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Listening to Studies in Classic American Literature

Keith Cushman

Résumé

This article argues that the final version of Studies in Classic American Literature is performative and meant to be “heard.” Building on Marjorie Perloff’s essay from the mid-80s on the performative quality of the Birds, Beasts and Flowers poems, I discuss the sonic quality of Lawrence’s writing which features prancing, loud-as-can-be capital letters, for instance. I compare the first version of the Franklin essay with the final version—and also the “intermediate” version of “Whitman” (1919) with the final version. They both began as rather academic essays but the many revisions make the imagined voice of the author somehow audible throughout. The aural quality and style of the essays certainly disconcerted some reviewers of the book: “If upon the subject properly in hand he writes like a man of insight and a clever workman with the edged tools of language, the next sentence might often be composed by a gum-chewing Main Street soda-fountain cut-up or a blear-eyed, bar-room bum.”

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1In 1879 Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest and radically innovative poet, wrote his fellow poet, Robert Bridges, in response to criticism of his lengthy poem, “The Loss of the Eurydice.” In the letter Hopkins reflected on the nature of reading:

I opened and read some lines, reading, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right. (Qtd. in Leighton 1)

2Of course, Gerard Manley Hopkins is supremely a poet to be “read with the ears”:

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle!

3Hopkins’s realization about his poem anticipates what contemporary theorists have argued about the reading experience. In Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter J. Ong observes that “‘[r]eading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination” (8).

4Angela Leighton observes in Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018) that

if actual sound is itself a transient passenger, invisible and always to be interpreted by the ear, how much more acute is the strange interpretability of sound in the written word, the ghost effects of which are built into its workings. For all reading is a matter of hearing things […] (Leighton 5)

5Capitalizing on an academic trend, the interdisciplinary journal Sound Studies has been with us since 2015.

6In this paper I will argue that reading Studies in Classic American Literature is significantly an experience of delighted listening. Needless to say, if one acknowledges that “all reading is a matter of hearing things,” then, in some way, we “hear” anything written by D.H. Lawrence and everyone else. My point is that a reader requires no knowledge of reading theory to recognize that the imagined voice of the author comes out especially loud and clear throughout Studies in Classic American Literature. It is as if Lawrence has written the Studies essays to be somehow audible. I will be comparing the Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman essays in Studies with the earliest surviving versions of those two essays. “Benjamin Franklin” and “Whitman” are the most dramatic examples of Lawrence’s transformation of the Studies essays into essays that we distinctly hear as we read. These two essays are the show pieces of Studies in Classic American Literature.

7As early as October 1915, Lawrence was talking about traveling to America. He wrote Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, that he “must see America”: “I think that there the life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying” (2L 417). Late in 1916 he informed Catherine Carswell that he wanted “immediately or at length, to transfer all my life to America,” where “the skies are not so old, the air is newer, the earth is not tired” (3L 25). In January 1917 he wrote J.B. Pinker, his agent in Britain, that he wanted “to go to America. It is necessary now for me to address a new public.” He had already “got in [his] head a set of essays, or lectures, on Classic American Literature” (3L 73). In 1917 and 1918 he wrote and revised a series of twelve essays on American authors from Franklin to Whitman, eight of which were published in the English Review between November 1918 and June 1919. “Whitman” was one of the four essays that the English Review did not publish.

8Mark Kinkead-Weekes describes the difference between the English Review essays and their final revisions:

Readers who know [Studies in Classic American Literature] only from the much later 1922 rewriting will be surprised at how much more literary and exploratory the first versions are, how much closer to the texts and how different in tone, without the combative and dogmatic brio of a later Lawrence for whom America had become a very different firsthand experience. (Kinkead-Weekes 439)

9I would add that the English Review essays seem not only “literary and exploratory” but often rather academic as well. The notorious author of a banned novel is presenting himself as a sober-minded intellectual communicating serious ideas about a body of literature that heretofore had not been taken seriously.

10The final version of Studies is more aggressive in manner. It abandons nearly all of what Lawrence called its “esotericism” (4L 365) while also becoming more critical of American culture. Nevertheless, all things considered, I believe that the Studies in Classic American Literature essays differ more strikingly from their 1917-1919 precursors in style rather than content. That includes the fact that the experience of reading Studies has become something like hearing it out loud. In introducing “combative and dogmatic brio” into the essays as Lawrence revised them one last time, he was “Americanising” (4L 338) them and making them “much sharper, quicker” (4L 342). In late November 1922 he warned his American agent Robert Mountsier, “You may think them too violent now, to print. Anyhow they are the first reaction on me of America itself” (4L 343). “They’ll no doubt horrify you,” he wrote Mountsier two weeks later. “But then you’ll see their form is now final. Bed-rock” (4L 358-359). He had at last captured “the American Demon” (4L 345).

