INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
41
terrace of a hotel where the Lawrences were dining and where the
youngsters were supposed not to intrude. I can't think Bynner was
making up that story any more than I can suppose Mabel Dodge
Luhan was wholly fabricating her account, in
Lorenzo in Taos,
of
the evening she and Lawrence danced around her living-room, bump–
ing into Frieda and her partner as often and hard as they could
in a kind of hysteria of jealousy until all four of them were black
and blue and breathless. Frieda was too much a born lady to take
out her angers on a lot of poor ragamuffins just as she was too much
a born fool not simply to sit down instead of letting herself be
bumped. I'm afraid Lawrence could be unpleasant like few people
one wants to respect; it's hard to put from one's mind the letter
he wrote Katherine Mansfield: "I loathe you. You revolt me stewing
in your consumption.... The Italians were quite right to have noth–
ing to do with you." That was in 1920 when Katherine Mansfield
was very
ill
and Lawrence had not yet learned of his own tubercu–
losis. But perhaps he already had his premonitions; as I say, one can
only be that cruel if it is oneself who is attacked. But surely no one
but Frieda could have lived with such a man and it's no use Aldous
Huxley telling us how sweet and gentle Lawrence could be, we know
from the letters that he was capable of sweetness and gentleness,
they're full of the evidence of his endearing human qualities. But he
was also half crazy and Frieda knew it and was able to sustain it.
If
Frieda had had a mind, she would of course have lost
it
trying to
understand Lawrence, and Lawrence would have been ruined both
as a person and a writer. Frieda was Lawrence's therapy but for–
tunately she didn't cure Lawrence, a cured Lawrence would have
been no Lawrence at all. In her mindlessness, she held Lawrence to–
gether, that was all, and she performed a great service to literature.
But of course I am using the word "mind" here in a way that
is
almost as confusing as Lawrence's use of it when he took his
doctrinal stand against the mental consciousness. To be sure, Frieda
had no intellect in the sense that Lawrence had such a first-rate
endowment of mental power: T. S. Eliot to the contrary notwith–
standing, Lawrence was a very well-educated man with a quite re–
markable capacity for quick learning, especially in his earlier years
he read widely and closely. Frieda had a perfectly competent organ
of understanding in her head, it was just that it operated behind
