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PARTISAN REVIEW
a group of followers for whom he was prophet and savior, and mani–
festly enjoyed the role, we tend to accuse him of playing artist to
the philistines. But this is a mistake, he never bullied people with his
artistic superiority, only with his messianism; he never asked or
claimed a superior social or personal place on the basis of his talents
or their recognition. As an artist he was the most unassuming man
who ever lived. It is also a mistake to think of Lawrence, as we are
likely to, as one of those instances of unacknowledged or unrewarded
genius whose recollection is supposed to fortify the rising artist against
a life of failure. Lawrence suffered enormous hardship; he was
ill,
he was poor, he had great trouble with the press, he was persecuted
by the law, he was accused of being a German spy in the war, with
alarming regularity his best friends became his public enemies. But
there have been few serious let alone revolutionary artists whose
right to special critical notice was won so fast and surely. He stopped
teaching with the publication of his first novel,
The White Peaoock,
which, incidentally, had been taken by the first publisher who saw
it, and never again attempted to earn his living except by writing–
in any writer's life this implies a large demand on society and a
considerable victory if it is managed even meagerly. And despite the
hostility which he generated every step of his way, the sheer power
of his gift imposed itself unusually early, demanded and received its
acknowledgment no matter how grudging or unsympathetic. From
the very beginning he was always thought of as a genius and, after
all, that isn't the common way we mask our dislikes.
But I have wandered too far from Frieda and her first mar–
riage and Professor Weekley. Poor Professor Weekley: I gather he
was something of a scholar, he wrote a whole series of books on
etymology, but I'm afraid this doesn't make
him
the less dim.
As
he comes through the letters and biographies he seems to have been
a person of low emotional intensity and high self-conscious principle
who, having once laid successful claim to a woman of spirit, felt he
owed it to himself never again to settle for less. I can scarcely sup–
pose he was quite as awful as Lawrence pictures him in the letter
to Amy Lowell where he describes Frieda's interview with him when
she returned to England in 1914, two years after the elopement. It's
a brilliant letter but somehow Lawrence's effort to make Weekley
into the very image of castrated middle-class respectability, calling
