D.H. Lawrence, the red-bearded and sickly Pan god of modernist literature, has spent most of his artistic afterlife as a cliche. Lawrence’s reputation, always informed by his radical views on the authenticity of the body and of sexuality, has become little more than a barometer of prevailing bohemian attitudes. As Frances Wilson writes in her gorgeous and illuminating new book, Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence, “In 1960, after Penguin had been tried at the Old Bailey for issuing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence was hailed as the mascot of the sexual revolution, but when, in 1969, Kate Millett skewered him in Sexual Politics for his submissive heroines and bullying heroes, he became one of those figures whose name triggers a psychological lockdown.”
Lawrence, one of the most powerful and expressive English-language writers of the 20th century, was really only “cool” for about one decade: the 1960s. Earlier, his books were suppressed and he was labeled a pervert by the authorities. Later, he suffered proto-cancellation at the hands of prim moralists masquerading as revolutionaries. It’s a good thing Lawrence’s words are hidden away in difficult books written for adults, else Millett’s pearl-clutching progeny might accidentally come across his works and try to bury them again.
Lawrence deserves better. His books certainly demand more. As Lawrence himself wrote in Apocalypse,
Once a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different every time we read it. Owing to the flood of shallow books which really are exhausted in one reading, the modern mind tends to think every book is the same, finished in one reading. But it is not so. And gradually the modern mind will realize it again. The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.
This is exactly what Wilson gives us in Burning Man. She saves Lawrence and his work from the false death of cliche and fixed meaning, presenting the man in all his burning contradiction alongside his works, which have their own pulse and give off their own animal heat. Burning Man is more of a resurrection than a seance.
Wilson has written something more than a biography: She expertly blends the vision of Lawrence’s works and the details of his life into a kind of associative collage. “How can a biography do justice to Lawrence’s complexities?” she asks. And just as fiction writers offer disclaimers that their characters aren’t based on real people and nonfiction authors claim that theirs isn’t a work of imagination, Wilson writes that she should “similarly state that Burning Man is a work of non-fiction which is also a work of imagination. I should further declare that I am unable to distinguish between Lawrence’s art and Lawrence’s life, which was equally a work of imagination, and nor do I distinguish Lawrence’s fiction from his non-fiction. I read his novels, stories, letters, essays, poems and plays as exercises in autofiction, which genre he pioneered in order to get around the restrictions of genre.”
Wilson avoids those same restrictions by doing a bit of her own genre-bending. Instead of a chronological and hermetically sealed account of Lawrence’s life, we begin in 1915, with Lawrence and his wildly bohemian German wife, Frieda, living on Hampstead Heath, before descending into a digression on Byron followed by a deep exploration of Lawrence’s The Rainbow. The book progresses mainly by association, where an offhand comment by Frieda is contextualized by exploring her life up to that point and then returning to what might be called the “rough present.” The main drawback of the technique is that it’s easy to become confused about where the reader is in time. The benefit is that the book begins to mirror the energy and chaotic vitality of its subject.
This isn’t to say that Burning Man is completely lacking in structure. The book is loosely organized into three sections: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, predominantly set in England, Italy, and America, respectively. The structure is a nod to the profound effect that Dante had on Lawrence and the complex duality that the two poets shared. As Wilson explains, “There are two Dantes in the [Comedy]: Dante-the-poet and Dante-the-pilgrim, and it is important to distinguish between them. Lawrence would share the poet’s temerity and dual vision: he too would be the author and the hero of his works, he too considered himself human and divine, his Inferno was also both symbolic and horribly real, and he too wrote his friends and enemies into his books. He would also share the pilgrim’s social discomfort.” She goes on to explain that Dante played the same role in Lawrence’s art that Ulysses played in James Joyce’s, that he even structured his life using Dante’s poem as a template. “This was his primal plan,” Wilson explains, “the complex figure in the Persian carpet that Lawrence’s biographers — because they have been looking from a flat perspective — have failed to see.” The peripatetic Lawrence, in his footloose ambulations around the globe, was always moving up, higher and higher in elevation. From the English heath to the Italian mountains to the High Desert of the American West, Lawrence wasn’t progressing forward but upward, until he eventually succumbed in 1930 to the tuberculosis that had haunted him for well over a decade.
Burning Man is rich in scope and complex in structure, but it isn’t a dry intellectual text. Wilson has a feel for the everyday tragedies, the “kitchen sink dramas” that constitute the bulk of our lives. There is a moment near the beginning of the book when she’s writing of Lawrence’s childhood and his ambitious middle-class mother, perpetually disappointed by her working-class miner husband. Setting up the reader to side with Lawrence’s mother, Wilson then abruptly pulls the rug out from under us: “Lawrence described the control his mother had wielded over the home, suggesting that it was Lydia rather than Arthur who had inflicted the worst damage. The nights when her husband was in the pub, Lydia Lawrence ‘would gather the children in a row’ where they sat ‘quaking’ in anticipation of his return. While they waited, she ‘would picture his shortcomings blacker and blacker to their childish horror.’” When Arthur returns home, he pleads with his children not to fear him in his colloquially rendered accent, “‘Never mind, my duckies, you needna be afraid of me. I’ll do ye no harm.’” As a reader, your heart trembles and breaks. You feel that you better understand not only Lawrence the man but also the predominantly working-class men at the center of his novels.
Gaining a deeper appreciation for Lawrence doesn’t mean agreeing with his neopagan philosophy or condoning his lust and violence (after luring Frieda away from her husband and children, he regularly beat her). And perhaps we gain a more profound understanding of both if we are able to maintain a critical distance while simultaneously accepting Lawrence’s profound contradictions with an open mind and heart. Wilson writes that Lawrence “was a modernist with an aching nostalgia for the past, a sexually repressed Priest of Love, a passionately religious non-believer, a critic of genius who invested in his own worst writing. Of all the Lawrentian paradoxes, however, the most arresting is that he was an intellectual who devalued the intellect, placing his faith in the wisdom of the very body that throughout his life was failing him. Dismantle his contradictions, however, and you take away the structure of his being.”
In Burning Man, Wilson does us the service of not trying to untangle or iron out those contradictions but instead uses them as models for the book. Burning Man isn’t a substitute for Lawrence, but it accomplished what most biographies can’t. It moves with the rhythm of his pulse.
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
