D. H. Lawrence once said that his memoir of Maurice Magnus, written in 1922, was "the best single piece of writing, as writing, that I have ever done." Maurice Magnus was a fascinating, almost comically well-educated ne'er-do-well, small and red-faced and strutting, who, once he was introduced to the writer, began crossing his path unexpectedly yet regularly, usually looking for a handout, and quickly turned from an amusing, affectionate acquaintance into a stalking menace, "a mongrel," "a vampire," "a curse." He was also a literary inspiration.

Herinneringen aan de voormalige soldaat in het Franse Vreemdelingenlegioen en letterkundige Maurice Magnus (1876-1920).

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.