Books: Dear Bertie

D. H. LAWRENCE'S LETTERS TO BERTRAND RUSSELL (111 pp.)—Edited,with on introduction by Harry T. Moore—Gotham Book Mart ($5).

Even after so many years there is no mistaking it—the voice of David Herbert Lawrence (died 1930), come back like an indignant ghost to nag the torpid flesh of Anglo-Saxons. It is not a pleasant voice: few of D. H. Lawrence's letters to his "friends" (victims would be a better word) show the genius that illuminated his fiction and poetry. It is a hectoring, querulous, spiteful voice, polite when it fears that it has aroused anger; but, once reassured by the listener's forgiveness, instantly...