Out of the Closet

THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF D. H. LAWRENCE. 558 pages. Viking. $7.50.

D. H. Lawrence once described himself as "a kind of human bomb." The bomb exploded in all directions. Lawrence left 14 brooding, contentious novels, dozens of excited essays, scores of loose, somewhat lumpy poems, and hundreds of febrile, fretful letters. He painted, occasionally, as he wrote, in an earnest, impetuous manner. All of these disjecta membra have been examined with fascination and respect by a large number of critics, biographers and memoirists, but they have all but ignored the skeleton in Lawrence's literary closet: he was also a playwright.

There is in fact not just one skeleton but ten, and they are relics worth exhuming. As plays, they are quite unplayable. Although two of them were produced in England some years ago, their subject matter and their dramaturgy are now badly out of style. Still, as part of a whole picture they are fascinating. They reveal Lawrence's rich gift for dialogue, and they show him working and reworking scenes and characters from his novels.

One play, Touch and Go, is an afterthought and a qualification of the novel, Women in Love, Lawrence's denunciation of England's industrial aristocracy. Three of the plays, echoing his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers, are concerned with poor middle-of-England mining families in which domineering mothers are locked in love-hate relationships with brutish husbands or acquiescent sons. Two plays are mild-mannered comedies in which Lawrence woodenly twits denatured civilization and desexualized man. There is even one play, based on the Biblical David, which fuzzily explores Lawrence's pseudoreligious cult of the demi-divine ruler.

Essentially, the plays are like sketchbooks--useful for Lawrence in preparation for his other work. Somehow, he knew from the time he finished them that they were no more than closet drama. "I enjoy so much writing my plays," he wrote to Critic Edward Garnett. "They come so quick and exciting from the pen--that you mustn't growl at me if you think them a waste of time."

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