PARTISAN REVIEW
books and letters not only must be read together if we are properly
to understand either but also that there is still room for conjecture
all around the biographical record; they license my suspicion that
Lawrence's recorded feelings about the war-the many letters he
wrote about his hatred of the war and the famous passages in
Kangaroo-were
very possibly a cover for other emotions he was
experiencing at that time of which he was not permitting himself
so much awareness.
To feel, as I do, that it was not the war alone but the fortui–
tous combination of war and his marriage that brought Lawrence so
close to the breaking point after he returned to England in 1914 is
obviously not to minimize the violence of his response to the war.
Anyone who allows himself fully to contemplate the organized
butchery in which whole societies can indulge themselves is bound
to be pushed toward insanity, and Lawrence was not one to spare
himself, or us, any final confrontation. Then too, in his inordinate
reaction to the simple routines of physical examination, we neces–
sarily read Lawrence's unconscious fear of the homosexual tempta–
tions of army life: surely more than even extraordinary sensitivity
is involved in Lawrence's horror because he had to queue up with
the other men and submit to medical examination, including an in–
spection of his genitals. The fact of his marriage to Frieda-I don't
mean the mere mention that the marriage has taken place but what
it weighed as an emotional event-is conspicuously missing from his
correspondence that fall and winter. War, war, war is his obsession,
we hear its rumble even through some of the best descriptive writing
he ever did and some of his most beautiful passages of nature writing.
In terms of his well-being, I think it was disastrous for Law–
rence to have married; it would have been better for him i.f he had
continued to live with Frieda without institutionalizing the relation–
ship. To legalize their union was to bring Lawrence's sexual feeling
for Frieda into the atmosphere of social regularity and conventional
family emotion; that is, it brought sex into established connection
with love-you know, like the song: love and marriage go together
like a horse and carriage. Lawrence wanted Frieda to love him like
a mother but the moment they were bound together in the institution
of marriage, it was as if Frieda was institutionalized in the mother
position, it was as if she had become the very mother person from
