THE INTELLIGENT HEART

Those close to D. H. Lawrence have written a host of intimate and revealing books about him. Seeking to bring a perspective to the Lawrencean revelation which the particular involvements of others have led away from, Harry Moore gives us a life of Lawrence, a book relating life and work, that for all its attempt at dispassionate portraiture pulses with admiration and sympathy for Lawrence. (If Moore does not condone all his actions, he does not probe them all either.) Yet this is a side-issue, for the book is of tremendous importance in its comprehensiveness, its fairness, its bringing of new material to the Lawrence dossier. There is constant pointing to the originals of Lawrence's novels; there are many great letters revealing Lawrence as only he could; there are newly published letters, including a priceless denouncement by Galsworthy acco on the publication of The Rainbow. The variegated skeins of Lawrence's relationships, those which remained intact and those, such as with Bertrand Russell and John Middleton Murry, which friction broke, weave a picture of his literary brethren, the camp followers, the critics. The personal view and history are here too with a less Immediate and more general emphasis than the books of the intimates. A literary must.