42
PARTISAN REVIEW
rather than in advance of her feelings, she felt her way with Law–
rence instead of thinking her way. "To know the
mind
of a woman,"
Lawrence wrote in a letter to Dr. Trigant Burrow, "is to end in
hating her. ... Between man and woman it's a question of under–
standing
or
love...." It would have been closer to the matter if
he had written that to know the mind of a man is to end
in
hating
him since obviously Lawrence was much more concerned to defend
men against being understood by women than to defend women
against being understood by men; we know that from as far back as
Sons and Lovers.
It wasn't intellect, however, that he wished to pre–
serve from comprehension. In the same letter to Dr. Burrow he goes
on to define love as the "pre-cognitive flow" and we are at once
aware of what it is he means by mind and what he opposes to under–
standing. Love is the state of affectional, quite animal connection
between two people such as exists between mother and child in the
child's infancy; understanding is the operative force which enters
into this relationship when the social connection replaces the earlier
physical connection. In all his adult life, in all his life with Frieda,
Lawrence looked to reproduce the non-cognitive connection of this
earliest love experience, his infant experience. It is what he meant
by the blood consciousness which he offered as his alternative to
mental consciousness, the opposition which plays such a basic part
in his attack upon modern civilization. Frieda had enough intelligence
of feeling-female intuition, if you will-to recognize Lawrence's
need for the kind of love he had once known in the infancy of his
life and enough undifferentiated maternal impulse to satisfy this
need as far as it can ever be satisfied in a grown man. She couldn't
make Lawrence happy, no woman could have, but better than any–
one we can imagine she met the first enormous requirement Law–
rence imposed on her, it is the same requirement he imposes on us
as his readers-that we suspend the usual exercise of reason and the
usual impulses of common sense and self-protection in order to re–
ceive such beneficence as this man of genius has within his giving.
Frieda was knowing, as a mother is, but we can put it that she didn't
have to understand what she knew about Lawrence any more than
a mother has to understand what she knows about her infant; and
that is why she didn't have to end in hating Lawrence and
in
de–
stroying him and herself.
