Free News from the World by Paula Fox Page B

Stanley Kunitz, sitting next to me at the table, said, “That’s the second dinner party in ten days that I’ve seen her leave in a tantrum.” I knew he wanted to comfort me. But that humiliating explosion was the occasion for Stanley to tell a Lawrence story.
    Years before, he had spent a summer on the outskirts of a small French village, Vence, with a group of other young people. Stanley, along with a few others, would walk to a post office a mile or so away to collect the group’s mail. One morning they passed a house on whose upper balcony sat a blanketed figure in a wheelchair, an attendant close by. Someone said, “That’s D. H. Lawrence.”
    The next morning as they passed the house, Stanley threw a note he had written up onto the balcony. In it, he expressed his love and admiration for Lawrence’s work.
    The attendant reached down, picked up the note and read it to Lawrence as Stanley and the others could see and hear.
    When they returned with their mail and passed the house again, Stanley glanced up at the blanketed figure on the balcony. As he did so, the figure rose to its feet and bowed toward the poet.
    Several weeks later when Stanley walked by the house, the man seated in the wheelchair was no longer there.
    It was 1930. D. H. Lawrence died that summer of tuberculosis. He was forty-five years old.
    He had left behind brilliant work, poems, translations of Italian writers (among them novels by Giovanni Verga), essays, short stories, and the luminous “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” a story that can stand, along with three of his novels— Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Rainbow— among the most radiant and memorable writing of the past two hundred years.
    But now his name is barely recognizable to most North American readers, and his reputation has suffered from attacks by groups who quarrel with this or that idea (some of them mad), which he always expressed with the provocation of a coal-miner’s son intruding upon the English literary world. An early prudery kept Lady Chatterley’s Lover out of print until 1959, not so very different an impulse in the government forces that would not permit American citizenship to be granted to Angelo Ravagli and Frieda Lawrence until they had married each other.

FRANCHOT TONE AT THE PARAMOUNT
    F RANCHOT T ONE DIED in September 1968. In 1935, when I was twelve, I saw the actor in the earliest version of the film Mutiny on the Bounty. I sat in a dark movie house, my knees pressed up against the unoccupied seat in front of me. Tone played one of the officers who mutinied against the cruel Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) whom they put overboard into a small lifeboat and abandoned to the open sea.
    The crew and officers returned to Tahiti. It was an exuberant story. The great ship moved through the waves, the masts creaked, the sails billowed as crew members shouted across the decks to one another amid ocean spray. Then they were in Tahiti, and Franchot Tone, wearing a sarong, a wreath of large, white-petaled blossoms hanging from around his neck, stood close to a beautiful, young Tahitian woman. Another fleshy fellow in the cast was the star of the movie, Clark Gable, a large man whose acting I found severely limited. I paid him no attention.
    My knees slipped down from seatback to floor. I leaned forward, enraptured by Tone, his delicate features, his narrow-lipped mouth, the irony I thought implicit in his remote smile that assured me “I’m superior to all this play-acting . . .” and above all, by what I perceived as his nature, quixotic and spiritual.
    I had been struck a great blow by the force of movie love. Later, in 1939, on spring vacation from a Montreal boarding school, I saw Tone in a Group Theatre production of The Gentle People.
    My father, a screenwriter at the time, knew the business manager of the Group, Walter Fried, whom he called “Cousin Wally.” Fried arranged for me to see