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Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence
An electrifying, revelatory life of D. H. Lawrence, with a focus on his difficult middle years
“Never trust the teller,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “trust the tale.” Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also, again and again, told stories about himself: the pioneer of autofiction. No writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature. In Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, the acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson tells a new story about Lawrence, focusing on his decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Taking after Lawrence’s own model, Dante, and adopting the structure of his Divine Comedy, Burning Man is a distinctly Lawrentian biography, one that pursues Lawrence around the globe and reflects his life of wild allegory.
Eschewing the confines of a full-length biography, Burning Man is a triptych of lesser-known episodes drawn from lesser-known sources, and from the tales of Lawrence told by his friends in letters, memoirs, and diaries. Focusing on three critical turning points in Lawrence’s pilgrimage (his crises in Cornwall, Italy, and New Mexico) and three central adversaries—his wife, Frieda; the writer Maurice Magnus; and his benefactress, Mabel Dodge Luhan—Wilson uncovers a lesser-known Lawrence, both as a writer and as a man.
Dizzyingly original, exhaustively researched, and always revelatory, Burning Man is a marvel of biography. With flair and focus, Wilson, Lawrence’s first female biographer, unleashes a distinct perspective on one of history’s most beloved and infamous writers.
“Never trust the teller,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “trust the tale.” Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also, again and again, told stories about himself: the pioneer of autofiction. No writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature. In Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, the acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson tells a new story about Lawrence, focusing on his decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Taking after Lawrence’s own model, Dante, and adopting the structure of his Divine Comedy, Burning Man is a distinctly Lawrentian biography, one that pursues Lawrence around the globe and reflects his life of wild allegory.
Eschewing the confines of a full-length biography, Burning Man is a triptych of lesser-known episodes drawn from lesser-known sources, and from the tales of Lawrence told by his friends in letters, memoirs, and diaries. Focusing on three critical turning points in Lawrence’s pilgrimage (his crises in Cornwall, Italy, and New Mexico) and three central adversaries—his wife, Frieda; the writer Maurice Magnus; and his benefactress, Mabel Dodge Luhan—Wilson uncovers a lesser-known Lawrence, both as a writer and as a man.
Dizzyingly original, exhaustively researched, and always revelatory, Burning Man is a marvel of biography. With flair and focus, Wilson, Lawrence’s first female biographer, unleashes a distinct perspective on one of history’s most beloved and infamous writers.
513 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 15, 2021
45 people are currently reading
2342 people want to read
About the author
Frances Wilson
45 books78 followersFrances Wilson was educated at Oxford University and lectured on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature for fifteen years before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She reviews widely in the British press and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She divides her time between London and Normandy.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
January 24, 2022
I had read Lawrence's major novels years ago, but knew absolutely nothing about his life. I'd come of age in an era when the prevailing wisdom of literary study was that one should come to an author's work clean--without any preconceived ideas or reference to secondary works, that one should grapple with the work directly, without knowing anything about their authors. Therefore you would construct their world view through their work.
In the case of Lawrence, at least as portrayed by Frances Wilson's bio "Burning Man," it was lucky I hadn't known a thing about him that wasn't evident in the books themselves. I have rarely read a biography that made me so dislike an author whose work I had admired. I had to skip a big hunk in the middle (Lawrence in Italy and his relationships with two questionable characters who played a big part in his life at the time, that dragged on and on--painfully, excruciatingly) to finally get to New Mexico and the part of the story that really interested me. (No idyll there either.)
His younger years were supremely important, to understand the toxicity of the family dynamic, especially the mother/son romance... the upwardly striving mother's disdain for the mining contractor husband, and her dragging the children into it, and Lawrence's pathological attachment to her. But as a portrait of the author, the man presented by Wilson is not a person I would have wanted to be in the same room with for five minutes--I'd have been running for the door. The more I read, the more I disliked him. I don't know if this is the product of a biographer falling out of love with her subject (as was the case in the three volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, who grew to passionately hate Greene, and the writing of which drove him mad). But what was missing in this book was the reason so many people put up with him--ie was what was great in Lawrence.
She took an interesting point of view from which to unfold her story of his intensely productive middle years--a detailed examination of his minor work, while only touching on the major except in terms of the struggle for publication (and the last book, Lady Chatterly's Lover, barely gets a mention). A writer's minor works hold, sometimes more visibly, the perspectives and attitudes which are hidden in the major works and sometimes even contradicted, as an author's artistry sometimes will drive him or her to truths they themselves wouldn't ordinarily entertain (case in point, Tolstoy and the making of Anna Karenina--see my review of Bob Blaisdell's book on the writing of AK).
All I could figure was that DH Lawrence either had such an overwhelming personal charisma that people would put up with anything to be near him--women and men--a charisma that just doesn't come across in these pages; or that people were so in love with his work that they would forgive him anything because he was a genius. Otherwise, I can't figure out why else people would have put up with the violence, the negativity, the irrationality, the grandiosity, the misogyny, the perversity, the demands, and the sudden rejections of this writer.
Well done but infuriating!
In the case of Lawrence, at least as portrayed by Frances Wilson's bio "Burning Man," it was lucky I hadn't known a thing about him that wasn't evident in the books themselves. I have rarely read a biography that made me so dislike an author whose work I had admired. I had to skip a big hunk in the middle (Lawrence in Italy and his relationships with two questionable characters who played a big part in his life at the time, that dragged on and on--painfully, excruciatingly) to finally get to New Mexico and the part of the story that really interested me. (No idyll there either.)
His younger years were supremely important, to understand the toxicity of the family dynamic, especially the mother/son romance... the upwardly striving mother's disdain for the mining contractor husband, and her dragging the children into it, and Lawrence's pathological attachment to her. But as a portrait of the author, the man presented by Wilson is not a person I would have wanted to be in the same room with for five minutes--I'd have been running for the door. The more I read, the more I disliked him. I don't know if this is the product of a biographer falling out of love with her subject (as was the case in the three volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, who grew to passionately hate Greene, and the writing of which drove him mad). But what was missing in this book was the reason so many people put up with him--ie was what was great in Lawrence.
She took an interesting point of view from which to unfold her story of his intensely productive middle years--a detailed examination of his minor work, while only touching on the major except in terms of the struggle for publication (and the last book, Lady Chatterly's Lover, barely gets a mention). A writer's minor works hold, sometimes more visibly, the perspectives and attitudes which are hidden in the major works and sometimes even contradicted, as an author's artistry sometimes will drive him or her to truths they themselves wouldn't ordinarily entertain (case in point, Tolstoy and the making of Anna Karenina--see my review of Bob Blaisdell's book on the writing of AK).
All I could figure was that DH Lawrence either had such an overwhelming personal charisma that people would put up with anything to be near him--women and men--a charisma that just doesn't come across in these pages; or that people were so in love with his work that they would forgive him anything because he was a genius. Otherwise, I can't figure out why else people would have put up with the violence, the negativity, the irrationality, the grandiosity, the misogyny, the perversity, the demands, and the sudden rejections of this writer.
Well done but infuriating!
October 19, 2021
Superb biography. I found it totally compelling. And certainly not “just another biography”, for Wilson casts an original and insightful eye over the old material and brings something fresh to the table. Lawrence came vividly to life for me in this meticulously researched book and it’s a must-read for fans and non-fans alike.
