Primal*

A Burning Bay Stallion Incarnates Lawrentian Purity

The Story. At 24, Lou Witt was without a taproot. Having drifted from New Orleans to Texas to Paris to Biarritz, Vienna, Palermo, Rome, London, she was as native to one bit of geography as another. Nor could people, any person, hold her. She saw through them, always had her own way. Her best lover, impetuous, paint-daubing Rico, she had subjugated. Now he was merely the futile, shallow Sir Henry Carrington, would-be London society painter, her husband. Their relation had paled to nervous platonism, Lou doubting there was a man who could think quickly and far enough, love largely enough, to fulfill her. Rico looked anxiously after other women.

Lou's mother had seen the unwisdom of their marrying. But she was a gunmetal woman. She withered everything she touched with destructive analysis, consumed people's illusions with acid irony. After 50 years, her search for life had grown fierce, into a crusade to deny life--nihilism.

A red-gold stallion changed these women--the mother a little, the daughter much. Lou saw him in the mews where their own mounts were kept a horse of enormous power with dark, invisible flame coming out of him. In his wild jet eyes gleamed demoniac visions of an untamed animal time when there were no human lies about goodness, love, perfection, ideals. He was a celibate stallion and a mankiller. Lou found him a terrible deity who gazed questioning, threatening, untouchable out of another world, with ears like daggers on his naked head.

She bought him, St. Mawr the bay stallion, and made Rico ride him. Rico had known horses as a boy in Australia and to fear St. Mawr angered him beyond control. One day, in St. Mawr's own country, near the Devil's Chair in Wales, Rico screamed at the rearing horse and dragged him over backwards. St. Mawr lashed and strained to rise, his neck arched cruelly, his mad eyes leaping from their sockets. Crushed beneath, Rico still reined the immense horse to earth.

As she galloped for brandy, Lou felt that the earth was flooded with evil, the positive evil that reins mankind to earth, keeping an unruptured surface over mankind's internal hemorrhage. As soon as possible, she went away with her mother and St. Mawr. Rico wanted St. Mawr shot or castrated, but Lou got him away to Texas--where he shed his deity on the wide, empty plains and made advances to a tall Texas mare.

There Lou left him. with the little Welsh groom whose lunar spiritual isolation had mastered not only the horse but, momentarily, the stony Mrs. Witt. Lou went on, into New Mexico, with her mother and their other groom, a half-breed Navajo from Arizona. The latter, detached, impassive, had seemed more than human back in England; but here, with dusky squaws about, he could be seen as himself, stupid, ratlike, sexually predatory.

Lou knew better than ever that she wanted no man, but only to be very still. And she found the place to be still--a ramshackle ranch high among mountains where inexorable spirits resisted any tampering with their scorched, flinty domain and promised life, straight from its source, to the dedicated listener.

The Significance. Author Lawrence looks into life as a mystical physiologist. He would lead men back through the wombs of the ages to the birthday of the species, lest they forget the elements of their nature. For him, good and evil lie far underneath manners and exist only where the primal passions are pure or emasculate. St. Mawr, the burning bay stallion, incarnates the Lawrentian purity as has no other creature.

The Author. Born to coal-mining in Nottingham, 40 years ago, David Herbert Lawrence scavenged crumbs of scholarship as he could. An unusual mother aided in this. He taught, wrote verse, published Sons and Lowers in 1913, his first important novel. He has wandered the earth as few men do--especially Australia, Mexico and the southwest U. S. In England, lately, he has been closely associated with John Middleton Murry, the late Katherine Mansfield's husband, in the publication of Murry's review, The Adelphi.

*ST. MAWR--D. H. Lawrence--Knopf ($2.00).