703 D.H. Lawrence (with David Ellis) | My Last Book with Dorian Lynskey

Summary

Podcast Summary: The History of Literature Episode: 703 D.H. Lawrence (with David Ellis) | My Last Book with Dorian Linsky
Host: Jacke Wilson
Release Date: May 19, 2025

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Introduction to D.H. Lawrence

In this episode of The History of Literature, host Jacke Wilson delves into the enigmatic life and enduring legacy of D.H. Lawrence, accompanied by David Ellis, an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent and author of the critical biography D.H. Lawrence, A Critical Life. The discussion navigates through Lawrence's tumultuous personal relationships, his literary contributions, and the controversies that have surrounded his work over the decades.

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David Ellis on D.H. Lawrence’s Early Life and Influences

David Ellis provides a comprehensive overview of Lawrence's proletarian roots and upward social mobility, highlighting how his background influenced his writing. He notes:

"[19:36] Ellis: Yes, yes. I'm always nervous about such blanket statements and I'm sure people out there have some other. But when I think about it, he was very interested in Robert Burns, of course, but Robert Burns was Scottish and from a rural background. John Clare, the English poet, was from a rural background. I can't think of anyone who was as good as Lawrence, from what I... I use the word proletariat deliberately."

Ellis emphasizes Lawrence's bilingual upbringing, thanks to his mother’s superior education and ability to speak standard English, setting the foundation for his intricate exploration of class and identity in his works.

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Lawrence’s Relationship with His Mother and Father

The podcast delves into Lawrence's complex relationship with his parents. Ellis explains:

"[22:20] Ellis: Mrs. Arnold, as I say, she was better educated than her husband and rather was regarded as a bit of a snob... She had three boys... when he was in London working, he suddenly died. She was absolutely devastated... He was intensely devoted to his mother and she urged him on... he was emotionally dependent because of his upbringing."

This deep emotional bond initially with his mother shapes much of Lawrence’s early life, but as he matures, his perspectives shift, leading to a nuanced reconciliation with his father's more earthy and authentic connection to nature.

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Ford Maddox Ford’s Influence and Lawrence’s Literary Breakthrough

Ford Maddox Ford, the editor of the English Review, played a pivotal role in Lawrence’s career. Ellis recounts:

"[29:11] Ellis: He found that he didn't want to be pigeonholed as a writer of working-class stories. He wanted to expand beyond that... Ford was inclined to say he's a genius quite often... Lawrence half believed it, but half thought... he was charismatic... He wasn't a quiet kind of person."

Ford Maddox Ford recognized Lawrence’s genius early on, providing him with the platform to reach literary London and helping to establish his reputation beyond mere proletarian narratives.

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Frida Lawrence: A Turning Point in Lawrence’s Life

The introduction of Frida Weekley into Lawrence’s life marks a significant transformation. Ellis details:

"[34:12] Ellis: Frieda was the daughter of a German soldier... she had a quiet life but was involved in avant-garde circles... she was extremely attractive, full of ideas, and prepared to sleep with him."

Frida’s intellectual and passionate nature challenges Lawrence, pushing him to explore freedom and self-expression in his works. Their tumultuous relationship is characterized by both fierce debates and deep emotional dependence, ultimately sustaining until Lawrence's death in 1930.

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Lawrence’s Literary Endeavors and Philosophical Pursuits

Lawrence was not confined to novel-writing; his literary portfolio was diverse:

"[52:38] Ellis: ...he wrote novels, short stories, novellas, books of philosophy, travel books, translated from Italian, poems, and plays."

Ellis highlights Lawrence’s desire to use literature as a means to effect societal change, often viewing himself as a writer with a mission rather than merely a creator of entertainment. This drive sometimes led to a sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction, especially towards the end of his life.

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Controversies and Legacy

Lawrence's approach to character development stirred significant controversies:

"[46:51] Ellis: He had a terrible reputation... using people he knew as models for his characters, which often offended them."

Despite initial backlash, Lawrence's works continue to influence and inspire, particularly among ecological advocates and female writers, who find renewed appreciation for his explorations of nature and human relationships.

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Interview with Dorian Linsky: Apocalyptic Literature and Human Connection

In addition to David Ellis, the episode features Dorian Linsky, author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World. Linsky explores the human desire for connection in apocalyptic scenarios, reflecting on how characters prioritize relationships over the solace of literature in the face of impending doom.

Linsky shares insights on:

• Human instinct to seek love and companionship during crises.
• The symbolism of literature in providing comfort versus the importance of direct human interaction.
• The Warnings from literature, such as in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last," where reliance on books alone is portrayed as insufficient.

He states:

"[61:13] Linsky: ...I'm just so sort of, sort of fascinated by exploring all these different things and joining all these different things together. So I can't name one book, but I think that would be the kind of book I was looking for."

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Conclusion

Jacke Wilson wraps up the episode by reflecting on Lawrence's enduring and contentious legacy, acknowledging the complexities that make Lawrence a perpetual subject of literary exploration. The episode underscores the multifaceted nature of Lawrence’s work and personal life, highlighting why he remains a pivotal figure in literary history.

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Notable Quotes

• Catherine Hughes on Lawrence’s Urgency:

  "[00:19] Jack Wilson: ...she believes that there remains something in his work that is urgent and alive."

• David Ellis on Lawrence’s Diverse Writing:

  "[52:38] Ellis: ...he wrote novels, short stories, novellas, books of philosophy, travel books, translated from Italian, poems, and plays."

• Dorian Linsky on Last Books:

  "[60:11] Linsky: ...I think you would just want something that had as much life in it as possible and like as much of the human experience."

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Further Resources

• David Ellis’ Book: D.H. Lawrence, A Critical Life
• Dorian Linsky’s Book: Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World
• Podcast Website: historyofliterature.com
• Support the Show: Patreon or Donate

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Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. This Memorial Day, turn up the heat with the Home Depot. Find the perfect grill and patio set to keep the cookouts coming all season long.

[David Ellis]

Grill up a feast with the next.

[Jack Wilson]

Grill 4 burner gas grill only $229 and complete your space with the stylish Glen Ridge Falls 7 piece dining set now on special buy for just $499 with free delivery. Take your Memorial Day cookout to the level all summer long with the Home Depot. See homedepot.com delivery for more details. Come in to your neighborhood Starbucks to enjoy free refills of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea, so stop in and stay a while. Your free refill is ready at Starbucks. Visit Starbucks.com refills for details. Hello. In November of 2021, Catherine Hughes wrote in the New York Review of Books. He remains one of the most frequently biograph subjects in literary history. He's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron, exclaimed his friend aldous Huxley in 1960, and there have been plenty more since then. She was talking about D.H. lawrence, born in 1885, famous in his day for novels like the Rainbow and Lady Chatterley's Lover, which were both banned and perhaps even more famous today, not just as a novelist, but as an essayist, short story writer and and person. A person who longed to stand breast to breast with the cosmos. A nasty little man, at times a great souled giant at others, a man at war with the world and at war with himself. We'll talk to one of D.H. lawrence's most recent biographers, David Ellis, as we try to figure out what exactly makes Lawrence so endlessly compelling today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. A lot of biographies of Mr. D.H. lawrence talking about his relationship with Frida, his wife. And let me finish the quote from Kathryn Hughes, because she says what I would like to say now, only she says it better. Why are there so many biographies as of 2021? Quote, what interests these writers and scholars are acts of revision and recuperation. For all Lawrence's hateful misogyny, racism, and plain bad temper, they believe that there remains something in his work that is urgent and alive. He never states an opinion without almost immediately countering it, such that to read him is to catch him in the very act of creation. Most importantly, perhaps, Lawrence grants readers permission to give up fretting about elegance, concision, likability and all those other qualities we know we shouldn't set such store by, but do. End quote. This is very true. I came to Lawrence sideways. I told a version of this story in our D.H. lawrence episode. But that's been what, eight years? Nine years? I think I can tell the story again. I'll tell it differently this time. I hadn't read Lawrence's novels, or maybe I'd. I'd tried one and it hadn't stuck. I was 22, living in Taiwan, in the second largest city of Taiwan, Kaohsiung, the one everybody overlooks in favor of Taipei. Well, I was used to that, living in Chicago, second city. Taipei is the capital and cultural center. Down in Kaohsiung, we just worked and we rode our motorcycles to get to work and to go home, where I had that pile of books standing next to my mattress on the floor in the little room with air conditioning, plowed my way through those books. And when I had a few extra minutes in between gigs, I'd park my motorcycle outside a tea house and study Chinese from homemade flashcards. If I had a little more time, I' go to one of a couple of English language bookstores, and maybe there was only one. I actually only remember one. Or I'd go to a big library they had there with newspapers from around the world on those long bamboo poles that keeps the newspapers in position. Or I'd go to the English language section of the library and find books to read. And there was a book there, D.H. lawrence on classic American literature. And I thought, sure, why not? And then after I dipped into it, it was so full of passion and venom, it made me want to read the guy's books. He had such strong opinions, and it seemed like literature mattered to him. I had grown up with 22 years of Ben Franklin being presented to me as this modest, prudent, wise, gently humorous figure. The celebrity in France, the scientist and publisher and founding father, the man with the kite and the key and the bread in his pockets, inventing a stove. In high school, we'd read his journal or autobiography or whatever it was, and he blocked out times in his day for reading and self improvement and exercise and sleep and whatever. I'm working from memory. And we all think as we read that, we all thought, well, this is how a genius gets so many things done. And what a wise person, segmenting his day into these little to do items. Here's someone who knew how to live, get things done. Ben Franklin and D.H. lawrence comes along. And first of all, I was surprised he even cared about this book. But not only did he care about it, he cared. Cared about it with passion. He hated it. He said, you're carving up your minutes into little miniature blocks of time. You're becoming a little miniature fuddy duddy. Life is a big river with a fast rushing current. Don't stand on the shore with your pocket watch. Jump into life and let the thing take you down its dangerous but exciting path. That's living. And of course we know now, at least grownups do. I don't know what kids are being taught in schools, but we, we grown ups know that Franklin had his own passions and peccadillos. And to that Lawrence would probably say, then what in you made you want to write about your little self improvement projects, your morality efforts? Why didn't you write about your lovers, about sex and wanting to have it bend? And Lawrence is furious at Franklin, at the world for promoting Franklin, at the fact that he, Lawrence, has to live in a world where Franklin existed and had these ideas, period. It offended him. And you think. I don't know if I believe any of this as I'm reading this, but this guy believes it. What else does he believe? And what will those passions make me think or rethink about how I'm living and what I've received as conventional wisdom to this point? Now here's where I start to think. Did I misremember this? It was a long time ago that I read this. So I looked up D.H. lawrence and his book Studies in American Literature and I see that, yes, Ben Franklin is in there. That's the second chapter. Here's the quote. This is D.H. lawrence, the perfectibility of man. Ah, heaven, what a dreary theme. The perfectibility of the Ford car. The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance. Education. Which of the various me's do you propose to educate and which do you propose to suppress? Anyhow? I defy you. I defy you, O society, to educate me or to suppress me according to your dummy standards? Skipping ahead a bit, there are other men in me besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you at the other end of this? Patience. Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be? Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you? Or Harvard College, the ideal self? Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self, shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark. This is the self who is coming into his own. The perfectibility of man. Dear God, when every man, as long as he remains alive, is in himself a multitude of conflicting men, which of these do you choose to perfect at the expense of every other Old daddy? Franklin will tell you. He'll rig him up for you. The pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man he set up. The first dummy American. End quote. Lawrence calls Franklin's ideas barbed wire. Like I said, I read the start of that before. Not all of that, but part of it. It's an experience. I just can't forget reading that in the way that it struck me. It's still funny for me to read it now. It's so not what I expected when I opened up this book. D.H. lawrence, he's a famous guy, expected some reasoned, measured book about American literature. The kind of book I love reading. Actually written. In this case, written by a famous and accomplished novelist. Well, he. Who would know better than this canonized figure? I did not expect him to be attacking Ben Franklin or to refer to himself as a wolf or a coyote with red eyes in the dark and say, this is who I am. This is the self coming into his own. Sounded more like a punk rock singer. But if it was a punk rock singer, singer or shouter, I'd have yawned. Ho hum, you hate the world, hate your education, blah, blah, blah. That was a cliche that had nothing new for me. I didn't find it to be all that interesting. I was glad that it existed. Rebellion. But everyone, all the rebels, seemed to be saying the same thing. And nobody was building anything. Lawrence was different. Lawrence was an artist believing in creativity but also believing that he had something better in him, just waiting to come out. A wolfish side, a passionate side. Something in the dark, a human side. And he needed the freedom and the courage to do it. And yet he was sitting there in a tweed suit, calling himself an ass in a tweed suit and accusing me, or asking me to accuse myself of not really living. I couldn't stop reading. Here's Catherine Hughes again, talking about the biographer Francis Wilson, who turned to Lawrence even after Lawrence had been attacked by critics as being a sadistic pornographer and a misogynist. And Hughes says all the same, Wilson read Lawrence on the sly, reveling in his fierce certainties, his indomitable belief that he was right and everyone else was not merely wrong, but wrong. He lambasted his publisher Heineman for rejecting an early version of Sons and Lovers as quote, blasted jelly boned swines, the slimy, the belly wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods. End quote. Now in middle age, Wilson has returned to Lawrence to find that it is his quieter mysteries that draw her in. This Lawrence is a modernist who aches with nostalgia, a sensualist who flinches when touched, an intellectual who devalues the intellect, and a worshipper of the body whose own waxy frame is fading away. At the time of his death in 1930, the man who had written so lushly about naked male flesh in Women in love weighed just 85 pounds. In a brilliant bit of phrase making Wilson calls Lawrence a self wrestling human document. A self wrestling human document. Don't we want to know more? And where do we turn when we encounter such a person and try to make sense of one? Well, we talk to biographers like David Ellis, who's done his best to distill Lawrence into something we can understand in the wonderful series of books, Reaction Books, Authors, A Critical Life. We've had many of these biographers on our show. I have enjoyed them all. Let's talk to David Ells today. And then let's hear from Dorian Linsky, expert in the Apocalypse, which Lawrence knew a little something about or cared a little something about. A lot of something. What am I even saying here? There's a tie. I connect the two in my head. Lawrence and the apocalypse he wrote about. It will ask Dorian about the last book that he will ever read. But first, David Ellis. After this. I'm Alan Sisto, the man of the west here at the Prancing Pony podcast. And I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark. Every week here at the Prancing Pony podcast, along with Sean or other co hosts, I explore the works of J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots of pop culture references, plenty of nerd humor and the occasional bad pun. It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every episode, reading important sections of the books and having a chat about what we've read. Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible. We do all the heavy reading so you don't have to. It's a great way for first time readers to learn the basics of Tolkien's world, while for Middle Earth veterans, it's a deep dive into their favorite stories. Now, the Tolkien fandom is like no other, so we spend time in the community giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes, and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get. So if you're ready to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony podcast wherever you listen. This episode is brought to you by Stay Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for.

