On Two High-Maintenance Individuals and the Man Who Paid the Price of Befriending Them

Ludwig Wittgenstein, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell 

photographed in 1929

 

 

I. 

 

In the early 20th century, the phrase high-maintenance was one confined to the world of technical engineering and referred to sensitive machines that demanded constant monitoring and often frequent servicing or repair with specialised parts to ensure smooth running.

  

But by the late 1980s, it was being used by those hip to the latest slang to describe romantic partners and emotionally draining personality types, as well as racing cars and fighter jets. The phrase only gained wide circulation, however, thanks to the hugely popular and influential rom-com When Harry Met Sally (dir. Rob Reiner, 1989) [1].    

 

 

II. 

 

I'm not here to discuss the Harry Burns & Sally Albright relationship, however, and whether the latter was or was not difficult to date due to her being very particular about the manner in which her food was served. 

 

I'm here, rather, to discuss an English writer and an Austrian-born thinker, both of whom I'm sure Bertie Russell would agree were extremely exacting, hyper-sensitive, and emotionally volatile men of genius: D. H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

 

While Lawrence was a passionate, prophetic novelist who used poetic language to describe being and Wittgenstein an analytic philosopher who used rigorous logic to define the limits of language, they had similar temperaments and shared an intensity that many people found exhausting.   

 

 

III. 

 

Born in an East Midlands mining community in 1885, Lawrence was a visionary who - by his own admission - preferred his own subjective model of the truth and waged a relentless crusade against many - perhaps most - aspects of the modern industrial world and the moral-rational idealism rooted in Plato that gave rise to Christianity. 

 

Sensitive to criticism, social convention and all forms of authority - and happy to tramp around the world on what he termed a savage pilgrimage, picking fights with friends and enemies along the way - Lawrence was someone who seemed to actively court controversy and thrive on conflict. 

 

His books were censored and sometimes banned. And if he can legitimately be thought of as carrying forward Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values, Lawrence can also be viewed as a forerunner of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Born just outside Vienna in 1889 into an extremely wealthy family, Wittgenstein was unsparing in his demand for absolute conceptual clarity and perfection from himself and everyone around him. Whether spending years obsessing over a single architectural detail, pushing students to breaking point with his teaching methods, or waving pokers in the faces of visiting professors [2], he tolerated no sloppy thinking (as might be expected of someone who originally wished to study aeronautical engineering).  

 

His close companion and friend - the brilliant Cambridge mathematician David Pinsent - noted that Wittgenstein was always on edge and easily upset by the smallest thing or any imagined insult. If someone made a casual remark or used a cliché, Wittgenstein would react with genuine horror and fury, viewing it as a moral failing rather than innocent small talk. 

 

Like Lawrence, his personal life was marked by a series of fierce arguments, abrupt ruptures and intense reconciliations. He swung between deep self-loathing and absolute certainty in his own rightness in matters of philosophical logic. Prone to severe bouts of depression, he would sometimes have suicidal thoughts and seek out total isolation. 

 

In brief: both Lawrence and Wittgenstein were highly-strung as well as high-maintenance individuals. 

 

 

V.

 

Just to be clear: Lawrence and Wittgenstein never met. 

 

When Lawrence visited the University of Cambridge in March 1915, at the invitation of Bertrand Russell, he was introduced to several prominent figures, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, but Wittgenstein was then serving on the Eastern front as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. 

 

Probably it's just as well that they didn't meet. 

 

For Lawrence was less than comfortable in the hallowed halls of Cambridge and came away detesting the Apostles, describing his visit as a major crisis that revealed to him the rotten nature of English intellectual life [3]. 

 

His visceral response was in part triggered by the rational cynicism of those he encountered and in part by his homophobia. For several members of the Cambridge Apostles and the affiliated Bloomsbury Group were either homosexual or had bisexual leanings and Keynes once rather amusingly declared that "practically everyone at Cambridge [...] is an open and avowed sodomite" [4] - this included Wittgenstein, of course.      

 

 

VI. 

 

Although they never met, there was one man - already twice mentioned in this post - who knew them both and was exasperated first by Wittgenstein (in the period 1911-1913) and then by Lawrence (1915-1916): Bertrand Russell ...

 

Born in 1872 - so a generation older than Lawrence and Wittgenstein - Russell would become one of England's most celebrated thinkers, social reformers, and outspoken opponents of the First World War (even spending six months in Brixton prison in 1918 for his pacifist writings and activism).  

 

Having won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1890, he graduated in 1893 with a degree in mathematics. Two years later, he won a prize fellowship in philosophy and was eventually given a teaching post in 1899. Aligning himself with figures such as G. E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead, Russell was part of the revolt against idealism and one of the founding figures in analytic philosophy.  

 

 

VII.

 

Russell first met Wittgenstein in October 1911, when the latter suddenly appeared one tea time, unannounced and unexpected. Wittgenstein introduced himself as an engineering student from Austria who wanted to study mathematical logic. 

 

Intrigued, Russell welcomed the earnest young fellow and quickly recognised he was an extraordinary individual - so much so, that he came to think of Wittgenstein not merely as his student and research collaborator, but his protégé. Between their first meeting and the summer of 1913, the two men developed an intense intellectual bond and worked tirelessly to solve some of the fundamental problems in mathematical logic. 

 

However, Russell soon discovered that Wittgenstein could be difficult, to put it mildly - not least of all when insisting on the impossibility of proving there were no rhinos in the room - and in May 1913 their relationship suffered a significant strain when Wittgenstein criticised Russell's work on the Theory of Judgment with such savagery that it shattered Russell's confidence in his own writings. 

