"Dear Bertie"

D. H. LAWRENCE'S LETTERS TO BERTRAND RUSSELL (111 pp.)--Edited,with on introduction by Harry T. Moore--Gotham Book Mart ($5).

Even after so many years there is no mistaking it--the voice of David Herbert Lawrence (died 1930), come back like an indignant ghost to nag the torpid flesh of Anglo-Saxons. It is not a pleasant voice: few of D. H. Lawrence's letters to his "friends" (victims would be a better word) show the genius that illuminated his fiction and poetry. It is a hectoring, querulous, spiteful voice, polite when it fears that it has aroused anger; but, once reassured by the listener's forgiveness, instantly rude and bullying again.

In the present case the forgiving listener was the Hon.* Bertrand Russell, 43-year-old lecturer on mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, author (with Alfred North Whitehead) of Principia Mathematica, one of the most revolutionary books of the 20th Century. The year was 1915-16; D. H. Lawrence was 30 and beginning to be well known, but in the middle of a "spiritual crisis" that was plunging him into "utter darkness of chaos." All that Russell and Lawrence had in common was a passionate objection to the continuance of World War I, and Lawrence hoped that they might not only get together in preaching pacifism but also in concocting a new philosophy of life. The 23 Lawrence letters in this collection (he did not preserve Russell's answers) have never been published before. Russell turned them over to a student who was doing research on Lawrence.

Invitation to a Voyage. The correspondence began amiably enough: after kicking young E. M. Forster in the teeth ("He sucks his dummy--you know, those child's comforters--long after his age"), Lawrence got down to business. "There must be a revolution . . . nationalizing of all industries . . . communications . . . land--in one fell blow." After that, man could really start "the adventure into the unexplored, the woman," and "fight clear to his own basic, primal being." Lawrence begged his new friend Russell to be a kind and tolerant listener.

Russell's answer must have been tolerant, because Lawrence promptly complained that it was. He then went on to say: "You must put off your . . . knowledge . . . you must live in my world . . . if I can't inhabit yours." To make sure, he went to stay a few days with Russell in Cambridge, rushed away in a state of "melancholic malaria." "I wish you would swear a sort of allegiance with me," he said. ". . . I have been much too Christian . . . I must drop all about God . . . You must drop all your democracy . . . There must be an aristocracy . . . a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents & democracies . . ."

Absolute Woman. In letter No. 11, Lawrence became more emphatic. "You must work out the idea of a new state," he insisted, underlining the word "must" 15 times. Lawrence suggested that in addition to a male "Dictator" the new state have a female "Dictatrix" too, in fairness to the female population. The ultimate aim, he continued with passionate wooliness, was "a perfect government" dedicated to "the highest good of the soul, of the individual, the fulfillment in the Infinite, in the Absolute."

But "Dear Bertie" seems to have boggled and backtracked. He sent Lawrence an outline of his democratic ideas for lectures--and got it back scrawled with screams ("no! no! no! no! no!"; "Do go to the root"). In Letter 15 Lawrence was more explicit. "You simply don't speak the truth . . . you are really the super-war-spirit . . . you want to jab and strike, like the soldier with the bayonet . . . You are simply full of repressed desires . . . As a woman said to me, who had been to one of your meetings: 'It seemed so strange, with his face looking so evil, to be talking about peace and love.' Why don't you own it." He concluded huffily: "Let us become strangers again."

Don't Drop That Lizard! After two months as strangers, Lawrence wrote again. He said frankly that "my quarreling with you was largely a quarreling with something . . . I was struggling away from in myself." He described his latest conclusions about "a blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness . . . If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the fetus . . . Do you know what science says about these things?"

Science seems to have been skeptical. Then Lawrence wrote to say that he had decided to emigrate to Florida, with his wife and "several young people," including his Armenian disciple, Dmitri Kouyoumdjian, to "start a new life in a new spirit. Won't you come . . . too?" he begged, "& be president of us?" But Bertie apparently wouldn't budge; and the British government refused Lawrence a passport. Disciple Kouyoumdjian was also a disappointment: he changed both his mind and his name, stayed on in England and became "Michael Arlen" of a bestseller called The Green Hat.

Baby-Face & Sugar-Daddy. Lawrence took only a few more stabs at Bertie. "What's the good of living as you do?" he complained. "Why don't you drop overboard? . . . Do become a creature instead of a mechanical instrument . . . start at the very beginning and be a perfect baby . . . Oh, and I want to ask you, when you make your will, do leave me enough to live on . . . My love to you. Stop working and being an ego . . . Are you still cross?"

Bertie still was. In 1918, he was clapped into jail for his pacifist views, spent his 6 months' sentence writing his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. Lawrence got out of England in 1919, but he never really forgave Bertie. "Have you ever seen him in a bathing dress?" he sneeringly asked a friend.

* He became Earl Russell in 1931, on the death of his elder brother.

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