Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
Mission Impossible!
By Noel Annan
D.H. Lawrence: A Biography
by Jeffrey Meyers
Knopf, 445 pp., $24.95
D.H. Lawrence suffered the fate of one of those heroes in the Iliad—Patroclus perhaps—who are destroyed by the gods. Patroclus storms across the plains of Troy killing and scattering the Trojans until at the height of his brief triumph, Apollo steals up behind him, breaks his spear, knocks off his helmet, and leaves him defenseless. The young Lawrence, too, had his brief hour of triumph when he emerged as a new star in literary London, the renowned young author of Sons and Lovers, and boasted of his sexual success with Frieda in his book of poems Look! We Have Come Through! Then Apollo struck. The First World War turned Lawrence into a pacifist and an outcast. His great new novel, The Rainbow, was prosecuted for obscenity; suspected of being German spies, he and his wife were harassed by the authorities and hounded from their Cornish cottage where they were living penniless. At the end of the war he shook the dust of London off his feet and set off on a long Odyssey wandering from country to country only to see, at the end of his life, his last novel banned and his paintings seized by the police in England.
Review, 5158 words
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