Foes and Lovers
MORTON, BRIAN
Foes and Lovers D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage By Brenda Maddox Simon & Schuster. 620pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Brian Morton Executive Editor, "Dissent"; author, "The Dylanist" THERE...
...A passionate reader of Nietzsche and Freud, she was much influenced by one of her lovers, the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, whose motto was "Repress nothing...
...His masterful fourth novel, The Rainbow, was banned for obscenity—the first of his many troubles with the British censors...
...The War years were hard on the Lawrences...
...The key point in any discussion of Lawrence's literary treatment of women is that if one flatly condemns as a misogynist the man who created Anna and Gud-run and Ursula Brangwen, one simply is not paying attention...
...Refreshingly, Maddox views Lawrence from a fond distance...
...Frail and tubercular, clearly unfit for military service, the writer was nevertheless subjected to repeated humiliating physical examinations...
...One gets the feeling that Maddox' energy simply flagged...
...When Sons and Lovers was published in 1913, Maddox tells us, the editors of the English Psychoanalytic Review were "gleeful at the appearance of a novel embodying the new theories from Vienna...
...Lawrence, free with his fists and his curses, would publicly refer to his wife as a "shit-bag...
...Some of his friends were appalled...
...The couple was subjected to police surveillance, their movements restricted for the duration of the War...
...This is a difficult trap to avoid, since the writer was in many ways such an obvious "case...
...At any rate, and whatever happens, I do love, and I am loved—I have given and I have taken—and that is eternal...
...No writer explored more searchingly, more delicately, more quiveringly—to use a Lawrentian word?the mysteries of womanhood and manhood...
...in other instances she works a little too hard to prove that his descriptions of the sexual act imply an appetite for anal intercourse...
...Frieda, for her part, began pursuing lovers during their engagement and did not stop after they were married...
...Most of their friends seemed to hold one of them, Lawrence or Frieda, unworthy of the other...
...She never defends his bad behavior, and, unlike so many others, she does not adopt the easy familiarity of the genre...
...Himself a gifted hater, he was capable in his writing and his private life of extraordinary viciousness...
...She also believed that women should use their strength to nurhire male genius...
...Lawrence provides a tempting target...
...She believed, writes Maddox, "that conventional Christian morality was the source of society's ills and that erotic pleasure...
...He remains Lawrence to her...
...He was constantly experimenting in his writing, testing and discarding notions about how we should live...
...When the "lonely, ailing, directionless" D. H. Lawrence met Frieda in March 1912, he "never had a chance...
...Her insights into the Lawrences' early years are provocative and subtle...
...Lawrence would not have been...
...she seems a sure guide through the baffling complexities of their romance...
...When Frieda's daughter was outraged by her mother's sexual promiscuity, Lawrence had calmly told her, "Every heart has a right to its own secrets...
...Besides his health worsening, his contempt for the run of mankind, always an element in his thinking, reached epic proportions...
...Making Lawrence out to be a raging woman-hater...
...This is not to excuse him, but to understand him...
...He wrote to a friend in 1928 that "the leader-cum-follower relationship is a bore...
...Lawrence wrote some ugly things about women...
...Idolatry...
...I'm especially happy to report that her narrative contains no cozy references to "Lorenzo" or "Bert...
...few people liked them both...
...So you see I'm becoming a lamb at last...
...Maddox does stumble here and there in addressing Lawrence's outlook on sex—though this issue is so complicated that no one on earth could help the occasional misstep...
...I think I ought not to blame women, as I have done, but myself, for taking my love to the wrong woman, before now...
...His sexual and political theories drifted toward authoritarianism: Woman must submit to man, the mass of men to a strong leader...
...To many who knew them, the marriage seemed a disaster...
...He ranted loudest, she observes, when he was feeling weakest...
...And the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and women, and not the one-up-one-down, lead-on-I-follow, Ich-dien sort of business...
...She's probably right, but...
...The biography closes with Frieda's life after Lawrence's death at age 44...
...As Joyce Carol Oates has famously observed, we live in a time when most biographies could better be described as "pathographies," mean-spirited exposes of their subjects' pathologies...
...Maddox wisely lets Frieda have the last word: "His life and his writing was one?and I say to everybody who wants to have anything to do with him or me: Hats off to our relationship...
...Maddox looks at Lawrence unblink-ingly, leaving no doubt why many of his contemporaries despised him, and why many of those who admired him preferred to do so from afar...
