Jessie Chambers was the second daughter of the smallholder of Haggs Farm where the teenage D H Lawrence became a welcome visitor because of his “exuberance, his gaiety, his powers of mimicry, his resourcefulness….his readiness to help” causing even Mr Chambers to exclaim “Work goes like fun when Bert’s here: it’s no trouble to keep them going”.

Jessie and Lawrence became close friends, paying weekly visits to the library where they took out more books than were strictly allowed, read and discussed them earnestly. For about a decade, Jessie was the sounding board for Lawrence’s musing over, say, the obligation to use one’s talents to do good, the nature of love, or his need to be free to travel abroad, without a fixed home which was a foretelling of the course his life would take.

Sadly, this intellectual closeness aroused the jealousy of his over possessive mother, who forced them to consider the emotional aspect of their relationship. With the callousness he was to show so often in the future, Lawrence told Jessie, “I’ve looked into my heart and I cannot find that I love you as a husband should love his wife”. Yet since he could not bear to give up her company, he suggested they could marry if she wanted, but he would need to seek physical fulfilment elsewhere, or if he managed to find a woman to satifsy him physically, he and Jessie could continue a clandestine intellectual relationship. Clearly this marred their friendship, obliging Jessie to conceal the love she felt for him, until his elopement with the married mother-of-three Frieda Weekley put an end to any further relationship.
In the meantime, her distress did not prevent Jessie from copying out some of Lawrence’s poems and sending them to a publisher, when he was all for giving up the attempt to get his work accepted after several rejections. Years later, he wrote to thank “the girl (who) had launched me, so easily on my literary career, like a princess cutting a thread, launching a ship”.

Jessie was also among the first victims of his habit of including people he knew in his books without any attempt to disguise them, although in making Jessie his model for Miriam in “Sons and Lovers”, what really upset her were the distortions in the portrayal of her relationship with Lawrence. This was despite his assertion “It isn’t meant for the truth. It’s an adaptation from life, as all art must be”.

This memoir was written after Lawrence’s early death from tuberculosis in 1930. Written with great clarity, this impresses the reader as utterly authentic, insightful and moving. Along with her inner suffering over his overt insensitive agonising, she notes his love of nature, acute powers of observation, and gift for putting sensations into words.

The memoir is also a vivid evocation of life in the early C20 in the rural and mining communities of Nottinghamshire. In a world devoid of television and social media, Jessie’s father read magazine instalments of Tess of the D’Urbervilles aloud to his enthralled wife, and the family acted out Macbeth under Lawrence’s direction, “half-amused, half-vexed” when Mr. Chambers , horrified by what he had to say as McDuff, was driven to exclaim, “Oh dear, oh dear! How awful!” Yet ironically, in the awful social class divide, Lawrence’s first publisher Hueffer was uncertain how to talk to working men, clearly unaware that they could be sensitive and self-educated.

Even the comments included in inverted commas in the memoir could be precisely what was said, because Jessie first began writing an account of her friendship with Lawrence under the title “The Rathe Primrose” as early as 1911. After her final break with Lawrence in 1913, she destroyed this manuscript, and it is interesting to speculate whether she was the victim of the sexism of the day when a publisher rejected it earlier as “unlikely to be a commercial success”.

This engrossing doorstep of a biography focuses on the eighteen years of D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with Frieda, his former tutor’s striking, ebullient, promiscuous German wife. Lawrence was probably attracted by her lack of inhibition and belief in free expression which she had picked up via a previous lover from continental thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, in such sharp contrast to the narrow, Congregational chapel world of the Nottinghamshire mining community in which he had grown up.
In turn, Frieda believed herself to be nurturing and inspiring his genius as a writer, arguing after his death that, if he had married his first girlfriend Jessie Chambers, he would never have been more than “a little local poet, a watered down Thomas Hardy”.

For those who admired Frieda, there seem to have been more who regarded her as a very damaging influence on him, even to the point of contributing to his death by failing to use common sense and insisting on obtaining proper treatment for the tuberculosis which he denied for years, almost to the end. Admittedly, he could only tolerate life in a sanatorium for a fortnight when he eventually admitted defeat. Apart from her frequent infidelities which Lawrence seemed to tolerate, her worst fault seems to have been provoking him quite knowingly into the savage bursts of anger in which he beat her, even in front of visitors and friends. This, together with the undeniable misogyny in some of his later writing, plus his preoccupation with male dominance in marriage, triggered the condemnation of the 1970s feminist movement, as represented by Kate Millett.

As a result, Lawrence now remains well-known, but not particularly revered, so it is interesting to learn how quickly and easily he gained initial recognition, although his growing fame was fed by the notoriety of his later work, culminating in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, banned in both England and America, which it is disappointing to learn was written simply to earn as much as possible quickly when he knew he was dying. Apart from his main rival James Joyce, Lawrence was admired by famous writers like E.M. Forster and Aldous Huxley, although many were offended by his habit of including them undisguised, but often caricatured in his novels. They were repelled by the too frequent violent outbursts which made even friends doubt his sanity at times.

This could of course be attributed to his frequent ill health, and the suppressed knowledge that he had a disease which caused him considerable pain, and would kill him prematurely. When he was a child, his mother’s possessiveness, heightened by the need to nurse him through a long illness, and generally to protect him from infection, must have affected his emotional development. Her bitter contempt for her husband, which she encouraged her children to share, must also have damaged Lawrence’s ability to form stable relationships, but author Brenda Maddox does not explore these aspects much.

Lawrence is fascinating in his dual personality. Many found him charismatic, charming and entertaining, although his skilful mimicry must have been insensitive at times. He was industrious, with many practical skills, often generous with his time and money, when he had it, to help others. Yet he could also be cruel, abusive, sharp-tongued, dogmatic and opinionated to the degree that one might question how “good” a writer he really was when he committed some of his bizarre, often confused, ideas to print.