 

Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein decided to leave Cambridge and retreat to a secluded wooden hut in Norway, before eventually volunteering to fight in the Great War. Afterwards, the relationship between the two men was never the same again. 

Nevertheless, Russell helped Wittgenstein publish his groundbreaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (in German in 1921 and in English translation the following year) - he even generously wrote an introduction, despite the fact that Wittgenstein made clear his view that Russell fundamentally misunderstood the work.  

 

Russell also facilitated Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929, by agreeing to accept the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis (and act alongside Moore as the examiner). But Wittgenstein wasn't particularly grateful and he increasingly grew to dislike Russell's popular writings and changing philosophical direction. 

 

 

VIII.

 

And then there was Lawrence ... Someone whom Russell found even more of a high-maintenance madman. At least Wittgenstein, for all his idiosyncrasies, was logical in his thinking and didn't subscribe to a libidinal philosophy based on an intuitive way of knowing described as blood-knowledge [5].  

 

Russell first met Lawrence in February 1915. They were introduced, I believe, by their mutual acquaintance Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, for some reason, imagined that both men would greatly benefit from the meeting. 

 

And, to be fair, at first they seemed to get along like a house on fire - united in their passionate opposition to the War, if nothing else. Russell initially found Lawrence an astounding figure: "He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet [...] he sees everything and is always right" [6]. They even planned to co-author and deliver jointly a series of public lectures on social reconstruction. 

 

However, their brief working and personal relationship quickly deteriorated due to deep philosophical differences and by early 1916 Lawrence chose to cut all ties with Russell - though not before sending him a number of outrageously aggressive and insulting letters that, for a while, made Russell feel so wretched that he even considered killing himself. 

 

Take a butcher's at this one for example, written on 14 September 1915, which opens: "Dear Russell, I'm going to quarrel with you again. You simply do not speak the truth, you simply are not sincere" and which then goes on to say: 

 

"You are simply full of repressed desires [...] Your will is false and cruel. You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but lustful and cruel. [...] The enemy of all mankind, you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not the hatred of falsehood which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. It is a perverted mental blood-lust. Why don't you own it. Let us become strangers again, I think it is better." [7]    

  

Wittgenstein may have made Russell feel intellectually inferior - and he may have found Wittgenstein's moral perfectionism tiresome - but Lawrence left him feeling completely worthless as a human being - and who needs that?    

 

 

IX.

 

On reflection - and despite my not much caring for him - it's difficult not to afford Bertrand Russell a significant degree of sympathy. 

In D. H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was obliged to manage two of the most intensely high-maintenance individuals of the modern era - young men who were incredibly exhausting and demanding to be around. 

Biographers, friends, and peers have extensively documented how both Lawrence and Wittgenstein were routinely impossible - prickly, combative, tormented, and heavily burdened by an agonizing duty of genius. Both actively thrived on opposition, were prone to explosive rages, and would rather sit in hours of tense, excruciating silence than tolerate casual small talk.

 

What Russell encountered in both men was an insane refusal to compromise with the world as it was. Crucially, however, while Lawrence insisted on raw, emotional vitality at all times, Wittgenstein enforced a standard of absolute intellectual integrity and this fundamental divergence explains why Russell ultimately drew such a sharp line of distinction between the two. 

In his Autobiography, reflecting on his state of mind during the tumultuous period in which he was closely associated with both men, Russell summarised the difference: "Lawrence is just as ferocious a critic as Wittgenstein, but I thought Wittgenstein right and I think Lawrence wrong." [8]

 

In other words, Russell respected Wittgenstein's hostility because its strict conceptual honesty acted as a rigorous intellectual challenge, forcing him to abandon untenable logical theories. 

Lawrence's hostility, on the other hand, was purely personal and rooted in Lawrence's need to psycho-pathologise the people he met. Lawrence successfully drove Russell to the edge of despair, but his criticisms lacked any substantive philosophical basis, leaving Russell unconvinced by his arguments. 

Push comes to shove, then, Russell chooses the logical fanaticism of Wittgenstein over the destructive emotional chaos of Lawrence. For at least with the former, you can reason - which is not the case with a man who sings If it be not true to me / what care I how true it be [9] and talks an awful lot about his solar plexus. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a famous scene in the movie, Harry (played by Billy Crystal) informs Sally (Meg Ryan) that there are, in his view, two types of women: high and low maintenance. This permanently shifted the phrase from a niche piece of slang into a universal linguistic shorthand for a demanding partner - and for this we can thank the film's writer Nora Ephron. 

      It might be noted, however, that there are critics of the term - especially as it is often used by men as a sexist insult about women (particularly women who are simply more than they can handle or out of their league).

 

[2] See the post 'Did You Hear the One About the Philosopher and the Actress?' (30 Oct 2025) in which I discuss the infamous 1946 incident where Wittgenstein brandished a poker in Karl Popper's direction. 

 

[3] In a notorious letter [19 April 1915] to David Garnett, Lawrence wrote that the scene at Cambridge filled him with "misery and hostility and rage" and he compared Keynes and co. to "black-beetles" (perhaps of the very same species that Wittgenstein would later place in an imaginary box to make a point about the meaning of words for inner sensations coming from public use rather than private hidden objects; see Philosophical Investigations (1953), § 293). 

      See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 320-321.

