Exhumer

SON OF WOMAN, The Story of D. H. Lawrence--John Middleton Murry--Cape & Smith ($3.50).

Few biographies are as searching as this one; few biographers would have gone on such a search. John Middleton Murry and the late David Herbert Lawrence were once friends; now Murry has written a book to tell the world why Lawrence was a false prophet. His half-apologetic epilog is addressed to the dead man: "The evil that you did, is done; and it is evil. You muddied the spring of living water that flowed in you more richly than in any man of your time. . . . You bewildered men who might have learned from you. betrayed men who would have followed you. We needed a leader and a prophet, you were marked by destiny to be the man; and you failed us."

Lawrence's secret, says Murry, was that he was a sexual weakling. "Lawrence was not a physically passionate man; he was not more passionate than the common run of men, but less passionate." This was the key to all his writing, to his whole life. Murry intimates that Bertha Coutts. one of the least lovely characters in Lady Chatterlcy's Lover, was really Lawrence's own wife, Frieda von Richthofen, whom Lawrence at times hated but could not do without. Murry thinks Lawrence's horror of the War, his sense of persecution and consequent hegira to Italy, Australia, Mexico, the U. S.. his reiterated vituperation against all the Christian virtues, were really only reactions of impotence.

Though Murry anathematizes a good half of Lawrence's work as poisonous (he considers Fantasis of the Unconscious Lawrence's best book), he praises as well as blames him as a man, says Lawrence should not be judged but loved. "Much better 'art' has been produced by Lawrence's contemporaries; books better shaped, novels more objectively conceived, poems more concentrated. Beside Lawrence's work they seem frigid and futile. It is simply that they are not commensurate with our deep needs of today. Our modern art is all obviously, irremediably minor. And it must necessarily be minor, so long as its aim is to be art. There is. and always will be, a place for minor art; but to produce it is not the function of a major soul. Lawrence was a major soul."

The Author, John Middleton Murry, minor soul, has one claim to fame: he was the husband of the late Katherine Mansfield. Two years before her death in 1923, Murry left his job as editor of the London Nation & Athenaeum; later started a monthly magazine of his own, the Adelphi. In Son of Woman he says he founded the Adelphi purely as a vehicle for Lawrence, and expected that Lawrence would come back to England to edit it. One of the most unpopular literary men in England, Murry was the original of the cruelly pilloried Editor Burlap in Aldous Leonard Huxley's Point Counter Point.

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