Magnus showed Lawrence a photograph of his German mother Hedwig, and, knowing that Magnus wanted her praised, Lawrence dismissed her loveliness as common and “trivial”. This biography explores one of his less familiar relationships, with a charming sponger called Maurice Magnus who crossed Lawrence’s path in Italy in 1919-20. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.“You revolt me stewing in your consumption.” “I loathe you,” Lawrence wrote in this last letter to her. In the past she had served as model for the liberated Gudrun in Women in Love (1920). In 1920, when Lawrence was in Capri – he left England in 1919, beginning what Wilson describes as a life “on the run” – his friend and fellow writer, Katherine Mansfield, was slowly dying of tuberculosis in Menton, France. She herself does not flinch from delivering a just opinion: “ The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive… It is also boring, at times brutally so.” Wilson’s acumen, and willingness to criticise when it is called for, aids her spirited case for reviving Lawrence despite his flaws. Wilson recalls her mother refusing to have Lawrence’s books in the home, and that her tutor in the early Eighties would not teach him. At the age of 20 I vowed never to read the novel again. As a student in Cape Town, I detested The Plumed Serpent (1926) with its demand for female submission (“marriage as female sacrifice”, in Wilson’s phrase) to a man male enough – that is, violent enough – to be a godlike leader. In choosing DH Lawrence, Frances Wilson takes on the challenge of a genius whose fantasies of manhood annoyed some, especially women. The biographer, Wagner argued, must scrutinize the complex relationship between the artistry and the life. Evidence of Roth’s crassness (slamming down the phone on a patient lover who was helping him to masturbate) could put off some readers others might feel that a writer’s private habits, however offensive, are irrelevant to their works.
If a biography should do justice to greatness, how should the biographer treat a writer’s discreditable acts? Erica Wagner raised the issue in these pages when she reviewed Blake Bailey’s recent biography of Philip Roth.
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