11At Christmas 1916, Lawrence’s American friend—and future American agent—Robert Mountsier and Esther Andrews visited him and Frieda in Cornwall. During that visit Lawrence told Mountsier about his desire to relocate in America and his plan to write a series of essays about American authors. As a result of his visit, on 4 January 1917 Lawrence sent Mountsier (who was back in London) a list of Everyman’s Library titles that he wanted Mountsier to send him for the project. Emerson’s Essays, Lincoln’s Speeches, and The Federalist Papers would not make it into Studies. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass of course would.

12Critics have described Lawrence’s idiosyncratic style in Studies in Classic American Literature in an intriguing variety of ways. We have already encountered Mark Kinkead-Weekes’s “combative and dogmatic brio.” A few generations ago, Harry T. Moore in The Priest of Love casually described Studies as “profound, if often casual” (321). To David Ellis in D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game, Lawrence’s “wholly altered manner” consists of “racy, colloquial aggression” (76). John Worthen in D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider refers to the book’s “new, punchy, hard-hitting style, which [Lawrence] developed as peculiarly appropriate to North America” (276). In The Life of D.H. Lawrence Andrew Harrison describes the style of the Studies essays as “more barbed and satirical” (250) than that of the earlier versions. But it is Anaïs Nin who long ago anticipated contemporary sound theory in her admiring, very personal pioneering book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, published in 1932. In her chapter titled “Language—Style—Symbolism” she observes that in language “Lawrence was prolific and varied.” She devotes one sentence to Studies in Classic American Literature, which she describes as “syncopated, with megaphonic insertions” (Nin 73). Nin hears the book as she reads it, and so do we.

13Before I begin my discussion of how Lawrence’s revision of “Benjamin Franklin” and “Whitman” made the essays much more audible, I need to point out a curious feature of three of the Studies essays. Critics have seemingly overlooked the surprising fact that nearly half the Poe essay is almost word for word identical to the English Review text, which had been published in April 1919. The Two Years Before the Mast and Moby-Dick essays had never been published. In October 1919 Lawrence sent the earliest surviving texts of these essays to the publisher Benjamin Huebsch, who had expressed interest in the book. These 1919 versions of the Dana and Moby-Dick essays became the Studies in Classic American Literature essays, almost word for word except for new beginnings and endings that Lawrence added to align the essays more clearly with the book. These two essays plus the Poe essay all include very lengthy quotations, taken verbatim from the earlier versions.

14Because Lawrence never revised a good deal of the Poe essay or nearly all of the two other essays, these three pieces of the book are rather different from everything else. “Benjamin Franklin” is about Franklin rather than Franklin’s Autobiography, his contribution to classic American literature. Lawrence’s harshly critical, often derisive portrait of the beloved Founding Father must have been especially startling to American readers. “Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin” (SCAL 24) is a rationalist who compiles a list of “virtues in columns” and gives “himself good and bad marks according as he thought his behaviour deserved” (SCAL 23). Lawrence associates Franklin with American materialism, complacency, conformity, and hypocrisy. He refers to Franklin as “Most moral Benjamin” immediately before quoting an extensive passage from the Autobiography in which Franklin, sent “to settle some disturbance among the Indians,” concludes that it might be “the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth” (SCAL 25). Lawrence admires Franklin for his accomplishments, but nevertheless, he “can’t stand” (SCAL 28) him.

15The English Review version of “Benjamin Franklin” appeared in the journal in December 1918. Some well-known segments of this version of the essay made their way into the Studies text in revised form. But a good deal of the English Review essay has little to do with Franklin. Approximately 40% of the essay is given over to Lawrence’s familiar pseudo-philosophizing of this period. For example, “Central is the mystery of Now, the creative mystery, what we have called the Godhead. It pulses for ever, in the motion of creation, drawing all things towards itself” (SCAL 182).

