D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912-1922. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, May, 1997 by Joan Bridgman

This is the second volume of an unusual enterprise -- a three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence, each written by a different author. Mr Kinkead-Weekes justifies this procedure on the grounds that three different Lawrences may emerge -- early, middle and late as it were -- and that this would accord with the subject's own views on the fluidity of character, its continual rebirth into new states of being and the impossibility of conveying `the old stable ego of the character'. Even more sinisterly, he announces that the mass of the new information in the Cambridge collected Letters and Works, with over two thousand unpublished letters, makes all previous biographies out of date. One's heart sinks as one grasps the monumental nature of the enterprise.

The first volume by John Worthen, published in 1991, was praised as superb and a model of lucidity in its 500 pages. This second volume is twice as long and bears out Mr Kinkead-Weekes's own fears -- it is unbearable in its tedious documentation of every detail, down to the colour of a duvet in Austria. The weight of scholarship becomes increasingly, oppressive and the close attention to detail blurs the reader's understanding, of events. There is a wearisome desire to re-examine and, if possible, reject previous biographies. Every piece of evidence is rigorously scrutinised. Review, evaluation of the material and conclusions are eschewed in favour of the lived life in all its confusion and complexity. Buried in `The Use of Sources' section towards the end of the book is a final defiant sentence from the author: `this biographer thinks summary and generalisation should go to the (admittedly more economical) devil; since the life of things tends to be found in detail, variation and change through time; though that story takes longer to tell.'

In this second volume Lawrence's first book of poems and two major novels are linked to the biographical material. Much of this is sensitively done and illuminating, but some of the commentary seems stubbornly to refuse to acknowledge what the author so plainly tells us in the various texts. I think that I can accept the author's contention that Ursula is generating the cosmic energy of kundalini when she caresses Birkin in the tea room of The Saracen's Head, but it is not `crass' to link this with anal obsession, given the numerous examples elsewhere. The poem, `Manifesto', contains the clearest possible expression of anal eroticism, surely autobiographical, and it is an inescapable element in the relationship between Will and Anna in The Rainbow where it is presented as an absolute requisite for the perfect physical relationship, signifying complete acceptance of the `other'. These references are ignored in the poems in Look We Have Come Through, although to be fair, Mr Kinkead-Weekes gives due weight to this aspect in his excellent section on The Rainbow. He seems to have slipped his self-imposed shackles of biographical restraint here and allowed literary criticism its head. The passage on `A Man Writing' even allows the imagining of the creative process, and the subsequent analysis of the novel is illuminating, particularly in his scholarly reference and footnote on Blake's `Tyger', which endorses a central tenet of Lawrence's thinking further. I found the commentary on this novel by far the clearest exposition in the book, linked perceptively to the life of its author.

This is a massive work of reference, for the library shelf, not the general reader. When not weighed down by the burden of the consciousness of writing the definitive biography, Kinkead-Weekes can be masterly in handling the enormous weight of evidence now available, but as the work progresses his attempt to convey the writing life of his author from moment to moment becomes tedious; no overall perspective is possible.

I was sorry, too, to lose so many good stories that do not pass the rigorous tests for evidence applied by this biographer. Out goes Brenda Maddox's account of Frieda rushing Lawrence into bed twenty minutes after first meeting in her book The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence, as does the possibility of a homosexual relationship with William Henry Hocking. Kinkead-Weekes's spirit of critical enquiry brings before the bar writings such as Sons and Lovers, Look We Have Come Through, Mr Noon and Frieda's Not I, But the Wind and finds them all guilty as charged of a significant degree of autobiographical fictiveness as are all the lively accounts of contemporary acquaintances.

Perhaps some of the problems with this biography spring from the three-headed approach. We are told by the author that his two co-authors acted as research assistants, subjecting each other's work to intense scrutiny. This would explain a good deal. This is a book written by a committee when perhaps a single view would have been more concise and purposeful. Nevertheless, one must admire the academic rigour and integrity of the work; it will stand as a valuable source for scholars -- at least until yet another cache of letters or lost texts appears.