Дэвид Лоуренс: Sons and Lovers

And it is a pity that sex was such a dirty little word in Victorian England, though for admirers of Lawrence it would be hard to wish it otherwise. The most subtle, almost sublime, tensions in his writing owe much to the war between his second-natural will to live and his natural desire to obey. Sons and Lovers is the work of a confused man, one who could not figure out which impulse to follow. As in life, so in fiction. In Sons and Lovers, the two impulses are represented on the one side by Paul Morel’s relationship with his mother and on the other side by his relationship with first Miriam, then Clara. In a much-quoted letter written to Edward Garnett dated November 1912, Lawrence defends the idea of the book, succinctly illuminating its themes.A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers—first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother—urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them.... As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul—fights his mother. The son loves the mother—all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift toward death ( Letters ).

Since Freud, mother love versus romantic love has become a familiar theme. Hundreds of pages, perhaps thousands, have been written about Lawrence’s Oedipus complex as demonstrated in the novel. Critics began to see the novel in a Freudian light as early as 1913; Sons and Lovers was taken to be the first, great, Freudian allegory. “As he stooped to kiss his mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering voice, so unlike her own that he writhed in agony,” Lawrence wrote. “‘And I’ve never—you know, Paul—I’ve never had a husband—not really—’ ” Mrs. Morel says. Paul “stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat” (page 234).

Although Lawrence was aware of Freudian ideas as early as 1912, there is no indication that he intended the book to have a Freudian subtext. Responding to the Freudian interpretation, he thought the critics had carved a half lie from an honest portrayal of his childhood. He saw what he had written as a novel, not a case history, and considered the text universal, a representation of “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England” (from the Garnett letter of November 1912). Later, in 1921, he published an anti-Freudian tract titled Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.

However, Lawrence admitted in various letters that he had loved his mother like a lover. He wrote descriptions of Mrs. Lawrence as if he were writing about a girlfriend: “She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman—you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us,” he wrote to Louise Burrows in December 1910, on the eve of his mother’s death ( Letters ). In the same month he wrote to Rachel Ann and Taylor, “This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal.” Later in the same letter he wrote, “Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had it, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breath me like an atmosphere” ( Letters ).

This, then, is the setting for the composition of Sons and Lovers. A remarkably gifted young man, tragically stifled under both the yoke of his mother’s love and the weight of Victorian morals, conceives of an autobiographical novel that will stick to the facts of his upbringing. Eastwood, the rundown though respectable mining town where Lawrence was born, changes to Bestwood. Lydia Lawrence, his mother, changes to Gertrude Morel. And Lawrence, with little change, renames himself Paul.

Lawrence based the character Miriam on Jessie Chambers, the doe-eyed, spiritual girl with whom he developed a friendship to rival any in fiction. “When we were alone together we were in a world apart, where feeling and thought were intense, and we seemed to touch a reality that was beyond the ordinary workaday world,” Chambers writes in her book (Chambers, p. 58). As in the novel, Chambers lived with her family on a farm a few miles away 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).