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ALFRED KAZIN
been based on things that Lawrence later heard from
his
mother), the
sense we get of Mrs. Morel, humiliated and enraged but in her inner–
most being haughtily inviolate, gives us a sense of all the power that
Lawrence connected with his mother and of the power in the relation–
ship that flowed between them. In
Sons and Lovers
he was able to
re-create, for all time, the moment when the sympathetic bond
be–
tween them reached its greatest intensity- and the moment when her
death broke it. Ever after, Lawrence was to
try
to re-create this
living bond, this magic symp;tthy, between himself and life. He often
succeeded in creating an exciting and fruitful version of it- in relation–
ship to his extraordinary wife Frieda; to a host of friends, disciples,
admirers and readers throughout the world; even to his own novels
and stories, essays and articles and poems and letters. Unlike Henry
James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence always
makes you feel that not art but the quality of the lived experience
is
his greatest concern. That is why it is impossible to pick up anything
by him without feeling revivified. Never were a writer's works more
truly an allegory of his life, and no other writer of his imaginative
standing has in our time written books that are so open to life. Yet
one always feels in Lawrence his own vexation and disappointment
at not being able to reproduce, in the full consciousness of his genius,
the mutual sympathy he had experienced with his mother. One even
feels about Lawrence's increasing vexation and disappointment that
it tore him apart physically, exhausted and shattered him. Wandering
feverishly from continent to continent, increasingly irritable and
vulnerable to every human defect and cultural complacency, he seems
finally to have died for lack of another place to aim at; for lack,
even, of another great fight to wage. His work itself was curiously
never enough for him, for he could write so quickly, sitting anywhere
under a tree, that the book seemed to fly out of
his
hand as soon as
he had made it; and he was so much the only poet in his imagina–
tive universe that he could not take other writers seriously enough
to rejoice in his own greatness. He was searching, one feels, for some–
thing infinitely more intangible than fame, or a single person, or a
"God"-he was searching for the remembered ecstasy of experience,
the quality of feeling, that is even more evanescent than the people
we connect with it. Lawrence kept looking for this even after he had
