Sons and Lovers: the Biography of a Novel [1 ed.] 9781942954279, 9781942954187

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the biography of a novel neil roberts

© 2016 by Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-942954-18-7 (print) eISBN: 978-1-942954-27-9 (e-book) Published by Clemson University Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina.

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To Freya, Jasmine and Erin

Contents List of Abbreviations

ix

List of Figures

xi

Introduction 1 1 Bert and Jessie, 1901–1909

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2 ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ and the Test on Lawrence, 1909–1910 33 3 ‘Paul Morel I’ and the Death of Lydia Lawrence, August–December 1910

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4 Betrothal and ‘Paul Morel II’, January–October 1911

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5 Re-enter Jessie, 1911–1912

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6 ‘The death-blow to our friendship’, ‘Paul Morel III’, February–June 1912

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7 From ‘Paul Morel’ to Sons and Lovers, July–November 1912

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8 Epilogue, 1912–1913

159

Bibliography

179

Endnotes

183

Index

187

vii

Abbreviations ED ET EY IOI L LAH LJC MS Nehls NG Plays PM PO Poems SL T VG WP

Émile Delavenay, D.H. Lawrence, L’Homme et la genèse de son œuvre E.T. [Jessie Chambers], D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years Helen Corke, In Our Infancy The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (8 vols) Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories ‘Letters of Jessie Chambers’ Mark Schorer (ed.), Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence: A Facsimile of the Manuscript Edward Nehls (ed.), D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (3 vols) Helen Corke, Neutral Ground The Plays (2 vols) Paul Morel The Prussian Officer and Other Stories The Poems (2 vols) Sons and Lovers The Trespasser The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories The White Peacock

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List of Figures Frontispiece: Manuscript page of ‘Paul Morel III’ with annotations by Jessie Chambers

xii

1 Jessie Chambers, c.1908

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2 Lydia Lawrence, c.1900

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3 Lawrence in 1906

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4 Lawrence in 1908

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5 Frieda, Montague and Barbara Weekley, 1905

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6 Lawrence in 1913

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Manuscript page of ‘Paul Morel III’ with annotations by Jessie Chambers

Introduction

I

magine these four writing scenarios. A young elementary school teacher, living in lodgings in a London suburb, guilty about having seduced and abandoned the love of his life, now burdened also with the knowledge that his beloved mother is dying, struggles in the evenings, after correcting his pupils’ work, to write a novel that is of deep personal importance to him. The following year, grieving for his mother’s death and engaged to another woman whom he increasingly feels to be unsuited to him, he begins the task again, and again fails to complete it. The same young man, having survived a near-fatal illness, left his job and ended his engagement, is back with his family in the Midlands town where his novel is set, locked, through his writing and her response to it, in a final struggle with his first lover about the meaning of their relationship, and beginning a new love affair that will transform his life. Finally, with his new lover, a woman from a background utterly foreign to him and the world of his novel, he rewrites the book again in a little lakeside town in Italy. Writing was the centre of Lawrence’s life. It is notoriously difficult to represent the activity of writing in biography. The writing is the reason why the biography is written at all, but it often seems to go on in some timeless, spaceless realm outside the life itself. It is possible to read some Lawrence biographies—even an otherwise excellent one such as Brenda Maddox’s The Married Man: 1

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A Life of D.H. Lawrence—without being aware that during the crucial months February to April 1912, when he met Frieda, and September to November of that year, when they made their first home together in Gargnano, Lawrence was spending most of his time writing the third and final drafts of Sons and Lovers. Certainly no one reading these books will learn that Jessie Chambers, the most intimate friend of his youth and the original of Miriam Leivers, crucially intervened in the novel’s composition by advising Lawrence to stick closer to autobiographical fact, wrote her recollections of important episodes on which he based parts of his narrative, made criticisms of the third draft to which he responded and herself wrote episodes that Lawrence incorporated with little revision. The Cambridge biographies, most relevantly John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, pay much more attention to Lawrence’s writing life, but my approach has been to go a step further and place the writing at the centre: to write, in effect, a biography of the novel. Sons and Lovers is the perfect candidate for this approach, for two reasons. The draft material that has survived, though far from complete, enables us to trace the stages of composition as life events, to make a narrative of them. Secondly, and perhaps uniquely, the life and the writing are intimately entwined and mutually influential. A number of recent critics, notably Violeta Sotirova in D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint, have argued that Sons and Lovers is a dialogic novel in the sense theorised by Mikhail Bakhtin: that the narrative is not controlled by a single authoritative point of view, but is contested by conflicting voices. Carol Siegel, in Lawrence Among the Women, contends that female points of view are especially important in this dialogue and, more recently, Russell McDonald has persuasively argued that this is not merely a literary device: ‘The vibrant interplay of male and female voices that animates many of the drafts, fragments, and published versions of these works reveals Lawrence’s desire to preserve his disagreements with women by letting their contributions stand in

Introduction

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unresolved dialogue with his own’.1 The ‘biography’ of Sons and Lovers shows us that the novel was shaped by literal dialogues, first with Jessie Chambers and later with Frieda Lawrence. (The more professional intervention of Edward Garnett is also important.) In the case of Jessie Chambers, traces of that dialogue have survived. It is natural to read an autobiographical novel such as Sons and Lovers as the retrospective account of events that occurred before the writing. To a large extent this is true, but there are crucial passages where Lawrence is responding to something much more immediate: his final conflict with Jessie over the draft that he shared with her in the spring of 1912 and his struggle later that year to establish a new relationship with Frieda. He had not made up his mind about his early experience before he began to write. His understanding changed not only between drafts but during the process of writing and even proof-correction. This novel that is ostensibly about his past bears the traces of the life that he was going on living as he wrote. As Andrew Harrison has recently written, ‘Lawrence studies today offer few greater challenges than negotiating the conflicted history of the composition and reception of Sons and Lovers.’2 Jessie Chambers’ contribution did not end with the publication of the book, which she bitterly resented. Sons and Lovers ended her relationship with Lawrence, she destroyed his letters (though she reproduced extracts from memory so that they appear in his published Letters) as well as the novel she herself had written on the same subject. But after his death she began writing a memoir. She sent her manuscript to the writer Max Plowman, who had known Lawrence slightly. Plowman was encouraging, and passed it on to Lawrence’s erstwhile friend John Middleton Murry. Murry wrote her a self-centred and patronising letter which persuaded her to abandon that connection. Subsequently, however, she was approached by the modest and respectful French scholar Emile Delavenay, and with his support she completed D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, the most moving of all memoirs of Lawrence and the most complete account of his early years. It was published in 1935 and much later Delavenay

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also published notes and extracts he had made of an earlier, more unguarded draft. Like all memoirs, Jessie’s book has to be treated with caution, taking into account the years that had passed, her bitterness at the ending of her friendship with Lawrence, her low opinion of his later work and incomprehension of his marriage to Frieda. As I hope to show, her judgement of Sons and Lovers itself is particularly unreliable. Nevertheless, she creates an unforgettable picture of the youthful Lawrence, as well as a painful and honest (if inevitably biased) account of their relationship. My book stands on the shoulders of more dedicated Lawrence scholars than myself. John Worthen’s biographical work, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years and his complete life D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, are as authoritative as it is possible to imagine biography being and, as I have said, never lose sight of the centrality of writing in their subject’s life. A more unusual but equally vital resource is the research done by Helen Baron and Carl Baron on the paper that Lawrence used for his manuscripts. Their initial realisation that he used the same paper for the novel as for his letters, followed up by patient and minute analysis of every letter and every page of manuscript, enabled them to assign approximate dates to most of the pages of the final manuscript. This research makes it possible to identify pages that date from the abandoned second draft (March–July 1911), his new start immediately before his near-fatal illness (November 1911), the period in Eastwood when he was showing his work to Jessie, and when he met Frieda (February–April 1912), his revision of this draft in Germany (May 1912) and the final draft, mostly written in Gargnano (July–November 1912). The first draft (late 1910), which like the second he didn’t complete, has disappeared. Reading the manuscript, even in facsimile, with this awareness adds a literal new dimension to the experience. The process of composition is laid bare, and with it the effects of the life-experiences that transformed Lawrence from the frustrated, depressed and ailing schoolteacher of 1911 to the creatively and sexually triumphant artist of the end

Introduction

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of the following year. Helen Baron’s edition of the second draft, published by Cambridge University Press as Paul Morel, is another indispensable resource, both for the text of that draft and for Jessie’s comments on and contributions to the third draft, included as appendices. Equally indispensable is Mark Schorer’s facsimile of the manuscript, published in 1977.

1 Jessie Chambers, c.1908

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My work has also been made possible by the encouragement of the community of Lawrence scholars. My thanks go to the University of Nottingham for appointing me to an honorary chair attached to the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre; to Nottingham again, and Andrew Harrison in particular, for inviting me to give a lecture on the centenary of the publication of Sons and Lovers in 1913, in which my thoughts on this subject began to take shape; and to the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America for the honour of a keynote lecture at the Thirteenth International D.H. Lawrence Conference in Gargnano in 2014, which took my research a stage further. Extracts from Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel and Letters Volume 1 by D.H. Lawrence reprinted by permission of Pollinger Limited (www.pollingerltd.com) on behalf of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. The facsimile of a draft of Sons and Lovers is reproduced by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and of Pollinger Limited on behalf of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Photographs are reproduced by permission of John Worthen. Parts of Chapter 2 have been previously published in ‘Writing with Women: Lawrence, Helen Corke and The Trespasser’, Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies Volume 3, Number 2 (2014).

1

Bert and Jessie, 1901–1909

T

owards the end of 1912, his long and tormented relationship with Jessie Chambers (Figure 1) finally behind him, beginning his new life with Frieda Weekley on the shore of Lake Garda, in the final draft of Sons and Lovers Lawrence imagined the first meeting of Paul Morel and Miriam Leivers, based on his first meeting with Jessie eleven years earlier. He wrote, ‘She seemed to be in some way scornful of the boy. “She thinks I’m common,” he thought.’ One might think that he was a reliable witness to his adolescent experience, but he changed his account to: ‘She seemed to be in some way resentful of the boy. “He thinks I’m only a common girl,” she thought’ (MS185). From the very start Lawrence imagines contradictory versions of his relationship with the most important person, apart from his mother, in the first twenty-six years of his life. There might have been reasons for either young person—aged fifteen and fourteen at this first meeting—to think that the other felt socially superior. Their mothers had met at the Congregational church in Eastwood, a centre for the aspiring working class, where they found ‘a degree of culture that was otherwise entirely lacking in their lives’, which put them on a footing of equality.1 But Lawrence’s father was a nearly illiterate coal miner, and the family lived in a terraced house in town, which he may have felt was a stigma when he entered the cottage, however modest, covered in 7

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Virginia creeper and honeysuckle, where Jessie’s farming family lived. He probably did not know then that two of her brothers worked down the pit to supplement the family income. The farm, with its horses, dog and pigs, the woods through which he walked the two miles from Eastwood to reach it, which came almost up to the garden fence, and the whole family—the mother, father and sons as much as Jessie herself—were deeply attractive to him, and were to become a second home in the seven years before he left Eastwood. But Jessie certainly felt inferior to Lawrence. He was a scholarship boy at Nottingham High School, whereas her ‘lack of education was a bitter humiliation’ to her (ET 23). The word ‘common’ itself is symptomatic of the aspiring but insecure social identities of both families. At the end of his life Lawrence wrote about the social gradations of the mining community: It was ‘common’ to live in the Square [where he had been born]. It was a little less common to live in the Breach [the ‘Bottoms’ of Sons and Lovers, to which the family moved in his infancy] … And it was most ‘common’, most degraded of all to live in Dakins Row.2 By the time he met Jessie his family had moved from the Breach to the more physically and socially elevated Walker Street, still a terraced house but with a bay window. The Chambers, too, had lived in the Breach before moving to the Haggs farm a year before Lawrence’s visit, and as a child he had, through his elder sister Emily, been friendly with Jessie’s sister May, though not apparently with any of the other Chambers children. But it doesn’t really matter whether, in reality, Lawrence or Jessie felt looked down on socially by the other. The distinctions registered by the word ‘common’ were to mean nothing in their relationship. What is telling is that Lawrence marks the meeting of Paul and Miriam with a note of vulnerability and imputed hostility, and that when he changes his

1901–1909

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mind about Paul feeling looked down on he doesn’t just delete the feeling but reverses it. Was he correcting his memory? This is unlikely—he had had plenty of opportunity for that in the several drafts he had already written, and the contributions Jessie herself had made, after reading these earlier versions. Throughout the novel these characters are hypersensitive to what they imagine to be the other’s feelings, their relationship is marked by an intense intersubjectivity, the rendering of which is one of Lawrence’s most notable accomplishments. The fact that he shifts from Paul’s point of view to Miriam’s is itself a sign of this. His original version, the boy feeling self-conscious as his circle widens, is a standard Bildungsroman motif; registering his hero’s effect on the other is more distinctive of Lawrence’s method. It is also telling that Lawrence finally fixes on Miriam as the more vulnerable one from the start. A reader of the novel might find it hard to judge which of the two fictional characters is more damaged at the end, but, in life, for Lawrence, writing from the perspective of his relationship with Frieda, Jessie was the defeated one. Neither pair of parents presented their children with a model of fulfilling sexual love. Lawrence was able to imagine that his mother and father had enjoyed a passionate relationship at the beginning of their marriage, but since earliest childhood he had known little but conflict and tension, contempt on his mother’s part and resentment on his father’s, sometimes issuing in violence. The marriage of Ann and Edmund Chambers was more harmonious but her own son reports that Ann, who bore seven children, ‘used to shudder when the subject of sex was mentioned’ (Nehls 3 536). Although it is evident from reports and photographs that Jessie was a very beautiful young woman, Lawrence’s interest in her was not initially, or ever primarily, one of sexual attraction. His sexual development, both physically and emotionally, was slow, and a strong bond developed between them before either was sexually conscious. This bond was made up of a shared love of books, which

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from 1906 developed into a shared devotion to Lawrence’s own writing, a love of the natural world fostered by the environment of the farm and above all the woods, and, most fundamentally, and encompassing both of these, a common religious/spiritual intensity, initially centred on Christianity but spilling over in their response to nature and to their reading. Lawrence’s unselfconsciousness about his relationship with Jessie may also have been fostered by the fact that, at least in its early stages, it was not exclusive but embedded in his love of the whole family. Although there were tensions, especially between Jessie and her brothers, this family was not, like his own, riven by radically opposed values, habits and aspirations. The family shared a love of literature, and read aloud together—Tess of the d’Urbervilles, for example, when it was serialised in a local paper. Shortly after he met the family Lawrence was struck down by pneumonia, from which he took a long time to recover, but when he had regained his strength he took delight in working with Jessie’s brothers on the farm. He was close to his younger sister but deprived of brothers—his eldest brother George, to whom he had never been close, married when Lawrence was twelve, and his second brother, the brilliant Ernest, who was the chief hope of Mrs Lawrence’s life, died in London shortly after Lawrence’s first visit to the Haggs. The idyllic pastoral atmosphere of some of his early writing such as The White Peacock and ‘Love Among the Haystacks’ reflects the life he shared there. His love of the family was reciprocal. Jessie’s youngest brother David wrote, ‘He brought an infectious zest for life and a vitality that inspired everybody he met; life became more exciting with him and he left an impression on us all that can never be erased.’ David ‘adored him’ and believed that ‘everyone loved him at this time; he combined with his vivacity a sweetness of disposition that was quite irresistible.’3 By contrast, Jessie never felt comfortable in the Lawrence house; she was oppressed by a feeling of tension and, later, by the hostility of his mother and sisters.

1901–1909

11

2 Lydia Lawrence, c.1900

Lawrence’s mother was aspirational on behalf of her sons, but her horizon was middle-class respectability (Figure 2). She did not value learning for its own sake, certainly had no ambition for Lawrence to be a writer, and was content when, leaving school at fifteen, he got a job as a clerk in Nottingham—a job that ended

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after a few months, when he became seriously ill. She was certainly unusually literate for an Eastwood miner’s wife: Lawrence describes her reading Flaubert and Meredith, and in his autobiographical play A Collier’s Friday Night the mother is shown reading A.R. Orage’s radical journal The New Age. But she read Flaubert with ‘a severe look of disapproval’ (L1 174), and in a telling vignette written late in life he describes his mother being ‘terribly impatient with “Diana of the Crossways” and terribly thrilled by “East Lynne”’.4 George Meredith was the epitome of the literary novelist when Lawrence was growing up, and Diana of the Crossways is one of his many sympathetic portrayals of socially transgressive sexual feeling. Meredith loathed Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, the great melodramatic bestseller of the late Victorian era, in which sexual transgression is a matter for punishment and remorse. There is no doubt which was more of a model for the kind of writer Lawrence aspired to be. During the years of his youth and early manhood, when his creative power was nascent and in its infancy, it was Jessie who stimulated and encouraged him. As he wrote in Sons and Lovers of Paul’s painting, ‘In contact with Miriam, he gained insight, his vision went deeper. From his mother he drew the life warmth, the strength to produce; Miriam urged this warmth into intensity like a white light’ (SL 190). The emotional tenor of their relationship in the early years— till Easter 1906, when Lawrence was twenty (Figure 3) and Jessie nineteen—was the ground of one of Jessie’s strongest objections to Sons and Lovers. For her, these early years were a time of innocent harmony, untroubled by sexual feeling, which she felt would naturally develop into love. She wrote at least three accounts (two of which survive) of their meeting on Easter Monday 1906, which was a watershed in her life. Lawrence came to visit her, as planned and as usual, but was uncharacteristically distant and preoccupied. Eventually he told her that their friendship was getting ‘out of balance’, finally admitting that his mother and sister had told him that if he and Jessie spent so much time alone together they should

1901–1909

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consider themselves engaged. He said to her, ‘I’ve looked into my heart and I cannot find that I love you as a husband should love his wife’ (ET 65–66). Jessie’s response was, ‘It’s your mother. I know she never liked me’ (PM 260). Lawrence protested that his mother had her interests at heart.

3 Lawrence in 1906

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But he insisted that they should continue to see each other. Frieda Lawrence was to describe Jessie as ‘the “sacred love”, you know the old split of sacred and profane.’5 But this is at best a half-truth. It did indeed become obvious that Lawrence was deeply divided in his feelings about women, as he desperately insisted that he and Jessie would always remain close, while he found another woman ‘I can kiss and embrace and make the mother of my children’ (ET 139). But his need for Jessie was not merely symptomatic of this division. She was the one who could nurture the growing-point of his life, his creativity. In Jessie’s words, ‘When we were alone together we were in a world apart, where feeling and thought were intense, and we seemed to touch a reality that was beyond the ordinary workaday world. But if his mother or sister returned, bringing with them the atmosphere of the market-place, our separate world was temporarily shattered’ (ET 58). We see here both the strength and the vulnerability of their bond. To become a writer, to fulfil his original and unique potential, Lawrence needed both a stimulus and a standing ground outside the family and social milieu that was at best uncomprehending of and at worst hostile to that potential. These Jessie provided, but in doing so she drew him, half-willingly, into a ‘reality’ that was insulated from material existence. She reports Lawrence exclaiming, ‘You push me beyond the very bounds of human consciousness’ (ET 147)—a feeling, and an accusation, that are echoed in Sons and Lovers: ‘I’m so damned spiritual with you always’ (SL 226). There is a moment of unconscious revelation in A Personal Record when, on the point of Lawrence’s departure for London, Jessie reports his mother saying, ‘And where would he have been without me to call him up in a morning, and have his porridge and everything ready for him? He’d never have got off to College every day if I hadn’t seen to things’ (ET 149). Jessie comments, ‘It struck me as incongruous that his mother should make so much of these homely services.’ Her inability to understand how, for the mother, her deepest values are channelled into practical care for her child,

1901–1909

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and her condescending use of the words ‘homely’ and ‘workaday’, might cast a shadow of scepticism over her claim that ‘one must accept life as a whole’ (ET 153). Jessie wrote of the Easter crisis, in her memoir thirty years later, ‘the delicate fabric of our relationship had been mutilated deliberately. The issue of love in its crudest sense had been forced upon us while we were still immature and unprepared’ (ET 69). From one point of view, Mrs Lawrence was acting responsibly according to the norms of her world. Her eldest son had been only a year older than Lawrence was now when he married—why should she consider that this twenty-year-old son was too ‘immature’ and ‘unprepared’ to face the implications of his behaviour? Moreover, George’s had been a shotgun wedding to a woman his parents thought ‘unsuitable’ (EY 53). Ernest had been little more than two years older than Lawrence was now when he had died, partly in his mother’s opinion because of the strain of an unsuitable engagement. But Jessie was a genuinely unconventional young woman. She judged her relationship with Lawrence according to her own spiritual lights, and was unconcerned about the rituals of courtship. In her opinion those who interfered were ‘Philistines’. Her two surviving accounts of this traumatic event were written in 1912, in the throes of her dispute with Lawrence about Sons and Lovers, and in the 1930s, after his death. Her first account was a short story that she sent to him in the spring of 1911 when, possibly unknown to her, he was working on the second version of his novel. His response to the story was, according to her, ‘They tore me from you, the love of my life. … It was the slaughter of the foetus in the womb’ (ET 186). I will discuss the several extraordinary aspects of this statement in a later chapter. Here I just want to say that neither in the draft that he was writing at the time he said this nor in the third draft that he wrote early the following year does Paul admit that he is acting under family pressure. Jessie told the story again, after reading the third draft, to ‘suggest something nearer to the actual spirit of the time’. Only in

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the final draft does Lawrence incorporate the family’s intervention, largely in Jessie’s own words. The outburst in his 1911 letter, the omissions in the second and third drafts, and his final compliance with Jessie’s version vividly convey how unstable was Lawrence’s interpretation of a critical moment in his early life. Can his memory have been faulty? That is unlikely—he would surely not have forgotten such a painful and humiliating experience. What is at issue is the deeper, less clear-cut question of how he interpreted their relationship. Jessie complained several times that he pre-dated tensions and self-consciousness between them, effectively denying that a critical change occurred in 1906. It was essential to her understanding of what had happened that their mutual harmony had been disrupted by outside forces. Lawrence clearly resisted this interpretation, even after he had incorporated the Easter Monday episode into the final draft. For example, in her memoir Jessie recalls a holiday on the Lincolnshire coast, in the August of that same year, when ‘some dark power seemed to take possession of Lawrence. … In some way I was to blame’ (ET 127). This is clearly the biographical basis of the episode at the end of Chapter 7 when Paul is unable to kiss Miriam because ‘[t]he fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into a shame’ and ‘[h]e hated her, for she seemed, in some way, to make him despise himself ’ (SL 216). In the novel this occurs two chapters before the Easter Monday episode. A plausible explanation of this is that he was trying to understand what had happened between him and Jessie and was reluctant to attribute the failure to external causes—even though, in his letter a year earlier, he had seemed to agree with that interpretation. He wanted to understand what had attracted him to Jessie, and why the very reasons for that attraction, the very kind of need that he had for her companionship, made mutual fulfilment ultimately impossible. One hitherto unconsidered possibility, which I shall return to in a later chapter, is that Lawrence made up his family’s explicit intervention in an attempt to spare Jessie’s feelings.

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By the time Lawrence made his declaration that he did not love Jessie, he paradoxically had a new reason for needing her in his life: he had begun writing, and from the start he took his writing seriously, so that it soon became the chief focus of his life. For years Jessie was the most important, initially the only, reader of his work. This was an important factor in the peculiar tension and conflict that, according to Jessie, ensued on the crisis of Easter 1906. Unless we consider Sons and Lovers itself to be such a document, A Personal Record is the only document of her relationship with Lawrence in those years. There is no reason to question the truthfulness of her account of how she experienced the relationship. However, we should keep in mind that she had carefully read, and been deeply wounded by, the third draft of Sons and Lovers, and that her narration of incidents that are echoed in the novel might be influenced by that echo. In other words, we should be cautious about treating Jessie’s memoir as uncomplicatedly a primary source. Her account is that, although they still enjoyed times of wonderful harmony after 1906, Lawrence became critical of her. It is to this period that she assigns his objection, familiar from Sons and Lovers, to such habits as touching flowers and hugging her little brother, telling her that she must ‘cultivate detachment’ (ET 125). He began to tell her that he was not one man but two, divided between the spiritual and physical, and that only the spiritual man could love her (ET 136). According to her account he seems to have swung violently between this attribution of their impasse to a division in his own nature, and accusing her of abnormality, telling her that she was ‘intense and introspective’ like Emily Brontë (130), that she had no sense of humour (ET 132) and even, cruelly and absurdly, that she was ‘absolutely lacking in sexual attraction’ (ET 133). As we have seen, Jessie correctly dates to the summer immediately following the crisis Lawrence’s ‘possessed’ behaviour on the beach at Mablethorpe (this was the first year in which they took a seaside holiday), and his locating this before the Easter Monday

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scene in Sons and Lovers is a sign of dissent from her interpretation of their emotional impasse. While there is no reason to doubt that Easter Monday was a significant event for both of them, Jessie’s own account of the extreme change in Lawrence’s behaviour brings into question her attribution of a single external cause. John Worthen argues that Lawrence, under his mother’s influence, had cultivated emotional detachment, and that, perhaps partly under the same influence, the overt signs of sexual awareness were in him unusually delayed. If the late awakening of sexual feelings made him painfully aware that he did not love Jessie ‘as a husband should love his wife’ it is unsurprising that he should veer between the recognition that he was incapable of falling in love (L1 58, 66) and the avoidance of that devastating conclusion by projecting the failure on to something wanting in her. It may be that, in the long term, Jessie would not have been a suitable partner for Lawrence—that she would not, as he later thought, have provided enough resistance to him— but it is important to separate this from the question whether it was strange and symptomatic for him not to be in love with her at the age of twenty. If he could not love her whom could he love? But he needed her for his writing, and for everything that his writing inchoately represented at this time—the possibility that he might become something other than a solid bourgeois citizen. It was some time in 1905 that he asked Jessie, ‘Have you ever thought of writing?’ and urged that they both should ‘make a start’. Soon afterwards, ‘with his eyes alight’, he said to her, ‘It will be poetry.’ He added bitterly, ‘But what will the others say? That I’m a fool. A collier’s son a poet!’ (ET 57). Jessie thought that an irrelevant consideration, but John Worthen argues that the barriers to someone of Lawrence’s background fulfilling himself as a writer were serious. One could write sententious sentimental poetry such as his mother wrote (EY 128–29), or one could be a journalistic writer like the local intellectual Willie Hopkin who published essays and poetry in the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser. But to be what Worthen calls a ‘professional “artistic” writer’ was ‘as alien

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to the mentality and concerns of the colliery village as if it had descended from Mars’ (EY 131). As we shall see, Lawrence’s class presented dilemmas as to how he should write, that weren’t resolved until Sons and Lovers itself. The ‘others’ included his own family, and not just his father. From the start he passed all his writing to Jessie—poems at first, but soon also the first draft of The White Peacock, ‘secretly’. Jessie’s inability to understand the problem of a collier’s son being a poet was an aspect of her originality, and an immeasurable blessing to the nascent writer. She was an audience that accepted his writing as the natural expression of his being. In A Personal Record Jessie gives a tart and judicious account of her response to the first version of The White Peacock, in which the heroine becomes pregnant by the colliery owner’s son Leslie but marries the worthy poor farmer George and goes mad before appreciating George’s merit and settling happily with him in Canada. Only a fragment of it survives, but it sounds like a melodramatic and sentimentalised version of Far From the Madding Crowd—Hardy being an obvious model for a young writer trying to fictionalise the world that Lawrence knew. In its first two drafts, written between 1906 and 1908, The White Peacock was called ‘Laetitia’. The very name seems symptomatic of Lawrence’s struggles with class and the idea of the literary (it is a more bourgeois version of Lettice, the first name of his sister Ada). Jessie writes that she thought the novel ‘story-bookish and unreal’, though ‘in spite of its sentimentality, a thread of genuine romance ran through the story.’ This is tellingly similar to her criticism of the 1911 ‘Paul Morel’, which she also called ‘story-bookish’ (ET 116, 191). In that case she told Lawrence what she thought. By 1911, painful experience had forced her to develop some detachment from him. In the case of 1906 and The White Peacock, even if she correctly recalled her initial judgement, it is unlikely that she voiced it. At the end of his life Lawrence recalled, ‘She thought it all wonderful—else, probably, [I] would never have written.’6 Lawrence’s later accounts of his youth need to be approached sceptically, but in this case he

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is probably more accurate than Jessie. His friend George Neville reports that his family and all his other friends were at best discouraging and at worst contemptuous of his writing.7 By the time he began writing Lawrence was the centre of quite a large group of friends whom Neville calls ‘The Pagans’. Jessie’s position in this group was uncomfortable, because it was clear to the others that she sought an exclusive relationship with Lawrence. But Neville acknowledges that she alone ‘did anything at all to encourage Lawrence in his writings’.8 It is doubtful whether Lawrence would have been encouraged by the kind of criticism Jessie makes in A Personal Record, even if she had been capable of it at the age of twenty. Lawrence is probably also right in saying that he would not have persevered without Jessie’s approval. A little later, in 1908, he sent some of his work to G.K. Chesterton for comment. After ‘some weeks or even months’ the author’s wife wrote back saying that he was unable to give an opinion owing to pressure of work. Lawrence’s response was, ‘I’ve tried, and been turned down, and I shall try no more’ (ET 155–56). He is unlikely to have persevered if, at a still earlier stage, his most intimate friend had told him his work was sentimental and story-bookish (Figure 4). Pace Neville, there was at least one more member of the ‘Pagans’ who had some interest in Lawrence’s writings. He had met Louie Burrows at the Pupil Teacher Centre in Ilkeston, which he attended from 1904 to 1905. He was close to Louie for many years, and in 1910, when his mother lay dying and he had rejected Jessie, he would ask her to marry him. At that time, he described her as ‘“my girl” in Coll’, in other words, between 1906 and 1908; he wrote to her frequently in those years and later, letters which are affectionate and occasionally flirtatious, and he described her as ‘a girl I am very fond of ’, but the letters don’t suggest a deeper or more intimate connection. In Jessie’s possibly prejudiced recollection he described her as someone he could marry ‘from the purely animal side’ (L1 193, 68; ET 140). In 1907, he wrote three stories on set themes for a competition in the Nottinghamshire Guardian. Because one

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person could not win more than one prize he persuaded Louie and Jessie to enter two of the stories under their own names. The story entered by Jessie, ‘A Prelude’, was the winner in its section. This might seem to contradict the idea that Lawrence was sensitive and secretive about his writing, cocooning himself in Jessie’s loving encouragement. However, Jessie herself describes this project as ‘a plan for raising a little money’, and he told Louie it was ‘just for fun’ (ET 113; L1 38). Later in her memoir Jessie says they first talked about the publication of his work in the spring of 1908, implying that the prize story didn’t count (ET 155). She calls ‘A Prelude’ ‘a sentimental little story’ and John Worthen is harsher still, describing it as ‘intensely literary’. The theme of the story is similar to that of The White Peacock, the Hardyesque theme of the poor man and the socially superior woman. It is certainly rather sentimental but, pace Worthen, it is considerably better written than the surviving pages of ‘Laetitia’: metaphorical language, the most blatant sign of the ‘literary’ in early Lawrence, is almost entirely absent and the working-class dialogue is convincingly done. There are even moments of subtle insight that anticipate Sons and Lovers. For example, when a son tells his mother he is glad to see her, ‘She took a bite of bread and butter, and looked up with a quaint, comical glance, as if she were given only her just dues, but for all that it pleased and amused her, only she was half shy, and a grain doubtful’ (LAH 7). Could it be that, when the strain of literary ambition was relaxed, and he was writing with a distinct aim and audience in mind, he was already able to produce a plainer, more genuine prose? There is, admittedly, no evidence that Lawrence valued this story. Unlike the other two that he wrote for the competition (which eventually became ‘The White Stocking’ and ‘A Fragment of Stained Glass’ in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories), he never revised it for publication, though this may be because it had been published under Jessie’s name. He later said of it, ‘thank God that has gone to glory in the absolute sense’ (L5 86).

