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D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence (1885-1930) |
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English novelist, story writer, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. D.H. Lawrence's preoccupation with sexual freedom led to obscenity trials, which had a deep effect on the relationship between literature and society. In 1912 Lawrence wrote: "What the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true." After World War the author's life was marked with continuous and restless wandering. "The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath-sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone at Moses's head." (from 'Why the Novel Matters,' in D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Anthony Beal, 1955, p. 105) David Herbert Lawrence was born in the mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in central England. He was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a struggling coal miner who was a heavy drinker. His mother, Lydia, née Beardsall, was a former schoolteacher, whose family had fallen in hard times. However, she was greatly superior in education to her husband. Lawrence's childhood was dominated by poverty and friction
between his parents. In a letter from 1910 to the poet Rachel Annand
Taylor he wrote: "Their marriage life has been one carnal, bloody
fight. I was born hating my father: as early as ever I can remember, I
shivered with horror when he touched me. He was very bad before I was
born." (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume 1: September 1901-May 1913, edited by James T. Boulton, 1979, p. 190) Encouraged
by his mother, with whom he had a deep emotional bond and who figures
as Mrs Morel in his first masterpiece,
Lawrence became interested in arts. He was educated at Nottingham High
School, to which he had won a scholarship. After leaving the school in 1901, Lawrence worked as a clerk in a
surgical appliance factory and four years as a pupil-teacher at the British School in Eastwood. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence received his teaching certificate. He then embarked on a teaching career at Davidson Road School in Croydon in South London (1908-1911). Lawrence's mother died in 1910 - he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine. This scene was re-created in his novel Sons and Lovers (1912). In 1909 a number of Lawrence's poems were submitted by Jessie Chambers, his childhood sweetheart, to Ford Madox Ford, who published them in English Review. While in Nottingham, Lawrence had regularly visited the Chambers family at Haggs Farm, where he started his friendship with Jessie. In 1910 Lawrence got engaged to Louie Burrows, his old friend. The next year, Lawrence had an affair with Alice Dax, the wife of a chemist. Falling seriously ill with pneumonia, Lawrence gave up schoolteaching. The appearance of his first novel, The White Peacock (1911),
launched Lawrence as a writer at the age of 25. In 1912 he met Frieda
von Richthofen, the professor Ernest Weekly's wife. They fell in love
and Frieda left her husband and three children. The couple eloped
to Bavaria and then continued to Austria, Germany and Italy. Sons and Lovers was based on Lawrence's childhood and contains a portrayal of Jessie Chambers, the Miriam in the novel and called "Muriel" in early stories. When the book was rejected by Heinemann, Lawrence wrote to his friend Edward Garnett: "Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today." (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume 1: September 1901-May 1913, edited by James T. Boulton, 1979, p. 422) In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, and traveled
with her in several countries in the final two decades of his life.
Violent fights become a part of their marriage and sexual bond.
Katherine Mansfield said: "I don't know which disgusts one worse - when they are loving and playing with each
other, or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out
Frieda's hair and saying 'I'll cut your bloody throat, you bitch.'" (D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912-1922 by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, 1996, p. 319) Lawrence's fourth novel, The Rainbow (1915),
was about two sisters growing up in the north of England. The character
of Ursula Brangwem was partly based on Lawrence's teacher associate in
Nottingham, Loui Burrows. She was Lawrence's first love. The novel was
banned for its alleged obscenity - it used
swear words and talked openly about sex. Lawrence's frankness in
describing sexual relations between men and women upset a great many
people and over 1000 copies of the novel were burned by the examining
magistrate's order. The banning created further difficulties for him in
getting anything published. Also his paintings were confiscated from an
art gallery. As an act of solidarity and support, John Middleton Mutty and Catherine Mansfield offered
Lawrence their various "little magazines" for his writings. An
important
patron was Lady Ottoline Morrell, wife of a Liberal Member of
Parliament. Through her, Lawrence formed relationships with several
cultural figures, among them Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and Bertrand
Russell, with whom he was later to quarrel bitterly. "He never let
himself bump into reality," Russell said later. "He would go into long
tirades about how one must proclaim 'the Truth' to the multitude, and
