2 (p. 378) “‘The man in ... quiver’ ”: Paul is reciting humorous verse based on an ode by Horace (65-8 B.C.).
3 (p. 378) ”Put Me among the Girls”: This popular comic song was written and composed by Clarence W. Murphy and Dan Lipton. The full verse is, ”Put me amongst the girls ... those with the curly curls, / They’ll enjoy themselves, and so will I, / If you put me amongst the girls.”
4 (p. 393) Orpen: Sir William Orpen (1878-1931), a portrait painter, became the official artist to the British government during World War I.
Chapter 14: The Release
1 (p. 413) ”Say ‘Caw!’...Jim Crow”: D. H. Lawrence puns on the name Dawes, which suggests jackdaw, a type of bird, which he expands to “crow.” Jim Crow was a character that the American minstrel performer Dan Rice made immensely popular in the 1830s.
2 (p. 417) ”Did you sleep, my dear?” he asked: In a letter to the poet Rachel Annand Taylor dated December 1910, D. H. Lawrence writes, ”I have been at home now ten days. My mother is very near the end. Today I have been to Leicester. I did not get home till half past nine. Then I ran upstairs. Oh she was very bad. The pains had been again.‘Oh my dear,’ I said, ‘is it the pains?’
‘Not pain now—Oh the weariness,’ she moaned, so that I could hardly hear her. I wish she could die tonight.”
3 (p. 419) veils that were ripping: According to the Bible, Luke 23:45, at the moment of Jesus’ death the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
4 (p. 439) water: With edema, a disease that is usually caused by malfunctions of the heart or the kidneys, large amounts of fluid deposit in the body.
Inspired by Sons and Lovers
Many filmgoers encountered the work of D. H. Lawrence for the first time in director Jack Cardiff’s 1960 adaptation of the author’s semi-autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. The film visually captures the contrast between a coal-mining backwater and London, where Paul Morel, played sensitively by a young Dean Stockwell, yearns to go. The screenplay maintains Lawrence’s subtlety as well as memorable dialogue, and two of the actors earned Oscar nominations for their powerful performances: Trevor Howard for his portrayal of Paul’s hard-drinking, oppressive father, and Mary Ure for her role as Paul’s lover, Clara Dawes. Sons and Lovers was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it won for black-and-white cinematography.
Lawrence proved to be an inspiration to his longtime correspondent and travel companion, the author and scientist Aldous Huxley, who wrote several portraits of Lawrence. These include a vitriolic sketch in his short story “Two or Three Graces,” and a more sympathetic one in his novel Point Counter Point (1928), in the figure of Mark Rampion. In Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s character John the Savage is based on Lawrence, and part of the novel is set in surroundings based on Taos, New Mexico, where Huxley visited Lawrence.
The works of D. H. Lawrence are sometimes associated with the “free love” sensibility of the 1960s, when the author’s works became enormously popular, but that association would have shocked Lawrence. He was a strict moralist and did not intend for his explicit language and sexual content to encourage or even suggest sexual freedom. Indeed, Lawrence was high-minded about sex. When performed with reverence, he believed, the sexual act connects one with spiritual mysteries and the natural powers of the universe.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
Lascelles Abercrombie
‘Odi et amo’ should have been on the title page of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. On the whole, the book may be said to contrast filial and maternal love with the kind of love which is called amour. A good many amours are described, involving several markedly diverse persons; but all the affairs and all the persons are unanimous in one matter—whatever kind of love it may be, some kind of hate is mixed up in it. A simultaneous passion of love and hatred is, of course, a well-known psychological fact; and certainly Mr. Lawrence makes its unfailing appearance in his story curiously credible. But it is not a very pleasant fact; is it not essentially a weakness of vitaility, a kind of failure—life failing to appreciate itself, hating itself because it cannot appreciate the splendour of its own fate? Whether or no, it is a fact one can easily have too much of. If Mr. Lawrence thought to give intensity to the whole length (the very considerable length) of his story by this mingling of contrary passions, he miscalculated seriously. The constant juxtaposition of love and hatred looks like an obsession; and, like all obsessions, soon becomes tiresome. You begin to look out for the word ’hate’ as soon as you have read the word ‘love’, like a sort of tedious game. ‘Odi et amo’ does marvellous well in an epigram; in a novel of four hundred odd pages it is a bore. The book has other faults. It has no particular shape and no recognizable plot; themes are casually taken up, and then as casually dropped, and there seems no reason why they should have been taken up unless they were to be kept up. Everything that happens is an extraordinarily long time about it, and sometimes it takes a very long time for nothing at all to happen. Faults like these ought to swamp any virtues the book may possess; set them down in this abstract fashion, and it seems incredible that Sons and Lovers can be anything but a dull success of cleverness. So, perhaps, it would be, if Mr. Lawrence were