Travelogue, Biography, and The Writing Life

An Unconventional Study of D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer

Aug 10, 2009

Part travelogue, part literary criticism, part biography, "Out of Sheer Rage" cross-pollinates genres and comes up with a weird but ultimately brilliant bloom.

Dyer's primary subject is not Lawrence at all but the difficult task of beginning to write. He waffles between writing a novel and writing his study of Lawrence. In wanting to mitigate this problem, he travels around Europe attempting to find the perfect place to inspire him to begin to write. What could be pretentious and long-winded, is a funny account of the writer's and traveler's life.

D.H. Lawrence: The Biography

While thoughts about Lawrence books, like The Rainbow and Women in Love, are sparse, the writer himself is illuminated through Dyer's own journey, which acts as a sort of proxy for Lawrence. Dyer finds neat ways to weave his own dilemmas into those of the writer in question, Lawrence. One senses Dyer's personal, as well as literary, life was altered, paradoxically, through the very frustrations that threatened to sabotage the writing of Out of Sheer Rage.

Writers on Writers

The rarity of such a first-hand way of getting to know the writer is a point of contention for Dyer. In fact, a strong aspect of Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer’s espousal of writers writing on writers as the superior form of literary criticism. Dyer embodies his intellectual point of view in the winding road he takes in getting to know Lawrence.

Dyer seems to relish in the countless elements that make-up a day in a writer’s life, but what imbues these pedestrian observations with a sense of profundity is the intermingling of Dyer’s life with Lawrence’s. What Dyer pulls off is a literary feat of a kind – he manages to compare his life with Lawrence’s and not come off as a pompous snob. Moreover, Dyer uses the lens of his life to show a mode of criticism - writers critiquing and studying other writers - that has too long been out of fashion.

A Critique of Literary Criticism

In a time when it’s difficult to fathom a politic that hasn’t been pinned to an unassuming dead writer, the critique of en vogue post-modern literary criticism seems long overdue and auspiciously on-the-mark. What was once radical is now passé and Freshman year English majors routinely cut and paste these criticisms to their term papers, rarely pausing to consider what moves, angers or inspires them as students.

Travelogue, Biography, and a Study of The Writer's Life

Dyer's magic is that he manages to turn his now habitual folly into a hilarious and likable story. What could have been pretentious is warm, smart, and funny. Dyer touches on the anxieties of the writer; twists into the pros and cons of writing in Paris, Rome, Oxford, and a Greek island; then does another handy maneuver into an impassioned soliloquy that dismantles the cool factor of post-modern literary theory. But while Lawrence comes through the story in the end, "Out of Sheer Rage" is an untraditional biography so die-hard Lawrence buffs beware.

The copyright of the article Travelogue, Biography, and The Writing Life in Artist Biographies is owned by Natasha Rivett-Carnac. Permission to republish Travelogue, Biography, and The Writing Life in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.