Meyers, Jeffrey "D.H. Lawrence: A Biography " Papermac: 1990
Lawrence, D. H. " The Love Poems of D. H. Lawrence" Edited by Booth, Ray Kyle Cathie: 1993
There are two basic ways of looking at D.H. Lawrence's life and body of work. One is through his health in particularly the lung problems that plaqued his life from the age of two weeks old to the illness that killed him at the ageof 44. The second is through the prism of his marriageto Frieda.
This is not to say D.H. Lawrence could be so easily explained. His talent is massive and his novels, poetry show this and it also illustrates a period of time that Lawrence lived and yet he was so much more. Some people dismiss him as a writer of his day. These two threads of illness and marriage do show some unity of Lawrence and it is that view that I decided to review the two books listed above together since both give a fairly full discription of Lawrence.
When pproaching this particular writer, I remember reading the criticism of the day of many who disliked Lawrence's opionions. Many were scandalizedby his strong belief in his own visions of greatness in the world of literature, society and to individual people who came across his path. Lawrence wrote this poem waiting for a train:
You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish,and I the fulfilment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else? It is perfect enough.
Lawrence also had what many people would term a hate/love relation with women all of his life. He came from Eastwood, a coal -mining village in the Erewash Valley, eight miles northwest of Nottingham in England and was born on September 11, 1885. He would later tell a friend that his mother never wanted him to be born.
Lawrence came from a family in which the parents fought constantly and his mother who affected a sense of superiority raisedthe children to have a distain for their hard working and hard drinking father. Lawrence would fight strong dominating women such as his wife, Frieda, all of his life. In her last illness, Lawrence came to be with her and to nurse her.
The Virgin Mother
My little love, my darling,
You were a doorway to me;
You let me out of the confines
Into this strange countrie
Where people are crowded like thistles,
Yet are shaplely and comely to see.
My little love, my dearest,
Twice you have issued me,
Once from your womb, sweet mother,
Once from your soul, to be
Free of all hearts, my darling,
Of each heart's entrance free.
And so, my love, my mother,
I shall always be true to you.
Twice I am born, my dearest;
To life, and to death, in you;
And this is the life hereafter
Wherein I am true
I kiss you good-bye, my darling,
Our ways are different now.
You are a seed in the night-time,
I am a man, to plough
The difficult glebe of the future
For seed to endow.
I kiss you good-bye, my dearest,
It is finished between us here.
Oh, if I were calm as you are,
Sweet and still on your bier!
Oh God, if I had not to leave you
Alone,my dear!
Is the last word now uttered?
Is the farewell said?
Spare me the strengh to leave you
Now you are dead.
I must go, but my soul lies helpless
Besides your bed.
Men play a part in his life too, however it is when he went to the home of his favority university teacher, Professor Ernest Weekley, about March 16, 1912 that he met the woman who was to share his life, the professor's wife, Frieda Von Richthofen Weekley. They ran off together six weeks after they met leaving her children behind and Lawarence who had trained as a teacher had also gave up all hopeof earning a living in that profession. Lawrence was determined, in spite of bad health, to support himself entirely as a writer.
Frohnleichnam
You have come your way, I have come my way;
You have stepped across your people, carelessly, hurting them all;
I have stepped across my people, and hurt them in spite of my care.
But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding
We have come our ways and met at last.
Here in this upper room.
Here the balcony
Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons slowly
Go by with their loads of green and silver birth-trees
For the feast of Corpus Christi.
Here from the balcony
We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-green river
Goes between the pine-woods,
Over the beyond to where the many mountains
Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the morning.
I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through me, who the first
Breeze of the morning through through a narrow white birch.
You glow at last like the mountain tops when they catch
Day and make magic in heaven.
At last I can throw away world without end, and meet you
Unshealthed and naked and narrow and white;
At last you can throw immortality off, and I can see you
Glistening with all the moment and all your beauty.
Shameless and callous I love you;
Out of indifference I love you;
mochery we dance together
Out of the sunshine into the shadow,
Passing across the shadow into the sunlight,
Out of sunlight to shadow.
As we dance
Your eyes take all of me as a communication:
As we dance
I see you, ah, in full!
