The Word and The Man

D. H. Lawrence is the flip side of James Joyce. They are as Protestant to Catholic, country to city.

Their celebratory rituals, the literary conferences, are as Vatican Council to Methodist encampment. The Joyceans are superbly organized. The James Joyce International Foundation holds an international symposium every second year in a place relevant to Joyce. The in-between year is filled by a conference in the United States. American Joyceans simply cannot go 24 months without convening.

No Joycean has to wonder about the date. Joyce, Jesuitically trained, created his own personal ecclesiastical calendar. Conferences are held on the days surrounding either June 16--Bloomsday, the date on which the action of his masterpiece, “Ulysses,” is set--or his birthday, Feb. 2.

Lawrenceans, like their author, are as rambling as an English garden. They never know when their next conference is coming, nor where. Lawrence wandered the globe before dying in Venice in 1930 at age 44. This summer, a combination of academic friendships and local largesse (plastic briefcases courtesy of the Conseil de la Region Herault ) brought them to Montpellier in southwestern France, which last month saw the first major international gathering of Lawrenceans since 1985.

The Joyce conference, which ended on June 16, was held in Monaco, the home of the Princess Grace Irish Library. Very few from Monaco made the journey westward to Montpellier. Lawrenceans are a different order from Joyceans. Joyceans believe in The Word. Lawrenceans believe in The Man. “I read Lawrence to learn about life,” Prof. Chong-wha Chung of Korea University in Seoul told me.

For those who braved them both, the conferences gave an opportunity to compare the two incompatible breeds. Absurdities both--the Joyce, with nearly 300 delegates, absurdly elegant and overproduced; the Lawrence, half that size, maddeningly scruffy, sweaty and ramshackle. Yet both were full of bright, genial people, mainly university teachers, willing to devote five days (Lawrence) or a full week (Joyce) to debating the meaning of life and love and language.

Joyce, who was born in 1882 and died in 1941, and Lawrence have much in common: two thin, shy, sickly, monogamous men who stayed clear of World War I, to write instead of the other war--the war between the sexes. With their work, they changed the novel and burst the bonds of censorship for those who write in English.

Lawrenceans, as a group, seem older, heavier and less merry than Joyceans. Their beards and sandals and loose shirts only accentuated the impression of a crowd of Lawrence look-alikes.

Lawrence seems to attract more American professors with last-for-first names, far fewer theorists, hardly a Marxist in the lot and few post-structuralists. In general, according to a leading American Lawrencean, Keith Cushman of North Carolina, they are far less cosmopolitan.

“Joyce was truly international,” he said. “Lawrence was much-traveled. But wherever he went, he remained English.”

But Lawrenceans give no quarter to Joyce, whom they find cerebral, unfeeling and, to their students, unreadable. They do not want luxury accommodation. Like their author, who lived in cottages and cabins from Cornwall to New Mexico, they are ready to rough it.

Feminism, however, and the difference between the sexes, dominated both gatherings. “I hadn’t expected such a gendered experience,” said one Canadian attending her first Joyce international. At every Joyce conference there is a “women’s caucus.”

Imagine their surprise this year, when they were told by the library that their speaker would be Shirley Conran, one of Monaco’s resident English literati. “You mean, the woman who wrote ‘Which of you bitches is my mother?’ is going to talk to us about creative writing?” gasped one.

Conran, however, cleverly sailed into the real gender dilemma of the female academic: how to get husbands to help with the housework.

Academic scholars put divorce lawyers in the pale with their discussions of what constitutes evidence of the consummated sexual act. One American professor reported a student ringing up at 3 in the morning, having just finished “Ulysses.” “Do Molly and Bloom sleep together again?” he demanded. (She couldn’t say.)

The Lawrenceans waded into real anatomy in discussing the “Excurse” chapter in “Women in Love.” What actually happened down around the “back and base” of the loins? They were told of one academic couple--named--who took the book into bed with them and tried to work out what was supposed to be fitting into what. The result? No satisfaction nor elucidation.

And Lawrence, the self-styled Priest of Love, himself? In a panel on biography, Jeffrey Meyers of the University of Colorado, whose “D. H. Lawrence” recently was published by Alfred A. Knopf (see Page 1) , described an interview with the painter Dorothy Brett in which all he wanted to know is “Did you screw Murry (John Middleton Murry) in 1919”? (Cries from the floor: “She did!”)

More seriously, had Brett and Lawrence had actually “done it” in Ravello in 1926? Brett, according to one version, said that Lawrence tried but failed, excusing the failure with a comment on a part of Brett’s anatomy which he said was “wrong.”

My text reads “pubes” for the part in question. Another version has, instead, an American word rhyming with “pubes” but referring to another part of the anatomy. The learned consensus was that “pubes” was decidedly more Lawrencean than that American vulgarism.

Lawrenceans, more than Joyceans, love the master’s words read aloud. They linger lovingly over phrases like “a tumbling heap of pink petals.” Unhappily, the same love envelops their own words. Long papers, honed on word processors in Tulsa or Swansea, were delivered in inaudible monotone to listeners somnolent in the Mediterranean heat.

Occasionally, Joyceans blur the line between art and life. (Some suggest that “Finnegan’s Wake” contains hidden clues about incestuous relations between Joyce and his daughter.) Lawrenceans do it all the time. Seeing Lawrence as a prophet, complete with beard, piercing eyes and untimely death, they seem to expect a Second Coming. “The world needs Lawrence today,” said one woman, “more than ever.”

But nobody’s perfect. Anthony Burgess, Monaco’s reigning literary monarch, said in the Joyceans’ opening speech: “I write for a living. Joyce never did.”

Lawrenceans more openly acknowledge imperfections in their god: repetitiousness, poor endings, violence toward his fictional women, and toward his real-life wife, Frieda, too. Mark Spilka, speaking not only as a professor at Brown University but as a worker with “Wife-Abusers of Rhode Island,” said jovially that Lawrence “would qualify for sentencing under current law.”

In death, both writers are united by 1990s problems with editions and estates. The Joyce world is in disarray over the “correct” text of “Ulysses,” which contains many errors. Its scholars too write in fear of the author’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, who appeared before them to say that he was taking a personal interest in all matters concerning his late grandfather. “You may not like it,” he told them, “but that’s the way it’s going to be.”

The re-editing of Lawrence is even more controversial because Cambridge University Press considers that the new editions create new works of all the books, thus extending the copyright well into the new century. Gerald Pollinger, whose literary agency controls the Lawrence estate, is never shy of reminding writers that they must pay him for use of copyright material.

At the Lawrenceans’ final “banquet”--self-service in the university cafeteria--Pollinger, tall, heavy, powerful, strode to the microphone like the chairman of the governors at an orphanage’s Open Day. He told little jokes. He gave away trinkets. Then he gave some unsettling news:

A fine trove of new Lawrence material has been found--letters from his Croydon years, documents, perhaps even a short story or two. . . . The Lawrence scholars would not have long to wait to see it. It would all be put up for sale.

Peter Preston of the University of Nottingham, amiable organizer of the conference, then announced that the university (near Lawrence’s birthplace) is to set up a D. H. Lawrence International Centre and will bid for the new Lawrence material.

Nottingham against the big American university libraries? In my view, it doesn’t stand a chance. Unless, of course, a fairy princess comes along.