Further Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

I.

 

What does it mean when a biographer of D. H. Lawrence declares that she is "unable to distinguish between Lawrence's art and Lawrence's life"?*

 

It means that she fails to understand that literature is more than merely the expression of lived experience and that the artist is engaged in a creative enterprise of thought; not merely recalling past events and providing (sometimes amusing, often malicious) portraits of persons known to them, but playing with percepts  and affects.** 

 

And so (once more) to the case of Frances Wilson ...

 

 

II.

 

The problem with failing to understand how and in what way writing exceeds life, is that once a biographer has successfully mapped the fiction on to a reality that is external to the text and checked for accuracy of representation, there's not much more for them to do or say. The vol-au-vent is stuffed and it's stuffed with chicken.

 

This partly explains why, in a study of over 400 pages, Wilson has very little to tell us about several of the major works produced by Lawrence in the period that is her main focus of interest (1915-1925). What it doesn't explain, however, is why a self-professed Lawrence loyalist is so dismissive of his novels.

 

Women in Love (1920), for example, is described by Wilson as a work lacking in the atmospheric grandeur of The Rainbow and judged to be a failed literary experiment when compared to Virginia Woolf's The Waves. It can only be considered the prophetic masterpiece that Lawrence believed it to be, she says, if readers are prepared to agree with the views of Rupert Birkin: "and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers" [113].***

 

The Lost Girl (1920), meanwhile, is described by Wilson as a book that is both mad and bad: "Its badness is because Lawrence had lost interest in human psychology [...] And its madness is the result of his tearing along like a dustball without having the faintest idea of what's coming next." [223] 

 

Aaron's Rod (1922), on the other hand, "is not a mad book in the sense of engagingly bonkers" like The Lost Girl, but is neverthess barely sane and yet another good book gone bad: "Lawrence allowed his anger to spoil his beautiful story [...] shouting and yelling and ranting about love and power and how women must submit to men ..." [256-257]  

 

As for The Plumed Serpent (1926), well this is simply a sour-flavoured version of the superior Quetzalcoatl: "Writing with his usual rapidity, he doubled its length and spoiled its beauty" [398], says Wilson. She goes on to add: "The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive and hard to forget. It is also boring, at times brutally so." [399]    

 

One can only conclude that with friends like Frances, Lawrence hardly needs enemies ...

 

 

Notes

 

* Frances Wilson Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 3. Future page references will be given directly in the text.   

** These terms, used by Deleuze and Guattari to discuss literary practice as distinct from philosophy, have a very precise and important meaning. Percepts are not merely perceptions; they are independent of the subject who experiences them. Similarly, affects are not merely feelings or affections; they pass beyond those who undergo them. Together, percepts and affects form a bloc of sensations, or what is usually referred to as a work of art existing in itself and not forever tied to a dead author. If one must talk about literature as life, then it's important to conceive the latter in a complex onto-ethical manner as a non-organic power (i.e., as something singular, impersonal, and beyond good and evil). The task of literature is to free life from what imprisons it - not capture it in words.  

      See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, (Verso, 1994), Part. 2, Chapter 7.  

      See also Daniel W. Smith's excellent Introduction to Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1996), pp. xi-liii. As Smith crucially notes: "For Deleuze, writing is never a personal matter. It is never simply a matter of our lived experiences [...] Novels are not created with our dreams and fantasies, nor our sufferings and griefs, our opinions and ideas, our memories and travels, nor 'with the interesting characters we have met [...]'" [xv].

      Unfortunately, Wilson doesn't appear to be much interested in any of this; she just wants to talk about autofiction in the most personal sense. She writes on literature not as a philosopher or even a serious critic, but as a biographer concerned with human lives, telling tales, and passing the word along.

 

*** To read my original reflections on Frances Wilson's Burning Man, click here. And to read my response to this attack on Women in Love and the teenage mentality, click here. 

Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here. 

 

 

In Defence of Women in Love and the Teenage Mentality (A Response to Frances Wilson)

Photo of Frances Wilson by Jonathan Ring

 

 

I. 

 

Once, in 1983, when I was twenty-years-old, I was riding in a car with a producer from the BBC's Community Programme Unit, on the way to Derby to film a piece of CND propaganda masquerading as investigative journalism, entitled 'Doctors Against the Bomb'. 

 

Heading as we were to the East Midlands, it was perhaps inevitable that the name D. H. Lawrence entered the conversation: I said I loved Lawrence and his writing; he - the producer - told me with a patronising tone and superior little smile: "Everybody does when they're young. But, don't worry, you'll grow out of it."

 

It's something I've never forgotten: and I determined at that moment to never abandon Lawrence or repudiate his influence on my thinking (and, indeed, my life).  

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this incident when I read the following crass sentence in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man (2021):         

 

"Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does [Women in Love] become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers." [1]

 

What this reveals, I'm sorry to say, is that Wilson is one of those high-brow readers who, whilst posing as a Lawrentian loyalist, sneers from her privileged position at his immaturity and despises a character like Rupert Birkin for displaying the uncompromising intensity of youth.  

 

She writes:

 

"There are wonderful things in Women in Love, but it is not the flawless masterpiece that Lawrence believed he had written. It is an experiment in the art of fiction [...] but we only have to compare the result with Virginia Woolf's The Waves to see that Lawrence has failed." [2] 

 

Did Lawrence ever claim to have written a flawless masterpiece? I don't think so. He wasn't interested in literary perfection - nor, for that matter, in comparative success. Besides, doesn't all great art ultimately fail? Its tragic beauty rests upon this fact.   

 

At the beginning of her study, Wilson says that, as an adolescent, she found Lawrence incomparable as an author and loved his fierce certainties:

 

"I liked the fact his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings." [3] 

 

Alas, returning to Lawrence as a middle-aged biographer, she now finds that things have changed: 

 

"Where once I 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." [4] 

 

Rather than consider that this disenchantment shows a loss of her own vitality, however, Wilson makes her snide little remark about Lawrence's fiction appealing only to teenagers. But, as Lawrence himself says, perhaps the mentality of a teenager is preferable to that of a jaded intellectual who now chooses to sit safely in judgement rather than risk falling in love.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 113. For a series of reflections on this book, click here and here.

[2] Ibid., pp. 112-113. 

[3] Ibid., pp. 2-3.

[4] Ibid., p. 3. This is a sentence that could have been written by Geoff Dyer; another author who claims to love Lawrence and has in part built his own career as a professional writer upon Lawrence, but then dismisses much of his work and transforms him from a figure of hate into a figure of ridicule, as if that's performing him a service.