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D. H. Lawrence: Man on Fire
D. H. Lawrence was once described as having ‘a quality of lightness about him’, as if he ‘shined from within’. Lawrence, likewise, describes one of his characters as having ‘sunlight inside her. Her heart beating seemed like sunlight […] In her was a more real day than the day could give’. This, no doubt, is the same lightness that is inside Lawrence. Not a benign beam of light, but a burning star. He once said that, throughout his life, he felt the fire of God going through him — which I do not consider an exaggeration. Frances Wilson, author of a biography on Lawrence called Burning Man, speaks of the ‘heat of his sentences’ and how ‘words came out of him like a running flame’. In a manner Paglia says is ‘too easily ridiculed’ today, Lawrentian characters are always on metaphorical fire:
to him, she was a flame that consumed him. The flame flowed up his limbs, flowed through him, till he was consumed, till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her […] And at last she began to draw near to him, she nestled to him. His limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of fire
In 1915, 1000 copies of his book, The Rainbow, were literally burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. Lawrence even believed that the tuberculosis (that eventually killed…
