When Frances Wilson was a teen her mother forbade D.H. Lawrence’s books in the house and her college English professor refused to teach him. It was the early 1980s and every good reader knew that Lawrence’s “Priest of Love” persona, based on his once-banned novels The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, concealed an ugly misogyny. Lawrence, so recently enshrined as a mascot of the swinging Sixties, had been unmasked as a sadistic pornographer who merely pretended to care about women.
All the same, Wilson read Lawrence on the sly, reveling in his “fierce certainties,” his indomitable belief that he was right and everyone else was not merely wrong but wrongheaded. Now, in middle age, Wilson has returned to Lawrence to find that it is his quieter “mysteries” that draw her in to his life. This Lawrence is a modernist who aches with nostalgia, a sensualist who flinches when touched, an intellectual who devalues the intellect, and a worshiper of the body whose own waxy frame is fading away: at the time of his death in 1930, the man who had written so lushly about naked male flesh in Women in Love weighed just 85 pounds.
Wilson has made a distinguished career out of testing literary biography’s limits and permissions. Her previous book, on Thomas De Quincey, matched structure and style to subject, so that reading it was at times like being lost in an opium haze.
She does something similar here with Lawrence, fashioning a text that feels as if it had tumbled out in the white heat of conviction. There is nothing balanced in Burning Man, nothing judicious, careful, or patient, which is exactly how Lawrence would have wanted it. Above all, Wilson resists any expectation that it is the biographer’s duty to resolve the dips, bumps, and tangles of her subject’s life. Instead, she makes a point of leaning into Lawrence’s contradictions, convinced that this is where the engine of his genius lies.
Despite The Rainbow and Women in Love being elevated to the literary canon, Wilson maintains that Lawrence’s novels do not represent his best work. Instead, we would do better attending to his short stories, poems, essays, reviews, sermons, and travel writing. These “minor” pieces have long been hard to find, but in 2019 a selection was brought back into print in The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence.
His letters are stories, his stories are poems, his poems are dramas, his dramas are memoirs, his memoirs are travel books, his travel books are novels, his novels are sermons, his sermons are manifestos for the novel.
And all of them are best understood as one continuous exercise in what today we call autofiction.
The focus of Burning Man is the middle years, when Lawrence was prosecuted for obscenity after the publication of The Rainbow, and when he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. To impose shape on a life that moved erratically from Britain and Europe to Australia, Asia, and the Americas, Wilson proposes a biographical triptych based on the bold assertion that Lawrence “structured his life” according to the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy. By Wilson’s reckoning, Lawrence’s Inferno takes place between 1915 and 1919, when he publishes The Rainbow and comes to the realization that England will not hold him. His Purgatory occurs in Italy, from 1919 to 1922, a phase of flux and recuperation during which he extends his range through the minor writing. Paradise comes in the form of New Mexico, where Lawrence is summoned by the wealthy American theosophist and patron Mabel Dodge with the promise of healthy air and the chance to save Western civilization.
So convinced is Wilson of Lawrence’s engagement with this medieval schema that she even maintains that each house he lived in “was positioned at a higher spot than the last,” in imitation of the upward thrust of The Divine Comedy. This is difficult to square with Lawrence’s evident love of contingency: Wilson herself tells us that he relished plotlessness, delighting in last-minute changes to social arrangements or travel plans.
Even with this unconvincing and cumbersome apparatus, Burning Man is an exhilarating ride. It opens during World War I with the banning of The Rainbow, Lawrence’s account of the sexual awakening of three generations of Midlands women.
The Rainbow is actually prim compared with Lawrence’s later novels, and Wilson believes that the trial was more about the teller than the tale, to use one of Lawrence’s favorite distinctions. Not only was the young author noisily opposed to the war with Germany, but the previous year he had married Frieda, whose maiden name was von Richthofen; she was a cousin of the famous Prussian flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron. Particularly disreputable was the fact that Baroness Frieda had abandoned her British professor husband and three children to elope with Lawrence, a coal miner’s son. Disqualified from military service on account of being a poor physical specimen, Lawrence was a perfect bogeyman for these jittery times.
Relocating with Frieda to the very edge of Britain was not enough to dodge the suspicious chatter. On the Cornish coast the Lawrences were suspected of being spies: their candle at an upstairs window was said to be sending messages to German submarines; there was talk of secret supplies of gasoline hidden in the cliffs.
Returning to London, Lawrence became close to Hilda Doolittle. An American imagist poet and protégée of Ezra Pound, Doolittle had married the British writer Richard Aldington and was now living in Bloomsbury. It is she who gives Lawrence a perch in a literary establishment that had never warmed to him.