 

[4] Keynes wrote this playful observation in a 1906 letter to his close friend and lover Duncan Grant, with reference to the tight-knit, intellectually progressive circles at the university. It is quoted by Simon Goldhill in Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History (Cambridge University Press, 2025). See Chapter 2: 'The Politics of Homosexuality', pp. 92-144.

      Lawrence, who struggled with his own homoerotic impulses, was disgusted by how casually and cynically the Cambridge crowd treated sexuality. He viewed their lifestyle not as a genuine form of love, but as a sterile, intellectualised perversion (they had their sex in the head, as he liked to say).

 

[5] In a famous letter (17 Jan 1913) to Ernst Collins, Lawrence writes: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 502-504. Lines quoted are on p. 503.  

      When, a couple of years later, Lawrence tried to convince Russell of a non-mental, elemental form of consciousness, the latter was unimpressed and unpersuaded. And, rather unfairly and somewhat crassly, Russell would later write that Lawrence's mystical philosophy of blood was essentially fascist in character and led straight to the Nazi death-camps See Volume II (1914-1944) of his three-volume Autobiography (George Allen & Unwin, 1967-1969), p. 23. 

 

[6] Bertrand Russell, quoted by John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 158.

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, Letters II. 392. As John Worthen notes, this letter went too far for Russell, who from this point on found Lawrence "increasingly absurd, incapable of real thinking and madly unrealistic". See D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, p. 160.

 

[8] Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Vol. II (1968), p. 54. Russell originally wrote these lines to Lady Ottoline Morrell in a letter of July 1915.

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction' to Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. (My italics.)

 

 

All They Ever Wanted Was Everything: Notes on the Scandalous Affair of Mr Lawrence and Mrs Weekley

D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley 

as imagined in 1912 [a] 

 

When in March 1912, Lawrence called upon Ernest Weekley, a professor of modern languages at Nottingham University College, in order to seek his help and advice with a proposed move to Germany, it was to prove a turning point in his life.

 

Not because of anything Weekley said or offered to do, but because he was introduced to Weekley's wife, Frieda; the woman he would marry two years later, having convinced her to leave her middle-aged husband and abandon her three young children and start a new life with him, a promising young writer. 

 

Not that she took much persuading, as this aristocratic German woman was bored out of her mind living a suburban middle-class lifestyle as wife and mother and had been having regular love affairs since 1905, including with Otto Gross, a drug-addicted psychoanalyst who was also fucking her sister, Else, at the time, and with Ernst Frick, an artist and anarchist.  

 

As John Worthen notes: "Frieda's affairs  appear to have satisfied her need for sex and self-determination" and they demonstrate how she was drawn to men "with lifestyles and purposes" very different from her husband's [b]. 

 

Thus, no suprise that she should immediately be attracted to Lawrence; a clever and unusual young man, seven years her junior. The story of them leaping into bed together within twenty minutes of first meeting whilst her husband busied himself in his study, her children played in the garden, and the servants looked the other way is, however, a myth [c].  

 

Probably, Frieda initially wanted Lawrence simply as another lover [d]. But, Lawrence being Lawrence, he wasn't going to be satisfied with that; like Pete Murphy, all he ever wanted was everything [e] and he regarded Mrs Weekley as "the most wonderful woman in all England" [f]. 

 

That is to say, the kind of woman his mother warned him against; one who was uninhibited and unconventional enough to let him fuck her whenever, wherever, and however he liked. Frieda had a punk indifference to bourgeois social norms and notions of right and wrong; she was carefree, spontaneous, and lived for the moment and if at times this shocked Lawrence, these were also qualities he admired and found deeply seductive.    

 

In May 1912, they travelled to Germany together; he was going to visit his cousin; she was going to join her father who was celebrating his 50th year in the army. They would be able to spend at least a week together and Lawrence believed that it was a make or break moment; that Frieda was going to inform Weekley of her affair. But this she didn't do - although she did tell her mother and sister Else about him at the first opportunity.  

 

Lawrence, meanwhile was kept out of the way of her father and put in a respectable family hotel, growing increasingly impatient and irritated with the entire situation: he wanted committment. 

 

But Mrs Weekly was far from ready to give such; "she loved Lawrence [...] and believed in him as an extraordinary person, but [...] he was in his way as unsuitable as Gross or Frick as a partner" [115], i.e., poor and probably a little insane - or, as Frieda's father described Lawrence when he did finally meet him, an ill-bred and penniless lout. 

 

However, things came to a head when Lawrence wrote to Weekley and declared his love for Frieda. Upon receiving Lawrence's letter - along with a telegram from his wife confirming the affair - he immediately wrote to declare the marriage over. To celebrate, Lawrence and Frieda went for a walk together and fucked in a dry ditch. Then he wrote a rather lovely poem for her: 'Bei Hennef', which can be read here.    

 

Of course, there was a lot of shit from all sides: Frieda's father threatened to "never see her again if she went off with Lawrence" [117]; Weekly became hysterical, threatening to kill himself and the children and calling her nasty names; and even Else "was convinced that her sister was behaving foolishly" [118].

 

But, eventually, after much struggling and painful conflict - I didn't know life was so hard - they come through and they are able to "transcend into some condition of blessedness" [g], leaving behind "the restraints of their old lives" [120], but not necessarily their old habits and there's kind of a sting in the tail of this illicit love story ... 

