Frances Wilson

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the most famous or notorious, novels of the twentieth century. First published in Italy in 1928, Lawrence himself described it as a ‘tender and phallic novel, far too good for the public.’ It was banned in England until 1960 when a prosecution against its publisher for obscenity failed. Lady Chatterley, which was Lawrence’s last novel, scarcely gets a mention in Burning Man, Frances Wilson’s brilliantly original biography of Lawrence. The book covers the author’s middle years, 1915 to 1925, that ‘decade of superhuman energy and productivity’ between the prosecution of his novel The Rainbow and the diagnosis of his tuberculosis. Frances Wilson will be discussing it and Lawrence himself at the Sherborne Literary Society on Sunday 6th October.

Burning Man adopts the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy - a work Lawrence considered a ‘piece of supreme art’ - to explain Lawrence’s apparently random wanderings during these years, when ‘he ricochets around the globe’. Looked at like this, ‘the apparent chaos reshapes itself’: ‘every house Lawrence lived in … was positioned at a higher spot than the last; he rose from the underworld to the empyrean’, a modern, consumptive Dante.

And how Lawrence travelled in these years. He was never in the same place for more than a few months: ‘he and his wife Frieda roamed the world like gypsies and slept like foxes, in dens’. In 1919 he left England for Italy, visiting or living in Turin, Florence, Rome, Capri, Monte Cassino, and Taormina as well as making trips to Malta and Sardinia. In 1922, Lawrence left Europe for the United States, where he settled for a while in New Mexico but also visited Sri Lanka, Australia, and Tahiti.

Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen just before the outbreak of the First World War. She was a Prussian aristocrat and cousin of the Red Baron, the German fighter ace, who had abandoned her husband and three children to be with Lawrence. Frieda generally gets a bad press: ‘she was tasteless and irresponsible’; ‘she had no evident talent apart from sex’; ‘she smoked in the face of her tubercular husband while he scrubbed the floors’; and ‘got fatter while he got thinner, got stronger while he got weaker and slept with anyone she felt like sleeping with’. Worst of all, she probably shortened his life. For all her faults, though, she was important to Lawrence, ‘a vital organ of his own body’.

One of the most striking aspects of this tumultuous period of Lawrence’s life is the strange, often downright weird, people he attracted. In Italy, he fell in with Norman Douglas, a pederast with literary pretensions and a taste for Mediterranean life, and Maurice Magnus, an adventurer and fraudster who had done a stint in the French Foreign Legion before committing suicide by drinking prussic acid. In America, where she lived in New Mexico, Lawrence and Frieda formed a close if turbulent relationship with Mabel Dodge, an eccentric, promiscuous, syphilitic, self-proclaimed ‘saviour of the Indians’. Dodge, whose life, according to Wilson, ‘reads like a Freudian case-study’, ‘was a psychoanalytic lab-rat’. Then there was Dorothy Brett, half deaf and wholly batty, who joined the Dodge menage in New Mexico, and other, more transient misfits and oddballs who passed in and out of Lawrence’s orbit.

Lawrence is, Wilson admits at the outset, a controversial subject, ‘one of those figures whose name triggers a psychological lockdown’. ‘Being loyal to Lawrence,’ she continues, ‘especially as a woman, has always required some sort of explanation’. Burning Man attempts to explain his complexities: ‘I am unable,’ she writes, ‘to distinguish between Lawrence’s art and Lawrence’s life … and nor do I distinguish Lawrence’s fiction from his non-fiction’. When he said jokingly, ‘Art for my sake,’ he meant it.

Lawrence was a prolific author, who produced a stream of novels, short stories, poems, travel writing, essays and reviews but the critical concentration on his novels has consigned much of his best work to the periphery. As a result, Wilson writes, ‘readers today have no sense of either his range or the preternatural strangeness of his power’. One of her aims in Burning Man is ‘to reveal a lesser-known Lawrence through introducing his lesser-known works’. For example, Lawrence’s introduction to Maurice Magnus’s memoir of his time in the French Foreign Legion is ‘the best single piece of writing as writing’ he ever produced. This means, Wilson explains, ‘that D.H. Lawrence’s best single piece of writing is an unclassifiable document virtually unknown to the majority of his readers’.

Burning Man forms an engrossing portrait of Lawrence in these central years by looking at his life - especially his marriage, his endless journeys and his companions - and his work. This biography seems to me to confirm the received impression that Lawrence was, by any normal standard, a strange but captivating man. Aldous Huxley, who knew Lawrence well in the last years of his life, summed him up as ‘different and superior in kind’. He was, Huxley thought, a ‘being, somehow, of another order, more sensitive, more highly conscious, more capable of feeling than even the most gifted of common men’. To spend time with Lawrence ‘was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness’, ‘a brighter and intenser world, of which, while he spoke, he would make you free’. It was these qualities which made both Lawrence the man and his work so compelling for they were one and the same.