The couple returned to England, embattled, Lawrence ready to publish Sons and Loversand to fight Frieda’s husband for her children (though there was a side of Lawrence that wanted Frieda unencumbered). They eloped to Germany in 1912, and there followed a year of fighting and reconciling that inspired the most brilliant sections of The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which he is so wonderfully attentive to the minute-by-minute gyrations of love and hate within a couple. There was a series of passionate, anxiously disembodied relationships with young women, followed by the fireworks of his meeting with Frieda Weekley, the married, older, aristocratic German wife of his college professor. The atmosphere of his childhood home, with his jolly but feckless miner father, his refined, long-suffering, son-smothering mother, infused his novels, poems, plays, and stories, and numerous biographies. Born in 1885, “Bert”-from his middle name Herbert-was a sickly child, and his mother didn’t think he had long to live.
It wasn’t obvious in his much-mythologized East Midlands childhood that this divisive figure was who Lawrence would become. He asked us to be stimulated, delighted, and outraged by turns. This is a writer, she argues, who didn’t ask us to agree with him. The author of acclaimed biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas De Quincey, Wilson is fully alive to his faults. Lawrence, Frances Wilson approaches Lawrence with the fierce spirit of argument that he has always attracted and required. In her new biography, Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. “Oh, but he’s a sister,” Angela Carter shouted out on TV, later explaining, with an insight that reveals who Lawrence can be in our own times, that she saw Lawrence as a “drag queen”: “The stocking covers a hairy, muscular leg.” Susan Sontag announced at one point that her whole project was to be a female D.H. “He was fiery and flamy and lambent, he was flickering and white-hot and glowing-all words he liked to use,” wrote Doris Lessing. It was left to female novelists and iconoclasts to defend him.
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir movingly described her distress at realizing that, despite Lawrence’s “cosmic optimism,” he “passionately believes in male supremacy.” But now Kate Millett turned Beauvoir’s ambivalence into something more angrily certain in her 1970 Sexual Politics, castigating Lawrence for propounding his “personal cult, ‘the mystery of the Phallus.’” Lawrence was toppled from the canon, and generations of English students (my own among them) got through English degrees without reading him.
And then they were taken up by the women. These arguments played out in court at the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where not just a book but a nation’s bodily life was on trial.
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