Philip Hensher

Over the rainbow: D.H. Lawrence’s search for a new way of life

In her biography of Lawrence, Frances Wilson compares the writer’s restless foreign wanderings to those of Dante in The Divine Comedy

Portrait of D.H. Lawrence by Jan Juta. Credit: Getty Images

When it comes to biography, some authors draw the punters, and others leave the mob cold. D.H. Lawrence has been written about a lot, from the moment he died. At least ten memoirs were published in the five years after his death by authors ranging from his sister and his wife to patrons such as Mabel Dodge Luhan. More followed, and only professional Lawrence scholars will have read all of them. There must be dozens of them, and some, such as the Cambridge three-volume effort by different authors, are immensely long. By comparison, there are only a handful of full-scale lives of James Joyce, and poor old Arnold Bennett has only one (excellent) biography, by Margaret Drabble. What is it about Lawrence that draws them so?

It might be something frustratingly incomplete about the literary output. Every aspect of his writing produces something masterly — ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ among the poems, The Rainbow from the novels and the magnificent ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’ from the essays. But as a body of work, probably only the short stories are consistently brilliant. Among the novels, on which his fame continues to rest, even Women in Love is, in the end, an interesting sort of experiment and static for most of its length. Many of the others are pretty bad, dashed off carelessly — The Plumed Serpent — or simply absurd, such as The Lost Girl. You have to dig around, and even an admirer like me has to admit that the standard of the best work isn’t sustained throughout.

The life, however, is undeniably fascinating. Lawrence belonged to a generation which was trying very consciously to break with the public conventions of the past. Several people took to saying the unsayable. Virginia Woolf gives an account of what happened one August day in 1908 when Lytton Strachey came into a room where she and her sister Vanessa Bell were sitting.

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