July 28, 2021
Perhaps to achieve an original take on D H Lawrence, Frances Wilson’s biography “of imagination”, links the author’s middle years, “the decade of superhuman energy and productivity” from 1915-25, with the events of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. So the war years of 1915-19 which Lawrence spent in England, being too sick to enlist, are “Inferno; “Purgatory” applies to 1919-1922, spent in Italy with his wife Frieda, who had abandoned her husband, his former tutor, and her three children for Lawrence, while the years spent in America and Mexico, 1922-25 are “Paradise”.
This approach made me realise the influence of Dante on the education of men of Lawrence’s generation, as well as on earlier writers like Shelley whom he admired, at least in his youth. Having only a sketchy knowledge of Dante myself, I probably missed the cleverness of many allusions, but the device seemed to me too contrived, and ultimately rather tedious.
Just as streams of consciousness can add power to fiction, the author’s continual roller coasters of digressions from digressions often bring Lawrence and his associates to life. However, the style creates a hectic quality, at times overloaded with detail or repetition. The stated intention to focus on some of the more “minor” characters in Lawrence’s life leads to what seem disproportionately long sections on for instance, Maurice Magnus, the conman lover of flamboyant writer Norman Douglas. Towards the end, with the restless Lawrence ricocheting round the world, from Australia to Ceylon to New Mexico in the company of characters portrayed as larger than life, amoral, highly eccentric, even mentally disturbed, like American patron of the arts and Indian rights, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the book verges on black farce. The author’s interpretation of the latter’s neuroses seems open to question, and a distraction from the business of trying to understand DH Lawrence.
Wilson’s tendency to provide potted summaries of some of Lawrence’s later plots, presenting them as increasingly bizarre, is counterproductive in deterring one from wanting to read them. Yet it is worth ploughing through the verbiage to glean the occasional insight. For instance, Rebecca West “compared his wanderings to those of the mystic or Russian saint ‘who says goodbye and takes his stick and walks out with no objective but the truth’ ”. She noted his “vision of mankind that he registered again and again…always rising to a pitch of ecstatic agony”. She also saw how “his shoulder-blades stood out through his clothing “in a pair of almost wing-like projections” – a sign of tuberculosis spotted long before in Roman times. His strong “sense of place” often led to disappointment: he detested Ceylon, probably because it aggravated the consumption which he refused to acknowledge, but loved the high desert regions of New Mexico which suited his declining health.
Influenced by Carl Jung, Lawrence told his first love Jessie Chambers, “I’m not one man, but two”: “the second me, a hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer which troubles the pleasanter me, the human who belongs…… to nobody, not even to myself”. Combining intense introspection with acute observation of others, Lawrence caused many people distress through portraying them so unmistakably in his novels, often incorporating real events. As shown in his striking poetry, he had an affinity with animals, which being dumb did not arouse his wrath.
The author seems to gloss over the more positive aspects of his personality, to focus on the flaws. He is mainly portrayed as an arrogant, opinionated monster, given to bigoted, offensive outbursts, but did he really mean them? The man who dreamed of founding a utopian “little colony”, with “no money but a sort of communism as far as the necessities of life” seems at odds with the one who rails against democracy. He beats his wife in front of horrified friends, although this may be a kind of theatrical act, triggered by Frieda’s provocative actions – the fag hanging from the corner of her mouth - almost a writerly experiment in experiencing anger in order to describe it. Towards the end, the rants become more extreme, the prose style grows intentionally cruder (to be more “American”) as Lawrence seems to disintegrate into a kind of madness. According to Frances Wilson, he “had once more changed his shape: no longer a marauding fox or a red wolf or a plumed serpent, he now saw himself as Pan, sex-god of the mountain wilds”. Is this artistic licence on her part? At worst, he might nowadays simply be diagnosed as having manic tendencies.
I would have liked a more thematic approach, analysing more objectively his dual personality perhaps better described as complex. To what extent was he damaged by his mother’s possessiveness, and her contempt for his father? In a class-ridden society, as a miner’s son he must have felt keenly the snobbery he encountered. The blinkered British censorship of some of his work, with even “The Rainbow”, condemned by the prosecution as “disgusting, detestable and pernicious….in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” must have stimulated his tendency to murderous thoughts, and his desire to quit a land with its “dead muffled sense” of everything being “sand-bagged”. The debilitating respiratory illness he suffered most winters, and in some climates, must have fed his negativity.
Finding this book by turns intensely gripping and tediously overblown, impressed by the author’s remarkably deep research, I am left with a sense of vital missing pieces in the jigsaw, distorting her portrayal of Lawrence. This motivates me to read the record of Jessie Chambers, the calm, intelligent girl on whom the youthful Lawrence “hammered himself out”, and to seek out another biographer to enable me the better to to judge to what extent his intense introspection ultimately blighted his genius.
This approach made me realise the influence of Dante on the education of men of Lawrence’s generation, as well as on earlier writers like Shelley whom he admired, at least in his youth. Having only a sketchy knowledge of Dante myself, I probably missed the cleverness of many allusions, but the device seemed to me too contrived, and ultimately rather tedious.
Just as streams of consciousness can add power to fiction, the author’s continual roller coasters of digressions from digressions often bring Lawrence and his associates to life. However, the style creates a hectic quality, at times overloaded with detail or repetition. The stated intention to focus on some of the more “minor” characters in Lawrence’s life leads to what seem disproportionately long sections on for instance, Maurice Magnus, the conman lover of flamboyant writer Norman Douglas. Towards the end, with the restless Lawrence ricocheting round the world, from Australia to Ceylon to New Mexico in the company of characters portrayed as larger than life, amoral, highly eccentric, even mentally disturbed, like American patron of the arts and Indian rights, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the book verges on black farce. The author’s interpretation of the latter’s neuroses seems open to question, and a distraction from the business of trying to understand DH Lawrence.
Wilson’s tendency to provide potted summaries of some of Lawrence’s later plots, presenting them as increasingly bizarre, is counterproductive in deterring one from wanting to read them. Yet it is worth ploughing through the verbiage to glean the occasional insight. For instance, Rebecca West “compared his wanderings to those of the mystic or Russian saint ‘who says goodbye and takes his stick and walks out with no objective but the truth’ ”. She noted his “vision of mankind that he registered again and again…always rising to a pitch of ecstatic agony”. She also saw how “his shoulder-blades stood out through his clothing “in a pair of almost wing-like projections” – a sign of tuberculosis spotted long before in Roman times. His strong “sense of place” often led to disappointment: he detested Ceylon, probably because it aggravated the consumption which he refused to acknowledge, but loved the high desert regions of New Mexico which suited his declining health.
Influenced by Carl Jung, Lawrence told his first love Jessie Chambers, “I’m not one man, but two”: “the second me, a hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer which troubles the pleasanter me, the human who belongs…… to nobody, not even to myself”. Combining intense introspection with acute observation of others, Lawrence caused many people distress through portraying them so unmistakably in his novels, often incorporating real events. As shown in his striking poetry, he had an affinity with animals, which being dumb did not arouse his wrath.
The author seems to gloss over the more positive aspects of his personality, to focus on the flaws. He is mainly portrayed as an arrogant, opinionated monster, given to bigoted, offensive outbursts, but did he really mean them? The man who dreamed of founding a utopian “little colony”, with “no money but a sort of communism as far as the necessities of life” seems at odds with the one who rails against democracy. He beats his wife in front of horrified friends, although this may be a kind of theatrical act, triggered by Frieda’s provocative actions – the fag hanging from the corner of her mouth - almost a writerly experiment in experiencing anger in order to describe it. Towards the end, the rants become more extreme, the prose style grows intentionally cruder (to be more “American”) as Lawrence seems to disintegrate into a kind of madness. According to Frances Wilson, he “had once more changed his shape: no longer a marauding fox or a red wolf or a plumed serpent, he now saw himself as Pan, sex-god of the mountain wilds”. Is this artistic licence on her part? At worst, he might nowadays simply be diagnosed as having manic tendencies.
