Jul 17, 2009

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Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis is credited with being the founder of the only modernist cultural movement indigenous to Britain. Nonetheless, he is seldom spoken of in the same breath as his contemporaries, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others. Lewis was one of the number of cultural figures who rejected the bourgeois liberalism and democracy of the nineteenth century that...

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Jul 5, 2009

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D. H. Lawrence on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels

Chapter 5 of  Studies in Classic American LiteratureIn his Leatherstocking books, Fenimore is off on another track. He is no longer concerned with social white Americans that buzz with pins through them, buzz loudly against every mortal thing except the pin itself. The pin of the Great Ideal.One gets irritated with Cooper because he never for once snarls at the Great Ideal Pin...

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Jul 4, 2009

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D. H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin

Chapter 2 of  Studies in Classic American LiteratureThe Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance.Education! Which of the various me’s do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to...

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Jul 2, 2009

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D. H. Lawrence on Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels

Chapter 4 of Studies in Classic American LiteratureBenjamin Franklin had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines ?The Aztec is gone, and the...

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May 26, 2009

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“The Great Death-Continent”:
D. H. Lawrence on America

Editor’s Note: The following passage on America is from D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). The Plumed Serpent tells the story of Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of 40, who, to escape her unhappy life, decides to travel to Mexico. She is horrified at Mexico’s ugliness, degeneracy, and backwardness. Eventually she encounters Don Ramon and General...

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May 24, 2009

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D. H. Lawrence on Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo

“There is an invisible hand that grasps my heart and prevents it opening too much to these strangers. They are beautiful, they are like children, they are generous: but they are more than this. They are far off, and in their eyes is an easy darkness of the soft, uncreate past. In a way, they are uncreate. Far be it from me to assume any ‘white’ superiority. But...

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May 21, 2009

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The American System vs. the White Race:
D. H. Lawrence on Moby Dick

“What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.“And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black,...

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May 19, 2009

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D. H. Lawrence on America’s Libertarian Spirit

“Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild...

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