16Both versions of “Benjamin Franklin” begin with detailed consideration of the question of human perfectibility. Here is the opening of the English Review text:

The idea of the perfectibility of man, which was such an inspiration in Europe, to Rousseau and Godwin and Shelley, all those idealists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was actually fulfilled in America before the idea was promulgated in Europe. If we sift the descriptions of the “Perfect Man,” and accept the chief features of this ideal being, keeping only to what is possible, we shall find we have the abstract of a character such as Benjamin Franklin’s.
A man whose passions are the obedient servants of his mind, a man whose sole ambition is to live for the bettering and advancement of his fellows, a man of such complete natural benevolence that the interests of self never obtrude in his works or his desires—such was to be the Perfect Man of the Future, in the Millennium of the world. And such a man was Benjamin Franklin, in the actual America. (SCAL 180)

17Notice the self-consciously academic manner of these paragraphs. Wordiness is part of that manner: the first paragraph contains 80 words in two sentences, the second paragraph begins with a 63-word sentence. Notice the formal parallel constructions beginning with the words “a man.” Notice the reliance on Latinate words, most notably “benevolence” and the fancy “promulgated” and “obtrude.” Compare those two paragraphs with the exuberant, performative, very noisy opening of “Benjamin Franklin” in Studies:

The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance.
Education! Which of the various me’s do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress?
Anyhow I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress me, according to your dummy standards.
The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz?
There are other men in me, besides the patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience? (SCAL 20)

18Instead of two rather labored paragraphs we have five brief, racily energetic paragraphs. The two opening paragraphs in the English Review text and these five short paragraphs occupy the same fifteen lines in the Cambridge Edition, but vive la différence!

19Both texts begin with the concept of human perfectibility—pompously expressed in the English Review essay, playfully expressed in the Studies essay. We hear the Studies essay because the author is talking directly to us in very down-to-earth language. The language is also interrogatory (nine sentences ask us questions) and exclamatory (five end with an exclamation point). The first two paragraphs of the English Review opening culminate with Benjamin Franklin. In Studies Franklin first appears in the brief fourth paragraph as part of a quartet along with Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz.

20The Studies text adds ten more lines with six more questions before emphatically resolving Franklin’s connection to the idea of perfectibility. The author asks in the sixth additional question, “Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?” And then comes the slangy answer: “Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American” (SCAL 20).

21“Such a man was Benjamin Franklin” has sneeringly become “Old Daddy Franklin will tell you.” Surely, Lawrence enjoyed writing in the playful, energetic manner of the Studies essay more than he enjoyed being the sober-sided author of the English Review essay.

22Lawrence includes Franklin’s six-point creed early in both essays. In the English Review text the six points appear in quotation marks, one immediately after another, followed by several paragraphs of commentary. The first of these paragraphs consists of one 89-word sentence. The English Review essay then lurches into several pages of pseudo-philosophizing that Lawrence would eliminate from Studies.

23The critique of Franklin’s creed in the English Review essay is abstract and impersonal. For example, “The religious truth is the same now as it ever has been: that preceding all our knowledge or will or effort is the central creative mystery, out of which issues the strange and for ever unaccountable emanation of creation.” (SCAL 182). But in the Studies revision Lawrence is not only the author but also something of an active participant. He presents himself as a man with an antithetical set of values to Franklin’s. He interjects his own ironically voiced critique of each point. For example, after Franklin’s first point, “That there is one God, who made all things,” Lawrence comments, “(But Benjamin made Him.)” After “That the soul is immortal,” Lawrence interjects, clearly speaking to us, “(You’ll see why, in the next clause.)” When he refers to Franklin in three of his six interjections, he disrespectfully refers to him as “Benjamin.” Lawrence, a strong presence in the Studies essay, is also a strong voice.

24Both versions of the essay include Franklin’s list of 13 virtues, from TEMPERANCE to HUMILITY. Only in Studies does Lawrence, playing the role of the anti-Franklin, indulge in the “fun” of playing “at Benjamin” (SCAL 26) by providing his own counter-list. For example, Franklin’s instruction for SILENCE is “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation” (SCAL 22). Lawrence counters this with “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot” (SCAL 27). Can we hear Lawrence saying it hot when he advises us to “say it hot?”

25Near the end of the Studies “Benjamin Franklin” Lawrence raises the volume with words all in capital letters plus two exclamation points. His language is aggressively colloquial as he complains that Benjamin is effectively saying that “if I don’t get my wages here below—that is, if Mr Pierpont Morgan or Mr Nosey Hebrew or the grand United States Government, the great US, US or SOMEOFUS, manages to scoop in my bit along with their lump—why, never mind, I shall get my wages HEREAFTER.” Lawrence has had enough: “Oh Benjamin! Oh Binjum! You do NOT suck me in any longer” (SCAL 29).

