Lawrence Festival

Dan Jacobson

One of the functions that took place during the recent D. H. Lawrence Festival in Santa Fe was a procession to the shrine on the Lawrence ranch, outside Taos. A few hundred people must have taken part in the ceremony. After listening to a string quartet play Schubert everyone formed up in a line. A drum was beaten somewhere ahead, girls in white robes scattered flowers, and we all went zig-zagging up a path to the little concrete structure in which Lawrence’s ashes are reputedly incorporated. In front of it is the tombstone of Frieda Lawrence, and of her third husband, Angelo Ravagli; above it is the phoenix symbol, in stone or cement, which Lawrence had adopted as his own.

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[*] The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, Eyre Methuen, 256 pp., £9.95, 28 February, 0 413 39950 8.

[†] One can clearly see this reciprocal process at work in D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare (Harvester, 420 pp., £8.50, 28 May 1979, 0 85527 746 7), the excellent study by Paul Delany of Lawrence’s experiences during the Great War. During those years, when The Rainbow was banned and he could not find a publisher for Women in Love, he and Frieda, tormented by the thought of the killings across the Channel and condemned to live in dire penury, were the target of much official harassment as suspected German spies. Unlike Mr Sagar’s biography, Professor Delaney’s book persuasively conveys a sense of the rhythms of its subject’s life: we feel in it the alternations and the connections between effort and illness, humour and rage, megalomania and despair, withdrawal and millennial expectation, creativity and disintegration.