D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War by Paul Delany

Abstract

was required to make. That spirit of irreverence survived. In Bleak House, to point up errant Lady Dedlock’s fate, Dickens required a gloomy plate of the Dedlock mausoleum to which Lady Dedlock comes at last. It’s a sombre affair. “That Phiz found the subject excessively sombre is indicated by the working drawing. . . in the margin of which he has sketched three mocking devils, one thumbing his nose with both hands, one laughing directly at the mausoleum, and the third peeking around the border of the drawing with a smirk on his face. How Dickens felt if he in fact saw this drawing we cannot know, but his doubts about Browne, expressed at least as long before as Mrs. Pipchin, would not have been lessened by it” (p. 156). To conclude, this is a thorough, innovative, astute and informative book, a scholarly oasis in the desert of readings, rereadings, and rerereadings of Dickens. It is a pity that cost presumably limited the number of illustrations, but the 126 included are well-produced. In addition to restoring for us an artistic tradition, showing us in lively detail how it works, and making a case for the collaborative efforts of Dickens and Phiz as a new kind of art, Steig’s book provides interesting material for anyone puzzling over the question of whether art refers to life or to other art and convention, a question perennial but, in ways Miller’s essay demonstrates, newly alive. r . d. m c m a st e r / University of Alberta Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978). xvii, 420. $ 15-95 For all the current interest in literary theory, we still lack even the rudiments of a poetics of biography. Lytton Strachey’s manifesto appeared more than sixty years ago but there is still considerable disagreement among those who write, read, and review biographies over his dictum that “ to preserve a be­ coming brevity — a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant — that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.” Those who bear witness to Strachey’s influence by deploring it think that truth rather than art is the biographer’s first duty; the biographer as artist is a figure of suspicion for them, especially when, as with Strachey, the art is ironic. The state of biographical criticism is so primitive that there is no customary distinction even between biographies whose subjects led lives of action that we cannot directly know, and those whose work we can study independently of their lives. Strachey did not write literary biographies, and he has nothing to say about the dispute over the priority of art or truth that often settles on the biographer’s treatment of the writer’s work. Johnson had no hesitation judging the poetry along with the life of the poet, but his de­ tached criticism has not inspired modern literary biographers. A very few appear to have managed the discussion of the writer’s life and work without losing a becoming brevity, but most recent literary biographies that undertake an analysis of the writing as well as the life, approach, in some degree, the form of Victorian biographies “with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection.” This is what happens, Strachey suggests, when the biographer functions as an undertaker rather than an artist, and it still applies — except that after Strachey no serious modem biographer dares to be tediously panegyric. Those literary biographies that leave the work alone achieve their becoming brevity at the cost of leaving out precisely that which explains our interest in the life. The second duty of the biographer, according to Strachey, is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit.” One rather recent kind of literary biography ful­ fills this duty as well as the first one while discussing the writer’s work. In this sub-genre the biographer, typically a literary critic, usually emphasizes the work to the detriment of the life. A pattern derived from the work is often used to order the...