I would have liked a more thematic approach, analysing more objectively his dual personality perhaps better described as complex. To what extent was he damaged by his mother’s possessiveness, and her contempt for his father? In a class-ridden society, as a miner’s son he must have felt keenly the snobbery he encountered. The blinkered British censorship of some of his work, with even “The Rainbow”, condemned by the prosecution as “disgusting, detestable and pernicious….in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” must have stimulated his tendency to murderous thoughts, and his desire to quit a land with its “dead muffled sense” of everything being “sand-bagged”. The debilitating respiratory illness he suffered most winters, and in some climates, must have fed his negativity.
Finding this book by turns intensely gripping and tediously overblown, impressed by the author’s remarkably deep research, I am left with a sense of vital missing pieces in the jigsaw, distorting her portrayal of Lawrence. This motivates me to read the record of Jessie Chambers, the calm, intelligent girl on whom the youthful Lawrence “hammered himself out”, and to seek out another biographer to enable me the better to to judge to what extent his intense introspection ultimately blighted his genius.
January 6, 2022
Not about the festival in America. The aim is to present DH Lawrence in all his messy, ranting glory. Unfortunately the execution is all over the place - especially in the middle section where it meanders aimlessly for dozens of pages.
Does make a compelling case for the poems, stories and travel writing over the novels (though oddly not Twilight in Italy).
Does make a compelling case for the poems, stories and travel writing over the novels (though oddly not Twilight in Italy).
January 24, 2022
Years ago (decades in fact) I read most of Lawrence’s novels, drenched myself in their psychodrama. It’s something I suspect I could have only done while I was still young and unknowing. Reading this biography, at first, felt like a terrible mistake. Lawrence is appalling. What was I to make of those magnificent novels? Were they magnificent?
And then something shifted and I was just astonished at the quality of Frances Wilson’s writing and the amazing (if still appalling) self-creation of the man himself. There are passages, even pages, that are scaldingly funny, revelations not only about Lawrence but the colorful cast of celebrities who surrounded him in England, then in Italy, and finally in the United States and Mexico. Some make for spectacular stories, each one topping the last. Wilson uses the trajectory of Dante’s Divine Comedy to structure Lawrence’s life, a framework I rarely found convincing, but it hardly matters. This is a brilliant biography, a work of literature in itself.
And then something shifted and I was just astonished at the quality of Frances Wilson’s writing and the amazing (if still appalling) self-creation of the man himself. There are passages, even pages, that are scaldingly funny, revelations not only about Lawrence but the colorful cast of celebrities who surrounded him in England, then in Italy, and finally in the United States and Mexico. Some make for spectacular stories, each one topping the last. Wilson uses the trajectory of Dante’s Divine Comedy to structure Lawrence’s life, a framework I rarely found convincing, but it hardly matters. This is a brilliant biography, a work of literature in itself.
August 10, 2022
In Burning man: the trials of D.H. Lawrence, Frances Wilson uses the structure of Dante's Divina Commedia to discuss the middle years of Lawrence. The episode of Inferno is linked to his stay in England and his tumultuous marriage to Frieda (1915-1919), the episode of Purgatory is tied up with his visits to Italy (1919-1922), and the episode of Paradise is parallelled to his life in New Mexico (1922-1925).
Working along this leitmotif inevitably involves making choices. I had the impression that Wilson selected three facets of Lawrence's life and discarded the rest. Wilson devoted a lot of time to his (not very interesting) stays in Italy and New Mexico but she barely discusses or even mentions D.H. Lawrence's groundbreaking novel Lady Chatterley's lover. A weird choice, given the amount of attention she gives to less important works.
Lawrence comes across as a man of contradictions, violent tempers and ugly backstabbings to key characters in his life, especially women.
Working along this leitmotif inevitably involves making choices. I had the impression that Wilson selected three facets of Lawrence's life and discarded the rest. Wilson devoted a lot of time to his (not very interesting) stays in Italy and New Mexico but she barely discusses or even mentions D.H. Lawrence's groundbreaking novel Lady Chatterley's lover. A weird choice, given the amount of attention she gives to less important works.
Lawrence comes across as a man of contradictions, violent tempers and ugly backstabbings to key characters in his life, especially women.
April 2, 2021
A superbly written biography of D.H. Lawrence, written in a beautiful analogy to Dante's Divine Comedy. Many episodes were revelatory gems. At times the books arch got lost in the details, but the information and prose always felt rich.
August 19, 2023
only frances wilson could have written about lawrence, because only geniuses get geniuses. i've been laughing since page 1 in utter disbelief over the magnificence of her prose, the crackling contagion of her passion, and her truly uncanny understanding of not only who, what, where, and when lawrence was but, most importantly, why. every page shines. wilson is a revelation.
October 7, 2021
Frances Wilson presumes Lawrence went through trials, but it seems obvious that he had one trial and that was his life, unless of course you include the lives of everyone he lived with, around, wrote to and harangued. Living through oracular pronouncements and various forms of passive-aggressive behavior, Lawrence in my singular opinion was an incredibly unpleasant man who surrounded himself with neophytes that came to either attempt to control him or be controlled by him. Of course, his psychology was incredibly complex, but my overall vision of the man is not pleasant. I'm glad I never had a chance to meet him.
And yet... Lady Chatterley's Lover is so beautifully written. Throwing off the constraints of the Edwardian age, Lawrence had the discipline to match his gift and preach North American modernism's message of using direct speech for elevated emotional effect. He was a modernist and a gifted writer with biases that caused people like Kate Millet to castigate his writing for the depth of his misogyny and generally misanthropic behavior.
Yet how can we condemn Lawrence without condemning the politics of Pound, Eliot, and Stein, who survived the rigors of World War II by the grace of Vichy France as her religious brethren were rounded up to die by the millions?
Perhaps, as Frances Wilson points out, the only way we can tact in this wind, is to follow D.H and understand there is a difference between the person and their writing if we want to absorb the positive aspects of their influence.
I suppose these politically flawed authors best not be read if they upset you too much, but when we experience Lawrence's brittle character, Wilson also wants us to consider his traumatic upbringing, his tuberculosis and all the other elements that made him so impossible.
As fascinating as his life and times are, I would recommend dipping into several of his novels before reading this biography, which at time made we wonder why the hell I was reading it, though part of the reason was to better understand another very male writer who is no longer popular, Henry Miller (though Miller is a model of sanity when compared with Lawrence).
Hiding in the shrubbery of Wilson's prose is a yeoman's use of language. Not exceptionally eloquent, it nevertheless is clear with plenty of narrative plotting. I wondered at times if she had been reading detective stories, as I found a who-done-accusatory aspect to the way she discusses characters and their relationships.
I doubt there's a best seller audience for this work but it certainly serves the cause of reconsidering Lawrence's writing, which can be sensual, artful and filled with the splendid writing about the natural world. Though famous for talking openly about sex, Lawrence's sexual orientation probably could have swung either way in the modern age. As it is, we have his fascinating life and several brilliant works to read.
And yet... Lady Chatterley's Lover is so beautifully written. Throwing off the constraints of the Edwardian age, Lawrence had the discipline to match his gift and preach North American modernism's message of using direct speech for elevated emotional effect. He was a modernist and a gifted writer with biases that caused people like Kate Millet to castigate his writing for the depth of his misogyny and generally misanthropic behavior.