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Lawrence wrote four drafts of his novel before submitting it for publication in 1910. On the evidence of what remains of ‘Laetitia’ he improved it immeasurably both in style and in its treatment of the central relationship between Lettie and George. In the final text Lettie has an unfulfilling marriage with the colliery owner’s son and George degenerates into alcoholism. Yet The White Peacock is a strangely unsatisfactory and depressing book, and not only because of the fates of the central characters. Jessie perceptively described it as ‘a subtle study in self-portraiture’, with both Lettie and the narrator Cyril ‘aspects of Lawrence’ (ET 118). Cyril is one of the most unsatisfactory yet revealingly symptomatic aspects of the book. Lawrence referred to Cyril in letters as ‘myself ’, yet he is an insipid version of his creator, with none of the vitality of Paul Morel. He resembles other early selfportraits such as Cyril Mersham in ‘A Modern Lover’ and Cecil Byrne in The Trespasser. The very names seem symptomatic, full of sibilants and liquids, names with no backbone as it were, as different as possible from ‘Bert’. These Cecils and Cyrils are less obnoxious versions of Cecil Vyse, the sexless aesthete in A Room With a View, published in the year Lawrence began his third draft. These characters are, in John Worthen’s words, ‘deprived of all context’ and ‘incapable of relationship, except with inanimate nature and (above all) with words’ (EY 148). Cyril significantly has no job, one indicator among many of the fact that Lawrence has transplanted himself into a bourgeois environment. He lives with his mother and sister in a ‘low red house’ in the woods, a house with a ‘dining room’, ‘drawing room’ and ‘study’, not the parlour and kitchen of a miner’s home. From one point of view this is necessary to the plot, since Lettie, the socially superior heroine, is Cyril’s sister. But it also means that Lawrence is dealing with the problem of being a working-class writer by evading it. He also evades another, equally important aspect of his family life. Cyril’s father is a drunkard who has abandoned his family and appears in the fourth chapter of the novel only to die.

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Cyril is living the fantasy that Paul sketches for his mother, ‘we’ll have a pretty house, you and me, and a servant, and it’ll be just all right’ (SL 286). There is in The White Peacock a version of the Paul–Miriam relationship but, like the characterisation of Cyril himself, it is insipid and evasive. When he began the novel Lawrence told Jessie that he would follow George Eliot’s plan of basing the novel on ‘two relationships’, but Cyril and Emily rarely engage the reader as does the tragic story of George and Lettie. There are moments that anticipate the tension of Sons and Lovers, as when Emily wears berries in her hair and Cyril complains, ‘Not Chloë, not Bacchante. You have always got your soul in your eyes, such an earnest, troublesome soul’ (WP 69; cf. SL 226); or when she speaks to a child ‘with a voice that made one shrink from its unbridled emotion of caress’ (WP 187; cf. SL 184). There are more severe criticisms of Emily in the manuscript, and the Cambridge editor suggests that Lawrence may have deleted these to spare Jessie’s feelings (WP xxiv). This may partly account for a lack of emotional logic or narrative momentum in their relationship. Towards the end a chapter closes with Cyril kissing Emily; forty pages later, with no intervening development, he learns that she is engaged to another man (WP 268; 307). Lawrence could clearly not even begin, at this stage, to give meaningful narrative form to his relationship with Jessie. This is partly because, when he was writing The White Peacock, it had still not run its course. He completed the novel in November 1909; it was in the following month that, for the first time in eight years, like Paul with Miriam, ‘He courted her … like a lover’ (SL 328) and the most painful phase of their relationship began. In 1908 Lawrence finished his college course. He had been disillusioned by the university, missing the sense of intellectual exploration that he had expected to find there, and feeling that the lecturers mostly treated the students as schoolchildren. Ironically, one of the few professors that he respected was Ernest Weekley,

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whose wife he was later to steal. His disillusionment meant that he lacked the motivation to complete a degree course, which would have qualified him to teach in a secondary school, and he was qualified only as an elementary teacher. Unable to find a job with a satisfactory salary locally, he accepted one in Croydon, near London. For the man who had scarcely spent a night under a different roof from his mother this was a traumatic but necessary break. It was also a break with the Haggs, which he may have felt even more keenly. Although he was to return there in the holidays till the family left the farm in 1910, the regular intimacy was at an end. Jessie recalls her parting with him: ‘La dernière fois,’ he said, inclining his head towards the farm and the wood. I burst into tears, and he put his arms round me. He kissed me and stroked my cheek, murmuring: ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry.’ (ET 150) What did Lawrence mean by this? By ‘inclining his head towards the farm and the wood’ he seems to be indicating that his relationship, or a phase of it, with the place itself has come to an end. He then makes a very uncharacteristic display of physical affection to Jessie, and the focus clearly changes to their relationship. Is he sorry because he is going away and will be seeing less of her, or because he has failed to be to her what she wanted him to be? It is not the last time Lawrence will make an ambiguous apology to Jessie. There is also a hint of affectation and self-dramatisation in his use of French. For a man who frequently complained that Jessie was excessively emotional, he seems to be provoking an emotional scene—it is not surprising that she bursts into tears at this point. John Worthen has argued that a crucial aspect of Lawrence’s self-conception as an artist at this stage of his life, and a reason for the weakness of characters such as Cyril Beardsall, is that he was a detached observer, incapable of emotional surrender. There is more than a hint of conscious

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scene-making in Jessie’s account of the farewell (it could of course be on her part, since we are reliant on her as narrator, but this seems less likely).

4 Lawrence in 1908

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In actuality, although the wonderful flow of sympathy between Lawrence and the whole family was never to be recaptured, there was no essential change in his relationship with Jessie. In so far as, at this time, it was centred on their shared devotion to his writing, it continued as before. He regularly sent her poems, as well as the third draft of The White Peacock, now called ‘Nethermere’, which he began in Croydon. In the summer of 1909 she took the single most important practical action in launching his literary career. The previous year Ford Madox Hueffer, later Ford Madox Ford, had founded a new magazine, the English Review. The contents of its first issue were astonishing, with contributions by Tolstoy, James, Hardy, Conrad, Wells, Galsworthy and W.H. Hudson. It is a mark of the Chambers family’s literary culture that, on Lawrence’s recommendation, they clubbed together to subscribe and, in Jessie’s words, ‘The coming of the English Review into our lives was an event, one of the few really first-rate things that happen now and again in a lifetime’ (ET 156). It is also a mark of her extraordinary belief in his genius that she thought a young writer who could only boast a story published under someone else’s name in a local paper could hope to appear alongside such great names. Lawrence’s own account of this event is famous: ‘the girl who had been the chief friend of my youth … copied out some of my poems, and without telling me sent them to the “English Review” … The girl had launched me, so easily, on my literary career, like a princess cutting a thread, launching a ship’ (LEA 178). Lawrence’s gracious simile led to Jessie being, rather incongruously, called the Princess in memoirs by Helen Corke and George Neville. More seriously, Lawrence disguises the fact that, although he had been unwilling to expose himself in this way, he knew what Jessie was doing. Hueffer’s account of his first response to Lawrence’s work is also somewhat mythologised. He recalled that Jessie sent the first version of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ together with the poems, and that, while his response to the poems was lukewarm, the very title of the story was enough to convince him that its author had

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‘character, the courage of his convictions, a power of observation’. The first few sentences were enough, he writes, for him to decide to publish it: The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. (PO 181) Hueffer was impressed by the specificity and detail, especially the registering of the train’s speed by the comparison with the horse, and by the imaginative precision of ‘loud threats of speed’ and ‘gorse still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon’ (Nehls 1 108–09). He was convinced that ‘this man knows’. Knows how to compose an arresting opening of a story, but also, and equally important for Hueffer, knows ‘how what we used to call “the other half ” … lives.’ He was looking for a first-rate writer from the working class, and in Lawrence he had found the genuine article. In fact, Lawrence did not write ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ until after he had met Hueffer and the latter had accepted some of his poems, but Hueffer’s inaccuracy, deliberate or not, is forgivable, since this is undoubtedly Lawrence’s most accomplished piece of writing to date. The story as a whole was much rewritten before it reached the form in which it is known, collected in The Prussian Officer five years later; but the opening was hardly changed (at least from the second draft in early 1910, the earliest to survive) and it has the authority of Lawrence’s mature work. Hueffer’s immediate identification of Lawrence as a working-class genius, however, was to be a cause of tension for the young writer. ‘A collier’s son a poet’ did not after all prove to be a barrier to acceptance, quite the contrary, but it was the cause of preconceptions about the kind of writer Lawrence would turn out to be.

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His competition stories ‘A Prelude’ and ‘The White Stocking’ (an undeveloped early version of the story collected in The Prussian Officer) were set among working people, but ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ was his first direct portrayal of the life he knew most intimately, the domestic life of coal miners. If he wrote this story in response to Hueffer’s expectations, the upper-middle-class metropolitan editor can also claim credit for the first germ of Sons and Lovers, because at the same time Lawrence wrote his first play, A Collier’s Friday Night. This play is set in a miner’s kitchen, with a cast of characters who are prototypes of the Morel family, Miriam and Beatrice Wyld, and centres on the son burning the bread that his mother has left to bake, because he is distracted by his female visitors, and her consequent display of hostility to Maggie, the ‘Miriam’ character. A version of this incident occurs in every surviving draft of Sons and Lovers. It was clearly central to Lawrence’s biographical project, but as we have already seen his interpretation of key events was constantly changing. In broad outline A Collier’s Friday Night covers the same incidents as the second half of Chapter 8 of Sons and Lovers (‘Strife in Love’). The father returns home from work and meets his butty-mates to divide up the week’s earnings. The mother is disappointed by the amount he gives her to run the home. He goes to the pub and she goes out to market, leaving her son (Ernest in the play) to supervise the baking. Maggie, the character based on Jessie, arrives, they discuss his poetry (designs in the novel) and her French diary, and he reads Baudelaire to her. Beatrice Wyld arrives, taunts Maggie about his other female friends and draws out of him a lightness and gaiety that contrast with the tone of his talk with Maggie. Distracted more by Beatrice than by Maggie, he forgets about the bread, which burns. He accompanies Maggie part of the way home and, on return, has a near-violent confrontation with his drunken father and a painful scene with his mother in which she reproves him for burning the bread and complains about the amount of time he spends with Maggie. The concluding dialogue is followed by a stage direction—‘There is in

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their tones a dangerous gentleness’—which makes it clear that this emotional crux was already central to Lawrence’s conception. In its structure A Collier’s Friday Night is actually closer to the final text of Sons and Lovers than the earliest surviving draft of the novel—written nearly two years later—which has the scene between Paul and his mother but no bread-burning or confrontation between father and son. However, although the play is dramatically very effective—enough for it to have been performed successfully at the Royal Court at the peak of Lawrence’s theatrical revival in 1968 (astonishingly, given the date and circumstances of its composition)—Lawrence’s interpretation of the material is as yet very tentative. The mother’s hostility to Maggie is strongly emphasised, but its prominence is mitigated by being shared with Ernest’s sister, and though the ‘dangerous gentleness’ and ‘abnormal emotion and proximity’ between mother and son are emphasised in the stage directions these are not dramatised as boldly as they are in the novel (‘He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat’ SL 252). The mother complains that Ernest is neglecting her in favour of Maggie but she doesn’t say she has never had a husband, as she does in Sons and Lovers. There is little sense that Ernest’s sexuality has been affected by his relationship with his mother. The tension between him and Maggie focuses on her solemnity, and Beatrice Wyld is merely a malicious gossip: her flirtation with Ernest doesn’t take the physical form that it does in Sons and Lovers and there is no occasion for Maggie to wonder, as Miriam does, why she might not push his hair back and remove the marks of Beatrice’s comb (SL 246). In the play as in the novel Ernest reads Baudelaire’s ‘Le Balcon’ to Maggie, but we are merely told that he reads ‘in tolerably bad French, but with some genuine feeling’ (Plays 1 33), whereas Paul Morel’s voice ‘was soft and caressing, but growing almost brutal … lifting his lips and showing his teeth, passionately and bitterly’ (SL 248). This difference is not surprising, given that the humiliating climax of his affair with Jessie was yet to take place when he wrote the play.

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If Lawrence was still struggling to represent the most intimate aspects of his theme, A Collier’s Friday Night is a real breakthrough in the portrayal of working-class domesticity, even more than ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: in the story, as in The White Peacock, the drunken father is killed off, but here we see him in all his unruly bitterness and resentment. By combining the ‘dangerous’ intimacy of mother and son with the bread-burning and confrontation with the father Lawrence created a thematically resonant nexus that he wasn’t to return to till at least the third draft of Sons and Lovers. Equally important is Lawrence’s command of contrasting idiom in the dialogue of the play. He is able to portray the drama of conflicting social aspirations purely through his characters’ manner of speech. Ernest Lambert: I say Mater, another seven and six up your sleeve. Mother: I’m sure! And in the middle of the term too. What’s it for this time? Ernest Lambert: Piers the Ploughman, that piffle, and two books of Horace: Quintus Horatius Flaccius, dear old chap … I’m sure I don’t know what we wanted that Piers Ploughman for, it’s sheer rot, and old Beasley could have gassed on it without making us buy it, if he’d liked … Father: I should non get ’em then. You nedna buy ’em unless you like—dunna get ’em then. (Plays 1 15) Ernest speaks as if he is trying to pass as a public schoolboy. Although the father is portrayed as drunk and malevolent for most of the play, his dialect speech, convincingly sustained throughout, is a contrasting marker of authenticity. As, in a different way, is that of the mother who, in a more educated register, also speaks in a direct and unpretentious manner.

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At about the time Lawrence was writing this play, Jessie visited him in London, and was invited with him to lunch by Hueffer’s partner and later wife, Violet Hunt. Ezra Pound was there, and startled Jessie by asking Hueffer how he would speak to a working man. Hueffer answered that he would speak exactly as he would to anyone else. Jessie felt ‘aglow inside’ because she believed he was sincere, and the ‘genial warmth’ of his personality made a strong impression on her (ET 174–75). Yet this was a company, and a world, that was acutely conscious of the unfamiliarity and difference of the working class—‘Central Africa and its tribes were better known’, Hueffer wrote, and he had felt ‘trepidation’ at the prospect of meeting ‘the son of a working coal-miner’. Despite his later affirmation to Pound, he wondered ‘how exactly was I to approach him in conversation?’ (Nehls 1 109–10). Violet Hunt, like Hueffer, was kind and courteous to her unfamiliar guests, but nevertheless noted that Jessie asked the maid whether she should keep her gloves on when eating (Nehls 1 127). The middle-class poet Rachel Annand Taylor recalled that Lawrence ‘was a terrific snob, he was definitely a cad, yet in this early period he was touching, he was so artlessly trying to find his way’ (Nehls 1 137). Another London acquaintance, Grace Crawford, described him as ‘a very “everyday young man”, with a small drooping moustache, carefully brushed hair and heavy clumpy boots’, making him sound like Leonard Bast in Howards End (EY 231). Leonard also has a ‘drooping moustache’.9 Note how the ‘carefully brushed hair’ serves as a marker of class even though, presumably, Lawrence’s hair was no more carefully brushed than that of more privileged young men. The author of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and A Collier’s Friday Night did not respond to this milieu by being assertively proletarian. Here is a sample of how he wrote to Grace Crawford: ‘It is a shame to break the moment from its stalk, to wither in the vase of memory, by thanking you’ (L1 146). This was not merely a symptom of his encounter with the London literary world. He

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had been writing in a similarly affected style to Blanche Jennings, whom he had met through his Eastwood friend Alice Dax (part model for Clara Dawes) since April 1908. This, then, is how Lawrence stood towards the end of 1909, in his twenty-fifth year. He had, in A Collier’s Friday Night, dramatised the central theme of Sons and Lovers, and in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ he had written an impressive first draft of one of his greatest stories. He had completed The White Peacock. But his direction as a writer was still very uncertain, and he wavered between satisfying Hueffer’s appetite for authentic proletarian fiction and acting up to a naive conception of bourgeois literary manners. The final, artistically triumphant draft of Sons and Lovers was still three years away. He had not even lived through the culminating experiences—the dénouement of his relationship with Jessie and the death of his mother—that would shape the narrative of the novel. He (and those who loved him) would have to endure more than two years of grief, guilt, emotional confusion and nearly fatal illness before he would reach his first maturity as a writer.

2

‘The Saga of Siegmund’ and the Test on Lawrence, 1909–1910

W

hen Jessie visited Lawrence in London in November 1909 he introduced her to a woman he had ‘almost decided to marry’ (ET 164). This was Agnes Holt, a fellow-teacher two years older than him. Jessie thought Agnes ‘talked to Lawrence rather like an elder sister, and there was about him a curious air of bravado that [Jessie] always felt arose from lack of conviction’ (ET 168). The night before this meeting Lawrence gave Jessie the manuscript of A Collier’s Friday Night and talked ‘very earnestly’ to her till two in the morning. He asked her what she hoped for in life, which reduced her to tears, and told her that he found the strain of life alone in London so hard to bear that he might ‘peg out’. He couldn’t afford to marry, so had decided to ‘ask some girl if she will give me … that … without marriage.’ Did Jessie think that any girl would? She answered that she thought Lawrence wouldn’t like the kind of girl who ‘would’. Then he asked her if she thought it wrong. Jessie answered with her habitual honesty: ‘No, I wouldn’t think it wrong. But all the girls I know would.’ ‘But you wouldn’t?’ he insisted. 33

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Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel ‘Not wrong. But it would be very difficult.’ He seemed to hang upon my words. (ET 167)

This is one of many extraordinary exchanges that are recorded between Lawrence and Jessie. He had told her that he had no sexual feeling for her, that she was completely lacking in sexual attraction, that she was a nun who could play no part in physical love, yet he seemed to care what she thought and felt about this pressing question. If one read this exchange without any knowledge of its context one would think it was the prelude to a proposition to Jessie. But no. Lawrence went on: ‘Well, I think I shall ask her. Do you think she would?’ Jessie’s searingly self-revealing answer was, ‘It depends how much she is in love with you’ (ET 167–68). In one of his affected letters to Blanche Jennings Lawrence wrote, I have got a new girl down here: you know my kind, a girl to whom I gas. She is very nice, and takes me seriously: which is unwisdom. I do not believe in love: mon Dieu, I don’t, not for me: I never could believe in anything I cannot experience or, which is equivalent ‘imagine’. I can’t help it: the game begins, and I play it, and the girl plays it, and—what matter what the end is! (L1 141) It is hard to see Agnes through the mirrors of Lawrence’s narcissistic prose here. She ‘takes [him] seriously’ but, when it comes to love, she ‘plays’. Was she ever a party to the possibility that they might marry? She played a part in Lawrence’s writing life, making clean copies of some of his poems and sections of The White Peacock. And, some time before Christmas, he probably did ‘ask her’. Her likely response may be judged from a letter that he wrote to Blanche Jennings in January: ‘She’s so utterly ignorant and old-fashioned … A man is—or was—a more or less interesting creature, with whom one could play about with smart and silly speech—no more—not

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an animal—mon dieu, no!—I have enlightened her, and now she has no courage’ (L1 153). Evidently Agnes was not, according to Jessie’s criterion, sufficiently in love with him. Alternatively, it may have been obvious to her that he did not ‘believe in love’. He remained on friendly terms with her and, when she married in 1911, made two copies of paintings for her, including Maurice Greiffenhagen’s An Idyll, whose representation of a half-reluctant, half-yielding woman in the arms of a satyr-like man preoccupied Lawrence at this time and featured prominently in The White Peacock. But Lawrence did know someone who was, almost by her own admission, in love with him enough to submit to his sexual demands. In A Personal Record Jessie neither confirms nor denies the biographical truth underlying the ‘Test on Miriam’ chapter of Sons and Lovers. She merely writes that at Christmas he told her that ‘he had been mistaken all these years, that he must have loved me all along without knowing it’ (ET 180). In an earlier draft, which the French scholar Émile Delavenay saw and made notes on, she was more explicit. According to Delavenay, Lawrence told Jessie that their long association was a preparation for ‘une intimité d’amour’, which came as a shock to Jessie, ‘yet at the same time inevitable’. They could not marry, or even, in Lawrence’s opinion, be openly engaged, but ‘pourquoi attendre? Ils ne respectent pas la loi, ils se feront une loi à eux’. Marriage would only be necessary if Jessie became pregnant (ED 702). In considering what followed, and its refraction in Sons and Lovers, we should bear in mind that if Jessie had become pregnant, if she had married, or if her new relation to Lawrence had become known, she would have lost her teaching post. We should also bear in mind that, even at this stage, Jessie ominously ‘heard the old forced note, the need to convince himself ’ (ET 180). Given the history of their relationship Lawrence’s proposal is unlikely to have had a happy outcome even in the most propitious of circumstances. The chances were made even worse by a

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new development in which his writing and sexual lives were characteristically entwined. Early in 1909 he had met Helen Corke, a teacher who lived in Croydon but worked at a different school. Like many other people Helen was impressed by the quality of his attention: ‘for a moment his interest is focused on me with a peculiar awareness: it is as though he were isolating me from all present’ (IOI 160). She described him as a ‘Wunderkind’, suggesting that she was stuck by both his genius and his youthfulness (IOI 174). She was three years older than him. It is unlikely that she thought of him at this time as a potential lover. Her later memoirs make it clear that she was largely, if not predominantly, attracted to women, and in so far as she was heterosexual she was preoccupied with another man, Herbert Macartney, a professional musician and her violin teacher. Macartney was unhappily married. Their professional relationship had over the years developed into a friendship and more recently into a passionate love on Macartney’s part and something more ambiguous, though compelling, on hers. Helen was born in Hastings where her father Alfred had a grocery store. Alfred was a romantic idealist with literary and intellectual interests. He focused his romantic idealism on his wife Louisa but by the time Helen was born, in her own words, he had discovered that ‘the woman to whom he had called did not exist’ (IOI 7). Throughout her autobiography Helen writes about her mother in a disdainful tone typified by her introduction: ‘Drama, or indeed melodrama, for which she had a strong instinct, she found in plenty; it was her absorption. She had no intellectual preoccupations, and accepted without question the religion, logic, social values and moral standards of her circle’ (IOI 3). Helen felt a much stronger sympathy and sense of kinship with her father, whose romantic idealism she acknowledged that she inherited, while recognising his limitations. She was thus, like Lawrence, born into a not very happy marriage, and was much closer to the parent of the opposite sex. Unlike Lydia Lawrence, however, Alfred

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Corke accepted his partner’s limitations and was determined, in his daughter’s words, that Louisa ‘should never suffer’ on account of his disappointment in her. There was in the Corke household none of the overt and sometimes violent conflict that Lawrence grew up with, but Helen’s parents, like Jessie’s, did not provide her with an example of happiness resulting from sexual love. In her childhood her closest companion was her cousin Evelyn. Even when they were adolescents, a difference between them was evident: ‘Evelyn associates ideas of love, marriage and babies with her boy friends. Love, as I imagine it, belongs to romance—to the fine, remote lovers of the book world’ (IOI 86). When they grew up, and Evelyn’s ideas of love, marriage and babies became a reality, this difference developed into a barrier; Helen no longer felt that they had anything in common. She remained fond of Evelyn, however, and was shocked when her cousin’s fourth pregnancy ended in her death. Her response is revealing of the intensity of her feelings on the subject of sex and marriage: Her husband’s lust has cut short the life she entrusted to him … He is guilty of a kind of manslaughter more detestable than that of the jailed criminal who has killed in a moment of desperation. (IOI 168) Throughout both Helen’s autobiography and her autobiographical novel Neutral Ground a dominant theme is literature as a resource for creating an idealised inner world to escape from material existence. The life of genteel poverty that she knew, especially after her father’s business failed and he had to eke out a living as an insurance salesman, offered few pleasures either of the senses or of the imagination. As we have seen, unlike her cousin she did not dream of a real-life lover and husband as a way out of this existence. She became a teacher, but she got little fulfilment out of her work. She regarded it as a life of ‘routine’, ‘a time-table existence’ whose only recommendation was the long holidays. What,

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she asked herself, was her life ‘on the other plane—that of the spirit and the imagination?’ I decide that only therein is the way of escape from one’s objective limitations. One builds one’s palace of art, one gazes into the magic mirror. Reality and romance are separate, two distinct, if parallel, phases of existence. (IOI 135–36) The phrase ‘palace of art’ is an allusion to Tennyson’s poem of that title, in which the speaker’s soul withdraws into a world of art, only to sicken from isolation, stagnation and ‘shameful sloth’. The ‘magic mirror’ similarly alludes to the same poet’s ‘The Lady of Shallott’, who turns away from the real world to the ‘mirror’s magic sights’ but also becomes ‘half sick of shadows’. Her allusions to Tennyson in her autobiography are one example—we will see more later—of how objective she was capable of being, in later years, about her younger self. In her autobiography the statement that ‘Reality and romance are separate, two distinct, if parallel phases of existence’ is followed with ‘But presently I am to see a figure who would appear to identify the two planes.’ This was Macartney, whose work at the Gaiety Theatre playing trivial musical comedies, and teaching private pupils, was relieved by annual engagements at Covent Garden. He was some ten years older than Helen, married with four children. Her account of his marriage, and of his wife’s character, is unlikely to be impartial, but it is the only one we have: it had been ‘a romantic, runaway marriage’ at the age of seventeen, ‘from which the romantic flavour had long evaporated’, his wife was ‘slovenly, an inept housekeeper’, and the children were undisciplined (IOI 148). Macartney had aspired to be a solo violinist, but the demands of family life made this impossible. He is another example of the snares of sexual passion, the delusiveness of its promise of ‘romance’, and the threat that it poses to the life of the spirit.