As a native Pennsylvanian Doolittle was less concerned with Lawrence’s provincial vowels and “plebeian” hair than she was with constructing a fantasy in which together they would undertake great, if unspecified, work. Frieda had confided to Doolittle that her husband was homosexual, ending the collaboration.
In truth, the role that Doolittle plays in Burning Man is less cicerone than counterweight to the unshiftable Frieda Lawrence, the brash, blousy woman who truly believed that her husband could not write a word without her. When in company Frieda and Lawrence would fly at each other with their fists, requiring an ever-changing audience to keep the drama of their marriage going.
As his guide for this part of the journey Wilson appoints Maurice Magnus, a minor man of letters whom Lawrence first met in Florence through the writer Norman Douglas. She devotes many pages to this American mongrel who had grown up in Europe. Before long, Magnus is sponging off Lawrence. At first it is just a drink or dinner, but soon he is expecting Lawrence to settle his hotel bills. Normally this would be the cue for some spluttering invective from Lawrence, who remained frugal all his life, as befits a boy who had grown up in a row house with an outside communal toilet. Yet he retained a curious soft spot for this preposterous companion.
In 1920, about to be arrested for debt in Malta, Magnus swallowed prussic acid. Lawrence insisted that he felt no guilt about the fact. By way of reparation, he set about finding a publisher for the memoir that his “friend” - Magnus’s code for a homosexual lover - had left behind, with all the profits going to pay off outstanding debts. This manuscript went by the delightful title Dregs and dwelled with lavish obscenity on the author’s time in the French Foreign Legion. To have any hope of publication, though, the sado-masochistic sex would have to go, and the title changed to the altogether less enticing Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by M.M., with an introduction by D.H. Lawrence.
Lawrence believed that his 86-page introduction to the memoir was the “best single piece of writing, as writing” that he had ever done. It is also, however, a cruel, cruel thing. Lawrence skewers his friend as an effeminate stooge, twirling around in a blue silk kimono that made him resemble a “little pontiff,” his rear end permanently stuck out like a small bird’s. It was as if, having once got too close to Magnus for comfort, Lawrence now felt the need to kick him away and then stomp on his head.
It sounds small, petty, and mean, the sort of thing writers might do when their real work has stalled and they feel a need to punish someone. Yet Lawrence’s creative life was richer than it had been in years. It was during this time that he produced much of the verse that appeared eventually in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. This was also when Lawrence produced “the finest opening line of any travel book,” according to Wilson. To be sure, the first line of Sea and Sardinia is sublime.
Sea and Sardinia blurs the boundary between interior and exterior movement, a kind of travel writing that had not quite been seen before.
The Lawrences traveled to New Mexico in 1922 at the behest of Mabel Dodge, who several years earlier had arrived from the East Coast on a divinely appointed mission to “save the Indians.” Once this had been accomplished, she planned to move on to the whole of white America, which she would teach to give up capitalism and revert to the mysticism and communal life of the pueblo.
As a first step in this ambitious project, Dodge had taken as her fourth husband Tony Lujan, a Taos Pueblo man. Now she summoned Lawrence from the other side of the world using what she claimed was one of her two wombs. This invitation also involved the more workaday method of writing him a letter. Dodge had become obsessed with Lawrence after reading his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and her idea was that he would interview her and “take my experience, my material, my Taos” and “formulate it into a magnificent creation.” Unfortunately for Dodge, the books that Lawrence proceeded to write out of their encounter were some of the maddest and meanest of his entire career.
Lawrence was by this point “a semi-sane bore.” Only recently Lawrence had published Studies in Classic American Literature, which many describe as “the greatest work of literary criticism of the age.” In the first of these essays, “The Spirit of Place,” Lawrence argued that America was not the innocent fresh-faced child of Europe, but its untranslatable “other.” There is, he suggests, an undercurrent in American literature that is bent on destruction, on smashing through its suave self-presentation.
Dodge, not unnaturally, was tired of being told she was lazy and should wear an old-fashioned apron like Lawrence’s mother and scrub her own floor. How pleasing to note that, this time, it was she who wrote to end their connection. She went public too, publishing Lorenzo in Taos two years after Lawrence’s death.
Frances Wilson ends her narrative in 1925, glossing over the final five years of Lawrence’s life, which include the writing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She maintains that Lawrence is still “on trial,” but there are signs that the jury may be tipping in his favor.
He remains one of the most frequently biographized subjects in literary history. But what interests these writers and scholars are acts of revision and recuperation. For all Lawrence’s hateful misogyny, racism, and plain bad temper, they believe that there remains something in his work that is urgent and alive. He never states an opinion without almost immediately countering it, such that to read him is to catch him in the very act of creation. Most importantly, perhaps, Lawrence grants readers permission to give up fretting about elegance, concision, likability, and all those other qualities we know we should not set such store by but do anyway.
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