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Lawrence saw boredom as a distinctively modern problem that grew out of a double sense of time as both empty and excessive. Identifying boredom with the masses and industrial society, however, also led him to explore how boredom extends into space. Focusing on Lawrence’s representation of the English Midlands, this article traces the effects of that spatialized boredom in various novels including Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I examine the relationship between monotony and boredom, as well as the prickly question of whether Lawrence represents the masses as subjects who experience such states or, instead, as objects who precipitate them in others. The last section considers how an alternative, and more positive, conception of monotony enters Lawrence’s depiction of the natural world but also folds back into his portrait of modern industrial monotony.

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1Like many writers and philosophers in the post-Romantic era, Lawrence regarded boredom as a distinctively modern problem that grew out of a double sense of time as both empty and excessive – an argument elaborated in a previous issue of Études Lawrenciennes by Elise Brault-Dreux. This apprehension of boredom as a function of temporality seems important for any effort to grasp literary modernism’s widespread fascination with the fate of Britain’s hereditary aristocracy between the world wars, when the upper classes seemed to be out of time, or living after their time – a sense of futility Lawrence captured at its nadir by remarking that the monarchy’s “chief function” now was “to open soup-kitchens” (LCL 157).

2But Lawrence also identified boredom with industrial society and the masses. Hovering on the horizon if not in the foreground of his fiction, the monotonous masses remain a constant presence behind his portraits of an alternative natural aristocracy. The mine, the factory, the trams and railways, the lines of streets massed amorphously over the landscape: these constitute the visible signs of boredom’s extension into space. The possibility of such extension is inscribed in the very notion of empty time: the spatial metaphor implies that one dimension may be, perhaps must be, imagined in relation to another. Just as the ticking of mechanical time haunts the “continual, slightly modified repetition… pulsing, frictional to-and-fro” of Lawrence’s style as it traverses the temporal dimension (WL 486), so too the marks of mass industrial society – its blurs and smudges, scabs and sores, plasters and patches – shadow the lines of printed text covering the pages of his books.

3Let me emphasize at the outset that my concern here is with monotony and the masses in the English Midlands as we find them in Lawrence’s English novels and stories. To state the obvious: the white (though often coal-blackened) masses encountered in that body of work are scarcely the same masses as those met in The Plumed Serpent, in which alien European culture and ideas are described as superimposed on the indigenous people of Mexico. Nor, by monotony, do I mean what we hear in Lawrence’s American writings – the “slow monotony of repetition” in the Mexican voice reading the Fourth Hymn of Quetzalcoatl, which “drift[s] darkly into the consciousness of the listeners” (PS 261), or the “endless plangent monotony” of an ancient Apache’s song expressing an “old memory” beyond the reach of the narrator’s conscious knowledge in “Indians and an Englishman” (MM 119). There is, to be sure, another story to be told about Lawrentian monotony, one that emerges in some of his descriptions of England and that resurfaces elsewhere in his observations on foreign lands. Yet, when we turn to that story briefly at the end of this article, we may feel it folding back into our tale of monotony and the masses in the industrial age.

I. Monotony in the Midlands

4Think of the “amorphous ugliness” of Beldover in the first chapter of Women in Love (11); or the “homogeneous amorphous sterility,” the “formless, squalid mass” of Wiggiston in The Rainbow (320, 324); or the “long squalid straggle” of Tevershall in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Think of the “alien, ugly little town” in “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” “clustered like smouldering ash, a tower, a spire, a heap of low, raw, extinct houses” (CSS 449), the clustering here enacted by Lawrence’s syntax. Or consider the Bottoms in Sons and Lovers:

The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’ dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby. (SL 6)

5In an earlier manuscript, before he had renamed the Breach the Bottoms, Lawrence had written:

The Breach is an oblong of miners’ dwellings, six blocks, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino. At the back of the Breach comes the scarp slope, from Eastwood town: in front the great beautiful opening of the dipslope, like the climb of a cockle shell, like a convex clamp shell sloping upward to the far-off pivot of Selston headstocks. (PM 176)

6The revision enforces a flattening of tone, a decline and fall into monotony. Instead of the explicitly “beautiful” imagery of “scarp slope” and “dipslope,” the published text offers “sharp slope” and “slow climb.” Of the manuscript’s vivid array of figures, only the simile of the blank-six domino survives to register the blank looks on the faces of the houses and their inhabitants.

