Lorenzo, the partially magnificent
William Scammell
D. H. LAWRENCE: TRIUMPH TO EXILE, 1912-1922
by Mark Kinkead-Weekes CUP, £29.95, pp. 943 The first great novelty of the 'Cambridge Biography' of Lawrence is that his short life has been divided up into three periods and handed out to three different biographers. The second is that, despite authorial protestations to the contrary, it shows every sign of wanting to be defini- tive, exhaustive, irreplaceable. Marble- heavy with piety and footnotes, computer-fresh and fleet of foot with all the latest in worldwide scholarship, it is as unlike Lawrence's own mercurial proceed- ings as it is possible to imagine; and there are multiple ironies in the fact that it is Cambridge, of all places, that is erecting the tombstone (new editions of the novels and letters, as well as this gigantic biogra- phy, and a proclamation of new copy- rights), since he hated its Apostles, its desiccated intelligentsia, and the adjacent Bloomsbury set.
'Yet it looks as though it's going to be infinitely consultable, if not exactly loved. John Worthen's excellent first volume, Published in 1991, covered the years 1885- 1912 and ran to 600 pages. Kinkead- Weekes, covering only ten years, runs to almost 1,000 densely-printed pages (we're now down to 8-point), presumably on the grounds that two of his major novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, and many of the best short stories, were produced dur- ing this period. At this rate, if David Ellis's third and final volume continues the trend, we shall have 2,000-2,500 pages on a life that lasted just 44 years, which seems a lit- tle excessive, even for those eager to spot every last recombustion of the phoenix's miraculous feathers.
Two events dominate proceedings in this crucial decade of Lawrence's life, the tragi- comedy of the elopement with Frieda Weekley, once an emancipated baroness, now a respectable wife and mother in the stifling English provinces; and the long wnterly grapple with 'The Sisters' and 'The Wedding Ring' that eventually got trans- muted into his two most highly-regarded novels (by commentators, at any rate, if not by common readers). Such a direct critic!' wrote Frieda later of his impact on her. 'It
was something my High and Mightiness was very little accustomed to.'
She had no intention, at first, of making a complete break with her husband and children, but the continental holiday with Lawrence turned into the lifelong, embat- tled, revelatory marriage that has enthralled the gossip in us ever since. Most of the essentials are set down in that amaz- ingly bright and breezy novel, Mr Noon, not published in its entirety until 1984. Lawrence's ability to transcribe his own life on the hoof, as it were, 'shedding ones sick- nesses in books' (which Auden later picks up in 'this country of ours where nobody is well), is a far cry from the poet's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' and yet the reli- gious intensity of his apprehensions, his intent tracing of inner and outer life, make him the most Wordsworthian novelist of the century.
'I can't forgive Conrad for being so sad and for giving in', he once wrote. He couldn't forgive Tolstoy and Anna Kareni- na either; and no doubt would have given Hamlet a good talking to if he'd happened to land up in Elsinore. Whether this insistence on dying into the unknown, and thence into endless rebirth, is seen as heroic or merely hectic is partly a matter of personal temperament, partly the long- standing clash between stoic classicism and fiery romanticism. Darkness becomes a species of transubstantiation; and sex trails clouds of the stuff in its wake. It's worth remembering, however, that the prophet was also a fine mimic — better than Charlie Chaplin, one visitor recalled — and liked to salt his prognostications ('the prob- lem of today .. . a new relation .. . between men and women') with antic dis- plays of parody and burlesque.
As to the marriage: the story of Lorenzo the partially magnificent, who also did the cooking and cleaning, and Frieda the emancipated, cracking plates over his head and lending her body out to needy and promising young men, is one of those mod- em moralities which lends itself to endless re-tellings (most recently in Brenda Maddox's The Married Man) and re- interpretations. Genius humbly putting up with the flim-flam of a bored and patrician flirt; or wet little mother's boy initiated into the sacred mysteries by the Goddess of Complete Being, who also happened to know some of the best German minds of her generation?
Kinkead-Weekes takes us scrupulously through the evidence, but at such a snail's pace, and with such a mountain of solemn, neo-Lawrencian commentary, that protest sets in early, and boredom not long after. Nothing is left to speak for itself. Neither letters nor stories can be quoted but they must be broken up and annotated, with the ever-anxious K-W hovering at our elbow ready to ensure that they are read in the correct light of Lawrence's all-powerful intellect. When he gets to the 'major' novels that succeeded the 'backward- looking' Sons and Lovers (which I for one think as fine as anything Lawrence ever wrote), the avalanche of commentary becomes insupportable. Of course the biog- raphy of any writer must take close account of the writings, but here we are installed in the seminar room for ever and a day. Biog- raphers also need to have a mental life of their own, and a sense of proportion. What a pity that John Worthen, a model of lucid- ity, wasn't entrusted with the whole job.
As a critic Kinkead-Weekes is also jejeune. Free verse does not offer a new 'kind of scansion'. Modernism doesn't 'oppose' art to life, and nor does Flaubert. Lawrence and Eliot were very different animals, it is true, but confusion is piled on confusion if category-mistakes about
subject-matter and technique are perpetrated, and different aspects of art (the formal and the substantive) are seen as mutually exclusive when they are not. The notion that one is all life-forces and 'unconsciously creative rhythms of living', the other all objective correlatives, is like supposing that H20 can't be wet and that water is inimical to science — i.e. it gets hold of the wrong ends of all the analytical sticks. Those of us who value Eliot and Lawrence will continue to broker a peace between what is lasting in their work (which might include both aesthetics and shedding one's sicknesses) and discount the two sorts of preachiness, whether couched in neo-biblical rhetoric or Bradleyan logic- chopping, for what they are.
Germany and Italy; Georgians and Imag- ists back in London; Russell and Blooms- bury; the visionary colony of 'Rananim'; pots of friends and influences and quarrels; lack of money and health; Frieda's heart- break over the children, Lorenzo's 'I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real deep want of the English people'; bad times in Cornwall; the unstoppable stream of novels, stories, essays, poems, plays, reviews — it's all here, up to and including the flight to Sicily in 1922, if only you can get it out from under the biographer's colossal robes and heavy staff. 'The only principle I can see in this life is that one must forfeit the less for the greater'. Com- pare and contrast: 'It is as she [Frieda] was fed and bred, and can't be otherwise.'
It's odd that feminists have demonised a writer who said (in 1914) that men must 'have the courage to draw nearer to women, and be altered by them'. Odd too that Lawrence's openness towards bisexual- ity was so entirely theoretical; faced with actual homosexuals like Forster and Keynes he broke out into mystic rant. The I've been released for care in the community.' break with Russell played out the Two Cultures drama long before Leavis and Snow. The affinity with flowers and crea- tureliness proved to be saner and longer- lasting than the reification of sex and primitivism; but he wanted also to import something of the impersonality of Greek art into his gospel of seething fecundities. We leave him bound for Taormina, anoth- er idyllic haven perhaps, like Fiascherino in 1913, which calls up one of Kinkead- Weekes's happiest sentences: 'Figs and oranges grew in the garden, and olive groves shimmered above — Lawrence said he always expected to see Christ and his disciples walking there'. I look forward to the concluding chunk of this massive enter- prise with some trepidation.
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