The Glimmering Edge of Awareness

ELT: VOLUME35:3 1992 principal responsibility for umbrellas. On being criticized by a lady who was shocked to see Miss Savage retrieving her umbrella and personal items from this gentleman (instead of leaving them with the attendant at the ladies' room), Miss Savage responded by telling this woman that although no doubt the indiscriminate association of male and female umbrellas might in a general way be productive of evil, yet my umbrella having become imbued with my personal qualities, she might be trusted to conduct herself with the most perfect propriety. At all events I should wait for the authorities or the male umbrellas to complain before altering my ways. Perhaps if they hear of my basket eloping with your MS. I may receive a reprimand, but I do not think it likely. At the close of his life, Raby suggests that Butler "stood deliberately at an angle to his age," a comment supported by those who found in his posthumous volume, The Way of All Flesh, a voice at once critical and original. And Butler's readers suddenly comprised some of the most important figures of the new century: Shaw, Bridges, Gosse, Strachey, E. M. Forster and Woolf. W. B. Yeats soon praised Butler's style as being that of the " 'first Englishman to make the discovery that it is possible to write with great effect without music'," while Forster declared that " 'if Butler had not lived, many of us would now be a little deader than we are, a little less aware of the tricks and traps in life, and of our own obtuseness'." Raby's clearly written biography reminds us not only of the arc of Butler's life but its importance in registering the shift from the Victorian to early modern era. Ira B. Nadel University of British Columbia The Glimmering Edge of Awareness The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume VI, March 1927-November 1928. James and Margaret Boulton, eds. With Gerald Lacy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xxxiv + 645 pp. $79.50 AFTER HIS massive hemorrhage in Oaxaca in February 1925, the doctors gave Lawrence "a year or two at most." Yet in 1927 and 1928, though shattered by frequent bouts of illness and suffering from chronic poverty, he was still full of astonishing energy and creative power. While living mainly at the somewhat primitive Villa Mirenda (which can still be found by following his directions from Florence), he traveled—in search of good health and often with the Brewsters, the Huxleys and the Aldingtons—to Villach in Austria, to Baden Baden to visit his motherin -law, to the Swiss Alps and to the south coast of France. 332 BOOK REVIEWS During this year and a half he toured the towns of the Etruscans (who "had life in themselves, so didn't [like the Fascists] have so much need to dominate"), had David performed in London ("the whole play is too literary, too many words"), translated the stories of Verga, revised his Collected Poems and arranged an exhibition of his paintings. Most important of all, he very capably and efficiently published privately and sold by subscription the provocative Lady Chatterley's Lover. Though many of the 770 letters in this volume—which are carefully, thoroughly and usefully edited—are dull business notes, Lawrence always kept up with his friends and showed concern for their welfare. Lawrence frequently yet stoically referred to his sore chest, bronchial trouble, pneumonia, influenza and malaria, but he never mentioned the dread word: tuberculosis. In April 1927 he felt "a sort of soreness, physical, mental, and spiritual," which he attributed to a middle-aged change of life. On a hot afternoon in July, after he had gathered peaches in the garden, Lawrence in Frieda's words "called from his room in a strange, gurgling voice; I ran and found him lying on his bed; he looked at me with shocked eyes while a slow stream of blood came from his mouth." Though he clung to life, Lawrence was horrified by the ghastly operations of his childhood friend Gertie Cooper, who had her left lung, six ribs and glands in the neck removed. Lawrence felt he would rather die than...