 

For just a few months later, whilst on a walking tour of southern Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol, Frieda had sex with a 21-year-old Englishman called Harold Hobson - in a hay-hut - whilst Lawence was off searching for alpine plants. I'm not quite sure what I think of this and Lawrence bottled up any anger and hurt he may have experienced (later telling Frieda that it didn't matter). 

 

But Worthen offers the following analysis:

 

"She was asserting to Lawrence (and to herself) that she was not giving up her independence, despite making a new life with him [...] If Lawrence wanted her, then he had to accept that she would not always stay faithful; and she did not." [123]

  

 

Notes

 

[a] This (fake) image by Stephen Alexander uses a headshot of Lawrence from 1913, aged 27, and a much earlier headshot of Frieda, taken in 1901, aged 22. The bodies belong to the Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) and the model Rose Soady (1885-1978), who was his principal muse and became Lindsay's second wife and business manager.   

      Like Lawrence, Lindsay attracted a mixture of acclaim and controversy for his work which often featured erotic pagan elements and was deemed by his critics to be not only obscene but anti-Christian. Adopting a larrikin public persona and affirming a libertine philosophy, Lindsay cheerfully fought against the strict moral conservativism of his times. Thus, I think this body swap is justified and appropriate (as well as amusing). 

      The lettering, of course, is taken from Jamie Reid's Fuck Forever design for the Sex Pistols and used to promote The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), a silkscreen print of which can be viewed on artsy.net: click here. I have added this in order to reaffirm my idea of Lawrence as a punk.

 

[b] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 110. Future page references to this work will be give directly in the post.  

 

[c] According to Worthen, Lawrence "refused to have sex with Frieda in the Weekley's house" as that would have constituted "too gross a betrayal of Weekley, who had shown him nothing but kindness". See p. 111 of the work cited above. 

 

[d] Worthen writes that although Frieda was attracted to Lawrence - and eventually came to love him - "she had not the least intention of leaving her husband or children", ibid., p. 112.   

 

[e] Pete Murphy was the lead vocalist with the post-punk band Bauhaus and I'm referencing a song entitled 'All We Ever Wanted Was Everything', from the album The Sky's Gone Out (Beggars Banquet, 1982): click here.  

 

[f] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol, I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 376. 

      In a letter written the following month to Edward Garnett (17 April 1912), Lawrence describes Mrs Weekley as ripping, splendid, and perfectly unconventional. See the above volume of letters, p. 384. 

 

[g] See 'The Argument' at the beginning of Look! We Have Come Though!, by D. H. Lawrence (Chatto & Windus, 1917). It can be found on p. 155 in volume I of the Cambridge Edition of The Poems (2013).

      Most of the poems in this collection were written during 1912-13 and tell the story of Lawrence's affair with Frieda during this period. It was not well received by the critics at the time, Lawrence claiming that the English press only spat on the work (and by implication his love for Frieda).

  

 

Authorial Insouciance contra Editorial Zeal

What do I care if "e" is somewhere upside down?

 

 

I. 

 

I was amused to see John Worthen's 'Corrections to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence' in the latest Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies [1] ...

No one can deny that it is a remarkable feat of editorial hard labour and Lawrence scholars owe Professor Worthen an enormous debt of gratitude for his tireless efforts to ensure that Bert's books are as close as they possibly can be to what he intended. 

 

The fact that Worthen continues to feel such peculiar responsibility - his phrase - not just for the volumes he worked on, but for the entire Cambridge Edition published between 1980 and 2018, is admirable and also rather touching [2]. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, whilst I agree entirely with Worthen's own assessment that the Cambridge Edition was a wonderful achievement, I don't share his sadness at the fact that the above contains minor errors (of spelling and punctuation, for example) and correcting typos is never going to be something that I'll have his unflagging enthusiasm for.

 

Ironically, that's in large part due to Lawrence, who expresses his unconcern for first or last (or most textually accurate and authoritative) editions of books; objects which, whilst often containing strange voices and beautiful visions, should never be allowed to 'disturb the haze of autumn' or 'blot out the sunflowers' and whose printed appearance didn't concern him in the least: 

 

'What do I care if "e" is somewhere upside down, or "g" comes from the wrong fount? I really don't.' [3]

   

 

Notes

 

[1] Volume 7, Number 1 (2024), ed. Susan Reid (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society).

 

[2] Worthen edited three volumes in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, co-edited five others, and was closely involved with the last three books. In total, there are forty volumes, published between 1980 and 2018. In addition, there are eight volumes of Lawrence's letters published by Cambridge University Press and a three-part biography, the first volume of which - D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 - was written by Worthen (CUP, 1991). 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books': introduction to A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald, in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 75. 

D. H. Lawrence and a Tale of Two Parliamentarians

D. H. Lawrence - Sir W. Joynson-Hicks - Lee Anderson

 

 

I have to confess, I was surprised to hear Lee Anderson mention the name of D. H. Lawrence in his speech to the Reform UK National Conference at the NEC in Birmingham yesterday ...

 

I know the MP for Ashfield is from the same neck of the woods and has a similar working-class coal mining background as Lawrence, but, even so, I was not expecting to hear England's most controversial author of the early twentieth-century namechecked by someone once described by the Daily Mirror as the worst man in Britain. 

 

Celebrating English culture, Anderson arguably revealed his Romantic nature by referring not only to Lawrence, but also to Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron [1]. Just how familiar he is with these writers I don't know; although in his maiden speech to parliament in January 2020 Anderson did claim to have read Lady Chatterley's Lover several times [2]. 

