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Born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, into a working-class family, David Herbert Lawrence was the fourth child of Arthur and Lydia Lawrence (nee Beardsall). He was educated at Nottingham High School and University College, Nottingham where he studied to become a school-teacher. On qualifying, he became a class teacher for several years but resigned due to illness. He supported himself thereafter by writing. In 1912 he met and fell in love with Frieda Weekley, a free-thinking German woman with a very different social background from Lawrence, for whom she left her husband and young family. They married following her divorce in 1914. Leaving England in 1919, the Lawrences spent much of their lives travelling, settling for varying periods in continental Europe, Australia and the Americas. From his earliest years to his last days Lawrence wrote, his literary importance confirmed well before his death, in Vence (France), on 2 March 1930.
In as much as Lawrence’s oeuvre is the result of his continual examination of the relationships between the personal, the social, the political and the spiritual, it may be the case that his thought is brought into sharpest focus by some understanding of his background and experiences. He is a writer whose work has given rise to diverse critical views [117-158]. His writing life spawned several controversies and some of his books were suppressed by an Establishment that he frequently offended. Lawrence continually drew on his working-class, nonconformist background to shape his ideas, even when they developed – as they did – out of resistance to his social and spiritual conditioning. In seventy years of reading and re-reading his work, few critics have felt able to ignore the relation between his life and writing (a tendency which this Guide reproduces!). For contemporary readers, however, important areas continue to be Lawrence’s relationship to a literary tradition as well as his relationship to modernist literary practice [14]; the ways in which his work explores issues of self and sexuality and, in particular, masculinity; his development of social and political themes; his awareness of the environment. Theorizing Lawrence, however, seldom occurs without some reference to the contexts which produced him.
Part I of this Guide provides an opportunity to assess the significance to an understanding of the novels, poems and plays of Lawrence’s family and social background as well as his working and intellectual relationships. For example, it is often acknowledged that Lawrence drew upon details of his family and working-class culture for the novel Sons and Lovers (1913), for plays like The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914) and for other highly praised pieces, notably the short story ’Odour of
D.H. LAWRENCE
Chrysanthemums’ (1911), his first novel The White Peacock (1911) and ’Daughters of the Vicar’ (1914). It is also the case that his marriage, and early experiences with women, were examined in a book of poems, Look! We Rave Come Through! (1917), and in the unfinished novel Mr Noon (1934; 1984). Lawrence used novels, in particular, to work out his ideas. The development of a personal philosophy or ’metaphysic’ (which was not fixed but altered subtly throughout his writing life) is consequently at the heart of the great challenge of the major novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), and gets continual examination, revision and restatement in Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).
(a) EARLY INFLUENCES
Biographers writing about Lawrence’s parents and their families emphasize the social backgrounds of both. The principal Victorian industries included steelmaking, mining and textiles. Textiles, mining and engineering accounted for a high percentage of employment in the East Midlands where the Lawrence family lived. Arthur Lawrence (1846-1924) worked all his life in the coal mines and Lawrence grew up in the mining community of Eastwood. Most young men who shared Lawrence’s social and economic background were likely to find employment in, or relating to, their local industries which in Eastwood was dominated by coal. Some of Lawrence’s forebears had worked in lace-making, for which Nottingham was an important centre in the nineteenth century, and his paternal grandfather was a tailor by trade who supplied the Brinsley mine with pit clothes (see ’Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ (1929) in Phoenix, 1936: 133). At the turn of the century the majority of working-class children left school by the time they were fourteen but Lawrence stayed on to obtain the kind of education that could make possible a different lifestyle, and in eventually qualifying as a school teacher he obtained a profession. In ’Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ (which is a nostalgic look back at his origins) Lawrence alludes to Eastwood’s industrial past as it developed from a rural settlement with its modern origins in smallscale mining into the small Victorian town which Lawrence knew, with church, chapel and market-place. The most palpable social changes occurred, as in comparable communities, with the arrival of the large privately owned mining companies. When Lawrence writes about his boyhood community and its social history in this essay he idealizes the modesty of working-class life, and rails against the obvious signs
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of modernization such as the products of new building schemes (new housing for workers’ families). Addressing details of working life, his attention is never seriously on economic hardship or social inequality, and while much of his fiction and poetry articulates anti-bourgeois sentiments, his representation of working-class values is not separable from his highly personal celebration of a ’native’ identity which is more romantic than it is political.
All accounts reveal that Lawrence was closer to his mother, Lydia (1851-1910), than to his father, especially after the sudden death of one of his brothers, Ernest, in 1901. His mother’s family, on the Beardsall side, are often represented by biographers as a family marked by its social aspirations, even pretensions, in severe economic decline, nostalgic for a lost status, contemptuous of their ultimate need for thrift yet proud of their prudent management in times of crisis. Lawrence is such an autobiographical writer in so many respects that these biographers have felt able to draw extensively on Walter and Gertrude Morel in Sons and Lovers, for example, for indications of Lawrence’s parents’ lives, and their uneasy marriage. Certainly, in her memoirs, Lawrence’s sister Ada is quite clear that the Morels are the Lawrences (A. Lawrence 1931; Lawrence and Gelder 1932).
With such strong links established between life and art it is difficult to sidestep the myths that endure when commentators attend to the character of Lawrence’s parents, either in detail or at the level of the thumbnail sketch. The importance of their perceived personalities is principally to explain Lawrence’s domestic allegiances and sympathies, as well as his developing personality, and to highlight the autobiographical dimension of his work. Lawrence’s father is more often than not the image of the semi-literate working man who enjoyed simple pleasures. At home in Eastwood, he apparently had few ambitions to travel beyond the masculine environments of the work-place and the public house. Biographies invariably point to his easy-going attitude to life, and his documented skills as a dancer to indicate a free nature, continually at odds with his wife’s more restrained behaviour which, in its temperance and moderation, is frequently emphasized to signify her growing disappointment with her lot. She is serious-minded, the auto-didact, the reader, committed user of the local library. As a girl Lydia Lawrence had a very brief experience as a pupil-teacher, and had ambitions to start a school of her own although this plan did not come to anything. Later she worked from home with her sisters as a lace-drawer for the factories in Nottingham. As a wife and mother she ran a shop from her front room, but this was a short-lived scheme.
D.H. LAWRENCE
Critic and biographer John Worthen describes Lydia Lawrence’s familiarity with her son’s work-in-progress, and her interest in his reception (Worthen 1991a: 141-5). By all accounts, throughout her married life she remained aspirational, and took every opportunity to improve the family’s domestic situation with strategic house-moves and necessary thrift. She is seen as passionately committed to her children and keen to raise them in opposition to their father’s family culture as much as possible. Family histories and family myths are in operation here, inevitably. As Worthen notes:
i.i [B]oth families were working class: one child had been educated ,,: to the age of 13, the other to the age of 7. But the most powerful i>. class distinctions always operate in borderline areas; and what divided the Beardsalls from the Lawrences was ideology, myth and t expectation: that made for a deep and lasting division. f( (Worthen 1991a: 26)
i
•• It is a challenge to reconstruct accurately a child’s feeling for its parents, siblings and extended family. With regard to Lawrence, Worthen (1991a: 51-60) provides the most detailed synopsis available, drawing attention to the facts as they are documented in memoirs and letters, both of Lawrence’s loathing of his father and, after his mother’s death, of the slow process of revising those familiar and frequently rehearsed feelings of contempt into tenderness (Letters I:
316). The first volume of Nehls’s D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (1957) also provides some invaluable accounts of Lawrence’s boyhood allegiances. Towards the end of his life he produced more sympathetic accounts of his father than before, and became harsher in his judgements of his mother (and mothers in general). The tendency of most commentators is to follow the lead of the narrative apparently offered in Sons and Lovers and to suggest an oedipal psycho-drama playing itself out in the stifling space of the family home [43-7; 134-8].
