D. H. Lawrence

From Philosopedia

Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930)

Lawrence, a novelist who held that industrial culture dehumanizes, preached a glorified union with nature and its corollary, sexual fulfillment. Although his Sons and Lovers was a success in 1913, it was not so until a publisher (Cambridge) bothered to print Lawrence’s original version, the “naughty parts” of about 10% which had been cut by his original editor, Edward Garnett. What Garnett cut had to do with the hero putting on women’s stockings and his references to “white, glistening globes” and other such descriptions of the female breast. Garnett had not, however, cut the part about the son’s being in love with his mother and his failure to experience love with other women.

Frieda and D. H.

When Lawrence visited Mexico, to gain material for The Plumed Serpent (1926), he stayed with the humanist and poet, Witter Bynner. Bynner wrote an account of their stay, in which he described the skinny, bronchitic miner’s son from Nottinghamshire and Emma Maria Frieda Johanna Baroness (Freiin) von Richthofen Weekley (a stoutly built, German noblewoman six years his senior whom he married, having eloped with her at a time when she was married to a Nottingham professor of etymology. Her cousin, von Richthofen, a German air-ace in World War I.

(Wags claimed she seduced him sexually within twenty minutes of their first meeting. They also related that in their numerous moves from southern Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, India, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico, England, and the south of France, it was Frieda who did the shopping and it was Lawrence who sewed the curtains as well as Frieda’s underwear.)

Bynner's book was entitled Journey With Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (1951). According to Bynner, Lawrence’s horror at the Spanish obsession concerning blood (Jesus dripping on the cross) and their love of bullfighting (first plunging the banderillas, then adeptly stabbing with the sword) did not sit well with numbers of Latinos.

When something was thrown at Bynner’s house to show their dissatisfaction, Lawrence was so terrified that he jumped into Frieda’s arms (she of the “big glistening globes”). Bynner withheld this and other tales until long after Lawrence’s death.

Frieda was not Lawrence’s only love, according to his biographer, Richard Aldington. Lawrence had written,

• I believe the nearest I have come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about sixteen.”

Aldington added, “I should say Lawrence was about eighty-five percent hetero and fifteen percent homo.” (Frieda never allowed a farmer’s boy, William Henry, into their house, although Lawrence maintained relations.) A Warden of All Souls, however, failed to see that Lawrence was homosexual at all, leading A. L. Rowse to observe, “but there is nothing like an intellectual for obstinate obtuseness.” Rowse added that in his rough mining community of Eastwood, Lawrence was laughed at and persecuted by schoolmates as girlish, “for he was refined and delicate. It was his fate to be persecuted by imperceptive fools most of his life, and it maddened him.”

Meanwhile, biographer Brenda Maddox in D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (1994), doubts that Lawrence was unconsciously homosexual, despite his alleged attraction to anal penetration in lovemaking. She argues that what he longed for was the strong father missing from his childhood. At the time Lawrence met E. M. Forster, who was then thirty-six years of age and still a virgin, Maddox states, Lawrence was deeply attracted to men but was repelled by homosexuals.

According to his early poems, Lawrence also was attracted to his mother. Upon her death, he carried her downstairs, found her hairs on his jacket, and wrote of her being on her sickbed:

My love looks like a girl to-night,

But she is old.

The plaits that lie along her pillow

Aren’t gold,

But threaded with filigree silver

and uncanny cold.

A few lines later we discover she is, indeed, dead. “And her dead mouth sings/By its shape, like thrushes on clear evenings.” His dead mother is called “my love,” “the darling,” “like a young maiden,” “like a bride,” and indeed the poem is called “The Bride,” the groom clearly being Lawrence. Critic James Fenton, an Oxford Professor of Poetry, notes Lawrence’s further indebtedness:

You sweet love, my mother

Twice you have blooded me,

Once with your blood at birth-time

Once with your misery.

And twice you have washed me clean,

Twice-wonderful things to see.