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Advanced automations to connect to your store Store mailchimp your marketing and boost your clicks multi channel campaigns now with SMS lights lit mailchimp. You're marketing today with the number one AI powered email marketing and automation platform Intuit. Mailchimp number one based on publicly available data on competitors customers. Plans vary SMS available as add on visit mailchimp.com okay, joining me now is David Ellis, who is Emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Kent. He's also the author of numerous books and articles, including works about Shakespeare, Stendahl, Wordsworth, and many others. He previously joined us on episode 508 for a discussion of Byron. He joins us today to discuss his book D.H. lawrence, which is an approachable critical biography of the English novelist published as part of the Critical Live series by Reaction Books. David Ellis, welcome to the History of Literature.

[David Ellis]

Thank you very much.

[Jack Wilson]

I should have said welcome back to the History of Literature. Okay, so whenever I discuss D.H. lawrence or even think about him, I feel like I've grabbed a hold of this enormous wild bird and tried to stick stuff it in a cage or something. And what I've done is eliminate all the strangeness and the fierce beauty from his life and art and outlook. So even though if I ask some rather conventional questions today, feel free to depart from that and give us the untamed version of Lawrence as well.

[David Ellis]

Well, I'll try. I'll try.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, so let me ask you first of all, when did you start reading D.H. lawrence's works.

[David Ellis]

Well, Sons and Lovers, his third novel, was a set text, if I remember, when I was at grammar school.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh, wow.

[David Ellis]

So in those days the authorities were willing to set long books to study and nowadays they only do short ones. But I also think that anybody with interest in books who was from my social background, sort of working or lower middle class, were naturally drawn to Lawrence because he established his reputation, first of all as a reporter on that sphere of life. People who were, as it were, upwardly mobile, who profited from the changes in legislation about education in the 19th century and who, yes, also reported on their own backgrounds. So I think there was some kind of natural affinity. I think I'd always known about Lawrence before I was out, asked to participate in the biography of him.

[Jack Wilson]

You write, as you put it in your book, you say D.H. lawrence was the first great writer to emerge from the English proletariat and what.

[David Ellis]

Yes, yes. I'm always nervous about such blanket statements and I'm sure people out there have some other. But when I think about it, he was very interested in Robert Burns, of course, but Robert Burns was Scottish and from a rural background. John Clare, the English poet, was from a rural background. I can't think of anyone who was as good as Lawrence, from what I. I use the word proletariat deliberately. One of his great. One of the people he admired a lot when he was young was H.G. wells. But H.G. wells fans were first of all domestic servants and then shopkeepers in Bromley, near London. So that's why I committed myself to that statement.

[Jack Wilson]

So what kind of childhood did he have? What was. I mean, what did it mean for him to emerge from the proletariat? How did he grow up?

