By Jeffrey Meyers.
446 pages. Knopf. $24.95.
As the tide favoring censorship of the arts rises once more in this country, a new life of D. H. Lawrence takes on a certain poignancy. Lawrence was only 44 when tuberculosis felled him in 1930, but like James Joyce he’s one of the great survivors of our century’s frequent government-versus-art conflicts. In 1915 the British government, unprepared for candor about lesbianism and women’s sexual desires, suppressed “The Rainbow.” In 1929, the police closed down an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings, and from 1928 to 1960, customs officials on both sides of the Atlantic protected decent folk from “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
It’s hard to think of another modern novelist who preached loving life as incessantly as did this coal miner’s son, yet he was constantly battered by it. Weak as a boy and often ill as a man, Lawrence was so dominated by his mother that during her life he could never love another woman. Later, feeling that women’s sexuality sapped his spiritual integrity, he imagined an ideal homosexuality from which he shrank in practice. For all his insistence that the sexual side of life be an explicit part of his fiction, Lawrence was a puritan. His ambivalence fueled his frequent rages and helped make his marriage to the beautiful, faithless Frieda von Richthofen one of the most tempestuous in literary history.
Jeffrey Meyers is a prolific scholar best known for a life of Hemingway. His formal portrait of Lawrence is as full, measured and sharply defined as one could ask for. One of the pleasures that biography affords is glimpses of the people his subject encountered, and a life as disorderly as Lawrence’s attracts disorderly accomplices. Meyers presents these with acid words which cut a memorable likeness. His treatment of the work is less persuasive. Lawrence presents problems for a reader now. His importance for modernism is indisputable: his fiction emphasizes instinct rather than reason; he brought Freud’s ideas to the modern novel; however awkwardly, he dragged sex out of hiding and put it plain upon his pages. But whatever his courage and innovation, Lawrence’s ideas were largely nutty. Many of the passages most important to him–like the nude wrestling scene in “Women in Love”–provoke laughter today. Who hurries to reread Lawrence? Meyers asserts the greatness of the books, but does not pause to prove his point.