It would be pointless to deny the strength of the emotional bonds that the young Lawrence forged with his mother (confirmed by the memoirs of Ada Lawrence, Jessie Chambers and others who saw him grow up), or the force of the anger that both of them directed at different times towards his father. Lydia Lawrence’s sensibilities worked in her son, and perhaps made easier his move away from the pit. By the time of his mother’s death Lawrence had begun to gain recognition as a writer. He had been to college and was working (not entirely happily) as a school-teacher. He had a measure of financial independence and he could earn a little extra money through publishing. Whatever
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he was to become, he was not working his father’s stall ix Colliery and was not likely to return to his boyhood see). . lnsley permanent way. Arguably, any level of recognition from 1 . ^ anY concerning his achievements and aspirations might have macj . ^atner for Lawrence to express tenderness towards a parent from v^, easier break had, in fact, been made quite early in their relation^, . ^ tne evidence is, however, that his father’s incomprehension at L^ The choices persisted; an incomprehension which could only ir^ ence’s his son’s writing life took him further away, in every SCK se as Eastwood. Se’ from
Lawrence is hardly unique in his youthful rejection of or\ but he also rejected for himself a specific masculine culture £ rent; left home to work as a teacher. Even so, in writing, he drew n ne he knew. Literary critic and cultural theorist, Raymond Vt/-ir reserves his highest praise for Lawrence’s ability to write ^i ^ms; first community [139-41]. Williams has in mind much of ^ ^ writing, which has its flowering particularly in the short stor> ,n^arV of Chrysanthemums’ and in Sons and Lovers: ’What really COK ^our is community, and when I say community I mean something. ^lve of course personal: a man feeling with others, speaking in ^ ^ is them’ (Williams 1970: 172). It is the refusal to separate the ’^ Vith and the ’social’, argues Williams, which is part of Lawrence’s, . na” in the representation of the relationship between mother anq ^Pn Sons and Lovers. The mother’s particular hostility towards her k , s m and his kind, is directed at her husband’s means of wage-ear^ n”> his attitude to his work, his social habits and, ironically, his e^ ^n” his own community of working men. None of these af *tn reproduced in her sons. ”e
Lawrence’s religious and moral education was at the hani large Congregationalist community of Eastwood which by all ^ ^e ’ reproduced and reinforced his mother’s values of educatk tlts improvement and self-discipline (Worthen 1991a: 64-8). By ^ ’ S(^- the energies of a range of preachers and lay-preachers, Sunday , °^ and chapel day school, temperance organisations like the Band MTT °°’ and the moral guidance offered by groups like Christian End ^e’ Lawrence acquired a set of moral codes and, more crucially, a lq ^ that informed the development of his personality and his p ^Se philosophy. This tradition stimulated Lawrence’s sense of cortv ^ and Englishness (although he becomes increasingly sceptical abcv , ^ ’England’ comes to represent). The imagery which he learned i^ , at persists in much of his writing, particularly where his empt . rebirth and resurrection and, in the later work, where reeeneh.. Is
’ ° ’tlnn :
•<4sis j ’tion;
D.H. LAWRENCE
linked in interesting and poetic ways with apocalypse. Although at the age of sixteen Lawrence was beginning, as might be expected, to question certain orthodoxies, he remained indebted to the religious teaching he received as a youth. In his essay ’Hymns in a Man’s Life’ (1928), he acknowledges the ’direct’ knowledge of the Bible which this teaching gave him. He also discusses the values which distinguished Congregationalism from, in his words, the ’snobbish hierarchies of class’ which characterized the Church of England and, presumably at the other end of the scale, the ’personal emotionalism’ of the Methodists
(Phoenix II, 600).
The boy Lawrence was by all accounts hungry for knowledge and his predeliction for reading and nature study, combined with his formal schooling, gave him a sound foundation. His youth seems to have been characterized by bookishness, and an intense interest in the arts. His first school was a Board School but he continued his education by winning a scholarship to Nottingham High School at the age of twelve. He left in 1901 for a short spell as a clerk in a medical supplies business, a period of unhappiness which coincided with the death of Ernest Lawrence, and serious illness for Lawrence. The following year he went into education as a pupil-teacher in the British School in Eastwood, also training in near-by Ilkeston. Following common practice he completed his training at University College, Nottingham (1906-08). After that he could work as a certificated assistant teacher, and found a post at Davidson Road School, Croydon, Surrey. Lawrence draws on his experience as a teacher in the description of Ursula Brangwen’s introduction to paid employment in The Rainbow [49-56].
(b) WOMEN, RELATIONSHIPS AND
MARRIAGE
. ^
Prior to 1912, Lawrence had a series of relationships with women which had implications for his writing. His relationship with Jessie Chambers
– his first love with whom he had his first extended discussions on literature and art – found expression, to her dismay, in Sons and Lovers, where she is the model for Miriam Leivers. He had been visiting the Chambers family at Haggs Farm (which Lawrence describes as a second home), since his High School days, being friendly in the first instance with Jessie’s brother. Both their families expected the long-term friendship with Jessie to be resolved eventually as an engagement, but by all accounts it was an awkward ’betrothal’. The tensions were considerable: despite the fact that both Lawrence and Chambers were still
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developing their adult personalities, Lawrence was clearly affected by the mutual dislike felt by his mother and Chambers – an antagonism which was quite evident to all who knew them. In addition, the young pair found that the qualities which contributed to a satisfying friendship did not necessarily produce a fulfilling romantic or sexual relationship. The criticisms levelled at Miriam in Sons and Lovers [57-65] may well also have been levelled at Jessie Chambers (on whom Emily in The White Peacock was also based). Lawrence ended their six-year engagement in 1910. In 1935, Chambers, using the pseudonym ’E.T.’, published D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, in which she describes their friendship and the tensions which developed between them and, usefully, draws attention to Lawrence’s early literary influences. Lawrence always acknowledged the value of Chambers’ encouragement of him as a young writer. Quite apart from their shared love of literature and the arts, ’and their enthusiasm for debate, she began his public career. In 1909 she sent a selection of Lawrence’s poems to Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of the English Review, a literary periodical which published established and new writers including Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Thomas Hardy and H.G. Wells. Hueffer (who published his own masterpiece The Good Soldier in 1915, the same year as The Rainbow], was always keen to identify and nourish new talent, and was central to the development of English modernism. A writer and critic as well as an influential editor (who, after 1919, was known as Ford Madox Ford) he met Lawrence and was extremely willing to support him, publishing his poetry and ’Goose Fair’ in the Review in 1909 and 1910 and ’Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and A Fragment of Stained Glass’ in 1911 (the same year as The White Peacock}. He also offered constructive criticism of other work. Lawrence published reviews in the English Review and, after 1911, regularly placed his poems in other literary magazines. As he acknowledged, it was Chambers’ action which first stimulated Hueffer’s interest, but at a personal level the relationship between Chambers and Lawrence failed.
