D.H.
Lawrence was not yet thirty when he wrote the following to an editor
who'd rejected his third novel, Sons
and Lovers:
Curse
the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling
invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the
sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up
England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers.
God blast them, wishwash. Exterminate them, slime.
If
not the precise vocabulary, certainly the same apocalyptic sentiment
exhorted by the Book of Revelation, which, in fact, he calls
“Apocalypse” in the testament he wrote sixteen years later during
the final months of his life. Clearly not a writer to mince words,
Lawrence tackles Christianity with a passion equally furious to what he
displayed for the editor who'd informed him his publisher feared the
public would find unacceptable the novel's “want of reticence.”
He
states his bias flat out in the first several paragraphs of
Apocalypse,
noting that he'd been douched
with the Bible growing up so
that
I
need only begin to read a chapter to realize I “know” it with an
almost nauseating fixity. And I must confess, my first reaction is
one of dislike, repulsion, and even resentment. My very instincts
resent
the Bible.
