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What made Lawrence 'different'
 D H Lawrence and 'Difference' is the major new study of the 20th century British author by Indian novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. It was launched in India recently at the British Council in Delhi. Amit Chaudhuri elucidates his interest in one of the 20th century British literary giants:
The first in-depth literary research you pursued was on Lawrence. Why was he so important to you so early on?
I was more or less ignorant of Lawrence's work till I was 20 or 21 years old. I'd read his poems when studying for my A-levels, but they hadn't really made an impression on me. In my final year at University College London, my tutor, the novelist, Dan Jacobson, asked me to read Sons and Lovers. (He is a great Lawrence enthusiast, and an enthusiast of literature, which is why I dedicated the present book to him.) This novel, its amazing visual sense, its style, its evocation of the quotidian, its essential rejection of modernist despondency, had, I think, a lasting effect on me as an apprentice writer - it opened my eyes to my own sensibility. Later, when reading Lawrence as a graduate student, I had to deal with why Lawrence had deliberately abandoned the control and precision he'd had in Sons and Lovers.
How was Lawrence received in India throughout the 20th century? Has he been popular here?
Lawrence was very popular here, I think, until about 20 years ago. I don't know if the reason for this was ever clearly articulated, because certainly Lawrence doesn't exhibit the sort of engagement with 'high' Indian culture that Eliot or Forster did. In the last two decades, I suspect that his stock fell in India as it did elsewhere, partly because, as U R Ananthamurthy once told me, he'd been attacked by feminists.
Have Lawrence's fiction, verse or essays significantly influenced your own fictional writing?
As I said earlier, 'Sons and Lovers' was an extremely important book to me - not for the usual reasons, such as its enactment of Oedipal conflicts, its portrayal of a man's sexual awakening, but for its crystallisation of lives lived away from the centre of things, and its creation of a language and style adequate to both the marginality and vividness of that experience. Lawrence's apotheosis of the here and now - in his writing, and in comments like 'Nothing is important but life' and 'Whatever the dead may know, they cannot know the marvel of being alive in the flesh' - offered me, as an apprentice writer, an avenue out of the very European, modernist gloom to which I was a bit in thrall as a young man.
Lawrence was restless, literally travelling the world to find a home for his soul. So much contemporary literature perhaps particularly Indian writing in English - is concerned with mobility and migration. Are there continuities, here?
Lawrence's wanderings, his restlessness brought a workingclass, Puritan, subversive English sensibility in contact with nonEuropean, superseded cultures, or peasant South European cultures. This contact brought about a great upheaval in that sensibility, and made it question its own Europeanness, its own definition. In this regard, I think there are fundamental differences between Lawrence's narrative of wandering and the sort of idealised migratory condition of some Indian writers in English.
Your book suggests that Lawrence has been fundamentally misunderstood - approached by generations of critics with wrong assumptions. What is the essence of your argument?
To summarise it very briefly, what I'm saying in the book is that the very things in Lawrence's work that have polarised critics in the past - his overwriting, his personal intrusions in his work, his clumsy repetitions and purple passages - are for me the entry to an enquiry into Lawrence's 'difference' in the English canon, and into an aesthetic that set out to critique 'Englishness' and Enlightenment ideas of art in various ways. Even the ways in which critics and contemporaries used to either praise or condemn his work reminds one of the way the West praised or condemned, read and misread, cultures different from itself.
The first decades of the 20th century were a ferment of new writing and the 'Western Canon' newly proliferated. Lawrence, though, was always something of a loner, a non-conformist. A century on, is he 'canonised'?
After the great interest people like Leavis and Raymond Williams took in Lawrence, for different reasons, his stock fell quite rapidly in the Seventies. I think, from several articles I've read about him in the past three or four months, that his reputation is being restored -- people are not so much reinserting him into the canon as just gradually beginning to understand the challenge he posed to it.
Published on 23rd
Feb, 2004
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