7Sometimes these images of small-town tedium are enlivened by the transformative powers of perception that Lawrence bestows on his natural aristocrats – that awkward cuss Aaron Sisson, for example, who apprehends rows of miners’ houses as “something like the keyboard of a piano: more still, like a succession of musical notes” (AR 39), a striking pair of similes that registers at one stroke Aaron’s peculiar combination of visual and musical sensitivity. But beneath the surface of such synaesthetic beauty lurk the repetitive sounds and rhythms of industrial capitalist society: the monotony of the masses.

8For further illustration, let’s recall two briefly separated moments in Sons and Lovers. When Paul Morel and Clara Dawes look out from Nottingham Castle, they see this:

Away beyond the boulevard the thin stripes of the metals showed upon the railway track, whose margin was crowded with little stacks of timber, beside which smoking toy engines fussed. Then the silver string of the canal lay at random among the black heaps. Beyond, the dwellings, very dense on the river flat, looked like black, poisonous herbage, in thick rows and crowded beds, stretching right away, broken now and then by taller plants, right to where the river glistened in a hieroglyph across the country. (SL 307)

9That the town seems no more than “a little sore upon the country yet” comforts Clara, and Paul agrees that it’s just a temporary “little scab” (307). After some conversation that leaves him brooding, Paul reviews the scene “from under sullen brows”:

The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere – dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit. (309)

10The parallel passages in the earlier version published as Paul Morel in the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s works are remarkably similar, the only significant changes involving the addition of words that enhance the imagery of mysterious sacred script in the first passage (“margin”) and tragic drama in the second (“scene” instead of the original “earth” [PM 140]).

11Lawrence’s prose remains staunchly ambiguous as to the source of the change in the scene described here. Have shifting light and cloud-cover altered it to match Paul’s mood, or does the evaporation of the “little, interesting diversity of shapes” merely reflect that mood? Or are personal mood and the various external components of the scene – the masses and their environment – all gathered under the same umbrella, “one atmosphere,” illustrating the mixture of subjective and objective elements that Martin Heidegger would find in boredom, which he defined as the fundamental mood or attunement of the modern age?

12But where Heidegger’s theory of boredom prioritizes temporality, incessantly deploying spatial metaphors of expanse and horizon to advance an argument about the time of boredom, Lawrence’s writing seems (in this respect) less hierarchical in its double emphasis on the passing of time and spatial awareness, as boredom’s invasion of the scene registers itself visually. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, in the passage we are considering, boredom makes itself felt by a deepening frustration of the visual: distinctions previously remarked by the observing eye are absorbed first into one “mass” (a term with tactile as well as visual meaning) and then into “one atmosphere.” Even as it implies both concentration and diffusion, the last phrase – “one atmosphere” – merges a sense of space with an apprehension of time.

II. Monotony and Boredom

13We should pause here to consider two problems that have remained dormant in our discussion until now but that need to be addressed. Each involves an elision of differences between related terms. One of these elisions has to do with the words boredom and monotony, which I have been using interchangeably. That is, in a sense, to repeat a common feature of philosophical and theoretical discussions of boredom, which often house under one roof numerous allied though not identical words with different etymologies and implications. Or struggle not to, as for example in Patricia Meyer Spacks’s groundbreaking study of literary boredom, which tries for a distinction between nineteenth-century ennui (Baudelaire, Flaubert) and twentieth-century boredom (Lawrence, Waugh) that feels more secure conceptually than linguistically (since ennui may be translated into English either as boredom or as ennui). Boredom and ennui, as the philosopher Lars Svendsen has noted (24), “belong to a large conceptual complex with long historical roots.” The problem recurs when we examine boredom alongside monotony. Though not entering the English language until the nineteenth century, boredom was long preceded by the Anglo-Saxon verb bore, as in the act of piercing – an irruption in or through space that may also take time, indirectly evoking the long time implied by boredom’s German precursor Langweile. The advent of boredom implies that acts of boring have established a domain, or engendered a state, a condition.

14Monotony, by contrast, evokes the world of sound and therefore time: the same sound, repeated over and over. The first use of the word monotony recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary occurs in a 1636 work on The Principles of Musik; its first literary usage is credited to Alexander Pope, complaining about repetitious rhymes, in 1706. But sound is hardly confined to the temporal dimension: it was established during the Renaissance that sound moves in waves through space. And just as monotony’s root word, tone, has been applied to visual art since the early nineteenth century, so too, since the middle of the nineteenth century, have monotone and, by implication, monotony itself. In theory, then, the abstract nouns boredom and monotony may seem to refer to different dimensions, boredom suggesting mass occupying space and monotony suggesting sound traveling through time, but they prove hard to keep apart. Both words indicate forms of repetition that begin in one dimension yet solicit or encroach on another.

