INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
35
rence's literary career. How can one write about the author of these
letters and ignore the wife who was so consistently at
his
shoulder
when he was writing most of them? It's absurd the way criticism
and even biography are willing to explore every influence that touches
a writer except the woman he marries. Why are Lawrence's letters
so wonderful, the best in modern literature and second only to Keats's
in
the whole history of English literature, except that they are so
absolutely personal, so close to home, so miraculously without an eye
to posthumous publication?
If
we don't hesitate to read a man's
mail, if we don't hesitate to read letters even as personal as these of
Lawrence, why should we scruple to read such a public statement
as his choice of a wife? I want to start with Frieda and throw her
out .as an institutional piety; instead I'll embrace her for the big,
significant, soft, silly reality she actually was. It's no accident that a
man marries the woman he marries and
if
he's a writer, sooner or
later he'll somehow explain his choice in his books. But sometimes it's
easier, .and it should always be thought more respectable, to get at
the books through the wife than at the wife through the books.
I'll begin with Frieda, then, and tell you what I think of her
but you must keep in mind that I
really
know nothing about her,
I've never even known anyone who met her. I think Frieda was a
bit of a swamp, and this, dear Norman, is literary criticism, impres–
sionistic to be sure, but literary criticism nonetheless, whatever its high
savor of gossip; it has directly to do with the kind of writer Lawrence
was. She had a swampy mind and spirit, she had no intellect, no
real intelligence, yet she had wits; she was shrewd like so many Con–
tinental and so few American women, she had her own kind of in–
nocence but it was not of the sort which is so continuing ·and inex–
plicable a fact of our American ineptitude. No American woman, no
matter how gifted in masochism-and we make a female specialty
of it in this country, it's part of our pioneer heritage-could have
been married to Lawrence without going mad; perhaps even a
Frenchwoman married to Lawrence would have gone mad. It took a
German woman like Frieda to stay entirely sane and make a suc–
cessful career of the lunacy of her marriage.
Now we must remember that in a way she had been bred for
her fate, unlike our Bennington girls, the ones who look to art and
