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Who has forgotten F. R. Lea vis's famous pronouncement in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist: you took Joyce for a major creative writer, then, like Mr. Eliot, you had no use for Lawrence, and if you judged Lawrence a great writer, then you could hardly take a sustained interest in Joyce. Somehow, happily enough, one managed to forget it in practice: but if the name of Wyndham Lewis were sub stituted for Joyce?and Leavis might permit the substitution?the suggestion might not seem as immediately outrageous. Historically the only significant com parisons of Lawrence with Lewis were made over thirty years ago by two critics with the sharpest of axes to grind?T. S. Eliot, and Leavis in response to him. The terms were as follows: in After Strange Gods Eliot had pointed to a ridicu lous element in Lawrence: his lack of a sense of humour, his possession of a certain snobbery and, in a highly inflammatory phrase, his incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking. At this point Eliot cited the ex posure by Wyndham Lewis in Paleface as a conclusive criticism of this inca pacity. Leavis, concerned to insist that Lawrence on the contrary had a supreme intelligence, rich sense of humour and all other admirable qualities, leaped at the chance to expose the man whom Eliot had chosen as exposer: while not denying Wyndham Lewis talent, Leavis managed to make it look suspect?he [Lewis] capable of making 'brilliant' connections (as if they weren't really brilliant at all, or as if to make a 'brilliant' connection were a bit flashy and reprehensible). But it really Lewis who incapable of thinking, the air of solid argument in his books just bluff, and the only side of Lawrence he ex poses the primitivistic yearning which Lawrence was capable of detecting and analyzing in himself, without outside help. And since Lewis's treatment of sex is hard-boiled, cynical and external he a poor witness to call as alternative to Lawrence's supposed sexual morbidity?which Eliot had stressed. Best of all Leavis could turn the tables on Eliot by allowing Lawrence himself to expose Lewis with some words written in a review of Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs: