Another Look at Lorenzo : D. H. LAWRENCE A Biography <i> by Jeffrey Meyers (Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95; 384 pp.; 0-394-57244-0) </i>

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.”

There seems to be a “right” time for reading certain authors. Hemingway, for instance, should be taken care of very early, even before Lawrence. But I first read a couple of Virginia Woolf’s novels as a teen-ager, when I ought to have been reading Hemingway, and hated them because nothing “happened” in them; I needed nearly two more decades to recognize the genius of happeninglessness. The 46-year-old feminist I have become, in part through reading Woolf, would hardly be swept away by Lawrence’s sexually anxious literary strut and swagger.

Nevertheless, if either my daughter or I chanced to meet Lorenzo, as his friends came to call him after he began to sojourn for long periods in Italy, I suspect that we’d be spellbound. People who knew him tended to be. “Friendship with Lawrence, for many people,” Jeffrey Meyers writes in “D. H. Lawrence: A Biography,” “was the most significant event of their lives.” Even at his most domineering, abusive, irrational and humorless, he was capable of exciting admiration--sometimes outright adoration--in a wide circle of acquaintances. (Editor’s note: On the character of the “Lawrenceans,” see Endpapers, Page 15.)

Not, apparently, in Jeffrey Meyers, however, whose tone throughout “D. H. Lawrence” remains generally cool and measured. This is just as well in a literary biographer, for whom capitulation to his subject’s charms could well lead to hagiography. But in view of this subject’s peculiarly intense and intuitive nature, Meyer’s dispassionate prose seems disappointing, even a little false. His thorough research and careful reading of many of Lawrence’s works compensate for his blandness, however.

The details of Lawrence’s rather brief life are familiar to many. Born in 1885 to a coal miner and his unhappy and unloving wife, Lawrence grew up in the English Midlands and became a clerk and later a schoolteacher there. A nearly fatal case of bronchitis when he was two weeks old prefigured his death from tuberculosis 44 years later, and he was frail and unhealthy most of his life. Nor was he robust emotionally, having formed a bond with his mother so intense and erotic that it consumed all his energies and spoiled several early relationships.

After Lydia Lawrence’s death, he eloped in 1912 with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, who abandoned her husband (Lawrence’s “favorite university teacher”) and three children. Passionate and powerful, “Frieda was Lawrencean before Lawrence,” and their marriage, though turbulent, endured. Together, the two led a poverty-stricken, peripatetic existence that carried them throughout Europe as well as to Ceylon, Australia, Tahiti, Mexico, and the United States, where they owned a ranch in Taos, N.M. “Lawrence’s great problem,” Meyers notes, “was that he always longed to be in another place,” searching with increasing desperation for better health even as he denied the gravity of his condition. In 1930, he died in Vence, in the Maritime Alps, with the last words: “I am better now.”

Despite continual restless journeys and increasingly poor health, Lawrence produced prolifically, not only novels but also short stories, travel pieces, literary and social criticism, plays, poems and translations. The best known are the sexually explicit novels banned as obscene, most prominently “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

Meyers skillfully connects many of these works with the details of Lawrence’s life to demonstrate his premise that “there was no separation between the artist who wrote and the man who lived.” Of his Midlands origins, for example, Meyers observes that “Lawrence, the first writer to use Freudian ideas in the English novel, used mining for coal--the elemental substance extracted from the dark subterranean regions of the Earth--to symbolize his search for the essential, instinctual unconscious.”

Unfortunately, the very abundance of Lawrence’s production hampers Meyers’ project. He simply cannot recount the details of Lawrence’s life (short though it was), lay out his salient intellectual and emotional features, and adequately analyze the connections between these and the literature that reflects them. As a consequence, his assertions can seem glib and unsupported, as when he declares, “Though Lawrence was in some respects abnormal, his mother’s cultivation of the feminine side of his personality gave him an astonishing insight into women and enabled him to create a brilliant series of female characters” without mentioning which of these he has in mind. (Most of them, from my experience, miss the mark of femaleness in some way or another. Brilliant projections of male fantasy, I’d be more likely to call them.) With similar presumption, as well as shaky reasoning, he concludes that Frieda’s enduring “the loss of her children and social status shows how deeply she loved Lawrence and how richly she was compensated for her sacrifice”-- without a word from Frieda herself on the subject.

As I worked my way through the details of a life and an oeuvre familiar to so many readers my age, I found myself wondering whether we need yet another biography of Lawrence. But if, as the publisher claims, this is “the first major one-volume biography . . . in two decades,” then a whole generation of readers may never have encountered one of the most original and fascinating literary figures of the 20th Century. For them, “D. H. Lawrence” provides an admirable introduction.