Volume 39, Number 4 · February 13, 1992
Lawrence in Love
By David Lodge
D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912
by John Worthen
Cambridge University Press, 626 pp., $35.00
So muses William Dubin, the fictional biographer of D.H. Lawrence whose midlife crisis is recounted in Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives (1979). It's a passage that focuses many of the anxieties—professional, ethical, psychological—of the modern biographer: the obsessive and almost perverse nature of the enterprise; the felt need to try to 'become' the subject of one's work, and the impossibility of succeeding; the straining to be comprehensive while knowing that selectivity is inevitable; the desire to give the biographical narrative unity and shapeliness, and the recognition that this is inevitably to deform the 'truth.'
Review, 5191 words
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