26We do not know why Austin Harrison, editor of the English Review, published only eight of the original twelve essays Lawrence submitted to the journal in the autumn of 1918. In any event Lawrence believed that the Whitman essay was too controversial to be published, no doubt because of its treatment of homosexuality (SCAL xxxvii). As late as September 1919, he told the American publisher Benjamin Huebsch, who was interested in Studies, that “no one has seen the essay on Whitman—no one in the world” (3L 400). That version does not survive. The earliest surviving text of “Whitman” collected in the Cambridge Edition is the revised “Intermediate Version assembled and sent to Huebsch in 1919.” The Whitman essay in this version still includes material concerning the “fundament” (as well as the vagina) and discusses the “last perfect balance […] between two men, in whom the deepest sensual centres vibrate in one circuit” (SCAL 366). Lawrence cut this material from Studies in Classic American Literature.

27The beginning of what I’ll call the Huebsch version quickly lapses into a lengthy paragraph about the “chakras” (SCAL 358), material that Lawrence would eliminate. He then quotes three lines from Leaves of Grass in which Whitman “embraces all things into a oneness with himself” (SCAL 359):

I am he that aches with amorous love;
Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know. (SCAL 359)

28Lawrence devotes much of this early version of the Whitman essay to analyzing the poet’s “accession into wholeness, his knowledge in full” (SCAL 359). In rather abstract language and at length he argues the pluses and minuses of “universal sympathy, merging” (SCAL 360). Whitman achieves “man’s maximum state of consciousness,” which seems to be a good thing unless you are someone “who does not find his reality in Allness or infinitude” and are “tempted to find Whitman a humbug” (SCAL 359). The chakras reappear: “the great appetites of the hypogastric plexus, the great corresponding will of the sacral ganglion must be conquered” (SCAL 362). Ben Huebsch passed on this version of Studies in Classic American Literature.

29Lawrence’s transformation of the Huebsch version for Studies in Classic American Literature is especially dramatic. After a few sentences introducing the “good gray poet” (SCAL 148), he launches into an aggressively loud performance, loaded with words all in capital letters and replete with exclamation points:

DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS! ONE IDENTITY! ONE IDENTITY!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE!
Do you believe me, when I say post mortem effects? (SCAL 148)

30Lawrence is only getting started when it comes to exclamatory and capital-letter mockery. This opening section of “Whitman” reads like a comedy routine that Lawrence is having a very good time performing:

I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalisation. First uncomfortable universalisation. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh god! Better a belly-ache. A belly-ache is at least specific. But the ACHE of AMOROUS LOVE! (SCAL 148)

31Next we hear the voice of a parent or schoolmaster, taking Whitman to task:

I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHUCHUCHUCHUCHUFFFF!
Reminds me of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They’re the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. (SCAL 149)

32It is impossible to read this performative, very funny passage, filled with words all in capital letters, without hearing the voice of the author.

33Lawrence devotes most of the first half of the Studies “Whitman” to his criticism of the poet’s adherence to merging: “embrac[ing] ALL” and “weav[ing] all things into [him]self” (SCAL 150). He sprinkles occasional words all in capital letters throughout the essay. We hear the author in his chiding, conversational style: “Oh Walter Walter, what […] have you done with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe” (SCAL 150).

34Perhaps surprisingly, in the end “[t]his awful Whitman,” a “rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity” (SCAL 151) turns out to be “a very great poet” who “has meant so much to me” (SCAL 155). Lawrence concludes “Whitman” and Studies in Classic American Literature with a ringing celebration of the promise of America, based on the “exultance” of Whitman’s “message” (SCAL 161): “Purified of MERGING, purified of MYSELF, the exultant message of American Democracy, of souls in the Open Road, full of glad recognition, full of fierce readiness” (SCAL 161).

35In arguing that Lawrence has substantially increased the volume of his essays on American authors in his final revision for publication in Studies in Classic American Literature, I have focused on the most exuberant and performative parts of the Franklin and Whitman essays. But we hear Lawrence as we read Studies throughout the book. Even in passages that lack words all in capital letters and exclamatory sentences, Lawrence’s racy, slangy, down-to-earth style seems audible.

36The Hawthorne essay published in the English Review in May 1919 contains language like this:

Parallel to this, the reasoning mind starts from the great cosmic theories of the ancient world, and proceeds, by a progress in particularisation, to establish great laws, physical and ethical, then to discover the exact and minute scientific relation between particular bodies or substances and the great laws, and finally to gain an inkling of the connection between scientific reality and creative, personal reality. (SCAL 243)

37That 64-word sentence aims to illuminate The Scarlet Letter. So does this sentence: “All thought, and mental cognition is but a sublimation of the great primary, sensual knowledge located in the tissues of the physique, and centred in the nervous ganglia” (SCAL 241). Compare those sentences from the English Review text to this passage from the made-for-America text in Studies:

