Lady Chatterley's Lover, Part 2

 I've got a lot of quotes/extracts from D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. What this says about my attitude towards Lawrence, I do not know. I will say usually I quote a lot when provoked or not understanding what I've read.

This quote probably started me thinking about Ernest Hemingway. The speaker is Michaelis, Lady Chatterley's first lover.

"Oh, more or less, I allow. A man's got to be, to get through. But that's not the point. The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? if he can't he's no right to the woman..." He paused and gazed at her with his full, hazel eyes, almost hypnotic.

p. 50; Chapter V (1959; Signet Classics, 1962)

For the  record, I agree with the sentiment - one should always give as good as one gets.

Was the real shocker Lawrence giving lady Chatterley her own erotic reactions?

Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little,  and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!

Chapter VI

Another place I thought of Hemingway: 

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life out of living things.

***

Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words became obscene, and dead ideas became obsessions.

Chapter VIII (P. 87)

Last night I got wondering if my novel -in-progress is nothing more than dead words and deader ideas. This is what the writing group does for me - takes me out of my own neuroses. Which also makes these notes a strange thing - I do not know if they will ever be read and if read they will not prove me an idiot. The writing group gives me an immediate course correction 

sch

2/21/20