A restless wanderer to Italy, Ceylon, Australia or the high plains of the US state of New Mexico and Mexico itself in search of the pure air at high altitudes to ease his lungs, Lawrence gained the material for his memorable travel writing. His keen observation of nature and animals (which did not prevent his vicious beating of a pet dog) produced some striking poetry: “A snake came to my water-trough….” . “Sons and Lovers” is an enduring classic, although a clear example of the degree to which he drew on his own experience, in the process misrepresenting his relationship with Jessie Chambers, which he would justify by arguing that “art is not life”, even if it draws on real people for inspiration.

His later work, as summarised and quoted from in this book, often appears too farcical, perhaps intentionally, produced too quickly, with a loss of his earlier more subtle and considered style. But whatever one’s view of his work, Lawrence and Frieda remain an intriguing couple, rattling through their world of evocative places and famous names from the past.

Perhaps to achieve an original take on D H Lawrence, Frances Wilson’s biography “of imagination”, links the author’s middle years, “the decade of superhuman energy and productivity” from 1915-25, with the events of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. So the war years of 1915-19 which Lawrence spent in England, being too sick to enlist, are “Inferno; “Purgatory” applies to 1919-1922, spent in Italy with his wife Frieda, who had abandoned her husband, his former tutor, and her three children for Lawrence, while the years spent in America and Mexico, 1922-25 are “Paradise”.

This approach made me realise the influence of Dante on the education of men of Lawrence’s generation, as well as on earlier writers like Shelley whom he admired, at least in his youth. Having only a sketchy knowledge of Dante myself, I probably missed the cleverness of many allusions, but the device seemed to me too contrived, and ultimately rather tedious.

Just as streams of consciousness can add power to fiction, the author’s continual roller coasters of digressions from digressions often bring Lawrence and his associates to life. However, the style creates a hectic quality, at times overloaded with detail or repetition. The stated intention to focus on some of the more “minor” characters in Lawrence’s life leads to what seem disproportionately long sections on for instance, Maurice Magnus, the conman lover of flamboyant writer Norman Douglas. Towards the end, with the restless Lawrence ricocheting round the world, from Australia to Ceylon to New Mexico in the company of characters portrayed as larger than life, amoral, highly eccentric, even mentally disturbed, like American patron of the arts and Indian rights, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the book verges on black farce. The author’s interpretation of the latter’s neuroses seems open to question, and a distraction from the business of trying to understand DH Lawrence.

Wilson’s tendency to provide potted summaries of some of Lawrence’s later plots, presenting them as increasingly bizarre, is counterproductive in deterring one from wanting to read them. Yet it is worth ploughing through the verbiage to glean the occasional insight. For instance, Rebecca West “compared his wanderings to those of the mystic or Russian saint ‘who says goodbye and takes his stick and walks out with no objective but the truth’ ”. She noted his “vision of mankind that he registered again and again…always rising to a pitch of ecstatic agony”. She also saw how “his shoulder-blades stood out through his clothing “in a pair of almost wing-like projections” – a sign of tuberculosis spotted long before in Roman times. His strong “sense of place” often led to disappointment: he detested Ceylon, probably because it aggravated the consumption which he refused to acknowledge, but loved the high desert regions of New Mexico which suited his declining health.

Influenced by Carl Jung, Lawrence told his first love Jessie Chambers, “I’m not one man, but two”: “the second me, a hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer which troubles the pleasanter me, the human who belongs…… to nobody, not even to myself”. Combining intense introspection with acute observation of others, Lawrence caused many people distress through portraying them so unmistakably in his novels, often incorporating real events. As shown in his striking poetry, he had an affinity with animals, which being dumb did not arouse his wrath.

The author seems to gloss over the more positive aspects of his personality, to focus on the flaws. He is mainly portrayed as an arrogant, opinionated monster, given to bigoted, offensive outbursts, but did he really mean them? The man who dreamed of founding a utopian “little colony”, with “no money but a sort of communism as far as the necessities of life” seems at odds with the one who rails against democracy. He beats his wife in front of horrified friends, although this may be a kind of theatrical act, triggered by Frieda’s provocative actions – the fag hanging from the corner of her mouth – almost a writerly experiment in experiencing anger in order to describe it. Towards the end, the rants become more extreme, the prose style grows intentionally cruder (to be more “American”) as Lawrence seems to disintegrate into a kind of madness. According to Frances Wilson, he “had once more changed his shape: no longer a marauding fox or a red wolf or a plumed serpent, he now saw himself as Pan, sex-god of the mountain wilds”. Is this artistic licence on her part? At worst, he might nowadays simply be diagnosed as having manic tendencies.

I would have liked a more thematic approach, analysing more objectively his dual personality perhaps better described as complex. To what extent was he damaged by his mother’s possessiveness, and her contempt for his father? In a class-ridden society, as a miner’s son he must have felt keenly the snobbery he encountered. The blinkered British censorship of some of his work, with even “The Rainbow”, condemned by the prosecution as “disgusting, detestable and pernicious….in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” must have stimulated his tendency to murderous thoughts, and his desire to quit a land with its “dead muffled sense” of everything being “sand-bagged”. The debilitating respiratory illness he suffered most winters, and in some climates, must have fed his negativity.

Finding this book by turns intensely gripping and tediously overblown, impressed by the author’s remarkably deep research, I am left with a sense of vital missing pieces in the jigsaw, distorting her portrayal of Lawrence. This motivates me to read the record of Jessie Chambers, the calm, intelligent girl on whom the youthful Lawrence “hammered himself out”, and to seek out another biographer to enable me the better to to judge to what extent his intense introspection ultimately blighted his genius.