INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE
47
to the dark gods of an earlier civilization than our Hebraic-Christian
civilization, as a metaphor against loneliness. His message makes no
reasonable sense: when was there ever an entire nakedness of body
and spirit between a man and a woman, it's rather dreadful to con–
template. But of course his message makes sense as poetry, as an
overleap of the imagination in order to dramatize the insufficiency of
our ordinary civilized sexual relationships.
I read Lawrence today and I'm utterly confounded by the
effect he had on me and my friends when we first read him: we
thought his metaphors were translatable into a program for practical
conduct! We knew he addressed himself to us not on behalf of a
new way of acting but a new way of being. We understood, of
course-after all, we weren't stupid- that his sociology, his politics,
his
anthropology, his religion were all of them directed only to the
quality of being which Lawrence hoped to produce; we never read
The Plumed Serpent
as a defense of Hitler or Mussolini, we knew he
didn't mean us to run around like Aztecs or Incas or whatever they
were. Yet in the sexual sphere we seemed to find in his books a literal
sanction which literally is not there-the sanction for a free, even an
experimental sexuality, and we recognized neither the contradictions
in
his
doctrine nor its abstraction from reality. Since Lawrence's mo–
rality had to do with the kind of person one is and since all this think–
ing had as its object the discovery of a better way of being, both of
which preoccupations are of course wholly in line with the concerns
of the romantic poets, we read Lawrence like the last of the roman–
tics, a bit on the mystical side but still the most intense and personal
of the romantic idealists, the one who imposed on us the heaviest
burden of self-consciousness and self-realization, as it used to be called.
In our effort to meet his high challenge to self-awareness, we failed
to perceive that there is no world for Lawrence's people, that they
are isolated in their intensity, and that he doesn't permit
us
to live
in
the actual world-this and his profound sexual puritanism, the
fact that he licenses sex only as a sacrament.
You're wiser in your generation, Norman, than we were about
Lawrence; no, not wiser, keener. Having been born in the years of
the economic depression gives you a keener nose for reality and a
quicker instinct to protect practice against theory, which is also why
you're less generous than we were. You're more acute in your read-
