I have only read two works by D.H. Lawrence: the short story
Rockinghorse Winner and the novel
Women In Love. The short story, while memorable and well-written, never really made itself felt on my own writing. But
Women In Love, which gave me a bit of trouble when I read it, has apparently influenced my prose.
If
you had told me while I was reading that book that a year later I'd be
seeing Lawrence's fingerprints on my writing, I'd have been surprised
and maybe a little huffy. There's a clumsy matter-of-factness to a lot
of Lawrence's writing that makes me uncomfortable. Still, these days I
often find myself wanting to read more of Lawrence's novels because even
though his prose doesn't flow the way I want mine to flow, the guy was
The Real Deal and with the passage of time I begin to not only see his
influence on all sorts of writers (A.S. Byatt, certainly, and likely
everyone else writing literature in English since the 1940s), I also
begin to think that maybe, you know, old Dave was a bit of a genius. I
plan to read
Sons and Lovers in the upcoming months, and we'll see after that.
I'm
not a genius, but when I look at passages like this, from my
work-in-progress, I think I see a bit of Lawrence's lamplight
brightening the way:
Mrs Pullman came bustling through the
French doors into the garden. She paused just outside, dazed by the
bright sun. Mr Pullman appeared behind her a moment later. He put a hand
on his wife’s arm. She batted it away and took a step into the garden.
Her cheeks and forehead were bright red.
"Just shut up," she said. "You’re talking nonsense."
George
said something but none of the guests in the garden could make out what
it was. He disappeared into the dining room. Mrs Pullman turned and
shrieked at him, something shrill and violent and her heavy frame quaked
with emotion. She shook a fist.
I have, of course, no idea
what this passage will look like once I've revised the novel a few
times. It might not even make it into the final MS. But I'm sure that if
I looked at other pages at random, I'd see more of Lawrence's
influence.
One subtext of this post is the idea that "finding
one's own voice" is not only highly over-rated, but also pointless in my
opinion.
Voice is part of
narrative, not a fixed property of the writer.
Voice is part of the
telling, not of the
teller.