‘The Lawrence problem’

It seems that everyone, or everyone of a certain age at least, has had experience of Lawrence. For many, their first experience of Lawrence comes in adolescence or early adulthood, in a setting fraught by the most personal of questions. Who am I, sexually speaking? What am I in the cosmic scheme of things? Lawrence's books ask such questions and often pose extremes as answers. So that everyone feels the need, at the outset, either to like him or to dislike him. There are other writers who produce a similar effect (one thinks, for example, of Lawrence's contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), but there are many more who do not. For we are talking, clearly, about more than just a literary judgement, though it may be partly that. We are talking about a judgement of the man, or rather of the man's effect on our life, and of a reaction that is almost visceral.