Cowpath

D. H. LAWRENCE & SUSAN HIS COW--William York Tindall -- Columbia ($2.75).

Lawrence and his worshiping women is a thoroughly exploited subject; Lawrence and his worshipful cow is a new one. The cow, Susan, browsed in the backyard at Taos, N. M., and was regarded by Lawrence with genuine devotion. "The queer cowy mystery of her," he wrote, "is her changeless cowy desirableness." William York Tindall, a 36-year-old professor with a razor wit, has read everything that Lawrence wrote, everything (so far as possible) that he read, and everything written about him, simply to trace the path that led Lawrence to this love. The result falls into that class of scholarly production in which acuteness and smugness fight a draw.

Tindall's researches found that Lawrence's materials came not only from his constantly anguished experience but from a whole raft of undigested philosophy, anthropology, occultism. The fashionable gibber of Madame Blavatsky from Tibet, the yoga writings of one Pryse ("All I say is Om," said Lawrence), the Bergsonian view that all was flux, the Freudian unconscious, the Jungian libido, many studies of primitive culture were all skimmed by Lawrence for his private religion. By the time he got to Susan, says Scholar Tindall with no particular depth, deep called to deep.

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