54
PARTISAN REVIEW
Trilling to a new selection of the letters of D. H. Lawrence. Mrs. Trill–
ing confesses that Lawrence no longer means as much to her as he
did in rebellious youth, and one believes her, since her analysis of
Lawrence's work is based not on his real and marvelous creativity,
but on an Oedipal conflict which she insists is the root of his ultimate
failure as a novelist. More than one great poet, or poetic talent, has
known the same kind of failure, which is probably rooted in the gap
between the poetic realization of reality, which is always funda–
mentally "personal," and the kind of novelistic instinct which spe–
cializes in
st.ory--an
instinct that Lawrence never really had. But
instead of paying the homage to him that his genius deserves--and
calls for-homage that would at least see Lawrence as possessing
the defects of
his
genius, Mrs. Trilling regales us with the kind of
clinical hindsight which, divorced from literary humility and appre–
ciation, has made this kind of writing a terror to anyone who simply
cares for literature.
I think it was this institutionalized conjunction of sex and love that
threw Lawrence into the despair of the war years. The conflict raging
in the world was an externalized expression 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 psychoanalytical
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 contradic–
tion, that runs through all his work.
This may not be an irrelevant private point, but it shows an
attitude toward literature which has nothing to claim for literature
itself. It is odd that the very people who are so quick to see sup–
pressed and wasted creativity in people who are merely emotionally
ill should always wish to deny the fundamental creativity of the
greatest writers, like Kafka and Lawrence and Dostoevsky-a mistake
that in the case of the latter, Freud pointedly refrained from making.
Yet the reason for this relentless psychologizing of art, so often equally
irrelevant to both art and psychology, is that it gives the analyst, who–
ever he may be, the chance to share in the creativity of his subject.
There is a sad perversion here of what, in genuine literary criticism,
is
an act of appropriation. Henry James said that the true critic
is
