DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
Born: September 11, 1885
Died: March 2, 1930
Little known facts:
D. H. Lawrence graduated from Nottingham High School in 1901 having made no remarkable academic impression overall, though he continued to be recognized with individual awards in mathematics.
In the 1907, he won the Nottinghamshire Guardian Christmas story competition with “An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude” under the name of Jessie Chambers, his long-time intellectual companion and confidant, so he could avoid constraints of submission limits.
Much better known facts:
Lawrence’s intense and convoluted love for his mother is one of the best-known facts of literary biography.
His observation of his parents’ difficult inter-class marriage led to his writing about alternative paths and outcomes for the rest of his life.
Lawrence’s major subject for his writing was about how the individual’s detached identity is threatened as one succeeds in finding sexual fulfillment and how that results in a constant veering between losing one’s self in passion and seeking that detachment which he believed was vital for a writer.
Snap Shot
D.H. Lawrence was one of the most influential British writers of the early 20th century, publishing many novels and volumes of poetry, including Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and—his best known and most infamous novel–Lady Chatterley’s Lover—published in Italy in 1928, banned in the United States until 1959, and banned in England until 1960. He garnered fame for some and notoriety for others of his novels and short stories early in his career and much later received critical acclaim for those works as well as his essays and personal letters. Much of the acclaim came posthumously—well after his passing in France in 1930.
Early Life and Non-Writing Career
The author was born in 1885 in the small Midlands coal-mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His father was a miner and his mother worked in the lace-making industry. Lawrence’s mother was from a financially stressed middle-class family, was well educated to the point of having been a student-teacher, and was a great lover of literature. She tried to pass to each of her offspring a love of books and the drive to grow beyond their blue-collar circumstances. (Bio)
Lawrence’s mother, Lydia, insisted that her sons would not grow into manual labor at twelve like their contemporaries. She taught them to understand they were different from their neighbors and their classmates, putting in place a set of social hurdles for them all to cope with for the rest of their lives. (Worthen)
His mismatched parents struggled with the conflicts that arose between them as opposites: she was intellectual, genteel, and strictly moral; he was physical, working class, and more carefree. These contrasts and the eddy currents coming from them became the undercurrents of his own struggles in personal relationships and drove the themes pervading his writing. (Worthen)
Lawrence was poor at sports, but he was an excellent student. In 1897 he was twelve and he won the first scholarship in Eastwood’s history to attend Nottingham High School. At Nottingham, Lawrence felt like an outsider—as one of two scholarship students there—and had difficulty in making friends. He graduated in 1901 having made no remarkable academic impression overall. (Bio) However, he had become a drag on the family finances since the scholarship did not cover all of the expenses. (Worthen)
In 1901, Lawrence secured a position as a factory clerk for a Nottingham surgical appliances manufacturer in order to help with the family finances. In 1905 he began a year’s full-time teaching in Eastwood to earn what he could before leaving in the fall of 1906 to attend the University College of Nottingham to earn a teacher’s certificate. (Bio) While there, he completed the Normal Course without difficulty, acquired a life-long contempt for academic life, completed a second draft of his novel, and entered three stories in a local competition in 1907. Once fully qualified as a teacher in 1908, he took a post in an elementary school in Croydon, and moved to London, fulfilling his mother’s dream for him to earn a living away from the coalfields, manual labor, and low-level clerical work. He read significantly modern authors (William James, Baudelaire and Nietzsche) while in London and it was during this time he lost his religious faith. (Worthen)
Major Relationships
Lawrence became increasingly candid about the nature and long-lasting residual effects of his intense love for his mother, Lydia Lawrence. His oedipal fascination persisted throughout his life and he wrote about his mother with either open passion or with a malice derived from it until he died. (Farr)
Jessie Chambers, the second daughter of another church going family of Eastwood and later of nearby Haggs Farm, became Lawrence’s intellectual companion, reading books and discussing authors and writing with him. Chambers saw all his early writing; her support was crucial to his persistence. Even after they broke what she had seen as an informal engagement, he continued to send her his manuscripts and she continued to critique them—until she became hurt by his fictional and distorted account of their failed sexual relationship in Sons and Lovers. (Worthen)
While living in Croydon outside of London in 1908, Lawrence got to know a fellow schoolteacher, Helen Corke. She recently had decided to have an affair with a married man who had been her long time violin teacher and after a five-day attempt at a sexual relationship, decided it was a failure and told him so. This led to the man’s immediate suicide while she was out of town recovering from the ordeal. She told Lawrence the story, and showed him her manuscript, The Freshwater Diary. Lawrence then used this material for his next novel. Later, his relationship with Helen evolved into another unsuccessful attempt at his early sexual expression made more difficult by previous failures by both of them. Ironically, Helen and Jessie became friends—both teachers, both writers, both objecting to his fictionalization and distortions of their relationships with him that they were sure would be recognized by their contemporaries.
