Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties

Abstract

In this anticipatory “post-war” statement from the first version of Studies in Classic American Fiction between late 1917 and mid 1918, Lawrence tried to position the living in relation to the dead, and to envisage a future beyond the war. Yet the incongruity of the second line with the rest of the passage indicates that he had formulated the problem facing Europe in 1918, without realising a solution.

We have now the hosts of weary, clamorous, unsatisfied dead to appease by our living. If we cannot appease them we shall go on dying until somewhere, in some unknown people, life can start afresh.

Which brings us to Fenimore Cooper and the Red Indians.

(Studies, 208)