<i>The Life of D. H. Lawrence</i> (review)
1981; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bio.2010.0924
ISSN1529-1456
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo88 biography Vol. 4, No. 1 Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 256 pp. $17.95. The story goes that one day down in Mexico, author D. H. Lawrence and his plump hausfrau Frieda went out riding their horses, and that Frieda got carried away in the fast motion of her spirited mount's romp. "Oh, it's wonderful," Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed in ecstasy, "wonderful to feel his great thighs moving, to feel his powerful legs!" "Rubbish, Frieda!" D. H. shouted, vaulting in his saddle. "Don't talk like that. You've been reading my books. You don't feel anything of the sort!" Lawrence has not lacked Frieda-like biographers who have read his books, fallen under the spell of his words, and tossed away the bit and curb to give their inspired horses free rein. What he has yet to find is a biographer able to distinguish the fictions and pretensions of Lawrence from the actual man, and so achieve what the writer himself called "that piece of supreme art, a man's life." Those words serve as the epigraph to Keith Sagar's pictorial life of Lawrence, and they seem to imply that this newest and briefest of Lawrentian biographers has somehow succeeded in making sense—or even art—of the author's restless, romantic, and fractious personality. Sagar's book is an attempt to return to basics, to invoke narrative simplicity and visual authenticity in order to see Lawrence without distortion . To that end, he has fashioned a concise, chronological album. Hundreds of prints, photos, and portaits eclipse a bone-thin text that is fleshed out with extensive quotations from the Lawrence letters. The pictures tell the story of Lawrence the man from cradle to grave, but the story of the writer is largely left untold. This is a visually handsome and irresistible browse of a book, a "Lawrentian experience" so easily consumed that it leaves the reader without a trace of indigestion. The only question is whether it is really a biography. Can the life of a writer be told without close and exacting focus upon his writings? Sagar's refusal to play critic no doubt spares us from the tedious exegeses that plague literary biography, but the biographer who refuses to analyze the literary postures (as well as nonliterary poses) of his subject runs the risk of being controlled by him. That is precisely what has happened here. The putative biography of Lawrence by Sagar is actually a life of Lawrence according to Lawrence. In fairness, it may be argued that "popular" biographies of this kind have a different game plan, a different set of priorities and expectations Reviews 89 than their scholarly cousins. True enough. But Lawrence is exactly the kind of author—there are many like him in temper, if not in talent— whose complexity as artist and human being defeats any attempt to "simplify" him, even for the purposes of a non-critical, pictorial biography . One has to be critical with writers of this kind, or else hostage to them. In allowing Lawrence to reveal himself, Sagar has extended an invitation for evasion. That unsuspected truth is hinted in the haunting cover portrait of the slight, bearded Lawrence. His arms are crossed in defiance, as if he is unwilling to disclose himself, and there is an unmistakable look of reproach on his face. What is he trying to tell us if not the fact that he will yield to none but the most rigorous and demanding biographical analyst? That type of searching inquiry is hardly compatible with Sagar 's coffee table portfolio of snapshots and epistolary snippets. But if the cover portrait is an ironic clue to the merit of the biography which follows it, the irony of the portrait has escaped the eye of the biographer. For Sagar, the difficulty of Lawrence as subject simply does not exist. A confident and efficient storyteller, he has eliminated everything unessential to the brisk momentum of his photo-text. Without leisurely evaluation or shrewd speculation, and lacking any account of the evolution of Lawrence's literary imagination, Sagar's tale, however well-told, is only half-told...
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