Lawrence and Christ

THE MAN WHO DIED-- D. H. Lawrence--Knopf ($1.75).

David Herbert Lawrence's second novel to appear posthumously in the U. S. (the first: The Virgin and The Gipsy, TIME, Nov. 24) may not be his last word but it is a good place to stop. When published in Paris (1929) under the title of The Escaped Cock it drew words of high praise even from so belittling a Lawrence critic as John Middleton Murry. Devoutly orthodox Christians may find the story blasphemous (it will certainly be awarded a place on the Pope's Index Librorum Prohibitor urn) but regular Lawrence readers will doubtless take it as it was meant.

Without once mentioning His name (Lawrence calls Him simply "the man who died") this anti Christian searcher after Christ tells what might have happened to Jesus if He did not really die on the cross. As with George Moore's hero in The Brook Kerith, the agony of the crucifixion and the coma of the burial stripped the Man of his Messiahship. Moore's hero in his revulsion thought he had been wrong: Lawrence's, that his mission was finished. Lawrence's Man showed himself to his disciples but would have nothing more to do with them; he wanted merely to live, and in a fuller way which he had neglected. Till his wounds were healed he lived with a friendly peasant, then he set out on his wanderings.

One day he came to the seashore, when he begged a night's lodging of a priestess of Isis. In her he found his feminine complement, and was happy for the first time in his life. But her followers resented him, discovered his scars, and would have delivered him to the Romans. Just in time he escaped them, put off to sea in a boat. Like most Lawrence stories, this one ends without finishing. "So let the boat carry me. Tomorrow is another day."

The Significance. Lawrence was tortured all his life with the desire to be whole. A hater of Christianity, a praiser of paganism, he was fascinated by the figure of Jesus, was by no means the first or last writer to essay his own Jesus-myth, to try to fit Him into his own ideal.

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