15Lawrence’s representation of the monotony of mass industrial society exploits precisely such mutual encroachments. In the description of Lady Chatterley’s ride to Tevershall, Lawrence stresses the oppressive monotony of town and industrialized surround by caking the scene with blackness: “blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs, […] the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black […] blackened shrubs […] black trees,” and so on, with numerous reiterations, several added in revision (LCL 152). This negation of color is associated with a “dismalness” reinforced by the rhythms of Lawrence’s sentences:

The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. (152)

16Adjectivally insistent, such writing may feel vulnerable to anti-Lawrentian complaints of rhetorical overkill, yet its extreme repetitiousness hardly conveys a single unvarying note of feeling: if Lady Chatterley’s hammering on black and blackened is meant to convey the dulling effects of industrialization, it’s hard not to sense the author’s and his heroine’s rising anger, yielding perhaps to a kind of wonder at modern humanity’s transformation of the natural world. The sense of negation expressed here doesn’t defy utterance but stimulates it, as if the language were determined to resist monotony, to loosen its grip by variations of rhythm, pitch, pace, and syntax. These variations appeal not only to our mind’s eye but also to our ear; they imply space, but they also extend through and over time.

17Expanding the Tevershall episode significantly in each version of the novel, Lawrence’s revisions heightened this dual effect of extension and recapitulation. The second Lady Chatterley prefaces Connie’s drive by remarking, “One had continually to live from one’s endurance” (FSLC 362), but in the third version we read: “One just had to live from one’s resistance” (LCL 152). Courting monotony, Lawrence’s prose seeks ways not merely to endure but to resist it. Yet, in extending the episode over several more pages, Lawrence risks sinking Connie’s car-ride into a kind of printed mud, a composition of polemical blots repeated ad nauseam that threaten to submerge the reader in the mechanical monotony of narrative voice-over:

One England blots out another. […] The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical. (LCL 156)

18Again, Lawrence’s language lets us know it knows what it’s doing. Superimposing a flat repetitive rhythm on the writerly and painterly metaphor of blotting, it lets us know, too, that it knows how, in the modern age, it is made (typewriter) and distributed (printing press). Here, literature’s capacity to foster bodily connections between author and reader, their fingertips imagined as touching in what Abbie Garrington (167-68) has described as an “haptic” intelligence of the written page, feels blunted by assimilation into industrialism – into a mechanical substitute for living continuity that the words seem aware of but cannot halt. Instead of standing out from the masses that produced him just as (Connie notes) it produced Mellors himself, the writer registers the possibility of involuntary reabsorption, which would see his delicate rhythmic and syntactic variations flattened out on the black-and-white plains of printed monotony, the words signaling not the pulse, the music, of the spoken voice but the click-click-click of the typewriter or (as in the “Aeolus” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses) the “thump, thump, thump” of the printing press (U7 101).

III. Monotony/Masses

  • 1 Discussing children’s boredom, Phillips writes that “the capacity to be bored can be a developmenta (...)

19The second elision referred to above begins in the title of this article, which indicates not only that monotony and the masses may be connected but also that monotony and the masses may be one and the same. One obvious danger is that of treating the masses as inert components of a single undifferentiated object of vision, as if monotony and the masses were, in Lawrence’s conception, identical – as if they leave the same marks, make the same sound. In employing the conjunction “and” in my title, I have tried to keep monotony and masses slightly apart while allowing for some ambiguity. So: monotony and the masses, not monotony of the masses. But I have also used the phrase “monotony of the masses,” which introduces another ambiguity. Is it that the masses are monotonous, that they embody a distinctive kind of monotony? And if distinctive, then how much: distinctive enough not to be monotonous? Or do the masses themselves experience monotony, implying first that the masses do have some agency or distinct identity, and second that their monotony may yield different tones, shades, even colors? Are the masses, in Lawrence, merely the irreducible sign of an irreducible monotony, or are they capable of feeling it – or achieving it, as boredom’s psychoanalyst Adam Phillips would say?1 Are they just boring, or are they themselves bored?

