36
PARTISAN REVIEW
lunacy for their personal salvation. For our poor girls, the lunatic
life of art has only a negative force, it's the obverse of the mental–
health culture in which they have been reared. But Frieda, being
German, had a large cultural support when she chose Lawrence.
Lunacy
was
mental health in post-war Germany and so far as Frieda
is concerned it doesn't make the least bit of difference that she was
chronologically pre-war, almost forty and long removed from Ger–
many by the time the war ended; she seems to me to have been
entirely typical of Germany in the years after the first war-being
an aristocrat, she was no doubt ahead of herself; the upper classes,
especially in Europe, always move in advance of their national cul–
ture, they can afford to take more chances. To make a successful life
on the slippery edge of madness was the progressive thing for some–
one of Frieda's background to do, like wandering around with a
knapsack or painting wooden bowls. Essentially there was a good deal
of the
wandervogel
in Frieda throughout her life and Lawrence liked
it in her although it also made trouble between them as it would
no doubt have gone on to make trouble for Lady Chatterley and
Mellors if the book hadn't ended when it did: you'll remember
Constance Chatterley and her sister had had German, not English,
young womanhoods. Was it Frieda or was it Lawrence-1 think it
was Frieda-who said she had been in a sleep when Lawrence found
her, the wife of a Nottingham professor of languages, pouring tea
while her three children romped on the lawn? She had whiled away
some of the tedium of faculty life with an inconsequential adultery
or two, but we can guess that it wasn't sex that had impelled her
to her infidelities any more than it was sex speaking when she in–
vited Lawrence to stay the night in the absence of Professor Weekley
-not sex, that is, in primary terms. Do I do Frieda an injustice?
-I always have this impression that it was art or, rather, creative-
ness that was the great imperative for her; sex was just a secondary
gain in the life of self-expression. Lawrence brought Frieda into the
full tumultuous tide of creative living, eventually he made her fa–
mous, which was its own immaculate pleasure, but right from the
start he gave her the creative status which Weekley couldn't provide,
he made her the woman behind his genius which is so much more
what women seem to want than being geniuses themselves. We have
it in Frieda's own words in her foolish memoir of her husband where
