Shorter Reviews: Lawrence in Love: Letters to Louie Burrows

Lawrence in Love: Letters to Louie Burrows edited by James T. Boulton. Southern Illinois University Press, $7.50.

This volume of Lawrence’s letters is a very satisfying thing to read. Especially to someone like me, perhaps, because this is the Lawrence I knew first, the English Lawrence, the poet who transfigured my own experience—my Midlands, my school friendships, my family—with the glow of life. I say satisfying because as time passes one gets grateful to what stays solid in one’s life, to the people who continue to prove themselves as important as you thought them. But there is a more objective-descriptive value to the word, in that this cycle of letters is so complete. It runs from 1906 to 1912, from Lawrence being twenty-one to Lawrence being twenty-seven, and covers the end of his relationship with “Miriam,” the death of his mother, the engagement with Louie, the illness at Croydon, and—at the very end—the elopement with Frieda. During these six years the crucial choices were made that determined the shape he would give to his experience, to his personality, to his talent. And these choosings are all reflected—this is the completeness and the satisfyingness—in the single curve of his relationship with Louie. This begins as a friendship within the group friendship of the “Pagans” (which included “Miriam,” for instance), becomes private and passionate, becomes an engagement to marry, suffers from Lawrence’s dissatisfactions, breaks down, breaks off. Louie, it seems clear, did not find anyone to take Lawrence’s place in her life. She remained a Midlands schoolteacher all her life, but went to Vence when he died in 1930, visited his grave twice, avoiding the other people there, did not marry herself until 1940.