Burning man, p.5
Burning Man, page 5
He was always aware of the dramatic potential of his childhood, and he captured the tension in his early plays, A Collier’s Friday Night and The Daughter-in-Law, which anticipated the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1950s. A Collier’s Friday Night opens with chatter between a Mother and her daughter which ends abruptly when the Father returns home black from the pit: ‘A man comes home after a hard day’s work to folks as ’as never a word to say to ’im, ’as shuts up the minute ’e enters the house, as ’ates the sight of ’im as soon as ’e comes in th’ room—!’ The son, Ernest (the Lawrence figure), then comes home from college and announces, ‘Fancy! Swinburne’s dead.’ When Ernest’s friend Maggie arrives for her Friday-night literature lesson, they discuss Francis Thompson’s new essay on Shelley, in which Thompson describes the poet’s childlike love of sailing paper boats. Maggie compares Ernest to Shelley:
ERNEST (flattered at the comparison): But I don’t make paper boats. I tell you, you think too much about me.79
Later, the Mother expresses her loathing of Maggie and Ernest comforts her: ‘I don’t care for her – really – not half as I care for you. Only, just now – well, I can’t help it, I can’t help it. But I care just the same – for you – I do.’ (‘I wish I could write such dialogue,’ said George Bernard Shaw of Lawrence’s plays. ‘With mine I always hear the sound of the typewriter.’) But as good as Lawrence’s dialogue are his stage directions, and the Mother and son’s exchange about Maggie is preceded by this:
There is in their tones a dangerous gentleness – so much gentleness that the safe reserve of their souls is broken.
Maggie is a portrait of Jessie Chambers, the girl described by Lawrence as ‘the anvil on which I have hammered myself out’.80 Jessie is also the model for Muriel in The White Peacock and for Miriam Leivers in Sons and Lovers, and she gave her own version of her relationship with Lawrence in D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, published under the pseudonym ‘E.T.’ When Jessie met Lawrence in the spring of 1901, he was fifteen and in his last year at Nottingham High School, and she was fourteen with a ‘dark rosy face, a bunch of short, black curls, very fine and free, and dark eyes’.81 He compared her to Emily Brontë, because Jessie was also, Lawrence explained to her, ‘intense and introspective’ and ‘governed entirely by your feelings’.82
Having already left school in order to take on her role as the family drudge, Jessie was yearning to complete her education and Lawrence offered to teach her French and Arithmetic. Her parents were tenant farmers with a tribe of children and a love of literature: Mr Chambers read Tess of the D’Urbervilles aloud to Mrs Chambers when it was serialised in the local paper, Jessie went about reciting Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy Gray’, and the family fought over copies of the English Review. Their farm, on the edge of a wood three miles from Eastwood, was called The Haggs and this was Lawrence’s ideal home. He later said that he was happiest when he was either there or on his way there, cutting through the alley in the woods, and circling the pond with the overhanging oaks. ‘Whatever I forget,’ Lawrence wrote to Jessie Chambers’s brother in 1928, ‘I shall never forget The Haggs – I loved it so’:
Jessie Chambers
I loved to come to you all, it really was a new life began in me there. The water-pippin by the door – those maiden-blush roses that Flower [the horse] would lean over and eat – and Trip [the bull-terrier] floundering round – And stewed figs for tea in winter, and in August green stewed apples. Do you still have them? Tell your mother I never forget, no matter where life carries us. – And does she still blush if somebody comes and finds her in a dirty white apron? or doesn’t she wear work-aprons any more? Oh I’d love to be nineteen again, and coming up through the Warren and catching the first glimpse of the buildings. Then I’d sit on the sofa under the window, and we’d crowd round the little table to tea, in that tiny little kitchen I was so at home in.83
This was the rural idyll that Lawrence tried to recreate in Rananim, and that he rediscovered at Lower Tregerthen farm. The Hockings’ horse was called Blossom and their dog Nell, and Mrs Hocking made fried potatoes rather than stewed apples, but Lawrence similarly loved to walk down to the farm and join the family around the fire.
Three traumatic events marked the start of his sixteenth year. The first was in September 1901 when, having now left school, Lawrence took a job as a clerk in a prosthetics factory in Nottingham where the women ‘were filthier than anybody he had ever conceived’. The new boy’s prudishness only encouraged them and one day, according to George Neville, a ‘number of girls rushed upon him, seized him, threw him down, and attempted upon him the Great Indignity’. Lawrence lashed out at them ‘with teeth, hoof and claw,’; he tore their dresses, bit their fingers and arms, scratched their faces, kicked them and eventually drove them off; his ferocity would always startle people.84 The impact of the assault, Neville wrote, cannot be underestimated and this may have been the reason for Lawrence’s lifelong horror of being unexpectedly touched. The second event took place two months later when, after one of his weekend visits home, Ernest, aged twenty-two, picked up an infection on his return journey and died two days later. Lawrence now became his mother’s favourite and no sooner had he been promoted than he too – in the third traumatic event of the autumn – fell dangerously ill: ‘The doctor says there is a spot about the size of a crown on his lungs that is clear. If that can be kept clear, he may live.’85
In the synopsis of Sons and Lovers that he later sent to Edward Garnett, Lawrence described how Mrs Morel ‘selects’ her sons ‘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.’86 This is what happened now: Lawrence pulled through his illness because of his mother’s determination, and was effectively raised from the dead. When he regained consciousness he found that his voice had broken (insofar as it would ever break), which meant that he had become a man. Told by the doctor to give up his job at the factory, he convalesced for a year and then accepted a post as a pupil-teacher at the British School in Eastwood, where he undertook ‘three years’ savage teaching of collier lads’.87
These separate experiences formed one rolling catastrophe. Lawrence’s illness, which coincided with the death of Ernest, was brought on – George Neville firmly believed – by the sexual assault at work; the death of Ernest led to Lawrence’s elevation as his mother’s lover; and his illness was clearly the start of his tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, which Lawrence believed to be caused by an excess of love, might therefore be seen, in his reasoning, as a sexually transmitted disease. ‘I don’t think,’ said Aldous Huxley, ‘one can exaggerate the importance of the disease in Lawrence,’ but Lawrence always denied that he had TB: ‘I am not really afraid of consumption,’ he casually informed a friend in 1913. ‘I don’t know why – I don’t think I shall ever die of that.’88 His denial was part of the culture: despite being responsible for one death in eight, TB was not talked about, even by doctors to their patients. Kafka, writing from the sanatorium where he would die in April 1924, noted that ‘in discussing tuberculosis … everybody drops into a shy, evasive, glassy-eyed manner of speech’.89 Lawrence’s disease made itself apparent, so Huxley observed, in ‘dips and rises and dips and rises’ throughout the year.90 Critically ill every winter, he was stronger by Easter and consequently, Lawrence said, ‘those three days in the tomb’ took on ‘a terrible significance and reality to me’.91 Accordingly, the most important events in his life tended to take place during Holy Week.
Until the tubercle bacillus was discovered in 1882, proving that consumption was the result of an airborne infection rather than an inner disposition, it hid its horrors behind a mask of sensibility. The image of tuberculosis as an internal flame that consumed the body was born of Romanticism (‘youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’, wrote Keats – himself consumptive – in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’), and a version of the internal combustion theory is what Lawrence preferred to believe, arguing that ‘Any excess in the sympathetic mode from the upper centres tends to burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with stress, and cause consumption. So it is just criminal to make a child too loving … It means derangement and death at last.’92 His excess-of-love diagnosis was later displaced by an excess-of-rage diagnosis. Lawrence’s lungs were ‘crocky’, he explained, because he shut his ‘rages of trouble well within my belly’.93 This was repeated on his deathbed, where Lawrence blamed Europe for his condition: ‘The root of all my sickness is a sort of rage. I realise now, Europe gets me into an inward rage, that keeps my bronchials hellish inflamed.’94 There is no medical link between rage and consumption, but those who live with consumptives often describe their emotional combustibility, and Lawrence’s furies became legendary.
