56
vigorous Frieda what life was like with the petulant and irascible coal–
miner's son, the parvenu who could never forget his class origin.
Not
L
hut the Wind
might have been a more important book. It
might have spoken conclusively about the Middleton Murry-Lawrence
controversy. It might have dealt more specifically with Lawrence's prob–
lems and his methods, and in doing so would have given us the first
definitive biography of the man. Perhaps too many of the people con–
cerned are still alive for Frieda to have spoken freely , or it may be that
the pressure of the Carswell, Brett and Luhan volumes led Frieda
Lawrence to tell merely the story of her own life with the wnter.
In the telling there is little added to Lawrence biographia, though,
occasionally a detail does succeed in revealing already-known material
more profoundly. In this light it is worth noting the emphasis Frieda
Lawrence places again and again on the class origins of the writer and
her recognition of the role of the class differences in the difficulties of their
life together. Or writing of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
she says ... .
"He had done it
...
·and
future generations will benefit, his own race
that he loved and his own class, that is less inhibited, for he spoke out
of
them and for them.
••. "
The genuinely critical biography that will trace the story of this man
who lost his class and who, as early as 1923, had already expressed most
of the elements of fascist ideology and consciousness·-the mystery of the
blood-the corruption of the cerebral man-the demonology and mythology
that he shares with the psycho-analyst
J
ung, another fascist ideologue,
etc.-telling how in his later years he repudiated his mother and his
mother's world and made the turn toward his father that would have
led him back to the work:ingclass, still remains to be written.
The book contains many hitherto unpublished letters that will reveal
Lawrence in a tender light. But it is as a self portrait of Frieda that the
volume should be approached; it is a just and excellent portrait.
NATHAN AoLER.
