D. H. L.-Last Word

D. H. L.--Last Word

NOT I, BUT THE WIND--Frieda Lawrence --Viking ($2.50). Until Frieda Lawrence published her testament this week, it must have seemed to her that every Tom, Dick & Harry, Thomasina and Henrietta had had their impertinent say about her late greatly-discussed husband, David Herbert Lawrence. Perhaps it would have been more dignified to keep silence when so many hastened to speak, but Frieda Lawrence has never stood on her dignity. "I did not want to write this book," says she. "I wanted to give Lawrence my silence." Then, with refreshing candor: "Do I want to blow my own trumpet? Yes, I do. . . . I will try to write as honestly as I can. Lies are all very well in their place but the truth seems to me so much more interesting and proud." Not I, But the Wind is in no sense a great book but it is a convincingly naive memoir, thickly padded with unpublished Lawrence letters, that most Lawrentians will want to read. And, having read it, even Lawrentians may heed the mute nunc dimittis of their master's shade.

Lawrence and Frieda were a strangely assorted pair. Lawrence was a lower-class Englishman, Frieda a German aristocrat. When they first met, he was a poverty-laden unknown of 26, she a settled matron of 31, with three children, married to a Nottingham University professor. Lawrence went to tea, to call on the professor. He met Frieda instead, and they fell in love almost at first sight. Frieda tried to have an affair with him, but he insisted on all or nothing; finally she left her husband and children, went to Germany with Lawrence. Her family were horror-struck but she stuck to her choice. Eventually her husband gave her a divorce and she and Lawrence were married, but for a long time they lived outside the pale. Theirs was a stormy life together. Writes Frieda: "What does it amount to that he hit out at me in a rage, when I exasperated him, or mostly when the life around him drove him to the end of his patience? I didn't care very much. I hit back or waited till the storm in him subsided."

Though Frieda and Lawrence quarreled they never separated for long. She shared his nomad existence 18 years, in Europe, Ceylon, Australia, the U. S., was with him in his last days on the Riviera. "I enjoyed being poor and I didn't want to play a role in the world." The thing she missed most was her children, whom she saw only secretly, at bitterly long intervals. The Lawrences quarreled not only with each other but with most of their friends. Their friendship with Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry "was the only spontaneous and jolly" one they had. And, as every Lawrentian knows, even that did not last forever. As for Lawrence's women worshipers, Frieda put up with them as long, as she could, then made a scene. One day in Taos, N. Mex., whither they had been invited by Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan (Lorenzo in Taos), "Mabel came over and told me she didn't think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: 'Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.'" Frieda continued to keep him. As Lawrence lay dying he said to her: "Why, oh why, did we quarrel so much?" She answered: "Such as we were, violent creatures, how could we help it?"

Frieda Lawrence's book will be read mostly on her husband's account, but readers will find in it things of her own. Her shrewd judgment of him as a man: "In his heart of hearts I think he always dreaded women, felt that they were in the end more powerful than men." And her indignant denial that in Lawrence there was anything of the pornographer: "Passionate people don't need tricks."

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