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Helen became Macartney’s pupil in 1905, when she was twentythree years old and he in his mid-thirties. Her first responses to him clearly involve an element of physical attraction: I look at him less casually, and see the finely balanced proportions of his body, limbs and head. He is tall, but not too tall, his thick, dark hair is shapely, and brushed back from a high forehead; his eyes are dark blue and longlashed … (IOI 145) This is an aestheticized response, but does not seem to be that of someone entirely lacking in heterosexual feeling. In Neutral Ground Corke asserts of her heroine, ‘Nothing of physical desire entered into her feeling for him’ yet ‘she admitted that she loved him’ (NG 123). She certainly successfully persuaded herself that her feelings for him belonged to the spiritual plane—the plane that, as we have seen, her temperament and experience had led her to think of as opposed to physical love. When her mother expressed concerns about the relationship, ‘hinting at dishonour’, she was outraged: Dishonour? What is dishonour? It is a lowering of standards. This intimacy of ours—it does not degrade. It brings to us both an enhanced quality of life … I do not want to marry him. Indeed, I am glad that the bounds of our association are defined by the fact of his marriage. (IOI 147) She later recognised that, ‘Out of [the] new energy’ that the relationship had given her, she ‘made an image’ of Macartney, ‘which she clothed in the finery of romantic idealism’ (NG 122). Her love of literature was absolutely central to this way of feeling, in marked contrast to the equally literary Jessie Chambers, who as we have seen did not believe in the separation of the physical and the spiritual. Helen writes in Neutral Ground:

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This isn’t a view of literature that we associate with D.H. Lawrence, but it was not completely alien to him when he first met Helen in 1909. At Christmas 1908 Helen’s relations with Macartney reached a crisis: he takes me in his arms and pulls me to the settee … I know that the sex impulse—which I think of as ‘the beast’ in him—has broken loose. Against it I pit every volt of my energy, which is reinforced by anger. There is a physical struggle lasting two or three minutes … It seems as if there is silence everywhere. When he speaks it is to say: ‘That is the end. You think I am a beast! So I am and I can’t help it!’ (IOI 162) A semi-estrangement followed, in which he continued to give her lessons, but their intimacy was suppressed. But this could not last, and Helen was conscious that ‘what is for me the supreme joy of friendship in association imposes on H.B.M. an exhausting degree of physical control’ (IOI 165–66). The following summer he asked her to spend a few days’ holiday with him and she agreed, though by now she was regarded with hostile suspicion by his family. In

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Neutral Ground, when the Macartney character tries to withdraw from the holiday because he can’t afford it, Ellis enthusiastically and assertively insists on paying for it herself. It isn’t clear whether, by agreeing to the holiday, Helen was consenting to the physical consummation of their relationship. Her own account of their five days on the Isle of Wight makes no explicit mention either of a sexual relationship or of sexual tension. However, it is at least possible if not likely that they made love during this time. In the first version of the fiction that Lawrence subsequently made out of her experience, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, this is made as explicit as possible, and Helen did not object. When he returned home, whether because of the contrast between his time with Helen and his bleak family life, or because the holiday had convinced him that sexual fulfilment with Helen was impossible, Macartney hanged himself. By coincidence, Lawrence went on holiday to the Isle of Wight, with his family and friends, at exactly the same time as Helen and Macartney. Not knowing whom she was going to meet he suggested that they travel together—an offer that she politely declined. Later, when he learned of Macartney’s suicide and Helen’s consequent depression, he devoted himself with great sensitivity to trying to bring her back to life: ‘At first I am only aware of his unobtrusive sympathy, then of a tentative endeavour to re-awaken my interest in literature and art, as related to personal experience’ (IOI 174). He almost certainly felt some sexual fascination with Helen from the start, and this is just the time when, after a long period of apparent latency, he became obsessed with getting sexual experience. But in the autumn of 1909 his sexual attentions were focused on Agnes Holt, and, as we have seen, when that pursuit proved unsuccessful, at Christmas he suddenly turned his attention to Jessie Chambers. There seems to have been no sexual tension between Lawrence and Helen during this period. Lawrence became aware that Helen had written an account of the Isle of Wight experience and asked to see it. When he had read

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it he asked, ‘What are you going to do with these prose poems?’ (IOI 177). He answered this question himself. He had planned to write, as successor to The White Peacock, a ‘bright’ story with a hero modelled on Jessie’s brother Bernard (ET 181). This same brother was the model for Maurice in ‘Love Among the Haystacks’, a story whose sexually-charged pastoral atmosphere perhaps gives some idea of what this unwritten novel would have been like. However, this plan was abandoned when Lawrence became obsessed with Helen’s story and between April and August 1910 wrote ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, the first version of the novel that was to be published two years later as The Trespasser. The planned consummation of Lawrence and Jessie’s relationship was deferred, at least till Easter at the end of March, more probably till the Whitsun holiday, 14–21 May. This can be explained by practical difficulties: for a clandestine couple neither of whom had their own home opportunities to make love did not come easily. But there may also have been a reluctance to take the irrevocable step: certainly on Jessie’s part, and maybe on Lawrence’s too. He wrote: We have fine, mad little scenes now and again, she and I—so strange, after ten years, and I had hardly kissed her all that time. She has black hair, and wonderful eyes, big and very dark, and very vulnerable; she lifts up her face to me and clings to me, and the time goes like a falling star, swallowed up immediately; it is wonderful, that time, long avenues of minutes—hours—should be swept up with one sweep of the hand, and the moment for parting has arrived when the first kiss seems hardly overkissed. (L1 154) This sounds as if, at this stage, he enjoyed kissing Jessie as an end in itself—a predilection he would later condemn in his fictionalised version of Helen. In the first draft of her memoir, according to Delavenay, Jessie wrote that at Easter there were only walks and

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conversations. It was a happy time—perhaps, John Worthen speculates, ‘because they could not sleep together’ (ED 703, EY 252). The dismal reports of both on their actual lovemaking support this idea. As we shall see, by the time Lawrence and Jessie did make love, in May, his immersion in the story of Helen and Macartney had destabilised his already doubtful feelings about Jessie. But even before Easter something happened that, according to Jessie, ‘disturbed Lawrence very deeply’ (ED 703). At least since 1908 he had been friendly with Alice Dax, one of the most prominent and radical members of the little circle of Eastwood intellectuals that formed around William Hopkin. She had some notoriety as an ‘advanced’ woman, an outspoken socialist, suffragist and agnostic who dressed unconventionally, decorated her house plainly, rejecting the ‘knickknacks’ with which most people of her class filled their houses, and perhaps most scandalously answered the door to the milkman when she wasn’t wearing stockings. Although she was as different in personality from Jessie and Helen as they were from each other, she resembled them in being the child of an unhappy marriage, and like Helen had grown up in an atmosphere of stifling respectable poverty. She was married to the local pharmacist and optician—a marriage that was evidently unfulfilling for her. Lawrence’s high regard for her is evident in his having shown her an early version of The White Peacock and partially accepted her no-nonsense criticisms. Our intimate knowledge of Alice is almost entirely based on two documents: a memoir by her friend Enid Hilton, the daughter of Willie and Sallie Hopkin, and a remarkable letter that she wrote to Frieda after Lawrence’s death, in which she reveals that they had had an affair, which was the only sexually fulfilling experience of her life, that she was devastated when it ended but, with heroic generosity, acknowledges that she could not have given Lawrence what he needed, and was happy for him that he found what he did need in Frieda.1 The date of their affair is uncertain. John Worthen believes that it probably began in the summer of 1911 and continued

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intermittently until Lawrence met Frieda in March 1912. This was long after Lawrence and Jessie’s disastrous sexual experiment, but in March 1910 Alice visited Lawrence in Croydon, after which he wrote to Jessie, ‘I was very nearly unfaithful to you. I can never promise you to be faithful. In the morning she came into my room, you know my morning sadness. I told her I was engaged to you. But it is all finished now with her—there is no more sitting on the doorstep’ (L1 157). As with all his letters to Jessie, we should remember that she destroyed them after Sons and Lovers, and reconstructed them from memory twenty years later, but there is no reason to doubt the substance of this, or to disagree with Jessie’s belief that Alice was one of the models for Clara Dawes in the novel. (Her other two putative models, Louie Burrows and Helen Corke, seem more dubious: in the case of Helen, this might be explained by Jessie’s erroneous belief that Lawrence had sex with her but not with Alice.) His final sentence strongly implies that there had been an overt sexual element in his relationship with Alice before this. ‘Sitting on the doorstep’ seems to suggest that they had been on the verge of an affair for some time. Jessie later wrote that Alice had ‘given Lawrence plenty of provocation, of which he had taken no advantage’ (LJC 67). Can it have been the case that during the period when Lawrence was flailing around searching for a girl who would give him ‘that’ without marriage, it had been available to him all the time? Alice was reputedly not conventionally attractive, unlike Jessie and Helen. Enid Hilton writes that she was ‘no beauty—even when young. She was extraordinary in appearance: thin, angular, with large hands and feet; straight, awkward, and wispy hair; and a strange mouth.’ But Hilton adds, ‘her eyes were wonderful … She had a wide, generous forehead and those eyes, deepset and steadily penetrating, looked at you directly with a long, wide stare that was disconcerting if you were not quite “right” with yourself and the rest of the world.’2 Lawrence’s letter to Jessie makes it clear that he found her attractive enough to be tempted. Alice’s availability casts an important light on his choice of Jessie as sexual

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partner in 1910. However exploitative that choice looks in hindsight, it was evidently not a case of Lawrence taking advantage of the only woman who would submit to him. He could have had Alice, a sexually experienced woman who desired him, whom he liked and respected intellectually. His choice of Jessie looks like a desperate attempt to achieve wholeness, to force his spiritual self, which found fulfilment with Jessie, into connection with his sexuality. According to Jessie, Alice’s visit disturbed Lawrence very deeply (ED 703). A week or two later he wrote to her, again ‘very much disturbed’, that he had to write the story of Siegmund (ET 181). Her opinion that he was disturbed by both Alice and Helen may be retrospectively coloured by the failure of their relationship in the ensuing months, but it is more likely that she was correct, and that these experiences made that failure dismally overdetermined. In the letter about Alice he tells her that he cannot promise to be faithful, and he was soon saying that for The Trespasser he needed Helen. He would always return to Jessie, but she must always leave him free (ET 182). The effect of all this on Jessie’s ability to respond spontaneously and enthusiastically to Lawrence’s lovemaking is not hard to imagine. It is clear from a letter that he wrote to Helen a few days before the Whitsun visit on which he and Jessie probably became lovers that his feelings for Jessie had become fatally compromised by his relationship with Helen. I had a letter from [Jessie] yesterday morning. She knew she had won. She wrote very lovingly, and full of triumphant faith. Since when, I have just lain inert. It is extraordinary, how I seem to have lost all my volition. She will take me as she would pick up an apple that had fallen from the tree when a bird alighted on it. I seem to have no will: it is a peculiar dull, lethargic state I have never known before. (L1 159)

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Lawrence reports, before the consummation with Jessie, feelings very like those which, in the novel, he attributes to Paul after making love to Miriam: He, as he lay with his face on the dead pine-leaves, felt extraordinarily quiet. He did not mind if the rain-drops came on him: he would have lain and got wet through … To him now life seemed a shadow … and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like being. (SL 331) It is also evident from this letter that he ‘needs’ Helen as more than a literary collaborator: ‘I know Siegmund is there all the time. I know you would go back to him, after me, and disclaim me’ (L1 160). The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers are linked as the two novels in which Lawrence drew heavily on writing by women with whom he was intimately involved (his relationship with Mollie Skinner, co-author of The Boy in the Bush, was much more distant). The writing of The Trespasser is also a hidden factor in the autobiographical circumstances underlying the final crisis in Paul and Miriam’s relationship. Helen’s ‘Freshwater Diary’ exerted a pervasive influence on the novel that Lawrence developed from it. It provided the basic narrative material, Lawrence directly quotes many phrases and sentences from it, and it is fatally a model for Lawrence’s style— much more so in the first draft, but still to a disabling degree in the final version. ‘The Freshwater Diary’ is a strange and symptomatic piece of writing. John Worthen is rather unfair when he writes that Helen ‘is unable to mention the most commonplace object without including her ideas about the nature of the universe and man’s place within it’ (EY 254), but it certainly bears witness to her belief, at that time, that literature ‘enshrined the great, the beautiful, the desirable, the Way of the spirit, towards which she turned, to forget the paucity, poverty and ugliness that was the obverse side of life’ (NG 71). Much of it is written in this style:

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We have hardly a regret for the vanished beauty of the morning—and it matters not at all that we can scarcely see five yards before us. The sunlight of the inner vision is unclouded—after nearly six years of waiting Fate has granted us five days of each other. Of this eternity the unseen sea is singing below us. Wrap us closer—grey damp shroud of mist. White, singing sea, lure us closer. Take us by the steep cliff pathway into the dark—let our last consciousness be the tighter grasp of each other’s arms. For Fate is already setting upon her favours a price to be paid in agony. (T 294) It would be very easy for literary criticism to dismember writing like this, but it would be unfair and pointless because I agree with Jane Heath that ‘The Freshwater Diary’ is a traumatic text—that is, its author is attempting to heal the traumatic experience of Macartney’s suicide, and more significantly her part in it, in the only way she knows how, by enveloping herself in the transcendent world of fine writing.3 It is important to make it clear that Helen’s later autobiographical writing, the novel Neutral Ground written about eight years later and the much later autobiography In Our Infancy, are written in a much more plain and direct style, reflecting an admirable objectivity about the illusions of her younger self. But it is fascinating that even in these books, written at a much greater distance from the experience and with much more self-knowledge, Helen is unable to re-imagine the Isle of Wight holiday. In In Our Infancy she breaks off the narrative of her relations with Macartney to say, ‘Of our five days’ experience in the Island enough has been written’ (IOI 169). She refers her reader to The Trespasser and includes ‘The Freshwater Diary’ as an appendix. Neutral Ground also breaks off with Ellis waiting on the Island for her lover to arrive. The narrative resumes four months later to describe Ellis writing the ‘Diary’ and then quotes a revised version of it. Though she is able to bring the maturity and perspective of her later years

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to bear on every other aspect of her story, the memory of those few days remains stuck in the traumatised and evasive literary prose of ‘The Freshwater Diary’. Lawrence would never have spoken as Helen did about literature enshrining ‘the great, the beautiful etc’ and forgetting ‘the paucity, poverty and ugliness’, but he too, more subtly, was in danger of being ensnared by a dualism which set an effete conception of literary style above and against the crude substance of life. He had, in response to the expectations of Ford Madox Hueffer, shown a supreme mastery of working-class dialogue and narrative in A Collier’s Friday Night and ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, but as late as 1911 he was writing, in an early version of ‘The Witch à la Mode’, a story inspired by his relationship with Helen, dialogue like this: ‘One is never at peace with oneself till one understands—’ ‘What?’ he asked. ‘How to resolve the discord.’ ‘You are fogged in symbols, as usual,’ he said. ‘The fog is not of symbols,’ she replied metallically. ‘It may be they are candles in a fog—’ ‘Candles in a yellow fog of my turbidity, eh? I’ll blow them out then, your symbols. I prefer fog unilluminated. I prefer to be in the dark. Candles of speech, expression, symbols or whatnot, only lead you wronger. I’ll wander in blind strides of impulse to my desire.’ ‘That’s an ignis fatuus,’ she said. ‘Maybe, for if I breathe outwards, and am positive, you move off. If I draw in a vacant sigh, you flow nearly to my mouth.’ (VG 132) In case it is completely obscured by the fog of symbols, what is going on here is that the young man wants the woman to sleep with him but she wants to keep the relationship on the spiritual

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plane. I doubt that Lawrence and Helen actually talked to each other like this and she would probably not have been pleased by the way in which she is portrayed in the story, but stylistically it answers much more than A Collier’s Friday Night to her conception of literature as a realm in which the mind moved above the body ‘in a state of exalted and unchallenged freedom’. It corresponds to the style in which Lawrence wrote between 1908 and 1910 to the provincial intellectual Blanche Jennings, and to Grace Crawford, a member of the London literary bourgeoisie, quoted in Chapter 1. He was understandably reluctant to be pigeonholed as a working-class writer, but was the alternative to be, in the worst sense of the word, a bourgeois writer? Here are some examples of the style of ‘The Saga of Siegmund’: Siegmund gave himself to the sunshine and the blessed breeze from the sea. In a passion he lay upon the bosom of the heaving noon of the sea and the sun. All his body passionately kissed the fragrant body of the large, magnificent sea-noon. Her soul clung closely to her body, like a round, solid flame to its oil. The winds could not sweep it away, straining, catching at the wick, almost lost. Death was fascinating for her because the flame of her soul clung always so securely. She was too strong and healthy ever to taste of death, ever to feel her flame blowing fast away from the wick, to be blown out at last. But Siegmund was as passionate as a flaring torch. He flamed strenuously, recklessly, consuming the resin and oil of his life almost to the end, then, with the dead ash threatening extinction upon him, he would wait in heaviness while his body laboured to replenish the fuel of his life.

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The elaborate extended metaphor, on display for its own sake, the gratuitous personification, the facile use of ‘transcendent’ language such as ‘blessed’ and ‘fragrant’ are all examples of what it means to describe this writing as ‘literary’ in a way that echoes the sensibility of Helen Corke herself. But the style is not merely an alien infection caught from her. This literariness is something that Lawrence consciously aspired to, to mark him as something more than a collier’s son, as an entry-card to the literary world, and as a dyke more substantial than school-teaching to keep him above the ‘morass’ that threatened him as much as it did Helen. The influence that Jessie was to have on his writing, in the brief period when she was virtually his collaborator, could not be more different. Lawrence wrote ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ between April and August 1910—in other words, the writing encompassed the period of his sexual relationship with Jessie. The influence of the writing on the relationship is complicated and possibly reciprocal. It is impossible to determine, but we can try to trace its elements. Lawrence may have been drawn to the theme of the man whose lover deprecates his sexuality by anxiety about the impending crisis with Jessie. His imaginative identification with Siegmund (note that it is ‘the story of Siegmund’, not of Helen, that Jessie remembers him saying he had to write) may have intensified that anxiety and, when their lovemaking failed, have inclined him to blame the woman. His growing feelings for Helen, in her opinion engendered by his identification with Siegmund, certainly compromised his commitment to Jessie, and he may have approached Jessie with expectations clouded by Siegmund’s experience. Conversely, his failure with Jessie is bound to have made some mark on the way he imagined the lovemaking of Siegmund and Sieglinde (as he called his heroine in the first draft).

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On 27 April, Lawrence wrote to his publisher that he had written about half of another novel (L1 159). Even allowing for exaggeration he is highly likely to have reached page seventy-eight of the manuscript, and therefore written the account of Siegmund and Sieglinde’s first night together, before the crisis with Jessie. Although ‘The Freshwater Diary’ is completely evasive about the sexual relationship, Lawrence and Helen spent many hours discussing the theme of the novel, and she never protested about this aspect of it. Siegmund’s feelings as the night draws on are described as follows: He could not, it was beyond the bounds of possibility, lay cold hands upon the racing leopard of his blood and choke it dead. It was even, he felt it, deadly sacrilege. So he was very quiet during the supper-time, uttering with difficulty a few words and a little laughter. All the while there was the call of the wild craving in his blood. Sieglinde was vaguely aware of it. The tension in which he was held, becoming dimly evident to her, distressed her. She was at a loss what to do for him. He sat there inexorable, looking up at her now and again with dark eyes that filled her heart with grief, for she could not understand them.5 Lawrence evidently has a strong investment in Siegmund’s feelings, but Sieglinde is portrayed with some sympathy here, though the sexual impasse is unambiguous. When, in 1912, having suffered much frustration himself with Helen, he revised the novel, he foreclosed the portrayal of his heroine with a harsh authorial judgement: ‘She belonged to that class of “Dreaming Women”, for whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss’ (T 64). Nevertheless, in both versions they do make love. Siegmund experiences an ‘ecstasy of peace’, but the next morning his mood is darkened by ‘the shadow of grief, that Sieglinde cared not for his body’. When she joins him in the morning

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she still feels ‘[t]he shock and intensity of the night before’.6 Lawrence would return to the word ‘shock’ two years later, in one of his more prejudicial comments on Miriam: ‘It was as if she could scarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a passionate kiss’ (SL 216). As I have said, the passages I have quoted here from ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ were almost certainly written before Lawrence’s Whitsun encounter with Jessie, and may both betray an anxiety about that encounter and have exerted a prejudicial anticipatory influence on it. Later in the draft Sieglinde ‘felt really oppressed by the notion that she was killing him, that her influence was fatal’, and recalls a passage from Gerhart Hauptmann’s Elga.7 Lawrence quotes this same passage in a letter to Helen on 21 June—evidence that he reached this point in the manuscript after the failure with Jessie. The context in the letter makes it clear that he is thinking of his relationship with Helen, but it was with Jessie that he broke little more than a month later. When Lawrence and Jessie finally made love it was, to begin with at least, out of doors. Jessie’s account, though written more than twenty years later, has a bleak authenticity. For myself I can only say that the tension was greater than I could bear. There were too many contradictory elements. I could not conceal from myself a forced note in L’s attitude, as if he was pushed forwards in his sensual desires—and a lack of spontaneity. The times of our actual coming together, under conditions both difficult and irksome, and with Lawrence’s earnest injunction to me not to try to hold him, would not exhaust the fingers of one hand, yet it is upon this flimsy foundation that Lawrence builds the relation with Miriam; and on this slight and inadequate experience he judged and condemned me, without stopping to inquire whether his own attitude was beyond reproach. (ED 704)

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John Worthen quotes a 1913 draft of Lawrence’s poem ‘Lilies in the Fire’: I am ashamed, you wanted me not tonight— Nay, it is always so, you sigh with me. Your radiance dims when I draw too near, and my free Fire enters your petals like death, you wilt dead white … Tis a degradation deep to me, that my best Souls whitest lightning which should bright attest God stepping down to earth in one white stride, Means only to you a clogged, numb burden of flesh … (EY 252) These are two very different perceptions of the event. Although Lawrence’s poem is much closer in time than Jessie’s reminiscence, we must bear in mind that it had been mediated by several drafts of Sons and Lovers in which, as we shall see, Lawrence was constantly reinterpreting what had happened between him and Jessie. In the final draft of the novel, which may not be the one that Jessie read, Paul and Miriam’s lovemaking is described like this: She was very quiet, very calm. She only realised that she was doing something for him. He could hardly bear it. She lay to be sacrificed for him, because she loved him so much. And he had to sacrifice her. (SL 334) If Jessie was basing her objection on this, or something like it, it is instructive that she describes it as a condemnation. Worthen confidently asserts that ‘She had never wanted nor desired him’ (EY 253). Lawrence’s account would not seem like a condemnation to someone who had felt like that: it would, rather, seem an appropriate recognition of her altruistic love. Jessie’s own account suggests not that she was lacking in desire for him but that his attitude, both at the time and earlier in their relationship, combined

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with the difficult practical circumstances and her natural fear of the consequences, made it impossible for her to respond as she would have liked. In ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, as in the final text of The Trespasser, the tragic story is narrated retrospectively and framed by a narrative clearly based on Lawrence’s own relationship with Helen. Cecil Byrne is another effete, insipid version of Lawrence, but the novel ends with the possibility that he and Sieglinde (Helena in the final text) might become lovers. In mid-July, Jessie visited Lawrence in Croydon and met Helen for the first time. The cross-currents between the three of them must have made this a very strange meeting. Helen was ‘prepared to dislike one whose claim on David was evidently so strong and subtle’, but she was overwhelmed by Jessie’s ‘warmth’ and by the impression she gave of being ‘always conscious of the pain in the world’. Jessie was, Helen felt, ‘ready to transmute my sorrow into beauty—even to see me as beautiful on its account’. She was beginning to fall in love with Jessie. Lawrence, by contrast, was in a cynical mood. Helen felt that ‘at the moment his desire is towards me—in such measure as I still represent the “Helena” of his Saga’, but she believed that he would ultimately go back to Jessie (IOI 187–88). At the end of the school term Lawrence and Helen went off in different directions to confront, in different ways, their emotional pasts. Helen returned to Freshwater to relive her time there with Macartney. Lawrence returned to Eastwood, initially staying with his parents, but planning to spend a few days with the Chambers at their new farm—they had left the Haggs in March. On 31 July, he wrote to Helen in Freshwater from Eastwood: [Jessie] met me. She is very pretty and very wistful. She came to see me yesterday. She kisses me. It makes my heart feel like ashes. But then she kisses me more and moves my sex fire. Mein Gott, it is hideous. I have promised to go there tomorrow, to stay till Thursday. If I have courage, I

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shall not stay … I must tell her also that we ought finally and definitely to part: if I have the heart to tell her. (L1 173) Jessie’s published memoir and Delavenay’s notes on the earlier draft tell slightly different stories about her break with Lawrence. In A Personal Record his announcement, the day after his letter to Helen, sounds like a bolt from the blue: ‘He had returned, overnight as it were, to his old attitude.’ Jessie insisted that their relationship must be all or nothing, and he answered ‘Then I am afraid it must be nothing’ (ET 182). According to Delavenay, however, Jessie herself had suggested they break off in July. Lawrence had said, ‘Between you and Hélène I am torn like a garment’, and it was in response to this that Jessie insisted on ‘all or nothing’. Lawrence reproached her for forcing the issue and Jessie put his attitude down to fatigue and the stress of his equivocal emotional situation (ED 704). Evidently, one way or the other, Jessie’s memory confused the sequence of events. Either way, his announcement in August was a shattering experience for her. Astonishingly, she seems to have felt no resentment towards Helen. On the contrary, in her notes for Delavenay she wrote: [Helen] certainly helped me over the most difficult bit of my life, and I must always be grateful to her for it. She herself said she had fallen in love with me … At any rate, she helped me to gather together some fragments of my shattered self-confidence, so that at least I was able to face my work again. (ED 704)

3

‘Paul Morel I’ and the Death of Lydia Lawrence, August–December 1910

T

hree days after breaking with Jessie, still staying with his family in Eastwood, Lawrence wrote again to his London literary acquaintance Grace Crawford. In this letter he dropped the affected style he had adopted in previous correspondence with her, and gave a sketch of his family home: the house, the furniture, the fire that always burned in a miner’s kitchen. He mentioned his father, out ‘drinking a little beer with a little money he begged of me’ and described his mother, ‘who is short and greyhaired, and shuts her mouth very tight’, reading a translation of L’Éducation sentimentale with ‘a severe look of disapproval’, and his younger sister Ada. His married brother and sister, George and Emily, ‘do not count’ (L1 174). This seems an odd dismissal—he had never been close to George but Emily had been his childhood playmate. He is focusing on the domestic scene, on the ‘small family’ as he was to call it in the second draft of Paul Morel, which became smaller as his siblings married out (PM 112). Could Lawrence have been half thinking about his projected novel as he wrote this letter? There is another text, a brief aborted novel, that has a role in the complicated genesis of Sons and Lovers. Later in July 1910 Lawrence wrote to Louie Burrows with various news about his literary activities, including something called ‘Matilda’: ‘when I looked at her I found her rather foolish: I’ll write her again when 57

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I’ve a bit of time’ (L1 172). This almost certainly refers to a fortyeight-page manuscript that has been published in the Cambridge University Press Paul Morel. It is clearly based on Lydia Lawrence’s family history, as more briefly summarised in the first chapter of Sons and Lovers. We meet the overbearing and embittered father, the gentle mother who suffers at his hands, and Matilda herself who like Mrs Morel inherits her mother’s physique but her father’s ‘imperious stare’ (PM 146). The fragment opens with a vivid and promising portrait of Matilda as a child, refusing to respond to the advances of the Methodist minister. It anticipates the brilliant portrayals of childish hauteur in The Rainbow and Women in Love. The interest is then dissipated in a retrospective family history and the narrative jumps to Matilda as a young woman, with a wouldbe satirical portrait of the schoolmistress for whom she works. It may have been this that Lawrence thought ‘foolish’. Matilda meets a young man who may have been a precursor of John Field, Mrs Morel’s disappointing first love. The date of ‘Matilda’ is uncertain. It must have been written after Lawrence’s move to Croydon because it is set there (rather than Lydia’s actual childhood home of Sheerness). The letter to Louie implies that it had been written some time ago, but recently enough for him to consider rewriting it. John Worthen speculates that, since in the preceding months Lawrence had been preoccupied with writing ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ and revising The White Peacock, he might have written ‘Matilda’ in early January 1910. This conflicts with Jessie’s description of his planned second novel, but her memory may have been inaccurate, or Lawrence may have made more than one false start, as he was to do after finishing Sons and Lovers. The family-saga style of ‘Matilda’, and the fact that it moves so quickly to her as a young woman, suggests that Lawrence must have planned at least to tell the story of his heroine’s marriage, and even some version of the story that was to emerge in Paul Morel and Sons and Lovers. The first three chapters of Sons and

