D. H. Lawrence

1885-1930

David Herbert Lawrence was born in a village in the industrial midlands of England. His father was a coal miner and his mother a schoolteacher. By birth and education he was therefore a man apart from the typical writer of the early twentieth cen­tury, who was very unlikely to be of working-class stock. By the time Lawrence's first book, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, he had begun to glory in his apartness, an attitude rein­forced by his elopement the following year with Frieda von Richthofen, the German-born wife of a Nottingham professor.

From 1912 until his death from tuberculosis in 1930, the Lawrences spent most of their time abroad: in Italy, Australia, and New Mexico. Their relationship was a stormy one. Lawrence always felt uneasy in conventional surroundings. Before World War I he had been accepted by the English social and literary world as a budding ge­nius, but friendship with him required a degree of patience that not all his would-be helpers were able to sustain. His difficult temperament went hand in hand with a powerful imagination and a prose style which, if humorless, beautifully matched the blunt and challenging situations into which he liked to plunge his fictional characters.

All his life Lawrence sought a Utopia, an ideally civilized community in which he could live with a few chosen followers. His dislike of British puri-tanism and snobbery, as he saw it, made him bit­terly dislike his own country. He thought for a time that he had found what he sought in Queens­land, Australia, and in Taos, New Mexico. But as time passed, his deteriorating health made him always harder to satisfy. ч.

Those of Lawrence's contemporaries who knew him well never accepted his view of himself as a tiger; they considered him a sick man living on his nerves. But they, like posterity, were forced to ac­knowledge the fineness of his best short stories, such as "The Prussian Officer," and his best nov­els, among which Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love are outstanding. Lawrence was also a more than ordinarily skillful writer of free verse, with an acute understanding of animals and a warmly sensuous view of nature. Artifice was as abhorrent to him as convention. He liked to think himself a child of the Mediterranean dawn —as a child of the Italy of the Etruscans, who preceded the coming of the Romans. In more primi­tive human beings Lawrence attempted to find the wholeness and balance he felt had been lost by civ­ilization.

In addition to his strikingly original fiction and poetry, Lawrence wrote some remarkable travel books, such as Sea and Sardinia and Twilight in Italy. When he chose, he also could be a refresh­ingly original critic. His Studies in Classical American Literature remains one of the best un­professional pieces of critical writing to be pub­lished in this century.

Katherine Mansfield

1888-1923

Katherine Mansfield performed for the English short story what the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov performed for the European story. In 1911, when she began to write the stories that made her famous, readers expected short stories to be "well made" with cleverly devised plots that had a beginning, a middle, and an end; with charac­ters about whom readers could feel that they knew almost everything; often with tricky but logically constructed endings, as in the short stories of O. Henry. Mansfield took the opposite course. As far as possible, she directed herself to the untidiness of real life. She became a mistress of small gestures, tiny fragments of significance, intuitive moments. She hardly ever told a story from A to Z, but took its inner core as her theme. The truth of a situation was immensely important to her. She was very conscious of the lies that human beings tell to pro­tect themselves, and attempted in her stories to carry the reader past these lies. Giving an intense sense of participation in life, she showed a con­cern with essentials only, a deep appreciation of situations that seem ordinary only on the surface. Her style, with its quick strokes, and its shifting evocative quality, is an instrument that conveys almost perfectly her special sense of life.

Katherine Mansfield's real name was Kathleen Beauchamp. Born of a wealthy family in Welling­ton, New Zealand, she studied in London as a young girl and later settled there. An attack of tuberculosis forced her to go to Germany to recu­perate, and there she began to write. In England once again, she married the editor and critic J. Middleton Murry and became known as a liter­ary reviewer and story writer. But appreciation of her work came too late for her to enjoy. Constantly ill, she spent most of her last years trying to regain her health in the warmer climates of Italy and France, where she died at an early age. Katherine Mansfield wrote three volumes that are particularly notable: The Garden Party and The Dove's Nest, which contain some of her best short stories; and her Journal, which reveals her aims and methods as a writer and is a legacy to all short-story writers who followed her. Almost all her writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, reveals her special personality. In a memoir, her husband de­scribed her as "spontaneous as no other human being I have ever met. She seemed to adjust herself to life as a flower adjusts itself to the earth and to the sun. She suffered greatly, she delighted greatly; but her suffering and her delight were never partial, they filled the whole of her."