40
PARTISAN REVIEW
Lawrence's quite extreme cruelty to Clifford Chatterley: Chatterley
is himself.
I'm convinced Frieda was the best possible, indeed the only
possible wife for Lawrence. She had a lot of strength, she was
there,
yet she was sufficiently amorphous to mold herself to any notion
of femaleness Lawrence needed to impress upon her. She must have
been an awful nuisance the way he couldn't even write a letter with–
out her telling him where she agreed and disagreed and adding her
own postscripts
a
la Lawrence, and it's embarrassing how she tried
to ape his style.
His
style, of all things for a German lady to ape!
But he loved it, of course, when they were newly together-he was
twenty-seven when they eloped, she was thirty-three and she must
have been still open and sweet-looking then; she aged badly, from
the pictures one gathers she became both sharp and overblown, a
bit witch-like-and it was very shrewd of him to have chosen her,
very therapeutic. Do you remember his remark about how he be–
lieved in art, not for art's sake, but for his own sake? "One sheds
one's sicknesses in books, repeats and presents again one's emotions
in order to master them." His marriage as well as
his
art
was a place
where he repeated and presented again his emotions in order to try
to master them;
it
was a proving ground for the material of his
books and he was very fortunate to have found a woman who was
sufficiently passive and masochistic to accept this therapeutic use of
her. Not that Frieda was quiet or withdrawn, she was far from be–
ing one of those docile women who confirm their femininity by a
refusal of self-assertion; in fact, she seems to have made her presence
known a good deal more noisily than many women who have far
less instinct for emotional subservience. She could lose her temper
at will and act rudely; she seemed to equate smashing dishes and
throwing things with both class and femaleness, like those movies of
ten or fifteen years ago in which the well-reared heroine finally
captivates her lover by breaking a vase over his head. But Lawrence
was no mean hand at making scenes himself and
if
we are even
partly to trust the memoirists, he could be savage and ugly whereas
Frieda was only elaborate. There's the bad story, for instance, that
Witter Bynner tells in
Journey with Genius
of Lawrence having the
bootblacks of Chapala arrested and jailed- they hadn't the money
to pay their fines-because they had come to solicit business on the