His temper was never apparent at The Haggs, however, where he now resumed his visits, spending so much time on the farm that his mother said he might as well pack his things and move in. Her son’s love of ‘the Haggites’ was, for Lydia, the deepest possible betrayal and it is striking, when we consider how close she and Lawrence had become during his illness and how jealous she was of his preferred family, that he persisted in returning there. ‘Nothing will stop me,’ Lawrence told Jessie, ‘unless your mother and father say I can’t come.’95 The farm was the refuge for Lawrence that the pub had been for his own father, and he received the same silent treatment when he sloped guiltily home to Bleak House. Frieda would be similarly jealous when Lawrence disappeared for long periods to Lower Tregerthen farm, where she was also convinced he was conducting an affair.
Lawrence in 1908
‘In our home,’ Jessie recalled, Lawrence ‘was a synonym for joy – radiant joy in simply being alive’. The Lawrence who cast a spell over his friends was born at The Haggs, where he realised himself completely. ‘Ah, you Haggites see the best of me,’ he liked to say.96 His magic lay in the nakedness of his presence and the quality of his concentration: there was nothing that Lawrence did not take in. He brought a ‘holiday atmosphere’97 and controlled the family temperature; the Chambers children were nicer to one another when Lawrence was around. There was ‘a quality of lightness about him,’ said Jessie, ‘something that seemed to shine from within’.98 Lawrence liked to invent games and play charades, but he also enjoyed the creativity of chores and, without waiting to be asked, he would peel onions, fetch water, brush the hearth and help with the harvest. ‘Work goes like fun when Bert’s there,’ Mr Chambers remarked.99 Lawrence even taught the Chambers children how to waltz, having been taught himself by his father. ‘Father says one ought to be able to dance on a three penny bit,’ he explained.100 This was the only occasion, May Chambers recalled, that Bert had ‘allowed his father to have any good points. He talked a lot about Mr Lawrence’s knowledge of dancing. It was easy to see how proud he was of him as an authority.’
Most of his time with Jessie was spent in the woods, where Lawrence had also been taught by his father the name of every bird, tree and flower. He moved through the natural world with the grace of a faun and in years to come the ranting, monological side of Lawrence’s character would always be tempered by the child of Pan. It was in the woods, Jessie recalled, that he told her about William Blake, whose ‘wife was a poor girl whom he taught to read, and also to print and engrave, and what a marvellous helpmate she was to him’. Jessie was Lawrence’s helpmate too, and ‘for a little time we lived with Blake and his wife’.101 Blake was another respectable working-class prophet with a distrust of science and a vision of a new Jerusalem, and Lawrence’s entire philosophy – ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ – was lifted from ‘The Argument’ in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which ‘Infernal’ book tells of the poet’s visit to the underworld. Robert Burns, the Ploughman Poet, was also ‘a sort of brother’ to Lawrence, who at one point began to write ‘a sort of life’ of Burns which was really, like everything he wrote, a sort of autobiography: ‘I’m not Scotch. So I shall just transplant him to home – or on the hills of Derbyshire.’102 Lawrence was saturated in Romantic poetry: ‘over and over again’, Jessie said, he read aloud his favourite Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, from her edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which he carried in his pocket.103 Whitman’s Leaves of Grass ‘was one of his great books’,104 and among the other poems which had ‘meant the most’ to him were Keats’s Odes and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode (‘The Rainbow comes and goes’). These, Lawrence said, were ‘woven deep’ into his consciousness and gave the ‘ultimate shape’ to his life.105 One Christmas he gave Jessie a selection of Shelley, while she gave him Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Reading together Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley, published in the Dublin Review in 1908, they learned that ‘the aboundingly spontaneous Shelley’ – a ‘poet of ascendency’ forever ‘struggling towards higher things’ – was unappreciated in his own age.106 The rise of Shelley was noted by Lawrence.
