David Holbrook

"David Holbrook has spent many years teaching D. H. Lawrence's works to students, while Lawrence has been a primary influence in Holbrook's novels and poetry. By degrees, however, he came to be suspicious of Lawrence's attempts to "teach us to be men and women," especially in the field of sex. So, Holbrook set out on a detailed analysis of Lawrence's whole oeuvre." "What he found was startling. From the beginning he found Lawrence haunted by a deep fear of woman, and by a hostility toward her, even in The White Peacock. In the great tragic novel Sons and Lovers, there are many clues to Lawrence's intense relationship with his mother. This predicament is illuminated by recent studies of gender from a psychoanalytic point of view. Holbrook finds that Lawrence's mother, in the absence of a real love relationship, and in her grief for her dead child, made Lawrence into her "idolised phallus." This phallus stalks through the short stories and especially through the versions of Lady Chatterly's Lover." "This element is to be found in the longer novels, in which Lawrence develops a personal myth in which his alter ego is depicted as the "man from the Infinite," who has a special role: to raise woman from the dead--in fact, to resurrect the dead mother. The reasons for this need are expressed with amazing clarity in Kangaroo, in which the Lawrence-like hero is haunted by a menacing mother in his dreams--the threat being that unless he gives her a meaningful life, she will blight his." "Lawrence's male characters are nearly all tormented by this kind of ghost, and his solution is to seek to exercise control over women. She may be put to death, as in The Fox and The Woman Who Rode Away. She may be sodomized and taken in contemptuous anger, as in Lady Chatterly's Lover, and is depicted as enjoying this. The enthusiasm for the sodomizing of woman is quite clearly there in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Mr. Noon. Some critics have spoken of this as a "holy communion," but Holbrook sees it as a denial of woman, an avoidance of the matrix where the ghost of the dead mother lurks." "In the end, in The Plumed Serpent, an intelligent American woman submits herself to the fascistic domination of two murderers who are running a new religious-political campaign, while forfeiting even her capacity for orgasm. Everything in Lawrence's work leads to this false solution." "Yet such critics as F. R. Leavis commend Lawrence for his concepts of "manhood"--and even endorse such stories as The Virgin and the Gypsy, in which a duplicitous traveler seduces a young girl in vengeance on the middle class. Yet the politics behind this kind of propaganda are those of Otto Gross, the insane German sex revolutionary who was a sometime lover of Lawrence's wife, Frieda, and her sister. Mr. Noon reveals the confusion in Lawrence between the novelist squarely in the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the husband of Frieda." "No one who reads this book can ever again consider Lawrence's position "normative" or "celebratory" but will find it full of hate and death--despite his achievements--in his best work."--BOOK JACKET.

Tolstoy despised women. He considered them to be dangerous and destructive. In this work, David Holbrook examines Tolstoy's enmity toward women and the possible reasons for it - his mother's lack of attention to him as a baby, her death, his psychopathological behavior toward his own wife, and the deeply disturbed attitudes he exhibited throughout his life. Yet, in spite of all this, Tolstoy created and wrote sympathetically about some of the most fascinating women in all of literature. In War and Peace, for instance, Tolstoy depicts the chaos and misery caused by men taking upon themselves the risk of battle in order to compete with women, who take on the risks of parturition. In the face of death, men pursue the question, "What do men live by?" - at times inspired by the beauty and spirit of women, and by love. In the end, however, Tolstoy strips his heroine of those qualities that make her so inspiring, and in this act, Holbrook believes, we see Tolstoy's fear of women and his attempt to control them. Yet Tolstoy was able to identify deeply with the female consciousness, and thus to give us the marvelous scenes around childbirth in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Further, he created, from his early bereavement, a pure and ideal mother figure - so pure that no woman could ever take her place. By contrast, sexual love with any real woman seemed an affront to that pure ideal. It is impossible to tie Tolstoy down to any oversimplifications, and Holbrook rejects both feminist interpretations on the one hand, and Christian interpreters on the other, finding in the art of this great writer a profound preoccupation with the truth of the human heart.

During the past quarter century, Holbrook argues, not only has the concept of sex become increasingly separated from the rest of existence, but sex casualties have increased disastrously. Whatever statistics one examines, whether those of sexual activity among young children, abortion, or sexual disease, one finds a grim antidote to any hopes of progress in the sphere of human dealings with the sexual. Holbrook locates many of the problems involved in this separation of sex and affection in the emergence of the idea that our lives are governed by impersonal forces beyond human control.