Yet how can we condemn Lawrence without condemning the politics of Pound, Eliot, and Stein, who survived the rigors of World War II by the grace of Vichy France as her religious brethren were rounded up to die by the millions?
Perhaps, as Frances Wilson points out, the only way we can tact in this wind, is to follow D.H and understand there is a difference between the person and their writing if we want to absorb the positive aspects of their influence.
I suppose these politically flawed authors best not be read if they upset you too much, but when we experience Lawrence's brittle character, Wilson also wants us to consider his traumatic upbringing, his tuberculosis and all the other elements that made him so impossible.
As fascinating as his life and times are, I would recommend dipping into several of his novels before reading this biography, which at time made we wonder why the hell I was reading it, though part of the reason was to better understand another very male writer who is no longer popular, Henry Miller (though Miller is a model of sanity when compared with Lawrence).
Hiding in the shrubbery of Wilson's prose is a yeoman's use of language. Not exceptionally eloquent, it nevertheless is clear with plenty of narrative plotting. I wondered at times if she had been reading detective stories, as I found a who-done-accusatory aspect to the way she discusses characters and their relationships.
I doubt there's a best seller audience for this work but it certainly serves the cause of reconsidering Lawrence's writing, which can be sensual, artful and filled with the splendid writing about the natural world. Though famous for talking openly about sex, Lawrence's sexual orientation probably could have swung either way in the modern age. As it is, we have his fascinating life and several brilliant works to read.
December 30, 2021
This brought to mind in many ways the excellent biography of P.B. Shelley by Richard Holmes. Wilson does not take on the entirety of Lawrence's life but narrows her focus to mainly the years 1915-1925. She does offer some background about his childhood and the last five years of his life are touched upon but the main portion of the book's detailed analysis is devoted to his differing personas adopted in England, Italy and the American Southwest. Both Shelley and Lawrence were self created through peripatetic, extensive travel. What I found most remarkable was that despite physical frailty and extreme hardship they were both guided by an irresistible need to pursue their art in a very physical manner, in literal pursuit, movement, frequent uprooting, often at a high cost paid by themselves and those close to them. Aldous Huxley is quoted near the end as saying, despite being often exasperated by Lawrence, admiring beyond measure his "unshakeable loyalty to his own self." Huxley found this to be "fundamental...accounts as nothing else can do, for all that the world found strange in his beliefs and his behavior." I can think of no higher compliment to a true artist. But being close at hand and tied to them in any kind of relationship is sure to have proven very difficult. Wilson's book demonstrates this very evenhandedly I thought.
January 14, 2022
I received an electronic ARC via NetGalley.
This is a rather meandering but very interesting biography of D.H. Lawrence, but often at the very least as much about the people around him (and literary and other influences on him) as about Lawrence himself.
I admittedly found it rather slow to start, but some of that may simply be because I am not particularly familiar with Lawrence or his writing. I'm fairly sure I've never read any of his works, and fascinating as much of this book was, it doesn't encourage me to try. I usually enjoyed the discussions of the people around Lawrence and their relationships with one another more interesting than the more direct biographical material, and Lawrence certainly comes out something less than likable in the story of his own life.
While the book is structured on using Dante's Divine Comedy as a framework for understanding Lawrence and his work, I did sometimes find the discussions of Dante somewhat distracting from the narrative of Lawrence's life and times. This isn't a criticism of the structural choice or of the quality of these sections, they just had a tendency to unmoor me from the progression of the narrative and forget what year range was being discussed.
It's an interesting book regardless, and even if it doesn't particularly make me want to take a dive into the works of D.H. Lawrence, it did inspire me to read more about some of his acquaintances.
This is a rather meandering but very interesting biography of D.H. Lawrence, but often at the very least as much about the people around him (and literary and other influences on him) as about Lawrence himself.
I admittedly found it rather slow to start, but some of that may simply be because I am not particularly familiar with Lawrence or his writing. I'm fairly sure I've never read any of his works, and fascinating as much of this book was, it doesn't encourage me to try. I usually enjoyed the discussions of the people around Lawrence and their relationships with one another more interesting than the more direct biographical material, and Lawrence certainly comes out something less than likable in the story of his own life.
While the book is structured on using Dante's Divine Comedy as a framework for understanding Lawrence and his work, I did sometimes find the discussions of Dante somewhat distracting from the narrative of Lawrence's life and times. This isn't a criticism of the structural choice or of the quality of these sections, they just had a tendency to unmoor me from the progression of the narrative and forget what year range was being discussed.
It's an interesting book regardless, and even if it doesn't particularly make me want to take a dive into the works of D.H. Lawrence, it did inspire me to read more about some of his acquaintances.
August 11, 2022
I bought this [paperback edition] because, having begun to re-read DH Lawrence, and in part propelled by the enthusiasm of a college teacher who, when I was in my teens, organised a brief tour of parts of Nottinghamshire with which Lawrence was connected, I wanted to know more. 'Burning Man' was being much praised and although I've not read many writer's biographies, this did exactly what I hoped.
I had no idea how much more there was to know; of the complexity - at times the awfulness - of his personality, the forces which drove him and his writing, the people with whom he lived and the places ... all the many places so vividly described! and I shall now continue with my reading of his novels considerably better informed.
I had no idea how much more there was to know; of the complexity - at times the awfulness - of his personality, the forces which drove him and his writing, the people with whom he lived and the places ... all the many places so vividly described! and I shall now continue with my reading of his novels considerably better informed.
July 23, 2021
A powerful, passionate and idiosyncratic tour through three key moments of Lawrence’s life as an artist. Layered as a Dantesque narrative of descent and ascension, offers real insight into Lawrence as person and author.
December 8, 2025
Frances Wilson’s Burning Man opens not with the sickly miner’s son of Nottinghamshire lore, but with Lawrence already in mid-flight, ablaze: The Rainbow just banned, reputation in tatters, marriage to Frieda both salvation and running sore, war closing in. It’s a bold decision – to start halfway through a life, in 1915 – but it suits a subject who always felt himself to be living at a breaking point. From there Wilson follows him across his “savage pilgrimage” through Italy, Cornwall, the U.S., Australia, Mexico and France, tracking not the usual cradle-to-grave arc but fifteen years of near-continuous crisis, creation and flight.
Having come up, while at the height of his powers in 1915, against the prohibition of The Rainbow and the deep distrust of his German wife Frieda (niece of the Red Baron) and his own Bohemian censoriousness, D.H. Lawrence embarked upon a form of literary wanderlust that would cover his last decade and a half of life and lead him to Italy, Australia, the United States, Mexico and France. Frances Wilson here writes an electrifying biography that starts halfway along, with only a few choice references to the writer's youth, focusing instead on the thin-skinned and complicated visionary who found himself right where he had planted himself, outside the society of the time, and aiming to find a place in the world where he could tend to his weak lungs and continue his work. Wilson is less interested in the boy who became the writer than in the writer who refused to become anything else. The childhood scenes are dealt with briskly; what fascinates her is the man who, in his thirties, realises that the society he writes for wants him either silenced or sanitised, and decides, more or less, to exile himself instead.
