Lawrence More Than Pornographer

Even if you don't know D.H Lawrence, you do. Much in the way that Miles Davis' "Bitches' Brew" unwittingly paved the road for Kenny G., the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover has bequeathed to our collective consciousness some of the cheesiest excesses of the English imagination. (We all know them by now; the sturdy matron, the randy stable boy, a "coincidence" in the back of an ancient Woolsley. Boom chickaboom....)

In her intelligent and exhaustingly researched biography of Lawrence, Brenda Maddox succeeds in raising her subject above the level of talented pornographer. The 600 page-plus D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage, is a volume of Mailer-ish manly heft. Nevertheless, the author manages to sustain the reader's interest throughout, allowing Lawrence to stand on his own--contradictions and all.

The book opens with the scene of the author's Lazarus-like return from death. A near-fatal bout with pneumonia leaves the newly resurrected Lawrence "with a heightened awareness of the physical world and a messianic tendency to preach." The author emerges as a different sort of evangelist than one might imagine. In an excerpt from one of his early poems, the virginal schoolmaster addresses his own sadly neglected member: "Thou proud, curved beauty Would worship these, letting my buttocks prance."

Maddox also spends a great deal of time confronting the flip-side to this sexual openess, namely, Lawrence's misogyny. Wisely, she seeks neither to excuse nor to unequivocally condemn her subject. In the first chapter of D.H. Lawrence, Maddox focuses on one of the author's early short stories. "The Old Adam," which centers around a "seductive three-year-old called Mary," emerges as both an unpleasant display of misogyny and a stunningly precocious pre-Freudian fable.

Despite her interest in exposing the "true" Lawrence, the author displays a necessary degree of reserve in discussing some of the other controversial aspects of the man's character. What is truly disturbing about D.H. Lawrence is not its subject's violence or misogyny, but the insistent conflict of sexual identity which precludes the possibility of an easy or happy outcome. Lawrence's sexual ambiguities defy easy categorization. Maddox quotes several provocatively homoerotic passages, including the famous swimming scene from The White Peacock.

....laughing, he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or, rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm around me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul...

However, Maddox declares that Lawrence was not, "like [E.M] Forster, a suppressed homosexual who did not have the courage of his desires."

She also rejects the idea that the author's often violent hatred of women was the manifestation of his own latent homosexual urges. Rather, she astutely characterizes him as "a hypersensitive man unable to bring together the male and female counterparts of his personality."

Lawrence was also a man unable to reconcile this division with his need to believe in the redemptive power of one woman's love. Here, Maddox takes her cue, turning Lawrence's troubled marriage into the main "character" of her book. Her excellent sense of pacing gives the story a dramatic edge and an cerie sense of inevitability. She brilliantly characterizes the writer's wife, the refined yet oddly primitive Friends von Richthofen, a relative of the infamous "Red Baron." Maddox writes wittily, "such was the woman lying in wait for the lonely, ailing, direction-less D.H. Lawrence.... He never had a chance."

In both Maddox and Lawrence's view, however, Frieda provided the author the ultimate chance at greatness, by acting as his muse. As a woman, she embodied a feared and dreaded negation which aroused Lawrence's violent hatred. He thrived on her contradictions. Despite her flagrant infidelities, he insisted that she was the love of his life. She served as the inspiration for works as varied as the violent "The Woman Who Rode Away" and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

D.H. Lawrence-The Story of a Marriage demonstrates its author's adeptness at conveying both one man's eccentricities and the collective neuroses of a seemingly distant time and place. The book also serves as a reminder of our own generation's unhealthily narrow-minded obsession with sexual identity. Amidst the increasingly convoluted discourse of love, marriage and sexual orientation, Maddox refuses to offer simple answers where none exist. D.H Lawrence embodied a kind of erotic pleasure that was oddly circumscribed. He articulated a "free love" ethic which Maddox reveals to be perversely doctrinaire and neurotic. His latest biographer appreciates these contradictions.

Dreaming of the day when life and love would be "a quite unlosable game," Philip Larkin wrote, "Sexual intercourse began/in nineteen sixty-three/(Which was rather late for me)/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Bestle's first I.P." Sadly, 1963 was too late for Lawrence as well.