FRIEDA LAWRENCE: THE MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE edited by E. W. TedlockJr. 481 pages. Knopf. $7.50
As an early prophet of the century's sexual revolution, in prose and by example, D. H. Lawrence attracted swarms of intense female admirers, several of whom rushed into print right after his death with memoirs whose burden was that only the author understood "Lorenzo's" real self, and only his cloddish wife Frieda stood in the way of some blazing fusion that would make sexual, if not literary, history.
Lawrence died in 1930, leaving generations of teen-agers to pore over his lyrical celebrations of sex (Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Plumed Serpent) as a mystical force that was its own imperative, displacing petty considerations of established custom, narrow morality or Christian ethic. For 26 years, until her own death in 1956, Frieda loyally supported the image of Lawrence as the ultimate male. But all the while she was writing an extensive fictionalized memoir. In this book, Professor E. W. Tedlock Jr. of the University of New Mexico has tried to patch together her fragmentary memoir into a coherent whole, and has also assembled a collection of hitherto unpublished correspondence by and to Frieda. The result is to transform Frieda from an offstage presence into a compelling personality in her own right.
More than Reality. The memoir itself is lesser Lawrence in philosophy ("Sex is almost the essence of living"), and the style is the still lesser English that might be expected of a Prussian baron's daughter. But the letters are delightful and perceptive. Most startlingly, they reveal that Frieda was at least as sexually uninhibited as Lawrence himself professed to be (which was a good deal more than he was in reality).
In the first year that she left her professor-husband and three children to live with Lawrence, Frieda was admitting that she could be attracted to other men. She and Lawrence, not yet married, set off on a walking trip with David Garnett and his friend Harold Hobson. Before the trek across the Alps was over, Frieda had confessed to Lawrence that she had felt a strong physical attraction to young Hobson, and he to her. Frieda discussed it freely in letters to Garnett, and Lawrence furiously scribbled comments across her letters-"Stinker! Bitch!"
There are many letters reflecting the affair she had several years later with John Middleton Murry, husband of Katherine Mansfield. "Why, I ask myself, was it you who should have revealed to me the richness of physical love?" Jack wrote to Frieda many years later, lamenting that he had lacked the courage to steal her from Lawrence. "And the loveliness there was between us came out of the generosity of your soul as much as the generosity of your body."