INT RODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
43
But she had her bad times nonetheless, of this there can be no
question; the two of them had a great talent for making each other
miserable. Lawrence might write of himself, "I shall do my work
for women, better than the Suffrage," but even Frieda must have
had her moments when she would have settled for the vote and
3!
less strenuous husband, especially in the war years. Those war years!
It's odd, the way the biographers always take what Lawrence says
at its face value when they come to dealing with the depression he
ascribes to his hatred of the war and skip the looming fact that the
outbreak of the war and the outbreak of Lawrence's first period of
acute emotional disturbance coincided almost exactly with the legit–
imization of his union with Frieda:. The final divorce decree came
on May 28, 1914; Frieda and Lawrence were married on July 13,
1914. For two years they had been in exile from England, now they
could be legal and they returned to England, to set up life together
as a respectable married couple. And war was declared!
For all their self-revelation, there are extraordinary reticences
in Lawrence's letters. There is no hint, for instance, in the Huxley
volume of what we learn from Moore's biography, that all the time
Lawrence was writing
Sons and Lovers
in
Italy he was in corres–
pondence with Jessie Chambers, the Miriam of the novel, sending
her
his
manuscript so that she could verify or correct his account of
their earlier relationship. It's one of the creepiest episodes in Law–
rence's history, the two of them, Lawrence and Frieda, sitting there
poring over Jessie's detailed revisions of Lawrence's earlier love
affair while back in England, alone, Jessie dug and dug, dredging
up every last memory as she cherished it, insisting that Lawrence do
her the justice
in
fiction that she felt he had denied her in real life.
What price both art
and
truth! Maybe-we hope-Lawrence was
ashamed of himself and that's why he doesn't tell Garnett, say,
what he's doing. But this isn't the only place where the letters can
be misleading if they are taken as the sole or chief biographical source.
If
we compare the poems in the
Look! We Have Come Through!
volume with the letters Lawrence wrote in the same period, the
correspondence is f.ar from adequate in suggesting the torments Law–
rence apparently went through in his life with Frieda after their
elopement, Frieda insisting, for one thing, that a mother has a perfect
right to miss her children. Instances like these warn us that the
