BIOGRAPHY: Death and the Author: How DH Lawrence Died, and was Rememberedby David EllisOxford University Press, 273 pp, £20
IN THE INTRODUCTION to this elegant, detailed and darkly humorous account of the demise of DH Lawrence, David Ellis ponders the meaning of that archaic oxymoron, a "good death". Where we might nowadays hope for an easeful passing among our intimates, death was once a public, moral and exemplary affair.
On his deathbed, the essayist Joseph Addison is said to have summoned a youth of "irregular" habits and announced: "I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian may die." John Donne, almost at the last, preached a sermon on death at St Paul's, and sat already shrouded for a final portrait.
Lawrence, by contrast, died a modern, private death - but a death, argues Ellis, no less hedged about with significance. Death and the Author is "an experiment in biography": an inquiry into what is to be learned, in a secular age, from the deaths of others.
In one sense, Lawrence and death are antithetical terms: his novels vibrate with such a sense of life, such an eager (though often forced) vitalism, that he seems an eccentric choice for a deathly exemplar. But as Ellis notes, the extreme value Lawrence put on bodily and spiritual health - expressed energetically in his vision of sex as almost vegetal life force - was in part an abreaction to his own ailing nature.
Lawrence died of tuberculosis at the age of 44: in the course of his long decline, he acknowledged the truth about his disease on only a handful of occasions. Coughing up blood in New Mexico in 1924, diagnosed by American doctors a year later, reduced to a six-stone wraith who traversed continents looking for a more life-affirming milieu, Lawrence struggled on as though death was for people who didn't know how to live.
It was an understandable attitude. Ellis is eloquent and informative on the grisly reality of being tubercular in the first half of the 20th century, before antibiotics obviated the horrors of sanatoriums and surgery.
The Victorians had contrived a consoling fantasy around TB; as Susan Sontag puts it in her Illness as Metaphor, consumptives were reputed to die "symptomless, unfrightened, beatific deaths". In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens calls the tubercular end "gradual, quiet and solemn" - consumption was more an aesthetic state than a real disease. Lawrence knew better, and early on rejected the canting notion of tubercular refinement. But he seems nonetheless to have been prey to moralising diagnoses, calling his symptoms "wounds to the soul" and imagining the cure in "long, difficult repentance, realisation of life's mistake".
Such notions are part of the moral perplex of his fiction too; as he has Birkin put it in Women in Love: "one is ill because one doesn't live properly - can't. It's the failure to live that makes one ill, and humiliates one." In real life, this Lawrentian maxim could turn extremely sour: in an unsettling letter to fellow sufferer Katharine Mansfield, in 1920, he wrote: "you revolt me stewing in your consumption".
As the end approached in the south of France in 1930, Lawrence (who could also be deeply sympathetic and helpful to others with the same affliction) showed little sign that he had reconciled himself to the truth. He refused to make a will - an omission that would lead to decades of legal wrangling among family and friends - and still spoke of his "wretched bronchials": making a medically meaningless distinction between himself and those with an authentic lung disease. He was still writing a week before he died. It was as if the admission that he was dying of an illness by then also associated with moral and sexual corruption might have justified the opinions of critics who condemned him as an ill-bred pornographer.
In this sense, his death is indeed exemplary: it's a lesson, perhaps, in the creative uses of what today would be pathologised as pure denial. Lawrence's refusal to go gently was in some respects a "bad death", especially for a writer, as Ellis points out, so keen to reveal other truths about life. But death, as Wittgenstein had it, "is not an event in life", and life (no matter how attenuated) was Lawrence's sole subject.
Once he had exited the scene, his death took on other, often absurd, meanings. Nobody could be quite sure what the writer's last words had been. He is said to have declared to his wife, "Frieda, you have killed me", or to Aldous Huxley's wife: "Maria, Maria, don't let me die."
The fate of his remains was comically convoluted. Frieda first managed to lose the urn. It was then deliberately left behind in France by her lover Angelo Ravagli, who substituted another of uncertain provenance when he joined her at Lawrence's ranch in New Mexico: the fake ashes were incorporated in an adobe temple devoted to the great man. Circumstances, writes Ellis laconically, "tend to make Angelo look bad".
Ellis recounts all of this with considerable style, and numerous digressions into the lives and deaths of other writers. His mastery of his subject (he is also author of a volume in the Cambridge biography of Lawrence) is matched by a mordant wit.
There are lapses: he avers, oddly, that it is "because he was neither Irish nor female" that Lawrence's reputation has recently been eclipsed by those of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. This seems ungracious at best, and Ellis compounds the slight by asserting that Joyce's ascendancy was won merely by dint of "an emergent, recently independent nation's pride in its literary heritage".
But while one might wish he had essayed a more complex picture of the construction of literary reputation, Ellis's biographical experiment is a profoundly instructive and moving success.
• Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. He is the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005), and is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published next year