20In Don Juan, Byron famously described “Society” as “one polish’d horde, / Form’d of two mighty Tribes, the Bores and Bored” (789). By “Society,” Byron meant the ruling classes, of course, and it goes without saying that he numbered himself among the “Bored.” Are Lawrence’s monotonous masses susceptible of similar division? If so, would that be a matter of dividing the masses into one lumpen tribe of bores ranged against another tribe of the bored, or are the bored but a motley assortment of discrete individuals – proletarian counterparts to Byron’s bored lords? Or does the capacity for feeling bored inevitably separate a Lawrence character from the horde, like Ursula Brangwen – taunted as “Proud-arse” by her pupils – in The Rainbow (367)? Does the capacity for boredom inevitably propel one upward in Lawrence’s scale of values? Or, at any rate, outward?

21When Lawrence writes in The Rainbow that Ursula sees the town and its inhabitants as “nothing, nothing,” he registers this very sense of self-separation as the necessary reflex of the natural aristocrat surrounded by industrial modernity’s “dummies” in “civic uniform” (415). But Ursula herself never is one of the masses: her recoil from the monotony of the masses signals a sense of spiritual distinction, accompanied here by a long familial process of upward social mobility initiated by Tom Brangwen’s marriage to his Polish lady, so that by the time she goes to college she feels justified in imagining herself as “one of the elect” (398). And then, bored at college by every subject except Botany, she realizes that what she wants is that “glimpse of something working entirely apart from the purpose of the human world” (404), as if questions of social class or caste might drop out. Some such transformation seems to occur in Ursula’s final vision at the end of the novel:

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. (458-59)

22This, however, is very much Ursula’s vision, hers and her creator’s; it isn’t shared by the townsfolk except as imagined in her mind and conjured by his language, and there’s no question here of voluntary immersion in the world of the masses.

23Other novels play out distinct variations on this theme, enacting on the larger scale of Lawrence’s oeuvre the characteristic local pattern of his paragraphs, with their variations on statement, restatement, reversal, and counter-reversal, their syntax of and, and, but, but. The ending of Sons and Lovers had already sketched a version of the aristocratic self’s relation to the masses quite different from Ursula’s at the end of The Rainbow. Adrift after his mother’s death in the “endless space” of town and country, Paul finds in the people he sees on the streets “no obstruction to the void in which he found himself,” but instead, “in each of them the same night, the same silence” (SL 473). As for Paul himself, Lawrence writes: “on every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. […] So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing” (473). But then, refusing to surrender to grief for his mother, he turns “sharply” and walks “towards the city’s gold phosphorescence […] towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly” (474). Here, perhaps, is singularity’s determined reabsorption, though on altered terms, into the scene of the masses: this novel’s last answer to its earlier sullen-mooded merging of an “interesting diversity of shapes” into “one atmosphere, dark, brooding and sorrowful” (309). The transformation of the gloomy monotonous town into “gold phosphorescence” effects verbally what Lawrence would later describe as the “joyful discovery” of light by the Impressionist painters, who by such means had “escaped from the tyranny of solidity and the menace of mass-form” (P1 563). This transformation is itself released from any new solidity or stasis sheltering under the abstract Latinate noun “phosphorescence” by the conjoined participial adjectives of the novel’s final sentence, “humming, glowing,” which quicken together the sound and scene of monotony, the sound and scene of the masses, fusing them in one unfinished process.

24And yet we only have to think of the snowbound finale of Women in Love to realize how Lawrence would cancel not only Paul’s final vision in Sons and Lovers but also its revision, its part-cancellation, at the end of The Rainbow. If Paul’s voluntary reabsorption in the “gold phosphorescence” of a “humming, glowing” Nottingham (SL 474) issues in Ursula’s removal to a vantage that allows her to imagine a new “living fabric of Truth” (R 459), Women in Love exacts bitter revenge, first by extracting its entire leading quartet (including Ursula) from English society and then by submitting them to the abstract monotony of the Alps: a monochrome world of whiteness that reflects its dissolving light back onto the scenes of monotony and the masses in the two previous English novels. The negation of a negation of a negation, the final act of Women in Love reimposes the “sullen mood” of Paul’s brooding picture of “one atmosphere” in the middle of Sons and Lovers (309).

25And then, in Kangaroo, Lawrence has barely relaunched the self in the New World before confronting another iteration of English society, another undifferentiated mass of repetition and monotony, superficially more affluent and mobile, but really little more than confirmation of what he had already seen in the “conglomerate mass” of postwar England (P1 650). Describing Somers’s first view of Sydney’s Murdoch Street, Lawrence writes: “And there went the long street, like a child’s drawing, the little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and yet apart, like modern democracy” (K 11). Dot-dot-dot: pictured dots, or printed dots, marking an ellipsis, a yawning gap in the modern soul, the space of monotony. Monotony and the masses.

