Live and let die

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 5, 1922-1923, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott; Death & the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died and Was Remembered, by David Ellis

The story of a life is also the story of a death, and one of the values of biography is that it enables us to die by proxy — a sort of rehearsal. Biographies of writers, says David Ellis in Death and the Author, are particularly apt, since writers often explore their feelings about dying and are people of ‘superactive consciousness’.

As the author of Dying Game, the final volume of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence, Professor Ellis is an authority on Lawrence’s last years. His new book expands into a meditation on tuberculosis, and on changing attitudes to death. He can be contentious in a clichéd way. It is rubbish, for example, to say that nowadays we are ‘accustomed to ignoring death or taking it in our stride’. More interesting is his exploration of how tuberculosis was treated before the introduction of life-saving streptomycin in the 1940s, and how writers dealt with the knowledge that they were terminally ill — not only Lawrence, but Keats, Thomas Mann, Orwell, Mark Gertler and Chekhov, plus Proust, Kafka and many more who, even when not TB sufferers, had something striking to say about dying.

In 1930, the year Lawrence died, TB killed 60,000 people in France and 50,000 in England. Treatments included lengthy sojourns in cold mountain air, lengthy but less costly sojourns in warm Mediterranean air, patent medicines, and various horrific surgical procedures. Lawrence was ‘in denial’, not admitting that he had TB until his last fortnight. He saw illness as a failure, or as an expression of ‘wounds of the soul’.