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Lovers are narrated predominantly from Mrs Morel’s point of view, and though Lawrence refers to the abandoned novel casually as ‘Matilda’ in his letter, the manuscript has no title: it is quite possible that Matilda was destined to give way to her children, as the main focus. Whatever plans Lawrence may have had in July about a novel based on his family, the ordeal that began in the following month and lasted the rest of the year profoundly changed his perspective. From the 6th to the 10th of August he went on holiday with his friend George Neville to Blackpool, which he described to Grace Crawford as ‘a crowded, vulgar Lancashire seaside resort … I shall enjoy it: you would think it hideous’ (L1 175). Neville’s lengthy account of the holiday makes it clear that Lawrence did enjoy it, and that his relish for ‘vulgarity’ was not an affectation. He spent much of the time flirting with a bold, unaffected young Yorkshire woman whom he thought ‘just lovely … I never thought I should find anybody as real’.1 A brief version of this holiday occurs in Sons and Lovers (pp. 412–13). Lawrence returned home to find that Lydia had fallen ill while visiting her sister in Leicester. He reported that she had ‘a tumour or something’ in her abdomen, which the doctor thought serious (L1 176). It was in fact a malignant cancer, and Lydia had less than four months to live. Nevertheless, it was during this period that Lawrence began writing the novel that he called ‘Paul Morel’. It is first mentioned in a letter to Sydney Pawling, co-director of Heinemann, on 18 October. He says it is ‘not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism [apt descriptions of The White Peacock, The Trespasser or both]: but a restrained, somewhat impersonal novel’ (L1 184). He says it is ‘plotted out very interestingly’ and about one-eighth written. The following February he was to tell an editor at Heinemann that it was still where he had left it four or five months earlier, at a hundred pages (L1 230). In other words, writing came to a halt soon after he had written to Pawling, if not before. In the same letter Lawrence wrote that he wished he

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were not so agitated, and could do more. It is fairly certain that the first draft was halted by the strain of his mother’s illness. None of this draft has survived. Apart from the letter the only clue we have to its character is a chapter plan which, being obviously written for Lawrence’s own use, is allusive and hard to decipher. The plan is divided into two parts. The first part centres on the Morel family and the conflict between the father Walter and his son Fred. It concludes with the deaths of both son and father. The second part focuses on the younger son, William, who works for a company called Haywoods, has some success at painting, and relationships with women called Mabel and Flossie. There is a clear resemblance to the second draft of ‘Paul Morel’, which Lawrence was to write in the following year. What is startlingly absent, however, is any mention of mother–son relationships. There is an ‘Introduction’ in which ‘he pushes her out of the house before the birth of their son’, an episode which was to survive as one of the most memorable of Sons and Lovers, but thereafter the mother is not mentioned at all. The role of the mother seems to be supplanted in the first part by an aunt and in the second by ‘Miss Wright’, who teaches painting and whose death concludes the novel. Wright was the real name of the governess of Lawrence’s friend Flossie Cullen, into a version of whose home he was to transpose Miriam in the second draft, where Miss Wright becomes Miss May. Whatever Lawrence conceived to be the main interest of the novel projected here, it does not seem to have been the emotional difficulties of a young man who is excessively attached to his mother. It must have been written before the letter announcing ‘Paul Morel’, because the hero is not yet called Paul, and it may be that the mother figured more prominently in the draft than she does in the outline. It is possible that the mother–son theme was so prominent in Lawrence’s mind that he didn’t need to make a note of it. Two words that Lawrence uses in his letter to Pawling are intriguing: ‘plotted’ and ‘impersonal’. Both words, especially with the deprecatory reference to his other novels, suggest that Lawrence

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is trying to persuade his publisher that he has learned a lesson from Hueffer’s strictures on ‘The Saga of Siegmund’. But the chapter plan does not look much like a ‘plot’: the dramatic climax comes at the end of Part One, and the rest of the story seems to drift. The first draft might be more conventionally ‘plotted’ than this or (more likely) Lawrence may simply have meant that he had gone to the trouble of imagining how his story would end before beginning to write it. ‘Impersonal’ is borrowed directly from Hueffer’s critical vocabulary. The previous month Lawrence had received Hueffer’s verdict on ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, which he summarised: ‘He says it’s a rotten work of genius, one fourth of which is the stuff of masterpiece. He belongs to the opposite school of novelists to me: he says prose must be impersonal, like Turguenev [sic] or Flaubert. I say no’ (L1 178). This resistance to the Flaubertian model of impersonality became one of the hallmarks of his criticism, notably in the review of Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig that he wrote in 1913, but there is one witness to a violent if brief apostasy. Helen Corke reports that, early in 1911, under the influence of Hueffer’s criticism, he insisted that ‘The essential of great art … is impersonality, objectivity, and an unassailable technique’, exemplified by Madame Bovary. ‘An artform, he declares, is justified whether it excites loving or loathing. Moreover, the subject of a work of art takes a place of secondary importance in relation to its technique’ (IOI 201). Her recollection is very precise—she gives a passage from Flaubert that Lawrence quoted—so is difficult to dismiss, but the reversal of attitude seems extraordinarily sudden and brief. What survives of the second draft, written soon after the conversation Helen records, does not read as if it was written to a Flaubertian model. There is almost no evidence in Lawrence’s own writing that he ever held such an opinion, but the one possible instance coincides exactly with the time Helen recalls. In February 1911, he wrote to Heinemann asking to suppress ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ and more or less citing Hueffer’s opinion as his own: ‘The book is execrable bad art: it

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has no idea of progressive action, but arranges gorgeous tableauxvivants which have not any connection one with the other’ (L1 229). It is therefore not entirely impossible that the lost first draft of Sons and Lovers was Lawrence’s one attempt at ‘impersonality, objectivity, and an unassailable technique’. However, it is perhaps more likely that Helen misremembered Lawrence’s account of Hueffer’s opinion as his own. During the period of his mother’s illness Lawrence’s most revealing letters are to a comparative stranger, the poet Rachel Annand Taylor. He had met her briefly at the house of literary acquaintances, and wrote to her in September because he was preparing a talk on her poetry for the Croydon branch of the English Association. It was Taylor who remembered him as a ‘terrific snob’ and a ‘cad’, and in his first letters to her there is an element of self-consciousness and affectation which might have created an unfavourable impression when he visited her the following month. However, as his anguish over his mother’s condition intensified he seems to have found relief in writing to her in an almost confessional fashion. On 15 November, he wrote that he and his mother had been ‘great lovers’, that he had ‘rather disgracefully’ broken his ‘betrothal of six years standing’ and ‘muddled my love affairs most ridiculously and most maddeningly’ (L1 187). This is his only reference to a long betrothal, and has been uncritically accepted by some commentators. There is no sense in which he was betrothed to Jessie before Christmas 1909; this way of putting it might be a way of explaining his guilt without admitting that he had rejected Jessie after persuading her to sleep with him. Although there is evidence in earlier letters of Lawrence’s closeness to his mother, this is the first time that he explicitly broaches what was to be the central theme of Sons and Lovers. And this is not an isolated outburst. There is strong evidence that his mother’s illness made him conscious of, or at least avow, the unusual and damaging nature of their bond. Writing in December from Eastwood six days before her death, having been given leave from school

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to help nurse her, again to Rachel Annand Taylor, he acknowledged that ‘we have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal … It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal’ (L1 190). The day before Lydia’s funeral, he said to Jessie ‘in a strangled voice’ that he had always loved his mother. When she replied to this obvious statement, ‘I know you have’, he retorted, ‘I don’t mean that … I’ve loved her, like a lover. That’s why I could never love you’ (ET 184). On 6 December, still awaiting his mother’s death, he wrote to Louie Burrows, ‘mother has had a devilish married life … and this is the conclusion—no relief. What ever I wrote, it could not be so awful as to write a biography of my mother.’ He goes on to say that ‘after this’ he will write romance, but first he has to finish ‘Paul Morel’ ‘which belongs to this’ (L1 195). All this evidence suggests that his conception of ‘Paul Morel’ changed as he suffered his mother’s dying. There is no sign that the chapter plan ‘belongs to this’, the nexus of maternal death-agony, embittered marriage and abnormal filial bond, that Lawrence was undergoing at this time. The plan ends with the death of a mother-figure, but it is impossible that ‘Miss Wright’, evidently unmarried and not directly related to the hero, could have been the fictional vehicle for this nexus. It is likely, therefore, that as his anguish over his mother’s death intensified Lawrence realised that the version of ‘Paul Morel’ he had begun that summer would not do. Unsurprisingly, everything he says about his mother at this time portrays her as a suffering victim: there is no sense that she was in any way culpable for her son’s emotional problems, still less for the failure of her marriage. In the letter to Rachel Annand Taylor he gives a sketch of his parents’ marriage: the mother a ‘clever, ironical delicately moulded woman, of good, old burgher descent’, married ‘beneath her’ to a miner ‘of the sanguine temperament, warm and hearty, but unstable … Their marriage [sic] life has been one carnal, bloody fight’ (L1 190). He goes on to say that he was ‘born hating my father’ and to describe the ‘abnormal’ bond with his mother. As John Worthen says, ‘A

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novel is there, in embryo’ (EY 282). Whatever Lawrence might have written in the preceding months, the central theme of Sons and Lovers is now inescapable. Sometime during 1910 Lawrence wrote the first draft of his second play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Like ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, which it closely resembles, this play draws on Lawrence’s experience of marital conflict in the mining community. The first draft has not survived, but in its final version it is, with The Daughter-in-Law (written immediately after he finished Sons and Lovers), one of Lawrence’s two dramatic masterpieces. Together with A Collier’s Friday Night these plays established his reputation as a dramatist in the 1960s. All three deal with aspects of the theme of Sons and Lovers: the embattled marriage, the emotionally damaging mother–son relationship, and sexually inhibited love between young people. While Lawrence was sitting with his dying mother he wrote another play which, if not as dramatically successful as these, is a remarkable biographical document. The Merry-go-Round is a comedy set in a miner’s cottage, around the death of a mother. It is a work of deliberate comic artifice, not a mode that Lawrence was suited to, but there is some genuine humour in the dialogue, where Lawrence brilliantly exploits his mastery of Nottinghamshire dialect. Unlike Mrs Morel, Mrs Hemstock is thoroughly and defiantly working class, and it is in her speech above all that the play comes to life. Unfortunately, this character, the most vivid and memorable in the play, appears only in the first scene. Her speech is vigorous and inventive, full of idioms like her description of the young woman who is pursuing her son, ‘She melts herself into a man like butter in a hot tater. She ma’es him feel like a pearl button swimmin’ away in hot vinegar’ and her verdict on marriage, ‘a man’s knee’s a chair as is soon worn out’ (Plays 1 120, 121). Dialogue like this no doubt served to distract Lawrence from his grief, and the mother’s death happens off-stage, an occasion not for mourning but for conflict over her will. Lawrence’s attempt to write so unsentimentally about

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a mother’s death counterpoints the poems he was writing about the same time, such as ‘The Bride’ and ‘The Virgin Mother’, which ends ‘my soul lies helpless / Beside your bed’ (Poems 1 67). These poems, with their unabashed erasure of his mother’s sexual history, are symptoms of rather than insights into his emotional condition, as Frieda was later to recognise, when she wrote ‘I hate it’ against each stanza of ‘The Virgin Mother’ (EY 411–12). In The Merry-goRound, however, not only does Lawrence treat the mother’s death unsentimentally, he gives a very unflattering portrait of the mother’s boy, Harry, who is repelled by the overt sexuality of the girl who likes him and complains to his mother’s nurse, ‘I want motherin’ … I dunna want huggin’ an’ kissin’ … I s’ll reckon I’m badly, an’ then tha can nurse me … I’ve lived by my mother.—What am I to do, Nurse—?’ (Plays 1 149). Lawrence’s similarity to and difference from Harry is seen in a letter two years earlier to Blanche Jennings, in which he wrote about the comfort of abandoning himself to a woman who would nurse, console and soothe him, but though there was at least one woman (Jessie?) who yearned to do so, ‘I will not have it’ (L1 62). Lawrence is clearly also thinking about himself when he gives Harry the lines, ‘I s’ll be glad when ’er’s gone. It ma’es yer feel as if you was screwed in a tight jacket—as if you’d burst innerds’ (Plays 1 148). At this very time he was writing about himself, ‘if you’ve ever put your hand round the bowl of a champagne glass and squeezed it and wondered how near it is to crushing-in and the wine all going through your fingers—that’s how my heart feels—like the champagne glass’ (L1 190). But Harry’s own mother is brutally unsympathetic to his attachment: ‘’e wor allers one o’ th’ lovin’ sort when ’e wor but a lad,—’d follow me about, an’ “Mammy” me … Well, I got sick of him slormin’ about like a cat lookin’ for her kittens, so I hustled him out’ (Plays 1 115). The autobiographical summary in the letter to Taylor of what was to become Sons and Lovers continues with an explanation of his break with Jessie: ‘She loves me to madness, and demands the

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soul of me. I have been cruel to her, and wronged her, but I did not know. Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had it, and nobody can have it again.’ He writes this in the context of telling Taylor that, the very same day, he has proposed to Louie Burrows in a railway compartment full of strangers. As we have seen in Chapter 1, he had been fond of Louie for many years, she had helped with writing out the draft of The White Peacock, in 1909 they had exchanged stories they had written and Lawrence proposed collaboration, which resulted in at least one joint enterprise, ‘Goose Fair’. His attraction to Louie was therefore far from being, as Jessie reports him saying, ‘purely animal’ (ET 140). Nevertheless, it is painfully evident that his proposal to Louie is at least partly an impulse of reaction against Jessie: ‘She will never plunge her hands through my blood and feel for my soul, and make me set my teeth and shiver and fight away.’ A couple of days later he wrote of Louie to his teacher friend Arthur McLeod, ‘She is a glorious girl … swarthy and ruddy as a pomegranate, and bright and vital as a pitcher of wine’ (L1 193). To Louie herself he wrote, ‘you are fullfruited and rash and open as a sunflower’ (L1 197). She represents the antithesis of the sickroom in which he is spending his days, as well as the soulfulness of his relationship with Jessie. In proposing to Louie he is also trying to exorcise the aspect of himself that he so balefully portrayed in Harry of The Merry-go-Round. Harry is nauseated by the overt sexuality of the girl who loves him. Louie represented the dream of uncomplicated sexual fulfilment: Dreaming your yielded mouth is given to mine, Feeling your strong breast carry me on into The sleep no dream nor doubt can undermine. (‘A Love Song’, Poems 1 92) But, as he was to admit a year later, when he was on the verge of ending their engagement, while she was ‘swarthy, and passionate as a gipsy’ she was also ‘good, awfully good, churchy’ (L1 343). The

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Merry-go-Round is as much about money as love. The three sets of partners who eventually come together in the right combinations need money (some of it from Mrs Hemstock’s will) to fulfil their desires. Fulfilment with Louie, it became increasingly apparent, would not happen without marriage, and marriage would not happen without more money than they had. This was to be the unfortunate main theme of the engagement that began with so much apparent joy and promise. There was another fly in the ointment. Committing himself to Louie did not resolve the divisions that he had confessed to Jessie. On the same day when he revealed to Jessie the true nature of his feelings for his mother she told him that he should not have involved Louie in ‘the impasse of our relationship’. Rather than retort that his love for Louie was a way out of that impasse, Lawrence replied, ‘With should and ought I have nothing to do’ (ET 184). The following month he wrote to Jessie, ‘the best man in me belongs to you. One me is yours, a fine, strong me … I have great faith that things will come right in the end’ (ET 185). How he imagined that things would come right is hard to tell, but as long as he felt as he did about his ‘best self ’ it could not have been a way that would make Louie happy. In Sons and Lovers Paul and his sister Annie hasten their mother’s death by giving her an overdose of morphia. Lawrence cannot have written this scene till at the earliest the spring of 1912 (third draft) or at the latest November of that year (final draft)—in the 1911 version he did not get far enough to have to deal with the death. The only evidence that this has a basis in biographical fact is the reminiscence of an acquaintance he made in Italy in 1913, Lina Waterfield, niece of Janet Ross and wife of the artist Aubrey Waterfield, who in an autobiography published in 1961 reported that Lawrence told her and her husband, separately, that the mercykilling had really happened. They are the only witnesses to the biographical truth of this episode, which I think should be treated with a little caution. Aubrey told Lina that he had ‘taken the story

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as a symbol of [Lawrence’s] terrible grief ’ and, while she reports that Lawrence said ‘emphatically’ to her, ‘I did it’, he also told Aubrey that ‘every incident’ was true, which is patently not the case.2 The person to whom he was most likely to have confessed, Jessie, the one to whom he said, ‘With should and ought I have nothing to do’, makes no mention of it. It is not intrinsically unlikely to have been true, but it is a perhaps more interesting possibility that he invented the mercy-killing (during which Paul and Annie ‘laughed together like two conspiring children’) in an attempt to exorcise the bond with his mother (SL 437).

4

Betrothal and ‘Paul Morel II’, January–October 1911

L

awrence’s engagement to Louie Burrows lasted from December 1910 till February 1912. It is documented mainly in Lawrence’s side of their copious correspondence during the period of their betrothal, and in his letters to others, notably Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke and his sister Ada. From this three strong themes emerge. One is the fact that they cannot marry yet because of the lack of money and the consequent need for Lawrence to make more money out of his writing while continuing to teach. A second is the sexual frustration that Lawrence suffered as a consequence of this situation and Louie’s refusal to countenance sex before marriage. A third is the continuing evidence that Lawrence was inwardly divided, and that he withheld something of himself from Louie. As early as 23 December 1910, only three weeks after his proposal, he wrote to Louie, ‘As [I] hope for salvation, I hope for you, and a home with you. But I dream of my mother. You do not know. If I told you all, it would make you old, and I don’t want you to be old’ (L1 212). He isn’t confessing the disabling nature of his bond with his mother. He never seems to have confessed to Louie what he told to Jessie and even to Rachel Annand Taylor. But he is hinting at something more than grief, at a darkening of vision, entailing depression but more enduring than depression, that he 69

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suffered through his mother’s illness and death. This darkening of vision belongs to the self who is a writer, and four days later he wrote to her in terms that should have rung alarm bells: ‘I am very much afraid indeed of disappointing you and causing you real grief for the first time in your life. It is the second me, the hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer which troubles the pleasanter me, the human who belongs to you’ (L1 214). It is not so much the fear of hurting her that is ominous as the separation of the writer from the man who loves her. For all the pain that he caused Jessie, there was never any doubt that it was the writer who loved her. This is one interpretation of the betrothed man’s apparently scandalous declaration to Jessie that ‘the best man in me belongs to you’ (L1 221). Another is that this was a reiteration of Lawrence’s line at least since 1906, that his love for Jessie was purely spiritual. His declarations to both women are signs of division. By March, it is clear that he was again trying to persuade Helen Corke to sleep with him. This could be interpreted merely as a symptom of his frustration, but his choice of Helen, and his letter to her, suggest that it is a sign of deeper trouble: ‘The common everyday—rather superficial man of me really loves Louie. Do you believe that? But do not think the open-eyed, sad critical, deep seeing man of me has not had to humble itself pretty sorely to accept the imposition of the masculine, stupid decree’ (L1 240). Quite apart from the intended infidelity, writing in this manner to Helen implicitly places her with him on a level from which they can look down on Louie. Jessie believed that Helen had become Lawrence’s mistress in the autumn of 1910 (ED 705). Helen denied this, and if it were true one would expect some reference to it in his renewed attempts at persuasion—which there is not. The third person to whom Lawrence wrote as to an equal, in condescending terms about Louie, was Ada. She had always been the sibling to whom he was closest, but the period between their mother’s death and Lawrence’s serious illness at the end of 1911 was one of particularly close intimacy between them, when he at

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least felt that they two alone shared the burden of that ordeal. In February he wrote to her, ‘Don’t be jealous of [Louie]. She hasn’t any share in your part of me. You and I—there are some things which we shall share, we alone, all our lives: you know, also, that there is more real strength in my regard for you than there is for Louie’ (L1 231). Two months later he is still making Ada his confidante in terms that show his regard for Louie was finely balanced between contradictions: ‘I never want Lou to understand how relentlessly tragic life is—not that. But I want her not to jar on me by gawkiness, and that she must learn’ (L1 261). There is some reason for thinking that his mother’s death intensified or at least focused his hostility to his father. This hostility had admittedly existed since childhood. May Holbrook, Jessie Chambers’ older sister, who had been friendly with Lawrence and visited the family before the period of his intimacy with Jessie, when the Chambers were neighbours in the Breach, writes of having tea with the Lawrences, the father behaving amiably and amusing the girls with humorous anecdotes, but ‘such a hateful feeling coming from Bert that I was almost frightened.’ After Arthur Lawrence left, Lydia told May, ‘He hates his father’ (Nehls 3 568). The portrayal of the father in A Collier’s Friday Night is hardly flattering, but there are no hostile references to Arthur in Lawrence’s letters before the one that he wrote to Rachel Annand Taylor, on the day of his proposal to Louie, in which he declared, ‘I was born hating my father: as early as ever I can remember, I shivered with horror when he touched me’ (L1 190). He seems to have associated this feeling with the episode of his father shutting his mother out of the house when pregnant with him, which survives from the early chapter plan of ‘Paul Morel’ to the final text. But it is only after his mother’s illness that he directly gives vent to hostile feelings about his father. The suffering and finality of her death, the end of the fantasies about a serene widowhood for her, shared with him, that he had indulged in The White Peacock and that Paul describes in Sons and Lovers— the brutal lack of any compensation or reward—were what made

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him tell Ada that life is ‘relentlessly tragic’. It was probably always on his mother’s account that he felt hostile to his father. He was to write this year in ‘Paul Morel II’, ‘Save on his mother’s behalf, Paul felt no very violent feeling for his father, either way’ (PM 51). Now that she was dead he wrote to the Congregational minister that Arthur was ‘disgusting, irritating, and selfish as a maggot’ (L1 220), and to Ada, ‘It’s astonishing how hard and bitter I feel towards him’ (L1 230). If, as he confessed many years later, ‘he had not done justice to his father in Sons and Lovers’, it may partly be because the novel was written in the shadow of his mother’s death (Nehls 2 126). He had begun writing the novel again by 13 March 1911. He was contracted to Heinemann to publish another novel and had decided not to publish ‘The Saga of Siegmund’. The need to pursue his literary career in this worldly sense was intensified by his engagement, which required him to make more money than he could earn by teaching. At the same time his mother’s death had focused his mind on his family history. But in many ways circumstances were not propitious for the enormous emotional and creative effort that this ‘terrible novel’ would demand of him (L1 237). His mother’s death might have made the writing of this novel an emotional necessity, but it had also left him depressed, and inclined to idealise her and demonise his father: ‘he showed no desire’, as John Worthen says, ‘to investigate the tensions of a marriage which might have gone complicatedly, rather than simply, wrong’ (EY 299). Moreover, he had chosen as the woman closest to him one to whom only ‘the pleasanter me’ belonged, not ‘the hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer’. He always believed that, as a writer, he needed a woman behind him. With The White Peacock he had had Jessie, and for ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ Helen. For his later drafts of Sons and Lovers he would have Jessie again and finally Frieda. Louie was intelligent and literary, and she and Lawrence had even collaborated on ‘Goose Fair’, but he evidently felt that she was not equipped for this more demanding role.

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‘Paul Morel’ is mentioned frequently in Lawrence’s letters to Louie between 13 March, when he announces that he has started it again, and 17 July, when he says he hasn’t worked on it lately. Almost certainly he did no work on it after this, since on 10 October he writes brusquely that he hasn’t touched it for months. After the first letter in which he tells her that it will be a ‘terrible’ novel but, ‘if I can keep it to my idea and feeling’, a great one, his references to it are mostly an accounting of the number of pages he has written (L1 237). He makes it sound more like the dutiful completion of a task than a creative fulfilment. In one letter he writes that he has done only five pages, ‘and that only from sheer pressure of duty’; in another that he has written fourteen pages ‘[a]t your behest’; and again that he has ‘managed’ ten pages (L1 262, 264, 265). It seems that the worldly aspect of the task, the writing of a book that will enable them to marry, dominates their correspondence about it. Lawrence’s feelings on the matter burst out when Louie has evidently asked him how long the pages are: ‘Am I a newspaper printing machine to turn out a hundred sheets in half an hour?’ (L1 266). Throughout this period he was distracting himself from the task by writing short stories and reading, in French, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (perhaps not coincidentally the story of a gifted working-class boy who rises in the world and treats badly his two lovers, one of whom is married; and whose name rhymes with Morel). Like ‘Paul Morel’, Lawrence describes it as ‘a terrible book’ (L1 262). At the end of May, Lawrence sent what he had written to Louie. She evidently said that she liked it, but he doubted whether she would tell him ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ (L1 274). This was in marked contrast to the response he was later to get from Jessie, and his expectations of her as a reader. Louie’s comments on the manuscript are confined to minor stylistic corrections and matters of internal consistency. The history of ‘Paul Morel II’ is strangely contradictory. It was a work of urgent personal importance to him: one senses that he

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had to write it in order to progress as a novelist. Yet the writing is shadowed by reluctance. He was working on it in the evenings after an exhausting day teaching, and his tone is not one of creative release but of shouldering another burden. Louie was pressing him to make progress with it, but its subject was the very ‘relentlessly tragic’ life that he wanted to shield her from. Unlike the first version, most of ‘Paul Morel II’ has survived: 278 out of 353 pages that Lawrence wrote. Most of what is missing is the opening, so we don’t know how Lawrence handled the crucial episode of Mrs Morel being shut out of the house while pregnant with Paul. The surviving manuscript begins with a laboured comic scene in which a sick Walter Morel is visited by his friend Jerry and ends with the early stage of Paul’s relationship with Frances Radford, or Clara Dawes as she became in Sons and Lovers. Some of these last pages are the only ones that were reused in the final manuscript. The most important differences from Sons and Lovers, which bear witness to Lawrence’s emotional state when writing this version, are that Paul’s relationship with his mother is sentimentalised, the mother is portrayed as beyond reproach, and the father is demonised. Thus, although the material circumstances of the family are much more faithfully represented than in The White Peacock, Lawrence again evades the emotional complexities of his parents’ marriage. Compare these two versions of the scene that prompts Paul’s first break with Miriam: ‘I don’t love her,’ he reiterated, and his soul was sick of Miriam. ‘I don’t love her—I shall never love anybody but you—’ There was such a hopelessness and such genuineness about this last protest, that Mrs Morel gave a little cry of pain, and put her arms round his neck. At that moment, she said in her heart, ‘He shall love her if he wants—and she shall have him if he wants her to—’ And his mother kissed him fervently, pressed him against her bosom. He put his arms round the light form of his mother, pressed

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her close, kissed her cheek and her neck. Then he laid his head on her shoulder, as if he laid it at rest. Again that final test of love—they rested in each other’s arms. A moment or two Mrs Morel remained thus, while both bosoms heaved with after-pain, and both hearts were sore from love. (PM 102–3) ‘No mother, I really don’t love her. I talk to her—but I want to come home to you.’ He had taken off his collar and tie, and rose, barethroated, to go to bed. As he stooped to kiss his mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering voice, so unlike her own that he writhed in agony: ‘I can’t bear it. I could let another woman—but not her—she’d leave me no room, not a bit of room—’ And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly. ‘And I’ve never—you know, Paul—I’ve never had a husband—not really—’ He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat. ‘And she exults so in taking you from me—she’s not like ordinary girls.’ ‘Well, I don’t love her, mother,’ he murmured, bowing his head and hiding his eyes on her shoulder in misery. His mother kissed him a long, fervent kiss: ‘My boy!’ she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love. Without knowing, he gently stroked her face. (SL 252) This is a much more emotionally compelling scene. Small touches intensify the physicality and therefore the borderline meaning of the embrace between mother and son: ‘kissed him fervently’ becomes ‘kissed him a long, fervent kiss’; ‘kissed her cheek and neck’

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becomes ‘his mouth was on her throat’. This last phrase, shifting agency from Paul to ‘his mouth’, suggests, as the last sentence does more explicitly, that he is unaware of what he is doing, and that the scene has a more dangerous potential. In the earlier version this dangerous potential is neutralised by the sentimental authorial commentary, suggesting that the embrace is normative, a ‘final test of love’. In the final version Lawrence has returned to the feeling of A Collier’s Friday Night, where a stage direction acknowledges that there is ‘a dangerous gentleness’ in the tone in which mother and son speak to each other (Plays 1 59). The play was also much more clear-sighted by having this scene follow the bread-burning episode (omitted from ‘Paul Morel II’), which showed the mother’s unwillingness to believe that her son had been more distracted by Beatrice Wyld than by Maggie, and a near-violent confrontation between son and father, emphasising the Oedipal undercurrent. Both these elements are restored in the final text of Sons and Lovers. This scene is directly followed by Lawrence’s first extant fictionalisation of his 1906 break with Jessie. As in the final version, Paul is morose and sardonic, tells Miriam that he can’t love her, and insults her by saying that she likes to ‘wheedle the soul out of things’ (PM 105). Lawrence’s rendering of this scene is especially interesting because, according to Jessie, sometime in the spring of 1911 she sent him a story narrating this episode from her point of view. This story has not survived, but in both Jessie’s versions that have survived—her response to the scene in the third draft in 1912 and in A Personal Record after Lawrence’s death—Lawrence tells her that his action is prompted by pressure from his family. Almost certainly her 1911 story also contained this element, which was crucial to Jessie’s understanding of what had gone wrong in their relationship. The response that, according to her, it drew from Lawrence is extraordinary: ‘They tore me from you, the love of my life … It was the slaughter of the foetus in the womb’ (ET 186). One hardly knows where to begin in trying to unpick the apparent bad faith of this utterance. This is the woman whom he has rejected

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after persuading her to sleep with him; whom he has told many times before and after this that he could not love her. He writes this to Jessie while engaged to be married to Louie. But perhaps even more remarkable is that, in his own fictionalisation of this same event, which he must have written shortly before or after reading Jessie’s story, Paul says nothing about family pressure. Nor, almost certainly, does he in the third version that Lawrence wrote early in the following year. Not until the final draft does Paul say, in words directly quoted from Jessie’s narration, ‘they say I’ve no right to come up like this—without we mean to marry’ (SL 264). I shall be looking later in more detail at the crucial issue of Jessie’s response to the third draft and its influence on the final text. At the present point, in the spring of 1911, the puzzle is that Lawrence chose not, in the novel, to give Paul’s behaviour an explanation that he had seemed to agree with, in emotionally vehement terms, in the letter. It would be consistent with the portrayal of Mrs Morel in this draft, and with his feeling about his mother at the time he wrote it, that he should not want to cast the blame for Paul’s brutal treatment of Miriam on her. But there is another possibility, which has not been considered by biographers. The only evidence of his family’s intervention is in writing by Jessie and a passage of Sons and Lovers that was actually (apart from a few immaterial modifications) written by her. She is unlikely to have made it up: I have no doubt that Lawrence actually told her this in 1906. But is it possible that he had made it up? It would be entirely understandable for him to represent the undoubted hostility that his mother and elder sister, at least, felt towards Jessie, and the emotional pressure that he portrayed in every version of the story from A Collier’s Friday Night onwards, as a principled concern about the code of courtship, and the consequences of an ambiguous friendship for Jessie herself. This leaves unexplained why, in the published text, written after his final break with Jessie when he had no reason to placate her, he at last incorporates her version. I shall return to this question later.

