CRITICAL THINKING BOOKS
Merciless on principle
A new biography of DH Lawrence fails to capture a restless and sometimes perverse author, writes Freya Johnston
Crisscrossing the world: DH Lawrence with his wife Frieda in Santa Fe, New Mexico
COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM MANUSCRIPTS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, LA PHOT 1/8
Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence
by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury Circus, £25)
Asa reviewer, DH Lawrence sets a formidable precedent. Hugely energetic and productive in verse and fiction, he also wrote dozens of essays responding to—and, typically, arguing with—books by other people. His style in such pieces was merciless on principle. “To my thinking,” as he told the world in 1927, “the critic, like a good beadle, should rap the public on the knuckles and make it attend during divine service.” The last thing he wrote, a few days before he died of tuberculosis on 2nd March 1930, was an unfinished article about Eric Gill’s Art-Nonsense and Other Essays (1929), a book to which he reacted with his usual bombastic ferocity: “Mr Gill is not a born writer: he is a crude and crass amateur… all this is most irritating… Mr Gill is so bad at the mere craft of language, that he sets a real writer’s nerves on edge all the time.” And this was a book that Lawrence liked.
Unsurprisingly, some of his reviews landed badly. But he made no apology for his grumbly, combustible treatment of other people and their books. “I can’t help it,” he told one correspondent, “I had to write what I felt.” What he felt most of the time might be summed up by a comment in another letter: “I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”