48
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing of Lawrence because you're less generous in your imagination
of heroism; transcendence worries you, perhaps
<Ii
little too much.
You immediately smell out Lawrence's remoteness from actual life
and his restrictiveness, you know that if you take him literally he
would pull you after himself into some unwholesome morass and
that he doesn't represent the romantic ideal of freedom. Steve Marcus,
for instance, says that after
<Ii
bout of Lawrence he always turns to
Colette: we would have scorned such an idea, thought it frivolous,
but Steve is right of course and we were wrong: as a sexual writer,
Colette is exactly the indicated antidote to Lawrence. And yet I
wonder. I wonder if this reality principle of yours doesn't define a
weakness as much as
<Ii
strength. At least we hoped ourselves capable
of ultimate emotion, ultimate vision, ultimate experience and, meas–
uring our capacity, we were willing to make mistakes; we didn't en–
ter maturity, like you who, born in the depression, still remain de–
terminists of every kind except economic, all set to accept whatever
limitations on our being and call them our fate. We didn't invoke
reality only as a negative force, only as a restriction of possibility;
there were times when we supposed reality was on our side. Dear
Norman, there surely is much to be said for a view of life, like Law–
rence's, which not only refuses the simple on the sole ground that
it is less than the complex but which also insists that we make our
own conditions and that our fate can be grand....
