D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider [Paperback]

In reading D. H. Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS I was struck by how much it cut to the core, and was curious as to how closely autobiographical the story was. That led me to an an excellent excerpt from this book that is available on the Web, that tells about Lawrence's nostalgia for his youth when he spent so much time at the Haggs farm (Leivers farm in SONS AND LOVERS). That excerpt as well as other material told me that Lawrence's fiction about this youthful part of his life was very thinly disguised.

The time and circumstances in which Lawrence lived seem so different from today. He grew up in Victorian England, the son of a coal miner, in the industrial age before the heyday of the automobile and all the communicative devices that have so changed our lives. From an early age it was evident that he did not have the physical capacity to follow his father's footsteps if he ever wanted to, which apparently he never did. Contrary to the toughened practicality of physical labor, he found refuge in books, which put him at odds with the rough and tumble ways of many of his peers, who later recalled that he preferred to play with girls. His coming of age involved the inner conflict presented by his mother, who was strong and imparted on him mental strength necessary to survive and even flourish despite being very susceptible to illness, but who also imparted demands as from one whose life's longings had been thwarted.

I don't know if I quite buy the author's emphasis of Lawrence as the Outsider, at least not in terms of his legacy. Certainly, the man marched to the tune of a different drummer. No doubt he had faults, but the excesses, which have been noted from evidence extracted from his writing, need to be measured against the strict conformity of the Victorian Age. Perhaps his greatest work, THE RAINBOW, was banned for reasons that seem laughable by comparison to today. Certainly, he exhibited a ruthlessness in being a writer, as in his relations with Jessie Chambers, which would make many a would-be writer wonder if it was all worth it; but writing about his experiences, whether they were thinly disguised or not, was an obsession, and became a psychological necessity. At a certain point, he really could not be anything but a writer, and it became his means of self-discovery, certainly a different tack from most people of the time who were marching blindly into battle or blindly into debilitating jobs. He persisted despite the fact that for years he could barely make a living and constantly had to depend on the kindness of friends and relatives. If anything, that dependence despite his overall independence, showed that he was more of an insider, one who had gained acceptance in the path he chose to follow. No doubt, his habitual exile and publishing difficulties depict him as the Outsider, but when it came down to it, he showed himself to be a courageous human being especially in facing a debilitating illness and refusing self-pity.

David Herbert Lawrence was born to a miner in the coalmining community of Eastwood located eight miles from Nottingham. The village is located in the middle of what was once Sherwood Forrest deep in the English Midlands. When Lawrence was born the area was an ugly coalmining region. His mother Lydia made the sickly, thin, bookish boy her favorite. His father Arthur was a near-illiterate spending time in the pub. The family had several children who went on to live routine lives. Only the genius of Lawrence burns brightly.
Lawrence was always an outsider, lonely wanderer. He taught school for several years even though he hated it. He graduated from Nottingham College with a certificate in teaching but did not go on for a BA degree.
Lawrence is known for the sexual explicit and sensual prose of such classic novels as : "The Rainbow", "Sons and Lovers."; "Women in Love"; "Kangaroo", "The Virgin and the Gypsy," and such short stories as "The Fox." His most famous book is "Lady Chatterly's Lover" which was banned in Britain until 1960. This sexy love story sold more than all of his other works combined! He also wrote travel essays, literary criticism and reams of poetry. Lawrence is one of those authors who could write anywhere about almost anything. His chief themes were:
a. The need for honest and open love between the sexes. He was adept at describing the feeling a woman has during lovemaking.
b. The destruction of nature and the natural harmony of life through crass industrialism and materialistic pursuit of money.
c. His hatred of the rigid English class system which was restrictive and hypocritical.
Lawrence has been accused of anti-semitism and the need for meen to be superior in relationships with women. Worthen is fair in exploring these attitudes. Lawrence had many characters flaws. He could be explosively angry, often hit women and could be cruel to animals. He could also be charming, loving and kind. A man of contradictions not easily pigeonholed.
Lawrence had an active sex life. He forsook the girl who loved him Jessie Chambers and several other lasses in the Nottingham region. He ran away with Frieda Richtofen Chambers who left her husband and three children to live with him. Though the two never divorced they were both unfaithful engaging in several affairs. Frieda was a big, strong German woman distantly related to the Red Baron. During World War I the British thought she might be a spy; the Lawrences were closely watched during this horrible time by the British authorities.
Lawrence was a Gypsy who lived in England, Italy, New Mexico, Mexico, France and Ceylon. He died at the age of 44 due to advanced tuberculosis.
He was poor and his books were out of favor at the time of his death.
John Worthen is a British scholar who has done a fine job of following Lawrence on the many stops he made across the globe in a complex life. Lawrence was a great writer due to the power, emotion and descriptive brilliance of his sparkling prose. This comprehensive biography is worth time and money.

Benjamin Kunkel reviews this work very favorably in 'The New Yorker'. It is he maintains the best one- volume biography of Lawrence that has as yet been written. In the key passage of his review Kunkel cites a letter of Lawrence as containing the heart of his perception of life. His commentary then follows:

"The real way of living is to answer to one's wants. Not "I want to light up with my intelligence as many things as possible" but "For the living of my full flame-I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look abeastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man." Instead of that . . . we talk about some sort of ideas. I'm like Carlyle, who, they say, wrote 50 volumes on the value of silence.

Kunkel interprets this passage as follows:

"Everything is here; in half a paragraph Lawrence comprehends his life. There is the sense, gained from Frieda, of having no obligations but to desire; the virtually pre-Socratic tendency to see all life as a species of flame (in Lawrence, to be alive is always described as being on fire); the tone simultaneously of great casualness and authority; the pleasure taken in vituperation ("I want to insult that man"); and, of course, the awareness that to marshal all one's eloquence, education, and discipline in defense of mute, dark, instinctual life is a crowning paradox, like Carlyle with his fifty volumes on silence."

Kunkel goes on then to note how great a part the theme of Lawrence's isolation plays in this biography. Isolated from his place of birth, from his family, from the aristocratic dabblers in the world of art he was continually meeting up with. Isolated from social conventions. Isolated from conventional morality, and from an ordinary place of home. Isolated by the frailty of his body , and by the frequent rejection of the literary establishment. Isolated too from the mores of his time.

This focusing on the personal life drama does not however help us solve the one real mystery connected with Lawrence, the fact of his literary genius.

It too perhaps goes too far in excusing Lawrence's Fascism, for Fascism turned out to be something other than the eccentric privilege of a few misguided idealists, and instead turned into one of the most murderous movements in human history.

Lawrence's story is in a sense a tragic one as he poor and sick died before reaching the age - of- forty- five. Yet he burned in his literary life with a gem-like flame life and gave to the world a beauty in words, rich and strange.

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