IV. Coal Age Monotony

26What we have been considering in these pages might be characterized as the bad monotony of industrial modernity. In contrast, some of Lawrence’s descriptions of the natural world disclose a different form of monotony. We might call it good monotony, but as we listen for it in these closing paragraphs, we must ask how good. In Sons and Lovers, this natural monotony makes itself felt in Lawrence’s description of England’s North Sea coast. Paul “loved the Lincolnshire coast,” we learn, and with Clara he looks “round at the endless monotony of levels, the land a little darker than the sky, the sea sounding small beyond the sandhills” (SL 402). Paul feels refortified, “his heart filled strong with the sweeping relentlessness of life” (402), and begins to detach from Clara; when they return to the coast, monotony shows itself again, but now it resists any move toward self-differentiation. Paul’s mother is fatally ill but she refuses (as he puts it) to let him go, and this unrelenting sense of maternal embrace rewrites the scene: reshapes it, recolors it. “Don’t those windmill sails look monotonous?” Paul asks (437). His own voice sinks into monotony, as if competing with the sound of the “black, heavy sea” (437), and Clara too feels “the black, re-echoing shore, the dark sky down on her” (438). Now the natural world sounds as black as it looks, as black as Paul’s own mood. Dark feels synonymous with black, identical to it. Monotony, in other words, goes bad again.

  • 2 I’m grateful to Ginette Roy for reminding me of this passage.

27In Kangaroo, in a passage that seems to echo those Lincolnshire reflections even as it answers back to the view of Sydney’s suburbia that we noted above, the good monotony of the natural world seems to reassert itself. But in addition to asking how good is this monotony, we must also wonder how distinct from the bad monotony of industrial modernity it looks when viewed in the longer, geological perspective summoned by Lawrence’s narrative. Gazing inland from the shore, Somers remarks “a weird scene, full of definite detail, fascinating detail, yet all in the funeral-grey monotony of the bush” (K 87), as if it’s possible to appreciate the “subtle, remote, formless beauty” of this landscape only “when you don’t have the feeling of ugliness or monotony” (77). Later, though, monotony is associated with the “[s]trange old feelings […] old, non-human feelings” evoked by a sudden apprehension of a “previous world! – the world of the coal age” (178).2 Such is Somers’s response to seeing vegetation massed along the cliffs that line the Australian coast. As historical experience gives way to a sense of geological time, Somers intuits “an old, old indifference, like a torpor […] An old, saurian torpor […] darkened, wide-eyed torpor” (178). Lawrence’s hero reflects:

Worlds come, and worlds go: even worlds. And when the old, old influence of the fern-world comes over a man, how can he care? […] Even the never-slumbering urge of sex sinks down into something darker, more monotonous, incapable of caring: like sex in trees. The dark world before conscious responsibility was born. (178)

28Not black or blackened, but dark, darker, darkened, implying extent and depth rather than simple flatness; shading and variation, not encroaching uniformity. In Lawrence’s New World, a sense of old-world monotony proliferates, pluralizes. But it rounds on itself too. The coal age: the non-human, the prehistoric; modernity’s opposite, but finally the origin also of our industrial species. The coal age: modernity’s inversion, its mirror-image.

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Bibliographie

Brault-Dreux, Élise. “Modern Boredom: Subjective Distortions of Time in D.H. Lawrence’s Work,” in Études Lawrenciennes, vol. 48, 2017. https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/282

Byron, Lord. The Major Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Garrington, Abbie. Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Heidegger, Martin. Four Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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Lawrence, D.H. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (K)

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Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. (R)

Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. Ed. David Trotter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. (SL)

Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (WL)

Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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Notes

1 Discussing children’s boredom, Phillips writes that “the capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child” (69).

2 I’m grateful to Ginette Roy for reminding me of this passage.

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Adam Parkes, « Monotony and the Masses »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 54 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 10 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3144 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.3144

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Auteur

Adam Parkes

Adam Parkes is Professor of English at the University of Georgia in the U.S. His publications include Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (Oxford UP, 1996), which features two chapters on Lawrence, and A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford, 2011). He is now writing a book titled Monsters of English Privilege, which examines modernist representations of a declining British aristocracy by such authors as Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Lawrence. He currently serves as President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America and Second Vice-President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA).

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