D.H. Lawrence: From Triumph to Exile 1912-1922 by Mark Kinkead-Weekes Cambridge, 943pp, £29.99 THIS book displays the dichotomy of nearly all literary biographies: there are numerous insights into the creation of great art but also pages of tedium concerning the mundanities of the subject's life.
Triumph to Exile is part of a three-book series on Lawrence, this one dealing with the start of his writing career and ending as he contemplates departure to America. Along the way we follow the tortured twists of his imagination that were to produce The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers and Women in Love.
Through pages of tedious detail and inflexible linear narrative we follow the restless Lawrence as he travels about Europe. Little of this advances our understanding of Lawrence's peculiar organic talent. However, the prising open of Lawrence's private life does serve a powerful purpose by showing how the tumult that often surrounded him shaped his literary output.
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, an academic at the University of Kent, does also show us the events that breathed life into Lawrence's imaginings: his intense and mutable relationship with his wife, Frieda, his detestation of the Bloomsbury set, and the ugly brutalities of the Great War.
The Lawrence of these pages is not interested in resolutions, in finding his ultimate expressive moment, but is content to chip away at a structure which he knows will never be fully observable.
Throughout this biography we find him wondering how to "move beyond" his last piece of work. This process of refining the creative energy provides his greatest challenge, one he rises to. The constant refinement was even extended to radically reworking the vital themes in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow in the final drafts.
The spur for so much of Lawrence's writing was the loathing he found within himself. He felt obliged to analyse in his own self-conscious style his discomfort with "grubby" England, which made him feel "soiled", and his homophobic distrust of literary companions for he saw "Bloomsbuggery" everywhere.
Kinkead-Weekes explains this process masterfully, and concludes that Lawrence used fiction as a stage for his alter-ego. For example, when Frieda withheld her affection Lawrence felt sapped of joy. But a novel like Sons and Lovers gave him a chance to explore why exactly he felt like this.
The main strength of this biographer is his refusal to make facile moral judgments; instead, he links Lawrence's personality disorders to his ability for dissecting human motivation. He shows how Lawrence's self-realisation about his own violent instincts helped to bring out the dark aspects of the characters in The Rainbow At times, his reading of Lawrence seems excessively benevolent and sympathetic, for example in his treatment of the intellectual relation between Lawrence and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Kinkead-Weekes spoon-feeds the reader by championing Lawrence while mildly maligning Russell.
The analysis put forward by the author that what fired Lawrence was his "need to assert manhood against the dominant female" seems a crude simplification of a complicated process. Lawrence's self-imposed exile and the break with his parents seem to have been more important to his development as a writer than his sexual philosophy. As Lawrence probed the recesses of his own sub-conscious and dealt with the things that would have offended polite society, he was looking back at his Nottingham childhood and the ugliness of the life there.
Instead of pursuing this theme, his biographer tries to connect the changeable relationship with Frieda with specific phases in Lawrence's career. He does not consider that a writer such as Lawrence was capable of drawing a line between the private chaos of his life and the explorations in his writings.
The book leaves the 36-year-old Lawrence in 1922, hardened by the experiences of his European adventures and a dehumanising war. Along the way, the reader has been given a solid account of the inner contradictions of the man and his belief that an English audience would never understand him.