34
PARTISAN REVIEW
me. It's not that I hesitate to re-examine Lawrence's ideas-and we
of course mean his sexual ideas-and I find I have more things I'd
like to say than there are people to listen. But they're of a random
personal kind that balks at the conventions of a formal literary essay,
it's the literariness that stops me, the orderliness of presentation and
the pedagogic attitude conventionally required of an introduction.
I've actually written of Lawrence only once before but I become
claustrophobic at the thought of plowing over the same old ground
again, about how Lawrence was born in 1885 and died of tuberculosis
in 1930 and how he was the son of a coal-miner father and a school–
teacher mother and how he loved his mother too much and it made
him nervous and about how he was a poet and therefore mustn't be
read literally, but a poet without an esthetic other than his doctrine,
his doctrine
was
his esthetic, and about how his doctrine has been
distorted by people who haven't bothered to read him thoroughly and
about how his doctrine has been misread even by people who have
read him more or less thoroughly because it assaults their most pre–
cious assumptions etc. etc. It isn't that the old ground is no longer
fertile; there's not an inch of it but would yield. And I don't ignore
the requirements of conscience
in
writing about Lawrence, the need
for a special sanity and balance of the sort we like to think is peda–
gogic and which does of course finally rest on one's willingness to
school oneself in what Lawrence actually wrote and intended: there
are so many and such assorted irresponsibilities Lawrence has suf–
fered. But surely one can be as responsible outside as within the
established forms, just as one can often best comprehend an object
by the full indulgence of one's subjectivity, Lawrence in his travel
writing being a classic instance. I'm all at once impatient of an ob–
jectivity which adds up to little more than submitting to a conven–
tion of literary address and moderating one's voice. I especially want
to take Lawrence, who is always written about so grimly, out of the
study into the living room where I can be easy and unsolemn, or
I want to write a letter, this letter. Lawrence needs to be gossiped
about, he was that kind of man and writer; he needs to be come at
with as much human immediacy as one can manage.
There's the matter of Frieda Lawrence, for instance. She was
a Lawrence
jact,
a human fact of the greatest significance in Law-
