The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Kafka is not difficult to read, because he employs a style of the utmost calm, lucidity, and simplicity. The surface narrative, however, is deceptive. He is trying to suggest, using familiar images and seemingly commonplace episodes, the disturbed condition of modern man. We may put it this way: There is, for Kafka, a Goal. But is there a Way? Kafka, though he belonged to no sect and was devoid of any trace of mysticism, was a deeply religious man. He thought of his writing, not as a pro- fession, but as a form of prayer to a God who continually eluded him. His heroes suffer from lostness, alienation, an inability to identify themselves. It is a feeling many of us have had. But at the same time they are seeking some redemptive grace (the Castle perhaps symbolizes this), which they vaguely sense. They have no place in the universal order; yet surely there must be one. In this sense Kafka may be said to be a metaphysical novelist, in some respects akin to the less ago- nized Borges.

In some of his shorter works—especially The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony—Kafka seems to foresee the dehuman- ization, the terror, and the bureaucratic tyranny of our epoch. They are chilling stories, recounted in quiet prose, parables of guilt and punishment, that strike to the very heart of our age of anxiety.

Though he died over seventy years ago, Kafka is contempo- rary. A neurotic genius, he was perfectly equipped to create a visionary world that reminds us of our real one.

C.F.

113

D.H. LAWRENCE

1885-1930

Sons and Lovers, Women in Love

It is hard to realize that when Lawrence died of tuberculosis he was only forty-five. From 1911, when his first novel appeared, to his death in 1930, no year passed without the appearance of at least one book. In 1930 there were six, and his posthumous works (excluding the extraordinary Letters) total another dozen or so. While producing so prodigiously, Lawrence was traveling widely, meeting and influencing large numbers of people, working at various hobbies, and engaging

in the unhappy controversies caused by his uncompromising ideas. This frail, thin, bearded man—novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, painter, and prophet—had a central fire of energy burning inside him. He stands out as one of the most alive human beings of his time.

Lawrence was born of a Nottinghamshire coal miner and a woman greatly superior to her husband in education and sensi- tivity. His early life, dominated by his mothers excessive love and his excessive dependence on it, is portrayed quite frankly in the first part of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence excelled at school and for a few years was a schoolmaster. In 1912 he eloped with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, a member of a patrician German family, and in 1914 married her. The latter part of his life was one of almost continuous wandering. In exotic primitives and undeveloped countries he sought the equivalent in fact of the life-feeling that blazes in his fiction.

This life-feeling attracts some readers, alienates or shocks others. You will not be able to tolerate Lawrence at ali unless you understand that he was neither poseur nor hysteric, but a prophet with a message fervently believed in, a message with which he sought to change the day-to-day behavior of the human race. The message is implicit even in so early a book as Sons and Lovers, which is certainly the one with which to start one's reading of Lawrence. It is to be found more particularly in The Rainbow, Women in Love (perhaps his masterpiece), and Lady Chatterley's Lover, one of his poorest novйis.

We must understand that Lawrence was an absolute revo- lutionary. His rejections were complete. He made war against the entire industrial culture of his and our time. He felt that it had devitalized us, dried up the spontaneous springs of our emotions, fragmented us, and alienated us from that life of the soil, flowers, weather, animais, to which Lawrence was preter- naturally sensitive. Worst of ali, he thought, it had withered our sexual lives. For Lawrence sex was not merely something to enjoy. It was the key to the only knowledge he prized— direct, immediate, nonintellectual perception of reality. As early as 1912 he was writing, "What the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true." (To some readers this will seem pernicious nonsense.)