D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood near Nottingham in 1885, the fourth child of Arthur and Lydia Lawrence. Arthur was a coalminer who had started in the pits at the age of ten. Lydia, more educated than her husband and with more genteel ambitions, had famously ‘married beneath herself’ and felt it keenly. She had aspirations for her children, especially Lawrence’s gifted brother Ernest, which went beyond the dirty, dangerous occupation of their father. When Ernest died at the age of twenty-three, Lydia’s hopes seem to have been transferred on to her youngest son David Herbert, known at home as Bert.
The tensions between his parents made a powerful impression on young Bert. Lydia Lawrence perceived her husband’s trips to the public house as central to a feckless lack of ambition. Arthur Lawrence considered them a natural pastime; a means of washing away the pit dust while socialising with workmates who depended on each other for their lives in a dangerous environment. Lydia wanted her boys to achieve more than their father, while Arthur couldn’t see why what had been good enough for him wasn’t good enough for his sons.
Eastwood and Lawrence’s early family life permeates much of his work. He described ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ as ‘full of my childhood’s atmosphere’.7
In this story, Elizabeth Bates, pregnant with her third child, is waiting for her husband Walter to return home from the mine, but suspects that he has gone to the local public house. As the night progresses she almost hopes that he is in the pub getting drunk, the only other reason for his lateness being an accident in the pit. Unable to dismiss her fear, but ‘nursing her wrath to keep it warm’, Elizabeth sets out for a neighbour’s house to enquire if her husband has been seen. A fellow miner confirms Walter is not in the local and the alarm is raised when it is realised that no one saw him leave the pit. Some workmates return to check on him, but they are too late: he has been smothered behind a collapsed pit-roof. Elizabeth’s husband is brought home, his body unmarked but lifeless.
Lawrence’s ‘Eastwood’ writings have a hint of documentary about them. This is a fiction that engages with the most secret, internal emotions of its subjects, but it is also an illuminating slice of real life, a family at home glimpsed clearly for a second through the window of a passing train, a precursor to the socially aware docudramas of Ken Loach.
Lawrence recalled how he often wished that his father would die in the pit and it is tempting to see ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ partly as a recollection of that uncomfortable desire. A similar revisiting of the fantasy occurs in Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers, as John Worthen points out:
The young Paul Morel lying in bed at night, hating his father, has gone a whole journey deeper into rage than his siblings. He prays: ‘Let him be killed at pit.’ A late essay confirms this as a true memory of young Lawrence, awaiting his father’s return and the dreaded row downstairs …8
Tucked within ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is the possibility that it was suspicion and drink that killed Elizabeth’s husband. When asked if she saw her father coming home from the pit, young Annie
became serious. She looked at her mother with large, wistful blue eyes.
‘No, mother, I’ve never seen him. Why? Has he come up an’ gone past to Old Brinsley? He hasn’t, mother, ’cos I never saw him.’ (78:22–6)
Perhaps if Elizabeth had listened to her daughter and raised the alarm earlier or indeed if his gang members had made sure he had exited the pit, her husband could have been saved. Perhaps the blame lies partly in Walter’s habit of preferring drink to his family to such an extent that his lateness is not an initial cause for alarm. But Lawrence doesn’t linger over these possibilities. Death has been with us all the way.
‘It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.’ (80:31–4)
What is there left to complete these landmarks except a death? Yet it would be wrong to see the miner’s life as simply marriage, birth, work, drink and demise because there are also the chrysanthemums, a hardy evocation of nature and beauty – an evocation which runs throughout these short stories and much of the rest of Lawrence’s work.
Lawrence was living at home in Eastwood when the national miners’ strike began in February 1912. His early story ‘The Miner at Home’ is one of a series Lawrence wrote between February and April of that year, shortly after illness forced him to turn to writing full-time. It is a simple though accomplished short story already showing the observational skills and originality of expression of a great writer.