[David Ellis]

The childhood is wonderfully depicted, I think, in Saint and Lois. Very happy on the whole. His father was a miner, inclined to drink from time to time. His mother was better educated than her husband and spoke, and this is crucial, I think, spoke standard English, whereas her father spoke the dialect. So like lots of people in England, I imagine, American America, Lawrence grew up as a bilingual. He could speak English in two different ways, but otherwise it was a happy childhood and he, as I say, he profited from the educational opportunities that were opening out so that he went to Nottingham Grammar School and eventually went on to do a two year course. Essentially it was a teacher training course. What is now Nottingham University wasn't called that then, but it was called college, but it's the same place. So he was, as it were, upwardly mobile, like most of his A lot of them found their way through teaching. There was an enormous increase in number with the spread of elementary education. There had to be enormous increase in the personnel. And he was one of the people who was taken on as a teacher. So he taught for a while.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. That seems like a great difference in what we might expect from a world where your father's a minor and that's everyone's expectation for you as well, that nobody sees a way out. But they had this way out, and he also had this mother. Maybe you could tell us a little more about his relationship with her.

[David Ellis]

Yes. Mrs. Arnold, as I say, she was better educated than her husband and rather was regarded as a bit of a snob, I think, in the neighborhood, because she spoke normal English. She had intellectual aspirations. Above all, she had expectations for her children, as I described, as everybody describes. She had three boys, and one of them was extremely successful in all departments as an athlete and did well at school and was embarked on a successful business career. And then when he was in London working, he suddenly died. And she was absolutely devastated. So that when Lawrence himself fell ill, she was particularly keen. She didn't want to lose another son. And at that moment, when he was, I don't know, in his teens, that became very close indeed. So much so that he complained afterwards that it made him, in some sense, abnormal. He was intensely devoted to his mother and she urged him on, as it were, wanted him to, had no, resisted any idea that she should go down the pit, down the mine, as his father wanted him to, because the money was good, and made sure that he had a different kind of middle class career.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. You mentioned that later in life he abandoned that powerful emotional allegiance that he initially felt towards his mother and he began to sympathize with his father. So what was his relationship with his father like? And maybe why later in life did he reconsider it?

[David Ellis]

Yes. Well, when he was young, as far as one can tell from sons and lovers, but from other evidence too, the children hated their father in certain ways. Their father, of course, is portrayed in the book as having a very soft and affectionate side, but he was regarded by his wife and therefore by the children to a certain extent, as brutal and rough and barbaric. And I think what happened was that as Lawrence developed, he. He became very aware of a kind of. With. With his wife, a kind of emotional dependence, that he was a very emotionally dependent person because of his upbringing, and he resented that more and more. And as he developed his ideas and his philosophy, he began to see his Father as a kind of noble savage figure, really, who was not corrupted by middle class aspirations and values. So his sympathies shifted. In a poem called Red Herring, he calls his mother a member of the goddamn bourgeoisie. And his father, he associates with the figures in his novels who are gamekeepers or educated working men.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And there's something more genuine or more. More earthy and real. They're more in touch with humanity and life.

[David Ellis]

Yes. And they're more in touch with nature too. It's true. His father was very interested in. Well, had a natural affinity with the natural world. And so, yes, they were more real in that sense. They weren't corrupted by education and, yes, middle class value.

[Jack Wilson]

And Lawrence inherited some of that directly from his father. Right. Where they would go on walks and the father would point things out and kind of an appreciation for the landscape and all that was in it.

[David Ellis]

Yes, I doubt that his father and his children went on walks, but certainly his father used to walk to the pit every morning and he would come home occasionally with a rabbit and. But he knew the names of the flowers and he could recognize them. He had a love of nature and certainly. But so did his mother. And Lawrence inherited all that. And his favorite subject when he was at university was botany. And he was famous. If you went on a walk with him, everybody talked about this that he could. First of all, he was pretty naturally observant and saw things that you didn't see. But he knew the names of everything as well. Yeah. So, yes, he was great amateur botanist in a way.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It's a great kind of reminder that we shouldn't just look for writers from one particular background or one particular class or educational history or that kind of thing. Because so much of what's great about Lawrence are these. What would be viewed as idiosyncratic or the unusual nature of some of his experiences are what gives his fiction its force.

[David Ellis]

That is quite true, but it was a kind of trap for him as well. But when he went to teach in Croydon, which is near London, he was taken up by the editor of the English Review, a man called Ford Maddox. Ford, we know him as now. Yeah. And I think Ford, who says that at that time the reading classes knew as much about the life in a mining town and a mining family as they did about the tribes in Africa, that they were completely ignorant of that world. So in a way, one of the attractions of him for them was that he was a recorder of all that world, but he found that a trap. He didn't want to be Pigeonholed as a writer of working class stories. On the contrary, he wanted to expand beyond that. And of course, in his social relations there was always an air of patronage about them. They regarded him as a rather wild and untutored person, a kind of genius from the lower orders that baffled them. How could he know so much? How could he write so well when he hadn't been to Oxford or Cambridge? That kind of attitude, which was essentially patronizing, it was very difficult for them to get out of. It had changed him a good deal, as you can imagine.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. Maybe if the records weren't as good as they are. If we were talking about something in 1600 rather than the early 1900s, we'd have theories that this was Ford Maddox, Ford who was writing through a pseudonym, and we'd have Lawrence authorship theories.

[David Ellis]

Yes, I got into all that. Yes, you might indeed have Lawrence. Well, yes, of course, his wife Frida used to. Used to claim that she'd written half the novels. Well, not half, but had been very. Had written parts of them, so. Right. But yes, we might have that. We might have that.

[Jack Wilson]

I want to save Frida for the moment because I want to ask one more question about Ford Maddox Ford, which is, he claimed, pretty famously. He described the moment that he discovered a story by Lawrence on his in tray pile. And he says how he read the first sentence or two and he immediately knew that Lawrence was a genius. Was that a true story? Was that how Lawrence broke through, so to speak? How important was Ford to Lawrence? Do you give any credence to the tale that Ford told about recognizing Lawrence?

