Frances Wilson has written a fiery biography of DH Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Rainbow

Bloomsbury, £25

Review by Rosemary Goring

To say that DH Lawrence was sexually supercharged is to underestimate the extent to which his life and work were dominated by sex. His novels and poetry are replete with sexual imagery and symbolism, which repulsed and enraged self-appointed guardians of public morality both in his lifetime and long after his demise. Philip Larkin got it wrong when he wrote that sexual intercourse began in 1963, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP.” In truth, it had begun decades earlier when, in the years immediately preceding the First World War, Lawrence began to publish. His first novel, The White Peacock, appeared in 1911 and was quickly followed by The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and Lovers (1913).

With justification, Frances Wilson calls the last-mentioned “the first English modern novel” and – adopting its author’s over-wrought manner – a “merciless killing machine”. Then, in 1915, in the midst of the carnage that was wiping out millions of Europe’s brightest and best, Lawrence produced The Rainbow, copies of which were seized by the police and declared obscene. It was reviewed in this newspaper by the ever-perceptive and uncensorious Catherine Carswell who was summarily sacked for giving it a positive review. She was the only writer to speak up for Lawrence publicly. “For the rest of his life,” writes Wilson, “he submitted to publication ‘as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh’.”

DH Lawrence was utterly in thrall to his wife, Frieda, who was ever eager to find fulfilment elsewhere. PHOTO: Getty Images

And what a life it was. For a start it was short. Lawrence was just 44 when he died of tuberculosis. But he packed into that brief span a phenomenal amount of work and a series of rambunctious, corrosive, exhausting relationships that would test the sanity of most people. For all his openness about sex, the man himself was queasy about homosexuality, conservatively minded and utterly in thrall to his wife, Frieda, who was ever eager to find fulfilment elsewhere. Wilson makes the convincing case that without Frieda there would have been no Sons and Lovers, but the couple’s relationship bordered on the psychotic. Among the many combustible scenes related by Wilson is one witnessed by Katherine Mansfield in which Lawrence battered his wife until each of them collapsed into chairs. “No-one said a word ... Suddenly, after a long time ... L looked up and asked Murry [Mansfield’s husband] a question about French literature.”

Lawrence met Frieda in the early spring of 1912. At the time she was married with three children to a professor called Ernest Weekly – the sort of name a novelist might give to a feeble character – who had told his parents that he had become hitched to “an earthquake”. Frieda was German, “a Teutonic blonde with a large bosom”, who was consumed with sex but did not know how to boil a kettle. After a matter of days, she and Lawrence eloped. In a letter to her cuckolded husband, Lawrence explained: “Mrs Weekly is afraid of being stunted and not allowed to grow, and so she must live her own life. All women in their natures are giantesses.”

What Mr Weekly thought of this one can well imagine. For Lawrence, however, his attachment to Frieda fitted his philosophy that a great man needs a great woman to plot his course through life. Theirs was a restless, peripatetic, globe-trotting, hand-to-mouth existence. Wilson parallels it throughout her engrossing, entertaining and illuminating biography to Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which hell for the nomadic, questing Lawrence was home.

Before Frieda blitzkrieged her way into his life, there were two other significant women. The first was his mother, Lydia. His father was a miner, prone to drink, while Lydia was a schoolteacher and domestic drudge who believed she had married beneath her and came to despise her husband. “His mother was all mind,” writes Wilson, “his father all body; his mother was pure will, his father pure instinct.” Oedipal-like, Lawrence “identified entirely” with his mother. The violence he witnessed dished out by his father, however, was mirrored by that which he delivered to Frieda. Everything, as readers of Lawrence will be aware, found its way, often undiluted, into his novels. One such shocking incident is included in Sons and Lovers in which Paul Morel adds a lethal dose of morphine to his dying mother’s milk. This is precisely how Lawrence, assisted by his sister Ada, despatched Lydia.

The second woman on whom Lawrence came to depend was called Jessie Chambers. Her memoir, A Personal Record, is invaluable to Lawrentian scholars, not least for the portrait it paints of his upbringing but also because of its sharp insights. It was Jessie, for example, who first recognised that Lawrence lived a life of Dantean allegory. Eventually, he cast her aside, as – in Wilson’s estimation – he turned “from a human being into a writer”, as if one can’t be both.

Burning Man is replete with fiery imagery and the sense that Lawrence’s devotion to his art would ultimately engulf him in flames. Wilson concentrates on his middle years, between 1915 and 1925, when he flew closest to the sun and when he produced some of his best work. She has also highlighted parts of his story ignored or underplayed by previous biographers, including an enlightening and diverting account of his friendship with Maurice Magnus, an erudite con man and sponger to whom Lawrence was introduced in Florence by the Scottish sybarite and rapacious gossip, Norman Douglas.

Biographer Frances Wilson, whose previous books include a compelling life of Thomas de Quincey, eloquently makes the case for Lawrence’s genius and the need for his revaluation. PHOTO: Jonathan Ring

Wilson, whose previous books include a compelling life of Thomas de Quincey, eloquently makes the case for Lawrence’s genius and the need for his revaluation. She is not a huge fan of his novels, which, it must be acknowledged, have dated somewhat. But there was much more to Lawrence than that. He wrote wonderful short stories and even better poems. His travel writing is yet to reach its sell-by date and he was an acute critic, in particular of classic American literature. He was also a peerless and fearless letter writer. Above all, he lived as if every day was his last.