Last year was an unexpectedly big one for DH Lawrence. Not only did Frances Wilson publish her wild biography of the writer, there were also two Lawrence-inspired novels: Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, which transposes elements of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of her time with Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, on to a contemporary East Anglian landscape; and Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness, inspired by the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. For some, all this will have been stirring. Even a Lawrence refusnik like me thrilled to Wilson’s confounding book. But others will have looked on, waiting for it to pass, trying hard not to shudder. To read Lawrence is, as even some of his admirers admit, to be in the company of a bully, a preacher and a narcissist. Fascinating, he might be (in small doses). Good company he most definitely is not.
But, wait. It seems we’re not done with him yet. Lara Feigel, the academic and writer, now arrives late to the party, determined not only to reassess Lawrence, but to use him as some kind of guide to life. Yes, I know, this is somewhat hard to fathom. He’s not exactly M Scott Peck, is he? However, there are special circumstances. Look! We Have Come Through! is a pandemic book, born in extremis, of sorts. As Feigel explains in the introduction, just before the first lockdown in 2020, she let her London flat and retreated with her two children to a cottage in Oxfordshire. Though she had, at the time, already “agreed” to write a book about Lawrence, the project now seemed to her to be newly “necessary”. She required him for “urgent literary companionship”, very few writers being, to her mind, so good on “extreme forms of proximity” as Lorenzo. “What I want to gain from him is… a sense of what it means to accept our lived experience as one of perpetual change,” she writes, as if any of us have a choice in the matter.
At this point, the reader will wonder precisely what ilk of book she is holding in her hands. Is it criticism, memoir or self-help? This is a hard one to answer. Given that Feigel is looking only for certain things in Lawrence’s work – she divides her chapters according to subjects such as sex, parenthood and community – students of literature may want to go elsewhere. But it’s not much of a memoir, either. Yes, we read of a Lawrence-inspired jaunt she once took to Germany and Italy with a lover, during which she was irritable and insufficiently “gripped by carnality”. But this is about as intimate as it gets. Most of the time, the territory is humdrum. She tells off her children; she goes for walks; her partner looks at her bum and wonders if she will ever leave him for a younger man.
Which leaves self-help. Like Feigel, I think most human beings feel, sometimes, that they would like to be able to break the rules – to be more free, less conventional, less atrophied – and it may be this that draws some to Lawrence, especially when young (he is, it seems to me, a writer for those whose sap is rising). But to consider him a guru? To turn to him, as she does, for parenting advice? To do so seems rather extreme, not to say bizarre, to me. But having embarked on her project, she gives it a good old go, reluctant ever to admit to failure. Take Lawrence’s attitude to democracy (he was against it). “This is one of the aspects of Lawrence’s thinking I find most difficult,” she writes, as if there may yet still be some way to come to terms with it.
How she strains to find common ground between her life and that of Lawrence! Long accounts of the novels are bookended with observations so limp, so utterly banal, they could apply to almost anyone, in any situation. When she has a cold, for instance, it’s just like one of his. On and on she goes. Lawrence believed that the unconscious is to be found not in the head, but in the belly button, which brings her carefully to consider her stomach, happily still “taut”; now she lives in the country, she’s also content to agree with him that she would do well to “learn how to live from the sheep”, and pah! to psychoanalysis. At one point, she writes: “Our summer unfolds, rather like the one in Women in Love.” What? Pulse quickening, the reader pictures wanton frolicking, the “complete union” Birkin hoped to have with Ursula Brangwen. But, no. It’s more to do with the sun and the grass and Black Lives Matter.
In her introduction, Feigel acknowledges the “brilliant women” who published books about Lawrence in 2021. The writer she doesn’t mention here, however, is Geoff Dyer, whose hilarious and wholly uncategorisable book about Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, was published in 1997. And no wonder. It’s impossible not to think of – to long for – Dyer as you read Look! We Have Come Through!, his project being, in some senses, quite similar to Feigel’s. (Like her, he trails dutifully to Eastwood, in Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence grew up the son of a miner.) How baffling to find her – much later, in her acknowledgments – writing that she is “grateful to Dyer for showing that Lawrence is best written about irreverently”. She could have learned from his mercilessness and candour; she needs the occasional joke far more than anything Lawrence can give her. Who is her book for? It’s hard to imagine its intended reader. Far from encouraging me to rethink Lawrence, it seemed to confirm all my worst prejudices, chief among them the notion that those who are apt to stick up for him are usually to be regarded with deep suspicion.
• Look! We Have Come Through! Living With DH Lawrence by Lara Feigel is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