He wore no coat, and his arms were freckled black. He stripped to the waist, hitched his trousers into the strap, and kneeled on the rug to wash himself. There was a great splashing and spluttering. The red firelight shone on his cap of white soap, and on the muscles of his back, on the strange working of his red and white muscular arms, that flashed up and down like individual creatures. (44:13–19)
Lawrence’s working-class characters are complex, intelligent and sensitive; by no means the standard fictional portrayal of the working class in Lawrence’s time or indeed today. In ‘Love Among the Haystacks’ a young man quotes a couplet in German while stacking a haystack, in ‘The Miner at Home’ a miner wrestles with his own reluctance to go on strike while trying to persuade his wife that he should, in ‘Adolf’ a weary father returning home from nightshift rescues an abandoned rabbit for his children.
Language is of course at the root of Lawrence’s writing. Like fellow working-class poets Robert Burns9 and John Clare, Lawrence considered the lives of ordinary people good enough for literature. He also wrote his characters’ speech in the language that he had grown up with.
‘Tha sees,’ he said, as he leaned on the pommel of his fork, ‘tha thowt as tha ’d done me one, didna ter?’ He smiled as he spoke, then fell again into his pleasant torment of musing. (4:3–5)
Modern writers such as James Kelman or Irvine Welsh do not feel the need to employ standard English to narrate for characters who speak in dialect, and the modern reader coming to Lawrence’s work may regret that he didn’t express such tales completely in the language of his subjects. The contrast can give the impression of a narrator of ‘superior’ class or education relaying the actions of people who seem sassy enough to talk for themselves. Lawrence is sometimes portrayed as a writer eager to leave his class behind, a precursor of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ who vents his frustration on the people who formed him, calling them ‘fucking peasants’, unable to understand why they too can’t escape the restrictions of their birth.
Lawrence had intended ‘Adolf’ (a short early sketch, it was never anthologised during his lifetime) for the Athenaeum. ‘I will try to be pleasant and a bit old fashioned,’10 Lawrence wrote to the editor. In the event ‘Adolf’ was rejected. Perhaps this self-conscious resolve to be old-fashioned accounts for the lack of Lawrence’s usual bite. Or perhaps the realism and element of tension that Lawrence could not bring himself to quite banish accounts for the journal’s refusal. The narrator’s father, a miner, returns from nightshift just as his children rise, fresh and full of energy from bed.
Then night met morning face to face, and the contact was not always happy. Perhaps it was painful to my father to see us gaily entering upon the day into which he dragged himself soiled and weary. (220:5–8)
Or perhaps it was Lawrence’s use of profanity (albeit in French in this instance), for which he would later be so severely censured and censored, that decided the editor of the Athenaeum against accepting ‘Adolf’. As the antisocial rabbit hops back into the wild,
bob! bob! bob! goes the white tail, merde! merde! merde! it says to the pursuer. The rabbit can’t help it. In his utmost extremity he still flings the insult at the pursuer. (227:25–8)
‘Adolf’ gives us a glimpse of Lawrence’s irreverence; there are times when the whole world is merde to him too. It also perhaps gives us a flavour of Lawrence’s sense of humour, which his friends
frequently write of in their recollections of the man, but that often seems absent from his writings.
Lawrence’s poor health made him unsuited to working in the mines and his intelligence, coupled with the support and determination of his family, enabled him to continue his education and gain work, initially as a clerk and later as a teacher in a board school.11 Neither profession was to his taste, and the young Lawrence must have feared he would be caught in a life from which there was no means of escape. The chance of making a living from his writing was even slimmer than for young writers today.
Lawrence was keenly aware and deeply afraid of the fate life might hold for him. Trapped by birth and circumstance in an occupation he found unfulfilling, marriage would probably soon follow clinching him in a financial and social trap that would foster frustration. His only release from drudgery would be in physical and sexual expression and eventually death.
