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Inner Torment. The primary value of the collection, however, is in its illumination of the stormy relationship between Frieda, the German aristocrat, and Lawrence, the coal miner's son. Lawrence emerges as much prig as immoralist. But he also amply demonstrates his doctrine that the most lasting relationship between man and woman is "love-hate." She concedes that some inner torment sometimes hurled him "over the edge of sanity. Once, I remember he had his hands on my throat, and he was pressing me against the wall and ground out: 'I am the master, I am the master!'" Her response: "Is that all? You can be master as much as you like, I don't care."
But Frieda has as many self-important feelings as self-effacing ones. She complained to one admirer about "socalled 'men' " whose chastity was "male conceit," and she added: "I know to my sorrow that I am six times the 'man' that any of you are." But with Lawrence's death at 45 of tuberculosis, Frieda was seemingly knocked to her knees: she reported "seeing his greatness whole for the first time." Like "a hero in the old days," he should be "burnt on a funeral pyre," and as his widow, she should "throw herself as a last tribute into the flames."
Where she threw herself instead was into an alliance with a pottering Italian painter and ceramist with whom she lived until she died, the last six years in wedlock. In explaining away her haste and the family of four that were left in Italy, Friend Aldous Huxley pointed to Frieda's "extreme helplessness when left alone to cope with a practical situation." It was indeed a fact, never mentioned in these jottings, that D. H. had done most of the household's dusting and dishwashing.
Outer Fidelity. For all her infidelities to Lawrence's person, Frieda had been resolutely loyal to his work. The slightest reservation by a reviewer was met with massive rebuttal. Her husband, she wrote, had "changed the world's outlook on sex for all time," and had been persecuted "only because the world was not ready for the new reality."
The world has now accepted the "new reality," and its views on Lawrence's literary skills have consequently become clear-eyed, discovering that his prose was often embarrassingly overblown, his plots contrived, his characters stylized. But Lawrence was at heart a polemicist, driven by an idea, and that idea lifts and illuminates his best pages. More than many a more skilled craftsman, Lawrence had changed the manners and morals of the Anglo-Saxon world.