D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study

The apprentice diarist of the early volumes ends and the public writer begins here. Written at Louveciennes in roughly sixteen days, the study argues what was then a minority position: that Lawrence — dead in 1930, notorious for Lady Chatterley — was a serious artist of the interior life, and that his readers of scandal had missed his readers' book. Nin's method is the one her fiction would use: sympathetic entry rather than judgment, the critic as medium.

Edward Titus published it in Paris in 1932 in a small edition, and its consequences outran its sales. The Lawrence connection gave Nin her first literary identity, and the book's circle of introductions led directly to the meeting at Louveciennes that opens the famous Diary. Reprinted decades later by Swallow, it remains the earliest published evidence of the sensibility the diary was privately rehearsing.

A short study in Nin's intuitive mode: chapters on Lawrence's treatment of instinct and the unconscious, his women characters — whom she reads with particular authority — his prose rhythms, and the religious seriousness beneath the scandals. Less analysis than advocacy: the book's argument is that Lawrence must be read from inside his method, and its demonstration is Nin doing exactly that.