Prolific to the last, Lawrence was a mercurial writer, apt to try and bottle the energy that had sprung up within him in mammoth sessions. Wilson, sceptical of many of the man's ideas and in awe of his extraordinary level of production, finds just the right tone to express this complicated individual, at once ridiculous and unavoidable, profound and petty. Lawrence is evoked in all his forms, "burning" - as she suggests in her title - his creative oil in all manner of different pursuits. There was little he seemed unable to do within his chosen areas, his descriptive and emotional repetitions as he seeded and reseeded the fertile earth he had lain on the page, finally blossoming into creations that were unafraid to bore and reiterate just so as to go in search of those rare moments of indelible, coruscating truth. And he certainly found enough of them to continue to matter.
One of the book’s deeper pleasures is how vividly she renders that decision as both principled and absurd. Lawrence, in her telling, is at once ridiculous and unavoidable: a man who can behave appallingly at breakfast and then produce, by lunchtime, a piece of spinetingling prose that touches something raw and true in everyone. She’s sceptical of a good many of his ideas – the blood-mysticism, the contempt for “mental” women, the political flirtations that look at best naïve and at worst dangerous – but she never writes him off as a crank. Instead she treats him as a kind of volatile experimental apparatus, perpetually trying to distil a liveable philosophy out of his own contradictions.
The wanderlust that takes up so much of the book isn’t just a series of picturesque backdrops. Each move – to Italy, to Cornwall, to Taos, to the Australian outback, to the mountains of Mexico – is read as an attempt to find an environment that matches, or mollifies, his inner weather. Wilson is very good on the way the outer landscapes feed into the work: how Sicily and the Amalfi coast burn themselves into Sea and Sardinia and Sons and Lovers’ Italianate heat; how the New Mexico high desert shapes the weird, visionary spaces of The Plumed Serpent; how the Mediterranean’s relentless light both energises and exhausts him. She shows a man who can never quite arrive anywhere, as if the act of settling would mean a kind of spiritual death.
Running through all this blazing activity is the quieter, more stubborn thread of Frieda. Wilson refuses to relegate her to the role of mere muse or domestic obstacle. Frieda is niece to the Red Baron, mother of three children left behind to run off with Lawrence, a woman with her own appetites and impatiences. Their marriage is shown as a long, bruising wrestling match between two people who both want absolute freedom and absolute loyalty. Wilson doesn’t tidy this up into a “great love story”; she lets the jealousies, infidelities, screaming rows and brief moments of tenderness stand as they are, which makes the partnership both more painful and more convincing.
Structurally, the biography is clever without being showy. Wilson threads Lawrence’s story through three archetypes – Dante’s journey, the mythic figure of the pilgrim, and, as her title announces, the burning man himself – to suggest that his wanderings are also self-immolations of a sort. She writes with detail: a quarrel in a boarding house will chime, a chapter later, with a passage in Women in Love; an image from a letter is allowed to reverberate in the description of a landscape. The result is a book that sometimes feels as restlessly associative as its subject.
Wilson makes Lawrence’s frantic productivity central to her portrait. Time and again we see him writing as if chased – by illness, by poverty, by censors, by his own conviction that he will not live long. She’s excellent on the repetitive nature of his work, too: those descriptive and emotional riffs he keeps returning to, the way he seeds and reseeds the same patches of psychic ground until something finally flowers. Rather than apologising for the reiteration, she treats it as method: an artist unafraid to bore, to circle, to overstate, because somewhere in that obsessive worrying he will hit a nerve that no one else has exposed.
Importantly, Wilson doesn’t mistake that persistence for infallibility. She is briskly clear about Lawrence’s failures – the unreadable stretches, the bullying tone, the blind spots around race and gender that make parts of the oeuvre hard to stomach now. She can be properly sharp about the pomposities of his late “leadership” fantasies, those dreams of founding a new community of the elect amid some suitably primitive landscape. Yet she always brings the critique back to something human: a sick, frightened, fiercely proud man trying to carve out a space of meaning in a world he feels has been hollowed by war and industrial civilisation.
Where some big biographies flatten their subjects into a single, coherent “story,” Burning Man leans into the ragged edges. Lawrence here is never less than multiple: the miner’s son with a chip on his shoulder, the mystic of the body, the tender observer of children and animals, the graceless house-guest, the friend who can wound unforgivably and then write a letter of such mortified honesty that you understand why people kept forgiving him. Wilson’s tone – half appalled, half exhilarated – matches that multiplicity. She writes not as a prosecutor, nor as a disciple, but as someone who has lived long enough with Lawrence’s books to accept that they can be both sustaining and infuriating at once.
Thus this “chastened” feeling we have when he hauls us back into the flow of a novel. Wilson allows us to feel our own fluctuation as readers – boredom, exasperation, sudden awe – and shows that those reactions are built into the way Lawrence works. He goes on and on so that, just often enough, he can arrive at a moment of coruscating truth: a quarrel that exposes the fault-line in a marriage, a landscape that suddenly seems to stand for a whole way of being, a character’s burst of cruelty or tenderness that feels shockingly unmediated.
By the time the book reaches Lawrence’s early death in Venice in 1930, what lingers isn’t simply the tragedy of a life cruelly cut short, or the familiar legend of the persecuted genius. It’s the image of a man who insisted, right to the end, on living at full temperature – burning through places, people and ideas at a rate that left scorched earth behind, but also a body of work that still smoulders in the culture. For anyone who has been moved by The Rainbow or Women in Love and puzzled by the man who wrote them, Wilson’s book is an essential, bracing companion: a biography that doesn’t tidy Lawrence up, but does make his restless, exhausting, necessary presence in literature feel newly alive.
Having come up, while at the height of his powers in 1915, against the prohibition of The Rainbow and the deep distrust of his German wife Frieda (niece of the Red Baron) and his own Bohemian censoriousness, D.H. Lawrence embarked upon a form of literary wanderlust that would cover his last decade and a half of life and lead him to Italy, Australia, the United States, Mexico and France. Frances Wilson here writes an electrifying biography that starts halfway along, with only a few choice references to the writer's youth, focusing instead on the thin-skinned and complicated visionary who found himself right where he had planted himself, outside the society of the time, and aiming to find a place in the world where he could tend to his weak lungs and continue his work. Wilson is less interested in the boy who became the writer than in the writer who refused to become anything else. The childhood scenes are dealt with briskly; what fascinates her is the man who, in his thirties, realises that the society he writes for wants him either silenced or sanitised, and decides, more or less, to exile himself instead.
Prolific to the last, Lawrence was a mercurial writer, apt to try and bottle the energy that had sprung up within him in mammoth sessions. Wilson, sceptical of many of the man's ideas and in awe of his extraordinary level of production, finds just the right tone to express this complicated individual, at once ridiculous and unavoidable, profound and petty. Lawrence is evoked in all his forms, "burning" - as she suggests in her title - his creative oil in all manner of different pursuits. There was little he seemed unable to do within his chosen areas, his descriptive and emotional repetitions as he seeded and reseeded the fertile earth he had lain on the page, finally blossoming into creations that were unafraid to bore and reiterate just so as to go in search of those rare moments of indelible, coruscating truth. And he certainly found enough of them to continue to matter.
One of the book’s deeper pleasures is how vividly she renders that decision as both principled and absurd. Lawrence, in her telling, is at once ridiculous and unavoidable: a man who can behave appallingly at breakfast and then produce, by lunchtime, a piece of spinetingling prose that touches something raw and true in everyone. She’s sceptical of a good many of his ideas – the blood-mysticism, the contempt for “mental” women, the political flirtations that look at best naïve and at worst dangerous – but she never writes him off as a crank. Instead she treats him as a kind of volatile experimental apparatus, perpetually trying to distil a liveable philosophy out of his own contradictions.
