BURNING MAN: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence is no longer censored but he is still on trial. History has remembered D. H. Lawrence not always flatteringly as a nostalgic modernist, a sexual liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look into his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered to the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this and how, 100 years after the publication of Women In Love, can we hear his voice above the noise? Delving into the memoirs of both those who loved and hated him most, Frances Wilson follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy, to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces his footsteps through the pages of his lesser-known work. She presents a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around the world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia, and in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, she shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'In this astonishing tale, rife with jealousy, messianism and blood, Wilson meets Lawrence on his own terms, offering readers a mythology of his deeply wild and complex spirit.' - Guardian. The book is divided into chapters Inferno: England 1915-19, Purgatory Italy 1919-22 and Paradise America 1922-25. In this way it is a triptych of self-contained biographical tales which take as their subject three versions of Lawrence with the focus on his middle years, the decade of superhuman energy and productivity between 1915 when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925 when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Lawrence was never in the same place for more than a few months; he and his wife Frieda roamed the world like gypsies and slept like foxes in dens because Lawrence believed there was no progress without contraries, and each of these tales sees him in battle. Here was a man both censored and worshipped in his lifetime and biography of this calibre is rare. 488 page paperback.