Lawrence and Life

...He goes no further, this is his true subject, and he repeats and presents it again and again...

...Certainly, Lawrence's letters should be taken in the way he wanted Pansies to be read— as brief, live expressions, feeling and thought at once, immediate as flowers are, but not any the less meaningful...

...And isn't the whole point of his or anyone's art that out of the insights it gives us we must make our own connections...

...I think, in fact, that Lawrence gives us there the best counsel for reading his work altogether...

...and, because he and Frieda were continually on the move, he always gave the next address, directing his correspondents to the cottage in the country, the flat in London, the Italian or German or Swiss village, the American or Mexican hotel...

...Once recovered, how is the faculty employed...

...which is how many of us have replied to this indictment in one form or another...

...One should no more pin down Lady Chalterleys Lover or Women in Love or The Plumed Serpent than one would demand that a flower provide the shelter of a house...

...Between these you find a sampling from Lawrence's immense correspondence addressed from so many corners of the earth to such a variety of friends, enemies, relatives, acquaintances, publishers...

...Even at the end of his life, in speaking of his last novel, Lawrence remarks that we still don't know whether Lady Chatterley will leave her husband and go with the gamekeeper, Mellors: "She hasn't done it yet...

...Nowadays, there is no lack of intuitions poetic or otherwise about the precarious life of the self in modern society, or about what richness the self has lost...

...Lawrence felt that modern life threatened selfhood and even extinguished it...

...He had opinions and reactions to everything and everyone...

...Review" Nowadays, people write letters to settle business details, to thank other people, to request something, to congratulate or condole...

...or "Oh, yeah...

...That statement in 1913 became a central part of Lawrence's imaginative thought, as did so many other phrases, insights and intense observations scattered through the letters...

...Lawrence can still speak to us because this faculty has not been altogether recovered, in some quarters never will be...

...They taught neither by precept nor by example, and we who were nourished on their ideals might show that it was poor nourishment indeed...

...Where are all those people going in their big ugly new cars...

...few people carry on a correspondence which deals with feelings as well as appointments...

...not a diagram of a flower, nor a chemical analysis, nor a mechanical model of a flower, nor a flower made of stone, paper or poetry...

...I don't mean, what good are they...

...At the very least, he saw modern civilization as inimical to the faculty of surrendering to life, of taking life as if it were a flower— but a real flower, with smell and color and immediate existence...

...Links between one domain of human life and another are, of course, precisely what we have lost, precisely what Lawrence's intuitions are about...

...If you want one from somebody, what you'll usually get is the first draft of a PhD thesis, without the footnotes...

...but rather, how does insight really affect experience...

...Unless we can make a vital connection between those insights and the actual, immediate, tangible, daily life each of us leads, then we will be reduced to despair or rage before a vast and threatening abstraction...

...If Lawrence stands for anything at all, it is for response, for the reality and intensity of non-rational understanding, for the perceptive, spontaneous faculty of knowing as one knows a person or a picture or the seasons...

...The new order of being is always about to be...

...Those parts of his letters that people quote were not sent through the mails as single pearls, nor as deathless credos...

...I think the point is that the younger generation cannot say this about many of its elders...

...or "So's your old man...

...Sometimes it is recovered, and with great force—what then...

...she now thinks that perhaps she and her contemporaries took Lawrence too literally...

...if you write a serious letter, you may get no answer...

...as with flowers, let them bloom and fade, giving what pleasure they can give in the uniqueness and actuality of their moments of being...

...Take, for example, the conditions of modern life...

...This question itself might signalize for Mrs...

...What is the Laurentian mode for the journey—walking it, with a rucksack on your back...

...Why is everyone on the move...

...He reacts vividly, whether it is to Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry on personal relations, or to Mabel Dodge on the will and unconscious "flow," or to Bertrand Russell on selfhood and economics, or to Earl Brewster on "Eastern thought...

...Look at my mother, how rich and still she is!— "And a young man should think: By Jove my father has faced all weathers, but it's been a life...

...But perhaps some lines of Lawrence's are appropriate here: "It ought to he lovely to be old to be full of the peace that comes of experience and wrinkled ripe fulfillment "And a girl should say: It must be wonderful to live and grow old...

