D.H. Lawrence - Slayer of Taboos

RAISED in the 1950's, I belong to a generation that first met D. H. Lawrence between the covers of a paperback copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" from the bottom of Dad's sock drawer. Its lurid cover and hiding place marked it as a book to skim, a little feverishly, for sexual information. That was how I began reading Lawrence, if you can call that reading, and I remember very clearly reaching the end of the book only slightly more mystified than I was when I began.

I returned to Lawrence later, in college, and I liked his work all right. But though I admired certain stories - "The Rocking Horse Winner," for example - my efforts to reread his novels mostly ran into the brick wall of Lawrence's abiding interest in the "loins" of his protagonists and of passages like this one from "Women in Love": "As if in a spell, Gudrun was aware of his body, stretching and surging like the marsh-fire, stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem. Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the blood faint in her veins, her mind went dim and unconscious."

Still, I've heard others speak movingly of his genius, and I'm a fan of Geoff Dyer's witty, unclassifiable "Out of Sheer Rage," an account of what happened to Dyer while he was avoiding working on a study of Lawrence, "a homage to the writer who made me want to become a writer." I knew there had to be something about Lawrence I was missing. Besides, I usually tell myself that if an author has been read with pleasure - or even just in English departments - for generations, and I don't understand why, I must be suffering a blindness from which I may eventually recover.

In that spirit of optimism, I began John Worthen's "D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider," which promises to help readers "find new ways of understanding" its subject. Claiming that allegations of sexism, racism, misogyny, fascism and colonialism have damaged Lawrence's reputation, Worthen, a professor emeritus of D. H. Lawrence studies at the University of Nottingham and the author of the first part of the three-volume Cambridge life of Lawrence, prepares us to expect one of those biographies that read like battle cries in a holy war to rescue an undervalued author from the dusty purgatory of the eternal remainder table.

Such a biography might employ the juicier bits of the writer's life as bait to lure the reader onto the hook of his work. It would demonstrate how personal history was alchemized into art and tell the inspiring if not exactly uncommon story of how the artist triumphed over adversity, loneliness and rejection. Above all, such a book should persuade us of the author's talent and perhaps explain why his gifts might have fallen out of favor. Unfortunately, that's not what Worthen's biography does.

Part of the problem is simple clarity - clarity of thought, of narrative, of diction. There's a carelessness throughout, or perhaps a disregard for the reader who must pause to untangle a passage like this one, on the already knotty subject of Lawrence's sexuality: "He offered himself the intellectual justification that sexuality should always entail conflict, opposition to the necessary other; his feelings for men could not, therefore, be concerned with sexual gratification. They were, however, 'attempts to assuage early disturbances and divisions in the self'; what he wanted was a beloved male companion, with whom he could talk and to whom he would not be opposed, unlike the self-involved and oppositional in his relationship with Frieda.

But something greater than a transparent prose style seems to be at issue: the more interesting question of how writers, including biographers, imagine their audience. To his credit, Worthen has a high estimation of his readership. Too high, perhaps; he assumes we share his intimate knowledge of

Lawrence's social circle and oeuvre. For the reader, the unfortunate result is like being at a party whose host has wrongly assumed we already know the other guests.

Unless we have read "Sons and Lovers," we might have a hard time grasping what sort of book it is, nor could we quite figure out why "The Rainbow" was banned - though a few anatomical nouns from "Lady Chatterley" do provide a hint of what all the fuss was about. Similarly, Worthen takes for granted our acquaintance with the major literary figures - Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells - who populated Lawrence's life, even as he tries to persuade us of Lawrence's status as a lifelong outsider.

I'm not suggesting a writer talk down to his audience, only that he organize the story of his subject's life in a clear, coherent, lively, understandable structure. But happily, the facts of Lawrence's history are, like his work, sufficiently intense and dramatic to keep us engaged. A coal miner's son, he was born in the English Midlands in 1885. His parents' stormy union provided a template for his own long, passionate, violent and almost unfathomably cyclonic marriage to Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. Lawrence met Frieda when he went to consult her professor husband about a trip to Germany, and she eventually left her three children for him. Their marriage is a riddle to which we might want a clue, but Worthen, who seems to believe that Lawrence's reputation has suffered partly because feminists have seized on his failings as a husband, is too busy defending Lawrence - as if literary immortality were something to be awarded, like child custody, in a contentious divorce suit. "Lawrence did hit Frieda, at least as often as she hit him," Worthen argues, adding that "the violence between them was something they had managed to incorporate into their marriage. She was never frightened of him for more than a few seconds at a time; nor he of her."

Well, that's a relief. In any case, it makes for a gossipy tale as the Lawrences brawl, curse, betray one another and leave emotional wreckage in their wake as they travel from England through Germany and Italy to New Mexico and Mexico. In the end, they wound up in the south of France, where Lawrence (nursed, with a shocking degree of distraction and inattention, by the tormented, unbalanced Frieda) died of tuberculosis in 1930. But Worthen's recounting of all this fails to include a persuasive case for Lawrence's greatness, and for why we might want to have a higher opinion of his literary gifts than of his domestic behavior.

Even so, while reading Worthen's book, I asked a group of friends, over dinner, if they still read D. H. Lawrence. After some snorting about all the white loins and purple passages, one recommended Lawrence's 1923 travel book "Sea and Sardinia," which he said was eloquent and charming. Worthen calls it "perhaps the most immediately accessible and attractive of his prose books; not only a miraculous feat of recreation but alive with the comedy of everyday experience." I'm pleased to report that both are right: "Sea and Sardinia" is a gem I might not have found had I not been reading Worthen. And so one might argue that, despite its flaws, Worthen's biography, like all such books, gets an automatic credit: if nothing else, it keeps the names of the dead upon the lips of the living.