Lawrence's Paintings

ELT 48 : 2 2005 William's hair. Here is the intrusively prescriptive passage that anticipates central notions in Lawrence's fiction of the next few years, but the lines significantly are omitted in Sons and Lovers after the scene of William 's enforced haircut by his father: "No man can live unless his life is rooted in some woman: unless some woman believes in him, and so fixes his belief in himself." This dominant sense in Paul Morel that celebrates a woman's ability to virtually assign the fate of her man is substantiated further by noting a small but meaningful difference between the third and fourth drafts concerning a memorable scene. In the midst of a raging battle with Walter in Sons and Lovers, Gertrude holds Paul to the sun, and Lawrence describes her equivocations: "If he lives .. .what will become of him—what will he be?" In the earlier draft from the same scene, Lawrence's refracted narrative perspective appears more inflated about Mrs. Morel's power to bless the child and command his future : "And then, if he lives, he will perhaps be a great man." This is the same Mrs. Morel who manages to rally her husband to relative health after the onset of an often deadly brain fever. As Lawrence turns from these drafts to write Sons and Lovers, he will see the danger of the powerful mother more clearly, and will extend the fictional life of the father. I leave it to others to speculate on the reasons for Lawrence's more mature perspective, and I thank Cambridge for this remarkable publication . PETER BALBEBT __________________ Trinity University Lawrence's Paintings D. H. Lawrence's Paintings. Introduction, Keith Sagar. London: Chaucer Press, 2003. 160 pp. £25.00 THIS RECENT edition of D. H. Lawrence's paintings resists simple categorization. An oversized and heavy volume, it looks like a coffee -table book with its large print, glossy pages, and colorful reproductions, but I suspect that it will be lugged to class by many teachers of Lawrence who are eager to introduce their students to this lesserknown aspect of the writer's creativity. With its lengthy introduction by noted Lawrence specialist Keith Sagar, the book functions somewhat as a scholarly text, yet it is devoid of such scholarly apparatuses as footnotes and a complete literature review. Something of a hybrid, D. H. Lawrence's Paintings is nonetheless appealing for being a "mixed marriage " of genres (to appropriate one of Lawrence's own working titles for 244 BOOK REVIEWS his novel The Lost Girl), even if occasionally frustrating for the very same reason as well. Until this century, Lawrence scholars and aficionados had access to only a small portion of Lawrence's work in oils and watercolors: the Mandrake Press edition of 1929, now hard to find, which reproduced the paintings exhibited in the Warren Gallery that year (twenty-five paintings in all, fifteen in oil and ten in watercolor); Mervyn Levy's reproductions of forty-seven art works in Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, published in 1964; and a critical study by Robert Millett in 1983 that included sixteen of the Mandrake Press's reproductions. Of these, the Levy volume has been the go-to publication for those interested in Lawrence's visual art. Many of its reproductions are in black and white, however, and thus are at a far remove from the originals; and even the color reproductions are fairly lackluster. In contrast, Lawrence's first biographer, Harry T. Moore, who saw the Warren Gallery exhibition paintings in 1932 in France, said that they "blazed." I saw that quality for myself in 1998 when, along with scores of other Lawrence enthusiasts from around the world, I viewed the ten Lawrence originals owned by Saki Karavas and displayed in his hotel in Taos, New Mexico (site of the eighth international D. H. Lawrence conference ). Our sense of the paintings dulled by long exposure to the Levy volume, we were astounded by their vibrancy. These paintings, amateur as they are, bear testimony to the statement of Lawrence's childhood friend George Neville that Lawrence "saw colours always about three times brighter than the rest of us." Only the...