Lawrence’s three great novels - Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1921) - concern the consequences of trying to deny man’s union with nature. Some critics found The Plumed Serpent fascistic in that Lawrence began to believe that mankind must be reorganized under one superhuman leader. But what really startled everyone was his Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in which readers exclaimed that he had described feminine sexual feelings better even than any woman had ever before been able to do. The book was banned in England and the United States for years. But copies were always somehow available and the intimate story of an English noblewoman who found love and sexual completion with her husband’s gamekeeper became a topic of discussion of the intelligentsia for a long time. (Those in the cognoscenti were aware that the gamekeeper in the story was wish-fulfillment fantasy on Lawrence’s part and, as Rowse points out, “It is significant that the double thrill the working-class fellow gives the sex-starved lady is not only sexual but also anal.)

Lawrence inspired other writers to imitate his daring, and he became one of the primary molders of 20th-century fiction. T. S. Eliot, writing about atheism, once stated,

• There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism of our friend Mr. J. M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr. [Bertrand] Russell.

Lawrence would have agreed with the last, for he detested Russell’s “arrogant rationalism,” according to Rowse. Meanwhile, his biographer, H. Kingsmill, wrote in 1938 that Lawrence had a “home-made” religion which hovered between agnosticism and pantheism. “There is no God, but everything is Godly,” Lawrence held. When Lawrence visited Ceylon, eight years before his death, he found “oriental mysticism” repellent, according to critic Simon Leys.

In Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936) is found, “I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness. . . .I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.” Freethinkers point to this as being his outlook concerning organized religion. Neither Lawrence or his wife were churchgoers

Although he openly had written and spoken about illicit sex, Lawrence seems never to have written or spoken about what he truly feared: tuberculosis. His frail state of health was generally ignored, but late in 1929 he caught a chill and his physician informed him he had tuberculosis. He entered a sanatorium in Vence, France, then left after a month for Villa Robermont, where he died of consumption after years of a hacking cough.

When Frieda was out of the room for a moment at the very end, he is said to have grasped Maria Huxley’s wrists and said, “Maria, Maria, don’t let me die.” According to another version, his last words to Frieda were “Wind my watch.”

Even before his death, Frieda had picked his successor: Angelo Ravagli, the husband of their landlady, an army lieutenant “with a well-known penchant for foreign women.” During the last two years of Lawrence’s life, Frieda found that Ravagli “gave her a feeling of being desired she had not had in years.” Eventually, the two married. Janet Byrne’s A Genius for Living (1995) writes of Frieda and Ravagli that they then lived a tranquil life despite his constant philandering.

Years after Lawrence’s death, Frieda in 1935 had his remains disinterred from his grave in Vence, cremated, and returned to San Cristobal, New Mexico. He was re-buried in a chapel-like structure above the Kiowa Ranch in Taos.

Catherine C. Robbins in The New York Times (6 August 1998) visited the site where the Lawrences had spent fifteen months on 160 wooded acres in the early 1920s and which his patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan, had given him in exchange for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. In 1998 the shrine with its memorial had deteriorated allegedly because of neglect by the University of New Mexico, leading the D. H. Lawrence Center at Nottingham University in England to demand that the cremains be returned there for better safekeeping. However, Frieda - fearful that some of his admirers might find the cremains and scatter them across the ranch - had arranged for their being mixed into the concrete used to build the memorial. Moving the cremains and cement were therefore considered impractical. Meanwhile, the university claimed in 1998 that the site which in “St. Mawr” Lawrence described as “Ah! It was beauty, beauty absolute, at any hour of the day,” had been carefully repaired. Lawrence had once complained that to protect furniture from gnawing rats they had hoisted it up to the ceiling on ropes, and Ms. Robbins confirmed visitors’ complaints “of rat droppings in the shrine.”

(See correspondence with Witter Bynner.)

{CE; James Fenton, The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998; GL; HAB; RE; TRI; TYD}