A Romantic Democrat

...The "instinct of community" was vital to his thinking, and his ideal was radically democratic: "So, we know the first great purpose of Democracy: that each man shall be spontaneously himself-each man himself, each woman herself, without any question of equality or inequality entering in at all...

...Their suppression was the terrible disappointment of Lawrence's life -for if people were not allowed to read what he had to say, how could he hope to bring about social change...

...Sagar's ideas of Lawrence as rebel and authoritarian only frustrate such an understanding...

...But he felt no sympathy for the Right-wing secret army that emerged in Sydney after World War I, or for rising Italian Fascism...

...This is the great achievement of The Rainbow and Women in Love, his best novels, as well as of the lesser Lady Chatterley's Lover...

...To some early social commentators, industrialism, capitalism, democracy, and popular culture appeared all of a piece...

...Instead, he has filled this book with quotations from the standard biographies-in particular Harry T. Moore's The Priest of Imagination and Edward Nehls' D.H...

...better than any other works of British fiction they demonstrate the effects of industrial capitalism on human energy and possibility...

...There is plenty of evidence to support this view: Lawrence's "hatred of the human world," his hero-worship, his pronouncements against democracy, especially while in Australia and America, his contemptuous attacks on general education, his sexism...

...excerpts from his letters, essays, literary criticism, and fiction tend to leap out from the page...

...That I know...

...Moreover, within the plot of Lawrence as romantic rebel the theme of Lawrence as an authoritarian, even fascist personality is overemphasized...

...For being himself-for being "damned and doomed," as he said of one of his characters, "to the old effort at serious living"-lawrence deserves our most serious understanding...

...True, Lawrence was a genius at speaking for himself...

...thus the criticism of one often entailed an attack on the others...

...And at the end of his life he said of his earlier enthusiasm for masculine leadership: "The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back number...

...I would assert, rather, that D.H...

...from memoirs by those who loved and hated the writer, usually in that order...

...As he put it: "I know we must have a more generous, more human system based on the life values and not on the money values...

...Lawrence was neither a romantic anarchist nor an authoritarian...

...Lawrence's collected letters now being published by Cambridge University Press, Keith Sagar might be expected to throw some new light on the life of this complex artist...

...In addition to the quotations, often as many as six per page, there are here over 150 pictures of Lawrence, his friends, paintings, and favorite places-with Sagar providing connecting commentary...

...He doesn't...

...Lawrence, A Composite Biography...

...Growing up as the son of a downtrodden miner and a socially ambitious mother, Lawrence had experienced this "base forcing" first hand...

...he had witnessed its effect on the lives of those closest to him and seen what it implied for his own...

...Lawrence's outlook was actually that of a radical democrat, as his essay, "Democracy," most clearly attests...

...Lawrence recognized his hardly unique limitation...

...The result is an odd hybrid of the new-fangled coffee-table picture book and the old-fashioned "life and letters" biography, where the subject is allowed "to speak for himself...

...He may have been driven to seek a personal solution, but he knew that the system had to be changed for everyone...

...The problem presented by Lawrence's contradictions is not solved simply by selecting bits of his writing for blame or praise...

...Yet even in his despondent and bitter moods, he kept trying to realize in his fiction that ideal society "based on the life values...

...Although never stated explicitly, the assumption seems to be that he rebelled against existing forms of authority because he wanted to be a master himself, a desire he finally satisfied in his writing...

...The leader-cum-follower relationship is a bore...

...Author, "Elizabeth Bowen" As one of the editors of the seven-volume edition of D.H...

...The problem for Lawrence, as for all idealists, was how to achieve a new community without "forcing the being" of anyone else...

...otherwise he could not have declared that his "real concern" as a novelist was to show "the changes inside the individual" wrought by society...

...All of his human energy demanded that he fight to be free of the system...

...But, while he never defended material inequality, he wanted to go beyond a state of average material comfort to one where people accepted each other's "present otherness...

...The biographer's task is to give some sense of his subject as a whole person...

...After all, at the back of the hero is the militant ideal: and the militant ideal, or the ideal militant, seems to me also a cold egg...

...And the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men and men and women, and not the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort of business...

...What Lawrence sometimes called "the industrial problem," sometimes "democracy," was really capitalism, or "the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition...

...it requires an understanding of the dynamics of his psyche...

...and that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man or of any other woman...

...But what steps to take I don't know...

...and from Lawrence's already published letters...

...It was not simply a matter of "fleeing...

...He believed the political state and modern democratic socialism were necessary to assure "proper facilities for every man's clothing, feeding, housing himself, working, sleeping, mating, playing, according to his necessity as a common unit, an average...

...But by combining Lawrence's self-analysis with a concise survey of his life, Sagar creates an unfortunately conventional picture of the romantic rebel, diminishing Lawrence's significance as a person, a cultural critic and a novelist...