In early 1912, Lawrence became engaged to an old friend from college named Louie Burrows (Bio) who had helped him care for his mother stricken with cancer before she died in 1910. He found Louie very capable of reading and critiquing his work as Jessie had and they planned a life as two teachers. However, he wrote to her that he felt changed after his bout with double pneumonia in late 1911 and that he felt they should break off the engagement. (Worthen)
Then, a few months later in the spring of 1912, Lawrence went to visit an old Nottingham professor, Ernest Weekley, to ask his advice about his future and his writing. While waiting for Weekley to return home for the appointment, Lawrence fell desperately in love with Weekley’s wife, the former Frieda von Richthofen. Lawrence immediately resolved to finalize the breaking of his engagement to Louie Burrows, quit teaching, and try to make a living as a writer. By May of that year, he had persuaded Frieda to leave her family (Bio) and run off to Germany, leaving behind a husband, who initially was furious but flexible in his consideration of various arrangements, but who ultimately became determined to have a divorce and restrict her access to the three children she left behind. (Worthen)
The journalist and Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin has argued: “She (Frieda) gave him what he most wanted at the time they met, being probably the first woman who positively wanted to go to bed with him without guilt or inhibition; she was not only older, and married, but bored with her husband, and had been encouraged to believe in the therapeutic power of sex by an earlier lover, one of Freud’s disciples. (Tomalin)
Lawrence cited another dimension to this when he was asked why he hadn’t married Jessie by noting that genius requires opposition and Frieda provided plenty of that. He said his life with Jessie would have been too easy. (Worthen)
Health
As a child, D.H. Lawrence was physically frail and struggled to find acceptance with other boys. He was also susceptible to illnesses—particularly those aggravated by the dirty air of Eastwood that was surrounded by coal pits. In high school, he often fell ill, grew depressed, and became indolent in his studies. In autumn of 1901 Lawrence contracted pneumonia, putting him back in his mother’s direct care and increasing her emotional grip on him. In 1911 he had an intense struggle with double pneumonia that his sister Ada nursed him through. Subsequently, he contracted influenza during the great pandemic at the end of WWI.
Writing Career
At the prompting of Jessie Chambers, Lawrence began writing poetry in 1904 and started drafting his first novel (eventually The White Peacock) in 1905. While at University College of Nottingham, he won the short story competition sponsored by the Nottingham Guardian in 1907 alluded to above. While at his teaching post at an elementary school in the London suburb of Croydon, Lawrence continued to write, and in 1909, Jessie Chambers managed to get some of his poems published in the English Review. The publishers at the English Review took an interest in his work and recommended The White Peacock to publisher, William Heinemann, who printed it in 1911. Set in his childhood hometown of Eastwood, the novel foreshadowed many of the themes, such as mismatched marriages and class divides, that would pervade his later work. A year later, Lawrence published his second novel, The Trespasser, based on the experiences of his fellow teacher Helen Corke also mentioned above.
While traveling with his recently discovered and uninhibited lover, Frieda Weekley, Lawrence published his first play, The Daughter-in-Law, in 1912. In the following year, he published his first volume of poetry: Love Poems and Others and his third novel, Sons and Lovers, considered his first masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century.
Lawrence and Frieda returned to England and married on July 13, 1914. That same year, Lawrence produced a highly regarded short story collection, The Prussian Officer, and in 1915 he published another novel, The Rainbow. It was considered very sexually explicit at the time and, as a consequence, was banned for obscenity, earning him notoriety but neither the financial independence he wanted nor the critical acclaim.
Lawrence felt betrayed by his country as a result and determined that he could not travel abroad because of World War I. So, they went to Cornwall in southwestern Great Britain. There the local government considered the presence of a controversial writer and his German wife—the sister of an increasingly prominent German fighter pilot—a security threat. They harassed them and finally banished them in 1917. The Lawrences spent the next two years in poverty moving among friends’ apartments. Despite this frenetic lifestyle, Lawrence managed to write four volumes of poetry: Amores (1916) Look! We Have Come Through! (1919), New Poems (1918) and Bay: A Book of Poems (1919).
In 1919 after the Great War, Lawrence left England for Italy and became the international artist throughout the 1920’s living two very remarkable years writing and traveling around Italy. In 1920, he revised and published Women in Love, which he saw as the second half of The Rainbow. He also revised a collection of short stories written during the war, published as My England and Other Stories in 1922.
Lawrence then pursued a lifelong dream of experiencing America. In February 1922, he left Europe and traveled east to Ceylon and Australia, settling in Taos, New Mexico. In Taos, Lawrence finished Studies in Classic American Literature, a well-received book of literary criticism of great American authors.