The wanderlust that takes up so much of the book isn’t just a series of picturesque backdrops. Each move – to Italy, to Cornwall, to Taos, to the Australian outback, to the mountains of Mexico – is read as an attempt to find an environment that matches, or mollifies, his inner weather. Wilson is very good on the way the outer landscapes feed into the work: how Sicily and the Amalfi coast burn themselves into Sea and Sardinia and Sons and Lovers’ Italianate heat; how the New Mexico high desert shapes the weird, visionary spaces of The Plumed Serpent; how the Mediterranean’s relentless light both energises and exhausts him. She shows a man who can never quite arrive anywhere, as if the act of settling would mean a kind of spiritual death.
Running through all this blazing activity is the quieter, more stubborn thread of Frieda. Wilson refuses to relegate her to the role of mere muse or domestic obstacle. Frieda is niece to the Red Baron, mother of three children left behind to run off with Lawrence, a woman with her own appetites and impatiences. Their marriage is shown as a long, bruising wrestling match between two people who both want absolute freedom and absolute loyalty. Wilson doesn’t tidy this up into a “great love story”; she lets the jealousies, infidelities, screaming rows and brief moments of tenderness stand as they are, which makes the partnership both more painful and more convincing.
Structurally, the biography is clever without being showy. Wilson threads Lawrence’s story through three archetypes – Dante’s journey, the mythic figure of the pilgrim, and, as her title announces, the burning man himself – to suggest that his wanderings are also self-immolations of a sort. She writes with detail: a quarrel in a boarding house will chime, a chapter later, with a passage in Women in Love; an image from a letter is allowed to reverberate in the description of a landscape. The result is a book that sometimes feels as restlessly associative as its subject.
Wilson makes Lawrence’s frantic productivity central to her portrait. Time and again we see him writing as if chased – by illness, by poverty, by censors, by his own conviction that he will not live long. She’s excellent on the repetitive nature of his work, too: those descriptive and emotional riffs he keeps returning to, the way he seeds and reseeds the same patches of psychic ground until something finally flowers. Rather than apologising for the reiteration, she treats it as method: an artist unafraid to bore, to circle, to overstate, because somewhere in that obsessive worrying he will hit a nerve that no one else has exposed.
Importantly, Wilson doesn’t mistake that persistence for infallibility. She is briskly clear about Lawrence’s failures – the unreadable stretches, the bullying tone, the blind spots around race and gender that make parts of the oeuvre hard to stomach now. She can be properly sharp about the pomposities of his late “leadership” fantasies, those dreams of founding a new community of the elect amid some suitably primitive landscape. Yet she always brings the critique back to something human: a sick, frightened, fiercely proud man trying to carve out a space of meaning in a world he feels has been hollowed by war and industrial civilisation.
Where some big biographies flatten their subjects into a single, coherent “story,” Burning Man leans into the ragged edges. Lawrence here is never less than multiple: the miner’s son with a chip on his shoulder, the mystic of the body, the tender observer of children and animals, the graceless house-guest, the friend who can wound unforgivably and then write a letter of such mortified honesty that you understand why people kept forgiving him. Wilson’s tone – half appalled, half exhilarated – matches that multiplicity. She writes not as a prosecutor, nor as a disciple, but as someone who has lived long enough with Lawrence’s books to accept that they can be both sustaining and infuriating at once.
Thus this “chastened” feeling we have when he hauls us back into the flow of a novel. Wilson allows us to feel our own fluctuation as readers – boredom, exasperation, sudden awe – and shows that those reactions are built into the way Lawrence works. He goes on and on so that, just often enough, he can arrive at a moment of coruscating truth: a quarrel that exposes the fault-line in a marriage, a landscape that suddenly seems to stand for a whole way of being, a character’s burst of cruelty or tenderness that feels shockingly unmediated.
By the time the book reaches Lawrence’s early death in Venice in 1930, what lingers isn’t simply the tragedy of a life cruelly cut short, or the familiar legend of the persecuted genius. It’s the image of a man who insisted, right to the end, on living at full temperature – burning through places, people and ideas at a rate that left scorched earth behind, but also a body of work that still smoulders in the culture. For anyone who has been moved by The Rainbow or Women in Love and puzzled by the man who wrote them, Wilson’s book is an essential, bracing companion: a biography that doesn’t tidy Lawrence up, but does make his restless, exhausting, necessary presence in literature feel newly alive.
October 26, 2021
Frances Wilson is building quite a reputation as a biographer with tomes on De Quincy; Dorothy Wordsworth and now the unfashionable (or at least out of fashion) DH Lawrence. Wilson eschews the cradle to grave biography and tends to have a framing device or reference point for her subjects. Hence in this the forever perambulating Lawrence mirrors the journey described in Dante's Divine Comedy going from Inferno (Cornwall); to Purgatory (Italy) and Paradise (America/New Mexico). She also vows to concentrate on lesser known figures in his life and vows to tell his story ins a different way perhaps. In part because as she points out everyone who knew Lawrence tended to write a memoir about him and he in turn used almost everyone he met as thinly veiled characters in his novels and whole body of work. Talking of bodies of work his own was soon overtaken by TB and whilst. being in denial about this, it also came to dominate his own psyche- and Wilson says he may have also passed it on to the likes of Katherine Mansfield. He also seems to have connected with others who themselves were riddled with disease (syphilis for example) but it took its toll and Lawrence sometimes wanted to escape or at least live with "Syphlisisation" in the same way we are being forced to accept living with covid perhaps?? Wilson writes fine pen portraits of the people in Lawrences story-particularly the women such as inevitably, Frieda and others like Mabel Dodge Luhan or Dorothy Brett. The men don't come off much better and Lawrence with his high voice and razor edge temper is a difficult if compelling protagonist. Wilson suggests the physical fights with Frieda became theatre- almost expected and that both had affairs - though Lawrence was more reticent perhaps.
Wilson is great on milieu, locations and the novels themselves and weaves a mesmerising story outlining the personal and physical dynamic between characters and how they perceived each other. The bibliography shows she has read much the best stuff on Lawrence and this book will join my favourite Lawrence volumes such as the Brenda Maddox on the marriage and Geoff Dyer on NOT writing a book about DH Lawrence. Completists will want to peruse the three volume Cambridge biography with each volume authored by a different writer- Worthern, Kincaid-Weekes and David Ellis. Still, Wilson holds her own and the book is beautifully produced, if strangely heavy to hold (heavier than you would expect at least). It will also send me back to some of the novels. Wilson is as on fire as her subject- recommended.
November 2, 2021
At first I was exasperated with this “specialized” biography. The prose seemed overwrought, and the subject—three of Lawrence’s so-called crises during his most productive writing years, which the biographer links to three episodes/sojourns in Dante’s Divine Comedy—unnecessarily obscure & complicated.
I skipped to the last section, because I’d always been interested in Mabel Dodge Luhan in her Taos incarnation & her marriage to Pueblo tribe member Tony Luhan. There were some intriguing clues to that scene; Mabel was the first to see the artistic possibilities of Taos & single-handedly initiated the germ of the artist’s colony it is today, but what a nutty woman! And the biographer follows her right down the rabbit holes into crazyland, which for me seriously impeded the reading, despite the nuggets of sometimes-fascinating facts that emerged from the mists of over-emotion.