The women who figure significantly in Lawrence’s life up to and immediately after the break with Chambers are interesting not only because of their commitment to Lawrence but also because of their wider interests and personalities: the social as well as the personal contexts which helped to define them. With the expansion of secondary education in the second half of the nineteenth century it was possible for women to become teachers, and several of Lawrence’s women friends trained and taught in schools achieving some financial independence (although women’s salaries were lower than their male colleagues’ pay, doing identical work). Although many women were
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D.H. LAWRENCE
active (as volunteers) in the social sphere and often in support of political parties and movements, nationally women’s rights were restricted and in particular they were denied the vote in parliamentary elections. Fighting against these conditions, the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union, established in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst) existed alongside the less militant NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies led by Mlllicent Garrett Fawcett), and both groups campaigned vigorously for increased women’s rights including the vote. (This was gained in 1918 for most women over the age of 30 – a decade would pass before the voting age for women was reduced to 21). Lawrence was not especially supportive of political activity but several of his close women friends sought, like Ursula Brangwen, financial and personal independence and some worked for social change.
In 1909-10, as the relationship with Chambers came to an end, Lawrence developed his friendship with Alice Dax, also from Eastwood. A married woman, older than Lawrence, she was the principal model for Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers. Dax, like her friend Blanche Jennings to whom Lawrence occasionally confided in letters, was committed, as her actions show, to social and political reform including campaigns to improve conditions for women (Worthen 1991a: 358-70; Feinstein
1993: 40-3). She was also ’literary’ and commented on an early draft of The White Peacock, as did Helen Corke, a teacher he met in Croydon whom he tried unsuccessfully to involve in a sexual relationship. Corke, who had literary aspirations, was interested in Lawrence only as a writer and visionary but, crucially, her diaries (which described the suicide of her married lover) gave him the story for his second novel, The Trespasser (1912). Towards the end of 1910 in the traumatic days before his mother’s death from cancer, he asked another close friend, Louisa (’Louie’) Burrows, with whom he had studied at college, to become his wife. She accepted his proposal but they did not marry Lawrence broke with her during a period of emotional upheaval in which he began to dread the idea of marriage (both to her and in ’ principal, although this would change). Burrows, also a teacher, was an independently minded woman and, like Dax and Jennings, supported the suffrage movement. Like Chambers, she had aspirations to become a writer – she and Lawrence in fact co-wrote ’Goose Fair’. Their relationship had developed during the last illness of Lawrence’s mother, and coincided with a period of great productivity for Lawrence even though he was teaching full time in Croydon, and ill. Worthen writes perceptively about the content of the stories at this time and in particular the kinds of marriages on which they concentrated,
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commenting that: ’1911 was a year in which [Lawrence] was trying to come to terms with divisions in his own nature and expectations; he had bound himself to a conventional engagement while simultaneously coming to believe that those in love naturally behaved unconventionally’ (Worthen 1991a: 301). The engagement with Burrows foundered. The days of these relationships and the emotional tensions to which they gave rise were to end abruptly, however, when in March 1912 Lawrence, who had resigned his teaching post due to ill health, fell in love with Frieda Weekley, a German woman some years his senior who was also the wife of his former college professor. Their meeting permanently changed the direction of his emotional and professional life. Content to take Lawrence as her lover, she eventually agreed to break with her husband – which included taking the tough and painful decision to leave her three young children with Weekley, who would, after much acrimony, divorce her. Her presence in his life enabled Lawrence finally to close down all the troubling relationships with other women which were at different times unfulfilled, and in many ways bound up with Eastwood and the loss of his mother. Chambers had encouraged Lawrence’s aspirations, as had Burrows, Dax and Corke; Frieda Weekley knew him to all intents and purposes, however, as an accomplished writer. His youth had been oriented towards family and friends, with due attention paid to propriety and respectability. After his meeting with Frieda, the break with that Nottingham background was essentially made, with important new steps taken towards selfresponsibility. In his Croydon years he had come to criticise the ’midVictorian’ moral attitudes and sexual timidity, as he saw it, of several of his girlfriends, and he had railed against the conventions of feeling that dictated love relations between men and women. His attitudes towards sexuality and marriage were not formed by the meeting with Frieda Weekley, but perhaps they were focused by the situation which her presence created. In May 1912 he and Frieda left for Metz in Germany, where her family – the von Richthofens – lived, both of them with some difficult decisions to make. When her divorce was finalized in 1914 they married in Kensington after significant trips principally in Germany and Italy as Lawrence enjoyed the autonomy of a writing life. While he was away from England he completed Love Poems and Others and Sons and Lovers (1913). , .
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(c) A LITERARY CAREER: LAWRENCE AND MODERNISM
The modernist period, or ’era’ as it has been called, straddles in its ’high’ phase at least two decades of radical change (1910-30) during which many of the social values and aesthetic practices of the ’long’ nineteenth century are left behind. Historically it includes the years of the Great War (1914-18) and, in Britain, post-war changes in the laws relating to education, women and public life, employment and housing, as well as the effects of economic recession. A period of extensive social and political change, it is marked also by diverse attempts in art and literature to understand, analyse and re-present the modern; as poet and critic Ezra Pound said, the task of the artist was to ’make it new’. ••*•
Lawrence is central to our understanding of modernism although many view him in practice and temperament as a figure at a distinct remove from intellectuals and practitioners like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, who themselves embodied radically different approaches to their historical moment. Hence the term ’modernism’ is deceptive in its suggestion of a coherent, monolithic artistic movement. Literary modernism in fact describes, or contains, a range of dissimilar and contradictory approaches to new subjects, so that we can think of it as characterized by diversity and plurality rather than consensus. Many radical positions within modernism are derived from revolutionary thinkers, chief among them Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, iconoclasts and innovators whose work encouraged a revaluation of social, political and personal ’certainties’. Other influences, however, helped along the development of modernist aesthetics. French Symbolisme, for example, with which the poet Mallarme was associated, had a significant impact on the work of, among others, W.B. Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Lawrence. Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908) appealed to Lawrence because of the claims it made for abstraction and new forms of consciousness expressed in ’primitive’ art. There was also a great deal of interest in myth as a mode of consciousness which preceded historical understanding (which was then viewed by the ’modernist’ intellectuals with scepticism), and a fascination with social anthropology, particularly the genealogy of belief systems described in Sir James Frazer’s extensive study called The Golden Bough (1890-1915). T.S. Eliot drew on Frazer in The Waste Land (1922) in references to fertility rites, the dying god and spiritual mythologies. Lawrence too knew Frazer’s work. Eliot was also impressed by T.E. Hulme’s ’Romanticism and Classicism’ (1911), a key document which was invoked to define
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’modernist’ aesthetics and which similarly influenced Pound in his ’imagist’ phase. With Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle (who published under the initials H.D.) and F.S. Flint, Pound established imagism, an anti-Romantic discrete form of modernist poetry, and he edited an imagist anthology, Des Imagistes in 1914.
