Books: Rare Friendship

A POET AND Two PAINTERS—Knud Merrild—Viking ($3.50).

The poet of this book's title is D. H. Lawrence. The painters are Knud Merrild and Kai Götzsche, two strapping Danish immigrants who met Lawrence in Taos, N. M. in 1922, lived that winter with him and his wife, Frieda, in a crude ranch shack which they rented to escape Mabel Dodge (Luhan). Among the flood of memoirs—mostly by women—which have appeared since Lawrence's death in 1930, this one comes nearest to giving an objective picture of Lawrence.

One day at tea, Lawrence proclaimed the need for killing off individual "schemers of all kinds" instead of...