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One difference between ‘Paul Morel II’ and Sons and Lovers overshadows all the others, and it concerns the portrayal of Walter Morel. It is clear that, in a number of respects, this character, like his equivalent in the final text, is based on Lawrence’s father. There is a scene of domestic harmony when the children help him to make fuses for work, and he tells humorous tales of life down pit (PM 14–15; cf. SL 88–89). ‘Filling straws’ to make fuses is one the recognisable details in the 1910 chapter plan (PM 163). But the portrayal of the father overall is much more hostile in ‘Paul Morel II’. There is a scene in which, from the window of the house of his middle-class friends, Paul watches his father in a degrading and humiliating drunken street fight (PM 50–51). There is no evidence that Arthur Lawrence ever behaved like this. The staging of this episode is one example of the merging of moral judgement with class consciousness, which is much more prominent in the early version. There are also moments of moralising authorial commentary that sound grotesquely unlike Lawrence, even the Lawrence of 1911: ‘After all, the final lesson of life is honorable self-sacrifice. It was a lesson Walter Morel would never learn. Mrs Morel sacrificed herself utterly, and the children often put away themselves. But Walter Morel would repress not one inclination for the sake of the others’ (PM 74). Passages like this show how severely his mother’s death had damaged his ability to make a balanced judgement of his parents. This conventional moralising may also be a sign of the pressure Lawrence—who had decided to suppress ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ because it was ‘erotic’—was under to write something acceptable to his publishers. But the most serious decision Lawrence made regarding the portrayal of Walter Morel was to incorporate into a story mostly based on his own family life the manslaughter of a son by his father, which had actually happened in 1900 in the family of Arthur Lawrence’s brother. As in the final text the Morel family consists of three brothers and a sister. The eldest brother William is similar to the equivalent character in Sons and Lovers, based on

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Lawrence’s brother Ernest, clever and popular, but he soon fades from prominence and his death is omitted. The youngest brother Arthur initially resembles the character of this name in Sons and Lovers, being the child who most loves his father when he is very young, but, unlike his equivalent in Sons and Lovers, who leaves school and joins the army, he is an academic success; unlike Paul he goes to High School and university, and has a more straightforward academic career than Lawrence himself. His early love for his father turns to hatred, and it is he whom the father kills in a drunken rage by throwing a knife-sharpening steel at him (in this detail Lawrence follows the real-life tragedy, but the victim in that family was working in the pit). Afterwards the father is such a ‘frail, broken creature’ that the judge imposes a lenient sentence and he is soon back home, an emasculated shadow of the troublesome and defiant figure we have seen earlier in the novel. He soon dies, and Paul weeps for his death, reflecting, ‘Life was so dreadful, and so cruel. It had been very cruel to his father’, a sentimentalism that the novel has done very little to justify (PM 126). Bearing in mind that Lawrence probably completed only about half of the novel that he planned (it ends with his meeting the equivalent of Clara, which occurs about halfway through Sons and Lovers) the father is thus again both demonised and disposed of, if less summarily than in The White Peacock. The deaths of a son and of Walter Morel are the culmination of the first part of the 1910 chapter outline, so Lawrence had probably planned to include this plot material from the novel’s first conception. Nevertheless, imagining that a character largely based on his own father could commit such a crime seems symptomatic of the state of feeling induced by his mother’s death. The need to write a publishable novel may also have motivated the inclusion of plot material more melodramatic than his own family life furnished. The manslaughter of Arthur almost certainly usurped the reallife death of Lawrence’s elder brother Ernest, which he was to use in later drafts at Jessie’s suggestion, and which is such a poignant

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and thematically resonant feature of the published text. William is still alive at the end of the incomplete draft, and Paul is in his twenties, nearly ten years older than Lawrence was when Ernest died; it seems unlikely that he planned another death in the family. Lawrence was to reuse dialogue between Paul and his mother, which in ‘Paul Morel II’ follows the death of Arthur and the father, but in Sons and Lovers relates to the death of William: ‘“What’s the matter?” he pleaded. / “You know what’s the matter,” she answered’ (PM 128; cf. SL 170). As in Sons and Lovers Paul falls ill and his mother has to rouse herself to nurse him. In this version, the intimacy of mother and son is portrayed in terms that—surprisingly, given the confessions Lawrence had made to Jessie and to Rachel Annand Taylor—seem innocently to revel in an Oedipal fulfilment: ‘nothing is sweeter, on either side, than this tyranny of love: the sense of being utterly in the hands of a lover is very sweet to a weak man, whilst to the woman her sense of responsibility is poignant, kindling’. He tells her that he will never marry, or not until he’s fifty (PM 128). Whereas the equivalent episode in Sons and Lovers takes place when Paul is a sexually immature sixteenyear-old, in this version he is in his early twenties. The father and Arthur are dead, William and Annie have left home; Paul and his mother are left alone together and move to a new house where ‘Paul felt at last he had a home’ (PM 127). He is living the Oedipal fantasy of Paul (at about the same age) in Sons and Lovers: ‘we’ll have a pretty house, you and me, and a servant, and it’ll be just all right’ (SL 286). The story of Paul’s relationship with Miriam follows broadly the same outline as in the final text, up to the point of his first rejection of her, which is where the text ends. As in Sons and Lovers Paul is irritated by her emotional demonstrativeness, and speaks brutally and sarcastically to her before the first breach (something Jessie was to protest about in the later drafts). In this version, however, the contrast between them rather complacently favours Paul: she makes up a story about a pet rabbit being a ‘little fairy prince’, but

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Paul’s ruthless imagining of the rabbit’s fate when released into the wild is ‘so much more vital, and so much more painful, and so much more interesting’ (PM 46). He makes a serious change to Miriam’s circumstances by placing her in a middle-class Eastwood family (the same family that he was later to use in The Lost Girl). When her mother dies she goes to live with her governess and a retired clergyman in a cottage that is clearly based on the Haggs, but there is nothing of the actual farming life by which Jessie and the Miriam of Sons and Lovers were surrounded. All this tends to make Miriam a rather effete character. There are a number of reasons why Lawrence might have abandoned the novel. The death of Arthur, so early in the story, exhausted much of its narrative momentum. How could Lawrence sustain it after this episode, the culmination of the family drama that is the novel’s main interest, and that leaves the family shattered? In Sons and Lovers too, less melodramatically, the parents’ marriage becomes less central in the second half. Narrative interest is maintained by the failed sexual relationship of Paul and Miriam, the adulterous affair with Clara and the death of Mrs Morel. We cannot know if Lawrence intended such a development between Paul and Miriam in this version. It is highly likely that Louie did not know the full story of Lawrence and Jessie: in any case his determination to insulate her from his own darker self must have inhibited him. Knowing that Lawrence had broken with Jessie after sleeping with her could only have strengthened her resolve not to follow Jessie’s example. It is even more likely that thoughts of Louie’s response would have made the portrayal of an adulterous affair difficult. Clara is undoubtedly based in part on Alice Dax, and it seems reasonable to assume that her precursor, Frances Radford, was also suggested by the married woman with whom, he had confessed to Jessie eighteen months earlier, he had been ‘sitting on the doorstep’ (L1 157). In August, Lawrence visited Alice, and it was quite possibly then that their affair began. Is it possible to imagine Lawrence writing a story based on this betrayal,

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knowing that Louie would read it? More intrinsic reasons might have made him flinch from fictionalising his mother’s death. Indeed, it is possible that he did not accomplish this until the end of the following year, when Frieda had vigorously challenged his mother-love. On 10 October, he wrote to Louie, ‘I am afraid I have offended Heinemann’s people mortally. I haven’t done a stroke of Paul for months—don’t want to touch it. They are mad, and they are sneery. I don’t like them’ (L1 310). Sandwiching the reference to ‘Paul Morel’ between the complaints about the publisher suggests that his contractual relationship was a major motivation for persisting with the novel. His creative enthusiasm was going into other projects. On 15 July, about the time he probably abandoned ‘Paul Morel’, he told Louie that he had been writing all day long, thirty-eight pages of a long short story (L1 287). This was ‘Two Marriages’, the first draft of one of his best early stories, ‘Daughters of the Vicar’. He never seems to have experienced such a flow when writing ‘Paul Morel’. This was not merely a diversion. ‘Two Marriages’ concerns itself with marriage across a social divide and with a son’s agonising mourning for his mother, so that Lawrence was experimenting in a non-autobiographical way with the major themes of his novel. By early November he had written another long story, probably ‘Love Among the Haystacks’, also one of his best early tales, inspired by the life of Haggs farm which would revitalise his portrayal of Paul and Miriam’s relationship. Ten days after complaining to Louie about Heinemann, he met them again and reported them ‘very much sweeter’. Heinemann wanted him ‘definitely to promise the next novel’ (L1 317). Possibly that very day he sent the manuscript of ‘Paul Morel’ to Jessie and asked her what she thought of it (ET 190). The novel’s fortunes were about to change dramatically, and so was Lawrence’s life.

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A

s well as lacking the intimate female reader he said he needed, Lawrence had, since Hueffer’s dismissal of ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, also been without a mentor in the literary world. This began to change in August when he heard from Edward Garnett, who acted as a literary adviser to publishers and had been a great supporter of Conrad and Galsworthy. Edward Garnett was also a name to conjure with for Lawrence, being the son of Richard Garnett, editor of the twenty-volume International Library of Famous Literature, bought by Ernest ten years earlier and a treasured possession in the Lawrence household. Garnett contacted Lawrence on behalf of the Century Magazine to ask for short stories. The stories Lawrence sent were rejected, but Garnett was to be a major influence on the progress of his second and third novels. In the case of Sons and Lovers, he was to have the final hand in shaping the published form of the novel for eighty years. More immediately, by sending ‘Paul Morel’ to Jessie, Lawrence reconnected with his most important female reader. The two met on 7 October, when Lawrence, accompanied by his brother George, and Jessie with Helen Corke, met at the theatre. Jessie thought Lawrence looked ‘profoundly unhappy’ and ‘under a severe strain’ (ET 187). This impression may have been retrospectively coloured by his severe illness the following month, as well as by Jessie’s hostility to his engagement to Louie. However, she 83

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claims corroboration from George, who told her that Bert wasn’t at all well and that ‘He calls out in his sleep, thinks somebody’s trying to kill him’ (ET 188). George also, according to Jessie, believed that Lawrence and Louie were a mismatch and that they would never marry. ‘Some time after’ this meeting Lawrence sent Jessie the manuscript of ‘Paul Morel’ (ET 190). The editors of the Letters date this immediately after the encouraging meeting with Heinemann on 20 October. On the evening of Friday, 3 November, he wrote to Louie that he was about to begin his novel again, and asked for her prayers in support of his task: ‘It is a book the thought of which weighs heavily upon me’ (L1 321). Between this date and the onset of pneumonia on 19 November he wrote at least eighty-five pages, totalling about 20,000 words. At this rate he would have completed a novel the length of Sons and Lovers in five months. Nevertheless, he complained twice in letters about not being able to get on with it because of school work and other demands on his time. Most of this early section of the third version has survived, but it isn’t possible to compare it with the second draft because, unlike his practice when he resumed the novel in March, he evidently discarded the pages of the second draft as he worked. This draft does, however, end with a comic scene between a sick Walter Morel and his friend Jerry (praised by Jessie but discarded in the final version) which is continued in the first surviving pages of the second draft. It may be that these early scenes, concerning the early married life of the Morels and Paul’s infancy, required only revision rather than completely new work, and that it was the reimagining of his own experience that ‘weigh[ed] heavily’ on him—in which case the speed with which he wrote these pages might be misleading. We can’t be sure that Lawrence waited for Jessie to reply before starting to write, but if he did send her the manuscript on or soon after 20 October this seems likely. Jessie recorded her response to the second draft in A Personal Record. Her recollection of the draft

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is unreliable—for example, she praises in the rewriting episodes such as the comic scene between Walter and Jerry, and the realistic detail of Mrs Morel spitting on the iron to test its temperature, which were already in the earlier version, and she gives a number of inaccurate verbatim quotations—but it is reasonable to assume that her memory of her critical response is correct. She thought the novel had ‘come to a standstill’, the writing ‘oppressed’ her with ‘a sense of strain’ and was ‘extremely tired’. Crucially, she thought that this fiction ‘was far behind the reality in vividness and dramatic strength’. Some episodes were sentimental and ‘story-bookish’ (ET 190–91). She was particularly critical of the omission of Ernest’s story and the transplantation of Miriam to a bourgeois family, though surprisingly she says nothing about the manslaughter of the son by his father. She reports that she wrote to Lawrence on these lines: I told him I was very surprised that he had kept so far from the reality in his story; that I thought what had really happened was much more poignant and interesting than the situations he had invented. In particular I was surprised that he had omitted the story of Ernest, which seemed to me vital enough to be worth telling as it actually happened. Finally I suggested that he should write the whole story again, and keep it true to life. (ET 192) This is the beginning of Jessie’s crucial contribution to the writing of Lawrence’s first major novel. It is also the beginning of their final conflict, because in giving this advice she had two motives: the overt one that ‘the theme, if treated adequately, had in it the stuff of a magnificent story’, but also another that she did not state to Lawrence, that ‘in the doing of it Lawrence might free himself from his strange obsession with his mother’. As we shall see, she believed that he failed this task. In his reply Lawrence asked her to write what she could remember of their early days, because ‘my

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recollection of those days was so much clearer than his’ (ET 193). He didn’t get this writing from Jessie till after his illness, but it would not have been relevant to the early chapters. The writing that Lawrence did in November 1911 is a draft of the first three chapters and the beginning of the fourth, up to the birth of Arthur. Perhaps the most memorable episode in these early chapters is when, after a late-night quarrel with her drunken husband, and pregnant with Paul, Mrs Morel is locked out of the house and has an almost mystical experience in the moonlight. A version of this episode is mentioned in the 1910 chapter outline and is likely to have occurred in every draft of the novel. We can’t know how Lawrence treated it in the first two drafts, but in this version it is very close indeed to the final text. It is significant for two reasons. We have seen that Lawrence claimed he was ‘born hating my father’. This episode, in which the unborn child shares the mother’s plight of being shut out of the house by the father, might have symbolised or even, in Lawrence’s mind, explained this antipathy. It is the first entry in the 1910 chapter outline: if this child’s relations with his parents were to have been central to the story envisaged there (which is by no means certain) it might have had an explanatory function. It is also Lawrence’s most developed piece of writing yet. It anticipates some of the most memorable episodes in The Rainbow and Women in Love such as Will and Anna stacking sheaves in the moonlight or Birkin stoning the moon’s reflection in the pond. In terms of Lawrence’s development, it looks beyond the dominant realist mode of Sons and Lovers, before Lawrence has fully accomplished that mode. The tall white lilies were reeling in the moonlight; and the air was charged with their perfume, as with a presence. Mrs Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the great, pallid flowers on their fleshy petals, then shivered. They seemed to be yawning lasciviously in the moonlight …

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Except for a slight feeling of sickness, and a second consciousness in the child, her self melted out like scent into the shiny, pale air. After a time, the child too seemed to melt with her into the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon. (PM 196) This is the one moment in the novel at which Mrs Morel’s highly distinctive personality is in abeyance. It was to be another two and a half years before Lawrence wrote his famous letter about rejecting ‘the old stable ego of the character’ and portraying ‘another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable’ (L2 183) but here we have an anticipatory glimpse of the art—that of The Rainbow and Women in Love—he was defending in that letter. There is the sense of a potential in Mrs Morel normally suppressed by her rigidly puritanical outlook. Because this potential is barely conscious it is articulated with the minimum of conceptual references and largely through natural imagery and sensuous experience. Lawrence later changed the crudely explicit ‘yawning lasciviously’ to ‘stretching’ but even without that phrase there is the sense of a normally suppressed eroticism, released by the strange circumstances in which she finds herself. The unborn child seems to share the experience with her, and the whole passage does seem more characteristic of Paul than of his mother. Paul’s sensitivity to the natural world, and his exceptionally close bond with his mother, as well as his hatred of his father, are all adumbrated in this scene. This episode stands out somewhat in the early chapters even of the final version, which are Lawrence’s most extended and accomplished realist narrative. It stands out even more in the November 1911 version, where there are stronger traces of hostility towards Walter, and a corresponding moral pattern that validates Gertrude’s point of view (when he rejected the ‘old stable ego’ Lawrence also rejected the ‘certain moral scheme’ that he believed went with it). Comparing what survives of the second and third drafts with the

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final text, there is a clear progression towards a more equitable portrayal of the parents, even if that progression is never quite accomplished. For example, in the third draft we find this passage: He had no religion, she said bitterly to herself. What he felt just at the minute, that was all to him. He would sacrifice his own pleasure never, unless on an impulse, for he had plenty of impulsive charity. But of the deep charity, which will make a man sacrifice one of his appetites, not merely one of his transitory desires, he was quite unaware. He was strictly irreligious. There was nothing to live for, except to live pleasurably. She was deeply religious. She felt that God had sent her on an errand, that she must choose for God from her sense of right or wrong. (PM 185) This is an advance on the passage from the second draft quoted in my last chapter, about Walter’s inability to understand that ‘the final lesson of life is honorable self-sacrifice’ (PM 74). Whereas that statement issues from an omniscient narrator, this is explicitly from Gertrude’s point of view. However, the language, especially the distinction between appetites and transitory desires, seems more characteristic of the author than of the character. In the final text Lawrence removed the references to religion, consistent with the portrayal of Gertrude as a woman whose principles had more of a secular than a religious foundation. He also removed the reference to self-sacrifice, thus completely banishing the echo of the earlier draft. The last six sentences are replaced by ‘He could not abide by anything. There was nothing at the back of all his show’ (SL 22). The whole passage is made less sententious, and the language is more suited to the character, so that Gertrude’s point of view is more of a reality, not merely formal as in the third draft. There are several examples in this text of derogatory language about Walter that Lawrence subsequently removed. ‘The pity was, she was too much above him’ (PM 188) is changed to ‘was too

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much his opposite’ (SL 25). Walter’s habit of getting out of bed as soon as he wakes up, surely one of his more admirable characteristics, is glossed by ‘He was all for trivial activity, as a substitute for thought’ (PM 211). Lawrence revised this to ‘He was all for activity’ (SL 56). The long comic scene in which Walter’s friend Jerry visits him at his sickbed, which is predominantly a satire on the father’s maudlin self-pity, not, as Jessie remembered, a touching portrayal of the tenderness between the two men, was subsequently cut. Lawrence did later add the episode in which Walter pretends to run away from home but leaves his bundle in the outhouse, which portrays him in a comically pathetic light, but he also added the description of the miner getting up before the rest of the family on a workday, getting his own breakfast, taking his wife a cup of tea in bed, and leaving early for work so that he could look for mushrooms (SL 37–38). Finally, Lawrence was able to imagine what his father was like when free from the disapproving company of his family. We see him entirely from his own point of view, with no shadow of moral disapproval, and he is happy in his own company, enjoying the simple things of life and practical activity, much as Lawrence himself did. Later in life Lawrence said that he thought he had not done his father justice in Sons and Lovers (Nehls 2 126). Many readers will agree with this when they consider the final text in isolation, but study of the drafts shows a consistent movement towards a more generous portrayal of Walter Morel. This draft also lacks the interaction between Mrs Morel and William in the opening, and the long section devoted to William’s development at the end of Chapter 3, which is entitled ‘Aftermath’ in the third draft but significantly renamed ‘The Casting off of Morel, the Taking on of William’ in the final text (SL 64–81). Given the emphasis that Jessie places on her advice to include the story of Ernest, this suggests either that Lawrence wrote these chapters before receiving her comments, or that she added the advice about Ernest at a later stage.

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On 18 November, Lawrence went to stay at Edward Garnett’s Arts and Crafts style house, The Cearne, near Edenbridge in Kent. It was his second visit. Garnett represented the possibility of extending his contacts with the literary world, and Lawrence may also have been attracted by his new mentor’s relaxed sexual mores: after his illness he invited Helen Corke to join him at The Cearne, adding that Garnett was ‘most beautifully free of the world’s conventions’ (L1 362). Garnett was married to Constance Garnett, the translator of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but they lived semi-detached lives. Some of Lawrence’s letters to Garnett have a somewhat affected worldly tone, as if he is playing up to what he imagines to be his mentor’s attitudes. A letter that he wrote after breaking with Louie, describing his subsequent meeting with her, is an example of this (L1 365–66). It was from The Cearne that in February he wrote the letter breaking their engagement. On his November visit Lawrence got soaked by rain walking to the house from the station, and by Sunday evening was seriously ill with double pneumonia. This illness changed Lawrence’s life. Ada came to nurse him but Louie was kept at a distance, possibly to shield her from the things Lawrence said when delirious. It was evident by the end of November that he would survive, and over the course of the next month he slowly gathered strength. But he would never go back to teaching, and at the beginning of February he ended his engagement. It was this illness that turned him into a full-time writer and a man unconstrained by plans to marry. It would be two months before Lawrence resumed work on ‘Paul Morel’, but the first writing he did after his illness, between 15 and 25 December, was a story that he called ‘The Harassed Angel’, in which he approached one of the novel’s central themes from a remarkably unexpected angle. Three years later he made some significant revisions and published the story in The Prussian Officer under the title ‘The Shades of Spring’. It has always been obvious that this story is a fictional reflection on his relationship

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with Jessie: though the incident and circumstances that it narrates are invented, the main characters are recognisably versions of Lawrence and Jessie. Its publication a year after Sons and Lovers made it seem like an afterword or even correction to the portrayal of Paul and Miriam in the novel—and, indeed, some of the revisions to the story may still be seen in that light—but the first version, written just now, when he is about to reimagine their relationship with her assistance, is much more ambiguous and experimental. The outline of the story is the same in both versions. John Adderley Syson, aged twenty-nine, a married man, educated and with the appearance of a gentleman, is going to visit the farm where Hilda, the sweetheart of his youth, still lives. As was his habit when younger, he takes a short cut through a wood, technically trespassing. He is challenged by a gamekeeper, a younger man whose virility and animal vitality are emphasised, and who reveals that he is now Hilda’s lover. When Syson arrives at the farm his acquired class difference makes his meeting with the family, where he was once an intimate, awkward, and Hilda seems much more mature and confident, making him afraid. She takes him to a hut in the wood, hung and carpeted with animal skins, and reveals to Syson that she was ‘married’, as she puts it, on the same night as he. She acknowledges that her new lover is limited in comparison with him, and can’t ‘[m]ake the stars flash and quiver’, but the story ends with a clear indication of her commitment to the gamekeeper (VG 150). The most significant difference between the first and final versions is that, in revising, Lawrence has Syson realise that he had all along been mistaken about Hilda: ‘He had considered her all spirit … He knew he had mistaken her, had taken her for something she was not. That was his fault, not hers’ (PO 106, 108). The point of the story is clear, and it seems like a correction of Paul’s, if not Lawrence’s own, view of Miriam in Sons and Lovers. The first version, however, is much more ambiguous. In ‘The Harassed Angel’, much more than in ‘The Shades of Spring’, Syson is portrayed as an effete aesthete, another version,

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though more critically presented, of the emotionally crippled autobiographical protagonists of Lawrence’s earlier stories. The editor of The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories points out the similarity of his name to John Addington Symonds, the homosexual aesthete, and Syson quotes Oscar Wilde. The hint of homosexuality may be relevant to the contrast with the gamekeeper’s exaggerated manliness; the aestheticism is certainly congruous with the portrayal of Syson as a man who is ‘extraordinarily delighted … to have a Past’, which he is revisiting ‘to make comparison’, and who regards the gamekeeper with ‘an artist’s impersonal, observant gaze’ (VG 141–42). His alienation from the world in which he was once so intimate is the result of a much starker social transplantation than Lawrence’s own: he was befriended by the timid son of a wealthy wine merchant whose father paid for him to go to Cambridge as a companion for his son. In contrast to ‘The Shades of Spring’, in which Hilda correctly judges that ‘He would not love her, and he would know he never could have loved her’, in ‘The Harassed Angel’ he fears that he is going to ‘fall in love with this old lover … a love that would invade many lives and lay them waste’ (PO 104; VG 147). This fear is partly based on what—at least to a reader unfamiliar with the later version—appears to be sexual attraction. He ‘discover[s] afresh’ ‘the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels’ (VG 147). When she speaks with ‘the old, low, husky tone of intimacy’ he feels ‘a quick change beginning in his blood’ (VG 146). This is a standard way, in Lawrence, to represent sexual arousal. In ‘The Shades of Spring’, however, this change is glossed as ‘the old, delicious sublimation, the thinning, almost the vaporising of himself, as if his spirit were to be liberated’ (PO 104). ‘The Shades of Spring’ reads as (at least in intention) a ‘last word’ on Lawrence’s relationship with Jessie, in which he recognises that he never either truly loved her or truly knew her, and

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takes responsibility for the unhappiness this caused. ‘The Harassed Angel’ reads quite differently, as the exploration of a fear that Jessie still has power over him. Syson recognises that by writing to Hilda and sending her books he has been ‘keeping her—a sort of dog-inthe-manger’ (VG 144). In real life Jessie did not have another lover and Lawrence was not married, so the barriers that he erects in the story did not exist, though the curiously null marriage of Syson in the story may have represented his engagement to Louie, whose life would certainly have been laid waste by a revival of his affair with Jessie. Jessie stayed with Helen Corke in Croydon during the Christmas holiday, and saw Lawrence looking ‘grievously thin, but yet somehow so vital’ (ET 193). He was planning to convalesce in the southern seaside town of Bournemouth, and told her that he would collect her notes for ‘Paul Morel’ after that. In the meantime, he had another literary task. Edward Garnett had asked to see ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, which Lawrence extracted from Heinemann and forwarded without opening the parcel. In marked contrast to Hueffer, Garnett was enthusiastic about the ‘Saga’ and set about advising Lawrence on revising it for publication. For the author of ‘Paul Morel’, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ was a creative dead end, however much he revised it. But in a worldly sense Lawrence’s literary career was stalled, he needed to publish another novel, and the completion of ‘Paul Morel’ looked a long way off. He stayed in Bournemouth for a month at what he called a ‘go-as-you-please boarding house’ with upwards of forty-five other guests. He said at first that he didn’t like it very much, but he seems to have enjoyed (as he often did) the casual and miscellaneous social life (L1 345). After complaining that he was ‘far more alone than if I had gone into apartments’ he came to appreciate ‘real privacy, such as domestic life never gives’ (L1 345, 351). The only life he had ever known was ‘domestic life’, even with the Jones family in Croydon. It was in this boarding house that he turned ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ into The Trespasser. This was a task which mainly comprised moderating

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the literariness of the novel’s style, though two years of spasmodic failed attempts to seduce Helen had given him a more jaundiced view of its heroine. It was in revision that he pinned the fictional Helena and by implication her original down as one of ‘that class of “Dreaming Women”, with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth’ (T 64). Despite improving it he still admitted that ‘At the bottom of my heart I don’t like the work, though I’m sure it has points … It surprises me by its steady progressiveness—I hate it for its fluid, luscious quality’ (L1 351). Surprisingly, given that The Trespasser is one of his least autobiographical novels, and one that he had put behind him and was revising purely because he needed to publish, he complained that ‘I give myself away so much, and write what is my most palpitant, sensitive self ’ (L1 353). It may be that the revision brought back to him the knot of his unsatisfactory relationships with Helen and Jessie when he wrote the ‘Saga’; or perhaps writing about Siegmund’s unhappy marriage (by common agreement the strongest part of the novel) was close to the nerve of his feelings about his engagement as he approached the need to end it. However, such a feeling seems much more appropriate to the fictional task he was about to embark on than to the work he was actually doing. When he left Bournemouth he went first to The Cearne, and it was from there that he wrote the letter to Louie. In it he cites his health and the need to give up teaching, but the heart of it is the sentence, ‘I am afraid we are not well suited’ (L1 361). As John Worthen says, ‘It is painfully clear that Lawrence was determined both to produce sensible reasons, and to end the engagement with or without reasons’ (EY 337). Louie believed all her life that he had already been seduced by Frieda. In fact, he hadn’t yet met Frieda; despite ‘The Harassed Angel’ it is unlikely that he was clearing the way for a resumption of his relationship with Jessie; he had probably by now given up hope of overcoming Helen’s resistance; and although his affair with Alice Dax was continuing, there is little evidence that he ever considered her as a potential partner. Ada

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wrote to Louie that she thought Bert had changed for the worse since his illness; Louie deserved someone better, Ada thought, and she ‘wouldn’t marry a man like him, no, not if he were the only one on the earth’ (L1 361). And this was from a woman who loved him. This might have been just an attempt to console Louie. But perhaps what his illness had done was to effect the triumph of the ‘hard, cruel if need be, me that is the writer’ over the ‘pleasanter me’ who had belonged to Louie (L1 214). He was leaving Louie not for another woman but for his life as a writer. .

