Re: March 12 - Rananim

[Noelle <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

On Thu, 13 Mar 1997, The Rananim Society wrote:

> To: http://www.rananim.prestel.co.uk/~rananim
> Subject: And More on Birkin's Sexuality..........
> From: http://www.aol.com/~LawBrown74
> Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 11:03:34 -0500 (EST)
> 
> ........Y.H.Kim, do you see what you have begat here?  And now you are
> silent.
> 
> Helen, I am thinking that we should all just rename "Women in Love".  I
> doubt
> if DHL came up with the title himself.........probably a publisher's
> concoction.......and maybe a new edition would reconsider the title.
> "Women
> in Love" just doesn't get it.  You laugh now at your own error in youth
> when
> the movie first came out.  I envision lesbians all over the lit. kingdom
> stumbling across the title and smiling and raising a happy eyebrow.  Little
> would they know "The Fox" lays so close upon the shelf.  Yikes!!   No ,
> this
> is not a lesbian novel  (and yet Gundrun.............oh let's not go there
> now .........we are still working over Birkin's sexual proclivities).
>      So let's collectively go with the title  "Men Atempting Bonding;
> Failing, One "Making Do" With A Woman Instead, And Another Dying Frozen On
> The Mountainside".   Or is that too wordy?   The weight of the rananim
> society may push some levers here. Randall, your task is to come up with a
> work of art for the front cover of this renamed novel.  I envision a
> domesticated man nestled in a large plump chair by the hearth looking
> forelorn and vacant into the flames.  Just outside this home, on the hill,
> I
> envision a very dead corpse in the snow.  Work with it.
> 
>      But really, all this concern about sexuality............what strikes
> me
> most about Lawrence is his "quivering aliveness"..........a writer atuned
> to
> all of his senses and open to the world around him.  He takes you with him.
>   Attentive, aware, courageous, calling you to be individually ALIVE.  Like
> Randall says "But as long as we're alive!"  Lawrence captures this for me
> and
> calls this forth moreso within me too.
> 
>     I no longer pigeonhole the world into tidy categories of
> sexualities........heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual........don't see DHL
> doing this either.   I would rather separate the world into the sexually
> alive and vibrant vs the sexually dead or atrophied.  Helen, you feel you
> have a knack for spotting a Birkin or a Gerald across the room.   I have an
> eye for spotting the vibrant or the atrophied.   But to each his
> own..............and I never attempt to rearrange other people's rooms.
>   Can't help but recall Dorthy Parker's poem.........."The closer and
> closer
> I totter towards the tomb...........The less I care who goes to bed with
> whom".
Yes, i think DHL did not want to pigeonhole the sexualities. However, in 
real life he was extremely uncomfortable with real homosexuals, such as 
Forster, John Maynard Keynes,Lytton Strachey . He exercised his 
homosexual musings in fiction, perhaps to deal with his ambivalence? 