[David Ellis]

Well, Ford was extremely important to Lawrence because he gave him his start in the magazine world and introduced him to literary London and patronized him in the proper sense. The story itself. Well, I think Ford was inclined to say he's a genius quite often. It was a word. It's an interesting word, actually, because I think Lawrence was unnerved by it in some ways. He half believed it, but half thought. He says somewhere they used to call me a genius because I didn't enjoy their incomparable social advantages. It was a kind of way of patronizing him. On the other hand, people were amazed by his fluency, by the extraordinary things he could write, by his apparent knowledge. He was also clearly, personally what we call now, charismatic. That people were very impressed by him in person. He wasn't a quiet kind of person, so that even someone like Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, was bowed over by him when they first met and by his ideas.

[Jack Wilson]

Yes, I was really struck by that, when I was reading your book, because, you know, I have this impression of him as being weak and, you know, because of his illness and maybe a little bit strange, he has this obsession with his mother and maybe a little resentful. And you paint a different picture of his social skills. And how exactly did he present to the world? Was he gregarious? Was he confrontational? Was he funny?

[David Ellis]

Well, he called the confrontational, of course, and I suppose it changed a lot. But one of the things he was like a lot of great novelists, like Dickens, he was a great mimic. So one of the. One of the things that gets. Gets forgotten about him was that he could be very, very funny. He made people, not too often, but he made people laugh. But otherwise he was full of original ideas, overflowing with new thoughts. I impressed a variety of people. Not only people like Russell and Lady Ottaly Morrell, of course, and people like that, aristocrats and also other writers. Most people thought him a very interesting and engaging figure. But of course he did have periods of great gloom and despondency and he could be pretty nasty if he was in a bad temper.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from David Ellis at LinkedIn. We know hiring is a big deal for your small business. Sometimes it can feel a little, ah, overwhelming. LinkedIn uses data that you can't find anywhere else to give you the best candidates. All so you can feel confident you're hiring the best person for the job. And even a little hiring Bliss. See why 86% of small businesses who post a job on LinkedIn get a qualified candidate within a day. Post a job for [e-mail] achieve LinkedIn. Your next great hire is here. El fondo de la cajita Hot fudge.

[David Ellis]

Sunday E ela Nueva Creamy Chili McCrispy.

[Jack Wilson]

Strip Dip Los Nuevos McCrispy strips out in McDonald's. Okay, we're back. So, David, I was really struck by. I don't think I've ever seen this in a biography before, but the title of your first chapter is Lawrence Before Frida. And it really emphasizes just how important Frida was to Lawrence. This was a real turning point in his life when he met her, that she even sneaks into the first chapter before she's even on the scene. So who was Frieda Weekly?

[David Ellis]

Ah, well, Frida Weekly. Yes. Just a word on turning points. I play around with that term because of course I've. I've written a bit of biography and I've written about biography, and I think biographers are far too fond of it. There's a turning point at every corner, as it were. But in this particular case, I think it's a justified term because she completely revolutionized his life. Who was Frieda Wheatley? Well, she was the daughter of a German soldier, a minor aristocracy, a baron. She grew up in Metz and there she met a young Englishman called Ernest Weekley, who was a student of languages and who would become a professor of languages at Nottingham University. And she married him and she had three children and lived a sort of quiet, apparently quiet life in a Nottingham garden suburb, but at the same time having a few affairs and going periodically to Germany to mix with friends of her sister who were very much bohemian and avant garde.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[David Ellis]

Particularly a man called Gross, who was a disciple of Freud and believed that sex ought to be free and generally quite radical ideas. But she was back in Nottingham when Lawrence called at the house asking weekly for a letter recommendation. And he was bowled over by her, absolutely bowled over, for all kinds of reasons. I think she was about five or six years older than he was, she was extremely attractive, she was full of ideas and she was prepared to sleep with him, which was quite important for him at that time.

[Jack Wilson]

Yes, you note that one of his friends had described how Lawrence believed in the importance of sex and viewed it as a great subject for a novelist. But as you suggest in his early years, including during his first marriage, this might have come more from sexual frustration as much as sexual experience.

[David Ellis]

Yes. Well, he was living in a sort of late Victorian moral atmosphere and he was brought up in a severe, as far as morals are concerned, sexual morality is concerned, quite a severe atmosphere. He was non conformist atmosphere. And so his actual sexual experience was very limited. And Frieda introduced him to a. Not for the first time, I suppose, but from a whole new idea of the new woman and feminism. I mean, the girlfriends he had were clearly interested in feminist issues, but they weren't like Frida, they didn't believe that sex ought to be free. It's free.

[Jack Wilson]

I mean, for Lawrence, was this as simple as. I mean, it seems so simple to us now as a belief that. Well, I'm a novelist, I believe that novels should be about life and sex is part of it. And why are we not writing about that? And furthermore, why are we not celebrating this thing or giving it the kind of importance that it deserves, given how much it takes up in our minds and biologically and so on? It just seems like something a dam had to burst, so to speak.

[David Ellis]

Yes, I think that's true, but I also think he was extremely. Ford. Max Ford was very impressed by it. He was extremely well read in 19th century Literature of all kinds, but particularly in its fiction, of course. And if you read all the 19th century novels, there's a kind of gap where sexual experience, where you have to fill it in for yourself, kind of convention. Even when people are going to have sex, you generally have the word afterwards.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right.

[David Ellis]

And I think probably he was referring to that, that it had not been properly treated, not in. Of course, I don't think there's much connection, but last time we talked, we were talking about Byron, weren't we? And Byron was from the same area as Laurence. I grew up there anyway. And so I suppose there are figures in the past who represented a certain kind of freedom, but they were mostly. Well, they were all men, weren't they? So I don't know. I think, yes, it was a strange thing for him to say, but it was prophetic because he spent a lot of his writing energy on talking about sex or working up to the moment of Lady Shasta. I suppose.

[Jack Wilson]

So Frieda was married and had children. What did she see in Lawrence? What attracted. I mean, he fell for her immediately and within days he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But how long did it take her to come around? And what was it that she saw in Lawrence?