Diverse avant-garde movements at this time produced statements, pamphlets and periodicals proclaiming the radical vision of each group. These included Filippo Marinetti’s manifestos, among them ’The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909) – Lawrence was familiar with Marinetti’s work, and the free verse of another Italian futurist, Paolo Buzzi (Letters II: 180) – as well as statements on visual arts and culture from cubists, expressionists, constructivists, vorticists and the surrealists. Key statements about literature and culture were produced by T.S. Eliot (Tradition and the Individual Talent’ [1919]), Virginia Woolf (’Modern Fiction’ [1919], A Room of One’s Own [1929]), E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer), James Joyce, H.D., Richard Aldington and many others. At the heart of literary modernism is the reformation of poetry and the novel, in particular. This resulted in an increased interest in the writer’s medium alongside a preoccupation with the modern human subject.
From the time he was first published, Lawrence enjoyed the support of a number of influential figures in the literary world. Writing after his death, his friend the critic and reviewer Catherine Carswell recalls his first novel, The White Peacock, as a succes d’estime and acknowledges Ford Madox Hueffer’s influence with Heinemann in getting it into print (Carswell 1932: 6). Hueffer’s support of Lawrence has already been described. The youthful Lawrence, in his letters, shows his pleasure at being published in Hueffer’s English Review, and shows too that he is not reluctant to be aligned with ’the new young school of realism’ and, with a sense of his contemporary moment, the ’new spirit’ in literature (Letters I: 139). The mature Lawrence would become, in his discursive writing (such as the late essays on the novel) and in the formal treatment of complex subjects in his most achieved fiction, one of the ablest commentators on the successes and failures of modern literature (for a detailed discussion of Lawrence’s modernist contexts and his critical contribution see Bell in Fernihough 2001: 179-96).
Lawrence’s novel The Trespasser, in draft form, found a champion in Edward Garnett, an intellectual and critic who was a reader for the London publisher Duckworth, and who became, at a crucial time in Lawrence’s life, his friend and mentor. Lawrence took Garnett’s advice on where to revise the text, and The Trespasser was published by Duckworth in 1912. Garnett remained central to Lawrence’s early
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D.H. LAWRENCE
career, his influence persisting throughout the period associated particularly with the publication of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence also made the acquaintance of Ezra Pound when he was teaching in Croydon, through Ford Madox Hueffer. Although they were not natural friends, Lawrence was willing to benefit from Pound’s influence which was considerable and, indeed, Pound helped his poetry into print in a number of significant periodicals, including The Egoist which promoted imagism. The fact that Pound tired of Lawrence’s writing fairly quickly is not too surprising given, ultimately, the divergent aims of each: Pound theorized about poetry in ways which were, and would become, increasingly alien to Lawrence. However, Pound knew Lawrence’s poetry because of Hueffer and from Georgian Poetry (5 vols. 1912-22) edited by Edward Marsh, and he reviewed Love Poems and Others calling it, with reservations, ’the most important book of poems of the season’ (Draper 1970: 53). After Pound, the American poet Amy Lowell supported Lawrence’s work in her annual anthology of imagist poets. Richard Aldington and H.D. cemented their friendship with the Lawrences at this time. H.D.’s novel, Bid Me to Live (1960) is in part a fictionalized account of her relationship with Lawrence. Aldington, like H.D., had an editorial role on The Egoist – he was succeeded in that capacity by T.S. Eliot whose ambivalent views about Lawrence’s literary value became central to the question of his reception [119; 124-5]. Aldington edited Last Poems (1932), and his work included a biography of Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius But … (1950).
In 1913, Lawrence also began the well-documented, often stormy, friendship with the critic and editor John Middleton Murry, and the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. Murry had published Lawrence in a quarterly which he edited, called Rhythm. Mutual respect and liking followed their first meeting although during the war years the Murrys (he and Mansfield were married in 1918) and the Lawrences grew apart – the relationship between Murry and Mansfield, and the Lawrences, is explored in Women in Love [56-65]. An important critic and influential figure in modernist literary history particularly through his association with key modernist magazines, Murry edited the Athenaeum between 1919 and 1921, and launched The Adelphi in 1923 (the year Mansfield died of tuberculosis), publishing an impressive range of writers which included Virginia Woolf as well as Eliot. In Murry, Lawrence hoped to have found a disciple. Their eventual estrangement was perhaps the most bitter of many he experienced (see KinkeadWeekes 1996: 559-62).
At this time Lawrence also got to know people who could offer him real practical support, such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, a wealthy literary
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patron, who could always accommodate him at her Oxfordshire home, Garsington Manor. He was on friendly terms most of the time with other writers including E.M. Forster and others associated with the Bloomsbury Group – a clique of artists and intellectuals who gathered around the sisters Vanessa Bell, the artist, and Virginia Woolf, and their closest associates who included the economist John Maynard Keynes and critic and painter Roger Fry – although Lawrence was the first to admit that he was not really at home in this company. He also met poet and novelist Aldous Huxley, who remained a friend and who saw a great deal of Lawrence towards the end of his life in France. Intellectual relationships, like his brief friendship with the Cambridge philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell (in 1915), were significant. Although they eventually had a bitter falling-out, Russell helped Lawrence to develop his highly idiosyncratic ’philosophy’ which he had rehearsed in a work-in-progress (1914) called ’Le Gai Savaire’ – a title that reflected Lawrence’s reading of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche – a work which became ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ (1914; published, unrevised, in 1936). ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ (which is more about Lawrence than Hardy, although his analyses of Hardy’s works are interesting), was drafted and redrafted at the same time as The Rainbow, and the relationship between the two texts is evident and important [55-6; 99-101].
If 1912-14 had been marked by new friendships – some, but not all, literary- the period 1914-18 was a depressing time for Lawrence who viewed the war as the last throes of a degenerate ’mechanistic’ Western culture. The popular view was that the war with Germany, which was declared in August 1914 (and when Britain went to war so did its dominions and colonies), would be over quickly, and Lawrence settled down steadily to write until the time came when the end of the conflict would allow him to leave England. Some of his friends enlisted. Others
– like Lawrence, eventually – were rejected for military service because they were found to be physically unfit in medical examinations. Weak lungs would not have prevented Lawrence from participating in nonmilitary ’war work’, as many men and women did, but he refused because he viewed such activity as in some way colluding with the idea of war. However, he was not a pacifist, a ’conscientious objector’, someone who opposed the war on moral or other personal, principled, grounds. According to Catherine Carswell, Lawrence’s preferred option was ’inaction’ – he would neither participate nor protest (Carswell
1932: 23). Regarding his own projects, he and Bertrand Russell (who was a pacifist) planned to work together – a series of lectures was . discussed – but disagreements quickly resulted and the scheme faltered.
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Lawrence expressed the new animosity he felt towards Russell to his friend Lady Cynthia Asquith in August 1915 (Letters II: 378-81), a few months after a trip to see Russell, Maynard Keynes and their friends at Cambridge, which Lawrence had hated. The concerns which surfaced during this visit are often cited to reinforce views about Lawrence’s homophobia, stimulated by his revulsion at the Cambridge ’men loving men’: essentially Keynes and his friends Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant (Letters II: 320). Lawrence would work on ideas about male friendship (which had for him a philosophical as well as a personal dimension) in later writing like the abandoned ’Prologue’ to Women in Love [63-4]. However, much of the correspondence of this period shows Lawrence to be highly critical of his new acquaintances and becoming insistent, even strident, about the ’dead’ and ’false’ culture they inhabit, as well as, paradoxically, recording in his fiction his hopes for a new
germination.
