Sons and Lovers

from the town. Lawrence, a year her senior, first came to the farm with his mother. Their relationship progressed in much the same way as Paul and Miriam’s. Lawrence frequently visited the farm, spending all day with the family, playing with the brothers, talking with the mother and father. When not at the farm, Lawrence wrote letters; at first he addressed them to the whole Chambers family, then gradually he addressed them only to Jessie. Their relationship developed slowly. Before they knew it, their lives were intertwined.

Lawrence left school at sixteen and took a job at a Nottingham company that manufactured medical supplies. After a brush with pneumonia and a long convalescence, he quit the job and started to work as a student teacher. He read everything he could get his hands on and, with Chambers at his side, explored the halls of the Eastwood library. The pair would leave the library literally burdened with books, their pockets stuffed with them. Ford Madox Ford once said that Lawrence was the only man he knew who read everything he claimed to have read. Chambers read alongside him. Books became their common ground.

They subjected their reading list to intense scrutiny, discussing the characters during long walks, trying to understand how a novel is constructed. Lawrence was not in the least academic in his approach. He personalized his reading, placing himself within the context of the fiction, trying on various philosophies and approaches as if they were shirts. He began to talk definitely of becoming a writer and, scribbling on scraps of paper wherever he could find them, undertook the task of becoming a poet.

Chambers was, in many ways, Lawrence’s first literary agent. In 1909, after Lawrence became frustrated at some initial rejection slips and declared he would never send off his work again, Chambers submitted three of his poems to The English Review with a letter to the editor, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), expressing her admiration for the poems and for the poet. Hueffer was impressed with the poems and offered to publish them. He also wanted to meet the poet, fancying himself a great discoverer of upcoming literary talent, and invited Lawrence to his house in London. It was through Hueffer that Lawrence met Edward Garnett, a man who would champion his writing in London literary circles and fortify his heart during difficult emotional times. Lawrence wrote in a letter to his friend Ernest Collings dated November 1912 that Hueffer “discovered I was a genius—don’t be alarmed, Hueffer would discover anything if he wanted to—” (Letters). But in reality it was Chambers who first recognized Lawrence’s literary talents and who first encouraged him to write what “he was urged to ... from within” (Chambers, p. 89).

Lawrence tried his hand at writing prose. “The usual plan is to take two couples and develop their relationships,” he said on a walk with Chambers. “Most of George Eliot’s are on that plan. Anyhow, I don’t want a plot, I should be bored with it. I shall try two couples for a start” (Chambers, p. 103). Lawrence wrote The White Peacock on that plan, creating two couples and exploring their relationship. He sent Chambers pages of the manuscript as he wrote them and she, in turn, offered her criticisms. So intense was their collaboration that, upon the publication of The White Peacock in 1911, Lawrence wrote Chambers, “I its creator, you its nurse.”

The pair mostly avoided the topic of romance and sex, although gradually, as they grew through adolescence and into maturity, the issue asserted itself. Lawrence had girlfriends outside of their relationship, even going so far as to propose to one while on a train, but Chambers always occupied a primary position in his heart. “It’s like this,” Lawrence told Chambers, “some strands of your nature are knitted with some strands of mine, and we cannot be parted” (Chambers, p. 141). Later he told the girl that she was necessary to him, the “anvil on which I have hammered myself out....” (Chambers, p. 152).

Despite, or perhaps because of, the obvious mental, emotional, and spiritual connection between the two, Lawrence’s mother disapproved of Chambers. Her antipathy created an atmosphere so charged (Chambers described it as “strung-up” and “tight”) that the girl grew to dislike visiting the Lawrence home. Though Lawrence and Chambers avoided the topic of romance and sex, the issue asserted itself Mrs. Lawrence forced the question upon her son, and Lawrence, bringing the moment to its crisis, talked to Chambers. He told her that he could not bring himself to love her as “a man should love a wife” because, as he explained, between mother love and romantic love, the blood tie was the stronger of the two. “I can’t make myself love you, can I?” he cruelly asked Chambers. “I can’t plant a little love-tree in my heart” (Chambers, p. 141). The situation, as Chambers described it, was simply that while loving his mother with an almost romantic passion, he had nothing left to give a lover. “They tore me from you, the love of my life,” Lawrence remorsefully wrote to Chambers in a letter from March 1911. “It was the slaughter of the fetus in the womb” (Letters).

Mrs. Lawrence grew fatally ill with cancer during the fall and winter of 1910 as Lawrence’s first novel went into its final proofing stage. She died before she saw the novel in print. Lost in the world without his mother, Lawrence passed into a period of hopelessness and despair. Her death, he wrote, had taken from him all his spontaneous capacity for joy. “The only antidote is work,” he wrote in a letter to his sister in March 1911. “Heaven’s—how I do but slog. It gets the days over, at any rate” (Letters).

Lawrence was not content with his first book. “Publishers take no notice of a first novel. They know that nearly anybody can write one novel, if he can write at all, because it’s about himself. A second novel’s a step further.” The Trespasser, his second novel, was published in 1912. “It’s the third that counts, though.... If [a novelist] can get over that ass’s bridge he’s a writer, he can go on” (Chambers, p. 189).

Lawrence conceived of Sons and Lovers, originally titled “Paul Morel,” during his mother’s sickness. With her death, he began working at it with a vengeance. He had mixed feelings about it and the progress he was making. “I am afraid it will be a terrible novel,” he wrote to Louise Burrows in March 1911. “But if I can keep it to my idea and feeling, it will be a great one” (Letters). In a different letter from the same month, he wrote Helen Corke, “Glory you should see [my novel]. The British public will stone me if ever it catches sight” (Letters).

Chambers and Lawrence had little contact during this time. She felt, however, that the writing of this third novel would allow Lawrence to work out his conflicting impulses, his loyalty to his mother on one side and his desire for romantic love on the other. She hoped that, through the expurgating process of writing, he could break the stifling maternal bond. She encouraged Lawrence to finish his book, hoping that, once free, he would finally be able to turn his romantic love to her.

So Lawrence wrote and Chambers waited. But as the pages of the manuscript came to her, she was horribly disappointed. “The shock of Sons and Lovers gave the death-blow to our friendship,” Chambers wrote (p. 202). The break came in the treatment of Miriam. Far from allowing Lawrence to see his way out of the painful double bind, the novel, as Chambers interpreted it, handed the laurels of victory to his mother. “He had to present a distorted picture of our association so that the martyr’s halo might sit becomingly on his mother’s brow,” Chambers wrote (p. 203). Chambers, disappointed and horrified, offered Lawrence few criticisms and broke off all but the most necessary contact.

Lawrence, who once wrote that he was incapable of standing in the world without a woman beside him, soon found Frieda Weekley, a woman he described as earthy, elemental, and passionate. She was older than he; she was married to his professor; she had three children. Even so, Lawrence convinced Frieda to run away with him to Germany after only a six-week courtship. Penniless and living in proverbial sin, the pair later moved to Italy, where, in the spring of 1913, Lawrence finished the final draft of Sons and Lovers.

Lawrence wrote Chambers the following brief letter from Italy in March 1913:I’m sending you the proofs of the novel, I think you ought to see it before it’s published. I heard from Ada that you were in digs again. Send the novel on to her when you’ve done with it.... This last year hasn’t been all roses for me. I’ve had my ups and downs out