 

It might also be noted that, the following year, Anderson stood up in the Commons to thank the Government for the extra funding they had given to the D. H. Lawrence Centre in Eastwood and to ask whether the Secretary of State would support his bid to get a Lawrence statue erected in Eastwood in order to celebrate the author's life and works [3].     

 

Times have certainly changed: a 100 years ago Tory members of parliament such as Sir William Joynson-Hicks were openly calling for the censorship and destruction of Lawrence's work ...

 

 

II. 

 

Best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government (1924-29), Joynson-Hicks (or Jix, as he was called) gained a reputation for moral authoritarianism. Not only did he clamp down on nightlife, but he vigorously opposed what he regarded as indecent literature. This included, for example, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

 

Postal workers - acting under instruction from Scotland Yard and the Home Office - intercepted copies of the latter being sent into Britain from Florence (where the book had been privately printed). Even more outrageously, the Postmaster General also opened another parcel which Lawrence had sent (by registered post) to the London office of his literary agent, containing two typescripts of a collection of poems entitled Pansies. 

 

The typescripts, confiscated (and eventually destroyed) on the grounds of indecency, gave Joynson-Hicks another chance to attack Lawrence in parliament as part of a relentless secret war waged by the authorities against Lawrence since 1915 and publication of arguably his greatest novel The Rainbow [4]. 

 

Lawrence was understandably enraged by this. However, despite being mortally ill in late 1929, he summoned the strength to go on the attack: "the Pansies seizure inspired him to keep up his campaign against hypocrisy and censorship" [5], memorably describing Jix as a censor-moron and a "miserable mongrel" [6].

 

One can't help wondering what he'd think of Lee Anderson and whether or not he too deserves to be thrown down a well of loneliness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Anderson's list of a dozen British literary greats seemed somewhat random and lacked chronological consistency. It ran in full: D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Jane Austen, Ian Fleming, C. S. Lewis, and George Eliot. 

[2] For those who are interested, the text of Anderson's maiden speech in the House of Commons (27 Jan 2020) can be read by clicking here. 

      Anderson is mistaken to say that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover in his home region - he wrote it in Italy - although it is based in and around the village of Teversal. Lawrence had made his final visit to what he called the country of [his] heart shortly before he began work on the first version of his novel in the autumn of 1926, so he was certainly in the process of assembling ideas.  

[3] Anderson's contribution to parliamentary debate on 16 September 2021 can be found in Hansard: click here. According to Nigel Huddleston - the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who responded to Anderson's request - there were "many D. H. Lawrence fans" in the House - which, if true, is another great surprise to me.  

 

[4] Readers who think this sounds overly-dramatic might like to see Alan Travis, 'The hounding of DH Lawrence', in The Guardian (10 April 1999): click here. 

      The key point is Joynson-Hicks misled his fellow MPs when he informed the House of Commons that the package containing Lawrence's typescripts had been sent via the 'open book post' and had been subject to a random search to ensure the contents had been charged at the correct rate, when, in fact, it had been registered and Lawrence's mail was routinely checked as part of a long-running police surveillance operation. 

 

[5] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane, 2005), p. 389.

    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Juliette Huxley [12 January 1929], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 132. 

 

 

On the Ball with D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Spring (c. January 1929)

watercolour (30 x 22.5 cm)

 

 

I. 

 

John Worthen's short piece in the latest Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies [1] concerning Lawrence's time as a pupil-teacher in Eastwood, is interesting for the revelation that the latter liked nothing better than to arrange an informal kickabout in the school playground during the lunch break, using bricks - and perhaps even jumpers - for goal posts. 

 

Although it seems Lawrence did not himself participate as a player, he was happy to act as a referee and so clearly understood the rules of the beautiful game - just like any other working-class lad at the time - even if there is no evidence (so far) to suggest he supported a local team [2].

 

Knowing this allows us to look at the above painting - Spring (1929) - with fresh eyes; perhaps Lawrence was not merely painting some local youths in the lovely French seaside resort of Bandol celebrating the scoring of a goal during a soccer match, but also fondly recalling the passion with which his own pupils at the Albert Street School would play the game ...

 

 

II.  

 

Funny enough, this picture by Lawrence is one that Keith Sagar seems to particularly loathe:

 

"Spring is supposed to be a painting of some boys in Bandol playing football, but by removing the blue shirts they wore in the first version of the painting, leaving them wearing nothing but boots, and by having all but one of them engage in activities which, whether homoerotic or not, have certainly nothing to do with the ball, he produces a ludicrous painting." [3]

 

The problem, however, is that whilst Sagar was a great Lawrence scholar, he was not, alas, a very good art critic and he misses the opportunity to recognise Lawrence's importance as a painter [4]. There is, I would suggest, a very special violence - and, indeed, a very special beauty - that emerges from his canvases as part of an art of sensation.

 

Lawrence does not wish to reduce his figures to the level of optical cliché; he is not trying to capture a likeness! Nor is he simply revealing and celebrating the flesh, he is rather pushing it in the direction of deformation and disfiguration (anatomical fidelity is no more an issue for Lawrence than it was for Cézanne).  

And so, returning to Spring ... 

 

Expecting and wanting to see an actual game of football, Sagar is irritated by the fact that Lawrence provides sensation rather than spectacle and that he is as uninterested in the score-line, the colour of the kits, or the intricacies of the offside rule, as the boys who play for the joy felt by healthy young bodies exerting themselves, the love of team mates, the ecstasy of celebration, etc. 

