Don't Get Dyer Started, You'll Love it to Death

After reading Geoff Dyer’s dust jacket blurb about how D.H. Lawrence did a study of Thomas Hardy, I searched my shelves.

Going and Staying
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,---
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

Seasons on blankness as of snow
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,--
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.
--Thomas Hardy


Anyone still read Thomas Hardy? I guess they do, I just did, but I tried to sell this book for a quarter at our latest yard sale. I last remember my six-year-old daughter coveting the book’s peeling imitation red leather cover, sections of open wounds of corrugated cardboard and glue. She thought the strangely dignified carcass of 1920 edition of Modern British Poetry was an ideal make-believe book of magic spells. Maybe it is. There were no takers, so I took pity on it and keep it just in case.

Now, some twenty years have passed since I purchased it at a flea market, and in this blog it finally becomes a bone fide textual subject, a focus of study. This is why it leads this week’s blog, because every study needs a place to start.

Editor, Louis Untermeyer, writes in the introduction that he is not interested in “hairsplitting,” but in the interest of some place to start he designates “modern” as beginning in 1885 (the year D.H. is born) and characterized by several historical periods and “chief tendencies.” This pre-post-modern modern literary analysis is not abstract, but kind of like old-fashioned cause-and-effect physics. Some are easy to understand today, like “The decay of Victorianism,” but others provoke amused ignorance, such as “The muscular influence of Henley.” Not the guy from the Eagles. As I read on, I didn’t get angry, I got bored, but I suppose that is why criticism grew into more than simple introductions to works and anthologies, why it started to provoke and get more abstract. The blasé aesthetic of “modernism,” gave way to the angst of “post-modernism” and then “post-everything.”

Geoff Dyer doesn’t get bored when he reads The Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, which surprises me. He rages about the state of criticism, “it kills everything it touches.” While I sympathize with his take on “this group of wankers huddled in a circle,” he displays a flair for his own literary histrionics. What imagery! This is not boring, and I can see why he compares literary scholars to “morticians,” but even dressing the dead can be a beloved act, a kind of acceptance of the temporal mixed with violence and reverence. “Going and Staying” like old Hardy says, the dead old fart.