At the Drop of a Stamp

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE (1,307 pp.)--Edited by Harry T. Moorp--Viking ($17.50).

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulseless lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins." Thus D. H. Lawrence in a letter to a friend, writing on the subject of his homeland. But Lawrence distributed his displeasure evenhandedly; he had equally sharp words for the U.S.: "It's so tough and wearing, with the iron springs poking out through the padding . . . Americans are not younger than we, but older: a second childhood. But being so old, in senile decay and second childishness, perhaps they are nearer to the end. and the new beginning." This 1,300-page-thick collection of Lawrence letters, ably edited by Southern Illinois University's Professor Harry T.

Moore, comprises a remarkably complete autobiography of the contentious, witty, prickly and tender novelist, who corresponded voluminously because he was so often away from home--driven first by a consuming desire for Utopia, then by a consumptive body that forced him to seek out hot, dry climates.

Like a man who had no time to wait for his own considered opinion, he set down his reactions to things literary, political, social and philosophical at the drop of a stamp. He had great friendships and great enmities, usually with the same people, and wrote them all down at white heat. He was often wrongheaded, but even his most outrageous opinions generally nick a vein.

>>On society: "I feel quite antisocial, against this social whole as it exists. I wish one could be a pirate or highwayman in these days. But my way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of today, is more satisfying ... I disbelieve utterly in the public, in humanity, in the mass."

>>On writing: "I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd. People should either run for their lives, or come under the colours or say how do you do?"

>>On modern painting: "Very clever work, quite lovely new colour and design, and inside it all nothing--emptiness, ashes, an old bone.''

>>On Christianity: "I loathe lambs, those symbols of Christian meekness. They are the stupidest, most persistent, greediest little beasts in the whole animal kingdom. Really, I suspect Jesus of having had very little to do with sheep, that he could call himself the Lamb of God. I would truly rather be the little pig of God, the little pigs are infinitely gayer and more delicate in soul."

>>On democracy: "I am no democrat, save in politics. I think the state is a vulgar institution. But life itself is an affair of aristocrats."

>>On life: "The second half of one's life should surely be one's own, after one has more or less given away the first half, for a pound of imitation tea . . . All truth--and real living is the only truth--has in it the elements of battle and repudiation. Nothing is wholesale ... If only one could have two lives: the first, in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they had to be made; and the second in which to profit by them."

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