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‘The death-blow to our friendship’, ‘Paul Morel III’, February–June 1912

O

n 9 February 1912, Lawrence returned to Eastwood, to the house in which his father and Ada now lived with Emily, her husband and son. If we think of his early life as a Bildungsroman, the story of a young man’s development and entry into the world, this return home after three years in London seems like a low point. But it was here, between early February and early April, that for the first time he worked as a full-time professional writer, completing—as was to be his habit for the rest of his life—the draft of a 200,000-word novel in under two months, and even breaking off to write four journalistic sketches of mining life, capitalising on the strike that coincided with his stay in Eastwood. He had earned a second instalment of royalties for The White Peacock (nearly £50), but this money had mostly been spent on medical expenses, and he had agreed to submit ‘Paul Morel’ to Heinemann by June. He was also returning to Jessie, who took up again her old role of Lawrence’s first reader, but in this case of a work which was of almost life-or-death importance to her. Did he imagine other possibilities with Jessie? John Worthen confidently asserts that he did not believe they had a common future and, in a retort to Jessie’s own claim, ‘in no sense were Lawrence and Jessie, in 1912, “together 97

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again”’ (EY 355). But I’m not so sure. We have seen that in ‘The Harassed Angel’, written at the time of Jessie’s visit to Lawrence in Croydon, Syson fears he is falling in love with Hilda, his attraction to her is physical, and it is only in the later revision that the ‘quick change beginning in his blood’ when in her company is glossed as ‘the vaporising of himself, as if his spirit were to be liberated’, signifying his old, sexually-inhibiting response to Jessie (VG 146; PO 104). Lawrence discussed marriage with Jessie, though in unpromising terms, saying, ‘If we were to marry now you’d expect me to stay at home’ and, when Jessie replied in the affirmative, retorting that he didn’t want a home and thought he would go abroad: ‘I can’t settle yet. I must move about’ (ED 706). On the tram to the railway station he seized her hand and said, ‘I wish we could run away on this’ (ET 197). She didn’t see why they needed to run away, and Worthen acknowledges that this just might have been their chance of breaking free from the past (EY 350). Lawrence did need to ‘run away’, if that means travelling abroad. He needed it for his imaginative and spiritual well-being, and for his physical health. He was to spend thirteen of the eighteen years remaining to him in foreign countries, and in restless movement. Not having a home was to be central to his way of life. He was already planning to travel to Germany, and stay abroad for a year, before he met Frieda. In A Personal Record Jessie wrote that she thought this seemed ‘an excellent plan’ and that during a year abroad ‘he might come to some kind of peace with himself ’ (ET 196). In her original draft, however, she gave a more dismal account of this conversation: Lawrence suggested that if during that period neither of them met anyone they preferred, they might marry. To Jessie marriage ‘faute de mieux’, to Lawrence above all, was understandably ‘a terrible prospect’ (ED 706). The forces opposing their union—even before what was to be the fatal blow of the portrayal of Miriam in ‘Paul Morel III’—were almost certainly insuperable. Perhaps the strongest was the intense mutual awareness that had formed their bond, and that Lawrence

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was to portray with exceptional subtlety in Sons and Lovers. At one point, Jessie records, she was about to make a movement towards him when ‘as plainly as though he spoke aloud, there came into my consciousness the words: “Don’t imagine that because my mother’s dead you can claim me”, and I felt the ground taken from under my feet’ (ET 196). Their meeting, or an amalgam of meetings at this time, is the basis of the last encounter of Paul and Miriam in Sons and Lovers, when Miriam dare not ‘rise, put her arms round him, and say “You are mine”’ because she is ‘afraid he would not let her’ (SL 461–62). Lawrence evidently intuited her conflict, just as she correctly sensed his resistance. In the novel Paul asks Miriam if she will marry him and, when she asks, ‘Do you want it?’ replies, ‘Not much’ (SL 462). Miriam’s last thought about Paul is, ‘He had no religion—it was all for the moment’s attraction that he cared, nothing else, nothing deeper’ (SL 463). This corresponds to Jessie’s judgement, as she records it in A Personal Record, that Lawrence was ‘a philistine of the philistines, and not, as I had always believed, inwardly honouring an unspoken bond’ (ET 203–04). It also startlingly and ironically echoes Gertrude’s judgement of Walter in the draft Lawrence had just written: ‘He had no religion … What he felt just at the minute, that was all to him’ (PM 185). As we have seen, Lawrence deleted the reference to Walter lacking religion. The possibility that he consciously transferred it from Walter to Paul is intriguing. Lawrence compresses the time between the mother’s death and the final parting from Miriam—there is nothing in any of the extant drafts corresponding to his engagement to Louie or his illness. Paul’s state of mind in the final chapter, in which everything is meaningless except the connection with his dead mother, probably corresponds more to the early months of 1911 than to 1912. He also compresses the final phase of his relationship to Jessie into a single meeting, so that the bitterness that in reality was caused by the portrayal of Miriam ensues on the collapse of their discussion of marriage.

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Another factor, unknown to Jessie, that must have told against any meaningful coming together between them was that Lawrence was still involved sexually with Alice Dax. He told Louie that Alice had asked him to meet her in Nottingham on 14 February, the day after the meeting with Louie about which he wrote so affectedly and unsympathetically to Garnett. Louie recorded that on that occasion he was in evening dress, and Worthen speculates that he might have gone to the theatre with Alice that evening (EY 367). This might, Worthen suggests, have been the biographical source of the episode in Sons and Lovers when Paul wears a dinner suit to go to the theatre with Clara and they make love afterwards. In his letter to Garnett, Lawrence wrote, ‘The sequel—which startled me—I will tell you personally some time. It shall not be committed to paper’ (L1 366). Given the worldly tone that he liked to adopt when writing to Garnett, this ‘sequel’ is likely to have been a sexual adventure. He certainly went to stay with Alice and her husband at Shirebrook, a Derbyshire town twenty miles from Eastwood, to which the Daxes had moved in 1910. He made this visit the day after meeting Frieda Weekley, on 4 March. In her letter to Frieda, Alice wrote, ‘He needed you. I remember so well his words:—“You would like Frieda—she is direct and free, but I don’t know how you would get on together.”’ This letter is one of the most remarkable documents relating to Lawrence’s biography, and qualifies Alice to be considered the most generous-spirited of all the women he was involved with. Sadly for her, that quality shines above all through her recognition that she was not the woman he needed: I had always been glad that he met you … I was never meet for him … Unlike you, I could never quarrel with D.H., the probable truth being that I felt unsure of him and feared to lose him, whilst he in turn, I suppose equally unsure of me, rarely quarrelled with me, but when he became extremely

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angry would turn and walk out. It was not honest—I know it, and I know too how much sooner I should have achieved myself had I given vent to the feelings I had, when I had them. And then I expected of him an honesty which I myself did not render, which was impertinence, so that always between us there were under-currents which we could not cross.1 Her friend Enid Hilton claims that ‘Lawrence asked Dax to leave with him, but she refused. Naturally, one wonders why.’ Hilton’s answer is that ‘she knew … that she could never be quite big enough for him’ and that she could neither leave her son nor burden Lawrence with the child.2 If this means that Lawrence asked her to go away with him in 1912, an even more jaundiced light is cast on his similar outburst to Jessie. However, we should treat Hilton’s explicit claim with a little caution, since it is made in a revision of her memoir, published in 1990. In the original memoir, probably written in the early 1950s, she merely wrote, ‘Naturally one wonders why she did not go with D.H. when he wanted her so badly.’3 If, as seems highly likely, Alice was the most significant real-life inspiration for Clara Dawes, their parting was much more painful for her than Lawrence’s fiction. Clara ‘would not be sorry when he was gone’ and ‘really, at the bottom of her heart, wished to be given back’ to her husband (SL 451). Alice was pregnant when she last saw Lawrence. Enid Hilton said that she hoped the child was Lawrence’s, but the dates make that unlikely, and she admitted to Frieda that her daughter ‘would never have been conceived but for an unendurable passion which only he had aroused and my husband had slaked.’4 She describes herself during her pregnancy as ‘suffering in body and sick in soul.’ Enid Hilton thought she went through ‘a hell of the sort we can barely imagine’ and (in the unpublished draft of her memoir) that she rejected all other men, including her husband, after her affair with Lawrence ended.5

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Her heart-wrenching story is redeemed by her affirmation that the daughter became ‘the most enduring and precious joy of all my years’.6 At their first meeting in February, Jessie handed Lawrence the written recollections that he had asked her for. These have not survived, but there is strong evidence that one sequence of events in particular is strongly indebted to Jessie, and that she can claim some of the credit for what she called ‘his power to transmute the common experiences into significance’ (ET 198). In what is now Chapter 7 of Sons and Lovers (pp. 200–06) there is an account of two excursions that Paul and Miriam make with a group of friends to the Hemlock Stone, a curious sandstone outcrop near Stapleford, and to Wingfield Manor, the ruins of a fifteenth-century house where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned, both about ten miles from Eastwood. There is no equivalent in ‘Paul Morel II’. These excursions are the occasion of two of the most sensitive episodes in the portrayal of Paul and Miriam’s relationship. Apart from the opening, which I discussed in the last chapter, only a few pages of ‘Paul Morel III’ have survived. Most of the final version, composed between September and November 1912, was written out afresh and Lawrence discarded the earlier draft, but in some cases he incorporated pages of the third version. He also retained the draft of the excursion episode, on which Jessie had written comments. These pages provide some of the most compelling evidence of the dialogue that shaped Sons and Lovers. Walking back from the Hemlock Stone Miriam lingers behind the group and, catching up, comes across Paul alone in the road ‘working away steadily, patiently, a little hopelessly’, trying to mend a broken umbrella. ‘A deep pain took hold of her, and she knew she must love him. And she had discovered him, discovered in him a rare potentiality, discovered his loneliness’ (SL 201). When he tells her that the umbrella had been William’s, ‘an’ my mother can’t help but know’, it is ‘the confirmation of her vision of him’ (SL 202). This is one of the most sympathetic and convincing moments in

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the portrayal of Paul and Miriam’s relationship, and one of the finest examples of the ‘power to transmute the common experiences into significance’. A broken umbrella, a boy trying to fix it: Jessie gave her own account of the incident in A Personal Record, in which she wrote that this sight was for her ‘symbolic’, ‘a sudden flash of insight’ (ET 41–42). It opens a doorway into his inner life. She added, ‘I did not tell him what I had seen.’ How then did Lawrence know about it? It is highly likely that, given the importance it had for Jessie, it formed part of the ‘notes’ that she wrote for him. This is confirmed by a comment that Jessie made on a passage that immediately follows in ‘Paul Morel III’: ‘This was the spirit of God, as I lived it, and as I gave it to you in my writing’ (PM 244). And the dialogue does not end there. She commented on the draft that she saw in the spring of 1912, ‘The revelation over the broken umbrella was a spiritual awakening. Miriam had a glimpse of the inner Paul, and it set her wondering and eternally seeking’ (PM 243). The phrase ‘the confirmation of her vision of him’ does not appear in ‘Paul Morel III’: in response to Jessie’s comment he intensifies and deepens Miriam’s feeling by adding this phrase and by describing her as ‘Quivering as at some “Annunciation”’. The Hemlock Stone excursion is almost immediately followed by the trip to Wingfield Manor. In ‘Paul Morel III’ this is prefaced by a brief paragraph about Miriam siding with Paul on an occasion when he ‘outraged the family feeling’. Jessie crossed this out and wrote ‘This was not my meaning’, suggesting that the derivation from her writing continues (PM 237, 298). Lawrence omitted this paragraph from the final text. At Wingfield Manor Paul climbs the staircase of a tower behind Miriam, in the wind. The ‘Paul Morel III’ text reads, ‘A high wind blowing through the loop-holes, filled the girl’s skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until Paul laid hold of the hem of her dress, and held it down for her, chatting naturally all the time’ (PM 238). Though less developed and less momentous than the umbrella incident, this is memorable for the way a tiny incident conveys

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the innocence, intimacy, sensitivity and unselfconsciousness of Paul and Miriam’s relationship at its most harmonious. Again it almost certainly derives from Jessie’s recollections: as with the earlier incident, she may not take credit for the writing, but it is she who felt and remembered the significance. Again the dialogue continues in the drafting. Jessie crossed out the phrase ‘chatting naturally all the time’ and wrote, ‘There was no need to chat. It was an act of the purest intimacy. Do not degrade it’ (PM 298). This is an example of the extraordinary refinement of Jessie’s feeling. I would venture that almost no reader would think the phrase ‘chatting naturally all the time’ in any way degrades the action. But to her it introduces an element of self-consciousness, as if Paul were chatting, however ‘naturally’, in order to cover the action. In the final text of Sons and Lovers Lawrence replaced the offending phrase with, ‘He did it perfectly simply, as he would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always’ (SL 205). The comparison with picking up a glove achieves what I assume Lawrence had intended with ‘chatting naturally’, while removing the hint of self-consciousness. We have no way of knowing whether Jessie would have been satisfied with this revision—she probably never read it—but it seems to me to meet her objection. Unless we suppose that Lawrence was merely pandering to Jessie he seems to have understood and sympathised with her criticism. In A Personal Record Jessie records her delight on reading ‘the early pages’ of ‘Paul Morel III’: Here was all that spontaneous flow, the seemingly effortless translation of life that filled me with admiration … Born and bred of working people, he had the rare gift of seeing them from within, and revealing them on their own plane … I felt that Lawrence was coming into his true kingdom as a creative artist, and an interpreter of the people to whom he belonged. (ET 197–98)

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There is no reason to suppose that this is not a true reflection of her feelings at the time—given her subsequent response to the novel, it is highly unlikely that she later reread it to remind herself of its virtues. As well as making a crucial creative contribution with the provision of episodes such as the Hemlock Stone and Wingfield Manor, she was also the first reader to recognise this major advance in Lawrence’s art—one that some readers continued to consider the peak of his achievement. She reports him saying at this time, ‘When we are not together, since I have been away from you, I don’t think the same, feel the same; I’m not the same man. I can’t write poetry’ (ET 200). This, however, only meant to her that they were ‘back in the old dilemma’ of his needing her for his work but being unable to love her, a dilemma that was now ‘a thousand times more cruel’ because his mother’s influence, as she interpreted it, reached from beyond the grave. The examples Jessie gives of what she admired in the early pages are from the chapters he wrote before his illness, in November. She describes his state when writing the novel back in Eastwood as ‘fixed in the centre of the tension [of his relationship with her], helpless, waiting for one pull to triumph over the other … The writing of it was fundamentally a terrific fight for a bursting of the tension’ (ET 201). She may have overestimated her own influence on his state of mind. The ‘tension’ could simply have been the result of the new intensity of creative effort; in so far as it was related to his emotional life, his affair with Alice and, from 3 March, only three weeks after his return, his meeting with Frieda are likely to have caused him stress. The ‘break’, as Jessie calls it, meaning the change in her response to the novel but also the breaking of the tension she attributed to Lawrence, ‘came with the treatment of Miriam’, who enters the novel in Chapter 6. By this time Lawrence had added about as much again to the November manuscript. A year later, when Lawrence sent her the proofs of the novel, Jessie wrote to Helen Corke, ‘The Miriam part of the novel is a slander, a fearful treachery. David has selected every point which

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sets off Miriam at a disadvantage, and he has interpreted her every word and action, and thought in the light of Mrs Morel’s hatred of her’ (LJC 27). (Almost uniquely, Helen Corke called Lawrence ‘David’, and Jessie adopted this name in correspondence with her.) In the same letter she wrote, ‘After reading a bit of that accursed writing I am as flabby as even David could wish to portray me.’ In the first version of her memoir she recalled, ‘I looked through the proofs … but I could find no change. I cannot believe that Lawrence ever rewrote Sons and Lovers for I found the proof-sheets tallied word for word with the Ms I had read. I didn’t dare attempt to read the whole thing. I only looked for changes in the parts where I most wanted to find them. But there were no changes’ (ED 709). Since, as a matter of fact, Lawrence did rewrite the novel extensively after March 1912, since many of the changes concerned Miriam and some of them were in response to Jessie’s notes, we must assume that she read very little of the proof, or that the changes seemed insignificant to her, or that she was too distressed to be able to judge accurately. Whatever the reason, the consequence is that her comments must be regarded as relating to ‘Paul Morel III’, not to the final text. In A Personal Record, as in the letter to Helen, Jessie’s main complaint is that Lawrence adopted his mother’s judgement of her, and that this was a symptom of his ‘strange obsession’ with his mother. Her only specific criticism is that he ‘completely left out the years of devotion to the development of his genius—devotion that had been pure joy’, which to her was ‘like presenting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’ (ET 203). Elsewhere it is clear that she was deeply aggrieved by two other aspects of the novel. In her surviving notes, written in March 1912, she repeatedly protests against Lawrence pre-dating the conflict between them. This implicitly challenges her construction of their relationship, that it was undermined by the interference of his family in1906, and suggests that the problems between them were more intrinsic. In 1935, she wrote to the Polish scholar Wincenty Lutoslawski

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that when Lawrence called the lovemaking of Paul and Miriam a ‘test’ and ‘pretended that the “test” had failed, he seemed to me inhuman. He killed himself in me’ (LJC 117). This unfeeling description of what she thought both of them had considered a ‘binding and sacred’ connection might well have been the most intolerable offence of all in Sons and Lovers. It would be understandable if when she ‘looked for changes in the parts where [she] most wanted to find them’ she had looked first at Chapter 11. As we shall see, Lawrence later revised the account of their first lovemaking. If Jessie did read these pages in proof, either the revisions were insignificant to her or she was too distraught to notice them. Lawrence and Jessie don’t seem to have discussed the novel once she had begun to be distressed by the portrayal of Miriam. She writes, ‘He asked for my opinion, but comment seemed futile … He left off coming to see me and sent the manuscript by post. His avoidance of me was significant’ (ET 201). He may not have been avoiding her. In March, as we have seen, he spent several days at the Daxes’, and later in the month he visited George Neville in Staffordshire. More significantly, he had begun his relationship with Frieda. But when she had read the finished manuscript they arranged to meet at her sister’s house after his return from Neville on 31 March. She thought that this would be a ‘limited opportunity’ to speak about the book and ‘made some notes on minor points’ (ET 205). Lawrence arrived after a long and difficult train journey, with frayed nerves but a ‘jaunty air’. It is characteristic of Jessie’s account that she portrays any apparent good humour in Lawrence during this period as a mask covering bitterness and despair. Nothing was said about ‘Paul Morel’, but Lawrence returned the next day, looking ‘far too much a sick man for me to dream of telling him all I thought and felt about his novel’. They went out for a walk and he said, ‘I thought perhaps you would have something to say about the writing.’ Feeling that ‘the time for speaking had gone by’, she merely said, ‘I’ve put some notes in with the manuscript.’

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She explains that, ‘It was not that I would not speak but simply that I could not … His defensive attitude had kept me at bay, as he intended it should, and now the time was gone’ (ET 209–10). There is no other evidence that Lawrence was sick at this time, and Jessie seems to be projecting on to him her own unwillingness to discuss the novel. However, the notes that she gave him dealt with much more than ‘minor points’, and they constitute another significant stage in her contribution to the novel. After getting the manuscript back from her he spent the next two days reading it through, and announced to Garnett that he would finish it that week. Whether he began the revision immediately is uncertain, but the next day he received the proofs of The Trespasser and devoted himself not merely to correction but to further revision of that novel, promising to Garnett that he would ‘wage war on my adjectives’ (L1 381). Helen Baron and Carl Baron surmise that he decided ‘Paul Morel’ ‘needed revising more extensively than he could undertake at once’ and that he would have to take it to Germany with him (SL xxxviii). Lawrence’s plan of going to Germany dates back at least to January, when he announced it in a letter to Louie (before breaking with her), adding, ‘Won’t it be just all right’ (L1 350). Lydia’s sister Ada had married the scholarly German Fritz Krenkow, and a cousin in Germany, Hannah Krenkow, had invited Lawrence to Waldbröl in the Rhineland. His tone in writing to Louie suggests that this initial plan was for a short visit, but by March he was thinking about trying to get a teaching post in Germany, and with this in mind he contacted Ernest Weekley, Professor of Modern Languages at University College Nottingham, one of the few teachers there whom Lawrence admired (EY 179). The consequence of this contact, Lawrence’s meeting with Frieda (Figure 5) on 3 March, his immediately falling in love with her, and their becoming lovers soon afterwards, is a story that has been told many times. For the present narrative the salient facts are that he met Frieda when he

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had written at least two-thirds of ‘Paul Morel III’ (L1 372), that from the start he considered their relationship a lasting bond which transformed his life, while she, until and beyond their departure for Germany, thought of it as one more in a series of affairs, and had no intention of leaving her husband. Their departure was not an elopement: she had independently made arrangements to visit her family in Germany which was, from Lawrence’s point of view, a lucky coincidence. It is especially important, when reading Jessie’s account of her meetings with Lawrence after 3 March, to bear in mind that she was unaware of or ignored this epochal new event in his life, and her interpretation of his state of mind is consequently unreliable. Jessie wrote that, ‘As the novel was nearly finished before Lawrence made the acquaintance of Mrs Weekley, it is a little difficult for her to claim a place there’ (LJC 67). This of course reflects Jessie’s belief that Lawrence didn’t alter the novel after March. It is true that there is little reflection of Frieda in any of the characters—though the moments of sexual fulfilment with Clara as well as some of Clara’s criticisms of Paul may owe something to Lawrence’s experience with her—but as we shall see she certainly did play a role in the revision of the novel. The monumental task of writing most of ‘Paul Morel III’ in six weeks was not Lawrence’s only literary activity in his new life as a professional writer. We have seen that he corrected the proofs of The Trespasser. He also wrote and published poems and, most relevantly to Sons and Lovers, he wrote four ‘sketches’ of mining life, taking advantage of his presence in Eastwood during the strike. The first and slightest of these, ‘The Miner at Home’, he wrote almost immediately on his arrival in Eastwood and submitted via Garnett to the Nation. It was accepted and, on receipt of the proofs on 14 March, he immediately wrote ‘Her Turn’, ‘Strike Pay’ and ‘A Sick Collier’ in three days. These sketches, though more developed than ‘The Miner at Home’, didn’t meet with so much favour and weren’t published till after Sons and Lovers. He wrote

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them primarily for money but seemed to think, rightly, that they wouldn’t be successful: ‘why … do I kill my own pig before I’ve driven it to market. There’s stuff in all the damned articles that nobody will want to print’ (L1 376). If by killing his own pig he meant writing unpublishable material, this of course was to be his habit throughout his life; but unlike The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover these were slight pieces written for money. This doesn’t mean, however, that they are without interest or literary merit. Though he calls them ‘sketches’, ‘articles’ and ‘journalistic’, they are fictional narratives, and the most substantial of them, ‘A Sick Collier’, found its way into The Prussian Officer. In the light of Lawrence’s development as a short story writer what is most notable about them is the almost complete absence of the bourgeois literary narrator, their objective representation of the world they are set in, and their morally neutral treatment of working-class marital conflict. All the male characters are ‘good’ husbands, none of them drinks excessively like Walter Morel, yet every story is centred on marital conflict, usually about money and the strike. John Worthen remarks that they are ‘the first sign that he could write about Arthur Lawrence’s world without subjecting it to Lydia Lawrence’s disapproval’ (EY 350). Their influence on ‘Paul Morel III’, given that Lawrence had written the first three chapters, where Walter figures most prominently, in November, may have been slight, but they might have played a part in any distancing from Gertrude’s perspective during revision. For example, it was during revision that Lawrence added the sympathetic account of Walter getting up, making his breakfast and walking to work, one of the few occasions on which he is portrayed entirely from his own point of view (SL 37–38). Lawrence also found time to write a whole play, inspired by his visit to George Neville, and composed soon after his return. The Cambridge editors suggest that he was prompted to return to drama by the news that Garnett had sent one of his plays to the Manchester actor–director–producer Ben Iden Payne. The

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prospect of Iden Payne acting in one of his plays thrilled him (L1 384). The possibility that a theatre professional might have spotted and developed Lawrence’s talents as a dramatist is one of the intriguing ‘alternative histories’ of Lawrence’s career. George Neville had secretly married a woman whom he had made pregnant and was living apart from her in a small Staffordshire village, where he was teaching. Lawrence described him as a ‘Don Juanish fellow’ and, writing from Neville’s lodgings, said the two of them ‘dodge about at evening’ (L1 373, 377). The play, clearly based on Neville and Lawrence’s situations, features the sexual adventures of two friends, one of whom is secretly married with a child, in a rural village. Like The Merry-go-Round it is a comedy, but having a lower-middle-class setting it lacks the vigorous workingclass dialogue of the earlier play. It is the only one of Lawrence’s plays never to have been professionally performed. The most interesting part is dramatically the weakest, namely the arrival in the third act of the married man’s friend’s fiancée, who acts as a Dea ex Machina, resolving the central character’s problems by means of a liberal and tolerant sexual code that obviously derives from Frieda. This character, with her aristocratic social ease and confident bearing, humorous toleration of her fiancé’s peccadilloes, and idealistic philosophy of free love, is the fullest picture we have of how Lawrence thought of Frieda in the first weeks of their relationship. On 3 May, Lawrence and Frieda met at Charing Cross station and left together for the garrison town of Metz in Lorraine (then part of Germany), where her parents lived. Lawrence stayed in a hotel and for the ensuing days saw frustratingly little of Frieda. She confessed to her mother and sisters (both of whom were married, with lovers) that she was with a man, and introduced Lawrence to them. They liked him and approved of the affair, but were opposed to any notion of her leaving her husband and family. Their bohemian approach to love and marriage—which up to now Frieda shared—was profoundly different from Lawrence’s fundamentally

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Puritan belief that Frieda was his mate for life. He was tormented by being separated from her while she was subjected to this hostile influence. Frieda’s father could not be allowed even to know that Lawrence was there, but this secrecy was breached when, on one of their rare meetings, he and Frieda strayed into a military zone and were arrested. Frieda was also prevaricating about admitting to her husband that she was with a lover. Lawrence had pressed her to make a clean breast before leaving England. She had got as far as confessing to two previous affairs, but this had such a severe effect on Weekley that she did not have the courage to go further. What she did say, however, aroused his suspicions and he sent a telegram to Metz demanding to know if she was with a man. She attempted to prevaricate, but on 8 May Lawrence took matters out of her hands, and wrote to Weekley himself. The fiasco of the arrest persuaded the family that Lawrence had to leave Metz, and he travelled first to Trier, en route to Waldbröl in the Rhineland, where he was expected by his cousins. During this period he launched on a new phase of his career as a professional writer, writing three travel sketches: ‘The English and the Germans’, ‘How a Spy is Arrested’ (an account of his own experience in Metz) and ‘French Sons of Germany’. He arrived at Waldbröl on the 11th. Here, though he was even further separated from Frieda, he was detached from the frenzy that his letter to Weekley had launched, and kindly treated by his cousins. A sketch that he wrote here suggests that he was flirting with Hannah, perhaps in retaliation for a brief affair that Frieda was having at the same time. Here in Waldbröl, between 11 and 23 May, Lawrence almost completed the revision of ‘Paul Morel’. For the first time he believed that he had finished his autobiographical novel, and this was the version that, with a few small subsequent emendations, he submitted to Heinemann in June. It was probably during this phase that he made the revisions which were directly influenced by the notes Jessie had given him at the end of March.

