D H Lawrence

When I was a senior in college, I took a seminar in the works of D. H. Lawrence and devoured every word. My timing was pretty well perfect. At 20, I was ripe for feverish encounters, hypnotic imagery, incantatory style: "the marriage of the living dark," as my favorite poem, "Bavarian Gentians," put it. My daughter, who waited until she was 24 and living in Africa, enjoyed "Sons and Lovers" and "Women in Love," but already she could characterize them as "pretentious."

It's a bit ironic to talk about fidelity and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in the same breath. After all, D.H. Lawrence's 1928 erotic masterpiece scandalized readers with its celebration of an adulterous affair between an aristocrat's wife and her gamekeeper. Yet fidelity is the quality that most distinguishes Pacific Resident Theatre's sensual, passionate and eloquent staging, which honors Lawrence's work to a degree rarely encountered in literary adaptations.

LAWRENCE AND THE WOMEN: The Intimate Life of D.H. Lawrence by Elaine Feinstein (HarperCollins: $27.50; 268 pp.). If there's a writer who all but begs to be viewed through the women in his life, it's D.H.

You just might wrestle a pig out of the mud, but it is quite as likely that the pig will wrestle you into the mud. Geoff Dyer, a writer of fine but jittery sensibility, found himself in a state of personal and literary breakdown. He was beyond blocked; he was splintered. Accordingly, in the hope of grounding his out-of-control fancifulness, he decided to attempt, or so he tells us, a sober academic study of D.H. Lawrence.

The playwright is one of the last links between private art and a mass public. On one hand, he shares with the novelist the boast of sole authorship. On the other hand, he shares with the screenwriter the pleasure of hearing a live audience react to the dialogue. It's the playwright's words we're hearing, one voice speaking to many. Things get complicated, though, when the playwright is adapting another author's work. Where does the author end and the playwright begin?

The novelist D.H. Lawrence, who shocked his generation by writing about sex, has won a place in Poet's Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The D.H. Lawrence Society in Nottingham, the town in central England near which the writer was born 100 years ago, said that after three years of lobbying it had been given permission to put up a memorial plaque in the abbey.

On a hill above Kit Carson's grave, in a house that was once the artistic and social center of Taos, more than a dozen colorful bathroom windows glow brightly in the chill desert night. In a room behind the mailboxes of the La Fonda Hotel on Taos Plaza, nine rather primitive oil paintings, branded pornographic and banned in Britain, hang among the memorabilia of the inn's owner.

In 1939, with Europe already sinking into World War II, 46-year-old Henry Miller left Paris, knowing that a cycle of his life had come to an end. As an expatriate in Paris he'd found his voice, and published the novels — "Tropic of Cancer," "Black Spring" and "Tropic of Capricorn" — which made his name. He'd had his legendarily steamy and dangerous affair with Anais Nin, and George Orwell had fired a salute on his behalf, hailing him as "a Whitman among the corpses." Miller, although banned in America, had arrived, and then, restless as ever, he accepted the invitation of another writer, his friend Lawrence Durrell, to visit Greece and the island of Corfu.

It's a bit ironic to talk about fidelity and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in the same breath. After all, D.H. Lawrence's 1928 erotic masterpiece scandalized readers with its celebration of an adulterous affair between an aristocrat's wife and her gamekeeper. Yet fidelity is the quality that most distinguishes Pacific Resident Theatre's sensual, passionate and eloquent staging, which honors Lawrence's work to a degree rarely encountered in literary adaptations.

Devotees of D.H. Lawrence, who wish that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was not his most famous book, have plunged his hometown into a three-week celebration of the centenary of his Sept. 11 birth. It is not universally popular. Fifty-five years after he died, 25 years after British courts finally permitted "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to be published with all the words he wrote, Lawrence is regarded as a modern master by the literary world.

Vengeance as motivation for the creation of literature is the subject so energetically palpated by Louise DeSalvo in this hands-on psychological examination cum literary analysis. Drawing on four relationships--Virginia and Leonard Woolf's sexually troubled marriage, D. H.

Three questions were repeatedly put to Brenda Maddox while she worked on this biography: "Is there new material?" (Masses of it); "Did Lawrence really go to Australia?" (Yes, and the 1922 visit inspired his novel, "Kangaroo"); and "Do you like Lawrence?" No one, she answered, could read D. H. Lawrence's letters and not like him. Yet it is possible to read this sympathetic and intelligent portrait of the great writer and be glad he is no longer among us.

LAWRENCE AND THE WOMEN: The Intimate Life of D.H. Lawrence by Elaine Feinstein (HarperCollins: $27.50; 268 pp.). If there's a writer who all but begs to be viewed through the women in his life, it's D.H.

"No one ever wished it longer than it is," Samuel Johnson sourly observed of "Paradise Lost." If that's the way you felt about "Sons and Lovers" in college, then I have some bad news. In 1912, having run away to Italy with the wife of his former professor, D. H. Lawrence, 27, was trying to make a living as a writer. "Sons and Lovers," his third novel, had already been rejected by one publisher when Lawrence sent it on to Edward Garnett, a reader for Duckworth.

When I was a senior in college, I took a seminar in the works of D. H. Lawrence and devoured every word. My timing was pretty well perfect. At 20, I was ripe for feverish encounters, hypnotic imagery, incantatory style: "the marriage of the living dark," as my favorite poem, "Bavarian Gentians," put it. My daughter, who waited until she was 24 and living in Africa, enjoyed "Sons and Lovers" and "Women in Love," but already she could characterize them as "pretentious."

The playwright is one of the last links between private art and a mass public. On one hand, he shares with the novelist the boast of sole authorship. On the other hand, he shares with the screenwriter the pleasure of hearing a live audience react to the dialogue. It's the playwright's words we're hearing, one voice speaking to many. Things get complicated, though, when the playwright is adapting another author's work. Where does the author end and the playwright begin?

On the Black Hill A Novel Bruce Chatwin Penguin: 256 pp., $16 paper Bruce Chatwin, the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad, died from AIDS-related complications in early 1989. His memorial service, held in a Greek Orthodox church in London on the day that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Chatwin's friend Salman Rushdie, was a legendary event, mobbed by fans, celebrities and hundreds of journalists. Chatwin was by then a cult ?

"Flame Into Being" was written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of D. H. Lawrence's birth in 1885. Burgess traces Lawrence's life and offers critical commentary on all the major and most of the minor writings. Though he initially planned to discuss only a few of Lawrence's books, he found "that it was not possible to separate Lawrence's work from his life." Burgess writes vigorously, concisely, and sometimes racily.

On a hill above Kit Carson's grave, in a house that was once the artistic and social center of Taos, more than a dozen colorful bathroom windows glow brightly in the chill desert night. In a room behind the mailboxes of the La Fonda Hotel on Taos Plaza, nine rather primitive oil paintings, branded pornographic and banned in Britain, hang among the memorabilia of the inn's owner.

Early in 1915 D.H. Lawrence, the son of a coal miner but a rising novelist and the self-styled "priest of love," visited Bertrand Russell and his friends at Cambridge. He came away from Cambridge "very black and down," unable to bear the "smell of rottenness, marsh-stagnancy" there. He described this visit as "one of the crises in my life." Ironically, it is the Cambridge University Press that is completing Lawrence's literary canonization. Since 1980, Cambridge has been publishing newly edited texts of Lawrence's works, including the novel "Mr. Noon," two-thirds of which had never been published.