THE D.H. LAWRENCE BEYOND CHATTERLEY
Burning Man: The Ascent Of D.H. Lawrence
Frances Wilson
Bloomsbury Circus €24 ★★★★★
As a history undergraduate in the 1980s, studying literature as a historical source, I read D. H. Lawrence’s novels. No one else was reading him by then, or no one I knew, and certainly not women. He was dismissed as obsolete, a posturing misogynist whose insistent carnality and primal spiritual yearnings were not just floridly overblown but faintly cringeworthy. But he was always a writer who provoked extreme reactions. Both censored and worshipped in his own lifetime, in the 1950s he was anointed by the critic F. R. Leavis who declared him ‘the great genius of our time’. The infamous obscenity trial of Penguin and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 recast him as a poster boy for the sexual revolution, before he was toppled by Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which skewered him for his chauvinism. His reputation never properly recovered.
‘Lawrence is still on trial,’ Frances Wilson acknowledges in her introduction to this book but, although she is a self-confessed Lawrentian, Burning Man is by no means a straightforward case for the defence. She describes it as ‘a work of non-fiction which is also a work of imagination’. Its focus is Lawrence’s middle years.
Wilson has structured the book to mirror Dante’s Divine Comedy: ‘Inferno’ covers Lawrence’s years in England during the war, ‘Purgatory’ Italy post-Armistice, and ‘Paradise’ Ceylon, Australia and New Mexico.
The conceit is not entirely successful, mostly because Lawrence’s travels consistently failed to bring him spiritual fulfilment. ‘I love trying things,’ he wrote in 1922, ‘and discovering how much I hate them.’
As Wilson makes gloriously clear, it was Lawrence who was always Lawrence’s main subject. He was a mass of contradictions: the self-anointed priest of love who hated to be touched, the nomad eternally disappointed by travel, the evangelist of wonder cramped by his own meanness of spirit. While noting the ‘emotional combustibility’ of consumptives, Wilson accepts that at his best, Lawrence was impossible and at his worst, positively poisonous. ‘I loathe you,’ he wrote to Katherine Mansfield when she was dying. ‘You revolt me, stewing in your consumption.’ His ferocity could be startling. The writer Norman Douglas described him as ‘one of the most envybitten mortals I have ever known’.
Wilson does not attempt to excuse Lawrence his misanthropy. Instead she mounts a quietly relentless defence of his lesser work. His genius, for her, is not contained within his ‘superbly imperfect, uneven and self-sabotaging’ novels but in his largely forgotten travel writings and in his lyric poetry. She lets Lawrence’s own words make the case for him and, despite everything, they do. I have never read Lawrence’s poetry or travel writings. I shall now.