Diana Trilling
A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
TO LAWRENCE *
Dearest Norman:
**
When I saw you the other day, you asked me how my
Lawrence introduction was going, whether I had finished it yet, and
you forced me to the unhappy admission that it was going not at
all, despite a hundred beginnings and the absolute need to be done
with it this summer. Your response was what I should have foreseen
it would be, one of those generational leers of yours: you knew all
about me and my generation-oh, this statistical urgency of yours!–
what made us comfortable and what str:ained us, what constituted
a subject-matter and what put a block in the road. You immediately
knew what was standing in my way: I was afraid to write about
Lawrence because he used to be so important to me, as to most of
my friends, and I used to think
his
ideas were
true.
Now I didn't
think so any more and I was afraid to confront the reasons.
Well, for the moment I offered no dissent because-it's prob–
ably a mistake for me to confess this to you-it had seemed to me,
too, that my inability to get the job done was a "resistance," a re–
fusal of self-knowledge, and it would be fairly clear that what I
would be resisting in any essay on Lawrence would be an assessment
of my present-day feelings about him and the disclosure of whatever
changes had taken place in me since I first read him with the sense
that he was my author. He's not at all my author any more, that's
sure. It doesn't occur to me to pick
him
up for plerumre, to learn
*
This letter is an excerpt from the introduction to a selection of D. H . Law–
rence's letters, to be published shortly by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
**
Norman Podhoretz was born in 1930 and graduated from Columbia College
in 1950. A literary critic, he has contributed to many periodicals including
Commentary, The New Yorke r, Partisan Review, Scrutiny,
and
The New Leader.