[David Ellis]

Well, I don't think anybody quite knows that, but she was obviously rather bored by her life. She was very taken by this young man who seemed devoted to her. But she. I think initially it's quite clear that she regarded it would be just another affair, really, she had several. But he was very insistent that that wouldn't do, that she had committed herself to him. And I think in the. Seems strange, I suppose now in the circles in Germany, in those left wing radical circles in which she moved, there was an idea of one of the functions of one of the missions women could have would be to nurture a genius. And he was certainly, perhaps jokingly introduced by her husband as a genius. I said, I got a genius coming to see me. So he had that reputation, but it wasn't. She was going to nurture him, but not in any sort of subsidiary handmaiden style. She was. This was going to become part of the enterprise, as it were. Well, why was she attracted? Well, he must have seemed extraordinary. I mean, he had an extraordinary presence, as so many other people apart from Frieda testify.

[Jack Wilson]

And just for people who aren't aware, it was more of a kind of relationship where she would challenge him and debate with him on intellectual side. It wasn't a worshipful helping that she was doing to his creative purpose.

[David Ellis]

No, exactly. That's why you say he wasn't a handmaiden at all. No, no, no. She was extremely. She could stick up for herself. They began having fierce arguments quite early on. And then part of her philosophy was that you should let it all hang out, as it were. You shouldn't repress. This is partly the Freudian impish repress things. So repression leads to all kinds of illnesses, mental and physical, and. And that you should always say what you felt. So they did a lot of that when they were on their own. But when they came back to England, they kept on doing it to the dismay of their friends. Often they would have quite furious arguments because Lawrence had quite a bad temper and she would stick up for herself. So it was a tempestuous kind of relationship. And I don't think. Well, I don't know. Nobody knows. But it might not have lasted. When they got back to England, they were going to stay there a few months. The war broke out, and they were actually stuck there for five years or so and stuck with each other in the sense that Lawrence had become dependent on her in his feelings. And she had nowhere to go, absolutely nowhere to go, because she couldn't. She would be. Well, she was an enemy alien if she was no longer with Lawrence and she had no money anymore. So in some sense they were stuck with each other. But. But the relationship persisted or lasted until his death in 1930.

[Jack Wilson]

And generally speaking, would it be your opinion that the relationship with her helped him as a novelist, or did the fights and so on detract from his work?

[David Ellis]

Oh, I think, yes. That's a famous question nobody can answer, really. It's sort of counterfactual, isn't it? Initially, it certainly helped enormously. It released a lot of things in him. It gave him access to experiences that he wouldn't have had otherwise. She certainly believed in him as a genius, as a writer. So in that sense she was very helpful. But she also wore him down in certain ways. So I don't know, we can't tell what. It's hard to conceive of him because he'd been engaged to a fellow teacher called Louis Burroughs before he met Frieda. And it's hard to conceive of him. They were going to keep a school in the country because they were both teachers. And it's hard to think of him sort of being a teacher and writing the Odd book. Instead of being what he was, a traveler all over the. And taking on great major themes, engaging with major themes. So who can tell of any of our own lives if we'd done this, if we'd done that and so on?

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Speaking of that, we haven't talked yet about your work as a biographer. What was available to you that you found helpful? I mean, do we have letters? I know we have kind of the novels themselves and you can draw what you can from that, but. But are there also. Is there a rich store of letters or diaries or the observations of others, or what were you able to pull from?

[David Ellis]

Well, it's an extraordinary, rich archive, really, because he was one of the great letter writers in English, along with Keats and Byron, really. I think there are eight volumes of letters, so the letters are extremely informative. But then he was also someone who people were aware of and drew attention to himself in various ways, so that almost everybody he knew wrote a memoir of him. And they were collected together wonderfully by one of your fellow countrymen called Niels N E H L S in three volumes. And you get there all kinds of people who knew him, people who disliked him, people who liked him and so on. And then there's a normal amount of work been done on his background. There are marvellous tapes of local people from Eastwood, where he was born, talking about the family and what they remember of young Bert. Of course, he's D.H. lawrence, isn't he? It should be David Herbert, but he didn't like being called David. He felt it sounded too posh and everybody in the family called him Bert. He was called Bert and therefore, I suppose it was Frida decided to call him Lorenzo and he was always known as Lorenzo by people later on. Bert Lawrence. Yes.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, let's introduce another character onto the scene, Lady Ottaleen. Who was she and what kind of relationship did she have with the Lawrences?

[David Ellis]

Lady Odin Morrell? Yes, I'm told it's Morrow. I used to say Morell. But moral? Well, she was interesting person. She. I don't know that much about her, but she was an aristocrat from Lawrence's own area. Her family were from the Nottinghamshire area and she ran a kind of salon in London for the more radical politicians and artists and writers. And she had bought a house near Oxford called Garcington, and she invited the people there, almost all of whom, well, I suppose all of them were against the war, they were anti war and some of them evaded conscription by getting jobs with her on the estate. So she she sort of commanded a wide circle of friends. She was, she was married to a politician, but she, Bertrand Russell was her lover for a while and all kinds of people like Lytton Strachey and so on, all the Bloomingtons, or what we now know as the Bloomington set, seem to have gone there. And Lawrence and Frieda were invited there and she was very impressed by Lawrence and he liked her and wrote her a lot of letters. But then he sort of depicted her, she felt, as Hermione in Women in Love. And she was very steep, not surprisingly, deeply offended by this. Partly, I mean, it's sort of the idea is that she has been the mistress of the Birkin figure who is clearly based on Lauren, so that that kind of pleased her. But there are various episodes which in which she doesn't play a particularly glorious part. So their relationship stopped till the very end of his life, when it was renewed slightly when he was by letter, when he was ill in the south of France.

[Jack Wilson]

Did he have a reputation of kind of using people that he knew as the raw material for his fiction and maybe draining or putting some tension on the relationships with them, or was he inventing this? And that was the objection, that she could recognize herself. But there were a lot of things in there that didn't happen.