simply a novelist. But he is a poet, one of the most remarkable poets of the day; and these faults of his are actually of no more account than the soot of a brilliant, vehement flame. Indeed, you do not realize how astonishingly interesting the whole book is until you find yourself protesting that this thing or that thing bores you, and eagerly reading on in spite of your protestations. You decide that the old collier, the father, is a dirty brute; and then perceive that he profoundly has your sympathy. The mother is a creature of superb and lovable heroism; and yet there is no doubt that she is sometimes downright disagreeable. You think you are reading through an unimportant scene; and then find that is has burnt itself on your mind. The ’Odi et amo’ of the main theme, in fact, is only an exaggerated instance of the quality which runs through the whole book, which may be best described as contrary, in the sense the word has when it rhymes with Mary. Life, for Mr. Lawrence, is a coin which has both obverse and reverse; so it is for most people, but his unusual art consists in his surprising ability to illuminate both sides simultaneously. The scope and variety of the life he describes, his understanding and vivid realizing of circumstance and his insight into character, and chiefly his power of lighting a train of ordinary events to blaze up into singular significance, make Sons and Lovers stand out from the fiction of the day as an achievement of the first quality.
—from the Manchester Guardian (July 2, 1913)
The New York Times
There is probably no phrase much more hackneyed than that of “human document,” yet it is the only one which at all describes this very unusual book. It is hardly a story; rather the first part of a man’s life, from his birth until his 25th year, the conditions surrounding him, his strength and his numerous weaknesses, put before us in a manner which misses no subtlest effect either of emotion or environment. And the heroine of the book is not sweetheart, but mother; the mother with whose marriage the novel begins, with whose pathetic death it reaches its climax. The love for each other of the mother and her son, Paul Morel, is the mainspring of both their lives; it is portrayed tenderly, yet with a truthfulness which slurs nothing even of that friction which is unavoidable between members of two different generations.... It is wonderfully real, this daily
life of the Morel family and the village wherein they lived as reflected in Mr. Lawrence’s pages; the more real because he never flaunts his knowledge of the intimate details of the existence led by these households whose men folk toil underground. They slip from his pen so unobtrusively that it is only when we pause and consider that we recognize how full and complete is the background against which he projects his principal characters—Mr. and Mrs. Morel, Paul, Miriam, and Clara.
Paul himself is a person who awakens interest rather than sympathy ; it is difficult not to despise him a little for his weakness, his constant need—of that strengthening he sought from two other women, but which only his splendid, indomitable little mother could give him—a fact of which he was constantly aware, though he acknowledged it only at the very end. And it is not easy upon any grounds to excuse his treatment of Miriam, even though it was a spiritual self-defense which urged him to disloyalty. Mr. Lawrence has small regard for what we term conventional morality; nevertheless, though plain spoken to a degree, his book is not in the least offensive.... Although this is a novel of over 500 closely printed pages the style is terse—so terse that at times it produces an effect as of short, sharp hammer strokes. Yet it is flexible, too, as shown by its success in depicting varying shades of mood, in expressing those more intimate emotions which are so very nearly inexpressible. Yet, when all is said, it is the complex character of Miriam, she who was only Paul’s “conscience, not his mate,” and the beautiful bond between the restless son and the mother whom “his soul could not leave” even when she slept and “dreamed her young dream” which makes this book one of rare excellence.
—September 21, 1913
John Galsworthy
I’ve finished Sons and Lovers. I’ve nothing but praise for all the part that deals with the Mother, the Father and the sons; but I’ve a lot besides praise for the love part. Neither of the women, Miriam nor Clara, convince me a bit; they are only material out of which to run wild on the thesis that this kind of man does not want the woman, only a woman. And that kind of revelling in the shades of sex emotions seems to me anaemic. Contrasted with Maupassant‘s—a frank sensualist’s—dealing with such emotions, it has a queer indecency; it doesn’t see the essentials, it revels in the unessentials. It’s not good enough to spend time and ink in describing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut; we all know them too well. There’s genius in the book, but not in that part of the book. The body’s never worth while, and the sooner Lawrence recognizes that, the better—the men we swear by—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Maupassant, Flaubert, France—knew that great truth, they only use the body, and that sparingly, to reveal the soul. In Lawrence’s book the part that irritates me most is the early part with Miriam, whence the body is rigidly excluded, but in which you smell the prepossession which afterwards takes possession. But most of the Mother’s death is magnificent.
