Barring some youthful poems, D. H. Lawrence had just twenty years of writing life. Throughout these years - which included and were in a special way harried by the incidence of the War - he was severely encumbered by circumstances. He had to reckon with poverty, with illness, with the misapprehension of friends, and the malice of strangers. None the less we find that, besides wresting from the most unpromising elements a life that was rich and adventurous, he was a prolific writer. Indeed, if we allow for the various nature of his output and take for comparison the twenty most productive years of any other accepted author, he would appear to have been the most prolific writer our country has had since Sir Walter Scott. In addition to a dozen full-length novels he wrote short stories, essays, translations, pamphlets, books of travel and of philosophy, plays and many poems. Over the same period his correspondence, whether measured by interest or by bulk, bids fair to rival the correspondences of our most communicative English men of letters. It is worth noting that from the very beginning most of Lawrence's correspondents have had the instinct to preserve what he wrote to them, and it may be safely predicted that his letters will be included with his more formal works in a particular sense that is faintly paralleled only in the case of Keats. They contain a free expression of his findings about life in the very accents he was accustomed to use in speech - accents that are fresh and inimitable. With their richness of human admission they do away with the charges of morbidity and impotence as with the contention that there was a sad or bad discrepancy between the man and the writer. Further works - letters and other things - still await print. For Lawrence as a writer it will be seen that all things have worked in the end together for good. The very difficulties of publication during his lifetime will justify, now that he is dead, his early and confident adoption of the phoenix as his emblem. Meanwhile, he is like Joey in the Punch and Judy show. He will not 'stay put', but bobs up serenely and repeatedly from the grave to mock those who would reduce him to a formula. His unholy ghost will not be pigeon-holed.
It is one of the marks of those who dislike him that they evince a lust for simple and final pronouncements - a lust as notable as their disparagement of anything in the nature of hearty praise.
For final pronouncements the critics must abide the verdict of the future reader. Lawrence as a whole remains to be read and to be reread. He has to create the taste for his work, and this takes time. But it is a taste that grows. Not only so: it is a taste that delicately transforms the palate and renews it for the retrial of other tastes, ancient and modern. His books are easy to read but hard to understand. Therein lies part of their potency. 'A book,' said Lawrence, who had pondered deeply upon such matters, 'lives as long as it is unfathomed.' Or again, 'The mind understands; and there's an end of it.' Therein also lies their vital difference from the books of such writers as Joyce or Proust, which are hard at first to read, but comparatively easy to understand once the initial difficulty is overcome. These have evolved a new technique, but they belong themselves to an outworn way of life. What they do - and it is much - is to interpret and express the old in a fresh language. Lawrence, on the contrary, except that the drum-tap and emphasis of his style are as original to himself as they are at first irritating to many readers, has elected to speak in a familiar language. But his story-shapes, his incidents, his objects and his characters are chosen primarily as symbols in his endeavour to proffer a new way of life. That there can indeed be a new way of life - though possibly only by a recovery of values so remote in our past that they are fecund from long forgetting, and as far out of mind as they are near to our blind fingers - is the single admission he seeks from his readers, as it was the belief that governed his actions. Most, however, even of those who have vocally admired him, will make any admission except just this. It includes, they know, the admission that his prescience was unique in his generation. Here is much for one man to ask of his fellows. So they prefer to continue with simplifications that are away from the point, with 'patterns' and with set phrases, which serve at the best to show how evocative Lawrence is - as a mere name more evocative than Lenin or than Freud. If Lawrence invariably committed himself, his critics infallibly give themselves away. Of all moralists he is the most demoralising.
I believe that there not only may, but must be, a new way of life, and that Lawrence was on the track of it. In his own words, he wanted 'to put something through' by means of 'a long, slow, dark, almost invisible fight', with a victory that would come 'little by little' and that could be interrupted only by death. It was so interrupted sadly, but not as will appear, fatally. Because of its undertaking, readers who find in themselves some answering spark and are content to wait without prejudice for fuller comprehension, will find nothing concerning Lawrence to be irrelevant. His immediate appeal is that of potent innocence which has met with a grave miscarriage of judgement. Here is a man who lived from a pure source and steadfastly refused to break faith with that source. And so we have another fountain for the heart, another proof that pure and living sources still exist and always will exist. Upon Byron's death Scott said it was as if the sun had gone out. With Lawrence it is the other way. With his going he has given to the sun, as to the water, an added splendour. Readers who never saw him will see sky and earth, bird, beast and flower differently because of him, and he will find a place like a friend's place in the lives of men who knew nothing of him until after his death.
While my own memories are fresh, I have set myself to put down all I can recall about Lawrence. Without attempting to write anything like a biography I have tried to give a narrative - in his own words when possible - of this non-Christian saint, this hero who repudiated heroism, this Innocent the First of our modern world. I shall show him as I see him - a man upon a dangerous but fascinating pilgrimage, who set forth from his City of Destruction in the English industrial Midlands, passed through the London and cosmopolitan Vanity Fair and traversed the physical and intellectual world, carrying a load of bitterness in his bowels and a talisman of purity in his hand, until such time as he died quietly and bravely with his work unfinished but with victory nearly enough in sight to place him as far beyond failure as he was beyond his fellows, because of the greater risks he ran. If I have not been as adequate as I should wish, at least I have tried to refrain from approaching the least solemn of men with graveyard graces.
For my first assembling of material I must renew my acknowledgements to several friends of Lawrence whose names appear in the text. During the original writing I had not access to the now published Letters. But with some two hundred of my own, and a good number which have been shown to me by their possessors or have come upon the market, together with those already published by Mr Murry, Mrs Clarke (Ada Lawrence) and Mrs Luhan, I was able to give a fairly detailed account of Lawrence's movements. This was aided by a scheme of dates and addresses kindly provided by Mr and Mrs Laurence Hilton from the collection of the letters with which they were entrusted for the formidable task of transcription. From Messrs Pinker I had the substantial benefit of reading the letters from Lawrence to their father, the late J. B. Pinker. By the courtesy of Messrs Heinemann and with the approval of Mrs Lawrence, I was able to quote freely from Lawrence's letters to me.
C. C.
Hampstead, November 1932