 

Spring demonstrates Lawrence's appreciation of the fact that football - and, indeed, sport in general - expresses and liberates certain vital forces and flows.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See John Worthen, 'D. H. Lawrence as Games Organiser and Football Referee', Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Volume 6, Number 3, ed. Susan Reid  (D. H. Lawrence Society, 2023), pp. 11-16.    

[2] Lawrence might have supported Notts County; the oldest professional football club in the world, formed in 1862; or Nottingham Forest, formed three years later; or Derby County, formed in 1884, and one of the twelve founding members of the Football League in 1888.

 

[3] Keith Sagar, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 68.

[4] What I mean by this is that Sagar thinks it sufficient to carefully establish the connections between Lawrence's life, writing, and painting, thereby framing the pictures in a bio-literary context. But in simply substituting snippets of biographical detail, personal anecdote, and literary criticism for a genuine analysis of Lawrence's paintings - i.e., one that is written in the terms appropriate to a discussion of a practice primarily concerned with colour and line - Sagar produces a somewhat pointless commentary which not only betrays his own ignorance of the plastic arts, but also his ultimate lack of confidence in Lawrence’s ability to draw.

On the Flintiness of Language in D. H. Lawrence's The Daughter-in-Law

Ellie Nunn as Minnie Gascoyne in D. H. Lawrence's 

The Daughter-in-Law (Arcola Theatre, 2018)  

 Photo by Idil Sukan

 

 

Read almost any review or commentary on D. H. Lawrence's The Daughter-in-Law (1913) and you'll be struck by the repetition of the following claims: 

 

(i) the play is a much neglected and underrated tour de force of English theatre ... 

 

(ii) Lawrence is superior to Chekhov as a dramatist and storyteller ... 

 

(iii) the language used has not only great lyrical beauty, but also an elemental potency best described as flinty ...

 

The first of these points can be swiftly dealt with. For whilst it's true that Lawrence never saw this work performed in his own lifetime and that the text of The Daughter-in-Law wasn't even published until 1965, ever since Peter Gill's celebrated production at the Royal Court Theatre two years later, it has been staged - and positively received - on numerous occasions. 

 

Most recently, for example, a 2018 production at the Arcola Theatre in London, directed by Jack Gamble, was described by Michael Billington writing in The Guardian as "arguably the best account of working-class life in British drama" [1]. 

 

It has also been adapted for radio and filmed for television and its reputation has, as Lawrence biographer John Worthen correctly says, gone from strength to strength. So it’s really something of a myth or popular misconception that The Daughter-in-Law remains neglected and underrated: we've all seen it and we all agree; it's a masterpiece of twentieth-century English drama. But it's certainly not unsung. 

 

As for the subsequent claim that Lawrence is a superior playwright to Chekov and that The Daughter-in-Law pulls feathers from The Seagull (1895) and flattens The Cherry Orchard (1903), well, that's a matter of opinion. Lawrence himself was rather fond of the Russian author and found in his work something new and important. Personally, however, I think Chekov even more boring than Ibsen and find almost anything preferable to his sub-textual theatre of mood. 

 

As for the third point; the flintiness of Lawrence's dialogue, we might ask what it even means to describe language in this manner ...

 

Flint is a hard, sedimentary, cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz and is categorized as a variety of chert. It is chiefly found in rock such as chalk and limestone and is usually dark grey or black in colour, often having a smooth, rather waxy surface. 

 

But when critics like Charles Spencer, writing in The Telegraph, refer to the "marvellously flinty vernacular" used in The Daughter-in-Law [2], they don't mean that Luther and Minnie sound as if they belonged like Fred and Wilma to the Stone Age (although, the Midland’s mining community they inhabited is, to us, over a hundred years on, almost as alien and far-off as that of Bedrock). 

 

Rather, they mean that their speech has a down-to-earth solidity and directness. 

 

Further, I think they also wish to imply that the words have an elemental potency and/or some kind of primordial authenticity. This is particularly true of the almost incomprehensible words and phrases spoken in dialect which, if Lawrence is to be believed, directly articulate the body and its strange forces and flows; not so much as signifying units of meaning, but as units of sound. 

 

Thus it is that, in The Daughter-in-Law - as in the novel Son and Lovers (1913) to which it is closely related - Lawrence skilfully combines elements of naturalism, kitchen sink realism, and his own often transgressive philosophy. Like Nietzsche, he attempts to write in blood and doesn't want to be simply read, so much as passionately experienced. 

 

For whilst Lawrence often regarded the emotions as counterfeit, he always believed in and attempted to solicit the genuine feelings of those who bothered to engage with his work. And, like Heidegger, Lawrence seemed to think it was his duty to safeguard the power of the most elementary words. For, just like our favourite Nazi, Lawrence was prone to a form of linguistic mysticism in which certain words and phonemes have greater essential value than others. 

 

Such a belief is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which posits that the earliest form of language was that spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden. Whether this language was also used by God to address Adam and is therefore divine in origin, or whether it was invented by Adam in order to name all things, including Eve, is open to debate. Either way, this notion of a forgotten, sacred language has fascinated many occultists, poets, and philosophers, including Lawrence and Heidegger, both of whom seemed to suffer from a kind of nostalgia for a time when we didn't speak words, but, on the contrary, they spoke us. 

 

Rightly or wrongly, Lawrence seemed to imagine that via a use of dialect, regional slang, and archaic terms he might somehow tap into this language of Paradise, thereby expressing mankind's deepest feelings and highest hopes. It's not without reason that the Cambridge edition of his plays contains a fifteen page glossary of such terms. 