...She does it well, too: Few people could write of Lawrence as half-mad and also full of the grace of life without turning him into Prince Myshkin, or without being anesthetically "tolerant...

...but the ideas of the moment are always continuous with immediate personal feeling...

...So personal a statement must have a recipient, and, of course, this one does: Written as an introductory letter, it is addressed to Norman Podhoretz and that whole younger generation whose life and fate were examined in last year's New Leader symposium...

...How do you relate Lawrence's transcendent apocalyptic ideas about modern life to this dilemma...

...It is refreshing to find them again in the context of his entire reaction to someone or something which engaged his interest—like the letters to Ernest Collings about some poems and drawings where you find, casually, Lawrence's famous and much-quoted statement: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect...

...Better to have erred through a hope of ultimate being, than by a restrictive sense of reality, which refuses to challenge fate...

...Lawrence's wryness about his heroine indicates that he thought so, too...

...All his interest was always concentrated on the moment of surrender—its peace, its wisdom, its regenerative power...

...Of course you, too, are in a car, although it may be-neither big nor new...

...Or, what happens after the surrender—whether that be to a person, to life, to the unknown self, to passion...

...or "Do go on...

...Trilling no longer reads Lawrence with the feeling that he is "her" writer...

...I hope not, because the history of modern life shows a repeated failure to ask that question with enough rigor or frequency...

...Everything he wrote, letters, novels, essays, stories, all make that demand...

...But Lawrence wrote his letters, as everyone does, out of many impulses, and it is useless, even dangerous, to project any theory about them, any generalized summary of their method or manner or intention...

...Most of the time he was away from people he wanted to talk to...

...Diana Trilling, in her introduction to the letters, responds to that demand...

...The imagination of ultimate being leaped way beyond us, who were of the immediate future...

...If you want to get from Princeton, New Jersey to Jericho, Long Island, how do you go...

...Why is it all so monstrous and inhuman...

...perhaps our children's grandchildren will reap the benefit, or perhaps no one will, because the apocalyptic future is always in the future...

...The serious and at the same time feelingful letter is rare...

...Lawrence was the kind of letter-writer for whom nothing was impersonal or irrelevant, whether it might be the character traits of his correspondent, the place where he was sitting while writing the letter, the fate of a novel, ideas about society, or the politics of the country he happened to be in...

...Perhaps no letters should he thought of in that way...

...Why does everyone have a car...

...Put it down to the telephone, or to other, deeper manifestations of modern life, the fact is that most people keep themselves out of the letters they write, or, if they do the opposite, it is with strain and showiness...

...It was a question that Lawrence ignored...

...But what is the relation of these intuitions to experience...

...If we of the younger generation are "keener" in our reading of this great and difficult writer, we are also, she finds, less generous in our imagination of heroism, in our belief in the possibilities of transcendence...

...He should be read, too, in that directly responsive way...

...In spite of generosity and the imagination of ultimate being, there is as yet no tenderness on the New Jersey Turnpike, nor togetherness on the Belt Parkway...

...Meanwhile, there is life as we know it, people as we know them, the way we live today...

...I think the younger generation feels that insight is not the problem...

...We could say, "So what...

...fewer still could take Lawrence so intimately and not be undone by his self-deceptions...

...Trilling the cageyness of the younger generation...

...D. H. Lawrence's letters were written before the spread of this general blight and, anyhow, he was a man who resisted it strenuously, so his letters still offer some of that rich encounter which great letters always provide...

...Don't try to hang too much on them, don't pin them down...

...What takes place in the new order of ultimate being...

...Is rage the relevant emotion...

...Or if you drive through that complex system of parkways, turnpikes and bridges, do you pay the tolls while gathering intuitions about the role of the machine in modern culture...

...She wants to bring Lawrence "out of the study into the living room," to get beyond the official picture, the Lawrence-and-Frieda mythology, and arrive at some real sense of the man...

...Diana Trilling has made a good selection of them, beginning with a 1909 letter from Lawrence to Heinemann, his first publisher, and ending with a brief note to Maria Huxley shortly before his death in 1930...