D. H. Lawrence’s decline in popularity in the years after his death, Frances Wilson argues in The New Yorker, is the result of F. R. Leavis’s elevation of him as novelist at the expense of his work as a travel writer or poet, thus making a wide-ranging, eclectic if uneven writer look monochrome:

Starched and stiffened, Lawrence was duly placed in Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’ alongside Jane Austen, Henry James, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis had no interest in the many-tentacled eccentric whose first published works were lyric poems and whose final book, Apocalypse, was a critique of the Book of Revelation. Leavis’s Lawrence was a novelist, period—hence the dictatorial title of his 1955 study, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. From now on, there would be no more D. H. Lawrence the travel writer, naturalist, short-story writer, poet, critic, essayist, dramatist, or philosopher. Having cauterized him once, Leavis cauterized him again: the canonical Lawrence was not the author of many uneven novels, which made sense only in relation to one another, but of two major works: The Rainbow and Women in Love. Leavis consigned the rest of Lawrence’s œuvre to the periphery, where it has mostly remained ever since.

In other news:  François Pinault’s “long-awaited private museum,” Bourse de Commerce, to open in January. “Spanning more than 113,000 square feet, the Bourse de Commerce will be the biggest of the three museums operated by Pinault. It is set inside a former stock exchange, and it has been designed by Tadao Ando, who has also overseen the architecture for the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth in Texas and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan.”

David Hockney is living in northern France and loving it. (Remember, he left L.A. last year because it was becoming impossible to smoke in the States.) He has been working on a series of paintings that will go on display later this month at Paris’s Galerie Lelong. Charlie Scheips surveys: “David Hockney trusts his instincts. In 2018, while in London to unveil his Westminster Abbey windows in honor of the Queen, Hockney decided he needed a break. He and his longtime assistant, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima (J.P.), escaped to Honfleur on the coast of Normandy. Besides the appealing prospect of a few days of rest and good food, Hockney was on a mission: he wanted to revisit Queen Matilda’s 11th-century tapestry at nearby Bayeux. Hockney found what he was searching for. It confirmed his hunch that the enormous 230-foot-long embroidered cloth was actually an anomaly in the history of Western picture-making. Not only does the tapestry vividly chronicle the two-year-long Norman conquest of England—which culminated with the Battle of Hastings, in 1066—it does so, Hockney realized, without using shadows or reflections. For Hockney, the Bayeux tapestry had more in common with Chinese scroll painting (also devoid of shadow and reflection) than with Western image-making. Hockney saw that one had to ‘read’ the tapestry in time and in sections—just as one unfurls a scroll.”

Kay Ryan’s essays: “On becoming Poet Laureate in 2008, Kay Ryan was asked what put her in the mood to write. ‘Anything that smacks of usefulness is off-limits,’ she replied. ‘Essentially, I read literary essays.’ Her own essays on literature are so deliriously good, so in excess of usefulness, that they’re often on their way to poetry.”

HarperCollins and Fox News launch a new imprint—Fox News Books: “HarperCollins’ Broadside Books will oversee the publishing arrangement. Fox News personalities like Bret Baier, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Martha MacCallum have already published prominent books, but the goal is to create a more dedicated publishing venue for Fox talent.”

Louise Glück speaks to The New York Times about winning the Nobel Prize: “This morning I got a phone call at something like quarter to seven. I was just awake. A man who introduced himself as the secretary of the Swedish Academy, he said, ‘I’m calling to tell you you’ve won the Nobel Prize.’ I can’t remember what I said, but it had some suspicion in it. I think I was unprepared . . . It doesn’t make sense. Now my street is covered with journalists. People keep telling me how humble I am. I’m not humble. But I thought, I come from a country that is not thought fondly of now, and I’m white, and we’ve had all the prizes. So it seemed to be extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life.”

What should we make of the Vikings? “They were the most extraordinary seamen and adventurers of all time, but their cruelty equally defies belief.”

Stefan Beck reviews Phil Klay’s debut novel Missionaries: “It’s strange to say of a book in which a character gets tied to a piano and cut in half with a chainsaw that it is in many instances a quietly psychological production, but there you have it. One is reminded of what Graham Greene, a writer who would have admired Klay’s grasp of both political turmoil and man’s fallen nature, told an interviewer who suggested that his recent play privileged dialogue over action: ‘I confined myself to one set and I made my characters act, one upon the other. What other sort of action can you have?’”

Photo: Lutheran Parish Church of Hallstatt

Poem: Alex Barr, “Daffodil Ride”