INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
39
Frieda a prostitute and refusing her all communication with her
children, doesn't ring entirely true for me; I have an idea that Law–
rence is projecting into Weekley an aspect of his own judgment on
Frieda and himself. Lawrence had been miserable about his equivocal
situation with Frieda in the two years between the elopement and
their marriage; whenever he thought people mistakenly assumed they
were married, he hurried to set the record straight. He had wanted
this married woman and he had had the courage to take what he
wanted, perhaps it was even an important condition of his love for
Frieda that she was already another man's wife and a mother; he
overrode Frieda's hesitations in fine style and got her to run off with
him. But he hated living with her without marriage, it shocked him
and he expected others to be shocked. The worst of which I seem
to be able to accuse Weekley in the scene Lawrence recreates is a
certain hamming and an inadequate imagination in supposing he
could outmatch Lawrence by taking a high moral line: this was
Lawrence's game and was there anyone to beat him at it? I didn't
guess it from Lawrence's reports of Weekley, actually I learned it
from Harry Moore's biography, but I suppose I should have been
able to figure out that Weekley wanted Frieda the more, not the
less, because she had left him for Lawrence: twenty years later, when
Lawrence died, Weekley asked her to come back to him and I find
this touching, it quite rounds out my image of him, that he had held
on to Frieda all these years as the test of his manliness. It's like some–
thing in a Lawrence novel, isn't it, but Weekley was precisely like
someone in a Lawrence novel, one of those men who need a woman
like Frieda to validate their masculinity. Lawrence needed
3i
woman
like Frieda himself, to validate his masculinity too, which not only
identifies him with Weekley but also with
all
his other Weekley char–
acters, including Clifford Chatterley, all the frightened insufficient
men in his novels who depend on women for their strength. This of
course is the confusing thing about Lawrence and his books. Every–
body knows Lawrence was representing an image of himself in the
g.amekeeper Mellors in
Lady Chatterley'S Lover.
But Lawrence was
not only Mellors in that novel, he was Clifford Chatterley as well.
Lawrence is not only the heroes in his fiction but the villains too,
which is what licenses the cruelty
in
his books.
This
is what licenses
