D. H. Lawrence & Death

Let me be precise and unequivocal here. David Ellis, the distinguished critic and the author of the third and final volume of the Cambridge life of D. H. Lawrence, now has written nothing less than a masterpiece of biography, intellectual history, and medical inquiry in a study that is simultaneously wide-ranging and sharply focused. As the two-part title suggests, the work reflects a meticulous knowledge of the salient facts and themes embodied in Lawrence’s death, as well as an uncommonly humane understanding of other writers, works, and quotations that Ellis aptly employs as echo and counterpoint to unify his central subject: the sustained emphasis on Lawrence’s emotional disposition and medical condition in the last months of his life as he finally succumbs to the tuberculosis he had battled intermittently for probably more than a decade. Among the writers used by Ellis either to supply insights about the subject of death in their work, or to establish the relevant context of their own experience with fatal illness, are Chekhov, Keats, Shakespeare, Orwell, Freud, Katherine Mansfield, Byron, Dr. Johnson, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Philip Larkin, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen. A disparate list, no doubt, and one that reflects the commonality of the themes and situations that Ellis so nimbly engages. No name-dropping by him here, but an integrated tapestry that places Lawrence firmly at the center as it seamlessly radiates outward to connect with eminent and enriching words from literature, theology, psychology, philosophy and medicine.

The volume is divided evenly into three parts—“Dying,” “Death,” and “Remembrance,” and each of these areas consists of small topical chapters (totaling twenty-two) that stipulate in pithy titles a unifying preoccupation within the ongoing chronology of the last months of Lawrence’s life (“Bandol,” “Tuberculosis,” “The Sanatorium,” “Ad Astra,” “Famous Last Words,” “Rights,” and “Mortal Remains”). Part One starts in the late autumn and early winter of 1929–1930 at the Lawrences’ rental house in Bandol named Beau Soleil. Part Two focuses on the circumstances of his actual death and its immediate aftermath, and Part Three encompasses issues of remembrance, estate, and Frieda’s strained relations with the Lawrence family. I describe such symmetries in the book’s design to indicate a special advantage of Ellis’s principle of organization: the chapter headings in no way suggest the almost kinetic experience of reading Death and the Author. That is, the work relentlessly moves forward to the April of Lawrence’s death while it also meanders through time and space to often engage—as relevant and informative digression—the various issues of health, creativity, and marriage that impinge on his fast-closing life. Thus the study resonates, in effect, with an oxymoronic tone of ruminative and ongoing drama, as Ellis stop-actions the straight chronology to provide pertinent recollections from Lawrence’s early years as well as comparative analyses of the experiences and works of other writers. Such a fluid and nearly cinematic texture of movement in the volume builds up an unusual pattern of suspense as the final days of his life draw near—not a minor achievement for Ellis to sustain, given the predictability of the ending.

Ellis describes the volume as an “experiment in biography,” and its success remains more significant than that modest phrase suggests. The work presents a careful focus on the final months in Lawrence’s life while it cumulatively develops the philosophical, theological, medical, and practical issues that everyone confronts at the proximity of death. In the best of artistic ambitions, Ellis manages to universalize the particular example of D. H. Lawrence, as in the introduction he notes that “how people respond to the news they have an illness for which there is likely to be no cure is one of the implicit themes of this book.” He adds that correlative themes include the attitude that people “might adopt to medicine, orthodox or unorthodox, and the difference between the retention of a positive attitude to an illness and...