Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

I am presently reading a biography of D. H. Lawrence by Brenda Maddox and have been prompted to ponder about this famous quote. I have always been a bit dubious about the critical endeavour, certainly when practised as an academic activity from one of our ivory towers, and have some sympathy for the notion that one should let the work of the man stand for itself, speak for itself and not surround it with all kinds of stuff from third parties about what it might or might not mean. Or perhaps should mean.

It is odd that Lawrence should transfer this exclusion to himself, but the general idea stands.

My starting point for today's ponder was that if someone wrote a book of instructions for something or other, the quality of those instructions would not be self evident. It would be entirely sensible to appeal to some external authority to vouch for either or both of the instructions and their author. Or maybe even appeal to some other work of the author to make sure that I have got the right idea. If I go to a solicitor I expect him to have his certificates hanging on the wall.

So before I take Lawrence and his dictats seriously, I expect to have leavite plaudits pasted into the back of the dust jacket. Or more seriously, to the extent that a novel instructs, and I think that lot of Lawrence's fiction is intended to be instructional, to instruct us in how better to lead our lives or to run our relationships, maybe it is reasonable to look outside the novel for some support or corroboration. If Lawrence's own relationships are a bit of a disaster, or at least not my sort of thing, I am going to be less impressed by his instructions, however good the story in which they are embedded. If I know that he hated whoever it was some fictional character was modeled on, or at least parted from on very bad terms (something that Lawrence was rather good at), I am going to take his presentation of that character and any instructions that might be derived therefrom with a pinch of salt. And I am only going to get to know about that sort of thing by reading literary biographies or criticism.

But thinking with my fingers, what is wrong with Lawrence drawing inferences from caricatures of people he knew? The people might be rather annoyed, but how does that damage the inference? If one is a very fat man, one should eat less - and it is not material to that conclusion that the unpleasant fat man on which this advice was hung was modeled on someone who was perfectly pleasant. Or what about if Lawrence made a convincing case that the straw man A really should do life style change B - with the catch being that A never happens, there are no A's. So what we would have is Lawrence promoting B in general using a non-existent A as a springboard. First, the inference might be OK, but the premise fails. Second, you should not generalise the applicability of B from A, even if A were true. But then Lawrence despised logic. I forebear from going on,

Another angle is that what might have stood for itself 100 years ago, does no longer. Lawrence was able to make all kinds of assumptions, to take all kinds of stuff for granted with his contemporaries. Some of this has now been lost with the passing of time and with the changes which have taken place during that time. So to that extent also I am going to need support, either from scholarly apparatus in the book itself (which I imagine Lawrence would also have despised) or scholarly books. A footnote, for example, to explain that in a Nottinghamshire coal mine of Lawrence's father's time a 'baggin' was a sort of rock cake taken with cold tea at docky time.

And more generally, I am finding that I am in danger of becoming more interested in this secondary material rather than in the primary material. I am getting to need to have someone digest this last for me, a development of which I would once have been rather scornful,

With thanks for the illustration to the Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. A snip from Amazon at just over £31 if you want to read more.

I shall return to the substance of the biography in due course.

PS 1: disappointed that google has no idea what a leavite plaudit might be. I wonder if IBM's Watson would have done any better? I like to think that he would. See http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/watson.html.

PS 2: I associate now to the episode of Morse involving a opera singer, a Welsh lady, with a rather lurid & unpleasant private life. At some point sidekick Lewis sums it all up by saying something solemn along the lines that his old father used to say that is was enough to like the football. It is enough to like the football and there is no need to bother with the footballer - who might well be rather unattractive in other ways, but one does not need to know about that. Stick to the football.