 

Amusingly - and controversially - by the time he came to write his final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1926), Lawrence had added several expletives to his elementary vocabulary in order to startle us out of what he calls our mob-selves. 

 

Now, if I'm honest, there was a time when, like many Lawrentians, I happily bought into this idea of a flinty, obscene ur-language of the feelings inscribed in our hearts via which we might speak the truth and not merely pass the word along. Keith Sagar, for example, never abandoned his faith in words such as sluthering and slikey to be sufficiently powerful to not only charge Lawrence's dialogue with magical force, but also re-vitalise audience members. 

 

Now, however, I have certain doubts and reservations about this - although, fortunately, these doubts and reservations needn't get in the way of one's enjoyment of The Daughter-in-Law as a rip-roaring piece of theatre [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Michael Billington, 'The Daughter-in-Law review - is this the best British working-class drama?', The Guardian (29 May 2018): click here to read online. 

 

[2] Charles Spencer, writing in a piece for The Telegraph in September 2006, after watching a performance of The Daughter-in-Law (dir. Kirstie Davis) at the Watford Palace Theatre. Spencer went on to argue that Lawrence was, in fact, a far finer playwright than novelist (or, at any rate, that his plays have lasted rather better than his novels). 

 

[3] This post is an edited version of a review of the opening night performance of The Daughter-in-Law, directed by Kirstie Davis, at the GBS Theatre, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, on 5 Feb, 2014, and featuring five final year students: Eliza Butterworth as Mrs. Gascoigne; Tom Varey as Joe; Anna Krippa as Mrs. Purdy; Lianne Harvey as Minnie; and Joe Blakemore as Luther - all of whom were excellent.

      Indeed, for such young actors, they seemed more than capable of rising to the challenge of the often complex and intense nature of the play's sexual politics and class concerns and even managed to make what are not particularly likeable characters seem sympathetic. That's the magic, I suppose, of having youth, beauty, and talent on your side.

      Finally, mention should also be made of Isobel Power Smith for her set and costume design; Peter Small (lighting design); Harry Butcher (sound); and dialect coach Helen Ashton - although I couldn't really tell (and didn't really care) how authentic the East Midland's accents were on the night.       

We Old Ones, We Are Still Here!

Meine Mutter celebrating her 96th birthday  

 

The old ones say to themselves: We are not going to make way, we are not going to die,

we are going to stay on and on and on and on and make the young look after us 

till they are old. - DHL [1]

 

 

I. 

 

This Sunday, my mother will reach 96 years of age. 

 

Some people say this is a real achievement, though I'm not sure about that; surely the achievement is dying an authentic death - something that requires courage and skill - not simply celebrating birthday after birthday and endlessly adding candles to a cake ...? 

Having said that, surviving to a very old age and becoming a monster of stamina in the process does seem to suggest a powerful expression of will. 

 

For even today, when - thanks to improved living standards and advancements in health care - life expectancy has significantly increased since the year my mother was born (1926), not many women in the UK will make it past 95 [2].

 

II.

 

Back in July 1926, D. H. Lawrence travelled north from Italy to Germany with his wife Frieda, in order to celebrate his mother-in-law's 75th birthday. In a letter to Edward McDonald, an American professor who was preparing a bibilography of his writings, Lawrence is scathing about the old who cling on to life and refuse to die: 

 

"'Wir alten, wir sind noch hier!' she says. And here they mean to stay, having, through long and uninterrupted experience, become adepts at hanging on to their own lives, and letting anybody else who is fool enough cast bread upon the waters. Baden-Baden is a sort of Holbein Totentanz: old people tottering their cautious dance of triumph: 'wir sind noch hier: hupf! hupf! hupf!" [3] 

 

 

III. 

 

Three years later, in July 1929, and Lawrence is again in Baden-Baden for the Baroness's birthday, despite his previous determination not to go. As John Worthen notes, this was a bad move [4]. For whereas his previous visits had mostly been happy ones, and he had always been rather fond of his Schweigermutter, now he found her unbearable. 

In a letter to his sister Ada, Lawrence writes:

 

"[...] Frieda's mother really rather awful now. She's 78, and suddenly is in an awful state, thinking her time to die may be coming on. So she fights in the ugliest fashion, greedy and horrible, to get everything that will keep her alive [...] nothing exists but just for the purpose of giving her a horrible strength to hang on a few more years." [5]

 

Later, in the same letter, he complains how his mother-in-law will not be left alone, even for a short period: 

 

"No, she must have Frieda or me there. It's the most ghastly state of almost insane selfishness I ever saw - and all comes of her hideous terror of having to die. At the age of seventy-eight! May god preserve me from ever sinking so low." [6]

 

 

IV.

 

Now, to be fair to my mother, she doesn't gulp down the air in greedy gulps like the Baroness - doesn't actively fight to stay alive. She just sits quietly in her chair all day, like a black hole at the centre of the universe [7]. 

 

But I understand - and share - Lawrence's sense of horror and humiliation.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'The grudge of the old', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 436.

 

[2] Readers interested in the national statistics estimating the number of people (mostly women) in the UK population aged 90 and over, between the years 2002 and 2020, can click here. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Edward McDonald (16 July 1926), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 495-496. Lines quoted are on p. 496.   

 

[4] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 400.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Ada Clarke (2 August 1929), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 397-398. 

[6] Ibid., p. 398. 

[7] See my poem 'Black Holes' in The Circle of Fragments and Other Verses, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) - or click here to read it on Torpedo the Ark. 