—from a letter to Edward Garnett (April 13, 1914)
D. H. Lawrence
Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being.
The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.
—from his foreword to Women in Love (1920)
Virginia Woolf
Perhaps the verdicts of critics would read less preposterously and their opinions would carry greater weight if, in the first place, they bound themselves to declare the standard which they had in mind, and, in the second, confessed the course, bound, in the case of a book read for the first time, to be erratic, by which they reached their final decision. Our standard for Mr. Lawrence, then, is a high one. Taking into account the fact, which is so constantly forgotten, that never in the course of the world will there be a second Meredith or a second Hardy, for the sufficient reason that there have already been a Meredith and a Hardy, why, we sometimes asked, should there not be a D. H. Lawrence? By that we meant that we might have to allow him the praise, than which there is none higher, of being himself an original; for such work as came our way was disquieting, as the original work of a contemporary writer always is.
—from the Times Literary Supplement (December 2, 1920)
T. S. Eliot
One writer, and indeed, in my opinion, the most interesting novelist in England—who has apparently been somewhat affected by Dostoevsky—is Mr. D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence has progressed—by fits and starts, it is true; for he has perhaps done nothing as good as a whole as Sons and Lovers.
—from The Dial (September 1922)
Questions
1. Galsworthy compares Lawrence to Tolstoy. Is it the breadth of Sons and Lovers alone that warrants immediate comparison to Tolstoy, or is there a deeper connection between the two writers? How do the two authors’ treatments of morality differ? Does Lawrence more closely resemble Dostoevsky, as T. S. Eliot suggests?
2. Does Paul Morel have an Oedipus complex?
3. To what do you attribute the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Morel? There is, of course, the difference in class and education. Is that the whole of it? Paul sides with Mrs. Morel, as the young Lawrence sided with his mother. The older Lawrence sided with his father, on whom Mr. Morel is modeled. Whose side are you on?
4. Lawrence’s natural settings are often symbolic. They color, reflect, or suggest the meaning of what happens in them. Analyze one instance.
5. In a preface to his novel Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “In point of style, fault is often found with continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination.” Do you agree that “every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding” comes from this kind of movement? Can you find a passage in the novel that bears out Lawrence’s claim?
For Further Reading
Biography
Delavenay, Emile. D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work, The Formative Years: 1885-1919. London: Heinemann, 1972. An analysis of Lawrence’s early life viewed through his writing; a good synthesis of biographical material with literary discussion.
Murry, John Middleton. Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence. London and Toronto: Jonathan Cape, 1931. Considered to be one of the best books on Lawrence ever published.
Nehls, Edward, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-1959. An anthology of recollections arranged chronologically in three volumes to create a complete and vivid picture of Lawrence’s life.
Sagar, Keith. The Life of D. H. Lawrence. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980. An illustrated biography.
Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. The definitive account of Lawrence’s youth.
Memoir and Personal Recollection
Lawrence, Frieda. The Memoirs and Correspondence. Edited by E. W. Tedlock. London: Heinemann, 1961. Fragments of writing from Lawrence’s wife, stitched together to create an intimate portrait of her personality and her life with Lawrence.
Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence, Novelist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. A review of Lawrence and his work by his friend and admirer, written for the express purpose of securing Lawrence’s place in “The Great Tradition” of English literature.
Miller, Henry. The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation. Edited with an introduction and notes by Evel
yn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1980. An unabashedly biased discussion of Lawrence’s personality and work in entertaining, passionate prose.
Criticism
Black, Michael. D. H. Lawrence, The Early Fiction: A Commentary. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Criticism on Lawrence’s short stories and his first three novels, as well as an informative essay on the different critical approaches to Lawrence and his writing.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: D. H. Lawrence. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. A review of critical approaches to Lawrence’s work with articles from twenty contributors, including Joyce Carol Oates and F. R. Leavis.
Siegel, Carol. Lawrence among the Women: Weaving Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. A critical analysis of Lawrence’s view of women and his relationship to the modern feminist movement.
Works Cited in the Introduction
Boulton, James T., ed. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 1, September 1901-May 1913. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. More than 500 letters provide rich insight into Lawrence’s youth, early loves, and first successes.