In the new issue of The New Criterion, Theodore Dalrymple revisits the work of D.H. Lawrence, whom he has previously called, in the 2003 City Journal essay What’s Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks?, “a bad writer and worse thinker”. While his opinion of Lawrence’s philosophy has not changed, Dalrymple has nonetheless come to appreciate certain aspects of both Lawrence’s work and individual character:
…when all is said and done, a writer of imaginative literature cannot be assessed wholly by his ideas. If he could, there would be no difference between philosophy and literature.Read the whole essay here (purchase required)
I lost a lot of respect for Lawrence after I read his utterly wrongheaded analysis The Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. See the Norton Critical Edition of it.