[David Ellis]

Well, that's the problem. Yes, he had a terrible reputation, which was perfectly justified, of using people he'd met and know as the starting points or models for certain characters in his novels. And the complication is the one you point to that then, because they're taking part in the plot of a novel, they begin to do things that the originals of them are shocked by. And that's certainly true of Hermione, of the Portrait of Lady Otterline in Women in Love. So yes, he did. And. And in two of his works he introduced a figure clearly based on a man called Norman Douglas, who was a writer of the time. And Douglass was angry about this and eventually wrote a pamphlet called A Plea for Better Manners in which he objected to this whole practice of putting people into books, as they say, and said, being a sort of old fashioned gent, that it wouldn't be stopped until they brought back duelling. So he did that a lot. Well, there you go. He wasn't alone, of course, but he appears in various novels of the time, sometimes in a favorable light, but sometimes not at all. So they did it to each other.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. I view his output as being very impressive. What was driving him? Was it financial need? Was it artistic? Artistic searching? Was he just somebody who needed To. He had so many ideas in him, they were just overflowing. Or how did he become as productive as he was?

[David Ellis]

Well, all of the above, really. I mean, certainly he needed to write all the time to make a living. He was desperately poor for some periods during the war and basically lived off charity. So he wrote as much as he could and took on all kinds of commissions. He wrote a book of history for schools, which he obviously did for the money. He only became financially comfortable with the private publication of Lady Chateller's Lover, which was what the French call a succes de scandal. You know, it became his notoriety meant that lots of people bought it and made him money. But at the same time, yes, he couldn't. What he couldn't do. He wrote all the time and he needed the money, but he couldn't write commercially, to order, as it were, on the whole, he had to write what he was believing in, what he thought about. A good example is a novel he called the Lost Girl, which begins in a very conventional manner. He deliberately wrote it in order to cash in on the fashion for a certain kind of provincial novel that had been popularized by Arnold Bennet. And the first part of it is a wonderful saga of provincial life, but towards the end it goes off into rather unusual Laurentian territory. Nevertheless, it was the one book that won a prize for him and £100. So he must have been pleased about that.

[Jack Wilson]

So we've talked a little bit about sex and we've talked about his novels, but he had many passions. What haven't we covered yet in terms of other pursuits? He had. We've. I mean, he wrote poetry, he was kind of a philosopher, he painted. What's important for understanding what was significant to his life.

[David Ellis]

Yes. I mean, one way of answering that is just to point to the extraordinary variety of the kinds of things he wrote. Well, he wrote novels, he wrote short stories, he wrote novellas, he wrote books of philosophy, he wrote travel books, he translated. He couldn't keep still, really. Translated from Italian. A couple. A couple of books. And he wrote lots and lots of poems. I'm sure I've missed out a category there, but. Oh, evil plays. Lots of plays. Well, a dozen plays. None of them quite made money for him, but he certainly liked to write them. He was just one of these. Okay, he wrote for money, but at the same time, he's one of these natural writers. He would have done it anyway, I think. And he was impelled by very. This is very 19th century, I think, in some ways, by wanting to make a difference by wanting his work to have some effect in the real world. He wanted people to have more sense and more grandiloquently. He says, you know, there's a wonderful interview we did with an American where the chap says, the newspaper reporter says, why do you write? And Frida says, butts him with. To show how clever he is. Egotism. And he says, well, no, no, it's not that. He says, you've got a talent you need to display, but you want people to have more sense. And he has this extraordinary phrase for the race, as it were. A great sense of the. Of the writer's responsibility to his community, even though he was cut off from his community and was a kind of exile. Everything he wrote has a. Has behind it this sense of the writer's mission. He never wrote. Well, never. He rarely wrote for entertainment, as it were. He was. Wanted to do something with his writing.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. You can kind of see that in his. A book that I had run across when I was fairly young about his studies in American literature and his kind of anger at certain authors for being hypocritical or for not being in touch with reality or not going for it when they could. And. And you can see a kind of attitude that he has to say, the world needs to be better and people need to be better. They need to think, they need to be more free. They need to be more in touch with themselves. And writers can't fail them in that respect. They need to meet them on those terms.

[David Ellis]

That's absolutely true. Yes. Yes. No, no, no. I think that's. He wanted to. To poke people in the ribs all the time. Yes. And that. That makes you. He was always a minority, so I don't know what the expression is, but his audience, his public was a kind of. Would never be a very large one. It's only that it's only rather, in some ways, due to the success of Lady Chatterley's Lover, that made him a household name, otherwise you can't think he would have become that.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Right. Was he satisfied? Did he seem like he was proud of his work or he felt like he was getting done what he wanted to get done, or was he constantly restless and searching for something different?

[David Ellis]

Well, I think at the end of his life, when he was dying of tuberculosis, he was bitter in many ways because he felt he'd. He attempted to tell people about things and not many of them or not enough of them had listened. He felt he'd. Well, he sort of blamed the world for the state he was in. That he'd been. He'd been working too hard. He makes fun of himself or he has fried the character. Make fun of him as a Salvatore Mundi, you know, to try and save the world. But it was in his nature to try and do that. In some ways, he's an inheritor of the great religious leaders of the 19th, non conformist religious leaders of the 19th century, you know, the Methodists, and he was a Congregationalist as a boy. So there's something of that fervor in him. And I think that when he was. When he was very ill at the end, he felt he'd failed and he'd worn himself out for people who didn't care.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you think if he looked at his legacy from the standpoint of 2025, he would be comforted by the way that he and his works are viewed? Or do you think he would say the world still hasn't gotten it, they still haven't absorbed what I tried to give them, or they haven't gotten the point yet.

[David Ellis]

That's interesting. His reputation is interesting, really. But I mean, one group that tend to be quite keen. I'm in. Are the ecological warriors, in the sense that he's always saying, we're treating nature abominably. We need to go back to living in harmony with the natural world. We destroyed it with our industrialization, all that. He would have felt things were much worse than they were when he was alive, but also that there were now people who were more conscious of the damage that had been done. In that sense, the complicated one is with feminism, really, because there was a moment when the feminist movement turned on him and pointed out some of the very nasty things he can say about women. And for a while, he was impurta nobody. People refused to teach him. But lately there's been a relenting of that and a lot of female writers have come back to admiring him and seeing the good things in his writing.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, he seems like one of those writers who. I can ask that question of you today, and 100 years from now, a podcaster can ask a biographer, that generation's biographer of Lawrence, the same question. And he's somebody who is enduring enough to be around, but also prickly enough or contentious enough that that will always be kind of an open question.

