Lawrence Selected Letters

BOOK REVIEWS strained condescension as to be at times close to unreadable. Necessarily , the main victim of this reductiveness, apart from Lockman's own scholarly credibility, is Lawrence himself, diminished as he is into little more than a sounding-board off which his acolyte's obsessive hectoring relentlessly bounces. Keith Wilson ________________ University of Ottawa Lawrence Selected Letters The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. James T. Boulton, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 524 pp. $39.95 ANYONE FAMILIAR with the seven-volume Cambridge edition of D. H. Lawrence's letters can appreciate the magnitude of the challenge James Boulton accepted in putting together this one-volume edition . Lawrence was not only a prolific letter writer, he also filled his letters with stylistic experimentation and used them to try out complex new ideas. "There is no single epistolary style that can be defined as 'Lawrentian ,'" as Boulton's excellent introduction shows, nor is there any unifying theme or attitude in Lawrence's letters, even during periods of his life when he seems preoccupied with one philosophy or another. Obviously , because letters could not simply be chosen at random from the vast number available, some rigorous principle of selection had to be followed , but the great variety of the letters does not lend itself to easy representation by a selection. Boulton's introduction makes clear his aim of presenting us with letters that illustrate Lawrence's sensitivity to different audiences, the range of his prose styles, the lively interest he took in the world around him, and the poetic passion that infused his perceptions . The greatest virtue of this volume is that it does present readers with an entertaining overview of the flexibility of Lawrence's talent and his mind. The biggest problem with the volume is that it does not work as well as a reference as some Lawrence scholars might wish. Among the most notable omissions of famous letters are the two to Sallie Hopkin in which Lawrence articulates his sense of authorial mission in terms that have deeply impressed numerous later readers. On 23 December 1912, Lawrence wrote "I shall do my work for women, better than the suffrage," a remark that has become extremely controversial among critics attempting to understand Lawrence's gender politics. Two days later (25 December 1912), believing that his previous letter had been lost, Lawrence again wrote Sallie Hopkin, and this time told her "I 359 ELT 41 : 3 1998 shall always be a priest of love, and now a glad one." The quote that furnished the title for Harry T. Moore's long-definitive biography, and also for the popular film it inspired, surely deserves to be included among the selected letters. Such omissions, however, seem part of a pattern of reticence about Lawrence's relations with women that somewhat limits this book's usefulness to anyone whose knowledge of Lawrence's life is slight. Sometimes the choice of letters seems meant to amuse more than to convey information, as with the comical juxtaposition of a letter to Lawrence 's fiancee Louie Burrows with a note to Frieda. The letter to Burrows (4 February 1912) informs her that on the advice of his physicians he has decided "I ought not to marry, at least for a long time, if ever," and thus he asks her "to dismiss me." The note to Frieda (March 1912) reads in its entirety: "You are the most wonderful woman in all England." The rest is history, known at least in its broadest outlines to everyone at all familiar with Lawrence's life story. Still, seeing these two letters presented as if there had been none in between suggests causality that only the chronology at the beginning of the section corrects. Lawrence had not yet met Frieda when he broke his engagement to Burrows. In general the treatment of Lawrence's relationship with Frieda is rather misleading. While any selection of letters would probably make it apparent that "most significant of all for his creative and personal existence was his life with Frieda Weekley," it seems a violation of the spirit of that relationship to represent it as more harmonious than it was, which is...