Out of sheer rage Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence

There have been biographies in which the biographer purposefully and shamelessly exchanges ideas with the subject and the reader. An exemplary recent example of that is the reckless antics of David Thomson in his brilliant biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud (1996). Now Dillon and Dyer play a little biography-within-a-biography game with the lives of two great writers, and the results are rather stunning, wholly interesting. Dillon is ostensibly consumed, as she pursues Paul Bowles, by the role of the biographer--the proper distance, reverence, dedication, intimacy. She met Bowles in 1976 when she was working on her well-received biography of his wife, the eccentric Jane Bowles (A Little Original Sin, 1990). In this book, Dillon returns to a man she seems fated to write about--Paul obviously fascinates her. In looking for him, she reveals as much about herself, a woman who has more than a physical appearance in common with his wife, Jane. For example, Dillon notes that "her mother's name was the same as my mother's" and that they had lived in the same building, at different times, in Manhattan. A disturbing look at the biographer, and, in turn, those who relish biographies. Dyer is a disarming writer. At once fastidious and droll. He rages gently at the reader that the project he selected to lose himself in "took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself." To awaken his muse and lose sight of his "I," Dyer and his alluring, most significant other, Laura, embark in hot pursuit of D. H. Lawrence, covering the places the peripatetic writer himself felt compelled to seek out, with Dyer grousing all the way. It's a writer's life in hot pursuit of the unknown, full of accusations, procrastination, misgiving, misadventure, and devilish soliloquies. It's very funny. And a very good biography of D. H. Lawrence. --Bonnie Smothers

There are well over 1000 books on D.H. Lawrence, but this one has an unconventional angle. On the first page, one is disabused of the notion that this will be yet another critical analysis or biography, perhaps brilliant, perhaps jargon-ridden, but destined to join all the others. Instead of his planned academic "Lawrence Book," Dyer (But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, LJ 11/15/95) gives us a splendid study on procrastination, denial, rationalization, and writer's block. As he travels around Paris, Greece, Oaxaca, and other locales, he agonizes over such things as what books to bring along and which to leave behind; either way, they become excuses for not writing. There is the irony that the self-admittedly undisciplined Dyer did indeed manage to produce this book, even if not the learned tome he had intended. It deserves to be called his "Lawrence Book," and it's probably all the better for the manner in which it was written. Heartily recommended, although libraries need not purchase if they have the 1997 British edition.‘Janice E. Braun, Mills Coll., Oakland, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Dyer writes two books at once, his own life and a challenging life of D.H. Lawrence, in this unique performance. This wrestling match with Lawrence reveals the author and his subject as finely matched opponents who ultimately shake hands on the nature of life and art. Dyer's record of his time spent exhaustively studying Lawrence is both tormented and comic. He ""rages"" at his very goals and against the compulsion to write, while also tracing, intermittently, Lawrence's own life's itinerary. In a sense, the project is a doomed undertaking. For could there be any less auspicious literary pursuit than formalizing the process of going ""from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of the to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either . . .""? Chagrined by his ambivalence, seduced by his indecisiveness, Dyer aspires to the ""floaty indifference of contentment"" and comes to prefer Lawrence's manuscripts to the final texts. He longs for freedom, yet his gateway into Lawrence comes in a moment of raging indolence. Convinced that Lawrence's ""writing urges us back to the source,"" Dyer traces the other writer's footsteps. Taos and Oaxaca, Sardinia and Eastwood are important backdrops along the way. Such scenery lures Dyer into a dialogue with Lawrence's mentors and tormentors and into the heat and chill of the arguments they waged. Larkin, Brodsky, and Julian Barnes are poetic referees in the ring. The push-me-pull-me here of the text and the sub-text, of biography and autobiography, turns up the volume on this fascinating symbiosis, which casts a new light on creativity and the importance of destiny. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.