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Studies in Classic American Literature (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

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I first learned of this delightful little work as a college freshman. My professor, a remarkably learned fellow with a tremendous knowledge of American literature, would occasionally reference it with amused appreciation. In our discussion of the Last of the Mohicans, I can still recall his enjoyment in recounting Lawrence's description of Cooper, sitting in a hotel room in a European city, with his gentleman's finery, surrounded by all of the trappings of a genteel aristocrat, living a sort of Walter Mitty life through his virtual antithesis -- Natty Bumpo, the protagonist of the Leatherstocking tales. To this day, I am amazed whenever I read this little tome, since Lawrence captures, in a few short essays, the essence of such authors as Franklin, Whitman, Cooper, and Melville. His style, so cheeky and incisive, is a joy to read. Lawrence had an astonishing grasp of what it is that makes American literature so fundamentally different from that which was composed by his own countrymen. He brings a pschoanalytic, Jungian perspective to bear on these great works, and sees in Natty Bumpo, Ishmael, and other heroes of American literature the archetypes of our collective American unconscious. Of course, this work tells us as much about Lawrence as it does about great American writers, which is why it makes such great reading. Lawrence is well known for being a novelist, but his corpus contains much else besides: travel literature, criticism, poetry, essays. This one is highly recommended.

There are three reasons to read STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence. First: to better understand Lawrence and his themes. Second: to be entertained. Criticism is rarely rendered with so much passion, wit and clarity. Third: to experience American culture from an outsider's perspective, a very knowledgeable though albeit highly opinionated perspective (which makes for that entertainment value).

DHL's prevailing theory is that to emerge as a distinct cultural, as well as distinct political entity free from Europe, America had to go through some growing pains before arriving at its authentic self. America had to kill off the European in its heart. He starts out with Ben Franklin, whom he gives a real trouncing for the overly self-conscious act of assigning an American character with a shopping list of virtues. (It should come as no surprise that DHL especially has trouble with "chastity.") Ben may be generating a fake, a lie, but he marks the beginning of an effort to break with the old homeland, Europe. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur is next in line for a beating. He moved his unfortunate family to the frontier, wrote the letters glowing with the accounts of the American Dream amongst the nature and the "savages" and then went back to France to revel in literary salons. When he returned, the wife and farm had met brutal ends in that American dream in which he had left them, so he settled in New York City. DHL screams, "Fake!" But Crevecoeur did announce the concept of an ideal tied to the unique attributes of the new world.

DHL takes us through Cooper, Poe and Hawthorne, who begin to make progress (and also give DHL space to expound in ways that have annoyed his feminist critics), and onto Dana (TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST) and Melville, who go to sea to find themselves and their American consciousness. It is Melville who smashes the old mold forever and makes way for Whitman to plow through with a new road, singing that song of self.

We get the tour of the past; we get, obliquely, a tour of post World War I intellectual preoccupations; and we get DHL being DHL at full throttle.

this is a masterpiece, and you do not have to know much about books to notice the expertise of the author, his sense of what he is writing.he has really given me an orientation into the vast lands of american letters.he has set me going into a different direction and has made me read some books again. i recommend this book to anybody with a deep interest in american letters, but please keep reading this author, he is wonderful. LUIS MENDEZ luismendez@codetel.net.do

In this analysis of (not always) well-known classic US authors D. H. Lawrence gives his personal, but very revealing, view on the heart of the American soul, the old and the new moralities and the cardinal aspects of the gender battle. These brilliant essays tell also a lot about the author himself and the backgrounds of his life vision.

David Herbert Lawrence
This world-class author was highly influenced by Nietzsche (rejection of the Christian slave and anti-senses morality, his anti-democratic stance and his misogyny) and Freud (the un- and subconscious).

The old and the new moralities
In the old morality, the `soul' of man stands above the `flesh'. In the new morality, the `soul' `sits in the dark limbs, in the body of the prostitute, in the sick flesh of the syphilitic'.

American soul
`The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer'.
The essential American action is destruction.
The spirit of the place is freedom to lynch anybody who is not one of them (racism).
The labor class is obedient because of the continual influx of more servile Europeans.

