D. H. Lawrence and Biography

30:3, Reviews D. H. LAWRENCE AND BIOGRAPHY Daniel J. Schneider. TAe Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986. $25.00 In the Preface to The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography , Daniel J. Schneider comments that the work was "written chiefly for general readers who . . . wish to deepen their understanding of the development of Lawrence's thought and feehng over the course of his lifetime" (ix). That is a fair statement of this critic's ambition, but it is also a characteristically modest judgment of the real value of Schneider's study, which has much to interest both Lawrence scholars and a less specialized audience of readers. His reiterated aim is to isolate a pervasive theme that connects the passions of Lawrence's Ufe with the obsessions of his art, as Schneider uses a doctrinal bridge to more than justify his volume's subtitle, "An Intellectual Biography ." He strives to document and evaluate a driving force of mind, temperament , and vision in Lawrence, "to lay bare Lawrence's incessant, all-absorbing, and passionate effort over a lifetime to develop a religious alternative to contemporary skepticism or outworn belief (ix). As the tone of that confident formulation by Schneider might suggest, he is essentially sympathetic to this prolific "effort" by Lawrence and to the fundamental contribution of Lawrencian doctrine. Such an avowedly admiring interpretation of a man and his masks (Schneider does acknowledge a debt to EUmann's biographies) results here not in hagiography but in a frank and refreshingly optimistic tone throughout the work. His study does not avoid incisive judgments on Lawrence's various failures and evasions, but its breezy partisanship in Lawrence's favor is effective, unsentimental, and an unusual tonic to many somber and pretentious anatomies of criticism that predominate today. By the end of TAe Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence, Schneider manages to relate this "religious" nature in Lawrence to such disparate elements in the artist's life as his early courtships, uneasy marriage, quarrels with male friends, and the development of his reading in Herbert Spenser, William James, and Edward Carpenter. Schneider's study does not provide striking, original insight as much as it offers a chronologically ordered and comprehensive synthesis of the latest findings in biographical, textual, and psychological research on Lawrence. The impressive first chapter, "The Religious Sense of Life," concerns Lawrence 's boyhood and the early signs and shaping forces of the lust for the transcendent that Schneider stresses in his criticism. The critic is shrewd as he documents the seminal relation between Lawrence's delicate health as a young boy to the emotional disposition of his later years. Schneider is also persuasive in a discussion of the suffering of Lawrence's mother and the idiosyncracies of her temperament, and he is more concrete than most commentators on how Lydia Lawrence's unrealistic goals and permanent frustrations affected Lawrence in ineradicable ways. His digressive explanation of Lawrence's aUegedly 369 30:3, Reviews "matemal side," however, seems a bit reductive and trendy, and it may fail to fully consider Lawrence's relation to other siblings in the development of his complex emotional affiliations. But above all in this crucial opening chapter, Schneider properly combines references to letters with his own critical intuition to estabUsh the fact of one prescient component of Lawrence's youth: that precocious and apocalyptic sense in the boy of a "childhood sense of wonder" combined with "the reUgious element inherent in aU life" (16). In his chapters on Lawrence's early manhood, Schneider is exceUent on the complexity of Lawrence's evaluation of his father. Also, while he is fully aware of the solid vitality and the "life-flame" essence in the mother, Schneider patiently outlines the reasons for Lawrence's ultimate and painful rejection "of the spiritually bullying mother" (27). Such a line of interpretation by Schneider proves particularly fruitful in his correlative discussion of Sons and Lovers, as his analysis refutes, in effect, the recent revisionist studies of this novel that praise Miriam and seek to undercut both Lawrence's perspective and Paul's judgments. Schneider gracefully suggests how and why there is insufficient evidence for...