Lawrence, David Herbert

LAWRENCE, DAVID HERBERT. - English writer, b. 11 September 1885 at Eastwood, d. 2 March 1930 at Vence. He is among the most representative novelists of his age. The son of a Nottinghamshire miner, his most genuine works are perhaps the early, partly autobiographical novels: The White Peacock (1911) and, above all, Sons and Lovers (1913), in which the settings of his adolescence and the hard life of the miner's family are admirably portrayed.

After that time his output was extremely abundant and, although it presents lyrical pages of undoubted value and powerful depictions of natural scenes, it became contaminated with irrationalistic and "immoralistic" presuppositions and with messianic intentions. L.'s pansexualism, a sort of mysticism in reverse in which there probably play a part, along with Freudian theories, pathological factors as well (the author was afflicted with tuberculosis, of which he died prematurely), is abundantly theorized, with manic fervour, throughout his narrative work and in certain veritable treatises. The fanatical exaltation of the sexual instinct and the open war on conventions and, more generally, on everything that is the product of culture and tradition provoked scandal, and the scandal culminated in the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), a novel in which sexual experience is attributed a value of absoluteness and the adultery of the protagonist is exalted as an act of regeneration and resurrection of the mortified senses. In his anxious and feverish search for primitive settings untouched by culture, L. was led into a sort of nomadism, whose stages are represented by travel books, some of them inspired by long stays in Italy. L. also translated Verga and a short story from Lasca's Cene (1929), and left a series of admirable essays on the American classics (1923). His last book, The Man Who Died, published posthumously in 1931, is a sort of blasphemous myth in which it is imagined that the risen Christ becomes aware of human love, the mystical reality preached by L. throughout his work, and that from the union of the man who died and the priestess Isis there is generated, or rather reborn, Osiris.

Augusto Guidi