1914-15 was also a tense period in Lawrence’s marriage. Middleton
Murry notes that:
[t]wo things were preying on him together: one was the War, the other his struggle with his wife; the two strains seemed to be making a sick man of one who, on his return to England [after the first trip abroad with Frieda], had looked radiantly well.
(Nehls 1957: 255)
The issues which arose in his new marriage were examined in Lawrence’s writing. Apart from the relationship with Frieda, the personal trauma that the war presented to Lawrence (in particular the indignity of the army medicals to which he was subjected) is described in the retrospective and highly autobiographical chapter of his novel, Kangaroo (1923), called simply ’The Nightmare’, and is documented in :”’ many of the letters of this period. In Kangaroo [69-72], it seems that the war is obscene because of its betrayal of ’manly integrity’ rather than for the loss of any broadly understood political or moral values. In part as a response to the madness of the war, Lawrence began developing his idea of a small island community – a ’colony’ (Letters II:
259) – of like-minded people determined on ’new life’. Later he called this imagined community ’Rananim’, and invented as its emblem the phoenix, common symbol of renewal. It came to nothing, but the idea shows the extent to which he was thinking about an alternative lifestyle, and working on a symbolic language with which to express it.
Also in 1915, Lawrence, Murry and Mansfield collaborated on a periodical called Signature for which Lawrence intended to write a series
18
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
of philosophical pieces. It was not a successful venture commercially, folding after three of six projected issues, but it enabled Lawrence to publish parts of his long essay ’The Crown’ which builds on ideas first tried in ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ and which, crucially, informs much of the doctrinal content of Women in Love [62-3; 101-2]. The major event of his year, however, was the publication of The Rainbow, and the ensuing controversy. Almost immediately the courts ordered its destruction under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The sexual content of the book certainly offended conventional morality, but the war-time authorities may also have had suspicions about Lawrence’s German connections through Frieda (and, if one looked closely, at ’unpatriotic’ sentiments expressed in the book through the character of Ursula Brangwen) [49-56]. The event was unusual enough for Phillip Morrell (Ottoline’s husband, and a Member of Parliament), to ask questions in the House of Commons, but Lawrence seemed not to have the energy for significant resistance (Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 285-
96). Many of his comments in the letters of this troubling period are valedictory – he spoke of fleeing to America which he perceived as more liberal, and where an expurgated version of The Rainbow was published, but was prevented by the war from sailing – and he persists in his version of a collapsing civilization, of a decaying England and a world ending. London, the heart of empire, is ’in a black rain … and a tube full of spectral, decayed people’(Letters II: 434). It was symptomatic of this culture of ghostly automata that it should reject his book of life. Although he had accepted editors’ revisions and straightforward cuts of his work, he could not be optimistic for his second ’Brangwen’ novel – still in progress – after the treatment of The Rainbow, and perhaps the thought that he had nothing more to lose gives that novel, Women in Love, its biting critical edge. Unable to go to America, the Lawrences moved, at the end of December 1915, to Cornwall. Settling for a time at Zennor, Lawrence, impoverished, worked on Women in Love – which he knew would not find a publisher in Britain – as well as a number of other pieces including poetry and short stories.
So this was a difficult period professionally and personally for Lawrence. His marriage contained tensions and had become characterized by struggle and resistance, often witnessed and discussed by their friends. In his reminiscences, Murry describes how he and Mansfield moved to Cornwall as the Lawrences’ neighbours, at Lawrence’s urging, although both had serious reservations, where they had previously enthused, about living so close. This was largely because of Lawrence’s erratic moods and judgements on the motives and behaviour of his friends (Nehls 1957: 370-81; 385-7), but also reflected
19
D.H. LAWRENCE
an unease at the open rows which periodically occurred in the Lawrences’ marriage. Their friendship was strained, and Murry and Mansfield eventually retreated from the South-West.
Despite the evident tensions, Lawrence’s letters record a genuine enthusiasm for the rural life available to him in Cornwall (he befriended and assisted a local farmer, William Henry Hocking, and there is speculation whether he, so different from the over-conscious Cambridge sophisticates, and Lawrence, were briefly lovers [Mark Kinkead-Weekes
1996: 377-80]). However, the Lawrences’ period of residency was brought to an abrupt end in October 1917 by a formal notice to leave issued by the military authorities. In fact, they had been under surveillance, with differing degrees of intensity, for some time. Lawrence’s letters were sometimes intercepted and opened, his house was searched, but he still declared himself shocked at the expulsion and ignorant of its causes. The Lawrences returned to London, renewing some old contacts, and then to a number of addresses which included a brief return to the Midlands before the end of the war made possible the first stage in a long, self-imposed, exile. In 1919 he left for Italy, a country he had first visited in 1912 and to which he would consistently return. The result of his first visit, Twilight in Italy, and his poems Amores (which were very early pieces), were published in 1916. Sea and Sardinia would be published in 1921, and Sketches of Etruscan Places [Etruscan Places], posthumously in 1932 [111-14].
Significant shifts had occurred in Lawrence’s personal philosophy between the publication of Sons and Lovers in 1913 and this move to Italy with Women in Love on the horizon – it would be published in America in 1920. Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) and New Poems (1918) constituted a major poetic achievement [82] and The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) was a significant collection [91]. He had also worked on exploratory essays like ’Study of Thomas Hardy’, ’The Crown’, related meditations like ’The Reality of Peace’ (1917), and he was reading, and writing about, American literature in preparation for what became Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) [104-
8]. He had used his writing to explore his own sexuality and had begun to develop a personal philosophy based on ’male’ and ’female’ oppositions and dualities. By the time he came to write Aaron’s Rod (1922), he was thinking about masculinity and individuality which would absorb him in his later work, not least, in the novels Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Crucially, he had also started to examine the radical possibilities of the novel form, with views that would find expression in the essays of the 1920s on genre [108-10].
