Inspired by Spite : CONCEIVED WITH MALICE: Literature as Revenge in the Lives and Works of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller, <i> By Louise DeSalvo (Dutton: $24.95, cloth; 437 pp., illustrated with photographs)</i>

Vengeance as motivation for the creation of literature is the subject so energetically palpated by Louise DeSalvo in this hands-on psychological examination cum literary analysis.

Drawing on four relationships--Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s sexually troubled marriage, D. H. Lawrence’s ambivalent dealings with his patron (the eccentric Lady Ottoline Morrell), Djuna Barnes’ solitary struggle to exorcise childhood abuse at the hands of her immediate family, and Henry Miller’s ambivalent entanglement with June Mansfield (the libidinous femme fatale of his novels who in real life was the second of his five wives)--DeSalvo probes the motivations for and the deeper meanings of the symbolically lethal compositions that issued form these troubled human connections.

What she locates are not Dryden’s gods avenging themselves in behalf of just causes, but psychopathy and meanness of spirit. Virginia Woolf and Barnes are limned as pathologically withdrawn, inwardly communing souls for whom the intimacy of one’s own room is preferable to the intrusion of company. Lawrence and Miller are portrayed as either expansive or morose--twin temperaments as steady as Jello in a windstorm. While there is some basis for these negative characterizations, they are hopelessly unbalanced.

In Barnes’ case DeSalvo emphasized the last 40 of her 90 years, which were spent in the solitary self-confinement of a one-room Greenwich Village apartment. There its played-out occupant, once a stellar expatriate presence in Paris, littered the floor with the false starts and imperfect drafts of a life story she was struggling to transmute into art.

Searching for corroboration of Djuna’s purported rape at the hands of her father, DeSalvo ransacks her subject’s play, “the Antiphon,” for telltale evidence of child molestation. This is a most unpromising critical approach, since “The Antiphon” is surrealistically structured. Nor do Barnes’ cryptic letters to friends lend themselves to meaningful analysis. It seems not possible for DeSalvo, implacable investigator that she is, to accept the subterfuge of art as balm for a wounded heart, or to admit the possibility that writers, especially those who are emotionally fragile, unwittingly deconstruct or even lie outright on occasion like most of us. The distinction between established fact and fiction created for whatever reason is lost on an author who boldly promulgates from the voluminous scholarly glosses she has industriously and impressively assembled.

DeSalvo does exhibit an enviable gift for synthesis in the detailing of her case studies. From disparate remnants of biography and autobiography, from snippets of literary history and criticism she has woven narrative tapestries that make for compelling if not always convincing reading.

Of her four accounts, the essay on Miller is the most accomplished, though even the interpretation of a widely known story (the source for the movie “Henry and June”) invites basic questions. In 1930 Miller had completed a novel, “Crazy Cock,” that was based on his life in a Brooklyn apartment with not only June but June’s lesbian lover. It is a flawed work that Miller refused to have published in his lifetime. In it the lovesick protagonist is himself revealed as flawed and possibly crazy. Miller attempted suicide during this dark period in his life. Is it possible for a cuckolded, depressed artist to work well under such a strain?

Revenge in this case rather than fanning the flames of creativity suffocated an intended work of fiction that was undermined by emotional crisis. It was only after his pain subsided that Miller could summon such elements as catharsis, humor and a coherent philosophy to interact with his tales of unbridled lust. And only then did he earn popular and critical acclaim.

In her blinkered fascination with the presence of human rottenness at the core of artistic inspiration, DeSalvo glides from literary analysis into the slippery reaches of psycho-supposition. The publication time of her husband’s novel, “The Wise Virgins” (interpreted in this volume as another spousal attack on a wife) is posited as the cause of Virginia Woolf’s mental breakdown.

What follows on the heels of this judgment are two pages of biographical summary in which Leonard assures Virginia of his unconditional love. Confidently ignoring her own citations of Leonard’s endearments--”To be really separated from you would be absolutely unbearable”--and herself admitting that “The Wise Virgins” was never discussed by the Woolfs as a source of pain to Virginia, DeSalvo unswervingly is able to characterize the novel as “vicious,” as “a betrayal” and as “a sadistic act.”

Positive representation of this sort in the face of conflicting evidence brings to mind the kind of forceful re-inventions of themselves that politicians accomplish at election time. Hypothesis and conclusion mysteriously change places. Such presto digitating (sleight of hand) acts make “Conceived With Malice” a piece of work you must keep your eyes on.