Oh Hester, you are a demon. A man must be pure, just that you can seduce him to a fall. Because the greatest thrill in life is to bring down the sacred saint with a flop into the mud. Then when you’ve brought him down, humbly wipe off the mud with your hair, another Magdalen. And then go home and dance a witches jig of triumph, and stitch yourself a Scarlet Letter with gold thread, as duchesses used to stitch themselves coronets. (SCAL 86)

38In the English Review essay Lawrence always refers to the novelist as “Hawthorne” (SCAL 243, 244). In Studies in Lawrence’s jokey, performative style he becomes a “blue-eyed darling” and “that blue-eyed Wunderkind of a Nathaniel” (SCAL 81, 95). As “Nathaniel,” he “warbles,” “Be good! Be good! (SCAL 82).

39As the editors of the Cambridge Edition of Studies in Classic American Literature point out, “the proof of [the book’s] ability to call attention to itself was in the quick, vociferous reaction it prompted in the American literary press” (SCAL lx). Not surprisingly, most American reviewers didn’t know what to make of such an unusual, unorthodox critical study. Some reviewers were offended by an English writer—definitely an outsider—daring to present his opinions on American literature. A reviewer in Current Opinion said that “Mr Lawrence is not so much concerned with the writers in themselves as he is with the opportunities they afford for the discussion and elucidation of his own philosophy” (SCAL lxi).

40Raymond Weaver, the author of a Melville biography that Lawrence had read before finishing his revisions of his Melville essay, stated bluntly that Lawrence’s “ignorance of American literature is comprehensive and profound” (SCAL lxi). Many reviewers commented on the highly idiosyncratic style of Studies in Classic American Literature. Brock in The New York Times Book Review admired Lawrence’s critical insights, which he found to be “arresting, illuminating, often the truth—or very near it.” But he had a complicated opinion of Lawrence’s style: “If upon the subject properly in hand he writes like a man of insight and a clever workman with the edge tools of language, the next sentence might often be composed by a gum-chewing Main Street soda-fountain cut-up or a blear-eyed, bar-room bum” (SCAL lxii). The implication of Brock’s assessment of the style of Studies is clear. We recognize the “gum-chewing soda-fountain cut-up” and the “bar-room bum” because we hear their voices.

41Stuart P. Sherman, a distinguished English professor at the University of Illinois, wrote perhaps the most interesting review of Studies. At about the same time that Lawrence was completing his revisions of Studies, he reviewed Sherman’s book, Americans. Franklin, Hawthorne, and Whitman all figure prominently in Americans. Lawrence composed his review of Sherman’s book in the style of Studies in Classic American Literature: “Well, there is Professor Sherman’s dish of cookies which he bids you eat and have. An awfully sweet book, all about having your cookies and eating ‘em” (IR 227).

42Stuart Sherman returned the favor by reviewing Studies in Classic American Literature in the New York Evening Post Literary Review issue of 20 October 1923. In his lengthy, insightful, rather elegant review, Sherman describes Lawrence—not pejoratively—as a “philosophic cave-man” and also says that Lawrence is “an ‘interesting’ fellow, perceptive, receptive, inquisitive, sincere, violent, and vengeful” (Draper 208, 212). But I am most taken with Sherman’s perception that the “style which ‘the greatest of living English writers’ employs to address his American audience” demonstrates that he is “resolved to be a genuine Americano” (Draper 208):

Something of a linguist, he has attempted to master the idiom and actually to write his book in the vernacular. A critic to the manner born […] may justly complain that his idiom is by no means flawless; yet to the uncensorious native there is a subtle flattery in hearing the loved accents of the mother tongue slipping so nonchalantly from the lips of a gifted alien. (Draper 208)

43In 1923 Stuart P. Sherman was both reading and listening to Studies in Classic American Literature. And that’s what we all do when we read this neglected masterpiece a century later.

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Bibliographie

Draper, R.P., ed. D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

Ellis, David. D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Harrison, Andrew. The Life of D.H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Lawrence, D.H. Introductions and Reviews. Ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Leighton, Angela. Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Moore, Harry T. The Priest of Love: A Life of D.H. Lawrence. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1974.

Nin, Anaïs. D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1932.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982.

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Keith Cushman, « Listening to Studies in Classic American Literature »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 57 | 2025, mis en ligne le 24 novembre 2025, consulté le 08 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/4153 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/158n7

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Keith Cushman

Keith Cushman is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published forty essays and seven books about Lawrence. He is a recipient of the Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Contributions to Lawrence studies. He first attended the Nanterre Lawrence conference in 1988 when some of the papers were presented in French.

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