The Fleshly Muse

FRIEDA LAWRENCE: THE MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE edited by E. W. TedlockJr. 481 pages. Knopf. $7.50

As an early prophet of the century's sexual revolution, in prose and by example, D. H. Lawrence attracted swarms of intense female admirers, several of whom rushed into print right after his death with memoirs whose burden was that only the author understood "Lorenzo's" real self, and only his cloddish wife Frieda stood in the way of some blazing fusion that would make sexual, if not literary, history.

Lawrence died in 1930, leaving generations of teen-agers to pore over his lyrical celebrations of sex (Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Plumed Serpent) as a mystical force that was its own imperative, displacing petty considerations of established custom, narrow morality or Christian ethic. For 26 years, until her own death in 1956, Frieda loyally supported the image of Lawrence as the ultimate male. But all the while she was writing an extensive fictionalized memoir. In this book, Professor E. W. Tedlock Jr. of the University of New Mexico has tried to patch together her fragmentary memoir into a coherent whole, and has also assembled a collection of hitherto unpublished correspondence by and to Frieda. The result is to transform Frieda from an offstage presence into a compelling personality in her own right.

More than Reality. The memoir itself is lesser Lawrence in philosophy ("Sex is almost the essence of living"), and the style is the still lesser English that might be expected of a Prussian baron's daughter. But the letters are delightful and perceptive. Most startlingly, they reveal that Frieda was at least as sexually uninhibited as Lawrence himself professed to be (which was a good deal more than he was in reality).

In the first year that she left her professor-husband and three children to live with Lawrence, Frieda was admitting that she could be attracted to other men. She and Lawrence, not yet married, set off on a walking trip with David Garnett and his friend Harold Hobson. Before the trek across the Alps was over, Frieda had confessed to Lawrence that she had felt a strong physical attraction to young Hobson, and he to her. Frieda discussed it freely in letters to Garnett, and Lawrence furiously scribbled comments across her letters-"Stinker! Bitch!"

There are many letters reflecting the affair she had several years later with John Middleton Murry, husband of Katherine Mansfield. "Why, I ask myself, was it you who should have revealed to me the richness of physical love?" Jack wrote to Frieda many years later, lamenting that he had lacked the courage to steal her from Lawrence. "And the loveliness there was between us came out of the generosity of your soul as much as the generosity of your body."

Inner Torment. The primary value of the collection, however, is in its illumination of the stormy relationship between Frieda, the German aristocrat, and Lawrence, the coal miner's son. Lawrence emerges as much prig as immoralist. But he also amply demonstrates his doctrine that the most lasting relationship between man and woman is "love-hate." She concedes that some inner torment sometimes hurled him "over the edge of sanity. Once, I remember he had his hands on my throat, and he was pressing me against the wall and ground out: 'I am the master, I am the master!'" Her response: "Is that all? You can be master as much as you like, I don't care."

But Frieda has as many self-important feelings as self-effacing ones. She complained to one admirer about "socalled 'men' " whose chastity was "male conceit," and she added: "I know to my sorrow that I am six times the 'man' that any of you are." But with Lawrence's death at 45 of tuberculosis, Frieda was seemingly knocked to her knees: she reported "seeing his greatness whole for the first time." Like "a hero in the old days," he should be "burnt on a funeral pyre," and as his widow, she should "throw herself as a last tribute into the flames."

Where she threw herself instead was into an alliance with a pottering Italian painter and ceramist with whom she lived until she died, the last six years in wedlock. In explaining away her haste and the family of four that were left in Italy, Friend Aldous Huxley pointed to Frieda's "extreme helplessness when left alone to cope with a practical situation." It was indeed a fact, never mentioned in these jottings, that D. H. had done most of the household's dusting and dishwashing.

Outer Fidelity. For all her infidelities to Lawrence's person, Frieda had been resolutely loyal to his work. The slightest reservation by a reviewer was met with massive rebuttal. Her husband, she wrote, had "changed the world's outlook on sex for all time," and had been persecuted "only because the world was not ready for the new reality."

The world has now accepted the "new reality," and its views on Lawrence's literary skills have consequently become clear-eyed, discovering that his prose was often embarrassingly overblown, his plots contrived, his characters stylized. But Lawrence was at heart a polemicist, driven by an idea, and that idea lifts and illuminates his best pages. More than many a more skilled craftsman, Lawrence had changed the manners and morals of the Anglo-Saxon world.

The Sunday paintings of D. H. Lawrence have long been a source of licentious but frustrated fascination because few people have ever seen them. I put a phallus in each one of my pictures somewhere," Lawrence told a painter friend, "and I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social, spirituality." The London police obliged by closing up Lawrence's first showing in 1929. Now, at last collected and vended by Viking Press (Paintings of D. H. Lawrence; $12.50), the long-forbidden fruit proves to have been outdated by onrushing realism. There is a sampling of candid nudes, but the approach is less pornographic or primitive than merely earnest. In the artistic output of Lawrence, 10,000 pictures would have been worth less than one word.

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