John Beer

The Riddling Narrative of Nature

While the failure of contemporary culture to present a suitable way forward for young people to follow could be devastating, as in its effects on Jessie Chambers, she herself was able to take comfort from the reflection that Mrs Lawrence’s jealousy had been to blame for the suffocation of their growing mutual understanding. At the distance of more than a century it is hard to adjudicate between the warring points of view. Yet it seems likely that if Lawrence had insisted firmly enough on having a passion for Jessie his mother would have submitted with a good grace and even worked for the support of the resulting family. Her apparent hostility may have been no more than a sign of recognition of Lawrence’s awareness that he was still in process of a growth that must involve the jettisoning of many ideas that the families of Lawrence and Chambers still took for granted. Lawrence’s mother, certainly, had come to resent her son’s attachment to the Haggs family, prompting him to visit them so frequently that she commented he might as well move to their farm; this was exacerbated after the sudden death of Ernest, their son, when she became increasingly aware of the outstanding promise shown by his younger brother, and her feeling that if he too were to leave home, while his father was largely absent, she would feel truly bereft. This led on to an understandable apprehension that if Lawrence were to marry Jessie the commitments involved might prevent her son from ever fulfilling his promise, or from achieving fame as a writer.

An Elusive Identity

When news of Lawrence’s death reached England in 1930 it was hard for his contemporaries to judge the extent of their loss—or even to know what name he might be remembered by. To anyone who, like Helen Corke, had known him as a teacher and friend, and who learned to respect his intelligence, he had always been ‘David’. To those who came across him casually in everyday life in his home village, he was ‘Bert’—or in later years (retrospectively, and with a touch of patronage)—‘poor old Bert’. His wife, for whom he always had a touch of Italian glamour, would call him ‘Lorenzo’. The range of names did justice to the elusiveness often experienced by anyone who tried to tie him down to a firm identity. For the literary world, meanwhile, he would continue to be simply ‘Lawrence’; he himself would avoid even that labelling (and for that matter any ambiguity) by simply combining his surname with his initials.

The Nature of Lawrence’s Poetry

Throughout his life Lawrence retained the sense that an appreciation of the mythological significance of nature might offer the key to understanding it. As early as The White Peacock, the narrator, Cyril Beardsall, comes across some wild flowers in the evening twilight and describes them, ending with snowdrops, which, he says, are sad and mysterious. We have lost their meaning … these conquered flowerets are sad like forlorn friends of dryads.

Negativity in Post-War Life

The conclusion of the First World War left Britain in a state of nullity. Four years of conflict had resulted in an unprecedented strain on resources, coupled with an immense number of casualties, both from the forces of Britain immediately involved and from those of her allies. The cultural effects were even greater. Tendencies noted in earlier chapters as beginning to emerge now resumed at breakneck speed. Industrialists found that activities introduced to assist the war effort could now be further developed in assisting extended production. The movement for freedom in Ireland gained in momentum, with the implications for the British army that they were accompanied by increasing tension north and south of the border. Above all, the movement for emancipation of women, which was now seen as more acceptable—largely, perhaps, as their contribution to the war effort was recognized—was now rewarded with the advancing of limited female suffrage.

Frieda von Richthofen and her Background

Our discussion of The Trespasser has so far been based on the assumption that it should be treated first and foremost as a work of art which Lawrence tried to create from materials supplied by his friend Helen Corke as part of his ambition to become a novelist. Despite his centrality, he, as ‘teller’, strikes one as a withdrawn figure, so intent on trying to recreate the sensations of the two people involved that he becomes the faceless narrator of the events described. When one looks at the work in conjunction with the various documentary materials that have since become available, however, one realizes how deeply involved in the story he himself was. His novella seems to be the account of a happy interlude enjoyed by two people who had discovered their affection for one another; it reads like a story that might have been related to him to make him aware of something that had happened to Helen Corke in the past. It is only as one reads the letters of the time that one sees Lawrence to have been taking a crucial part in the lives of all the people associated with his surroundings.

Fresh Thinking at the Turn of the Century

One could not grow to maturity at the end of the nineteenth century without becoming aware of the omnipresence of change. The transformation of Britain, beginning in the seventeenth century, from a trading nation based largely on agriculture to one engaged more firmly in industrialism is a fact obvious enough to amount to a truism, but the exact process by which that transformation took place is less frequently investigated.

Probing the Contradictions of Nature

On leaving the southern hemisphere, Lawrence’s main new novel had been devoted to the relationship between his recent experiences there and the threefold preoccupations that continued to dog him. As before, he wanted to describe his reactions to nature as it struck him in this new environment; he remained deeply interested in the relations between men and women; and he was continuing to think about more fundamental questions, such as those concerning the relationship between human organisms and the universe at large.

In Search of an Adequate Symbol

Lawrence’s decisions, first to break with Louie Burrows and then to start a new life with Frieda von Richthofen, might seem to have solved his earlier dilemmas. It was not long, however, before he saw that his new life brought with it problems of its own. Frieda, he found, had not foreseen the extent of the sense of deprivation that she would experience through the loss of her children; while the break with Louie had put an end to any plans he had made for developing his autobiographical novel on an epic scale, giving prominence to her background, which would have been of a different kind from any that he had hitherto attempted. Although the naturalism in which he had shown himself to excel had been well suited to autobiography, he now needed a fictional mode that could answer to the metaphysical concerns expressed at the end of Sons and Lovers.

Tenderness and the Modes of Energy

Kate Leslie’s apparent vacillation in The Plumed Serpent mirrored an element in Lawrence’s own position. Examination of his later novels shows an increasing tendency to move from the simple to the complex, suggesting that he had come to acknowledge a recognition that human nature could not be treated in simple terms. While he continued to press the need for Western humanity to acknowledge the existence of its ‘blood consciousness’, and so provide the necessary complement to its domination by a rational, mechanical ideology, he saw that if a new religion were to take the place of a Western Christianity that had been so inadequate in the face of a universe showing itself to be increasingly complex and subtle, it must develop a position far removed from reversion to an animism like the traditional Indian version, which would involve simple repetition of the past. His recognition of the fact involved him in correspondence with Witter Bynner, who, reading The Plumed Serpent in its published version, had reservations, related particularly to the part played by Ramon. Bynner describes how at the end of 1927 he screwed up his courage to express his criticism in a letter to Lawrence: you must know, without my saying so, that I think the first half of it a consummate piece of noticing and writing, You are much better about Mexico there than you are in Mornings.

Realism, Romance and the Transformation of Narrative

During the remainder of his stay in Eastwood, Lawrence devoted a good deal of time to the production of his first long piece of writing, which took the form of a long story entitled The White Peacock. This prompted his own comments on it: when it was in the process of being published as a whole, he excused himself from analysing it in detail, saying that it was ‘painfully callow’—a judgment which Leavis agreed with, supporting his view by quoting Lawrence’s own statement. ‘I was very young when I wrote the Peacock—I began it at twenty. Let that be my apology.’1 It is true that the speech of some of the characters cited may strike one as ‘callow’, but that does not strike one as a true judgment of the book as a whole. Anthony Burgess was nearer the mark, when, detailing the defects of the work (‘this work, with its Latin and French tags and burblings about classical music, is full of Lawrence’s (or his mother’s) genteel wish-fulfilment’), he went on: ‘This does not, of course, make it a bad novel. Far from it’;2 and indeed, it is hard to read these pages without perceiving them to be the work of an intelligent and gifted young man.