[David Ellis]

Yes, I think that's true. I think controversial is a mild word for what Lawrence was.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, well, the book is called D.H. lawrence A Critical Life. David Ellis, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[David Ellis]

Not at all. It's nice to Speak to you again.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. And finally today, Dorian Linsky, after he and I spoke about his forays into apocalyptic literature, I asked him a special question. Okay. I'm here with Dorian Linsky, the author of Everything Must the Stories We Tell about the End of the World. Dorian, this highly appropriate question comes from a listener who asked, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[C]

I think you would just want something that had as much life in it as possible and like as much of the human experience. And two, had a kind of an authorial voice that you wanted spend time with. Now, unfortunately, I never read, at least never finished either Ulysses or Middlemarch, both of which may well fit that bill.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Or perhaps Tolstoy's War and Peace is another one people will mention for those reasons.

[C]

Exactly, exactly. Those kind of, like, everything novels. So that's kind of a struggle because there's people that I would like to sort of, you know, spend time with, like, you know, Orwell's essays, because I'm so immersed in Orwell film for the previous book. But, you know, he does have very, like, male perspective on things. Not the greatest understanding of women. And so you think, well, hang on, wouldn't I want that included as well? Wouldn't I want that experience? And I've noticed that when I write books, I try and put in as much as possible.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, I'm just so sort of, sort of fascinated by exploring all these different things and joining all these different things together. So I can't name one book, but I think that would be the kind of. That would be the kind of book I was looking for. This sort of giant, like, sort of panorama of life. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, when people attempt those novels, you know, when they get the great American novel or it's. Or it's Dickensian in its scope, they don't necessarily come off. But I like the idea that you want to try and grab the world and get it down on the page.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Now, when I've been asking this question to people, I think most people imagine themselves maybe in bed at the very end of. They're somewhere in their 90s or maybe older. But you've got this other experience where you've immersed yourself in all of this apocalyptic literature. I'm wondering if in those books where the asteroid is headed for Earth or the scientist is aware that we're about to blow up the planet, or that Kind of thing. Do the characters ever reach for poetry or for literature? Do they seek out literature for some kind of consolation or do they look for other ways to spend their last moments?

[C]

Yeah, no, I think most of the time it is just sort of being with people they love. It's the conversation, it's the last dinner, it's the last drink, it's the last party. That's the instinct. If you leave out all the kind of dark options where people like the drug crazed orgies or the joining a religious cult or going on a crime spree, all of that lot. If you look at the kind of more normal responses. Yeah, I think it's that kind of human connection. But there's a very famous warning against relying too much in literature. In this short story that was made into a Twilight Zone episode, Time Enough at Last, I don't know if you know it, where Burgess Meredith plays this guy who's the kind of work he loves reading more than anything else. And he works in a bank and he happens to be in the kind of like locker of the bank, the vault, when a bomb drops and he comes up and finds that everybody's dead. Then he finds the ruins of New York Public Library and lots of the books are still intact. And he's like, fantastic. I can just read undisturbed for the rest of my life without all these horrible people getting in the way. And then as he leans over to pick up his book, his glasses fall off. Smash. Which means he can't read. So maybe that is a warning that you should always choose people over books. Much though I love books.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Well, it's interesting that if that's the warning that's coming from authors who have a vested interest in having the rest of us believe that books would be. It'd be a good thing to buy a bunch of books so that we would have them on hand in case something like this happened. If the authors are saying, you know what, maybe there would be something better than a book at a moment like this. I guess we should probably listen to them.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, in that extreme, of course, neither of us want to discourage people from reading, but yeah, no, it's very interesting how people converge, how so many writers converge on what we be the best way to spend the last day.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. I guess I should amend that and say that people should be reading Everything Must Go, the stories we tell about the end of the world and maybe listening to the History of literature podcast while they're at it.

[C]

Well, absolutely. On the last day you can listen to a podcast while doing other things. So that's handy.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Dorian Linsky, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[C]

Thank you so much.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh boy. Shameless self promotion from your host, Jack Wilson. Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. I am thankful to Mr. Linsky and to Mr. Ellis, Dorian and David for joining me today. You can find their books in bookstores everywhere. And I'm thankful to you for putting up with me. Putting up with me. What was the Winston Churchill line? Never end a sentence with a proposition. Winston. Well, that's a rule up with which I will not put. So thank you for upping with which me you've put or something. I'm no Churchill. Cross him off the list of people I'm not and never will become. It's looking like like Caesar might be next. My list is starting to look like my grocery list. When I'm almost at the checkout aisle, I've rounded the corner, almost time to pay, and I don't even have as much in my cart as I thought. Luckily, I snuck a few treats in there. I might not be Caesar, but I've got a bag of cheese curls and some chocolate chip cookies, which we'll have to do. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[David Ellis]

Time.

[Jack Wilson]

I'm Shirley Leung, columnist at the Boston Globe and host of say More where we go beyond the headline with bold, intimate conversations about the biggest issues shaping our world. In a new special series, we're going to confront the C word. That's right, cancer. It's a disease that touches us all, but it's hard to talk about. In a new five part series, I open up for the first time about my own battle with breast cancer and explore the science, history and deeply personal stories behind the this disease. There is life beyond cancer. Join me for the C Word stories of cancer. Follow say More from the Boston Globe. Wherever you get your podcasts, you've likely heard about touching grass to reconnect with nature. But have you heard about hunting for fossils in conflict zones or saving an endangered species of butterfly while incarcerated? These are just some of the amazing stories we're sharing on Going Wild, the chart topping and award winning podcast produced by Nature on PBS, hosted by me, wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Winn Grant. In the brand new season of Going Wild, we're talking to some of the most interesting champions of nature, ranging from TikTok's black forager, Alexis Nicole Nelson and Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Ed Yong to Nat Geo explorer slash standup comic Ella Al Shamahi to explore what led them to create change within themselves, their community and the natural world. Get inspired, all while exploring our place in the wild. Listen to going wild with Dr. Raewyn Grant wherever you get your podcasts.