Bones to Crunch

D. H. LAWRENCE: PORTRAIT OF A GENIUS BUT . . . (432 pp.)-- Richard Aldington--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3.75).

Biographer Richard Aldington chose the subtitle for this book because, when he began to collect material, almost every one who had known Poet-Novelist Lawrence used the phrase "Of course, Lawrence was a genius, but . . ." Whatever Lawrence might have been as a literary man, they sniffed, he was no great shakes as a gentleman.

Biographer Aldington cannot restrain a few well-bred sniffs of his own. Even though he manages to explain and forgive much that struck others as deplorable, even in a genius, he cannot quite condone the fact that Lawrence was capable of the "atrocity" of drinking red wine with bouillabaisse. But while Aldington, like any other good biographer, sets limits to what his subject may do without reproach, he has a keen nose for a good story. His flair for highlighting all that was spectacular in David Herbert Lawrence's brief and frenzied life makes the book a valuable and highly readable one.

Life with Father. Born in 1885, in a grimy coal-mining village in Nottingham shire, Lawrence soon grew, as he himself said, into "a delicate pale brat with a snuffy nose" who "trotted after his mother like a shadow." Only father Lawrence, a "strikingly virile" miner who could "just laboriously spell out a newspaper," dared to stand up to his strong-minded wife, a woman with a deep urge to advance the Lawrences in the world. Their brawls and battles earned him the horrified contempt of his "prim" children.

In 1905 David achieved one of his mother's dearest ambitions for him by graduating from Nottingham's University College. He became a schoolteacher. He took into the world a strangely assorted equipment of traits. He was cantankerous, hotheaded, brimful of self-pity, bossy, fanatically rebellious against the very notion of being bossed himself.

Life with Frieda. In his first novel (The White Peacock), as in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence's hero was a lusty gamekeeper, and his heroine a "refined" lady who finds her happiness in the man of the woods. This, approximately, was the story of Lawrence's own life. After dropping schoolteaching in the vain hope that he would soon make -L-2,000 a year by writing, he ran into Frieda von Richthofen, daughter of a baron, wife of an English philologist and mother of three children.* A month after their first meeting they ran away together, she leaving her husband and children.

Thus began one of the strangest, most strenuous marriages imaginable. For much as Lawrence might pine to play the role of lusty gamekeeper, he was at heart intensely prim, easily shocked. Aristocrat Frieda, on the other hand, was simple, straightforward, totally "unrefined." When he raged at her, she merely picked up a dish and heaved it at his head. Her toughness stood her in good stead. Lawrence worshiped her and never looked at another woman.

It's in the Blood. "Your most vital necessity," Lawrence wrote to a friend, ". . . is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly." On this rock, amid constant storms of flying crockery and verbal cruelty, Lawrence built his life. His artistic creed was no less brief and simple: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect . . . What our blood feels . . . is always true."

Lawrences own blood boiled through his veins so furiously that it spilled out in streams of writing wherein truth and balderdash, rage and beauty, were usually mixed inseparably. Always tender and understanding where primroses or tortoises or mountain lions were concerned, he grew to hate the human race so much that the very ideas of mercy arid justice became anathema to him. "Jesus becomes more unsympathisch [unsympathetic] to me, the longer I live," he complained indignantly. "I believe in wrath and gnashing of teeth and crunching of coward's bones."

It was not only his declared enemies, e.g., the critics who sneered at him as "sex-soaked," whose bones he yearned to crunch. Those who most admired and helped him invariably felt his teeth, which grew sharper with age. He liked to say how important it was that he and others like him should go to work and "kill some . . . beastly disdainful bankers . . . lawyers . . . and schemers of all kinds." "I will kill Mabel first," he said gravely and contentedly, referring to the helpful lady, wealthy Mabel Dodge Luhan, under whose New Mexico roof he was living at the moment.

Lawrence never acted on the impulse. He died, in 1930, of the tuberculosis which had gripped him from childhood and which he had always dismissed as a mere "cold" or "flu." Later generations, to whom his spite and savagery will seem as remote and curious as the ferocity of the Elizabethans, are not likely to dwell long on either his creed of "blood" or the books which expressed it, e.g., the famed Lady Chatterley. What they will mark most in Lawrence is those many writings through which he put new and startling life into old, timeworn subjects and places, as in his Studies in Classic American Literature, Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan Places, his poems of nature and a host of essays on life and living. If he was no gentleman, he was a wonderful talker.

* And cousin of the redoubtable Baron Manfred von Richthofen, leading German air ace (80 Allied planes) of World War I.

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