D.H. Lawrence's nonfiction has impressed me. But if St. Mawr is any indication of the quality of his novels, Evelyn Waugh must have been correct in being bored stiff by them. St. Mawr is a horse, a magnificent horse, a pulsing, living, arrogantly alive creature. That sentence is an approximation of the Lawrentian style, in which everything is said, nothing is hidden, and all emotions are overblown. A woman falls for a horse, finding it a worthier companion than her mewling husband, then heads off for the American Southwest, with the horse, and renounces men altogether to stare at the desert.
In the second half of this volume, The Man Who Died, Lawrence with a straight face has Jesus say, "I am risen!" when he achieves an erection. The story begins wonderfully, in the spare style of Par Lagerqvist, but declines into travesty when Jesus travels to Lebanon and meets a young woman at a temple of Isis. He is still alive after the Crucifixion because, he says, the Romans took him down from the cross too soon. There is a lot of overheated rhetotic amid the intersection of pagan and Hebrew traditions, and Jesus ultimately impregnates the woman and wanders off. What could have been as striking a tale as Anatole France's Thais falls embarrasingly flat. Lawrence got into a lot of trouble with the censors, who found him unredeemably dirty. I am beginning to think they had a point.
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