BOOKS AND WRITERS

AVIER one of their quarrels, when they were at Spezia and D. H. Lawrence had rushed away into a little boat to get away from her, Frieda shouted after him: " Well, if you can't write like a poet, you can at least drown like one!" Perhaps, when she said this, she was remembering at the back of her mind that she had first fallen in love with Lawrence when she saw him float some little paper-boats on a pond, to amuse her children. A still more Sheilcyan episode is when Lawrence wrote from Irschenhausen to Jessie Chambers—Miriam of Sons and Lovers— inviting her to join him and Frieda there.

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Lawrence is Shelleyan in more than these traits. 'He challenged his contemporaries at a place where a taboo had formed like a scar over one of the deepest and most secret wounds of life. His sexuality was as much an assertion of a principle of purity as of immorality, just as what was really disturbing about Shelley's atheism was the religious passion he brought to it. Lawrence also had a touch of social worldliness, which was Shelley's at birth. By choice, Lawrence preferred the lords and ladies and barons and baronesses to the poor. The basic revolutionary-anarchistic impulse in his life was hatred of the ugliness of Nottingham. He could not face ugliness at any price, and he could not sec in socialism a way of curing it. So he simply fled from it, hurling back curses across his shoulder as he went. He has been compared to Blake, but he lacked Blake's stillness ; and when one has said that, one sees that the comparison will not hold.

* * * * " Like all extreme romantics . . . Lawrence's personal life is a kaleidoscopic pattern of light and shadow . . . like any other manifestation of disorder it must inevitably be detestable to those who have, or like, the classical temper."

Talk about the classical temper is usually a gambit for being nasty. The person who uses the phrase seems inclined to imagine himself with the physical appearance of a younger T. S. Eliot, but wearing a Roman toga. Fortunately, though, Mr. West* is not in a classical temper with D. H. Lawrence all the time, though he has little patience with his followers, and none at all with people who, writing about Lawrence, had the advantage of knowing him. Yet these friends—Brett, Catherine Carswell, Mabel Dodge Luhan and the others—do, it seems to me, in their amateurish reminiscences, give occasional glimpses of Lawrence more rewarding than the factual account which makes up the first four chapters of Mr. West's book. Fortunately Mr. West warms up with the fourth chapter, which opens significantly with the words: " In the excitement of departure and change Lawrence found a complete release, as usual. He fell back into love with almost everything." Perhaps Mr. West, though not entirely approving, sympathises more with Lawrence's Wanderlust than with his early days of Nottingham, schoolteaching and freeing himself from his mother (who makes her least sym- pathetic appearance in these pages). At any rate,, his account of the travels in Australia and New Mexico is extremely lively.

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Mr. West writes in a disciplined, epigrammatic prose, which sometimes slides over into smartiness. His compressed summary of Lawrence's aims—reducing them to a kind of reformist radical programme—is not inaccurate, but seems to miss something—the ecstasy of Lawrence. " He thought that the mad destructiveness of our civilisation in our time was a hysteria induced by these divisions of man's unitary being, and he attempted to apply, with Lady Chatterley's Lover, the time-honoured cure for hysteria—a shock— a slap in the face or a douche of cold water." This is by no means unjust, except that it is like a schoolmaster's report on some praise- worthy governess or nurse.

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There are excellent things in Mr. West's book, after its rather mean start. His account of the rhythm in the prose of The Man * D. H. Lawrence. By. Anthony West, (Barker. The English Novelists

Series. 6s.)

Who Loved Islands is admirable: "The slowly beating, treacly movement of the passages describing the doomed man's dream- world contrasts with the sharp drum-tap of those describing the killing reality that has him by the feet." He is right, I think, in arguing that the short stories are Lawrence's best work ; and his analysis of the collapse of inspiration which occurs in a book like Kangaroo, is just. On the other hand, in developing Dr. Edith Sitwell's dismissal of Lawrence as " the Jaeger poet " he is being superficial.

This volume, then, contains some of the sharpest insights into Lawrence's writing ; and yet Anthony West is not a critic who can draw the right conclusions from his own apercus. Summing up, he concludes: "It is probably a mistake to treat Lawrence as a literary man when one attempts to assess his place in his time : he belongs not with those who were primarily writers and artists, but with those who were livers and life-changers, and writers more or less incidentally. He is closer to Ruskin and William Morris ... &c." This is shoddy and evasive, and depends entirely on a vague dis- tinction between " writers " and " non-writers " who are prophets. The introduction of Ruskin and Morris into it does not help either, for they both have no slight claim to be called writers. The difficulty of assessing Lawrence is that he challenges all the con- ceptions of what is meant by " the novel " and the poem which have been current in this and the last century. There are certainly standards by which we can assert that he is a worse artist than, say, Proust or Joyce or Eliot, because in trying to create within his writing something organic which imitates in its flow and movement the nature of life as he perceived it, from moment to moment, he ignored those standards completely. From this point of view, like Whitman, he was too much an isolated innovator, and fails often by the standards of those who may be inferior to him. But, like Whitman, he raises the question whether the studied, cerebralised literature of his time does not sacrifice too much to an intellectual conception of form, and whether it does not create a world of a literary kind of sensibility which is so shut out from nature that it is spiritually suffocating.

* * * * Lawrence's poems do not have the organic perfection of Eliot's but they may claim to have an organic relationship to life which has not been attained by the poet who compared the evening tc " a patient etherised upon a table." What one should think abou. is the reasons why Lawrence could never have written such a line and why his whole work is a protest against the kind of sensibilit) which produces such a metaphor. It is easy for contemporar3 critics to decide what seems more correct or aesthetic by their owe contemporary standards, which are either fashionable or which have been imposed on them by the intense creative purposiveness of a Proust or a Joyce. What is difficult to judge is the livingness of a writer. It seems to me that Lawrence, despite his many imperfections, remains extremely living, 'and if one cannot relate this to our current ideas of what makes up a literary figure, we had better suspend judgement. The question is certainly not settled by saying that Lawrence, although writing a prose whose rhythm is like the pulsing of a heart, and whose surfaces reflect exactly the background and action he is describing, is not a writer.

* * * * Mr. Harry T. Moore's Life and Works of D. H. Lawrenceir which will be published in this country in due course by Allen and Unwin, is the most useful, informed and the least opinionated book I have seen on Lawrence. It contains a good deal of new material, not of a sensational, but of a relevant and helpful kind: reports on Lawrence's performance as a schoolteacher, references to little known articles about him, And the like. This book is not 5i suggestive or stimulating as Mr. West's, but it is completer and more objective than Mr. Richard Aldington's biography.

STEPHEN SPENDER.

t The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence. By Harry T. Moore awayne, New York. S4.50.)