Sons and Lovers

here with Frieda. But we mean to marry as soon as the divorce is through.... Frieda and I discuss you endlessly. We should like you to come out to us sometime, if you would care to. But we are leaving here in about a week, it’s getting too hot for us, I mean the weather, not the place. I must leave off now, they’re waiting for me (Letters).

Chambers, who felt she had been horribly mistreated and deceived both in fiction and in life, didn’t read the proofs of the novel. One reading was enough to last her a lifetime, she said. She sent the letter back to Italy without reply. Lawrence, at first hurt by the snub, didn’t attempt further communication. After more than ten years of love and friendship, this letter was the pair’s last contact.

Lawrence returned to England with Frieda in 1914. Her divorce finally came through and they wed. Though their relationship was often tumultuous, the marriage lasted until 1930 when, suffering from a tubercular hemorrhage, Lawrence died at the age of forty-four.

If Sons and Lovers did not bring the fortune Lawrence had hoped for, it did put him on the literary map. After 1913 the English reading public, his admirers and his critics alike, knew Lawrence was a writer to be reckoned with. They treated him accordingly. He attracted the esteem of F. R. Leavis, an influential and bombastic literary critic, who said that Lawrence was “the great creative genius of our age, and one of the greatest figures in English Literature” (The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Frederick J. Hoffman and Henry T. Moore, p. 95). At the same time, he sparked an emotion near hatred from T. S. Eliot, who said Lawrence had a “lack of critical faculties which education should give, and an incapacity for what is ordinarily called thinking,” a sentiment that was echoed by some of the members of the bohemian Bloomsbury Group (Achievement, p. 98).

“I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not just what they fancy they want,” Lawrence wrote in a letter to Ernest Collings in January 1913 (Letters). “Gradually, I shall get my hold on them.” In quick succession, Lawrence wrote a collection of short stories, The Prussian Officer, and two novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. By the time Women in Love was published, in 1921, Lawrence had indeed gotten his hooks into the English public. Unlike so many other Nottinghamshire youths who were destined for the pit, Lawrence, it became clear, was destined for the canon.

At the same time in literary history, James Joyce had published his Dubliners and was hard at work on Ulysses, Virginia Woolf was developing her “tunneling” technique through The Voyage Out, T. S. Eliot had just conceived of The Wasteland and moved to England, Old Man Yeats was developing into his last spiritual phase and had just published Responsibilities and Other Poems, E. M. Forster had exhausted his first burst of creativity, Evelyn Waugh was gathering material for his Brideshead Revisited, and Ezra Pound, who had published five collections of poems, was busy being influential. Ford Madox Ford undertook the task of discovering Modernism and was collaborating with Joseph Conrad, who had given up the sea in favor of the pen, on his later novels. British Modernism, then, was just getting underway.

The beginning of Modernism is generally marked by the imprisonment and death of Oscar Wilde and the publication of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its end by the death of Virginia Woolf in 1941 and the conclusion of World War II. The movement is categorized by a loosening of the constraints of plot and characterization as well as the development of a more emotive language. It is sometimes said that Lawrence is matched only by Joyce in pulling the novel into the twentieth century, though a case can be made in support of some of their other contemporaries.

Sons and Lovers is not generally considered to be Lawrence’s best book, nor his most refined. It was, however, the most widely read of his novels, and though Lady Chatterley’s Lover gave him a certain degree of infamy, Sons and Lovers is perhaps the novel for which he is most famous. In addition, it has the distinction of marking the end of his youthful period. It is Lawrence’s birthing book, so to speak. In it, he ended his literary apprenticeship and wrote himself into his mature style. A careful reader can watch the shift as it happens. Like a pregnant woman in a maternity dress, Sons and Lovers is, in reality, two books under one jacket, the old and the new together.

The book opens with a description of the Morel family in the tradition of the social realism of Dickens, Hardy, or Fielding. Here is Mrs. Morel, spitting on the iron, going off to church. Here is Mr. Morel, making gunpowder tubes for the mine, humming as he works. Children come tumbling in, tearing collars and destroying dolls. But the characters are more than types: the abused wife, the drunk husband, a flock of browbeaten children. Although the reader decides relatively early on that Morel is a scoundrel and a rogue, Lawrence, with remarkable objectivity, presents the other side of Morel. To balance the cad, we see the man bringing his wife tea in bed and wanting a kiss. Lawrence treats these scenes tenderly, endowing them with emotion while managing to avoid sentimentality.

Part One describes all aspects of lower-class life: the births, the deaths and marriages, the holidays and fairs, the courting rituals and wooing practices, the trouble with money, the trouble with health, the fear of injury, the aspirations for social advance. Part One is simple and straightforward; it progresses along at a good clip and follows a realistic timeline. It is simple but not dull, realistic but not storybookish. It is, in short, a triumph of Victorian social realism.

Part One closes with William’s death and Paul’s illness. As Paul recovers, during the interlude between the two sections, he is reborn as a man, capable if not ready for romantic love, in a fresh relationship with his mother. Part Two opens. Miriam appears in the doorway at Willey Farm, “sixteen and very beautiful.” With the characters already firmly in place, Lawrence starts writing the novel that he was born to write.

It could be coincidence, or it could be that Lawrence had discovered his subject, but in any event it is not without note that all of the romantic and sexual scenes in the novel occur in Part Two. These scenes allowed Lawrence to write in a language that was, for him, most natural. This is the language that would later be called Lawrencian, a language elusive and vague, but yet so true. “Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together.... Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her” (page 185).

But then, too, there is Lawrence’s other language, the language of symbol. “Paul and Miriam walked in silence. Suddenly he started. The whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he could scarcely breathe. An enormous orange moon was staring at them from the rim of the sandhills. He stood still, looking at it” (page 197). This language pervades the book: Paul tossing cherries at Miriam; the memorable scene in which Mrs. Morel holds her unnamed infant up to the setting sun. This language predicts the excursions Lawrence made into the sublime with The Rainbow and Women in Love.

In Lawrence’s mind the sexual/romantic language and the symbolic language were not at all separated. Through it, he described what cannot be described, indirectly naming what cannot be named: a sense of the spiritual. Perhaps, too, it is this language that Lawrence felt filled the unspoken need of the British public: the need to live, unfettered and unconstrained, in the face of a great mystery. He had an unfailing sense of the real, in life and in man. He understood that love could be explained more completely and more subtly by pointing out the pollen on a woman’s cheek, deposited there as she turned away from her lover, a smudge of yellow on her white skin. But he didn’t understand just intellectually. There is a sense, with Lawrence, that he wrote with his entire body, not just