The Letters of D. H. Lawrence
by
[Viking, $5.00]
THIS seems, at the present time, an important volume. Lawrence was our contemporary, and his influence on us is still alive; is still, probably, growing. It is an influence as difficult to describe as it is significant; no one who knew Lawrence was, apparently, the same person afterward; no impressionable reader can know his books without being in some way changed. His philosophy, as philosophy, may have been onesided and crazy; he may have lacked the true novelist’s ability to create a world that we can recognize as the world our own experience defines for us; as a poet he was perhaps tentative and insecure. But he felt with what for many people was a new and heightened awareness; he orientated emotions in a fresh direction. I should like to suggest that Lawrence was the embodiment, in a single individual, of the most important emotional theories of our time. We believe that to be good artists we must see reality afresh, with the eye of a child, uncontaminated by preconceived ideas. Lawrence was always seeing reality afresh. ‘It was,’says Aldous Huxley in his introduction to the Letters, ‘as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life.’ Lawrence, more than any of our contemporaries who have been articulate, was pure impulse, in his life and in his writings. He felt the need of an appropriate ‘societal’ background, as all artists do, and he felt more intensely than most artists that to-day it cannot be found. He believed that a mechanical civilization kills the essential human instincts; he restlessly traveled all over the world looking in vain for a place where they still might flourish. He was thrown back on his own emotions; and, significantly enough, he did not emphasize the articulate emotions that involve reason before they can be completely expressed, but the inarticulate emotions that can only be expressed, if at all, in a kind of blind action. ‘Why can’t you darken your minds,’he wrote, ‘and know that the great gods pulse in the dark, and enter you as darkness through the lower gates?' His egoism, his fascination, his insistence on his own rightness, might be regarded, to put it crudely, as the characteristics of a man who had never grown up, who retained, heightened to an extraordinary degree, the sensibility, the direct impulses of a child, and who, as a result, symbolized the desires of a civilization grown sick of itself, incapable of rational solution, and anxious for emotional escape.
Lawrence himself would have angrily repudiated any such interpretation. And it is only on reflection that it seems justified; as one reads these letters one is carried away by their reality, and the picture they give of the individual life they make so moving. Some of them are admirable, especially the letters to Middleton Murry, Mrs. Godkin, and Lady Cynthia Asquith. But the whole book should be read, for even if one denies that Lawrence has any final value except as a type of sensibility, one cannot help respecting, perhaps envying him. And it is a proof of his vitality that after reading his letters the accomplished introduction by Aldous Huxley seems literary and unreal.
THEODORE SPENCER