20
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
(d) LEAVING ENGLAND: ITALY, CEYLON, AUSTRALIA
By 1919 Lawrence had written, if not published, much of the serious work which was to make his reputation as an important English writer. Between 1919 and 1922 he lived mainly in Italy including Taormina, Sicily, where he re-read the novels and short stories of the nineteenthcentury Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga, whose most prominent English translator Lawrence was to become (see Hyde 1981). He also lived in Capri and Florence, the scene of a brief extra-marital relationship with Rosalind Baynes [Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 601-6]). More importantly, this is a period which shows him trying to gain some control over the publication of his work in America as well as England – indeed his sights are,set on America for most of this period as the place where he felt he could consolidate a large audience. J.B. Pinker, Lawrence’s literary agent in the important years since 1914, gave up that role in 1920, and Robert Mountsier, an American journalist whom Lawrence had come to know in Cornwall, agreed to act as his agent in America at this time, something which he did until 1923. This was a productive period for Lawrence with the publication of Women in Love as well as, in England, The Lost Girl, and his play Touch and Go (both 1920). He was also in a position to work on Aaron’s Rod and Air Noon as well as the major novellas, The Captain’s Doll (1923), The Fox (1920; 1922) and The Ladybird (1923), and short stories. Sea and Sardinia took shape, as did a further volume of poetry, Birds, Beasts and flowers (1923). Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was published in 1921. In this short book Lawrence attempts to define his notion of unconscious functioning in contrast to Freud’s ideas of ’the’ unconscious. (Psychoanalysis, a mode of psychological enquiry originated by Freud, theorized the psychosexual development of the individual as a child, and then as an adult, in relation to the family. Lawrence, who counted analysts among his closest friends, disputed Freud’s terms.) Much of his earlier discursive writing deals with ’instinctive’ functioning, so it is not surprising that Lawrence at last decides to refute, in a book, other ideas on the unconscious. The Psychoanalysis project left Lawrence with enough enthusiasm to consider a sequel, which became Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Neither of these books attracted the broad acclaim he felt they deserved, but an understanding of their themes is useful in reading the fiction of this time [102-4]. This is not the sum of the projects on which he worked in this busy period – which include a history text-book called Movements in European History (1921) – but it
21
D.H. LAWRENCE
shows him committed, not least, to further imaginative explorations of his developing ’metaphysic’, his personal philosophy.
Lawrence’s acquaintances now included, in Florence, Norman Douglas – a novelist and travel writer who had worked with Hueffer on the English Review – and his companions, Maurice Magnus and Reggie Turner. With these, Lawrence had experiences which would find their •way into Aaron’s Rod, and all three men can be recognised in the ’Italian’ part of the book. In his lengthy introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (by Maurice Magnus, 1924), Lawrence describes his stay in Italy from 1919. The introduction is completely autobiographical, which is part of its value, but he also expresses his views on a kind of manly integrity which is, crucially, unheroic. Magnus, the writer of the ’parent’ text, is both product and symptom of the Vicious spirit’ of the war years (upon which Lawrence can now reflect), but his importance to Lawrence lies in the more redemptive aspects of his self-knowledge. In Magnus, ’the lonely terrified courage of the isolated spirit’ is set positively against the masculine spirit of ’modern militarism’ (Phoenix II: 359).
1922 was a key year for literary modernism. It saw the publication of a range of significant texts, among them James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, about which Lawrence was disparaging, and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, both works literary landmarks. In this year the Lawrences left Italy, and Europe, for a series of extremely long voyages. This was the high period of the commercial shipping lines, establishing a global network of destinations which aided the traveller and the migrant: many of Lawrence’s characters, like their creator, are en route. Lawrence journeyed to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Australia, America (where he would settle for a time) and Mexico, where his experiences were to have a considerable effect on his writing. He had immediately behind him the controversies which still surrounded the publication of Women in Love – the threat of law suits from individuals who recognized themselves in his characters, and the threat of censorship. This was the publication year of Aaron’s Rod, begun in 1917 and which Lawrence called, on completion, the last of his ’serious English novels’ (Letters IV: 92). It was also the year of England My England and Other Stories, and the second version of The Fox. It is worth noting John Middleton Murry’s positive reviews of Aaron’s Rod (after his hostility in print to Women in Love). He called it ’the most important thing that has happened to English literature since the war … Mr Lawrence’s theme is the self-sufficiency of the human soul’ (Draper 1970: 177-80). Murry also reviewed Fantasia of the Unconscious positively, believing it to be
22
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
revolutionary. These reviews helped to improve the damaged relationship between the two men after Cornwall.
During the journey to Ceylon, Lawrence concentrated on his translations of Giovanni Verga: his versions ofMastro-Don Gesualdo and Little Novels of Sicily were published in 1923 and 1925 respectively. Arrived at their destination, the Lawrences stayed just outside Kandy with painters Earl and Achsah Brewster whom they had met in 1921 (the Brewsters co-edited D.H. Lawrence: reminiscences and correspondence. [1934]). The visit was in part to introduce Lawrence to Buddhism, which interested the Brewsters (as did psychoanalysis [Letters IV: 279], about which Lawrence had by now written), but Lawrence was not engaged at all by his brief contact with Buddhist culture: ’I shrewdly suspect that high-flownness of Buddhism altogether exists mostly on paper: and that its denial of the soul makes it always rather barren, even if philosophically etc more perfect’ (Letters IV 218). In fact, Lawrence’s feelings of alienation on this visit were extreme. To Mabel Dodge Sterne (later Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy supporter of the arts who was waiting for him in America) he wrote that the forest in Ceylon was ’metallic’ and he deplored the animal noises with their ’machine’ quality. To her, he also writes of ’the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of the temples’ (Letters IV: 225). To Robert Mountsier he said: ’the magnetism is all negative, everything seems magnetically to be repelling one’ (Letters IV: 227). Especially evident in these views, Lawrence’s chief mode of expression is unequivocally that of the appalled visitor from the heart of Empire. The Lawrences stayed in Ceylon for just over a month and then left for Western Australia, arriving in Fremantle and moving on to Perth. Here he met M.L. Skinner, a writer in whom he developed a professional interest. With her permission he would re-write her novel, The House of Ellis’, published under both their names as The Boy in the Bush (1924) [69]. The greater part of his stay in Australia, however, was apart from new friends, in Sydney and Thirroul, south of Botany Bay. Lawrence’s principal ’Australian’ novel is Kangaroo [69-72], a political fiction which deals with the aspirations of the charismatic Benjamin Cooley, nicknamed ’Kangaroo’, and his disciples who call themselves the ’Diggers’. The narrative deals in part with another exploration of male friendship (after Women in Love and Aaron’s Rod), this time the ’mateship’ offered to Richard Lovat Somers (an English writer on tour), by some of the followers of Kangaroo, but more particularly the love of Kangaroo himself, in need of a lieutenant who is also a
23
D.H. LAWRENCE
visionary. It is usually asserted that the substance of Kangaroo is totally imaginative although Robert Darroch, in D.H. Lawrence in Australia (1981), argues the reverse. An interesting contrast emerges in the letters of this time in the language which Lawrence chooses to describe Ceylon and Australia respectively, in the context of observations which highlight his distrust of the visual, seeing, as a mode of knowing (his short story ’The Blind Man’ [95] develops this idea). To Robert Mountsier he wrote of Ceylon, which he disliked, ’From a cinematograph point of view it can be fascinating: the dark, tangled jungle, the terrific sun …’ (Letters IV: 227, emphasis added). On the other hand, of his new country, with which he was enthralled, he said, ’But nobody has seen Australia yet: can’t be done. It isn’t visible’ (Letters IV: 273, latter emphasis added).
