‘Top Cat’ and Leavis butt heads

WHEN “Top Cat” TS Eliot savaged the reputation of safely deceased DH Lawrence, it took one ferocious literary lion, virtuosic critic FR Leavis, to set the record straight.

A figure forgotten by today’s culturally impoverished collective consciousness, Leavis perhaps roars most fiercely in his central work, DH Lawrence: Novelist. Adding Lawrence to that splendid pride, our Great Tradition of Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Henry James, Leavis makes tatty old Tom Eliot’s fur fairly fly.

Eliot’s accusation that Lawrence was incapable of thinking betrays “a failure of intelligence” in Eliot himself, Leavis writes. Lawrence’s “transcendental intelligence” was “inseparable” from his “creative genius”, serving “the whole integrated psyche”, and is “intensely active in his creative writing”. Lawrence’s thinking is in fact “so much superior to what is ordinarily called thinking that it tends not to be recognised as thinking at all”.

Leavis believes Lawrence’s “power of sustained and complex thought” is “superior to Mr Eliot’s (yes, to the author of Four Quartets).”

Eliot’s the “Christian writer” (resentful of Lawrence), yet it’s Lawrence who reveals a “truly religious reverence for life and human dignity”. Eliot’s famous play The Cocktail Party is characterised by “a shocking essential ignorance of the possibilities of life”. The “true moral sense” we find in Lawrence’s story Daughters Of The Vicar brings “into discredit the spirituality of The Cocktail Party”.

As for writing badly, any badness in Lawrence’s work is “never in the order of badness in Eliot’s”, where intelligence is undermined by “unrecognised emotional bias”. Lawrence’s education, including Nottingham University College, was “better calculated to develop his genius” most fruitfully “than any other”. Rather than lacking “critical faculties”, Lawrence exhibits a healthy, wholesome “infallible centrality of judgement”, making him “an incomparable literary critic” whereas Eliot’s “major value judgements” are “nearly always bad”.

■100 years ago, on November 18, 1922, Lawrence asks agent Robert Mountsier to answer another request he “lecture”. He’d like Seltzer to “do Kangaroo this spring”, “certainly” wants him “to bring out Studies”, of which he’s “re-written the first five” and may “try a Taos novel”.

On November 19 he asks Seltzer to send Aaron’s Rod, England My England, Fantasia to sisters Ada at Grosvenor Road, Ripley. and Emily at Main Street, Carlton, to arrive “for Christmas”.