Such restrictions undercut the lives around him. His mother had escaped the poverty of her family home through marriage to a miner only to find herself committed to an unsatisfactory union. She maintained her education and stimulated her mind through church activities, but there would be no real escape for her from the restrictions of class, gender and poverty. As Lawrence reached adolescence and entered the world of work and education he could see the same pattern being replicated in his own life and that of his friends and siblings. A combination of zeitgeist, talent and poor health released Lawrence into full-time writing, but the life he might have had continued to inform his work.
Lawrence frequently writes from a female point of view. He was delighted when an early anonymous review of The White Peacock asked,
To begin with, what is the sex of ‘D. H. Lawrence’? The clever analysis of the wayward Lettie … almost convince[s] us that it is the work of a woman … if so, we must wonder greatly at the sympathetic understanding of the male point of view …12
Young Lawrence had sisters and many female friends. He grew up in a world where women might address their husbands as ‘master’ or ‘mester’, but they worked as hard as men. Lawrence had ample examples of women’s intelligence, but he was aware of the restrictions that society placed on them. For example, sex before marriage was a taboo that if discovered would result in automatic dismissal for a female teacher while men might escape with a warning. Women were not permitted to work after marriage and all economic freedom was lost to them as soon as they acknowledged or gave in to love or sexual desire. By filtering some of his stories through women’s eyes Lawrence ups the ante. If it was difficult for him to realise his potential, how much more difficult must it be for women?
In ‘The Last Straw’, Fanny is a recently demobbed ‘lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first love, a foundry worker, after having kept him dangling, off and on, for a dozen years’ (230:10–12). Everything about Fanny’s return is a comedown. She repeats the phrase in her head: ‘What a come-down! What a come-down!’ Her stylish luggage sits on the platform next to the cheerful train that will wait in the station for a tempting ten minutes after she alights, but there is no returning to the fine life she has left behind. ‘She had come home—for good’ and home is a kind of prison (231:11–12, 9).
Lawrence repeatedly portrays human relationships as a trap; Fanny has to marry for security and social status, but in Lawrence’s stories society continually distorts the natural sexual impulse into a snare. In ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ he writes,
It was the automatism of sex that had caught him again. Not that he hated sex … But it had become mechanical, automatic, and he wanted to escape that. Automatic sex shattered him, and filled him with a sort of death. (302:11–15)
If love and marriage are tricky things for a man or woman of means they are much trickier propositions for those without financial advantage. But in Lawrence’s world social standing can bring its own problems.
There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time, though nobody ever said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll’s house, a voice would start whispering: There must be more money! There must be more money! (270:12–18)
Restriction of the self, whether it be sexual or social, is anathema to Lawrence.
Women were a constant source of inspiration and support in Lawrence’s creative life. Firstly his mother, who after the death of Ernest, focused her ambitions on Lawrence. His friend Jessie Chambers also helped to nurture his artistic ambitions and talents. She shared his love of literature and encouraged Lawrence’s writing, even reading first drafts after he had disappointed her by withdrawing his (admittedly reluctantly given) declarations of affection. Fellow teacher Helen Corke granted Lawrence access to her diaries detailing her unhappy love affair with a married man who eventually committed suicide. With her permission Lawrence used them to form the basis of his novel The Trespasser.
Ultimately there was Frieda, his wife, at the time of their meeting a married woman, six years older than Lawrence and the mother of three young children. If Lawrence had had any yearnings for respectability, his elopement with Frieda would have done for them. Her husband was a modern languages professor at Nottingham University College, where Lawrence’s name remained a taboo for many years. But the obligation to be true to himself and the need to create drew Lawrence much more than a ticket to polite society ever could.
Frieda was originally from Germany and the prejudice and harassment that she and Lawrence experienced during the First World War were perhaps factors in helping him to realise what a catastrophe this first major modern war was. It was also a catalyst that sent the couple overseas, never to live permanently in Britain again.