(e) AMERICA
The trip to Australia was, without doubt, immensely productive. With Kangaroo drafted he continued his travels, heading for America via New Zealand and the South Seas. The Lawrences arrived in San Francisco and, almost immediately, made for the American South-West. Lawrence had been invited to Taos (New Mexico) by Mabel Dodge Sterne who was rich, admired his writing and believed that, because of his principles, he could provide a voice for the dispossessed Native American population in the preservation of whose cultures she was interested she influenced Lawrence to oppose the Bursum Land Bill, which restricted Indian land rights (see ’Certain Americans and an Englishman’ [1922]). Despite his initial reluctance to be indebted to this woman who so obviously had fixed ideas about his destiny, Lawrence obeyed her call. Sterne, whom Lawrence castigated as ’egotistical’ – they quarrelled often because he did not wish to be dependent on her published her reminiscence of their often tense friendship in Lorenzo in Taos (1932). By all accounts, Sterne was used to the company of distinguished individuals – the American poet and novelist, Gertrude Stein, wrote a ’portrait’ of her – and she was in a position to introduce Lawrence to other artists and writers as well as to try and involve him in her interests. In a letter to his mother-in-law Lawrence revealed his wariness of Sterne, however, calling her ’another culture-bearer’ with ’a terrible will to power – woman power, you know’ (Letters IV: 351, emphasis added). Whatever reservations he may have had about her, he enjoyed a certain celebrity status while he was in America – he turned down the opportunity to do a lecture tour, but his publisher Thomas Seltzer kept him visible.
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
Sterne accommodated the Lawrences and was able, with her companion Tony Luhan, to take them to various Native American events, particularly dances, descriptions of which found their way into Lawrence’s Mexico and New Mexico writing. Newly arrived, however, Lawrence had to set his own impressions of Native American culture against representations of Native Americans familiar to him from nineteenth-century and contemporary popular American fiction, and he endlessly ’theorized’ America and Americans. He was quick to denounce the capitalist imperative (America is the biggest bully the world has yet seen. Power is proud. But bullying is democratic and mean’ [Letters IV: 352]), and to bring his unique mode of ’psychologising’ to bear on this new territory:
Everything in America goes by will. A great negative will seems to be turned against all spontaneous life – there seems to be no feeling at all – no genuine bowels of compassion and sympathy; all this gripped, iron, benevolent will, which in the end is diabolic. How can one write about it, save analytically.
(Letters IV: 310).
This was written prior to the last significant revisions to his
’(psycho)analytical’ book, Studies in Classic American Literature [104].
Lawrence’s principal base in New Mexico was at Taos although
towards the end of 1922 he moved to a nearby ranch at the foot of the
Rocky Mountains, mostly to put a little distance between himself and
the demanding Mabel Dodge Sterne. Some new friends, two Danish
artists, Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild joined them. Lawrence had
hopes that Merrild, would do some book designs for him, principally
Birds, Beasts and Flowers – Merrild wrote an account of their friendship
in A Poet and Two Painters (1938). Merrild and Gotzsche had links with
a community of Taos artists, which must have appealed to Lawrence
who was also a painter. In America the Lawrences also met the poet
Witter Bynner (who described their friendship in Journey with Genius
[1951]), and Willard Johnson. Both men appear in The Plumed Serpent
as Owen and Villiers having accompanied the Lawrences on their first
trip to Mexico in 1923. Gotzsche – responsible for a portrait of Lawrence
– went with him on his second trip in the same year.
Indeed, Lawrence made significant journeys between 1923 and 1925 to Mexico. On his first journey he saw many of the pre-Columbian sites of interest and spent two months at Chapala writing ’Quetzalcoatl’, the first version of The Plumed Serpent. This and later trips took him to the ruins at Teotihuacan, many other historical sites
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D.H. LAWRENCE
and Mexico City. Between 1924 and 1927 he published StMawr (1925), The Princess (1925) [87], the stories which were revised for The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (1928) [96], and wrote essays about his American encounters, including Tan in America’. He also began formally articulating his aspirations for the novel form. That it needed radical reconstruction is implied by the initial title of ’Surgery for the Novel – Or a Bomb’ (The Future of the Novel’), which incorporated his dislike of the self-conscious, self-reflexive writing of some of his contemporaries, in particular James Joyce – he read Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 in New Mexico. Other important essays on the novel written at this time developed his theme of the sad state of modern fiction [108-10].
At the end of 1923 Lawrence briefly returned to England. Frieda had gone ahead alone in part to see her family and Lawrence’s letters of this time show a real reluctance to revisit his home ground. Unexpectedly, once in London, he arranged a formal dinner party at the exclusive Cafe Royal for some old friends which included Catherine Carswell, ’Kot’, the translator S.S. Koteliansky, Murry the artists Mark Gertler and Dorothy Brett. Carswell (1932) describes how in the course of a bizarre, rather ’theatrical’, evening Lawrence invited each of them to return to New Mexico with him, reviving his long-held desire for a commune of like-minded, creative individuals. In the strange atmosphere of the party, Carswell writes, they assented, but only Dorothy Brett, who was something of a disciple, finally accompanied the Lawrences back to New Mexico (Brett, with whom Lawrence later had a brief affair, published Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship [1933]). At this time Mabel Dodge Sterne (now Mabel Dodge Luhan), gave a rundown ranch (which Lawrence called ’Kiowa’) to Frieda Lawrence, for which she received the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence combined periods renovating the house and its environs with excursions into ’Hopi Country’ to see native dances and to visit reservations.
1924 and 1925 were extremely productive years for Lawrence. Even though he was suffering greatly from tuberculosis which weakened and nearly killed him, he yet somehow found the energy to travel and write. His American’ experience was largely confined to the cultures and the landscapes of the South-West, and it was these places that he now felt to be familiar, if curiously ’unheimlicti. While he revised The Plumed Serpent, he worked on the essays which became Mornings in Mexico (1927), and he wrote David (1926), a play (not about Mexico), which was staged in London. By the time he left America in the autumn of 1925 – the climate finally proving bad for his health – he had completed his significant essays on art and the novel and put together Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays.
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
(f) THE RETURN TO EUROPE
The last five years of Lawrence’s life were spent in Europe, at first mainly in Spotorno, Northern Italy, and then near Florence. While the Lawrences had ’bases’, they continued to move around, sometimes because Lawrence’s ill-health required a change. The American experience was over for him and the relationship with Mabel Dodge Sterne, who had made it possible, more or less at an end. The period in Italy after the move from America produced The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) which is thematically a precursor of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his last novel set in the English Midlands about an adulterous affair which challenges divisions of social class and expectation. Settled just outside Florence, and having made his final trip to England, Lawrence concentrated on the Chatterley novel, writing three versions [75-9]. Although it was not Lawrence’s only project at this time, it occupied his attention significantly, and shows the influence of his last visit ’home’ (described in ’Return to Bestwood’ [1968] and two autobiographical sketches), as well as the direction of his developing thought on ’phallic consciousness’. Much of the ’vitalist’ philosophy in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is rehearsed in Sketches of Etruscan Places, a travel book which describes Lawrence’s response to the remains of the ’sensual’ Etruscan civilization (ancient sites between Florence and Rome) which he visited on a tour of tombs with his friend Earl Brewster (of his Ceylon trip) [113]. About this time Lawrence also renewed his friendship with the Huxleys, seeing much of them in his last months.
