BIOGRAPHY: Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence, Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury, $49.99

It is easy for us to forget how enormous a figure D.H. Lawrence was in his lifetime and immediately afterwards. After the publication of his novels The Rainbow, Women in Love and Sons and Lovers he was often grouped through the 1920s with Joyce, Proust, Eliot and Yeats as a member of the highest echelon of modernist writers. When you consider that in the two years following Lawrence’s death in March 1930 no fewer than 17 memoirs were published about him, there is a case to say that, by sheer force of personality alone, Lawrence was, back in the day, the biggest of them all.

This is perhaps largely due to the way artistic movements, indeed historical eras, are never as clearly delineated as they seem. So despite the rise of avant-garde modernism in the early decades of the 20th century, the more decoratively emotional dramas of English Romanticism well and truly still held the imagination of readers worldwide. Lawrence himself was as much under the sway of Byron, and particularly Shelley, as anyone, and therefore as much a writer of Romantic impulse as he was an experimentalist.

And while Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time were important for the way they formally mirrored the illusions of an increasingly fragmented world, Lawrence’s early novels were less aesthetically radical as they were bracingly, and symbolically, honest. Indeed, Frances Wilson, the author of Burning Man, a fascinating new Lawrence biography, believes that he invented autofiction long before Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk, and with a type of urgency that ushered in a new age of gnashing self involvement and wilful psychogeographic drift.

Wilson’s Burning Man feels like the most charismatic moment in the afterlife of Lawrence since Geoff Dyer’s non-memoir of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, appeared in 1997. The striking thing about both these books is how relentlessly entertaining they are, in Wilson’s case because of the way her excitingly intuitive scholarship sits alongside an appetite for weighing in, defending, attacking and outright laughing at her subject.

This immersive approach is further heightened by her decision to model the narrative structure of Lawrence’s life on Dante’s Divine Comedy, no less, thereby ramping up the already high mythological stakes he has always tended to arouse.

Still, Burning Man remains an impossibly balanced narrative of the tubercular Lawrence’s “semi-sane” lifestyle,
driven as it was by his search for a medicinal “vale of health” on the one hand, and his rather more abstract ambition to reunify the sundered body and mind of Western culture, on the other.

Lawrence comes across here not just as a hero-writer but as some kind of toxic emanation of the coal-dark inferno of industrialisation. In Wilson’s hands he is as nastily messianic as he is admirably allergic to domestication and sentimentality. Inevitably, though, he was an artist formed by the very traditions he was setting out to redeem.