
Luke Batterham
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'IT'S NICE TO SAY WHAT ONE THINKS': Lawrence gears up for a damning review. Edgell Rickword, the recipient of this letter, was editor of The Calendar of Modern Letters, which had just run a review of Lawrence's Plumed Serpent by C.H. Rickword, Edgell's cousin. In general Lawrence's novel about the cult of the plumed serpent in Mexico had not received a good press. Rickword's review was no exception. The writing, he thought, was sometimes 'nauseating in the extreme', the book smacked of 'charlatanism' and in it 'the fervour of the missionary overcame the integrity of the artist'. So the wounded Lawrence vented his spleen on Pedro di Valdivia, a history of the conquistador who was first royal Governor of Chile, by the super-glamorous R.B. Cunninghame Graham, ex-gaucho and friend of everybody who was anybody from Lawrence of Arabia to Joseph Conrad. Lawrence condemned his rival prophet's book as a piece of hack-work in which 'We never see the country, we never meet the man, we get no feeling of the Indians' (The Calendar, 3, 1927, 322–6; for a study of the affair, see Davis Ellis, D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, 1998, pp. 335-6). But as Cunninghame Graham's biographer concedes, Lawrence had a point: 'His histories and biographies are protracted by digressions and sprinkled with inaccuracies and proof errors... As D. H. Lawrence complained, he could be self-indulgent, repetitive, and slapdash' (Cedric Watts, ODNB). This letter is published in the supplementary volume of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, viii, edited by James T. Boulton (2000), p. 99.