“D. H. Lawrence died in March 1930, when I was just thirteen years old and too unliterary to notice,” writes Anthony Burgess in Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence. My father, he continues, “would undoubtedly have seen a brief notice of Lawrence’s death in the Daily Mail, knowing him vaguely, like the newspaper itself, as a purveyor of dirt. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ he might have said in something like Lawrence’s own boyhood accent.”

As prolific a writer of novels and other genres as Lawrence, Burgess wrote this brief book to pay tribute to Lawrence on the occasion in 1985 of his centennial. While denying any influence of Lawrence on his own work, Burgess identifies himself with Lawrence in that they both came of working-class backgrounds and wound up as British writers in exile married to foreign aristocrats. Both as boys were called “mardarse” (sissy). This identification with Lawrence is intended to be a main theme, but doesn’t prove very illuminating.

Using his own recollections, Burgess does, however, in his first chapter, “Lawrence and Myself When Young,” give us a vivid sense of Lawrence’s reputation in the Thirties. “Between his death and the outbreak of the Second World War, Lawrence was remembered as a doubtful prophet but almost totally ignored as a writer.” In 1928 he had published a dirty book, which was banned, and had had the London exhibition of his dirty paintings raided by the police. The