> 
>      In closing, Forster has been brought up and to me he pales in
> comparison
> to DHL.  When I read him I keep thinking  "That's nice" or That's cute" and
> I
> don't think this is a strong gutted response like I get from DHL.   I think
> V. Woolf once wrote that reading him was like going to his home for
> tea............you sit in the parlor, you chit chat nicities, you can smell
> the tea brewing in the kitchen, you hear it perking or bubbling away in the
> near room...........and yet you know somehow that TEA WILL NOT BE SERVED".
>   Well DHL always seems to deliver for me with some spice sense, and flesh
> thrown in.  I like this.  Best to All.  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Lawrence
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> To: http://www.rananim.prestel.co.uk/~rananim
> Subject: DHL's Contradictions...
> From: http://www.world.std.com/~albright (R.H. Albright)
> Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 08:45:49 -0500
> 
>         "The Perfectability of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme!... I am
> many men. Which of them are you going to perfect?"
>         ---DHL, beginning the of the "Benjamin Franklin" essay,
>                 _Studies in Classic American Literature._
> 
>         "Frankly, I think most of Lawrence's characters would find
> themselves smack dab in the middle of the Kinsey scale, but of course there
> was no such thing yet."
>         ---Jay Katzeman, post to Rananim on 3/11/97
> 
> Really? First of all, I shear Lawrence's abhorrence of scales for
> measurement. Secondly, Birkin is Birkin. Gerald is Gerald. Tom Senior was
> Tom Senior. Will Brangwen was Will Brangwen. And so forth. And was I asking
> for hero-worship as a youth, as much as someone I could relate to, when I
> was young? If Lawrence's characters are "contradictory", maybe that's part
> of the reason I could relate. If you're torn between this and that, if you
> see the complexity of life, of wanting to be this but simply being THAT...
> isn't there bound to be some strife in your self-realization?
> 
> "Without contraries, there is no progression."
>         ---Blake, "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" again
> 
> Only linear thinkers are afraid of contradicting themselves. And here's a
> curve ball for all of you: I'm gay. But I don't relate anymore to the
> "minority" into which I happen to be born anymore than I do to the
> "straight" majority. I like people, no matter where they come from, which
> is why I as a person don't feel "ghettoized". Only you create or accept
> these boxes in which people try to place you.
> 
>         "Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather
> immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness. Nothing is at
> last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
>         ---Emerson, from "Self Reliance
> 
> Doesn't this last sentence, in particular, sound very much like these
> sentences from "Foreword" to _Women In Love_ that DHL wrote:
> 
>         "This novel pretends only to be a record of the writer's own
> desire, aspirations, struggles: in a owrd, a record ofthe profoundest
> experiences in the self. Nothing that comes from the deep, passional sould
> is bad, or can be bad. So there is no apology to tender, unless to the soul
> itslef, if it should have been belied."
> 
> And is there an inherent counter-dialectic that you may hear to both
> Emerson and Lawrence.
> 
> "Be A Demon". It's a poem by DHL. It's also Henry in "The Fox".
> Or be Noble. It's a point made by DHL in _Apocalypse_ and elsewhere.
> Are the two mutually exclusive?
> 
> Some people gloss over the bisexuality of _Women In Love_ for the "good
> couple, bad couple" theme. Great! Straight guys want to be The Fox. Cool!
> Lawrence would love the way his works can still glisten like that.
> 
> Jay: As for ghettoization of gay writers: isn't that a contradiction, too?
> Who makes the ghettos? Who chooses to live in them? Not me. Michael
> Cunningham dreams of _A Home at the End of the World_ where people can be
> themselves. Alan 's hero in _Audrey Hepburn's Neck_ (now under
> contract with Wayne whatever-his-name, _Joy Luck Club_, to become a motion
> picture) is straight, but his best friend is gay. There's no progress? At
> least there are Gay and Lesbian interest sections to bookstores now, if you
> want them. At least there is now a Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage
> Dictionary, again if you want it.
> 
> But I liked Lawrence not because he was a "hero", and more than just "a gay
> role model". I liked him because I felt there was a kindred spirit there. A
> rock the boat kind of guy who wasn't satisfied with the way things were,
> who dreamed of a better world to come. He was one, but I had others too, in
> which to find solace.
> 
> All I can say is: Live your life. Make your own reality. Many of my friends
> happen to be straight, but it's not like I chose them that way. Most are
> right-handed, too. I'm a leftie. Is DHL marginalized by having this
> knowledge available? Wasn't it always there, in the work, merely glossed
> over by people like Leavis and Spilka in their desire to rehabilitate him
> for the heterosexual masses? Same with _Twelfth Night_. Was Shakespeare a
> Jew, a gay courtesan, or... do I care? You can play up or down the
> bisexuality as much as you want.
> 
> _WIL_ openned doors, even though it was written by a man who was basically
> "ghettoized" by others as well as chose to "ghettoize" himself. Blake ended
> up in obscurity for awhile. Looney tune, you know. Nietzsche's depth took
> nearly a century to come into its own. All I can say is that if it weren't
> for visionaries like these people, _Men Are From Mars, Women Are From
> Venus_ might STILL be at the top of the charts!
> 
> But Nietzsche was right. For every step forward, we also probably go a step
> back. The Rainbow Flag to me is just a pretty kite, an all-embracing thing.
> To others, it means faggot. Gay-bashing, anti-Semiticism, and anti-Hispanic
> reductionist classification going on in my own, once-tolerant home state of
> California. Things may be getting worse as well as better. Gotta blame
> someone, you know! Particularly if they're "different", which brings me
> back to Helen's point...
> 
> Yes, Helen. Birkin, Gerald, and company are all... quite... uh...
> different! One frustration, I've heard, that DHL had with Joyce as well as
> Flaubert is that they stuck "different" voices into what he thought should
> have been ordinary housewives. I actually disagree, and think there are
> some housewives out there who may be quite imaginative, and bored in their
> suburban poolside settings. But then again (contradiction, folks), maybe
> he's right, and most ARE happy in their suburban, isolated nightmares.
> 
> The Mob that watches 53 channels of junk TV and is happy. But break the Mob
> up into individuals, and you'll find some adorable little Homer Simpsons
> along the way. What's wrong with a little James Bond, here and there? Is
> that a contradiction?
> 
> How about some quotes from Fred to end this:
> 
>         "16
>         _Up_
> If you want to get to the peak, you ought
> To climb without giving it too much thought."
> 
>         "18
>         _Narrow Souls_
> Narrow souls I cannot abide;
> There's almost no good or evil inside."
> 
> And this one, dedicated to the one and only D.H. Lawrence:
> 
>         "62
>         _Ecce Homo_
> Yes, I know from where I came!
> Ever hungry like a flame,
> I consume myself and glow.
> Light grows all that I conceive,
> Ashes everything I leave:
> Flame I am assuredly."
> 
>         ---all from _The Gay Science_
>                 ---Friedrich Nietzsche
> 
> -Randall Albright
> http://world.std.com/~albright/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>