Keeping up the fight

Paul Delany

• D.H. Lawrence: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers
  Macmillan, 446 pp, £19.95, August 1990, ISBN 0 333 49247 1
• D.H. Lawrence by Tony Pinkney
  Harvester, 180 pp, £30.00, June 1990, ISBN 0 7108 1347 3
• England, My England, and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Bruce Steele
  Cambridge, 285 pp, £37.50, March 1990, ISBN 0 521 35267 3
• The ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ Trial (Regina v. Penguin Books Limited) edited by H. Montgomery Hyde
  Bodley Head, 333 pp, £18.00, June 1990, ISBN 0 370 31105 1
• Boy by James Hanley
  Deutsch, 191 pp, £11.99, August 1990, ISBN 0 233 98578 6
• D.H. Lawrence: A Literary Life by John Worthen
  Macmillan, 196 pp, £27.50, September 1989, ISBN 0 333 43352 1

When Willie Hopkin first caught sight of D.H. Lawrence in his pram, he thought him a ‘puny, fragile little specimen’. Forty-four years later the fragile specimen died, reduced by tuberculosis to a weight of 90 pounds. It is understandable, then, that Jeffrey Meyers should make much of Lawrence’s ‘lifelong invalidism’, and conclude his biography with an appendix called ‘A History of Illness’. Lawrence himself tempted biographers along this road by saying that ‘one sheds one’s sickness in books’: doesn’t this mean that the sickness is the key to the work, linking the man who creates to the pattern of his creation like the skin left behind by the snake?