Book review: ‘Burning Man’ made me want to reread D. H. Lawrence

How unusual to find a book on D. H. Lawrence that barely mentions Lady Chatterley’s Lover! But this is a thrillingly unusual biography in every way. Frances Wilson explains that when she was growing up in the 1980s, D. H. Lawrence was generally ignored and despised. University English departments regarded him as a sadistic pornographer and flatly refused to teach him. Hence, no doubt, her teenage passion for him – he was forbidden fruit..Now, she says, she is a bit more sceptical: "Where I once found insight, I now find bewildering levels of naivety; for all his claims to prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world." She is shocked by his casual racism – he hated his visit to Ceylon because it meant being "in the heat among black people" – and she appreciates the absurdity of him banging on about male superiority while his wife, Frieda, sat and smoked and he scrubbed the floors. Wilson also admits that he could at times be "an impossibly self-aggrandising, semi-sane bore". But still she loves him, and it is the fierceness of her engagement that gives this book its pizzazz.. The cabin in D.H. Lawrence Ranch in north of Taos, where the famous author lived with his wife Freida Image Credit: Shutterstock .According to Wilson, everyone who knew Lawrence left accounts of him – 17 biographies in the four years after his death, and dozens more since. He obviously made a huge impression on anyone who met him. This had nothing to do with his "incredibly plebeian" looks – "the weedy runt you find in every gang of workmen" – but everything to do with his erudition and electrifying ideas. He was hailed as a genius as soon as his first poems were published in 1909, when he was 24..On the other hand, nobody was impressed by Frieda – Aldous Huxley called her "incurably and incredibly stupid"..Wilson focuses on his most productive and turbulent years, between the prosecution of The Rainbow in 1915 and the writing of The Plumed Serpent in 1925. (Lady Chatterley’s Lover came later.) For somewhat obscure reasons, she structures her book like Dante’s Divine Comedy, claiming that England was Lawrence’s Inferno, Italy his Purgatory, and New Mexico his Paradise – though some of his life in Taos sounds far from paradisal. These were the years when he was writing non-stop, publishing four books in one year (1923) and knocking out Kangaroo in seven weeks while also doing all the housework. He was suddenly so flush with royalties and gifts from his American admirers that he actually burned a cheque for £50..But these were also the years when he was developing tuberculosis. He never admitted it until the very end of his life – he talked of "the bronchials" – but he always craved fresh air and higher altitudes. He wrote outdoors whenever possible and opened all the windows in any house he entered..Wilson also claims that each house he lived in was higher than the last, though he died in the South of France..Every page, almost every paragraph, of this book is exciting (except some of the digressions on Dante). Wilson complains that many biographies feel like plodding across a vast flat plain, whereas she is never afraid to dart off into the bushes, chasing intriguing characters wherever she finds them. Dodge, his American patron, is obviously pre-eminent, the "millionaire Pocahontas" married to an Indian chief who lured Lawrence to Taos and kept him there. But there are also fascinating vignettes of Hilda Doolittle, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, Norman Douglas and someone called Maurice Magnus, who kept turning up wherever Lawrence was living, usually to borrow money. He left Lawrence his memoirs, and Lawrence went to considerable trouble to get them published and to provide an introduction, which he considered "the best single piece of writing" he had ever done..If you want a cool, dispassionate biography, this is not it. Wilson writes as a fan. She worships her hero and then gets furious when he lets her down. At times she seems to be almost channelling Lawrence, especially in her landscape descriptions, which are as good as Lawrence’s own. Burning Man had the effect of making me want to reread Lawrence, which I have not done for years, and also to look out for anything else Frances Wilson writes..The Daily Telegraph.Read more. Experimental biography peeks into the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky Book throws light on unsung architect behind the making of modern India Life story of Lee Child: Vivid, entertaining and sprinkled with fiction