I tried the first section, about Lawrence’s escape from England with Frieda, the German-born wife of his tutor, fleeing his northern mining town roots for good. Again there were bits of gold amongst the emotive passages, so I pushed on to the middle part of the book, a baffling Italian interval when Lawrence hung out with a gay writer couple & became sufficiently entangled with one of them to introduce & then publish that man’s strange memoire of the French Foreign Legion.
Throughout the whole, I found myself so wishing that the author had written a more straightforward, conventional account of these three ‘pieces’ of Lawrence’s life, because her research skills appear advanced & her interpretations were often original…but unfortunately her stories were in the end just too phantasmagorical for me.
I skipped to the last section, because I’d always been interested in Mabel Dodge Luhan in her Taos incarnation & her marriage to Pueblo tribe member Tony Luhan. There were some intriguing clues to that scene; Mabel was the first to see the artistic possibilities of Taos & single-handedly initiated the germ of the artist’s colony it is today, but what a nutty woman! And the biographer follows her right down the rabbit holes into crazyland, which for me seriously impeded the reading, despite the nuggets of sometimes-fascinating facts that emerged from the mists of over-emotion.
I tried the first section, about Lawrence’s escape from England with Frieda, the German-born wife of his tutor, fleeing his northern mining town roots for good. Again there were bits of gold amongst the emotive passages, so I pushed on to the middle part of the book, a baffling Italian interval when Lawrence hung out with a gay writer couple & became sufficiently entangled with one of them to introduce & then publish that man’s strange memoire of the French Foreign Legion.
Throughout the whole, I found myself so wishing that the author had written a more straightforward, conventional account of these three ‘pieces’ of Lawrence’s life, because her research skills appear advanced & her interpretations were often original…but unfortunately her stories were in the end just too phantasmagorical for me.
October 6, 2021
I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway. I have never read anything about D. H. Lawrence before so I was going into this book ‘blind’. It was stated this book would concentrate on characters from his life that usually were only discussed in a cursory manner. I don’t know if that is accurate or not since, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know anything about Lawrence previously. I’ve only read one of his short stories, ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’, many years ago.
While I did find this book to be well-written, there were times when I felt it veered a little too much away from Lawrence. This is mostly when discussing Magnus. I started to lose interest as I wanted to hear more about Lawrence’s life. Of course, what I did learn about Lawrence kind of disappointed me.
I realized as I was reading that I didn’t like Lawrence as a person. I had this same experience when reading’A Beautiful Mind’. While you can’t deny the talent of the person, you may not find them likable at the same time. With Lawrence, I found him to be angry, mean-spirited and conceited. I don’t know if this was a result of him having TB. I guess any chronic illness would make you angry. Or did he have some sort of mental illness. I’m not sure.
So, all in all, I’m glad I read the book as I was able to learn something new, which is a good thing. I don’t know if reading this will prompt me to read any of his novels. Maybe.
While I did find this book to be well-written, there were times when I felt it veered a little too much away from Lawrence. This is mostly when discussing Magnus. I started to lose interest as I wanted to hear more about Lawrence’s life. Of course, what I did learn about Lawrence kind of disappointed me.
I realized as I was reading that I didn’t like Lawrence as a person. I had this same experience when reading’A Beautiful Mind’. While you can’t deny the talent of the person, you may not find them likable at the same time. With Lawrence, I found him to be angry, mean-spirited and conceited. I don’t know if this was a result of him having TB. I guess any chronic illness would make you angry. Or did he have some sort of mental illness. I’m not sure.
So, all in all, I’m glad I read the book as I was able to learn something new, which is a good thing. I don’t know if reading this will prompt me to read any of his novels. Maybe.
July 18, 2021
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this new literary biography.
Frances Wilson in her new biography Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, comes at her subject not at the beginning of his life, nor his end but at his most creative, troubling, and wandering. Focusing on the years 1915 starting with his troubles on The Rainbow from censors and publishers to the year 1925 when Lawrence is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Wilson follows a large cast of characters who appear in various forms throughout his writings. With focus on the lesser known characters Ms. Wilson explores his relationships with both his wife and his patron, and others and how that framed the character that was Lawrence. In addition the amount of traveling he did, during some very difficult times is astonishing.
This is not an easy book to read. Familiarity with the texts and the man are helpful. However the structure, borrowed from Dante's The Divine Comedy is intriguing and carrys the narrative along. The stories are generally interesting, and and amusing. I don't think I would like to have been around him much. I don't think my opinion was changed on either the man or his writing, but I did very much enjoy the journey as I read.
Frances Wilson in her new biography Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, comes at her subject not at the beginning of his life, nor his end but at his most creative, troubling, and wandering. Focusing on the years 1915 starting with his troubles on The Rainbow from censors and publishers to the year 1925 when Lawrence is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Wilson follows a large cast of characters who appear in various forms throughout his writings. With focus on the lesser known characters Ms. Wilson explores his relationships with both his wife and his patron, and others and how that framed the character that was Lawrence. In addition the amount of traveling he did, during some very difficult times is astonishing.
This is not an easy book to read. Familiarity with the texts and the man are helpful. However the structure, borrowed from Dante's The Divine Comedy is intriguing and carrys the narrative along. The stories are generally interesting, and and amusing. I don't think I would like to have been around him much. I don't think my opinion was changed on either the man or his writing, but I did very much enjoy the journey as I read.
June 2, 2024
What an adventure this man's life was! It's a testament to his presence that there are so many first-hand and second or third hand biographies of him. The Lawrence presented here is not violently opposed nor blindingly worshipped. Here his life is mapped onto Dante's Comedy. In parts this is a stretch however it was a good way to delve into his life.
The strongest part was probably Inferno. It seems his best novels were forged there. I enjoyed reading about his interactions with other literary figures like Katherine Mansfield. Purgatario mostly covered his years in association with Magnus and Douglas, which made me quite uncomfortable (Douglas is a disturbed man) but it did form an important part of his life. However, I remain unconvinced to read the biography of Magnus. Paradiso was very interesting. I haven't read Huxley before but now I want to read Brave New World. I loved the pictures included, especially the final painting. Like the Divine Comedy, this book was also a travel book, and Lawrence's relationship with the land varied wildly, especially with his (unacknowledged) sickness.
The strongest part was probably Inferno. It seems his best novels were forged there. I enjoyed reading about his interactions with other literary figures like Katherine Mansfield. Purgatario mostly covered his years in association with Magnus and Douglas, which made me quite uncomfortable (Douglas is a disturbed man) but it did form an important part of his life. However, I remain unconvinced to read the biography of Magnus. Paradiso was very interesting. I haven't read Huxley before but now I want to read Brave New World. I loved the pictures included, especially the final painting. Like the Divine Comedy, this book was also a travel book, and Lawrence's relationship with the land varied wildly, especially with his (unacknowledged) sickness.
July 31, 2025
In a late letter of June 2012, Heaney recalled “Tom Brangwen’s speech at the wedding of his daughter in Lawrence’s The Rainbow. It’s more than fifty years since I read it, but something of its power keeps in the memory.” When I asked Heaney what Lawrence meant to him as a writer, his vivid 2-page typed letter on November 12, l985, not included in this edition, recalled the pure honey of that novel:
"Lawrence’s example was a corroborating one. His solidarity with the underground silent part of the psyche and of the society. His chthonic energy. His sexualizing of ground and growths. All that was entirely sympathetic to me and I felt naturally at home with his way of responding. When I was teaching The Rainbow in the late sixties, I was always affected by a number of the scenes there as if they were dream memories of my own—Anna being carried out into the stable, Will and Anna stooking the corn. I still love the forthrightness and impatience and sudden unmediated quality of much of his poetry. I also think the essay on the poetry of the living present is one of the best statements by a practicing poet about the essential differences between kinds of lyric."
