Psychiatry

THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY--D. H. Lawrence--Knopf ($2.50).

By its sheer artistry, Sons and Lovers escapes its Freudian obsession with the mother-son relationship, and establishes itself as a classic human document expressed in lyric prose. But since then (1913) Author Lawrence has played less the artist and more the psychiatrist, his favorite study still the positive and negative reactions of sex attraction and repulsion. At their best the short stories of the present collection are a neurological graph done into Lawrence's powerful prose, and at their predominant worst (witness the title story) they are queer extravaganzas of symbology.

Of the graphs, one or two plot the reactions of a slight half hour. Such is "Smile." An English husband comes to the Italian nunnery where his wife lies dying. Mismated to her, he dreads their last words together. The Mother Superior, a comfortable woman in voluminous black, greets him with the news of his wife's death. He goes to the corpse, led by a young nun who lures him with mischievous eyes, and a lovely hand "passive as a sleeping bird." In the quivering candle glow the composure of the dead face mocks him, and his embarrassed relief reacts with an extraordinary smile. Contagious, it starts wickedly on the pained faces of the attendant nuns, like "subtle flowers opening." The mischievous young one strangles her smile with sobs on the Mother Superior's bosom, but the husband rushes, with his, down the echoing corridor, and out of the convent.

Another graph "The Man Who Loved Islands" registers the lifetime development of a man's passion for aloofness. He first indulges his passion by buying an island where he is "The Master" over his own microcosm of necessary attendants--a butler, a housekeeper, a carpenter, a mason. Wearying of these servants, who cheat him, quarrel among themselves, and pine for the peopled mainland, he retreats to a smaller island where he is served by one old couple and their daughter. Out of sheer indifference he allows himself to be seduced by the daughter, whom he marries because he has got her with child. Irritated by these human complications, he escapes to the last island, a mere pile of rocks in the North. He finds solitude at last; hunger and blockades of snow. In a frenzy of lonely remorse he staggers to the icebound shore, but sees not a sail.