The Lawrences’ marriage was often difficult, sometimes violent, frequently poverty-stricken and uncomfortable, but as with any intense and difficult relationship it opened new emotions to the writer. The fact that Frieda came from a different class and country, was older than Lawrence and had experience of a different way of life expanded his horizons still further. The semi-voluntary exile the couple went into after the war expanded the range of experiences and observations available to fuel his intellect and his writing. Lawrence crossed continents, societies, classes and cultures. He could portray a Prussian officer as successfully as he could a Nottinghamshire mining family, a decadent sun-worshipper or a disillusioned gentleman gardener.
There are traces of a bitter wit in ‘England, My England’. Evelyn is suited to a simple life of a man of the soil, but because he is a gentleman he cannot be trained for or permitted to follow his vocation. The income will never be enough to support his family in the manner to which they must become accustomed and Evelyn, though gently born, is not of independent means.
‘England, My England’ was written in 1915 and expresses a sense of rage with the First World War at a time when the majority of the country was still firmly behind the conflict. As the husband of a German wife Lawrence could have had no illusions. He and Frieda had returned to England to get married. They had intended to stay for a brief holiday, but were stranded by the outbreak of the conflict. They settled in Cornwall where Frieda’s nationality led to open persecution and accusations of spying for the enemy. Eventually they were expelled from the county at only three days’ notice, under the newly strengthened Defence of the Realm Act. Lawrence was to date his disenchantment with his homeland from this time. After the war, he never lived in England permanently again.
The couple were living on the Sussex estate of the Meynell family when Lawrence conceived ‘England, My England’. The story offended his hosts and when Perceval Lucas, the husband of one of the Meynell daughters, was killed in France the following year, the story seemed horribly prescient. Lawrence, who had described ‘England, My England’ as ‘a story about the Lucas’s’, briefly wished that it were at ‘the bottom of the sea’.13
A heightened awareness of mortality invok
ed by the early death of his older brother, combined with his own serious illnesses and brushes with death, might help to explain Lawrence’s prodigious output. Like that other short-lived, wandering writer Robert Louis Stevenson, Lawrence knew that his chances of making old bones were slim. There is an appreciation for life within his tales, and the theme of wasted existences and death is repeated in these short stories. Life is fragile. A moment’s lapse or act of defiance can kill.
In ‘Love Among the Haystacks’ one brother shoves another from the top of a tall stack of hay. The fallen man narrowly misses a small knob of wood that might have killed him had his head glanced against it, disaster is averted and both young men meet mates, fall in love and get married. They are true to nature, true to themselves and to each other. The young orderly in ‘The Prussian Officer’ is not so fortunate. The young man’s officer has conceived an attraction for him. But instead of acknowledging or acting on his desire the officer represses it, beating and abusing the younger man until he attacks his superior in turn. The result is the death of both men. Lawrence’s portrayal of the violence that repression can create is all the more remarkable for its time, a period of institutional, social and legal persecution of homosexuals. A confused contemporary reviewer tried to explain the officer’s savagery through the example of a criminal who when asked why
he had thought it necessary to put a comparatively harmless female out of the way, made reply that he did not like the shape of her nose. In the same way, if hard pressed, the Prussian officer might have answered that he did not like the shape of the limber young fellow’s body.14
The problem is of course that he liked it against his inclination.
Same sex desire is also hinted at in ‘The Blind Man’, another story set in wartime, and one with echoes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Isabel and Maurice Pervin are living quietly in Maurice’s farmstead awaiting the birth of their child. Maurice has been wounded in the war and returned without his sight, but the couple have adjusted to the change and live a quiet, countryside existence. On the whole they are happy, though occasionally assaulted by depression and ennui. On the evening on which the story is set, their near isolation is about to be broken by a visit from Isabel’s old friend Bertie Reid. Bertie and Maurice have never got on, but life has changed in the years since they were last together and old enmity is to be set aside.
Selected Stories Page 2
