My to be read pile has been dominated by D.H. Lawrence for much of the past year because I picked up a whole bunch of his during my first flourish of enthusiasm - back in the nineties, would you believe - then never got around to reading them, mainly because there were so many and very few with spaceships on the cover. Consequently, now that I've made some headway, excepting one fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel, my to be read pile is all D.H. Lawrence; and I'm now onto those published posthumously.
This Mortal Coil is short stories, only one of which I recall having read before, and in a few cases collected for the first time for all I know. Lawrence never wrote a formal autobiography, possibly because his writing was already strongly autobiographical, which This Mortal Coil illustrates with short stories quite clearly drawn from his life reproduced in chronological sequence - from his youth in Nottingham, to Europe, and finally to his deathbed. Lawrence seems to have been a little embarrassed by a couple of these examples (hence my doubts about their having been published more than once while he was alive) presumably due to their juvenile quality - conversely meaning the earlier efforts are fairly breezy, predating the heavy fog of emotional symbolism in which he enveloped the later works. Of these earlier efforts, Adolf is particularly delightful as an account of his pet rabbit - so named before even the first world war should anyone be wondering. Indeed, the stories I enjoyed most were those recording details in the domestic lives of mining families around the turn of the century, these being short but substantial and benefiting from the kind of focus which suggests, at least to me, a sort of written analogy to the paintings of Walter Sickert, or other Post-Impressionists as Lawrence's fixation with flowering plants begins to make its presence felt.
'Your foggy weather of symbolism, as usual,' he said.
'The fog is not of symbols,' she replied, in her metallic voice of displeasure. 'It may be symbols are candles in a fog.'
'I prefer my fog without candles. I'm the fog, eh? Then I'll blow out your candle, and you'll see me better. Your candles of speech, symbols and so forth, only lead you more wrong. I'm going to wander blind, and go by instinct, like a moth that flies and settles on the wooden box his mate is shut up in.'
'Isn't it an ignis fatuus you are flying after, at that rate?' she said.
I've quoted this passage because I enjoy how it describes what Dave was trying to do with both his writing and his life, at least in the later years, while simultaneously presenting a criticism of the same; and which additionally accounts for why the last three or four in the collection are perhaps a little too chewy for their own good, at least in comparison with Adolf, Rex, The Miner at Home and others. Nevertheless, in sheer stylistic scope this may be the broadest collection of Lawrence's short stories that I've read, and accordingly one of the most satisfying.
