The World of Lawrence

The Lawrence obsession was a fever of the early Paris years, and it was shared: Anaïs Nin had just published her own Lawrence study when she and Miller met, and Lawrence — dead in 1930, scandalous as ever — was the ground their endless first conversations kept returning to. Jack Kahane, waiting to publish Tropic of Cancer, actually wanted a Lawrence brochure from Miller first, to dress the house in respectability; the modest assignment detonated. Through 1933 Miller read, charted, and drafted at manic scale — the walls of his workroom papered with schemes and genealogies — as the little book grew into a theory of everything.

It also grew into a crisis: the deeper he went, the more Lawrence's contradictions — and his own — refused to resolve, and the manuscript became the rare project that defeated him; he cut it loose and wrote his own books instead. The hundreds of surviving pages waited until scholars Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen edited them into the volume Capra Press published in 1980 — arriving, with terrible neatness, in the year of Miller's death. Read now, it is less a book about Lawrence than the shelf's Rosetta stone: watching Miller define Lawrence's war — body against machine, life-force against civilization — you watch him drafting the creed the Tropics would preach as his own.

The salvaged argument, in movements: Lawrence as the age's sacrificial figure — the artist as scapegoat driven out by the civilization he diagnosed; readings of the novels and the late prophetic books; the war of flesh and machine, sex and will, that Miller takes up as his own; and throughout, the fever of the Villa Seurat years audible under the prose — appreciation at a temperature criticism is not supposed to reach.

Come to it late, after the Tropics: it is the workshop where their doctrine was forged, mislabeled as a book about somebody else.