3 Review(s)

In November 1919 D. H. Lawrence arrived in Venice, thirty-four years old, a big name with a banned book behind him, scraping by on very little but with a zest for life undiminished by shaky health. He had had a bleak war-hounded out of Cornwall, humiliated in army medicals-and was now overjoyed to be free and on the move, a twentieth-century English exile who would remain passionately English to the end of his days. Philip Callow's account of Lawrence's last years and his almost relentless travels between New Mexico, Europe, and England brings the great writer to life in intimate detail. As Lawrence's disgust with the Western world grew more intense, his rage ebbed and flowed erratically, but between the rages he knew rapture. He relished his workingman's aptitude, but what sustained him was his writing. "Without it," he once said, "I would have been dead long ago." His anger finally found an outlet that earned him money: he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover and broke the taboo against explicit sex in literature. In poetry, novellas, travel writing, and the painting of visceral canvases, Lawrence continued to respond to the demands of his art. And, to the end, he clung to his wife, the fundamentally married man he had always been. In Body of Truth, Philip Callow gives us a poignant and revealing story of the artist at life's end.