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5 Frieda, Montague and Barbara Weekley, 1905

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We don’t know how extensive these notes were. What survive are the twenty-three pages of Chapter 9 (Chapter 7 in Sons and Lovers) which include the umbrella and skirt-holding episodes, annotated by Jessie; four pages of commentary by her on this chapter; and three short pieces of narrative in her hand. These are all printed in Appendices IV and V of the Cambridge Paul Morel. The editors of Sons and Lovers state that two of her narrative fragments possibly and one certainly are revisions of ‘Paul Morel III’ (SL xxxvi–xxxvii). It is my belief that they are original pieces of writing by Jessie. Lawrence incorporated them into the novel with only light emendation. The Cambridge Paul Morel also includes a ‘Commentary on a draft’ by Jessie which the editor believes relates to ‘Paul Morel II’. As we have seen, a remarkable feature of Lawrence and Jessie’s friendship was an exceptional mutual awareness, amounting almost to intersubjectivity. This was the basis of their intimacy but may also have been one of the barriers to their forming a sexual relationship. This intersubjectivity is played out in the dialogue between them that contributed to the successive revisions of ‘Paul Morel’. There are two notable examples of this in the surviving pages that Jessie annotated. During the expedition to Wingfield Manor the young people visit a church. In Version III Lawrence wrote: It was a novelty to Paul and Miriam to find themselves in a church, free from restrictions. They walked down the chancel, while the others tried the pulpit, and the reading desks, and the vestry. Paul would not go beyond the Communion rails, nor would Miriam. His feeling for the sanctity of things was very precious to her. ‘A little prayer?’ he murmured, putting up his eyebrows quizzically. They knelt for one moment, and nobody noticed them. (PM 238)

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Jessie deleted ‘putting up his eyebrows quizzically’ and wrote, ‘Indeed no! Paul was reverential and not a bit self-conscious’ (PM 298). This episode belongs to the period before Easter 1906—in other words, the period when according to Jessie their relations were harmonious. She was acutely sensitive to any reading back into this period of feelings or attitudes that, to her, belonged after the break. Evidently Paul quizzically raising his eyebrows is an example of this. Note also that Jessie makes no distinction between reality and fiction. She was of course a sophisticated reader and recognised that ‘Paul Morel’ was a novel, but her hope that in writing it Lawrence might ‘free himself from his strange obsession with his mother’ meant that he had, in important essentials, to honour the biographical truth. It would be easy to dismiss this perspective as that of someone who has a basically non-literary interest in the novel. But Lawrence himself didn’t dismiss it. His response in this instance is remarkable. Here is the passage as it appears in Sons and Lovers: In that atmosphere Miriam’s soul came into a glow. Paul was afraid of the things he mustn’t do. And he was sensitive to the feel of the place. Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together. He would not go beyond the communion rail. She loved him for that. Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her. (SL 203) Lawrence has done far more than comply with Jessie’s objection. In Version III Paul’s subjectivity is present only as refracted through Miriam: ‘His feeling for the sanctity of things was very precious to her.’ In the final text there is a literal dialogue of souls: ‘Miriam turned to him. He answered.’ Sentence by sentence the viewpoint shifts between Paul and Miriam as each responds to the

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other’s religious intensity. Perhaps more directly than anywhere else Lawrence portrays what might unkindly be called the folie à deux of himself and Jessie, by which each encouraged the other’s tendencies to spirituality and abstraction. Bearing in mind that this episode almost certainly originated in Jessie’s earlier notes, it is highly unlikely that what Lawrence is doing here is recalling the experience and correcting his record of it. He is responding to Jessie’s description of him as reverential and dramatising the intersubjectivity that engendered that state of mind. We are close here to Violeta Sotirova’s analysis of Lawrentian dialogism in her excellent study of narrative viewpoint in Sons and Lovers. This is Sotirova’s commentary on the episode (also in the fragment of manuscript annotated by Jessie) in which Miriam takes Paul to share her appreciation of the beauty of a wild rose bush. Rather than take the repeated description of the same object simply as a means of enacting a shift in viewpoint, or as a subtle way of exposing differences between the two characters, I interpret the whole scene, with its repetitions, as a way of showing that the characters respond to each other’s perceptions … It is not the external objects of narrative ‘reality’ alone that provoke the characters’ reactions, but also the sentiments of the other. The viewpoints are thus not simply juxtaposed in contrast but brought together in dialogue.7 It happens that three drafts of this episode have survived: Version II, Version III and the published text. These three versions are different enough to make each of them very dubious, considered as autobiographical reminiscence. Here, too, the context of the final version is Lawrence’s recent literal dialogue with Jessie as much as, or more than, the biographical incident ten years earlier. Here is Version II, written in 1911 and read by Jessie at the end of that year.

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They went on round the corner, where was a magnificent tree of yellow willow-catkins … ‘Ah lovely!’ cried Paul, arrested … ‘Yes, it is beautiful,’ she murmured with a choked throat. Feeling giddy, she went near to him, leaned slightly against his shoulder. That was delicious, and he did not move away. She knew she was making a mistake, yet she could not refrain from timidly sliding her hand into his arm. He drew away, almost unconscious: his instinct was to keep himself alone, intact. This is the instinct of a man in love, when he is away from the beloved. Miriam noted with bitterness the withdrawal, whilst he was serenely unconscious. So that, whilst the harmony between them seemed to him, save for indistinct moments, perfect, for her there was always a discord and a sense of strife. (PM 84–85) I have omitted a dialogue in which Paul makes several biblical references, but this does not alter the fact that religious sentiment, in response to the catkins, is entirely absent. The significance of the scene is very simple and explicit: Paul rebuffs Miriam’s innocent physical advances because he is in love with his mother. The portrayal of Miriam as conflicted and Paul as serene contrasts both with Jessie’s later view of this period, as being without conflict on either side, and with Lawrence’s, in which the conflict is Paul’s. We have no surviving response by Jessie to this episode, but the fact that in later versions the catalyst is a wild rose tree may suggest that she wrote a version of it. Alternatively, of course, Lawrence may simply have thought that roses were more symbolically suggestive. In Version III Lawrence turned up the sexual tension, as well as introducing religious feeling. Paul and Miriam, in the hush of twilight, stood reverentially before it. Point after point of steady roses gleamed up towards the sky. The boy and girl were silent, rather forlorn with wonder.

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Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel ‘It’s quite true of Moses,’ he said, in a queer tone. Miriam looked at him. Her face was pale with love and inquiry. He tossed his head and flung his hand at the flowers, hating to explain. ‘The bush is on fire with the Lord,’ he said: ‘Only for us, a white, cool fire, of stars.’ She looked at him. The bush then was really wonderful! She thrilled with joy, lifted her face, with a peculiar, sipping motion, towards the flowers. And she looked sidelong at Paul. But he was silent there, in a kind of communion with the tree. He did not wish to kiss her, as she wished, almost for the first time, to be kissed. Passion was sealed in him with a kind of fervour of soul. His mood was abstract, purely religious. A touch of lips would have been a spiritual agony to him. He could not kiss cool kisses. So, when Miriam made it impossible for him to kiss her, she wanted his mouth. She had taken him to his holy of holies, and wanted him there to clasp her body. That was her tragedy: she purified his love too much. For it was pain to him even to touch her, then. Paul went home running, knitting his brows in agitation, because of the strife in himself. Miriam wanted him, even more than he gave: and his mother, all that part of him which belonged to his mother, strained against Miriam. (PM 233–34; my italics)

Not surprisingly, this passage outraged Jessie more than any other on which her annotations survive. She objected to Paul saying, ‘Only for us, a white, cool fire’ as ‘Much too significant for that unconscious period’, and to Miriam looking ‘sidelong’ at Paul, but when she came to the lines about Miriam wanting Paul to kiss her and clasp her body she crossed out the two paragraphs and wrote, ‘Astonishing misconception. Miriam was sixteen—as pure

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and fierce in virginity as Paul’ (PM 297). In a separate commentary on this chapter she wrote, ‘At that time no instinct of sex was awake in either. To suggest it in Miriam destroys the purity of the whole incident: it was all spiritual for Miriam as well as for Paul’ (PM 243). There is no reason to doubt Jessie’s assertion that she did not have the feelings Lawrence attributes to Miriam, and the whole passage is crudely explicit and unconvincing. Again, his redrafting in response to her objection is subtle and creatively productive: In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point, the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses. Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush. ‘They seem as if they walk like butterflies, and shake themselves,’ he said. She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstasy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers, she went forward and touched them in worship. ‘Let us go,’ he said. There was a cool scent of ivory roses, a white, virgin scent. Something made him feel anxious and imprisoned. The two walked in silence. (SL 195–96; my italics) In her analysis of the dialogism of this passage Sotirova shows that the conflict occurs for Paul when he realises Miriam’s feelings, and that this is conveyed through ‘the typical metaphors,

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allegedly associated with Miriam’s experience: white, ivory and virgin appear[ing] in the presentation of Paul’s viewpoint’.8 I would add to this that the word ‘virgin’, which does not appear in either of the earlier versions, has migrated from Jessie’s commentary: ‘Miriam was sixteen—as pure and fierce in virginity as Paul’. Moreover, the words ‘communion’, ‘soul’ and ‘holy’, all of which are associated with Paul in Version III, are here transferred to Miriam. This seems to be Lawrence’s response to Jessie’s insistence that ‘it was all spiritual for Miriam’. The revision represents a positive response to her criticism in that there is no consciousness of sexual tension in either character, but there is an undercurrent of unease that Jessie does not acknowledge, and that becomes explicit when the ‘white, virgin scent’ makes him feel ‘anxious and imprisoned’. As Sotirova demonstrates, this scent represents the intersubjectivity which makes their intimacy so precious, yet which constantly inhibits Paul. Jessie’s version of the scene has none of the tension and subtlety of Lawrence’s final version, but it is the dialogue (at least partly hostile) with her that makes it possible. Jessie made a total of thirty-two comments on the twenty-three pages of this fragment. Not a single one of the phrases she objects to remains in the final text. Often this is because Lawrence has completely rewritten a section, but on occasions we can see him, as in the two cases above, directly responding to her challenge. A smaller instance occurs in the dialogue when Paul says he thinks that if one person loves, the other does, and Jessie responds that if not, love would be terrible (PM 237; SL 202). Paul answers, in both versions, ‘Yes but it is—at least with most people.’ In Version III, Miriam, ‘not reading his reservation aright … was assured’. Jessie objected, ‘Nay—Miriam knew that Paul spoke for his own assurance’ (PM 298). The final text reads, ‘Miriam, thinking he had assured himself, felt strong in herself.’ This is a very striking illustration of how the final text refers as much to their most recent dialogue as to earlier events: Lawrence’s revision combines both his and her perspectives.

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Twelve of Jessie’s thirty-two comments are protests against Lawrence pre-dating aspects of their relationship, ranging from ‘a struggle between the mother and the girl for the possession of the boy’s soul’ to the reading of Schopenhauer, Spencer and Nietzsche (PM 231, 297). However, though Lawrence removed all these instances, there is strong evidence that he dissented from Jessie’s belief that there had been no tension between them before Easter 1906. One striking example is the episode during the family holiday to the Lincolnshire coast, on which Miriam accompanies the Morels, when Paul’s disturbed reaction to the rising of the moon over the sand-hills is attributed to the ‘[t]he fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman’ having been ‘suppressed into a shame’ (SL 216). This is a condensation of three episodes that Jessie reports, on three successive summer holidays between 1906 and 1908. On each of these occasions she thought he was ‘in great distress of mind’, and the third time she was frightened that he had ‘become dehumanized’ (ET 127–8). These holidays all, of course, occurred after Easter 1906. But in Sons and Lovers the episode is placed two chapters before Paul’s announcement that he could not love her as a husband should love his wife, and that his family had advised him to see less of Miriam. There is no record of Jessie having commented on this, but since Lawrence had followed the same sequence in ‘Paul Morel II’ it is hard to imagine that she didn’t protest. Jessie is factually correct about the dates of the holidays, but this makes Lawrence’s challenge to her construction of their emotional history the more significant. At the weakest, the Easter Monday conversation was unimportant enough for him to have misremembered the sequence of events; at the strongest, his ordering of events is an implicit polemical blow against Jessie’s interpretation. At the same time, probably, that she wrote her comments on the fragment of the draft, she wrote three episodes which Lawrence incorporated into the novel. The most important of these is another version (after her 1911 short story and, possibly, a second version in response to his request for her memories) of that traumatic event.

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Helen Baron and Carl Baron, the editors of the Cambridge Sons and Lovers, argue that this episode is a ‘revision of Lawrence’s text’, on the grounds that she appended a note explaining, ‘Pages 284–294 [of “Paul Morel III”] really do Paul an injustice. The brutality was not true of that period. If it had been so, subsequent events must have been different. These pages merely suggest something nearer to the actual spirit of the time’ (SL xxxvi–xxxvii). I will be arguing that this is a completely original piece of writing, an alternative version of the event, not a revision of Lawrence’s text. Since the relevant pages of ‘Paul Morel III’ have not survived, we can’t be certain what it was that Jessie thought ‘brutal’, but we can make an educated guess based on the versions that we do have. In Jessie’s fragment Paul is strained and unnatural in manner, and tells her that he doesn’t love her as a man should love his wife, but he makes no personal attack on her character. In ‘Paul Morel II’, by contrast, he behaves to her with deliberate rudeness and complains that she ‘would wheedle the soul out of things’. He also brutally rejects her disgust at seeing a trap baited with the guts of an animal (PM 105). These passages remain in the final text, where Paul’s criticism of Miriam is even more extreme: ‘You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved’ (SL 258). We may be pretty sure, then, that ‘Paul Morel III’ was similar, and that Lawrence resisted Jessie’s objection to the ‘brutality’ and wanted to portray Paul in a more unfavourable light than Jessie remembered. However, Lawrence did incorporate Jessie’s version, in particular the dialogue in which he asks her if she could get to like another man and confesses that he is acting under pressure from his family. This dialogue appears almost word for word. But it is in a separate scene, a week after Paul’s initial break with Miriam (SL 262–66). In this scene Paul behaves much more sensitively than in the earlier one, with no brutal criticisms of Miriam’s character. It is also only in this scene that Paul makes suggestions of ways in which they can continue to see each other. An obvious conclusion

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from this is that Version III, like Versions II and IV, contained a scene in which Paul behaves with deliberate cruelty, and that Jessie’s fragment is not a rewriting of this scene but a completely new version of the episode. Lawrence resisted changing the tone of his original version—which, to any reader other than Jessie, is a powerful expression of Paul’s misery and internal conflict—but was impressed by her narrative and wanted to use it. His solution was inspired. His first scene suggests that Paul can only make the break by inflicting cruel wounds on both Miriam and himself, while his more sensitive and conciliatory behaviour in the later scene gives a much fuller picture of the emotional reality and suggests to the reader that the future of their relationship is still undecided. The likelihood that Lawrence included Paul’s admission of family pressure only after reading Jessie’s narrative in the spring of 1912 raises another intriguing point. According to Jessie, as we have seen, when she sent him her fictionalised account of this episode in the spring of 1911, while he was working on ‘Paul Morel II’, he ‘promptly’ replied: ‘They tore me from you, the love of my life … It was the slaughter of the foetus in the womb’ (ET 186). If Jessie’s recollection of Lawrence’s expression, and the date, are reliable, it is remarkable that, despite having responded in this way to Jessie’s story, he omitted the family’s intervention from Version II. If my interpretation of events is correct, he also omitted it from Version III. For Jessie this episode was a chasm between their earlier, innocent and harmonious relationship, and the conflict of later years. It was essential to her understanding of her early life that this conflict had been imposed from without, that it was not an inevitable expression of something already latent. Lawrence’s omission of the intervention from early drafts, together with his persistent pre-dating, as Jessie saw it, of the conflict, is further evidence that he dissented from her understanding. In Sons and Lovers, the rejection of Miriam immediately follows the most powerful and disturbing scene between Paul and his mother (discussed in Chapter 4) in which she emotionally blackmails him

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into saying that he doesn’t love Miriam. There is, however, no scene in which Gertrude or Paul’s sister tells him that if he maintains his intimacy with Miriam they should consider themselves engaged. We learn of this pressure only in Paul’s dialogue with Miriam, which was actually written by Jessie, and a short subsequent passage in which Paul reflects that ‘his mother had dinned it into him that this present situation could not go on for ever, and was grossly unfair to the girl’ (SL 266). It is surprising that Lawrence doesn’t present the conversation between mother and son which was so central to Jessie’s understanding of their relationship, and that he narrates the terrible scene of Paul’s rejection of Miriam (entirely from her point of view) without having supplied this explanation of it. This suggests that, at the very least, what his mother ‘dinned into him’ didn’t have the explanatory force that it had for Jessie or, at the strongest, that it never happened and Lawrence was trying both to represent his mother’s attitude in a favourable light and to spare Jessie’s feelings. Whatever the truth his eventual decision to include it in the novel was, as I have said, inspired. There are two other episodes in Jessie’s hand, probably written at the same time as the ‘Easter Sunday’ episode. In her edition of Paul Morel Helen Baron calls these ‘One Saturday Afternoon’ and ‘Flower Sequence’. Her hypothesis is that these are original pieces of writing by Jessie, on the grounds that in ‘Paul Morel III’ a chapter ends with the fragment that Jessie annotated, whereas in Sons and Lovers these episodes (which are actually continuous with each other) follow on. ‘One Saturday Afternoon’ begins with a dialogue between Miriam and her sister Agatha. This is Agatha’s first and only appearance in the novel and, as Helen Baron notes, ‘Miriam had, it seemed, been deliberately presented as the lone girl in a family of men.’9 When he incorporated a revised version of Jessie’s narrative into the novel he found it necessary to add a sentence explaining that Miriam had a sister. It is not clear to what period the memories Jessie narrates refer. In Sons and Lovers Lawrence places them before the Easter Sunday

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conversation, but it is likely that Jessie is remembering a later period, since she portrays Miriam undergoing an inner conflict of a kind that she denied existed before this epoch. Agatha cuttingly reproves Miriam for letting Paul see that she ‘wanted him’, a ‘new point of view’ which arouses feelings of shame and ‘subtle infamy’. She prays, ‘let me not want Paul Morel … if I ought not to love him’ and then ‘if its [sic] thy will I should love Paul make me love him—like Christ would’ (PM 251). If this is indeed Jessie’s original writing it was a gift to a novelist in its uninhibited portrayal of the inner life of a spiritually and emotionally intense young girl at that time. Lawrence’s main contributions are to add imagery of twisting, coiling and knots to the portrayal of Miriam’s feeling, and to link her reference to Christ explicitly to sacrifice (SL 208). Both these additions connect with less sympathetic descriptions of Miriam elsewhere: in the beach scene, later in this chapter, when she ‘shrank in her convulsed, coiled torture’ from the thought of physical love, and in ‘The Test on Miriam’ in which she ‘lay as if she had given herself up to sacrifice’ (SL 216, 333). The episode that Helen Baron calls ‘Flower Sequence’ concerns Miriam’s awareness of Mrs Morel’s hostility and of Paul’s deference to his mother in this respect. The interest of Lawrence’s use of this scene lies in his apparent sympathy with her point of view, since he adds details that reinforce it. Jessie’s text begins by stating that Miriam discontinued visiting the library and calling for Paul each week because ‘a series of trifling occurrences suddenly awakened her consciousness’ (PM 255). Lawrence revises this to ‘a number of trifling incidents and tiny insults from his family awakened her to their attitude towards her’ and when Miriam stopped coming every week ‘Mrs Morel sniffed with satisfaction’ (SL 209). Paul pins flowers to the bosom of Miriam’s dress in a rare, if controlled, moment of physical intimacy. When he hears his mother coming downstairs he hurriedly finishes, turns away and says, ‘Don’t let mater know’: Miriam announces that she will call for him no more (SL 210–11). Lawrence thus allows Jessie into the novel to narrate

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a telling moment that supports her analysis of their history. But he also interpolates a passage that epitomises the conflicting interpretations that still, in the final draft, play against each other. Paul ‘would not have it that they were lovers’; the abstractness and spirituality of their intimacy cause a violent conflict in him when she so much as slips her arm into his. ‘With Miriam he was always on the high plane of abstraction … She would have it so.’ He also adds to Jessie’s statement that ‘to her, flowers appealed with such intimacy she must make them part of herself ’, ‘Paul hated her for it’ (SL 209–10, PM 255). It is often the case in Sons and Lovers that Paul’s point of view is very difficult to distinguish from the narrator’s. Some such explanation seems necessary for the contradiction between ‘He would not have it that they were lovers’ and ‘She would have it so.’ Helen Baron and Carl Baron, in the Introduction to the Cambridge edition of Sons and Lovers, write that (as Jessie herself said) the points raised in the three scenes that he used could be described as ‘minor’ compared to Jessie’s judgement that ‘the entire structure of the story rested upon the attitude he had adopted’ (SL xxvii). Helen Baron also argues that Lawrence’s revisions show a ‘relentless interpretative drive’ that Jessie had little chance of persuading him to halt.10 I think on the contrary that the evidence of these revisions and his use of Jessie’s texts shows Lawrence far from fixed in his interpretation: specifically, he allows her version of the Easter Sunday incident to challenge his perspective, and incorporates a scene that she wrote to illustrate his enslavement to his mother’s dislike of her. What is at stake in these scenes is far from ‘minor’: they constitute a strong dialogic intervention on Jessie’s part, on the central ground of the reasons why their relationship failed. We shall see more evidence of how unfixed Lawrence’s interpretation was in the next chapter. I have worked on the assumption that he made the revisions that directly respond to Jessie’s interventions during his time in Waldbröl in May. This seems to me to be

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a sound assumption, though it is of course possible that he made further revisions to these passages in the final draft. This distinction is important because the Waldbröl revisions were made when he was separated from Frieda, and Jessie’s influence is likely to have been dominant. There is one very important section of the novel for which pages written in Waldbröl survive in the final manuscript. Three passages of the ‘Test on Miriam’ chapter are from this period of revision: from p. 325, ‘I can’t marry you’ to p. 326, ‘As she stood under the drooping thorn-tree’; from p. 328, ‘There was a great crop of cherries’ to p. 332, ‘Instinctively they all left him alone’; and from p. 338, ‘“Well,” said his mother’ to p. 340, ‘You ought to marry one such’. These passages cover Paul and Miriam’s first lovemaking and Miriam’s response to Paul’s rejection. I will be discussing Miriam’s response in the next chapter. The account of their lovemaking is, I believe, quite sensitively written—at least, considered as a work of fiction. Miriam’s feelings are represented thus: ‘She relinquished herself to him—but it was a sacrifice, in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her’ (SL 330). Jessie may not have felt, in real life, at all like this, but it would be harsh to say that in writing like this Lawrence ‘judged and condemned’ her. We have no way of knowing whether this narrative is more or less hostile to Miriam than the pages Jessie read in March. We don’t even know whether she protested about this chapter: it may be that by this point, as she wrote in A Personal Record, ‘comment seemed futile’ (ET 201). It is at least possible, however, that the sensitive tone of this writing represents a response to what Jessie said about an earlier version, or what Lawrence intuited that she felt. An important point, which would have been significant to Jessie if she did read these pages, is that in the fiction there is no equivalent to Lawrence’s insistence that he needed (implicitly a sexual relationship with) Helen for the purposes of ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, and nor does Paul tell Miriam ‘not to try to hold him’. In other words, a significant portion of

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what were for Jessie ‘conditions both difficult and irksome’ don’t apply in Miriam’s case. If Jessie only looked in the proof for ‘changes in the parts where [she] most wanted to find them’ she is likely to have looked at this chapter, and she may have thought that these omissions, in themselves, made the portrayal of Miriam’s response less sympathetic than it should have been (ED 709). Lawrence was reunited with Frieda in Beuerberg and then in Icking, both in Bavaria. The stayed in Icking, rent free in a house lent by Frieda’s sister Else, until early August, when they set out on a journey, largely on foot, across the Alps. In Icking, Lawrence completed his revisions and sent the manuscript to Heinemann on 9 June. He was conscious of what he had achieved: ‘I know it’s a good thing, even a bit great’ (L1 416). But Heinemann rejected it, writing personally to Lawrence. It lacked unity and its ‘want of reticence’ made it ‘unfit … for publication in England as things are’. These are themes that would echo throughout Lawrence’s career. But Heinemann also felt, startlingly, that ‘one has no sympathy for any character in the book’ and that ‘the degradation of [Paul’s] mother, supposed to be of gentler birth, is almost inconceivable’ (L1 421). We must remember that this is not a critique of the novel that was eventually published, which Lawrence extensively rewrote. Nevertheless, Heinemann’s comment on the mother suggests that he was seriously disabled as a reader of working-class fiction. Lawrence responded, in a letter to Garnett, with a memorable rant: Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the bellywriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its [sic] a marvel they can breed. (L1 422)

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It didn’t help that this rejection came just at a time when Weekley was putting intense pressure on Frieda, and she was so miserable about the loss of her children that Lawrence feared she might desert him. However, Garnett came to the rescue, as he had with The Trespasser, offering to read the novel for Duckworth. By 22 July, Lawrence had received Garnett’s notes and was ready to start revising again.

