D.H. Lawrence

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.
As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;
And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;
Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.
That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Openly pledging heaven:
Here’s to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!
The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilisation, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,
And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That’s how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,
The year of our women.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.
The secret is laid bare.
And rottenness soon sets in.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked
She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.
She’d been naked all her days before,
But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.
And women have been sewing ever since.
But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.
They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,
And they won’t let us forget it.

Now, the secret
Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips
That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

What then, good Lord! cry the women.
We have kept our secret long enough.
We are a ripe fig.
Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.
Ripe figs won’t keep.

Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.
Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.
What then, when women the world over have all bursten into self-assertion?
And bursten figs won’t keep?

I really enjoyed Sons and Lovers. As a female I can honestly say it is the best book I've found for explaining the female psyche

Kate Millett wrote a lot of very nasty things about Lawrence in her book Sexual Politics (1970), and his reputation within the academy has never recovered. According to one of my older professors, he used to be talked about alongside Joyce as one of the greatest English-language writers.

She's not entirely wrong about DH's attitudes towards sex. Doesn't really bear on his quality as a writer, but these are the times we live in. He's too good not to stick around until the pendulum swings back

Kangaroo is an amazing and bizarre novel

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Kate Millet was batshit insane and intellectually dishonest.
Mailer ripped her a new one in The Prisoner of Sex

The Rocking Horse Winner is an awesome short story

I really enjoyed The Rainbow
I didn’t like Women in Love as much mainly because too much time spent on the author self insert and not enough on Ursula.
I enjoyed the sexy bits in Lady Chatterly but the gamekeeper’s ideas on what was wrong with society and how to fix it was too long winded after a while

Also check out his essays on The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick.
He was one of the people responsible for reviving interest in Moby Dick. Melville was a neglected and almost forgotten author for a while until Lawrence and a few other authors and critics helped spark a revival of interest in his work.

OP here, I literally JUST TODAY found Studies in Classic American Literature at Goodwill and got it for a dollar. I'm curious of his thoughts on The Scarlet Letter cause that book leaves me with something different every time.

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If you loved Sons and Lovers, read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, if you haven't already.

I think in general, if you like Lawrence, Mishima is a good recommendation. Similarities exist. They were both reactionaries in some form, concerned about the pace of change.

Lawrence's work has more of a pastoral longing, before collieries dotted the Midlands, and a sympathy for the working class. Mishima is more bothered by the abandonment of discipline and its resulting effect of traditional hierarchies.

One of the things I like most about Lawrence is he pays close attention to style, due perhaps in part to his poetry background. He has an elegant, calm prose style with poetic elements, but he avoids some of the larger trends of modernism; he's more of an extension of Victorian realism, kind of its last gasp.

And just on the topic of novels I like and have some shades of Lawrence, check out A Death in the Family by James Agee. It's a mid-century novel, left unfinished as the author died unexpectedly. It has a similar strand of high prose. I've never seen it discussed on Yea Forums so I like recommending it because it's something that gets missed.

I think another part of it is that he's regarded as a sort of proto-fascist.