of sickness versus health, or sanity versus morbidity (and perversity). This was undoubtedly a deplorable literary-critical state of affairs, from which Lawrence scholarship has never recovered. By the time D. H. Lawrence: Novelist was published, the period in which Leavis struggled with the problem of whether or not to repudiate Eliot, and thereby call his own previous critical judgements into question, seemed to have passed. As if forgetting that his own publications made a cover-up all but impossible, Leavis rewrote the history of his connection to Eliot, using Lawrence both as a shield and as a justication for the revisions. He could not help distorting the record in the process. The published essays clearly demonstrate Leaviss changing perceptions of Eliot, and how Leavis used Lawrence to displace his own indebtedness to the other writer. Leavis twice described his initial encounter with Eliot, rst in an article entitled Approaches to T. S. Eliot (1947), and then in T. S. Eliot as Critic (1958).74 In between these two essays, Leavis wrote of his initial encounter with Lawrence in the introduction to D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. All three passages share a remarkable resemblance in form, suggesting that Leavis felt compelled to rework repeatedly the account of his critical indebtedness while he campaigned against Eliots literary and personal failures and for Lawrences intellectual greatness. In these texts, Leavis initially praises Eliot but then transfers the praise to Lawrence. The fundamental problem can be located in the question with which Leavis opens T. S. Eliot as Critic: How can a book of criticism be at once so distinguished and so unimportant? The question is the more worth asking because the author of the volume [The Sacred Wood] was at one time so unquestionably a major critical inuence.75 Because Leavis had repeatedly acknowledged his indebtedness years before, he now issued a declaration of independence. In the earliest account, Approaches to T. S. Eliot, Leavis recollects his experience of encountering Eliot for the rst time. He writes about his immense debt to Eliot for teaching him what the distinguished and effective application of intelligence to literature looks like.76 Because Leavis had been quarrelling with Eliot over Lawrence for years, the frank declaration seems surprising. In
74 Approaches to T. S. Eliot was published as a review of T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings by Several Hands in Scrutiny, 8/1 (1947) pp. 56 67. It is also published in The Common Pursuit. T. S. Eliot as Critic originally appeared in Commentary and was later republished in Leaviss Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London 1967). 75 Anna Karenina and Other Essays, p. 177. 76 The Common Pursuit, p. 280.

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D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, he writes about his discovery of Lawrence in 1919, one year before he read The Sacred Wood for the rst time, thereby establishing Lawrence as the earlier inuence. Rather than Eliot, it was Lawrence who had been a major contemporary fact and who demanded .S. Leaviss attention.77 In T Eliot as Critic, Eliot is reduced to a writer of little importance. His immense inuence is nothing more than a vague and minor stimulus.78 Eliots antipathy towards Lawrence was anything but a clear-cut affair; however, Leavis developed a very signicant antipathy to Eliot and found it necessary to construct the relationship between Eliot and Lawrence in terms of an either/or structure. Contrary to Bergonzis conclusion that Leaviss career should be read as a long road to rejecting Eliot, Leavis did not repudiate Eliot. Instead, in a way that reproduces Eliots calling Lawrence a great writer and an unintelligent man incapable of thought, Leavis thought of Eliot as a heroic, great writer and an unintelligent critic incapable of judgement. For Leavis, it was not only possible but necessary to recognise, within the connes of a single lecture entitled Eliots Classical Standing, that Eliots heroism is that of genius and that Eliots inner disorder and disability were intellectually debilitating.79 In other words, Leavis did to Eliot what Eliot did to Lawrence, and did it repeatedly in essays throughout the 1960s and 1970s. While dissenting from a critical conclusion of Lionel Trillings, R. P Blackmur made the following peculiar remark: but this is only a dis. agreement in judgement, the one part of an argument least likely to stand.80 In the case of both Leaviss harshest judgements of Eliot as poet and critic and Eliots acerbic comments on Lawrences personality, the reverse has proved true. The judgements have survived, but the context of their arguments and how and why they came about have not. When the argument and the judgement oat free of one another something has gone badly wrong. The point of this paper has been to restore the continuity of argument and judgement wherever possible. It is quite possible, even probable, that the judgements argued for in the process will not stand. Should Leaviss correspondence see the light of day, and further volumes of Eliots letters be published, some modication will surely follow.

D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, p. 9. Anna Karenina and Other Essays, p. 176. 79 Lectures in America, pp. 30, 50. 80 The Politics of Human Power, in The Lion and the Honeycomb (New York 1955) p. 39.
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