After a visit from the Lawrences to her villa in Tuscany, Lady Ida Sitwell wrote, “A Mr. D.H. Lawrence came over the other day, a funny little petit-maitre of a man with flat features and a beard. He says he is a writer…His wife is a large German.” It is little wonder that Lawrence often lost his temper. His fits of anger are almost as famous as his fits of sexual arousal. Once, in the Black Forest, Maddox reports that he was so angry that he even found the pine trees irritating: “Why can’t they have leaves!”

Moderate in almost nothing, Lawrence virtually worked (wrote) himself to death. At the age of forty-four, weighing eighty-five pounds, he was working on a book review when he died. In it, he offers his own redefinition of “pleasing” God: “…happily doing one’s best in the job in hand, and being lovingly absorbed in an activity which makes one in touch with – with the heart of all things; call it God.”