Another friend, Giuseppe Orioli, a bookseller in Florence, was willing to print Lady Chatterley’s Lover privately. Lawrence knew that mainstream publishers would not touch the book because of the descriptions of sex it contained and the subsequent risk to the publisher of prosecution – as with The Rainbow he would again fall foul of the censorship laws and in England, as in America, only an ’authorized abridged’, that is to say an expurgated, edition appeared in 1932. So even this last period in Europe was not free from controversy. Indeed, while he was busy organizing the distribution otLady Chatterley’s Lover (copies sent to Britain were seized by the police), he learned that his book of poems, Pansies (1929), had been confiscated on its way to the publisher because of fears concerning its content [85]. In the same year (the year he completed The Escaped Cock] Lawrence was again judged to have offended against standards of public decency when thirteen of his paintings from a show at the Warren Gallery, London, were seized with the further possibility that they might be burned by the authorities
26
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HHT”
D.H. LAWRENCE
(Letters VII: 369). Resigned to such treatment, from Bandol near the Mediterranean, where he retreated in the hope that the sea might raise his ailing spirits (he also wrote Nettles, Apocalypse and Last Poems), Lawrence noted to Witter Bynner that:
”’•’ it’s Europe that has made me so ill. One gets so innerly angry with
the dull sort of hopelessness and deadness there is over here.
’ Anyhow, in New Mexico the sun and the air are alive, let man be
!: what he may. But here they’ve killed the very sun, the very air.
”;’ (Letters VII: 574)
He was not alone in suffering from the regulations relating to censorship: as Lawrence was aware, Joyce’s Ulysses was seized by the authorities because of the outrage to public morality it was alleged to offer; Radclyffe Hall’s novel about love between women, The Well of Loneliness (1928), was also banned, and literary history offers many other examples of the law at this time policing an adult readership.
Lawrence’s words to Witter Bynner are a reminder not only of his wrath, sadness and immediate ’metaphysical’ preoccupations, but also of his worsening state of health, and, after a short period in a sanitorium in Vence, Lawrence died. His last long work is Apocalypse (1931) which developed from an introduction written for Frederick Carter’s book, The Dragon of the Apocalypse. Carter, a painter with esoteric interests, had been in contact with Lawrence in 1923 and his book offered the opportunity of a new project. In Apocalypse, Lawrence rethinks his views of Revelations, and continues the metaphoric language of rebirth and the emergence of something fine, phoenix-like, out of the destruction of his degenerate civilization. The final part of Apocalypse is a hymn to integration, and provides a fitting funeral oration for its writer in its emphasis on rebirth, regeneration and, in a strange way, community; a concept which Lawrence took on a long and complex journey in the course of his writing life:
So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections,
especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic
•’” connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind
• and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly,
slowly happen.
(Apocalypse 149)
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
That Lawrence was a man of strong views frequently expressed energetically cannot be denied, and the stamp his personality left on his many relationships is recorded in volumes of letters and a range of memoirs. His interest in and desire for friendship, contact, did not mean that he surrounded himself with admirers and hangers-on. On the contrary, he journeyed with few companions – Frieda Lawrence most constant among them. Catherine Carswell, who greatly admired Lawrence, said of him that he was ’without human dreariness’. David Garnett (son of Edward), commented on his ’agreeable’ nature, and Richard Aldington noted from the start that he was an ’individualist’. After his death, E.M. Forster called him ’the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’, but his literary peers were not always so generous in their assessments, resistant perhaps, to the radical countervoice to tjieir practice that his work represented. Many of his friends and acquaintances, like Bertrand Russell, noted ’the energy and passion of his feelings’ although, as with Russell (and Murry), this sometimes made for rapid and often irreconcilable, fallings-out. At low points, particularly during the years of the Great War, he is described as angry and intolerant of his situation. He was, at this time, quick to see slights and, with the suppression of The Rainbow almost immediately after its publication, not surprisingly defensive. Few were surprised, at this stage in his life, to see him reject England. However, it is clear from the records that he knew the value of friendship which transcended local disagreements, and his marriage, with its unorthodox beginnings and despite periods of conflict, infidelity and coolness, lasted. Biographical studies reveal the strains, but ’marriage’ was an area of experience which Lawrence early on made central to his theorizing about male-female relationships and, clearly, valued.
Feeding his curiosity, Lawrence continually subjected his encounters, and his environment, to rigorous examination. A controversial figure, he was not approached during his life-time by serious offers to write his biography, and was never in a position – in the unlikely event that he had wished it – to authorize anyone to write his life. Following his death, as we have seen, a number of former friends took on that task, often writing in opposition to each other. In the period leading up to the Second World War, Lawrence’s critical reputation was low: his comments on leadership (for instance in the ’political’ novels of the
1920s) encouraged some commentators to think of him as a protofascist, and T.S. Eliot’s reservations about his perceived values and their expression in his writing were highly influential (as were Murry’s authoritative’ statements). The re-assessment of his work principally by the critic F.R. Leavis, who read Lawrence as producing a good effect
29
D.H. LAWRENCE
morally and spiritually, altered the situation by the introduction of a strong counter-voice to these others. Particularly in the 1950s, in the wake of New Criticism, his reputation revived, although in the 1970s his values were again under scrutiny [117-58]. He has become one of those writers where a great deal of biographical detail supports the almost innumerable critical studies. So it is that the ’Lawrence industry’ has a dual focus, biographical and critical and, more often than not, the two domains dovetail.
FURTHER READING
Lawrence’s life and relationships have been represented in a vast number of memoirs and reminiscences. At least ten volumes were produced shortly after his death by friends who were champions, defenders and critics of Lawrence, to whom the description of ’genius’ nevertheless invariably stuck. The volumes by Aldington, Brett, the Brewsters, Bynner, Cars-well, E.T., Corke, Ada Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence (Not I, But the Wind) Luhan, Merrild, Murry and Neville (see Bibliography), need to be read in parallel in order to construct the man. Aldous Huxley, perhaps most usefully, produced an edition of Lawrence’s letters (Huxley 1932) accompanied by a serious and influential introduction which in part sought to defend Lawrence against the self-protective slant sometimes adopted in his accounts by John Middleton Murry, who was respected and had an audience. Readers also have access to Moore’s Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence (1962) which printed a greater number of letters than Huxley but which was still partial in its coverage. Since Moore, mainstream publishers like Penguin Books have issued editions of selected letters. The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of D.H. Lawrence. (Boulton et al. 1979-93) in seven volumes, makes the complete letters available in a coherent format. It also provides useful biographical and historical background including chronologies pertaining to the correspondence in each volume. For quicker reference it has spawned a shorter volume, The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence (Boulton 1997).
A further invaluable source of biographical information which reprints excerpts from many accounts, as well as introducing a great deal of new material from the full range of Lawrence’s acquaintances, is the Composite Biography (Nehls 1957) in three volumes. Accounts of the life of Lawrence as it impacted on the work have also come from the pens of critics and include studies by Moore (1951; 1974), a contentious biography by Delavenay (1972) which takes Lawrence up to 1919, Delany (1979) which deals with the effect of the war on Lawrence,
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
and Burgess (1985). Currently, however, it is difficult to imagine a more detailed and comprehensive biography than the three-volume Cambridge Biography (Worthen 1991, Kinkead-Weekes 1996, Ellis 1998) With its emphasis on authenticated detail, it has clarified numerous issues relating to Lawrence’s personal and professional relationships as well as the composition and publishing history of all the texts in his oeuvre. Aside from this, short autobiographical pieces are available in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence (McDonald, ed. 1936) and Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works by DR. Lawrence (Roberts and Moore, eds 1968).
^
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