The great are not always good. If a biography should do justice to greatness, how should the biographer treat a writer’s discreditable acts? Erica Wagner raised the issue in these pages when she reviewed Blake Bailey’s recent biography of Philip Roth. Evidence of Roth’s crassness (slamming down the phone on a patient lover who was helping him to masturbate) could put off some readers; others might feel that a writer’s private habits, however offensive, are irrelevant to their works. The biographer, Wagner argued, must scrutinize the complex relationship between the artistry and the life.
In choosing DH Lawrence, Frances Wilson takes on the challenge of a genius whose fantasies of manhood annoyed some, especially women. As a student in Cape Town, I detested The Plumed Serpent (1926) with its demand for female submission (“marriage as female sacrifice”, in Wilson’s phrase) to a man male enough – that is, violent enough – to be a godlike leader. At the age of 20 I vowed never to read the novel again. Wilson recalls her mother refusing to have Lawrence’s books in the home, and that her tutor in the early Eighties would not teach him. She herself does not flinch from delivering a just opinion: “The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive… It is also boring, at times brutally so.” Wilson’s acumen, and willingness to criticise when it is called for, aids her spirited case for reviving Lawrence despite his flaws.
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