I recently finished Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence, a visceral biography that probes the great writer’s life to reveal the raw, grinding friction that fueled Lawrence’s work.
Lawrence was, to quote the critic Geoff Dyer, a man who often wrote “out of sheer rage.”
The rage was not unproductive, however. It was creative and remarkable. His letters were poetry. His poetry was novelistic. His novels were criticism, and his criticism was often in the form of letters. One of his best bits of writing is an introduction he wrote to a friend’s memoir about being in the foreign legion, trashing the guy’s character after his death. He was not exactly sentimental about his friendships.
To that end, Lawrence serves as a fascinating, if polarizing, case study of a writer.
He often wrote huge works where he had very little familiarity with his subject matter. For example, he wrote Studies in Classic American Literature without ever having been to the United States. It was his custom, while writing his travel memoirs, to hole up in the least salubrious hotel in a town and immediately begin bashing out a screed about the condition of people in the place he had just arrived in, without ever even bothering to meet anybody.
It’s all rather shameless and at the same time I can’t help but admire him. Lawrence has been lauded and trashed with equal energy by critics ever since he began being published in the early 20th century. He was, perhaps, a “writer’s writer.” But reading about him has been energizing, and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves words.
The most arresting moment in the biography is a passage Wilson includes from David Garnett, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and a so-called friend of Lawrence. Garnett’s description of Lawrence, the son of a coalminer, is a masterclass in a brand of class contempt that Lawrence both provoked and fed upon. Garnett wrote:
“He was the type of plumber’s mate who goes back to fetch the tools, the weedy runt you find in every gang of workmen, the one who keeps the other men laughing all the time, who makes trouble with the boss and is saucy to the foreman, who gets the sack, who is ‘victimised’, the cause of a strike, the man for whom trades unions exist, who lives on the dole, who hangs round the pubs, whose wife supports him, who bets on football and is always cheeky, cocky and in trouble. He was the type who provokes the most violent class-hatred in this country, the impotent hatred of the upper classes for the lower.”
Oof. The man the Bloomsbury set perceived as a “weedy runt” making trouble with the foreman also had an electric, unvarnished voice.
Writers often play it safe. We like to know the subject of our work, for example. We like to have an idea about the plot. We like to have an idea about what we’re doing. All those things help. I’m not saying I don’t value them!
But. Chapters four through eight of Lawrence’s study of Thomas Hardy barely mention Hardy once, and they instead veer off into a sort of mystic meditation on religion, gender, sexuality, and the wider universe. They’ve got nothing to do with Hardy, and yet they’re extremely readable. Dyer, the critic, included them in full in The Bad Side of Books, a recently released compendium of Lawrence’s criticism, which I’d also recommend.
If a writer loses Lawrence’s saucy quality or the willingness to be the one who makes trouble, we can sometimes lose a pulse that makes communication effective. The most effective narratives don’t always sound like they were drafted by a sanitized committee; they sound like they were written by a person with a distinct point of view and sometimes, a bit of cheeky energy.
Being an outsider, or at least maintaining an outsider’s eye, is often the only way to find a truly original story in a landscape of professional blandness. I’m not suggesting we professional writers should start turning all our case studies into Lady Chatterley’s Lover but I’m not saying we shouldn’t, entirely, either. At the very least I’m inspired by Lawrence’s ability to shock people and to provoke unvarnished hatred. It’s remarkable.
Rage is certainly at a premium in communication these days, too. But to what end?
