The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence by D. H. Lawrence

First published:The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley, 1932; The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Harry T. Moore, 1962

Critical Evaluation:

One’s understanding of D. H. Lawrence cannot be considered complete without a careful perusal of The Collected Letters. For there is a side of Lawrence that, while it is found elsewhere, receives its fullest expression only in the letters—a side that, beneath all the tensions of his life, is cheerful, optimistic, affirmative. Lawrence’s belief in the ultimate sanctity of physical being finds its embodiment not only in formal essays and narratives, but in these informal meditations that reflect his day-to-day existence.

This aspect had already been revealed in 1932, when Aldous Huxley published an impressive collection of Lawrence letters. Moore draws heavily on Huxley’s edition in the expanded collection. Appearing less than two years after Lawrence’s death, the Huxley book was a great achievement, and many Lawrence scholars have an almost sentimental attachment to the pioneer volume of letters. But the time has long been ripe for a more comprehensive collection, one that would include not only many unpublished letters, but items in the myriad volumes of memoirs and biographies. The Collected Letters, however, is scarcely complete; no collection could be. Many letters will still have to be consulted in the Huxley volume and from other sources; secondary items and duplicative letters were, as Moore ruefully points out, excised.

The earliest item is a postcard dated 1903, shortly after Lawrence had turned eighteen. At this point he was still very much the miner’s son seeking a way out by attending a pupil-teacher center. The girl to whom the postcard is addressed is one of a group of friends known as the Pagans. The last letter, dated 1930, is from a sanatorium at Vence, France, a few days before his death. The intervening pages form the most complete epistolary record we have thus far of a major modern writer: his private life, his struggles with public and publishers, his friends—who often came and went in a rather kaleidoscopic way—his thought, the temper of his mind. They remind one most forcefully of the extent to which a writer is an intuitive register of his time, and therefore of time to come. Depressed and disgusted with the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence, from the beginning, is concerned with what is to follow, and in his musings he foreshadows the disillusionment of the 1920’s. The society that could produce such a war is obviously sick, wrote Lawrence, but the society that is to follow, one that will contain the moral cripples blasted by the war, is almost too horrible to comprehend.

The Collected Letters creates a distinct persona. Rarely do his letters provide us with the sort of immediate, unfiltered reactions to experience that we find in other letters. His are more mediative and reasoned in tone. That fact might imply distortion. Nevertheless, the Lawrence we get is clearly a genuine Lawrence, one who persists below the surface of daily events. This Lawrence possesses the serene face of the man who has the capacity and the courage simply to be, who has discovered his own center of existence and refuses to be disturbed too much by the trivia and the peevishness of others, who is concerned that others learn, not certain rules and regulations, but how to live, and who is, therefore, fiercely against anything he considers a denial of life. Oddly, for the comparison would be shunned by the earlier author, he reminds one in these pages of an earlier idealist, Thoreau, who asserted: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Thus, in one letter, we find Lawrence asserting that one ought to fulfill as the deepest of all desires the wish to avoid the extraneous, to live only for pure relationships and living truth. The point is made over and over again in the letters: the need to put aside extraneous pressures, those of money and property, and to cultivate one’s soul. This idea would not be foreign to the author of WALDEN, though, of course, Thoreau would scarcely have taken Lawrence’s road to immortality.

Lawrence’s desire is a general wish to distinguish between what is life and what is not-life, between being and not-being (Lawrence likes to quote Hamlet here). It is as part of this general desire that we get the specific ideas with which Lawrence has been dentified and that we discover that those ideas are scarcely as specialized as they might seem to be in other contexts, as in his FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS, for example. Here we find the very important letter of January 17, 1913, to Ernest Collins, a letter containing the first relatively systematic statement of Lawrence’s belief in the emotions, in the body, in the sense of physical being, as against the abstract knowledge of life provided by the intellect, knowledge which, to Lawrence, is not knowledge at all. Here we find his attacks on Freud and Freudianism as being too abstract, too intellectual, in their approaches to man’s hidden life. Here, in another important letter of July 16, 1916, to Catherine Carswell, we find Lawrence distinguishing his own views from those of Christianity, accepting the Christian ethic as the greatest historical force ever to sweep through mankind, but seeing it, as did George Bernard Shaw, as something to be surpassed. A new ethic is now needed, he claimed, one that will encourage the fulfillment of bodily as well as spiritual desires. Developed and modified in essays, fiction, and later letters, these concepts ultimately become the center of Lawrence’s final statement on man and his time in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

In a very real sense these letters are better sources of Lawrence’s attitudes than his more formal statements of them, for here those attitudes can be seen as aspects of his larger concerns—that man learn to love, not to hate, life, that he become capable of living joyously by developing his total self, not by denying any part of his being. Lawrence is, of course, fully aware of the fact that to a large extent he is reacting against his own problems. In September, 1913, after having run away with Frieda (then still married), he identifies himself as typically English in his repression of passions and emotions. After living some months with Frieda, he writes that he is learning to loosen up a little.

To a reader reared on the assumption that contemporary authors are always negative and dismal, perhaps one of the most startling aspects of THE COLLECTED LETTERS is the view it provides us of Lawrence’s optimism, an optimism that could turn on occasion into an almost aggressive affirmation. It is scarcely a Pollyanna-like optimism. In one of the most haunting letters in the collection, written to Lady Cynthia Asquith, in January, 1915, Lawrence describes the depths of despair and hopelessness into which the news of the war had plunged him. He had been on a walking tour with some friends, and the sense of life was running high among them, when he learned that war had been declared. Since then, according to Lawrence, he has not seen anyone, spoken to anyone. Only now is he beginning to rise from his grave; he begins to hope that something may emerge from the war. As his spirits rise, so does his hope. Lawrence begins to hope, as did many of his generation, that the very destructiveness of the war may lead to the sort of smash-up that will require a social reconstruction, and the world may then be ready to listen to him. As it becomes evident that the smash-up is not going to take place, Lawrence falls back on his affirmation of the roots of life itself. Thus, in the darkest days of his career, toward the end of the war, we find him asserting the need for a carefree, spontaneous existence, the need to be. Shortly after the end of the war, while making plans to leave England, Lawrence writes cheerily that the important thing is not to be crushed; the capacity to live is the only thing that matters.

The clearest suggestion that there was something in Lawrence that could not be touched came during the war when Lawrence was looked upon suspiciously by his Cornish neighbors and apparently suspected of spying (Frieda was, after all, a Richthofen). Lawrence was ordered away from the coast on a few days’ notice. We know from biographical sources how deeply hurt and outraged he was. In a less balanced man, the affair might well have become the center of his life. In the letters, however, we find Lawrence, after his initial shock, taking it all pretty much in stride. Ablaze with plans, he discovers that he is not really anxious to return to Cornwall. Infuriated again, after a visit from Scotland Yard, he manages to drop his fury with surprising speed; he has other matters on his mind—his new novel, literary essays, friends. Without rancor he can write of renting his cottage in Cornwall.

Even the suppression and censorship of his novels, embittering and demeaning as they were, failed to crush Lawrence. After The Rainbow was suppressed, we find him correcting proofs, collecting early poems for a book, trying out the idea of a subscription scheme for The Rainbow. He believed in his books as he believed in life and in himself. The reader who would know Lawrence can really know him only through his letters as well as his biography and his published works.