An Elusive Identity

Abstract

When news of Lawrence’s death reached England in 1930 it was hard for his contemporaries to judge the extent of their loss—or even to know what name he might be remembered by. To anyone who, like Helen Corke, had known him as a teacher and friend, and who learned to respect his intelligence, he had always been ‘David’. To those who came across him casually in everyday life in his home village, he was ‘Bert’—or in later years (retrospectively, and with a touch of patronage)—‘poor old Bert’. His wife, for whom he always had a touch of Italian glamour, would call him ‘Lorenzo’. The range of names did justice to the elusiveness often experienced by anyone who tried to tie him down to a firm identity. For the literary world, meanwhile, he would continue to be simply ‘Lawrence’; he himself would avoid even that labelling (and for that matter any ambiguity) by simply combining his surname with his initials.