Lawrence David Herbert - D.H. Lawrence: a Biography

Praise for
D. H. Lawrence

Lucid, elegant, scholarly, and entertaining. Economist

This splendidly written biography of Lawrence tracks his savage pilgrimage with sympathy and deep understanding. Boston Globe

Meyers provides a succinct, factual narrative of events. He vividly evokes the settings of Lawrences peripatetic life. America

An industrious researcher and interviewer, Meyers is always vigorous, his conclusions unhesitant and forcefully expressed.... Shrewd [and] excellent. JULIAN SYMONS,Times Literary Supplement, author of Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, The End of Solomon Grundy, and Bland Beginning

The author has been enterprising in interviewing those aged survivors with firsthand contact with Lawrence. One can hope that this readable biography will generate new readers for Lawrence. Library Journal

Meyers reveals Lawrences life as the source for some of the most original writing in the English language.... Coverage of Lawrences life is precise, compressed, focused on the essential, formative experiences.... With Lawrence, there is always need for demythologizing. Meyers routinely rends the prophetic veil bedecking the author of the major novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Christian Science Monitor

Meyers is a prolific scholar.... His formal portrait of Lawrence is as full, measured and sharply defined as one could ask for. One of the pleasures that biography affords is glimpses of the people his subject encountered, and a life as disorderly as Lawrences attracts disorderly accomplices. Meyers presents these people with acid words that cut a memorable likeness. PETER S. PRESCOTT,Newsweek, author of A World of Our Own and A Darkening Green: Notes from the Silent Generation

Meyers has collected a considerable amount of new material on his subjects background and activities [which] add much to ones understanding of the forces that impelled him to write, and to live, as Lawrence did.... An excellent biography of a very complicated man. PHOEBE-LOU ADAMS,Atlantic Monthly

We get from Meyers the facts (some new and significant, thanks to diligent research), worked up into a lively story that is firmly aligned to when, where, and what. There are interviews with friends of Lawrence you thought were dead, and the first published photo of Lawrences supposed lover, William Henry Hocking. This is surely the most readable, judicious, and authoritative scholarly biography of Lawrence yet written.... Meyers puts forward his version of Lawrence with style and confidence. London Review of Books

A Fever at the Core: The Idealist in Politics

Married to Genius

Katherine Mansfield

The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis

Hemingway

Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam

Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle

D. H. Lawrence

Joseph Conrad

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

Scott Fitzgerald

Edmund Wilson

Robert Frost

Bogart: A Life in Hollywood

Gary Cooper: American Hero

Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers

George Orwell

Fiction and the Colonial Experience

The Wounded Spirit: T. E. Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom

A Readers Guide to George Orwell

Painting and the Novel

The Spirit of Biography

Hemingway: Life into Art

T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography

Catalogue of the Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon

George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

Wyndham Lewis by Roy Campbell

George Orwell: The Critical Heritage

Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage

Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader

Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation

D. H. Lawrence and Tradition

The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence

The Craft of Literary Biography

The Biographers Art

T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend

Graham Greene: A Revaluation

JEFFREY MEYERS

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First Cooper Square Press edition 2002

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of D. H. Lawrence is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1990. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

Copyright 1990 by Jeffrey Meyers

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press

A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1109

New York, New York 10003-1503

www.coopersquarepress.com

Distributed by National Book Network

A previous edition of this book was catalogued as follows by the Library of Congress:

Meyers, Jeffrey

D. H. Lawrence: a biography/Jeffrey Meyers.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 18851930Biography. 2. Authors, English20th CenturyBiography. I. Title.

ISBN 0-8154-1230-4

PR6023.A93Z68118 1990
823.912dc20 8943294

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

FOR WILLIAM CHACE

Illustrations follow

Though Lawrences life and works have been subject to intensive scrutiny, my own researchand the use of unpublished essays and letters of Lawrence and his circlehas revealed significant new information about the influence of coal mining and Congregationalism on Lawrences life, his parents background and social class, the circumstances of his mothers death, Lawrences physical sterility, the reasons for the suppression of The Rainbow and his exhibition of paintings, his friendship with Robert Mountsier and Esther Andrews, his homosexual relationship with the Cornish farmer William Henry Hocking, Ford Madox Fords role in Lawrences expulsion from Cornwall, the origins of his connection with Alfred Knopf and the clinical history of his tuberculosis. I also provide new interpretations of several works, including England, My England, The Rocking-Horse Winner and The Princess.

I have tried to emulate Lawrences great gift of perceiving and revealing the inner life of people, to illustrate his complex method of mingling autobiography and fiction, and to show (as F. R. Leavis observed) that there was no separation between the artist who wrote and the man who lived.