A Search for Manhood

...Lawrence believed that his mother had feminized him...

...Reading this new one, I found myself reflecting on the many stages of Lawrence criticism and biography I have traversed during more than 30 years of academic life...

...Reviewed by Carolyn G. Heilbrun Avalon Professor in the Humanities Emerita, Columbia...

...Through the decades, interpretations of Lawrence's life and work have evolved the way a crustacean sheds one shell and then forms another...

...He did much of the domestic work...

...Lawrence's faults and betrayals are honestly displayed in this biography, if hardly chided...

...One should add, however, that for him that fulfillment meant the accomplishment of a "man's" entire destiny...

...Squires and Talbot, perhaps because of this dual viewpoint, are especially astute in reading much in Lawrence's novels as disguised but evident messages to Frieda that he could not deliver any other way...

...Lawrence's fiction with a central sexual theme develops from The Rainbow, in which he has bestowed his own experiences upon the woman protagonist, Ursula Brangwen, who can be seen metaphorically to be giving birth to herself at the end of the novel...

...Perhaps one must turn to Lawrence from his or her culture, seeking enlightenment with problems and questions immediately present...

...Of particular salience is the authors' decision to call Living at the Edge a biography of both D.H...

...Whereas, in his earlier works, "female characters serve[d] as agents of male wholeness, now men do so for themselves...

...yet despite their efforts to place Frieda at the center of Lawrence's existence, she remains singular only as wives of famous men are ever wont to be: in his orbit...

...The authors are aware that feminists, and perhaps many women not so identified, might be "angered" by Lawrence's views on women's place in sex and in marriage...

...and] prepares to sacrifice the woman...

...Lawrence's sexual theories form an essential part of Living at the Edge, not because Squires and Talbot are necessarily in favorof women being deprived of orgasm, but because they are making a vigorous and intelligent attempt to explain Lawrence's development as a novelist and thinker...

...The theme's penultimate expression is in The Plumed Serpent, where a woman achieves contentment only in self-abnegation to her chosen male...

...Even when young, some of us found Lawrence's evocation of "the old dark gods who had waited so long in the outer dark" a bit troubling...

...But does the declaration that their book is a double biography make it so, or is this, like the biographies that have preceded it, about Lawrence, with his marriage to Frieda simply a major event in his life and work...

...Aligned with that search is his palpable homosexuality, his adoration of manly men...

...We are not told why she had no children with Lawrence, or if any means were taken to prevent her having children...

...Throughout the book, theiruse of his last name and her first provides a clue to the inevitable unbalance in their narration...

...Thus they must find themselves admiring the scene in Lady Chatterley's Lover where Connie discovers during a night of passion, through "the deepest organic shame...

...One can only wish he had come to terms with his evidently androgynous nature less painfully...

...Frieda did manage, certainly as she is presented in this book, to hold her own with Lawrence...

...his whole life was a search for his manhood...

...He had a vision, and he devoted himself to embodying it in fiction...

...Here, then, is a biography for anyone coming to Lawrence anew, or anyone wishing to revive an acquaintance with him...

...Lawrence will inevitably be viewed through the lens of generation...

...Finally, in Lady Chatterleys Lover, "the Lady" discovers "a religious awe in the man's flesh," and anal intercourse is revealed as her necessary sexual surrender and the means of her ultimate satisfaction...

...Diana Trilling, in a 1973 essay entitled "Lawrence and the Movements of Modern Culture," spoke of "an unconditioned sexuality with no goal except its own fulfillment," a comment still relevant today...

...Ironically, as the authors perceive, whatever his ideal woman in his books, in life he seems, apart from Frieda, to have found great comfort in a buddy: His friend Dorothy Brett, for instance, "turned herself into the man Lawrence had always wanted to work beside...

...author, "Writing a Woman's Life,' "The Last Gift of Time" Any work about D.H...

...Similarly, throughout their book they celebrate Lawrence's search for words to express his sense of darkness: When, having witnessed an Apache dance, he says, "something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror," he is undergoing a uniquely Lawrentian experience, not one widely encountered...

...Those who helped Lawrence, like those who irritated him, ended up as easily recognizable evil characters in his books...

...Reading Living at the Edge, though, we understand his unique interpretation of life, and his endless pursuit of its ideal form, which he never found...

...I would highly recommend it to any young person wishing to read a biography of Lawrence, or to any older person interested in seeing where studies of this writer stand these days...

...For those who have not recently reread "The Woman Who Rode Away," as well as for those who would not find its horror mitigated by either technique or serenity, suffice it to mention that the woman is laid on a sacred altar and "at the orgasmic moment when the dying sun shines through a long shaft of ice...

...This special awakening to one's breaking soul is also, as we have seen, to be found in anal intercourse...

...True, she gave up her children (as, later, Doris Lessing would do) to leave her first, wildly unsatisfactory marriage...

...It was undoubtedly easier to sympathize with his pronouncements and remedies in the England before and after World War I than today in the Western world after the '60s...

...This "double biography" is, moreover, written by a married couple who bring to their work the "lens of our own marriage...

...Or, as the authors put it, "Lawrence begins to marginalize women," even if they are central to the narrative...

...Tellingly, the authors introduce her into the story with the heading "Frieda Finds Her Destiny...

...Frieda may have indeed been his inspiration and enabler, but doesn't her entire claim upon our interest abide in her husband...

...Equally undeniable is his assured place in the history of the English novel, and his unique ability to speak to certain people at certain times with indispensable insight and authority...

...It takes into account the major earlier works on Lawrence, and benefits from a careful reconsideration of previously published opinions and interpretations...

...That his own particular needs and assumptions, more than with any other writer, drove his life and works is undeniable...

...Lawrence's language agonizes as it reaches for something he endlessly sought but never found...

...where in the jungle of her body every secret is pried open...

...that is why he will always appeal differently to different generations...

...They counter this objection by pointing, for example, to the "technical perfection" of "The Woman Who Rode Away," and to the "serene perfection" of the story's art...

...That is not to suggest Living at the Edge is either unwelcome or unnecessary...

...she refused to become his maidservant or, in his final hours, his nurse...

...She felled logs for the new porch, hauled them, trimmed them, shot rabbits for meat, saddled the horses," and so on...

...He struggled to deny this, yet partially acknowledged it in his occasional sexual adventures with men both in his writing and personally...

...The authors concur in the general belief that sex, in both its meanings, is the source of just about everything in Lawrence's universe, andadopthis views without much debate...

...the priest lifts his long phallic knife...

...quite the contrary...

...And I concluded that Michael Squires and Lynn K. Talbot seem, despite their scholarly finds, to belong to the '50s when their subject's sermons about sexual salvation overwhelmed his admirers...

...the use of contraception in that marriage is inconceivable...

...She insisted that men needed women to be equal to them, but it is never entirely clear what she means by this— other than not putting up with denigration in any form...

...The authors are working on an edition of her letters...

...The woman's destiny was to receive sex without seeking her own sexual satisfaction, a principle the authors do not challenge...