D. H. Lawrence

Nature, Narrative, Art, Identity

J. Beer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137441645
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137441652
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A full account of Lawrence, ranging from his talent as a young writer to the continuing genius of his later work, and concentrating on his exceptionally acute powers of observation, both human and natural.

1

Fresh Thinking at the Turn of the Century

One could not grow to maturity at the end of the nineteenth century without becoming aware of the omnipresence of change. The transformation of Britain, beginning in the seventeenth century, from a trading nation based largely on agriculture to one engaged more firmly in industrialism is a fact obvious enough to amount to a truism, but the exact process by which that transformation took place is less frequently investigated.

Anyone undertaking a detailed survey of the kind would be likely to begin with certain areas of the English Midlands. If they did, a part of the area near Nottingham would at first strike them by its rich agricultural possibilities, and by the fact that that pastoral landscape was interrupted by workings above the earth suggesting that an underground area beneath was devoted to mining the results of its afforestation.

This particular area had an additional interest, moreover, since it was the location of many landed estates—so many that the area came to be known as the Dukeries. D. H. Lawrence, who was brought up in the area, related how, as a boy, he chatted to servants such as the gatekeeper and cooks at the great house known as Welbeck Abbey, and how one of them, Mrs Orchard, as she sat gazing into the fire, would tell him stories of the Dukes, some of them eccentric, whom she had served.¹ Welbeck Abbey stood close to Sherwood Forest, haunt of Robin Hood and his outlaws. From knowing the servants at such places as well as the people who employed them and the popular stories that were told about Robin Hood and his opposition to the Sherriff of Nottingham, writers such as Lawrence gained a feeling for human beings of all kinds—including the traditional aristocrats—along with the resistance to authority which often typified their attitude.

In the nineteenth century, moreover, the owners of landed estates had been overtaken by events as they came to see the difficulty of maintaining them, as opposed to the rich rewards awaiting those who exploited the minerals, mainly coal, which they had made available. One by one the estates were swallowed up, while the workings below them were developed slowly, uses for the coal below were discovered, and more labourers attracted to earn their living by bringing it to the surface. The hills of Derbyshire had always been home to quarries that could produce the rocks and slates needed by local communities; but the coalmining industry soon dwarfed those possibilities. Meanwhile, the basic agricultural activities of the area continued, to meet the needs of the new industrial settlements.

D. H. Lawrence, who was born in 1885, was acquainted with these slow changes in the area from an early age, notably from his visits to the Haggs, a farm near Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, inhabited by the Chambers family, who worked the farm in a traditional manner and grew crops to nourish the surrounding population: they included several boys working as labourers and two girls, May and Jessica, who were expected to play their part in looking after the farmhouse. At the time families were powerfully dominated by their male members, and the uncertain conditions of work in colliery towns, where, in spite of good pay, work at slack times might be reduced to two or three days a week, resulted in the men involved guarding their male position even more jealously than those in steadier employment.² The father in the Chambers family organized a milk round, serving houses in nearby Eastwood, which could draw on the resources of the cows at his farm. May settled to her duties peaceably enough, but Jessie had a streak of rebelliousness, expressing itself, for example, in her impatience at brothers who continually spoilt her efforts at keeping the farmhouse clean by tramping into it with boots covered with mud from the fields where they had been working. She determined not to abase herself, as her mother had done, before the over-ruling males of the family, but to make for herself a better life—perhaps by taking advantage of the new educational opportunities now opened up by successive Acts of Parliament. Eventually other members of the family would also free themselves from the strict confines of English social life by moving to the colonies, which at that time were offering new opportunities; Jessie’s restlessness was, however, for a time the chief voice of rebellion.

Her sister, May Chambers, one of the members of the family who joined the emigration going to Canada, recorded afterwards the vivid memories of her early days in Nottinghamshire, where the first thing she recalled was the strong division of children by gender. The boys formed a dominant group, strongly tribal in their concentration on manly sports and contemptuous of any boys who failed to join in.

Lawrence, young member of a family who lived nearby in Eastwood, did not fit easily into this environment. His father worked all his life in the local colliery as a ‘butty’ or ‘mining contractor’, to use the official designation. Having been born in 1846, before the provisions of Education Acts could take effect, Arthur Lawrence never went to a proper school, and came to despise all employment that called for literacy. Indeed, it is all too easy to dismiss him as a simple, brutish lout, totally incapable of responding to a well-educated wife with aspirations for her family. She, for her part, had failed to anticipate the nature of living with a grimy worker who expected on returning home each day to take a bath after his meal and even to have his back scrubbed by his wife as he did so. But the roughness of Arthur’s working life did not mean that he was incapable of responding to his environment. What is recorded of him suggests a man who was replete with knowledge of the natural phenomena he encountered on his way to work each morning: his daughter Emily said that ‘he knew the names of birds and animals and that. He was very good at that’,³ while his son George thought that his brother had been unfair to his father: ‘He was a man. And admitted that he liked his beer, I’m perfectly well aware, but otherwise our old dad was a fine fellow and [Bert] made me very vexed with some of the slighting remarks he made in his book about my old dad.’⁴ Indeed, in 1950, he confessed that if he had met Lawrence at that time he would probably have given him a good thrashing.⁵ Arthur Lawrence emerges, even in hostile accounts, as a man with an instinctive enjoyment of life, never so happy at home as when he was employed on some household task. He even attended chapel occasionally, if rarely. May Chambers recalled his striking appearance on such occasions:

He looked handsome in a rugged way: black curly hair and beard streaked slightly with silver; blue eyes smiling kindly in a rugged face, glancing over the congregation with a friendly air, well-built and strong in figure; and a genial manner. By comparison the mother appeared bitter, disillusioned and austere. Her attire was black, as I recall it.⁶

By the time his first children were born Arthur Lawrence was just over thirty years old. His workmates always thought of him particularly in positive terms. An anonymous miner was reported in 1955 as declaring ‘Now there was a man. Full of life and friendliness. Big roaring carnation in his coat. They still talk about him in Eastwood.’ He was remembered by this respondent as a good dancer, to be thought of as a truly memorable figure by comparison with a son who had never had any pals, and who had only ‘played ring-o’-roses with young women’.⁷ Lawrence himself came to think that his portrayal of his father had been lacking in justice, giving too much weight to his mother’s self-righteous condemnation.⁸ And it certainly seems that Lydia Lawrence had little feeling for what might be regarded as the ‘culture’ of the colliers, which extended well beyond their pleasure in brass bands and pigeon-fancying. Lydia Lawrence might deplore their drunkenness, which by spending their money deprived their wives and children of having enough to eat—yet it would hardly be likely to occur to her that their drunken singing of ‘Lead kindly light’ was still an obscure tribute to the writing of John Henry Newman some years before. After the unexpected death of their son Ernest, Arthur had accompanied her to London, where, she reported bitterly, her husband had been no help at all. But however ineffectual his efforts on such occasions, Arthur never withheld his supporting presence. His appearances in the records are slight: he took snuff ⁹—the use of cigarettes underground being (understandably) forbidden; he was ready to give his daughter Ada away at her marriage;¹⁰ he sometimes accompanied members of the family on their holidays;¹¹ and—at least when sober—always treated his wife with respect. When she died, he was unwilling to think of marrying again: ‘I’ve had one good woman—the finest woman in the world, and I don’t want another’.¹² He himself lived until October 1924.

As a child, Lawrence showed bitter hostility towards his father, which his mother blamed on the quarrel that had caused him to exclude her from the house during her pregnancy with their youngest son. May Chambers, on her first visit to the Lawrence house as a child was struck by the manner in which the young son shrank from his father in company—though even more intrigued by various signs that this hostility was accompanied by a secret bond between the two males, manifested when Lawrence refused the offer of cream in his tea—a trait shared by Arthur Lawrence, who declared that it spoilt the flavour—or when the young boy, after a dispute with the young brothers as to who was entitled to some mushrooms which the length of his legs had enabled him to snatch ahead of them confessed shamefacedly that he had hoped to take them home for his father’s tea. Lawrence told her that he was forced to show solidarity with his mother in disputes with his father, but it is evident that he felt a deep subterranean love for the man who could enthral his family with tales of the young creatures he encountered in the early morning on his way to work.

It cannot be known whether May developed any strong emotional attachment to Lawrence, but it is notable that at a very early stage in their relationship she took him to visit her favourite part of the wood, where they approached a ‘little pavilion of poles with the bark still on’ which, she explained, was the keepers’ hut. When her young companion suggested that the keepers might be around, she pointed out confidently that there was no smell of tobacco smoke. It is hard to believe that a memory of this incident was not at work in his mind some years later when he introduced the gamekeeper’s hut, to figure strongly in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Whatever her own feelings may have been, they were superseded a year or two later when she married a stone-worker, William Holbrook, with whom she spent the rest of her life, following him to Canada when he emigrated there in 1914.¹³ In the meantime, however, she had become aware of the attachment that was developing between Lawrence and her younger sister Jessie, who, captivated by his brightness of personality and intellect, shared his years of maturation and self-discovery. May remembered how, when Lawrence quoted the lines from Omar Khayyam questioning the advisability of lifting one’s hand to ‘It’ for help, ‘for It / Rolls impotently on as Thou or I’, her mother forbade such discussions in front of the younger children, declaring that she would not have their faith destroyed.

Lawrence’s love for his mother has been persuasively seen as a key to his whole later development. This affection, along with the hostility towards his father, has stamped him in the eyes of some as an early victim of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• 1 Fresh Thinking at the Turn of the Century
• 2 The Riddling Narrative of Nature
• 3 Realism, Romance and the Transformation of Narrative
• 4 The Vulnerability of Passion
• 5 Frieda von Richthofen and her Background
• 6 In Search of an Adequate Symbol
• 7 Corruption, Energy and a Flowering Moon
• 8 The Limitations of Transcendence
• 9 Negativity in Post-War Life
• 10 To the End of the Earth
• 11 Dimensions of Consciousness in the Tales
• 12 Probing the Contradictions of Nature
• 13 Tenderness and the Modes of Energy
• 14 Final Thoughts
• 15 The Nature of Lawrence’s Poetry
• 16 An Elusive Identity
• Appendix: Lawrence’s Sexuality and his Supposed ‘Fascism’
• Select Bibliography
• Index