American literature
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN `doesn't let me have a soul of my own. He says that I am nothing but a servant of mankind, a galley-slave.' But he was also a destroyer: `Extirpate the savages to make room for the cultivators of the earth.'
HECTOR ST JOHN DE CREVECOEUR (`Letters from an American Farmer') shows that there are no `Sweet Children of Nature. All fraternity and equality go up in smoke and his ideal of pure sweet goodness along with it.'
For JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, there can be no blood-mixing between the white and the red race. His world is a paradise for killers (`The Deerslayer', `The Last of the Mohicans').
EDGAR ALLAN POE is fascinated by inquisition, torture and murder. For him, a woman is `a vulture of stern passion'. `Drugs, women, self-destruction are adventurers in the horrible passages of the human soul.'
In NATHANAEL HAWTHORNE's `The Scarlet Letter', the male protagonist is `a spiritual fornicator and a liar'. The female protagonist is the destroyer of the white consciousness, of the old moral, of spiritual love.
DANA's `Two Years before the Mast' depicts the sea as the cosmic enemy, as the great disintegrating force, leaving the human nerves blank.
HERMAN MELVILLE hated the white world and searched for a savage Eden (`Typee'). But, he came to understand that `civilized' people can't go back. `Moby Dick', the white whale, represents `the deepest blood-being of the white race', `that lonely phallic monster of the individual you.' The whale is hunted by our old consciousness. His death is a suicide.
WALT WHITMAN is the first author to break down the old morality. He gives the soul its own life, a life of sympathy. But he misinterprets sympathy as a feeling `for', not as a feeling `with'. His individual self leaked out of him into the universe (`Democracy', `En Masse', `No Identity').

These remarkable interpretations and insights are a must read of all lovers of world and US literature.

This book is literary criticism about some of America's most famous writers. Basically, it is a "Lawrencian" reading of classics.

D.H. Lawrence comments on Benjamin Franklin, Melville, Hawthorne, Dana, Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Whitman, and de Crevecoeur. In doing so, he is trying to get a picture of what America is and what it is trying to do. Although he mentions his interest in some, all fall short of the mark of creating a new identity for America.

If you have ever read notes by Lawrence on some of his novels (like "Lady Chatterley's Lover"), you will see the repeat of a lot of ideas and language. This was written later in his life, so it does make sense that some of his ideas of the blood-relationship would come again.

I would not recommend this book for people trying to understand American writing (except maybe to use this as contrast), but I would highly recommend this for anyone studying D.H. Lawrence. This will give you another perspective (aside from his fiction).

D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the American classics at the time Lawrence wrote his collection of essays. The works of Harriet Beecher-Stowe and Mark Twain are notably missing. But Lawrence's aim was not to analyze all the seminal works of American literature. He chose specific authors who fit his agenda and constructed an evolutionary argument around them. Lawrence's main thread is that America can't emerge as a culture in its own right until it discards completely the influence of Old Europe and finds its own "spirit of place"--the sense of who the people are and what drives them. The author's search for this spirit of place results in a more or less disparaging analysis of each American author in turn, with few exceptions of genuine praise.

We begin with Benjamin Franklin. Lawrence derides him for advocating "the perfectability of man" (Lawrence 15) and creating a list of virtues, and proceeds in doing the same himself. "I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women." This is of course merely a symbol; Lawrence was not pagan. But it begs the question: If we are supposed to accept all these new rules at face value, based only on Lawrence's discursive analyses and often abstract philosophizing, doesn't it stand to reason that Benjamin Franklin's rules were open to symbolic interpretation as well? I marvel at Lawrence, actually. He makes a good deal of sense, but he too hits a wrong note sometimes. And then speaks entirely in absolutes for the whole book, as if his opinion truly is the only one. Suffice to say Benjamin Franklin was a good deal more intelligent than Lawrence makes him out to be and was horrifically underserved by Lawrence.

From Franklin onward, Lawrence hardly has a good thing to say about any of the American authors. Sometimes they deserve it. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur gets slammed for oversimplifying nature and idealizing the frontier lifestyle in his Letters from an American Farmer. Fenimore Cooper really gets it for romanticizing the frontier, the relations between white men and Native Americans, and for utilizing the 1800's literary conventions of his contemporaries when concocting a love triangle. I agree that the conventions were stale and unrealistic, but what can one expect when everyone wrote their historical fiction with those same tired conventions? I'm pretty sure somebody out there thinks The Last of the Mohicans is a classic of 1800's historical fiction right up there with Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis.

