Seizures

David Herbert Lawrence, bearded son of a miner and of letters, has often shocked his native England with the pagan implications of his novels (Sons and Lovers, Women in Love). His most recent tale, Lady Chatterley's Lover, he thought best to publish privately, stealthily. But officialdom soon learned of its existence, found the book so concupiscent that it was forever banned from England.

Last week, while its author sunned himself in Italy with sophisticated and sympathetic Novelist-Essayist Aldous Leonard Huxley, news came that another Lawrence venture had riled English moralists. In London since mid-June there has been a first exhibition of Mr. Lawrence's adventures into painting. Two titles were typical: A Boccaccio Story, A Flight with An Amazon. Thousands of Londoners have seen them. Critics have snorted: "Repellent and distorted nudes . . . compel most spectators to recoil in horror."

Last week a troop of detectives swooped down upon the gallery, made off with a dozen Lawrence nudes.

Another Londoner who excites his fellow townsmen is Sculptor Jacob Epstein. Born by the Hudson, he has done most of his controversial carving beside the Thames (TIME, June 1, 1925). Sculptor Epstein's recent London exhibition of drawings also included many an explicit nude. Englishmen came, saw, said various things, but there was no official interference.

Last week, however, Sculptor Epstein heard that 200 books elegantly illustrating the exhibition, designed to sell in the U. S. at $90 per copy, had been seized by U. S. authorities, sent to Washington, pronounced "unfit for circulation."

"Now isn't that silly?" said Sculptor Epstein.

He had more to say when he read adverse criticisms of Night, his newly-unveiled ornament on the London Underground office building. One pundit had observed:

"It has no psychological significance whatever. It is a great, coarse object in a debased Indo-Chinese style, representing a creature half-Buddha, half-mummy, bearing upon her knee a corpselike child of enormous size."

Sculptor Epstein declared: "If the man in the street does not like the look of it on his daily way to work he can always avert his eyes. In any case, the artist who considers the taste of the masses is a fool and is stultifying his own art. . . . In all beauty there is an element of strangeness, of unfamiliarity, which ordinary, non-creative people find alarming. . . . In my Night there is a touch of the inhuman. That is appropriate to the vast, vague idea of night. You could not personify such an idea by an ordinary pretty human figure."