he seemed to have no doubt that the multitude would listen." (Autobiography by Bertrand Russell, 2010, p. 231) Lawrence called Russell and Lady Ottoline traitors
in a letter to Cynthia Asquith: "They betray the real truth. The come
to me, and they make me talk, and they enjoy it, it gives them a
profoundly gratifying sensation. And that is all." (The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, compiled and edited by James T. Boulton, 1996, p. 104) During the First World War Lawrence and his wife were unable to obtain passports and were target of constant harassment from the authorities. Frieda, a cousin of the legendary "Red Baron" von Richthofen, was viewed with great suspicion. They were accused of spying for the Germans and officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919, when their years of wandering began. Lawrence started to write The Lost Girl (1920) in Italy. He had settled with Frieda in Gargano. In those days they were so poor that they could not afford even a newspaper. The novel dealt with one of Lawrence's favorite subjects - a girl marries a man of a much lower social status, against the advice of friends, and finds compensation in his superior warmth and understanding. "But it needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a prostitute. If you haven't got the qualities which attract loose men, what are you to do? Supposing it isn't in your nature to attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then you can't be a prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since willing won't do it. It requires a second party to come to an agreement." (from The Lost Girl, 1920 ) Lawrence put aside the manuscript for some years and rewrote it in an old Sicilian farm-house near Taormina in 1920. In the 1920s Aldous Huxley traveled
with Lawrence in Italy and France. Between 1922 and 1926 he and Frieda
left Italy to live intermittently
in Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. These years provided
settings for several of Lawrence's novels and stories. In 1924 the New
York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan gave Lawrence and Frieda the Kiowa
Ranch in Taos, receiving is return the original manuscript of Sons
and Lovers. In an essay called 'New Mexico' (1928) Lawrence wrote that "New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had." He felt that it liberated him from the present era of civilization - "a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new." After severe illness in Mexico - Lawrence contracted malaria - it was discovered that he was suffering from life-threatening tuberculosis. It was the major reason why the Lawrences decided to confined their travels to Europe. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence's most famous work, was first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, Constance Chatterley, and a man who works on her husband's estate. A war wound has left her husband, Sir Clifford, a mine owner in Derbyshire, impotent and paralyzed. Constance has a brief affair with a young playwright and then enters into a passionate relationship with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Oliver Melloers. Connie becomes pregnant. Sir Clifford refuses to give a divorce and the lovers wait for better time when they could be united. "Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity." - One of the models for the cuckolder-gamekeeper was Angelino Ravagli, who received half the Lawrence estate after Frieda's death. Lady Chatterley's Lover was
banned for a time in both
the UK and the US as pornographic. In the UK it was published in
unexpurgated form in 1960 after an obscenity trial in Court 1 of the
Old Bailey, where defense
witnesses included E.M. Forster, Helen Gardner, and Richard Hoggart.
The judge, Sir Laurence Byrne, had a Penguin copy of the novel in which
his wife had underlined the racier bits. Lady Byrne sat beside her
husband on the bench. Byrne was a devout Roman Catholic. Mervyn
Griffith-Jones, who led the prosecution, told the jury that he had
counted the "four-letter words": "The word 'fuck' or 'fucking' occurs
no less than thirty times . . . 'Cunt' fourteen times; "balls" thirteen
times; 'shit' and 'arse' six times apiece; 'cock' four times;"piss"
three times, and so on." Richad Hoggard for the Defence said those
words are used far more freely than many of us know. ('Of
Public Libraries and Paperbacks: "Deviant" Masculinity and the Spatial
Practices of Reading in Post-War London' by Richard Hornsey, in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-war and Contemporary British Literature, edited by Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene-Harwood, 2003, pp. 46-47) Among Lawrence's other famous novels is Women in Love (1920), a sequel to Rainbow. The characters are probably partially based on Lawrence and his wife, and John Middleton Murray and his wife Katherine Mansfield. The friends shared a house in England in 1914-15. Lawrence used the English composer and songwriter Philip Heseltine as the model for Julius Halliday, who never forgave it. When a manuscript of philosophical essays by Lawrence fell into Heseltine's hands - no other copies of the text existed - he used it as toilet tissue. According to an anecdote, Lawrence never trusted the opinions of Murray and when Murray told that he believed that there was no God, Lawrence replied, "Now I know there is." Lawrence argued that instincts and intuitions are more important than the reason. "Instinct makes me run from little over-earnest ladies; instinct makes me sniff the lime blossom and reach for the darkest