Lawrence lived on the ranch in New Mexico until 1927 except for a few trips to Mexico, New York, and England. During that time, he produced a novel, Boy in the Bush (1924); a story collection, St. Mawr (1925); and another novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926).
D.H. Lawrence died on March 2, 1930, at the age of 44, in Vence, France from complications of bronchial tuberculosis that had afflicted him a good part of his life. It was in spite of his long struggle with the disease that he wrote several of his best and longest lasting work–including the second and third versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Taking Another Look
Although Lawrence was reviled as a crude and pornographic writer and painter for much of the latter part of his life, he is now widely, though not universally, considered—in company with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf—one of the great modernist English-language writers. His precision with language, his wide range of subject matters and genres, his psychological complexity, and his exploration of female sexuality mark him as one of the most sophisticated and innovative English writers of the early 20th century.
Lawrence considered his work as a life-long attempt to challenge the constrictive and, in his view, the oppressive norms of modern Western culture—particularly the Puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society. He knew full well his views were seen as radical—specifically his regard for sex, the primitive subconscious, and nature as cures for the ills of modern industrialized society.
While Virginia Woolf was mastering her use of stream of consciousness, Lawrence was probing the subconscious, looking for answers to what he had observed in human kind and reflecting his discoveries and speculations in his fiction and non-fiction as an active player in the Age of Insight in his writing and his painting.
His work and the response of critics were quite positive after World War II and there was another surge after the obscenity trials.
Magical Realism
Some of Lawrence’s short fiction contains haunting moments of magical realism in which his detailed realist prose traps us with some confining assumptions while he has made in clear he is, at least in part, a modernist who is taking us on a journey that will likely probe both the conscious and the subconscious. We are struck by the ambiguity of the apparent change or the perception of change about what is explainable through science and reason in the understanding of a character and usually the reader. The power of touch is given extraordinary meaning by Lawrence to the point that it becomes a channel for psychological or spiritual transformation in both “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Blind Man.”
The detailed realistic settings laid out in such detail are clearly from the mining village of Eastwood and the Haggs Farm of his childhood as one can guess after reading any serious biography of Lawrence. Touch as used in these two cases can be so traumatic that it sparks insight or crushes one’s protective shell. Lawrence’s biographer reveals the author’s own sensitivity to human touch in his intense reaction to having been medically examined by the military in his third and last classification for conscription.
The Epilogue
The British Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in 1960—thirty years after his death—has been said to mark the first symbolic moral battle between the humanitarian English liberalism and “the striped-trousered ones who rule” so often caricatured by Aldous Huxley. It is often cited as the initial battle (and a victorious one) in cultural wars of the 1960s over pivotal issues of human rights: including the legalization of homosexuality and abortion, abolition of the death penalty and of theatre censorship, and reform of divorce laws. (Robertson)
Over three months following the trial, Penguin sold 3 million copies – showing that the suppression of a book through unsuccessful litigation served only to promote dramatically increased sales. (Robertson) Ironically, Lawrence died intestate and his legacy went entirely to his wife Frieda, ultimately resulting in benefit to her three abandoned children by Weekley while no Lawrence family members ever saw a penny from the royalties of his ultimate successes. (Worthen)
A FEW OF QUOTES OF LAWRENCE
“If there weren’t so many lies in the world … I wouldn’t write at all.” (Bio)
“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.” (brainyquote)
Writing to Rachel Annand Taylor as Mrs. Lawrence lay dying in 1910, “We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct . . . It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal” (Collected Letters I 69 quoted in Worthen).
A FEW QUOTES ABOUT LAWRENCE
“. . . in painting and writing, he was using shock tactics, so that, recovering from their shock, people would realize that the sexuality of the novel or painting was no more than ‘part of every man’s life, and every woman’s.’” (Worthen)
As British poet Philip Larkin quipped in one of his poems, “Sexual intercourse began/In 1963/Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first LP. (Bio)
NOTABLE WORKS
Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women In Love (1920), Studies In Classic American Literature (1923), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928.
SOURCES
Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House, 2012.
Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. New York: Counterpoint, 2005.
Young, David and Keith Hollaman (eds.). Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology. New York: Longman Inc., 1984.
“D.H. Lawrence.” Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2014. Web. 22 December 2014
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/d_h_lawrence.html
Farr, Judith. “D. H. Lawrence’s Mother as Sleeping Beauty: The “Still Queen” of His Poems and Fictions” MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 1990. Web. 22 December 2014.
Robertson, Geoffrey. “The trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” The Guardian. Friday 22 October 2010. Web. 22 December 2014.
Kunkle, Benjamin. “The Deep End: A new life quoted of D. H. Lawrence.” The New Yorker December 19,, 2005. Web. 22 December 2014.
Tomalin, Claire. Independent on Sunday (1991). Web. 22 December 2014.
Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.