May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1911 - 1917)

Edith A. Cubitt: Children Dancing Round a Maypole (c. 1900) 

Watercolour drawing (commissioned by Ernest Nister)

vam.ac.uk

 

 

1 May 1911

 

After his advances to Agnes Holt in the autumn of 1909 had come to nothing - not even a handjob - Lawrence convinced Jessie Chambers to become his lover. 

 

In the two years that followed, finally free from the bonds of chastity, Lawrence actively pursued several women - or bed bunnies as he referred to them - in the hope of further sexual experience; "years of enforced virginity had given way to a kind of compulsive arousal" [1].

 

One of these women was the lovely Louie Burrows, to whom he wrote on May Day 1911:

"I would sell birthrights and deathrights for an embrace of thee, Louisa: toss 'em out of the window, poetic powers, perceptivity, intellect - pouf: for a few kisses and a tight clasp." [2]

 

 

1 May 1912 

 

Lawrence has now met and fallen in love with a woman whom he believes to be the most wonderful in all England. 

 

Unfortunately, Frieda Weekley is married with children. Still, that doesn't deter either of them from beginning an illicit affair and on May Day 1912 he writes a letter in which he expresses his anxiety and guilt - but also his commitment to the relationship - having arranged to effectively elope with her to Germany:

"I feel so horrid and helpless. [...] And what was decent yesterday will perhaps be frightfully indecent today. [...] 

      What time are you going to Germany, what day, what hour, which railway, which class? Do tell  me as soon as you can [...] I will come any time you tell me - but let me know.

      You must be in an insane whirl in your mind. I feel helpless and rudderless, a stupid scattered fool. [...] I would do anything on earth for you [...] but I don't like my feeling [of] presentiment. I am afraid of something low, like an eel which bites out of the mud, and hangs on with its teeth. I feel as if I can't breathe while we're in England." [3]

 

 

1 May 1913

 

Although he and Frieda are now an established item, Lawence is still thinking back to his (mostly sexless) relationship with Jessie - and doing so with increased bitterness. In a letter to Edward Garnett, he writes:

 

"It's all very well for Miss Chambers to be spiritual - perhaps she can bring it off - I can't. She bottled me up till I was going to burst. But as long as the cork sat tight (herself the cork) there was spiritual calm. When the cork was blown out, and Mr Lawrence foamed, Miriam said 'This yeastiness I disown: it was not so in my day.'" [4]  

 

It's always surprising how explicit Lawrence was with his sexual metaphors. Reading this, however, makes one wonder whether Jessie (or her fictional alias of Miriam) had a fear of semen and/or the act of ejaculation? In other words, was her intense disgust-response to male sexual activity rooted in a genuine phobia, or was it merely a consequence of her moral beliefs and idealism? 

 

Either way, this would explain (in part at least) why she was so bitterly ashamed of having allowed Lawrence to fuck her; it was as if he had "dragged her spiritual plumage in the mud" [5]. 

 

 

1 May 1915

 

American readers will probably know that William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York.

 

English readers will probably ask: So what? 

 

Well, it turns out that Lawrence was fascinated by this event and much amused by a song (of anonymous origin) that was written about the shooting and Czolgosz's execution in the electric chair. On May 1st 1915, he enclosed the lyrics to the song in a letter to the English author Eleanor Farjeon (presumably at her request) [6]. 

 

 

1 May 1916 

 

In a letter to his Freudian friend Barbara Low - a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society - written from his cottage in Cornwall, Lawrence expresses his complete dismay with the world at war:

 

"I would write to you oftener, but this life of today so disgusts one, it leaves nothing to say. The war, the approaching conscription, the sense of complete paltriness and chaotic nastiness in life, really robs one of speech." [7]  

 

Of course, having said that, Lawrence then goes on (at some length) to speak of the local flora, his work on what he still at this time calls the second half of The Rainbow, and the current state of his health: "I was very well, but have been seedy again these few days ..." [8] 

 

But mostly he complains of the utter nausea he feels for humanity; "people smelling like bugs, endless masses of them, and no relief: it is so difficult to bear. [...] I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me." [9]. 

 

Still, it is from such nausea and violent anti-humanism that great art is born and the greater health discovered. For as Lawrence says: One sheds one's sickness in books.

 

 

1 May 1917

 

Today, of course, when we are all supposed to stand with Ukraine and wear a little blue and yellow ribbon or badge in solidarity, to say anything positive about Russia is almost taboo. But in May 1917 Russia was, for many people, the country that held out the greatest promise. 

 

And so it is that Lawrence writes to his Russian-born friend S. S. Koteliansky:

 

"I feel that our chiefest hope for the future is Russia. When I think of the young new country there, I love it inordinately. It is the place of hope. We must go, sooner or a little later. [...] Send me a Berlitz grammar book, I will begin to learn the language - religiously." [10]

 

Notes

 

[1] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 252.  

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 264. 

[3] Letters, I. 388-89. 

      It should be noted that this letter was actually written on April 30th, 1912, and not May 1st, but I'm using a little artistic and historical license for the sake of the post.

 

[4-5] Letters, I. 545. 

      This letter has been dated by the editor as 2 May 1913. It is mostly famous for the following boast made by Lawrence: "I know I can write bigger stuff than any man in England." [546]. 

[6] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 332.

[7-9] Letters, II. 602. 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 121. 

 

 

The second part of this post - May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1921 - 1929) - can be read by clicking 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.