Only to dance together in triumph of being together
Two white ones, sharp, vindicated,
Shining and touching,
Is heaven our own, sheer with repudication.
Lawrence and Frieda had loud, wild and public fights that many witnessed. Frieda left him on many occasions and had numerous affairs with other men. Violence may have played a part in their relationship, however they always returned to each other. She was with him when he died.
Lawrence was two weeks old when he contacted bronchitis. The author, Jeffrey Meyers, put in an " Appendix: A History of an Illness" at the end of his book which is very useful in showing how Lawrences traveled to different places in the world for some relief for his weak lungs. There was no cure. Meyers showed on many occasions that many people during that time with similar lung diseases usually did better outside of sanatorums than in them. Then to make matters worse, Lawrence contacted malaria in Ceylon.
Other friends and fellow writers also had simular health issues such as Katherine Mansfield who died in 1922. Mansfield and her husband, Middleton Murry, were at the Lawrence's wedding on July 13, 1914 in London. Murry was to play a part in both Lawrence's and Freida's lives as he was Frieda's off and on lover and possible lover of Lawrence. Murry was a strong critic of Lawrence and was not liked by many other writers of the time.
According to Meyers, Lawrence's way of writing throughout his substantial work was to relay on impulse instead of logic. Although he was a spontantaneous, rapid writer he was a very careful and critical editor.
Lawrence was known for his great powers of concentration and could write undisturbed even when surrounded by noise and people although he was most inspired by nature and often worked with his back to a tree and a notepad on his knee.
Lawrence also never made notes or outlines. He never forced himself to write although his writing was often seasonal, slacking off in the summer and picking up in the fall. He wrote: "Write when there comes a certain passion upon you, and revise in a later,warier,but still sympathetic mood."
Many of Lawrence's friends and acquaintances all got the blunt of his analyzing of them. He also believed that writing autobiographical works like "Sons and Lovers"could be therapeutic for him and helped him see the patterns and meaning of one's life as in psychoanalysis although others didn't always agree. He felt writing about one's life could lead to self-knowledge and enable one to conquor the problems of the past in order to be master of them.
Unfortunately, Lawrence seemed all to ready to tell others how to live their lives and with his many prejudices such as sexism and anti-Semitism he expressed them in what many thought were tackless letters. Those who got along best with him were those who took those letters and novels very lightly. Meyers feels Lawrence was guided by passion and not reason and would be surprised when people did not understand this.
During the last five years of his life when his battle with TB was gaining ground, Lawrence became more seriously concerned with the theme of resurrection. He gave up his earlier belief in a strong leader for today's world and returned to his prewar I ideas of the regeneration of society through the personal relations of men and women as in "Lady Chatterley's Lover".
Another nice thing about Meyer's book is his "Epilogue". Many of the people that were mentioned in the book were given their own "end story" here including Frieda and her second husband and other players mentioned in the biography.
In the obituaries of Lawrence at the time of his death, he was often portrayed as perverse and scandal was attached to his entire body of work. E.M. Forster opposed this view and considered him as "one of thegreatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Today, few critics would make the charge as the times have changed since D.H. Lawrence's lifetime. The fights for censorship of his novels and paintings have changed drastically since then as well. Many readers and scholars have discovered a richness and insight to his books that have surprised many although not Lawrence himself who remained in many instances with one foot in the puritan morals of his mother's day. Still, his work is an unbelievale source of outpouring of genuis and spirit rare matched since. It was such a shame that his life ended so early and it spent so much of his energy to prolong it as long as he did.
Beautiful Old Age
It ought to be lovely to be old
to be full of the peace that comes of experience
and wrinkled ripe fulfilment.
The wrinkledsmileof completness that follows a life
lived undaunted and unsoured with accepted lies.
If people lived without accepted lies
they would ripen like apples, and bbe scented like pippins
in their old age.
Soothing, old people should be, like apples
when one is tired of love.
Fragrant like yellowing leaves,and dim with the soft
stillness and satisfaction of autumn.
And a girl should say;
It must be wonderful to live and grow old.
Look at my mother, how rich and still she is!
And a young man should think : By Jove
my father has faced all weathers, but it's been a life!