"Lawrence’s example was a corroborating one. His solidarity with the underground silent part of the psyche and of the society. His chthonic energy. His sexualizing of ground and growths. All that was entirely sympathetic to me and I felt naturally at home with his way of responding. When I was teaching The Rainbow in the late sixties, I was always affected by a number of the scenes there as if they were dream memories of my own—Anna being carried out into the stable, Will and Anna stooking the corn. I still love the forthrightness and impatience and sudden unmediated quality of much of his poetry. I also think the essay on the poetry of the living present is one of the best statements by a practicing poet about the essential differences between kinds of lyric."
June 8, 2022
Lawrence's work engaged me from a young age - relatively speaking my interest declined, but this rather great piece of writing rekindled interest - at least for the duration of reading the book. Not that on the whole he comes across as a particularly sympathetic character, but Frances Wilson finds some soaring passages, many from the poetry rather than the fiction, and brings in a lot about various Lawrence acolytes and associates and there activities in the artistic Bohemia of the early 20th century - sometimes inspiring, quite often rather sordid or absurd.
The extensive allusions to Dante and Virgil were a bit lost on me, and some of her judgements questionable, but I found on the whole Wilson's prose had a lot of verve, energy and insight - certainly as well as writing about a talented writer she is one herself. For much the greatest part absorbing and enjoyable - though I won't be rushing back to Lawrence!
The extensive allusions to Dante and Virgil were a bit lost on me, and some of her judgements questionable, but I found on the whole Wilson's prose had a lot of verve, energy and insight - certainly as well as writing about a talented writer she is one herself. For much the greatest part absorbing and enjoyable - though I won't be rushing back to Lawrence!
November 25, 2021
A truly interesting approach to understanding DH Lawrence as a person and as an artist. Using Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ as a framework to relay her study, Wilson gives substance and texture to the bits between Lawrence’s Self One and Self Two extremes. It’s impossible to like anyone in this book — everyone is flawed, some fatally so, and there are times when the people in Lawrence’s universe (and Lawrence himself) are so repulsive that you’ll want to close the book. Don’t. On her very first page, Wilson quotes Lawrence’s ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’. Reading the whole arc of Lawrence’s life is the counterpoint to his assertion, ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale.’
NB - NOT for an audience new to DH Lawrence. Read a few of his books first for context. Also perhaps Rachel Cusk’s ‘Second Place’ as a shortcut primer on Mabel Dodge Luhan.
NB - NOT for an audience new to DH Lawrence. Read a few of his books first for context. Also perhaps Rachel Cusk’s ‘Second Place’ as a shortcut primer on Mabel Dodge Luhan.
September 19, 2024
I agree with the majority of reviews here - this is a tremendously well researched biography but lags and meanders terribly. I'm not sure I came away from the book knowing more about Lawrence than I did before.
This is not a literary biography. If you are looking for a book that gives you a close up on Lawrence's literary process, motivations for writing and his creative inner world - this isn't it. Lady Chatterley's Lover is mentioned perhaps three times in the entire text. Time isn't particularly given to Jessie Chambers. One short paragraph explores the posthumous impact of Kate Millett and second wave feminism on his work.
This is a book that talks around Lawrence and presents how other side players viewed him. It doesn't get to the heart of the man or his creative vision. Because of this, his worst traits are aired in an imbalanced fashion.
This is not a literary biography. If you are looking for a book that gives you a close up on Lawrence's literary process, motivations for writing and his creative inner world - this isn't it. Lady Chatterley's Lover is mentioned perhaps three times in the entire text. Time isn't particularly given to Jessie Chambers. One short paragraph explores the posthumous impact of Kate Millett and second wave feminism on his work.
This is a book that talks around Lawrence and presents how other side players viewed him. It doesn't get to the heart of the man or his creative vision. Because of this, his worst traits are aired in an imbalanced fashion.
April 28, 2023
No writer before D. H. Lawrence had created so permeable border between life and literature. In this book, the author, Frances Wilson, examines Lawrence's work from 1915 to 1925. In 1915, for example, there was an obscenity trial centered around "The Rainbow." In "The Rainbow," Lawrence discusses quite bluntly the idea of sexual desire and the part it plays within a relationship. The book was prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates' Court on November 13, 1915. The result was over 1000 copies of the book were seized and burned.
In 1925, Lawrence was diagnosed with TB.
Focusing on Lawrence's "trials" and his three adversaries, Wilson takes a look at a lesser-known D. H. Lawrence than the one we know from the headlines.
In 1925, Lawrence was diagnosed with TB.
Focusing on Lawrence's "trials" and his three adversaries, Wilson takes a look at a lesser-known D. H. Lawrence than the one we know from the headlines.
January 6, 2022
At first I found this book tough to read. That’s not a criticism of the book but at bedtime I often felt too tired. It’s not a casual portrait but something you could imagine finding a place on a literature course. Then I took it on holiday. Reading it during the day and much more quickly, I got into its poetry. By the end I felt rewarded. Although my impression of Lawrence was tarnished, it was much fuller and more realistic. I had met many interesting characters and had a much better understanding of their dynamics. It would be great to take on holiday to Italy or New Mexico, perhaps not to Cornwall in winter.
October 31, 2024
A marvellous rich book full of magnificent stories.
These two quotes from a Guardian review of the book capture its essence well:
"Burning Man is a work of art in its own right, as wanton and as magnificently flawed as anything Lawrence ever wrote; an object lesson in all that can happen when literary passion is allowed to go completely mad in the archives."
"Sometimes ecstatic and sometimes shrill, it brings Lawrence alive in all his derangement: his ridiculousness as well as his glory; his perspicacity and his blindness."
These two quotes from a Guardian review of the book capture its essence well:
"Burning Man is a work of art in its own right, as wanton and as magnificently flawed as anything Lawrence ever wrote; an object lesson in all that can happen when literary passion is allowed to go completely mad in the archives."
"Sometimes ecstatic and sometimes shrill, it brings Lawrence alive in all his derangement: his ridiculousness as well as his glory; his perspicacity and his blindness."
January 31, 2022
This is...great. Deeply researched, smart, unafraid to draw conclusions about Lawrence's many quixotic (to put it politely) journeys, relationships, while maintaining a deep respect for his work. One of the two best books I've read about DHL - the other is "Out of Sheer Rage,'' by Geoff Dyer (who blurbed Wilson's book), though they are very different in style and content (His is shorter, and funnier.)
But this is remarkable. Read it.
But this is remarkable. Read it.
August 22, 2021
A rich, impressionistic view of Lawrence. It doesn't analyse his work as such but gives you a rare insight into what sort of man he was and the demons that plagued him throughout his life. I had read a few of his novels but wouldn't say I knew a great deal about DHL. This book blew away most of my preconceptions.
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January 5, 2022DNF. I put it down and found that I really wasn’t interested in picking it up again. The premise is great and it should have been a very interesting and enlightening book, but I found that Lawrence was playing a supporting role rather than the main character. There’s lots of information about other people, many of whom I’d never heard of, but they weren’t who I wanted to read about.
March 17, 2022
This is a brilliant book.i hadn't read biography like this for years and hadn't read Lawrence since my student days but I'll be looking for The Rainbow and Women in Love in my local library, Cork City Libraries - also the travel books and the short stories, and Frieda's autobiography, Not I but the Wind. Wilson's book is qxslow burner, not always easy to read but totally worth the effort
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