The Displaced Person

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 870, 6 April 1956, Page 12

The Displaced Person

THE INTELLIGENT HEART, by Harry T. oore; Heinemann, English price 25/-.

(Reviewed by

J. R.

Tye

H. LAWRENCE can no longer be regarded as the world’s rejected guest; there is now a literature of biography, reminiscence and criticism, particularly since the war, so large as to be formidable. The Intelligent Heart is Harry T. Moore’s second biography of Lawrence in the last five years, and is as detailed a-study of environment as one could hope to find. With admirable persistence Mr. Moore has studied the "Lawrence country" in person, has routed out the humbler acquaintances of the earlier and later years, and has collected two hundred hitherto unpublished letters, some of them notable. Lawrence is now fully documented within a volume which achieves an excellent chronological balance. Some aspects one distrusts, while at the same time deriving a wry amusement; there is, for instance, the hearsay evidence of an unnamed married woman who claimed to have initiated Lawrence into sex and became inviolable after the liaison ended; the Sicilian newspaper anecdote which converts the Lawrence _menage into another Duchess’s kitchen; and Mr. Moore’s own acidulous commentary on Mrs. Luhan’s attempted absorption of Lawrence. But what emerges more clearly than before is the unfortunate pattern of circumstance which determined the ambivalence of almost all Lawrence’s relationships. Lawrence regarded himself as the victim of popular education, which decreed that he should become a prodigy. For him the mother sacrificed the peace of her family and bound herself so strongly to him that it was years before he | achieved normality. Dependence and the desire to escape are characteristic motifs of Lawrence’s life and work. His friendships in a mounting social scale were ecstatic and disruptive essays, often ‘terminated by the discovery of identifiable and unflattering portraits in the sequence of novels; for Lawrence, without cynicism, unashamedly used his wife, his family, his friends and his acquaintances as the raw substance from which to form his patterns of argument and symbol. The events of the inter-war years and the Second World War have vindicated much of his diagnosis of the divorce of intellect from feeling, the cause of his estrangement from Bertrand Russell. His cure was a sexuality neither libertine nor promiscuous, but radical and archetypal. Here he lies open to the charge of superstition, and of perversion in advocating a relationship which is social rather than biological; Lawrence had no_ children, and showed no desire for them. ; Lawrence was essentially without roots and without a sense of property, involved in the human being and in revolt against organised humanity. His restless and versatile personality led him to many places and among many people; while Mr. Moore gives too little attention to the intervals of peace and fer-

tility, he takes us ably through the diverse and interesting portrait gallery of the Lawrence period.’