Volume 11, Number 2 · August 1, 1968
From Some Ashes No Bird Rises
By William H. Gass
Phoenix and Phoenix II
by D.H. Lawrence, by Viking
Phoenix II, 640 pp., $12.50
It was a miserable war, a dirty war, a war fought low in the loins, in his tubercular chest, in the loving, bitter household of himself, the pits, in the flame he liked to fancy was an image of all honest healthy phallic life; his sharply burning beard and head circumnavigated in Brett's paintings of him by a wake of holy light or by the ship of death—it was hard, sometimes, to tell which. 'Savage,' he said (he and Henry Savage were sitting on the edge of a Kent cliff, and Lawrence was striking his chest), 'I've something here that is heavier than concrete. If I don't get it out it will kill me.' It was Lawrence, of course, who was in there, glaring past the ribs like Rilke's panther past its bars, and there were always other bars before him, colliery chimneys and mother's arms, banning judges, timid editors, tea-cup society, sycophants and sucking friends, abundant Frieda…the menacing female monolith.
Review, 3060 words
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