SOURCE: “Silver Spoon to Devil's Fork: Diana Trilling and the Sexual Ethics of Mr Noon,” in D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 237-50.

In the following essay, Balbert argues against Trilling's interpretation of D. H. Lawrence's Mr Noon.

“Is not the marriage bed a fiery battlefield as well as a perfect communion, both simultaneously.”

Diana Trilling's prominent, severe attack in The New York Times Book Review on the ethics of D. H. Lawrence and the ethos of Mr Noon requires a response. Trilling's pioneering criticism on Lawrence in the 1940s and 1950s is well-known and often helpful; through the years—although not recently—she has written several intelligent and largely sympathetic assessments of both the novelist and his work. In her 1984 review of Mr Noon, she correctly asserts that “for anyone interested in the derivation and interpretation of Lawrence's sexual doctrine, it is mandatory reading” (24). Why...