4
PARTISAN REVIEW
ladies, gathering at Julien's tomb at midnight, join forces in building
up a little shrine.
Lawrence is, to a remarkable degree even among contemporaries,
a "case," and he has received drastic treatment as such from all quar-
ters. But it is really not helpful to be told by the psychoanalysts that
he suffered from one or another malady, or by a theologian like T. S.
Eliot that he was possessedof the Devil, or (what perhaps amounts
to the same thing) that he was an unfortunate product of the capital-
ist system. All of these interpretations have their relevance; but none
of them quite explains away the phenomenon which, in the first place,
has compelled our attention. So much is true for any writer and for
any phenomenon, of course, and even leaving aside the matter of
special bias every critical approach is limited ultimately by the cate-
gories of the thinking mind itself. The problem is always to discover
the approach that will do least violence to the object before us, that
will reconcile the greatest number of the innumerable aspects that
every object presents to the understanding. It merely happens that,
in Lawrence's "case," criticism has been more than ordinarily handi-
capped by a certain difficulty in determining exactly what the object
itself really is. Although Lawrence speculated in several fieldsof knowl-
edge, and contributed many valuable insights, he did not leave a sys-
tematic body of thought; yet some people base their approach to him
almost exclusively on what they call his ideas. On the other hand, if
he is treated as an artist, there
IS
the hard fact to get around that all
but a few of his poems and novels are lacking in some of the most
prominent features usually associated with works of art. To add. to
the confusion, if his so-called
ait
is as often as not admired or con-
demned for its thought, his so-called thought is either accepted or re-
jected because of the art through which it is expressed. It does not
help to draw parallels with Whitman and Melville; for these figures
too have been singularly viscuous objects for criticism. Perhaps the
biographers and memoir-writers have been closest the mark, after all,
in almost ignoring Lawrence the thinker and Lawrence the artist for
Lawrence the man.
In any case, Lawrence's hold on the contemporary imagination
seems to have been as much the effect of his reputation as of his
accomplishments; and to say that it was based on the total image
presented by his career is perhaps to take everything into account.
This is not to dismiss his accomplishments but to put them in their
proper relation to something else. "What a man has got to say is
never more than relatively important," Lawrence remarks in the
Letters;
and, while this may not be true for everyone, it was true
enough for him to suggest an approach that will undertake at least
