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What I want to say arises out of a general interest in how biographers explain the behaviour of their subjects: the different and sometimes contradictory explanatory codes to which they appeal. One of these codes might be called physiological, or organicist in the old sense (before post-structuralism gave a different currency to that term). You find it in relatively recent discussions about whether Mozart's fondness for obscenities could be attributed to the medical condition known as Tourette's syndrome; or, more specifically, in a report from the Guardian in 1993, "New research supports the claim by Sylvia Plath's doctor that an inherited condition led to her suicide."¹ As these examples suggest, organicist solutions are often invoked when the behaviour to be explained is considered abnormal. Lawrence's behaviour, and above all perhaps his preoccupations, often struck his contemporaries as abnormal, and in trying to explain both, they frequently reminded their readers that he suffered from tuberculosis (and then of course died from it). That reminder is pervasive in the obituaries, where illness is often offered as the excuse for offensive peculiarities. The illustration I want to offer is not from an obituary but from a memoir published in 1935, five years after Lawrence's death. One of the reasons I choose it is because its author (Curtis Brown) was Lawrence's literary agent and in the main sympathetic, with no axe to grind.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_14

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