...One cannot really tell whether their conflicts continued to nourish them, or whether the marriage became a sort of standoff—necessary to them both, although a source of little delight...
...After his flirtation with grandiose and inhumane styles of despair, he came around to a more generous way of thinking...
...This book is strongest, though, in dealing with the early years of Lawrence's marriage...
...Her stance is intelligent, probing, quizzical, dispassionate, humorous, and slightly formal...
...Maddox shows that Frieda was the aggressor from the beginning...
...As incomprehensible as they were to everyone else, the two of them understood each other to the end...
...We may flatter ourselves that we are wiser about these matters than he was, but all this means is that we are not as brave in exploring our own contradictions...
...He never changed his mind...
...Foes and Lovers D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage By Brenda Maddox Simon & Schuster...
...He routinely beat his wife, Frieda, once large-mindedly complaining to a female friend how distasteful it is to beat a woman: "Afterwards one feels simply humiliated...
...As Lawrence and Frieda enter middle age, Maddox' focus becomes less steady, her book less "the story of a marriage" than a well-told yet rather conventional biography of the artist...
...I believe in marriage...
...There is no record of him speculating how the beaten woman feels...
...The standard picture has an imperious, callous Lawrence forcing Frieda to abandon her husband and three children...
...But whatever the opinions of friends, there is no sign that either of them regretted the union...
...But none of these ideas represented Lawrence's final position...
...But her depiction of their later years, the comings and goings, the battles and the reconciliations, does not give the reader as much help in comprehending it all...
...In 1930, while he lay near death, she was making plans to visit her latest lover, "who scolded her and told her that, if Lawrence was that ill, her duty was to remain near him...
...She wasted no time in remarrying...
...Something broke in Lawrence over this period...
...The biographer who skirts the danger of pathography may fall victim to the opposite danger, becoming enamored of her subject or identifying with him in a proprietary way...
...Bring off the same if you can...
...In a fascinating chapter about her prior life, she comes across as a free-spirited, questing, altogether formidable young woman...
...Oh, if only people could marry properly...
...Assaulting Lawrence with the blunt instrument of psychoanalytic theory...
...Let every man find, keep on trying till he finds, the woman who can take him and whose love he can take...
...And Frieda, a cousin of Baron Manfred von Richt-hofen, the notorious "Red Baron," came under suspicion of the authorities...
...A few times, in my opinion, she reductively interprets his comments about life as comments about coitus...
...It is hard not to be disturbed by writings like the novella "The Woman Who Rode Away," wherein a pampered white woman is kidnapped by Indians and made the victim of a ritual sacrifice, to the narrator's obvious relish...
...Consider just a few of the traps she gracefully avoids: Haired of Lawrence...
...Steering clear of this problem is Maddox' most impressive accomplishment of all, for in some of his moods, Lawrence was a raging woman-hater...
...Frieda and I have struggled through some bad times into a wonderful naked intimacy, all kindled with warmth, that I know at last is love," he wrote to Sallie Hopkin...
...Seeing him as the contradictory figure that he was, she emerges from her study with affection...
...But she also shows us that the distemperate Lawrence was not the whole man, that his talent for hatred was more than matched by his genius for tenderness, curiosity, reverence, friendship...
...As E. l. Doctorow says in Ragtime, he was one of the last of the great shameless mother-lovers...
...who cares...
...Indeed, some of Lawrence's letters to others in their first years together are moving hymns to marriage...
...She gives due weight to the "case for the prosecution," notably the argument put forth by Kate Millet that he was "monstrous," but finally concludes that his rantings are expressions of a profound sense of powerlessness and frustration...
...For the most part, however, Lawrence escapes the patient treatment...
...something changed...
...As she says in her Introduction, "No one could read Lawrence's letters and not like him...
...author, "The Dylanist" THERE ARE so many ways to write badly about D. H. Lawrence, it is remarkable that Brenda Maddox writes about him so well...
...Maddox, reviewing his record, is a model of intelligent poise...
...He filled his fiction with malicious portraits of people who respected and trusted him...
...was the cure...
...The artist is reduced to his neuroses, his art to the scratching of a psychic itch...
...Even Leon Edel's magnificent six-volume life of Henry James is afflicted with this fault: By the time he reaches James' later years, Edel is no longer so much biographer as bodyguard...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
