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Sale 86
Lot 433
Lawrence, D.H (1885-1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic, and painter. His works include Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley's Lover (banned in the U.S. until 1959), The White Peacock, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Autograph letter signed, 2 pages, 10½ x 8 1/8 in., Oaxaca, Mexico, January 22, 1925. Written in brown ink on both sides of a sheet of beige paper; corner tips are discolored. Holograph envelope is missing upper right corner with stamp. To Carlo Linati in Milan, regarding an article Linati had written about Lawrence:
"The Corriere della Sera with your article on me, wandered in today. It makes me laugh a bit. I never knew I was so frenetico. You leave me quite out of breath about myself….I have been busy down here in Mexico doing a novel I began last year; it's nearly done. I dread to think of its going out into the world. I call it Quetzalcoatl [published as The Plumed Serpent the following year]. But really, Signor Linati, do you think that books should be sort of toys, nicely built up of observations and senations, all finished and complete? - I don't. To me, even Synge, whom I admire very much indeed, is a bit too rounded off and, as it were, put on the shelf to be looked at. I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd. People should either run for their lives, or come under the colours, or say how do you do? I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment. That rather cheap seat in the gods where one sits with fellows like Anatole France and benignly looks down on the foibles, follies, and frenzies of so-called fellow-men, just annoys me. After all, the world is not a stage - not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches - like a god with a twenty-Lira ticket - and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and so superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. You need not complain that I don't subject the intensity of my vision - or whatever it is - to some vast and imposing rhythm - by which you mean, isolate it on to a stage, so that you can look down on it like a god who has got a ticket to the show. I never will….Stick to Synge, Anatole France, Sophocles: they will never kick the footlights even. But whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else…."
Estimated Value $3,000 - 5,000.
Sotheby's New York, Dec. 12, 2001, lot 179.
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| Realized $3,960 |
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