Seeing Lawrence whole

“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....