INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
45
,
whom she had been supposed to detach him. You remember how,
in writing about the Morel boys in
Sons and Lovers,
Lawrence said,
"As
soon as the young men come into contact with women, there's
a split. William gives his sex to a fribble and his mother holds his
soul." Well, the split was bad and Lawrence had looked to Frieda
to put the pieces together, to unite soul and body as Jessie Chambers
had been incapable of doing. But in actuality this was not at all the
service Frieda had performed. On the contrary, she had kept soul
and sex apart or at least unlegalized in their union, until now the
marriage took place and sex and love were presented to Lawrence
in the person of a wife. I think it was this institutionalized conjunc–
tion of sex and love that threw Lawrence into the despair of the
war years. The conflict raging in the world was an externalized ex–
pression of the private sexual struggle which was to absorb so large
a part of his emotional energies for the rest of his life.
This is no irrelevant private point I'm making, no psychoana–
lytical advantage I'm trying to take of Lawrence, need I make that
clear? The conflict which was crystallized in Lawrence when he
and Frieda finally married seems to me to be the essential conflict,
and contradiction, that runs through all his work. Lawrence wanted
to rid sex of its usual paraphernalia of love emotions, he wanted the
sexual relation to be rid of the "mental" trappings which he felt
were so destructive of the dark mysterious physical connection. But
he also wanted love to be totally assimilated into the sexual exper–
ience, he feared to give the sexual emotions any autonomy unless
they were sanctified by love. It was a conflict so strong and so deeply
rooted in his own personal history that it was impossible of resolution
and it accounts, in my opinion, for our inability ever finally to under–
stand what Lawrence is driving toward in his fiction, our inability
ever to parse either his plots or his characters and finally say, with
any conviction of accuracy, just what it is he
appr.oves
in the relations
between
his
heroes and heroines. We know of what Lawrence disap–
proves, we know he disapproves of all assertions of will and all sexual
behavior which has mere sensation as its goal. But even here he is
ambiguous, flagrantly so at times. In the character of Mellors, for
example, it's impossible to distinguish what Lawrence would call an
assertion of will from what he presents to us as an expression of the
gamekeeper's inviolable masculinity and wholly admirable pride. And