cherry. But it is intuition which makes me feel the uncanny glassiness of the lake this afternoon, the sulkiness of the mountains, the vividness of near green in thunder-sun, the young man in bright blue trousers lightly tossing the grass from the scythe, the elderly man in a boater stiffly shoving his scythe strokes, both of them sweating in the silence of the intense light." (from 'Insouciance', 1928) Lawrence's belief in the importance of instincts reflected the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Lawrence had read already in the 1910s. Aaron's Road (1922) shows directly the influence of the German philosopher, and in Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence expressed his own idea of a a Übermensch. The Plumed Serpent (1926) was a vivid evocation of Mexico and its ancient Aztec religion. Lawrence's last major work of fiction, The Man Who Died (1929), originally entitled The Escaped Cock, was published in two parts, the first in 1928 and the second in 1929. The bold story of Christ's life following his resurrection, was written in a New Testament pastiche language. Instead of going to heaven, Christ initiates himself into the fully human world, and becomes seduced by the perfume of the priestess of Isis. Lawrence's non-fiction works include Movements in European History (1921), Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious (1922), Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) and Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation (1931). D.H. Lawrence died at Villa Robermond, in Vence, France on
March 2, 1930, in the company of Frieda, her youngest daughter Barby,
and Maria Huxley. Before his death, he had read a biography of
Columbus. "Then we buried him, very simply, like a bird we put him
away, a few of us who loved him. We put flowers into his grave and all
I said was: "Good-bye, Lorenzo,"" Frieda later recalled. (D. H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion by Paul Poplawski, with a biography John Worthen, 1996, p. 83) She
moved to the Kiowa Ranch and built a small memorial chapel to Lawrence;
his ashes lie there. In 1950 she married Angelino Ravagli, a former
Italian infantry officer, with whom she had started an affair in 1925. Jake Zeitlin, a Los Angeles bookseller, who first took care of Lawrence's literary estate, summarized his feeling when he first saw the author's manuscripts: "That night when I first opened the trunk containing the manuscripts of Lawrence and as I looked through them, watched unfold the immense pattern of his vision and the tremendous product of his energy, there stirred in me an emotion similar to that I felt when first viewing the heavens with a telescope." Lawrence also gained posthumous renown for his expressionistic paintings completed in the 1920s. For further reading: D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study by Anais Nin (1932); The Savage Pilgrimage by C. Carswell (1932); D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by J. Chambers (1935); D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, ed. by E. Nehls (1957-59, 3 vols.); D.H. Lawrence by A Beal (1960); The Art of Perversity by K. Widmer (1962); The Deed of Life by J. Moynahan (1963); Double Measure by G. Ford (1965); The Art of D.H. Lawrence by K. Sagar (1966); D.H. Lawrence's American Journey by J. Cowan (1970); Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence by S. Gilbert (1972); D.H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels by S. Sanders (1973); The Priest of Love by H. More (1974); D.H. Lawrence's Nightmare by P. Delany (1978); D.H. Lawrence: A Biography by J. Meyers (1990); D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 by John Worthen (1991); D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology by A. Fernihough (1993); D.H. Lawrence: A Study of the Shorter Fiction by W. Thornton (1993); D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage by Brenda Maddox (1996); D.H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion by P. Poplawski (1996); D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912-1922 by Mark Kinkead-Weekes (1996); D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet by F. Becket (1997); D.H. Lawrence, Dying Game by D. Ellis (1998); D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider by John Worthen (2007);The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator by James Moran (2015); The Life of D. H. Lawrence: a Critical Biography by Andrew Harrison (2016); D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism by Susan Reid (2019); D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, edited by Indrek Männiste (2019); D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis by John Turner (2020); Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson (2021); Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature: Lawrence and Joyce on Trial by William Simms (2022); White Male Disability in Modernist Literature: Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and Faulkner by Martina Kübler (2023); The Limits of Love: The Lives of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen by Michael Squires (2024) - Other film adaptations: The Rocking Horse Winner, 1949, dir. Anthony Pelisser; The Fox, 1967, dir. Mark Rydell; The Virgin and the Gypsy, 1970, dir. Christopher Miles. - Suomeksi on julkaistu myös novellivalikoimat Leppäkerttu ja Novelleja. - See also: Olavi Paavolainen, Ezra Pound, Alan Sillitoe, Tennessee Williams Selected works:
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