INTR O DUCTION TO LAWRENCE
37
she says with the catastrophic naivete which is her style, "I had
always regarded Lawrence's genius as given to me. I felt deeply re–
sponsible for what he wrote." More revealing than the remark itself
is its context, an account of Lawrence's relation with Mabel Dodge
Luhan; it seems that Mabel and Lawrence wanted to do a book
together, it was to be about Mabel, and Frieda explains her position:
"I did not want this. I had always regarded Lawrence's genius as
given to me." It's from passages like this that I draw my impression
that for Frieda art rather outranked sex. But Lawrence could have
been a bad artist and it would have been all the same to Frieda so
long as he was for self-expression in the largest possible quantity;
she had no taste, as we mean the exercise of artistic judgment. But
then neither had Lawrence; Lawrence never thought of art
in
terms
of taste any more than he thought of art in terms of permanence.
The value for Lawrence of a created work lay not in its lastingness
or in its conformity to esthetic standard but in its rightness at the
moment and for its creator, in its usefulness as a form of personal
communication. He cared just as much about his painting as about
his writing and he wasn't a very good painter; and he could devote
himself to embroidery and the decoration of little boxes with the
same casual gravity he gave to his major literary efforts. Is it funny
that I use the word "casual" of Lawrence? It's the accurate word.
Certainly there was never a writer who took himself so solemnly as
a human being but so unsolemnly as an artist.
I don't for a moment mean that Lawrence was unsolemn about
the content of his books or even about their method. He was always
the subject of his books and he regarded himself as the most serious
subject in the world. And he was a very conscious artist, he was any–
thing but the primitive some of his critics have made him out to
be; nothing could have been more intellectualized than his theory
of the unconscious source of art. But he never "saw himself" as an
artist,
only
as a person and workman; although his extraordinary
gifts
were recognized unusually early
in
his career,
it
never occurred
to him to suppose they earned
him
any privilege
in
society.
Writing
was simply the way he made his living as someone else made his
by carpentry or ditch-digging and he
did
it as competently and
quietly
as
if
ours were a
world in
which as much status accrued to a
carpenter as to a literary
celebrity.
Because he attracted to himself
