Lawrence as Gossip

Abstract

To read the letters is—as Mr Huxley says of being with their author—‘a kind of adventure’. And this, even more than their beauty and absorbing interest, gives them their especial quality. But ‘beautiful and absorbingly interesting’ they are. And they are also exceedingly amusing. For Lawrence had a tongue. The way he used it was his one vice. Gossip he did, and with what fury! To the deadly venom of a wit that might be termed classical was added a vigour of language acquired from labouring men, and directing these was a ferocity of perception that was all his own. He spoke of people behind their backs as Voltaire must have spoken, or Alexander Pope. But there was this difference, that he had no jealousy in his composition and was as incapable of unkindness as of guile. No man ever desired more truly to see everybody happy and vital up to the measure of their beings. ‘I hate my enemies,’ he writes in one letter, ‘but I mostly forget them.’ It was true. And he would never grudge any good that might come to an enemy, though this was not in the sense we understand as Christian, but from an overflowing, impatient life. He was never tolerant, but always sensitive, where others were concerned. Frequently his friends of one day were his enemies of the next, and vice versa.

From ‘D. H. Lawrence in his Letters’ [review of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence], The Nineteenth Century and After, cxii (1932) pp. 635–6.