Books, Arts & Manners: Eros or Agape?

In a letter to Edward Garnett (July 3, 1912), D. H. Lawrence describes Frieda’s torments caused by the “storms of letters” from her abandoned husband begging her to sacrifice her love for Lawrence and return to her children: “She lies on the floor in misery—and then is fearfully angry with me because I won’t say ‘Stay for my sake.’ 1 say ‘decide what you want most, to live with me and share my rotten chances, or go back to your children—decide for yourself . . .’ And then she almost hates me, because I won’t say ‘1 love you—stay with me whatever happens.’ I do love her. If she left me, I do not think 1 should be alive six months hence.” There is more drama—marital and sheerly human—in that brief passage than in the entire movie Priest of Love, which Alan Plater adapted and Christopher Miles directed from Harry T. Moore’s Lawrence biography and some of Lawrence’s own writings.

The biography itself is conscientious and readable, but it is not ready-made cinematic material—as, indeed, few if any artists’ biographies are. A writer (or other artist) lives largely in his work; it is the work that sanctions the idiosyncrasies, bizarrenesses, and terrible doldrums of his life; if the film cannot convey this relationship—this hallowing of the humdrum or perverse by the pursuit of the ideal (and what film can?) —the thrashings about and even the clevernesses of the writer must remain comparatively mundane and disappointing. Even so flamboyantly alive a writer as Lawrence is, finally, less interesting than his characters; and if he is interesting, it is in splinters of conversation and fragments of happenings such as those quoted above, rather than in the more obviously theatrical and conventionally dramatizable aspects of his life.

JS

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John Simon

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In a letter to Edward Garnett (July 3, 1912), D. H. Lawrence describes Frieda’s torments caused by the “storms of letters” from her abandoned husband begging her to sacrifice her love for Lawrence and return to her children: “She lies on the floor in misery—and then is fearfully angry with me because I won’t say ‘Stay for my sake.’ 1 say ‘decide what you want most, to live with me and share my rotten chances, or go back to your children—decide for yourself . . .’ And then she almost hates me, because I won’t say ‘1 love you—stay with me whatever happens.’ I do love her. If she left me, I do not think 1 should be alive six months hence.” There is more drama—marital and sheerly human—in that brief passage than in the entire movie Priest of Love, which Alan Plater adapted and Christopher Miles directed from Harry T. Moore’s Lawrence biography and some of Lawrence’s own writings.

The biography itself is conscientious and readable, but it is not ready-made cinematic material—as, indeed, few if any artists’ biographies are. A writer (or other artist) lives largely in his work; it is the work that sanctions the idiosyncrasies, bizarrenesses, and terrible doldrums of his life; if the film cannot convey this relationship—this hallowing of the humdrum or perverse by the pursuit of the ideal (and what film can?) —the thrashings about and even the clevernesses of the writer must remain comparatively mundane and disappointing. Even so flamboyantly alive a writer as Lawrence is, finally, less interesting than his characters; and if he is interesting, it is in splinters of conversation and fragments of happenings such as those quoted above, rather than in the more obviously theatrical and conventionally dramatizable aspects of his life.