LAWRENCE ON MAJOR LAWRENTIAN THEMES

LAWRENCE (DAVID HERBERT, 1885-1930, novelist and poet) IMPORTANT AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('D.H. Lawrence'), to [Henry] Savage, celebrating life and child-birth; also mentioning a book by Casanova ('he'll suit me') and encouraging Savage to be serious about writing poetry, 4 pages, small quarto, 28 Percy Avenue, Kingsgate, Broadstairs, 'Friday', [18? July 1913]

'...One's soul needs a stomach of bronze, to digest this damned life. But it's all right really...I think if I had a child coming...I should be happy...all the world starts again, right clean & jolly, when a child is born...the mother's blood ought to run in the womb like sunshine. Because we must all die, whereas we mightn't have been born. And when a child comes, something is which might never have been. And if it was my Child I should be glad, whoever died, being old, or being in a cul de sac...'

Henry Savage's friendship with Lawrence began after he reviewed Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911), for the Academy. Later the biographer of Richard Middleton, a novelist and poet, as a child Savage had the singular distinction of having his head used by Arthur Orton, the Tichborne Claimant, for the oath 'On this innocent child's head I swear I am the rightful heir'. He was also a friend of Norman Douglas and Dorothy Richardson. He and Lawrence fell out after the First World War because Savage thought Lawrence too dogmatic: 'One had to efface one's own individuality and consent to become a mere echo' [in the present letter Lawrence says 'Don't mind my wise preaching']. Frieda (then Mrs Ernest Weekley), who is mentioned in the present letter, had left her husband and three children in 1912 to live with Lawrence.

Exceptional letters by D.H. Lawrence have become scarce; nothing to compare with the present letter has appeared at auction for ten years.

£3,500