Where to Live?

BOOK REVIEWS tinuing resonance and for the ways in which that resonance shapes creative and critical writing alike. Complementing Virginia Hyde's The Risen Adam (1992) and expanding on the work of such other important Lawrence scholars as Jim Cowan, Charles Rossman, and Sandra Gilbert , this study will prove very useful to readers interested in Lawrence, the Bible, and, most importantly, their fruitful intersection. Judith Ruderman Duke University Where to Live? The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume VIII. Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index. James T Boulton, comp. & ed. New York: Cambridge University press, 2000. xvii + 418 pp. $95.00 THE FINAL VOLUME of Lawrence's Letters (current cost for the set $830) contains 115 pages of recently discovered letters to and from him; sixteen pages of corrections to the previous volumes; and a 285page comprehensive critical index for the entire edition, including 78 columns on Lawrence and 65 useful entries on major subjects. The letters provide a brief run through the major events and themes of his life. They show how difficult it was to arrange for the publication of his contentious works while living abroad—poor and in poor health—and always on the move. There are twenty pages from the publisher Thomas Seltzer, proclaiming Lawrence's genius and attacking the agent Robert Mountsier for swindling Lawrence—then confessing that he, too, is unable to pay his author. Lawrence's mood ranges from sentimental: "I loved my mother more that [i.e., than] I ever shall love anyone else" to satiric: Jack Squire "won't use any of the stuff for his Mercury—too much quicksilver for him. He likes his mercury not too mercurial" and savage: "I don't forget, Huebsch, that you said ... I was a liar, and that you could prove it: and then you didn't prove it. Nor could you___Don't forget, in your turn, that I have a tongue in my head, and teeth too, that I can use upon occasion." In a patronizing but perceptive and prophetic letter on The White Peacock , mentioned by Lawrence in his "Autobiographical Sketch," Ford states that it "sins against almost every canon of art," but has remarkable poetic gifts and reveals "the makings of a very considerable novelist ." Lawrence describes his arrest as a spy in Metz while courting Frieda, Katherine Mansfield helping Frieda to see her estranged children and his own emotional—and sometimes physical—struggles with 109 ELT 45 : 1 2002 Frieda. He looks to Italy to wake him up and, always able to find a cheap but beautiful place, gives an enticing description of their cottage in Lerici , "tucked in a tiny bay, almost alone, under great hills of olive woods." His poems reveal the "inner history" of his life, and he takes particular pleasure in reading Milton in an old-spelling edition. Orwell, who experienced the same sensation, said in "Why I Write": When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e., the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost—"So hee with difficulty and labour hard/ Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee"... sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure . Rejected for military service "owing to weakness of chest," Lawrence retreats to Cornwall where he sees "Three ships ... torpedoed just here, gone, the men seen struggling in the water... for a few minutes." He tries to place Maurice Magnus's Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, written "by a man who hated it and deserted from it. . . rather awful, and very improper ." And he announces Magnus's death, with surprising indifference , to Magnus's close friend Norman Douglas: "he was found in a white suit dead on his bed in his room at Notabile, having taken poison." After a rough winter in the mountains of New Mexico, Lawrence is "cured for the time being of wild west, desert, freedom, simple life, the soil, and all that sort ofthing. At the moment I want to be a signore___It is a devastating country: lays waste to the soul and gradually hardens the heart." But later, down in Oaxaca, he falls deathly ill with malaria and influenza...