Body of truth

by Philip Callow

"In November 1919 D. H. Lawrence arrived in Venice, thirty-four years old, a big name with a banned book behind him, scraping by on very little but with a zest for life undiminished by shaky health. He had had a bleak war - hounded out of Cornwall, humiliated in army medical exams - and was now overjoyed to be free and on the move, a twentieth-century English exile who would remain passionately English to the end of his days.". "Philip Callow's account of Lawrence's last years - his tempestuous relationship with Frieda and his relentless travels between New Mexico, Europe, and England - brings the great writer to life in intimate detail. As Lawrence's disgust with the Western world grew more intense, his rage ebbed and flowed erratically, but between the rages he knew rapture. He relished his workingman's aptitude, but what sustained him was his writing. "Without it," he once said, "I would have been dead long ago."". "His anger finally found an outlet that earned him money: he wrote L