A modernist only by mistiming, there was little to interest him in the aesthetics of his own age. The Romantic period was as close to Lawrence as the modernist revolution is to us now: he could feel its roots and he grew from its soil. When Lawrence’s father was born in 1846, Wordsworth was poet laureate and when Lawrence himself was born, Wordsworth had been dead for only thirty-five years. Wordsworth was a hallowed paternal presence in late Victorian England whose influence can be felt in Lawrence’s reverence for nature, blanket hatred of industrialism and overriding sense of wonder. ‘Wonder’ was a favourite word of both Wordsworth and Lawrence: ‘Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,’ Lawrence wrote in ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’. The problem with modernity, Lawrence believed, was that the wonder had gone.
When she was sixteen and he was seventeen, Jessie and Lawrence went every Thursday evening to the library to choose their books. It was, she said, ‘the outstanding event of the week’ and she describes this period of their lives as ‘a kind of orgy of reading. I think we were hardly aware of the outside world.’107 Jessie and Lawrence worked their way through the canon of English literature and a great deal more besides: Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande, Virgil’s Georgics, Schopenhauer’s Essays, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Jessie’s account of their reading suggests that they consumed more literature in five years than most educated people do in a lifetime. This was the apprenticeship which enabled Lawrence to hold his own at high table in Trinity College, Cambridge.
It was when he was ‘nineteen or so,’ Jessie recalled, that his ‘fatal division began to manifest itself’.108 What happened was this: Lawrence now understood himself to be a great man in need of a guiding woman. ‘Every great man – every man who achieves anything, I mean – is founded in some woman,’ he explained to Jessie. ‘Why shouldn’t you be the woman I am founded in?’ Forced to confront the nature of their relationship, they ‘became self-conscious’, said Jessie, ‘and aware of a barrier’.109 That barrier was Lydia Lawrence. His relationship with Jessie, Lydia explained to her son, was becoming a problem and people would talk: they should either get engaged or break it off. The ultimatum forced Lawrence to examine his feelings for Jessie and he duly discovered that he loved her, but as a woman in whom to ‘found’ himself and not ‘as a husband should love his wife’.110 On Easter Monday 1906 – when Lawrence was twenty – he mournfully suggested to Jessie that they could get married, so long as she understood his position; this way, he reasoned, they could at least continue their conversations about literature. Jessie now realised that Lawrence moved and breathed under the ‘incapacitating’ pressure of his mother: ‘I was conscious of a fierce pain, of the body as well as the spirit … I saw the golden apple of life that had been lying at my fingertips recede irretrievably.’111
The magical Bert who brought joy to the Haggites still existed after what was now referred to as ‘the Easter Monday episode’, but he was ghosted by a ‘dehumanised’ other self who ‘utterly negated life’. Lawrence at first understood his division in terms of the difference between love and desire: he could not love the object of his desire and he could not desire the object of his love. Self One loved Jessie but, to Self Two, Jessie ‘had no significance at all’. There was a similar split in Lawrence between the self who lived and the self who wrote: ‘I have a second consciousness somewhere actively alive,’ he would tell a later muse, Helen Corke. ‘I keep on writing, almost mechanically.’112 This second, writerly consciousness is what led Forster to conclude, when he read The White Peacock, that Lawrence had ‘not a glimmering from first to last of what he’s up to’.113
The accounts of young Lawrence in the memoirs of Jessie Chambers and George Neville tell us something about the complexity of his attitude to sex and sexuality, and something about the difference between his male and female friendships. Neville, who married the girl he made pregnant while ‘spooning’ in an alley, describes Lawrence as his naive sexual inferior – which is how Lawrence would be seen by men for the rest of his life – while Jessie, like all of Lawrence’s women, realised that ‘the whole question of sex had for him the fascination of horror’.114 Neville’s Memoir of D. H. Lawrence was subtitled The Betrayal, a term associated with Lawrence except that in this instance it is Neville who sees himself as betrayer because he revealed those facts that would embarrass his friend the most. Neville suggests that because he did not play football or cricket, Lawrence was never part of male changing-room culture, and he was thus able to maintain his innocence until his late teens. He illustrates this level of innocence with an anecdote.