Poe is "rather a scientist than an artist," because he "reduc[es] his own self as a scientist reduces a salt in a crucible." Lawrence seems to like him until he accuses Poe of trying to make his "disease" (love) fair and attractive--which, as it turns out, is the "duplicity of art, American art in particular." Good to know.

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes hellish romance, says Lawrence, and has such a fixation with sin that it becomes stale. Thank you, Lawrence, for going after The Scarlett Letter with a vengeance. That one deserved it. Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast is where Lawrence starts getting very metaphysical. (I wouldn't advise anyone to read individual chapters out of order. This really must be read as a consecutive whole or you won't understand a thing.)

But Lawrence likes sea voyages. He has praise for Herman Melville--and criticisms. Melville is criticized for finding a tropical paradise and wanting to return to civilization. Then Moby Dick comes along, and we find out the white whale is a symbol of the "deepest blood-being of the white race...our deepest blood-nature." We hunt him because we want to "subject him to our will." That is, the men hunt him. Lawrence doesn't have much to say to us women other than criticize us for wearing our American suits.

Walt Whitman. Lawrence really likes Whitman. He derives from Whitman the concept of true American Democracy, souls meeting on the Open Road, free to do as they please. But he still criticizes him for following the Christian doctrine in his philosophy, confounding `sympathy' with "Jesus' LOVE, and with Paul's CHARITY."

Lawrence was a very brilliant individual, a devoted critic, and an insightful analyst. I enjoyed Studies in Classic American Literature immensely upon my first reading. For the most part, if there are faults to find in American literature he will point them out. That's all right, somebody had to do it. But I wish he'd rein it in just a little. No need to antagonize the ladies, Lawrence--or couldn't you predict that women would read your book some eighty years into the future? His trick of using he exclamation mark to prove a point was fun at first, and got really old by the time I got to Walt Whitman, though this could possible be attributed to the fact that Lawrence starts out very concrete and moves so far into the abstract that readers may have trouble following him unless they read the entire book in one sitting and keep all the cross-references fresh in their memories. He's also a little too self-important for my liking. We all know there are problems with the American classics. Did Lawrence never consider that we wouldn't like to be preached at the same way he didn't take to the self-righteous Americans like Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne?

This is a small book yet Lawrence's genius enables him to see big things in it, especially about those large writers like Melville he felt an affinity to. "Trust the tale and not the teller" is one of his motto's here and he tries to show how the great works go beyond the intentions of their creators.
One objection. He is especially hard on Franklin who he makes into a priggish, petty prune of a minor moralist. Franklin was a many - sided genius who was open to kind of creation Lawrence had no sense of.

delightful. the essay on moby dick alone is worth the read. has stayed fresh in my memories for over 20 years. lawrence may have been sobering out in taos, but his genuis was burning bright. remember, the works he was praising were not yet completely "canonical." lawrence was a key signpost. vivid and sensitive, imagistic appreciations.

This passionate brief survey of American Literature contains much spontaneous flowing masterful and original writing. Lawrence famous 'Trust the teller not the tale' is the motto of the work. It argues that the true creative work takes on a life of its own that even its creator cannot completely define and control.
Perhaps the most famous essay in this book is Lawrence's hatchet- job of Ben Franklin who he found to be a spiteful, penny- pinching, calculating dead soul. In fact old Ben could be in certain places as lively and probably more lively than Lawrence himself.
What however is most important is that Lawrence in this work understands the great subterranean and mysterious genius of a kindred spirit for him, the literary creator of the Great White Whale.

Excellent book. Lawrence is the only writer I know of who was able to trace the priggish type of American back to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a great man, but one of his more regrettable legacies appears in the modern WASP holier-than-thou type, the type that thinks it's inherently immoral to stay up late, and inherently moral to be a non-smoker. Take a close look at his interests and you'll see that it's to his advantage to preach what is, basically, servility. The rest of us Americans can't stand him (I'm convinced that Al Gore lost the election because he embodies this type), but his belief in his own piety remains unshaken to this day. Well, Lawrence gives him a perfectly-placed kick: check it out.

All of these essays are thoughtful, funny, and insightful. Lawrence has a unique way of grasping the undercurrents of works of fiction, and many of his most surprising assertions ring true upon reflection.