D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage by Brenda Maddox Simon & Schuster 620 pp. $30.00 Review by Robert Kiely Featured in BBR August Among the many intriguing photographs in Brenda Maddox's fine biographical study of D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, one stands out among all the rest. Taken in New Mexico in 1935, five years after Lawrence's death, it shows three women huddled together like school chums on a front porch. They are obviously having a great time, not just smiling for the camera, but laughing at some joke of their own. On the left, still wearing her dark hair in girlish bangs, is Mabel Dodge Luhan, "the Ottoline of the Golden West," who had brought the Lawrences to New Mexico and set them up in their mountain retreat. On the right, wearing a weird turban, is Dorothy Brett, Nietzschean devotee of Lawrence who followed him about the world insisting that he make love to her. In the middle is Frieda, frowzy and chortling, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Wearing an impossibly baggy flower-strewn dress and clasping her hands around one knee, she sits triumphant like a Wagnerian Annie Oakley. If this had been an Irish story, the three women would have been sitting on Lawrence's coffin to make sure the corpse didn't wake up for one last brawl. But it isn't an Irish story. Lawrence, of course, was from the British midlands and Frieda was descended from Prussian aristocracy. Even in their wildest and silliest moments, there is an earnestness and solemnity about their unconventional lives that alternately makes them seem admirable and infuriating. While insisting on the primacy of the body and the need to be down to earth, they could both exert their wills in the name of abstractions that appear to have little to do with the flesh. Lawrence could hardly talk or write about orgasms or sexual positions without lapsing into philosophy, religion, and politics, and sometimes a combination of all three. What more is there to say about this talented and idiosyncratic man and his German wife? And why say it now, when Lawrence's reputation is under a cloud of irritation and indifference from feminists and other readers with a low tolerance for male supremacy, fascism, and feverish late Romanticism? Brenda Maddox has not written an apology or a defense. While well aware of the attacks on Lawrence from many quarters, she nonetheless takes for granted that he was a writer of genius with powerful descriptive gifts and extraordinary insight into human psychology. She also confesses to liking him. "No one could read Lawrence's letters and not like him." But what mainly interests Maddox is Lawrence's sexuality. Famous and controversial because of his writings about sex, he still remained for her a puzzle as a sexual being. Did he really love or hate women? Was he a repressed homosexual? Was he impotent? What was he actually doing while he was writing and saying all those notorious things about sex? In order to piece together a coherent picture, Maddox has chosen to focus her biographical study on Lawrence's marriage to Frieda. More than any other biographer, she has given Frieda a central place in the narrative and, what is more important, a voice. She portrays Frieda as a "naturally" sexual being, skilled to the point of artistry in making love and making men love her. In many ways, she was Lawrence's sexual tutor. Though both were experienced when they met, she was the expert, the teacher, both master and mistress. Maddox shows us a passionate, good-humored, sensual woman, but also a person of intelligence and sensitivity. No other biographer that I am aware of deals so fully and so well with her suffering and remorse over leaving her children and finding herself forbidden to see them. Maddox is a splendid and imaginative narrator. When dealing with Frieda and the other women in Lawrence's life, she is always compelling, sympathetic and entertaining. On Lawrence's male friendships and the question of his homosexuality, she is less satisfying. True enough, this is an issue on which Lawrence was a good deal more evasive and skittish than most others. On one hand, he could condemn sex between men as coming from "deep inward dirt...a sort of sewer." On the other, he could depict, in novels like The White Peacock and Women in Love, a love between men so tender and erotic as to be "superior" to anything possible with a woman. In her introduction, Maddox states simply that Lawrence "was not homosexual in any accepted meaning of the term." Much later, she argues that he was not, "like Forster, a suppressed homosexual." It is perfectly true that Lawrence was not like E.M. Forster (in any sense), but the "accepted meanings" of sexual categories were among the things Lawrence railed against. Whatever we call it, Lawrence's attraction to men was a constant and powerful factor in his life and writing. As Frieda and Lawrence wandered the globe from England to Germany to Italy to Australia to New Mexico, they encountered characters as colorful and unconventional as themselves. It is to Brenda Maddox's credit that she gives full due to these figures and has a great eye and ear for the telling or ridiculous detail. Maurice Magnus, the author of Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, liked the color of Lawrence's hair and asked whether he dyed it. "It's got no particular color at all," Lawrence answered. "So I couldn't dye it that." He met Witter Bynner, Harvard '02, translator, poet, patron of Ezra Pound, in New Mexico where Bynner, a lover of "silk kimonos and caftans...led the annual parade in Santa Fe in deerstalker costume." After a visit from the Lawrences to her villa in Tuscany, Lady Ida Sitwell wrote, "A Mr. D.H. Lawrence came over the other day, a funny little petit-maitre of a man with flat features and a beard. He says he is a writer...His wife is a large German." It is little wonder that Lawrence often lost his temper. His fits of anger are almost as famous as his fits of sexual arousal. Once, in the Black Forest, Maddox reports that he was so angry that he even found the pine trees irritating: "Why can't they have leaves!" Moderate in almost nothing, Lawrence virtually worked (wrote) himself to death. At the age of forty-four, weighing eighty-five pounds, he was working on a book review when he died. In it, he offers his own redefinition of "pleasing" God: "...happily doing one's best in the job in hand, and being lovingly absorbed in an activity which makes one in touch with - with the heart of all things; call it God." Frieda lived on until 1957, remarried, but if she had the last laugh, it was not at Lawrence's expense. Brenda Maddox gives her the final words in this absorbing tale: "His life and his writing was one - and I say to everybody who wants to have anything to do with him or me: hats off to our relationship! Bring off the same if you can!" Maddox calls the Frieda-Lawrence marriage "a mismatch made in heaven." She does nothing to gloss over the crudities, quarrels, selfishness, egotism, insensitivity of which each was capable. But she obviously takes pleasure in recalling the lives of these two and will give equal pleasure to any reader willing to put reservations aside and think about D.H. Lawrence once again. Robert Kiely is professor of English at Harvard and author of Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth Century Novel. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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