7

From ‘Paul Morel’ to Sons and Lovers, July–November 1912

L

awrence announced to Garnett on 4 August that he would ‘write Paul Morel over again’, a task that he estimated would take three months (L1 431). In fact, by then he had probably already written the first seventy-six pages of the final draft. The following day he and Frieda set off on their transalpine journey, and it wasn’t till a month later, by Lake Garda, that he returned to the task. Two new and very different influences came into play in the final rewriting: Garnett himself and Frieda. Garnett’s notes on ‘Paul Morel III’ haven’t survived, but there is a list of what the editors call ‘preparatory jottings’, reproduced in the Cambridge edition (pp. xl–xli). These relate to the ‘Test on Miriam’ and ‘Passion’ chapters, and there are two main themes. One is a criticism of dialogue as ‘cheap’, ‘affected’ and not ringing true. This probably relates mainly to the scenes in which Paul is showing off to Clara before their relationship becomes intimate. A more significant theme is registered in the comments, ‘you are insensibly making Paul too much of a hero’ and ‘you identify your sympathies too much with Paul’s wrath’. The degree of identification between narrator and central character is one of the major critical problems in this novel, and will be one of the themes of this chapter. It was probably in 131

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response to comments such as this that Lawrence wrote to Garnett on 22 July, ‘I loathe Paul Morel (L1, 427). Exactly what Lawrence meant by this outburst is unclear. Was he protesting that he had always disliked the character, and Garnett had failed to see this, or that since writing the third version (and implicitly as a result of his experience with Frieda) he had changed his opinion? And what was it about Paul that he loathed? Since he reiterated during the writing of the final draft that he was improving the book immensely, and since the character of Paul is emphatically based on himself before he met Frieda, it is likely that his loathing was a new impulse and a significant factor in the direction of the rewriting. What it was that he loathed about Paul is perhaps clarified by what he says immediately before this: ‘I don’t want to go back to town and civilisation … [Frieda] says I’m reverting, but I’m not—I’m only coming out wholesome and myself. Say I’m right, and I ought to be always common.’ This is perhaps the first of the defiant assertions of working-class identity that were to become a hallmark of Lawrence’s later autobiographical writing. It may underlie Paul’s insistence to his mother, in the final text, that he belongs to the common people, and doesn’t want to become middle class (SL 289–90). But Paul’s trajectory, like that of his author till now, is to become increasingly middle class, and it is telling that his final action, like that of Balzac’s socially aspiring hero Rastignac in Le Père Goriot, is to walk towards the town. Lawrence’s dislike of his character would certainly have been endorsed by Frieda who wrote a skit called ‘Paul Morel, or His Mother’s Darling’. Frieda’s constant presence while Lawrence was writing this draft, her assertive character, and the intimate connection between the novel’s themes and their developing relationship, would make it certain that she took an active interest in it, even without her explicit claims to have done so: ‘I lived and suffered that book, and wrote bits of it when he would ask me: “What do you think my mother felt like then?” I had to go deeply into the character of Miriam and all the others.’1 Unlike Jessie Chambers,

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there is no surviving evidence of Frieda’s actual writing in the novel, but it would have been characteristic of Lawrence to make this request. She told Garnett ‘I wrote little female bits’ in a continuation of Lawrence’s letter (so he is sure to have read what she wrote) immediately after the novel was completed (L1 479). As early as 7 September, when Lawrence was just resuming writing in Italy, Frieda wrote to Garnett, ‘I think L. quite missed the point in “Paul Morel”. He really loved his mother more than any body, even with his other women, real love, sort of Oedipus …[W]e fight like blazes over it, he is so often beside the point’ (L1 449). As this letter indicates, she had an unusual if rudimentary awareness of psychoanalysis, gained from one of her previous lovers, Otto Gross, a maverick Freudian who, Frieda later said, ‘revolutionised my life with Freud. Through him and then through me Lawrence knew about Freud …’.2 This is highly likely to have at least reinforced if not decisively influenced the development of an increasing sense that Mrs Morel’s relationship with her sons is emotionally damaging, and the transformation of ‘Paul Morel’ into Sons and Lovers, a title that Lawrence proposed for the first time when more than halfway through this draft. This development includes, crucially, a much more prominent role for William, which for many years was obscured by the cuts that Garnett made to the manuscript. For example, in ‘Paul Morel III’, the third chapter, entitled ‘Aftermath’, focuses almost entirely on Walter’s relationship with his friend Jerry. In the final version the title is significantly changed to ‘The Casting off of Morel, the Taking on of William’; the episode with Jerry is dropped and replaced by an account of William’s early life and his mother’s hostility to his girlfriends. However, Frieda’s assertion that Lawrence had ‘quite missed the point’ regarding Paul’s love of his mother is somewhat mystifying. We have seen that in ‘Paul Morel II’ (which Frieda didn’t read) the mother–son relationship is sentimentalised and sanitised, and only fragments of ‘Paul Morel III’ have survived. But one of these fragments, included with revisions in the final draft, is the

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bread-burning scene and its aftermath. As we shall see, Lawrence intensified the Oedipal character of this scene in his revisions to the manuscript, but it already included Paul’s plea to his mother not to sleep with his father, perhaps the most Oedipal moment in the novel. It may be that, in ‘Paul Morel III’, Lawrence’s rendering of this painful piece of self-analysis, so destructive of what had been the supreme value in his life, was wavering and inconsistent. This could also explain Jessie’s belief that in it Lawrence ‘handed his mother the laurels of victory’ (ET 202). But we are also reminded by ‘we fight like blazes over it’ that Frieda’s influence on the novel is unlikely to have been a matter of Lawrence simply acquiescing in her point of view. This is especially important in the case of Miriam. Provoked by Jessie returning Lawrence’s final letter to her, Frieda sarcastically called her the ‘white love, white of egg’ of his youth, and given their respective temperaments it is unlikely that her going ‘deeply into the character of Miriam’ entailed much sympathetic insight (L1, 532). We might expect to find the portrayal of Miriam becoming harsher in the final draft. At times this is so, but there is not a consistent pattern, and we shall see that there are numerous occasions on which, in revisions to the final manuscript, Lawrence introduces a more favourable perspective and strengthens Miriam’s voice. Another way in which Frieda may have influenced the novel’s final version was more involuntary. Lawrence’s experience with her was one of liberation and unprecedented fulfilment. To a large extent their open conflicts were an aspect of this liberation. But one cause of conflict, the most important one, was deeply painful and potentially destructive of their relationship. As Weekley became more anguished and hostile about her affair, it became increasingly apparent that he would, as he was legally entitled to, prevent her from seeing her children if she stayed with Lawrence. At one point he offered her an informal separation and a house in London with the children in return for leaving

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Lawrence. This, as John Worthen points out, ‘would have struck Frieda’s sisters’, bohemian women who remained married while conducting a series of affairs, ‘as the ideal solution’ (EY 416). It would have suited Frieda, too, before she knew Lawrence. But Lawrence was emphatically not a bohemian. He was a kind of Puritan, but a very unusual kind: he believed in commitment (once he had found, in Frieda, the person he could commit to) but he was increasingly suspicious of self-sacrifice. A remarkable feature of his behaviour during this critical period is that he refused to ask Frieda to stay with him for his sake: ‘I say … “decide for yourself—Choose for yourself ”’ (L1 421). Worthen has written with insight about this development in Lawrence’s attitude to relationships, which became central to his philosophy: He was trying desperately to steer clear of a solution in which she gave up, for his sake, what she most deeply longed for. He was sure that self-sacrifice—in some ways the most seductive policy for them both—would make them hate each other: they had both known enough of it in their lives … He was coming to regard the independence of both partners within a relationship as a necessary precondition of its survival. (EY 416) Perhaps most significantly of all, as regards Sons and Lovers, Lawrence believed—or persuaded himself—that if Frieda sacrificed herself for her children they ‘would not be free to live of themselves—they would first have to live for her, to pay back’ (L1 486). He had become unrecognisable from the man who wrote, little more than a year earlier, in ‘Paul Morel II’, ‘the final lesson of life is honorable self-sacrifice’ (PM 74). This new, or newly intensified, suspicion of self-sacrifice had a profound bearing on the two most important female characters in the novel. The idea that Miriam’s love for Paul is self-sacrificial is a major motive for his rejection of her; and Lawrence’s belief

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about the effect of Frieda’s sacrifice on her children has an obvious bearing on Paul’s relationship with his mother. Because so little of ‘Paul Morel III’ has survived, opportunities for direct comparison with the final manuscript are limited. There are, however, a number of pages that Lawrence reused with emendations, as well as numerous emendations to the final manuscript itself, which show Lawrence continuing to rethink the central characters and relationships at a very late stage. In some cases he made further substantive changes at the proof stage. These changes affect the portrayal of both parents, and most significantly Paul’s relationship with Miriam. Lawrence’s assertive claim to be ‘common’ might be interpreted as an early sign of the shift of allegiance from his mother to his father that was very evident later in his life. In 1922, he told his friend Achsah Brewster that he ‘had not done justice to his father in Sons and Lovers and felt like rewriting it … Now he blamed his mother for her self-righteousness’ (Nehls 2 126); and in his late essay ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ he writes as if his father and the masculine world of the mines were the most important influence on his early development. We have seen that Walter Morel is portrayed in a less prejudicial light in the third version than in the second. Partly this is a response to Jessie’s suggestion that he stick more closely to the facts—after all, Arthur Lawrence had not killed one of his sons—but there is also less identification with Gertrude’s judgement and a less middle-class perspective. The changes that Lawrence made to the final draft are unsurprisingly less drastic than the omission of the manslaughter, but we can see a further movement in these directions. Some changes can be observed in pages that survived in the final manuscript from ‘Paul Morel III’. In that draft Lawrence compared Walter’s exclusion from the family to that of ‘some coarse trooper quartered on a refined household’. We can see here a trace of the class-based contempt more strongly betrayed in ‘Paul Morel II’ when Paul watches his father brawling in the street from

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the window of his middle-class friends’ house. The implication that Walter’s worst crime was his coarse manners hardly fits with Lawrence’s newly found pride in his own commonness. Lawrence kept this page of manuscript but deleted this comparison and wrote instead, ‘He was never man enough to admit, even to himself, his fault. Even in his own heart’s privacy, he excused himself ’ (MS 69). This is still a harsh judgement, but Lawrence removes the trace of class-based contempt. Even the judgement that Walter never admitted responsibility is made in a more nuanced way: ‘Morel never acutely suffered anything’ in ‘Paul Morel III’ is reversed to ‘He had hurt himself most’ as a consequence of his failure to admit his fault and make peace (MS 67). Straightforward contempt is changed to a recognition that Walter is himself a victim of the situation. The first quarrel between the parents that is fully narrated in the novel is provoked by Walter cutting William’s infant curls, an ‘act of masculine clumsiness’ that is ‘the spear through the side of her love for Morel’ (SL 24). It is noteworthy that, even in ‘Paul Morel III’ (again the pages are reused), Lawrence places such emphasis on a conflict in which Walter is sober and amiable, not even demonstrably at fault, but claiming a masculine identity for his son in a way that is entirely appropriate in his world—‘Yer non want to make a wench on ’im’—and in which Gertrude’s response—‘I could kill you, I could’—betrays her fanatical determination to prevent her sons from being in any way shaped by their father. In ‘Paul Morel III’, however, the narrative commentary frames the incident with a reference to her superiority: ‘The pity was, she was too much above him.’ When he reused the page in the final manuscript Lawrence changed ‘above him’ to ‘his opposite’, a much more neutral comment (MS 25). On the same manuscript page Lawrence wrote that Gertrude ‘lost none of her nobility’. In this case the change was not made until the proof stage: ‘nobility’ changed to ‘worth’, again toning down the endorsement of the mother.

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The climactic aftermath of the bread-burning scene, in which Paul and his mother kiss and he comes close to a physical fight with his father, is as we have seen another in which Lawrence reused the manuscript of ‘Paul Morel III’. When Gertrude accuses Paul of burning the bread because of his preoccupation with Miriam, Lawrence wrote first, ‘Instead of running away to bed, as his father would have done, he sat and waited.’ In revision he changed ‘as his father would have done’ to ‘as he would have liked to do’ (MS 297). Two important themes in the portrayal of Walter Morel are his lack of respect for non-manual work and his inability to share in the triumphs that signify his sons’ removal from his own world. When his wife announces that Paul has won twenty guineas in a painting competition, he exclaims, ‘twenty guineas for a bit of a paintin’ as he knocked off in an hour or two—!’ (SL 296) In the final manuscript Lawrence added, ‘he was silent with amazement’, reinforcing Walter’s philistine incomprehension. This was then changed in manuscript to ‘silent with conceit of his son’, an obviously more sympathetic comment, acknowledging the family feeling that Walter is unable to express (MS 358). It is in this scene that we get another glimpse of Walter’s hidden or repressed emotional life when he rubs away a tear and says, ‘Yes, an’ that other lad ’ud ’a done as much, if they hadna ha’ killed ’im’ (SL 297). The scene, much earlier in the novel, when Paul goes to the pit to break the news of William’s death to his father shows perhaps the most remarkable and subtle manuscript change in respect of Walter Morel. That scene has been much admired for the understated way in which Walter’s grief is conveyed by leaning against a truck with his hand over his eyes, ‘as if he were tired’ (SL 167). Lawrence added the sentence with this phrase to the ‘Paul Morel III’ manuscript: ‘Paul saw nothing, but his father leaning against the truck as if he were tired’ (MS 197). The fine emotional effect is there, but mediated through Paul’s observation. In proof Lawrence made a further small but crucial change: the sentence now reads,

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‘Paul saw everything, except his father leaning against the truck as if he were tired’ (my italics). Now the father is tragically isolated in his grief: everything in this scene is presented from Paul’s point of view except for this poignant detail. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, it is in the final draft that Lawrence added the brief but important scene in which Walter gets up early, makes his breakfast and walks to work, gathering mushrooms on the way (SL 37–38). Even tinier moments like his unobserved grief and his unexpressed pride in his son combine with this to suggest, disproportionately to their length, the inner life of the miner, excluded and deformed by the bourgeois values of his home. Perhaps the most important changes in the final manuscript concern the portrayal of Miriam. Jessie’s crucial role in the composition of the novel, and the tragic consequence of her feeling of betrayal at the outcome, is a central theme of this book. Since she read ‘Paul Morel III’ very carefully, but only cursorily looked at the proofs when Lawrence sent them to her in 1913, there is a question whether her judgement (in a letter written immediately after she received the proofs) that Lawrence ‘selected every point which sets off Miriam at a disadvantage, and … interpreted her every word and action, and thought in the light of Mrs Morel’s hatred of her’ pertains to the final text (LJC 27). I think that there are elements in the text, especially in the ‘Test on Miriam’ chapter, that justify Jessie’s feeling of betrayal, but it is demonstrably untrue that Miriam is portrayed exclusively in the light of Mrs Morel’s hostility. In analysing the changes in the final manuscript I shall also be disagreeing with the views of the two scholars whose work above all has made my study possible. Helen Baron believes that Sons and Lovers is characterised by a ‘relentless interpretative drive’ to Miriam’s disadvantage, while John Worthen argues that in Miriam Lawrence was ‘creating a pattern of manipulative and frustrated desire: and he was concluding that what Miriam wanted was possession and power, to make up for her deep unhappiness’.3

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I shall be arguing to the contrary that Lawrence was constantly rethinking and reinterpreting the relationship of Paul and Miriam, that there is no final interpretation, and it is this that makes the novel both dialogic and true to life. I will begin by looking at some passages for which there no clear evidence of late composition (they are on paper that Lawrence used in Italy, which means that they may have been copied from an earlier draft or newly composed) but which clearly demonstrate a dialogic intention. Carol Siegel has written of Lawrence: ‘Female presence in his fiction deconstructs the discourse of the teller. Everywhere the text resists the interpretation the narrator would code into it, it belongs to woman.’4 Sons and Lovers provides some of the clearest examples of this. In Chapter 8, Paul complains, ‘I’m so damned spiritual with you always.’ Miriam ‘remained silent, thinking, “Then why don’t you be otherwise”’ (SL 226). This is an extremely rare (even silent) direct riposte by Miriam to Paul’s consistent reference of the block in their relationship to her spirituality. Perhaps the only other, a few pages later in the same chapter, is when Paul exclaims, ‘“If only you could want me, and not want what I can reel off for you!” “I!” she cried bitterly. “I! Why when would you let me take you?”’ For once this provokes in Paul a recognition that ‘he was as much to blame himself ’, though characteristically this doesn’t prevent him from ‘hating her’ (SL 233). In the case of Miriam thinking, ‘Then why don’t you be otherwise?’ there is a telling emendation later on the same page. Lawrence wrote, ‘his kisses would betray him: they were not what she wanted: they would not be sad or spiritual, only eager, and that would hurt her so, she would shrink away’. He then crossed this out and wrote instead, ‘There was such a difference between them. His kisses were wrong for her’ (MS 271). This could be construed as Paul’s point of view: nevertheless, Lawrence seems to have realised that claiming Miriam wanted ‘spiritual’ kisses contradicted the thought he had attributed to her only a few lines earlier.

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Between these two instances of Miriam’s dissenting voice is the episode when Paul is mending a puncture and Miriam runs her hands down his sides saying, ‘You are so fine!’, a gesture of physical intimacy from which he characteristically recoils. In manuscript his response is first explained as follows: He laughed, hating her voice, but his blood roused to a wave by her hands. There was no directness in her love of him, none of the simplicity of two creatures coming together, but always the shifting of the centre, the meeting in some communion. It was as if he were to her some flower that she almost worshipped, which she preferred to keep passive. (MS 272) It is not surprising that Lawrence wanted to change this. It is a clumsy and attitudinising piece of writing, as well as being contradictory, suggesting both that Miriam wanted a communion with Paul and that she treated him like an object. In revising, he produced one of the most subtle passages in the novel: ‘He laughed, hating her voice, but his blood roused to a wave of flame by her hands. She did not seem to realise him in all this. He might have been an object. She never realised the male he was’ (SL 227). This epitomises the uncertain relationship between the narrator and the central character. The first sentence is entirely about Paul’s feelings. The second, with the use of the word ‘seem’, gives us his impression of how Miriam felt. The third could equally be a report of how she felt about him, or his interpretation of how she felt. The last sentence in isolation is an authoritative statement about Miriam, but in context it is coloured by Paul’s feelings. As in the more extended examples I discussed in the last chapter, the rose bush and church scenes, it is the intersubjectivity, not a flaw in the character of one individual, that blocks their relationship. Another deconstruction from a female point of view comes not from Miriam but from Clara, though it concerns Miriam. At the

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end of Chapter 10, Clara tells Paul, ‘you haven’t found out the very first thing about her … That she doesn’t want any of your soul communion. That’s your own imagination. She wants you’ (SL 321). The chapter ends with Clara telling Paul, ‘You’ve never tried’, and the next chapter begins with Paul’s resolution to make Miriam his lover. When that attempt fails, Paul reverts to his belief that Miriam wants only spiritual love, but the authority of Clara, the sexually experienced woman, is not cancelled. At the beginning of the following chapter, when Paul resolves to make love to Miriam, he reflects that ‘many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity’, excessively sensitive to women because ‘a woman was like their mother’ (SL 323). This is the one moment in the novel when Lawrence explicitly identifies the theme as he was to expound it in a letter to Garnett when he had completed it: ‘the tragedy of thousands of young men in England’ who ‘can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives’ (L1 477). From the beginning, the portrayal of Paul and Miriam’s relationship is open to conflicting interpretations. The first significant episode, which seems set up to display Miriam’s inferiority as a sensual being, is an example. Paul loses himself in the motion of a swing, ‘every bit of him swinging, like a bird that swoops for joy of movement’. She is reluctant to take the swing herself and when she does, and he pushes her, she feels ‘the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust’ which makes her afraid. ‘She could never lose herself ’ in the action as he does (SL 181–82). This seems premonitory of the sexual conflict in their relationship and pre-emptively to attribute it to Miriam’s fear. Equally striking, however, is the contrast between the spontaneity of the sexually unawakened Paul in this scene and his own inability to ‘lose himself ’ when making love to Miriam. The evidence of changes in the final manuscript suggests, not a ‘relentless interpretative drive’ but a surprising instability of intention. At the end of Chapter 7, following Paul’s intense

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reaction to the rising moon, Lawrence wrote, again in the final manuscript: As they walked along the dark fen-meadow, he watched the moon, and did not speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, and she seemed, in some way, ashamed, as of some deep cowardice. (MS 254) In the manuscript he changed this to ‘for she seemed, in some way, better than he’. In proof it was changed again to ‘she seemed, in some way, to make him despise himself ’ (SL 216). Allowing for the fact that this is all Paul’s point of view, and not a reliable comment on Miriam, the first change is clearly favourable to her, reversing the previous judgement, while the final change is much more subtle, showing Paul projecting his self-contempt on to her. In the published text, on one of the occasions when Paul tries to limit their relationship because of pressure from his family, there is a sympathetic passage from Miriam’s point of view: Miriam was astonished and hurt for him. It had cost him an effort. She left him, wanting to spare him any further humiliation … She was hurt deep down. And she despised him, for being blown about by any wind of authority. And in her heart of hearts, unconsciously, she felt that he was trying to get away from her. This she would never have acknowledged. She pitied him. (SL 234) In the final manuscript he made an interlinear addition: ‘She really hated men, was born to despise and hate them for the temporal authority they possess. It was not in her to be a mate to any man’ (MS 279). This shifts the emphasis away from a critique of Paul with which the reader is likely to sympathise, and suggests that even this reasonable feeling is symptomatic of a disorder in Miriam. It is particularly jarring because, unlike most of the negative comments

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on Miriam, it cannot be construed as Paul’s point of view, since he isn’t present. But these sentences do not appear in the published text. Lawrence reversed his intention in proof, leaving the passage much more sympathetic to Miriam. This is a particularly strong example of the unresolved state of Lawrence’s feeling—or of his artistic intention—even as late as the final manuscript and later still when correcting the proofs. In Chapter 9, in the scene which is Lawrence’s fictional response to the Easter Monday that for Jessie marked the critical change in their relationship, after Paul tells Miriam that he cannot love her, Lawrence wrote in the final manuscript: Love her! She knew he loved her. With his soul he loved her. And if he did not love her physically, as he said—well then, he must do without. What was it, after all? Her soul was great enough for him. (MS 312) This portrays Miriam as a fanatic who persuades herself that her own insufficiency is a mark of superiority, and who is contemptuous of her lover’s needs. It is emphatically Miriam’s free indirect speech, and again cannot be construed as Paul’s point of view. In the manuscript Lawrence altered this to: Love her! She knew he loved her. He really belonged to her. This about not loving her, physically, bodily, was a mere perversity on his part, because he knew she loved him. He was stupid like a child. He belonged to her. (SL 261) This is a much more sympathetic response, and consistent with Jessie’s claim that ‘so far as I was concerned love was a whole, a synthesis of all that I was’ (ET 137). Miriam is unfortunately mistaken about Paul’s feelings, but this is hardly to her discredit. Shortly afterwards, in the manuscript, Lawrence attributed Miriam’s suffering at this rejection to hurt pride: ‘Was she after

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all so weak and inadequate? Her pride suffered the tortures of the damned. She felt she must prove her superiority, that she must have ground for pride’ (MS 313). No doubt hurt pride is always an element in the suffering of a rejected lover, but this emphasis, especially in association with the need for ‘superiority’, somewhat repels sympathy for Miriam. Lawrence deleted these sentences and replaced them with ‘He would come back. She held the keys to his soul. But meanwhile, how he would torture her with his battle against her. She shrank from it.’ The changes Lawrence made to the final manuscript are predominantly in favour of a more sympathetic representation of Miriam. For example, in what is now Chapter 8 there is a passage that has been twice rewritten. Lawrence first wrote: She wanted gentleness and misty, soft love, nothing violent that would hurt her. She could not bear anything like physical violence. She felt that it would destroy her. (MS 277) This is crossed out and the following written between the lines: She wanted all his soul, not to meet him. She wanted to draw all of him into her, not to enjoy him and give him enjoyment. He did not count, if only she could put him all inside her, she felt she could be at ease, her measure might be made up. The first version portrays Miriam as merely pathetic. One can almost sense the shift in mood in the revision as Lawrence reacts to this conventional feminine passivity as a form of emotional predatoriness. The revised version makes Miriam sound like a spiritual vampire. But he also crossed this out. The dense mass of deleted text is followed by the sentence, ‘She wanted the love that absorbs a man, leaves him a drifting nonentity.’ This is also deleted—it is not

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clear at what stage, but it seems more congruent with the second version than the first. There follows this passage: He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body, not him. All his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel which united them spiritually. She did not want to meet him, to give him warmth for his warmth, life for his life, being for his being. She wanted to draw all of him into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness. Which fascinated him, as drug taking might. In the manuscript this follows the two deleted passages. It looks as if it was written before he made the first deletion—otherwise he would not have needed to write the new text between the lines— but the first four sentences read like another, less hostile version of ‘She wanted all his soul …’. The analysis is very similar, but the explicit ‘he felt’ introduces the characteristic intersubjectivity of the narration of Sons and Lovers, while the final two sentences acknowledge Paul’s complicity. The final sentence, squeezed in at the end, was evidently added at a still later stage. The presentation is, in Jessie’s word, ‘softened’, especially by the omission of the phrase, ‘He did not count.’ Even now Lawrence was not satisfied, and in proof deleted ‘spiritually’ and changed ‘to give him warmth for his warmth, life for his life, being for his being’ to ‘so that there were two of them, man and woman together’ (SL 232). There are conversely a few occasions on which revision is more critical of Miriam. I will give just one example. Following the moon episode, shortly before the passage that I discussed earlier, the published text reads: He was naturally so young, and their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know he wanted to crush her onto his breast to ease the ache there. He was afraid of her. The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had

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in him been suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled torture from the thought of such a thing, he had winced to the depths of his soul. And now this ‘purity’ prevented even their first love kiss. (SL 216) The word ‘purity’, following on the account of Miriam’s feelings, seems to place the burden of preventing the kiss on her. Moreover, placing the word in inverted commas seems like a cheap sneer: it almost forces a contemptuous intonation when the passage is read aloud. However, ‘He was naturally so young’ is a revision of ‘He was so pure’ (MS 254). The later word ‘purity’ in this version clearly refers to Paul, and the quotation marks are explained by its being a reference back. The change of this single word makes the passage more hostile to Miriam. This may be an accident, the result of Lawrence not noticing that ‘purity’ no longer referred back. But there is another context that might be in play here. In her notes on the ‘Paul Morel III’ version of what is now Chapter 7, Jessie repeatedly uses the words ‘pure’ and ‘purity’: ‘Miriam was sixteen—as pure and fierce in virginity as Paul’ (PM 297); ‘At that time no instinct of sex was awake in either. To suggest it in Miriam destroys the purity of the whole incident’ (PM 243); ‘There was no thought of the distinction between body and spirit because each was perfectly pure’ (PM 244). As we have seen, Lawrence revised the episode in response to Jessie’s comments, but this does not mean that he was in sympathy with their affirmative tone. In revising Sons and Lovers Lawrence is not just reinterpreting the experiences of his youth; he is also responding to his most recent, and final, conflict with Jessie. In the case of episodes such as this one that recent conflict may even be the more important context. We see another example in the scene when Paul breaks off with Miriam after they have become lovers. In the May revision to ‘Paul Morel III’, Lawrence wrote, ‘She knew that she left to him too much the initiative’ (MS 416). He reused this manuscript page but crossed this out with the interlinear emendation:

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Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel she felt in a sort of bondage to him, which she hated because she could not control it. She had hated her love for him from the moment it grew too strong for her. And, deep down, she had hated him because she loved him and he dominated her. She had resisted his domination. She had fought to keep herself free of him, in the last issue. And she was free of him, even more than he of her.

In one of her surviving notes on ‘Paul Morel III’, Jessie wrote that at the time of her discovery of him with the umbrella ‘her love for Paul had not grown beyond herself—nor beyond her control. It was not until it became invested with holiness like religion and had behind it the whole force of the will to live that the denial of it became terrible to her’ (PM 298). Lawrence seems in his revision to be responding to this note. But in this case his response is distorted by a projection of Paul’s feelings on to Miriam. The experience of hate as a consequence of loving is characteristic of Paul, not of Miriam. There is also a difference, subtly derogatory to Miriam, between Jessie’s statement that the denial of love was terrible to her and Miriam’s hatred of Paul because he dominated her. The assertion that she was more free of him than he of her reads like wish-fulfilment on Lawrence’s part. The relation between fiction and autobiography is perhaps as fraught in Sons and Lovers as in any novel. Jessie was not a naive or uneducated reader, and she well knew that Sons and Lovers was a novel, but she also believed that in it Lawrence was attempting to understand his relationship with her. In this, if in nothing else, Frieda concurred with Jessie: ‘By the hour while he was writing the final Sons and Lovers he would try to understand his relationship with Jessie and why he did not want to marry Jessie.’5 John Worthen quotes and endorses this comment, but also writes that the analysis of Miriam ‘shows Lawrence now developing a character according to his own fictional logic—not according to the

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patterns of real life’ (EY 449). It is difficult to see how both these statements can be true. Worthen’s comments relate to the conversation of Paul and Miriam when he ends their affair. In ‘Paul Morel III’ Miriam complains, ‘It has been one long battle between us—you fighting away from me.’ In revision Lawrence added, ‘He had thought the love had been innocent and good’, but then deleted this in proof (MS 417). It is astonishing that Lawrence could even momentarily have attributed such a thought to Paul, given the way that the relationship has been portrayed—an extreme example of his still unresolved state of mind. Miriam’s bitterness is entirely understandable as a response to his rejection. She doesn’t let him say what he would have liked to say, which is ‘It has been good, but it is at an end.’ Paul seizes on her bitter outburst to fashion himself as the victim and Miriam as a monstrous deceiver: ‘At last, the whole affair appeared in a cynical aspect to him. She had really played with him, not he with her … He sat still, feeling as if he had had a blow, instead of giving one. Their eight years of friendship and love, the eight years of his life, were nullified’ (SL 341). From Jessie’s point of view, of course, the irony is that it was she who believed that, in the early years at least, their relationship had been ‘innocent and good’, and Lawrence who portrayed it as a continual battle. But even without the biographical perspective Paul’s exploitation of Miriam’s outburst to self-indulgently cast himself as the victim and evade responsibility for the pain he has given her throws an ugly light on his character. There is some evidence that Lawrence is not entirely identified with Paul at this moment, when he sarcastically recommends Miriam to marry a man who worships her and she replies, ‘Thank you … But don’t advise me to marry someone else any more. You’ve done it before’, reminding him of precisely why their relationship has not been ‘innocent and good’ (SL 341). In the narrative leading up to their lovemaking Lawrence inserted a new page that includes one of the (perhaps unintentionally) most diagnostic passages about Paul:

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Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel He could not meet her gaze. Her dark eyes, full of love, earnest and searching, made him turn away. Not for an instant would she let him forget. Back again he had to torture himself, into a sense of his responsibility and hers. Never any relaxing, never any leaving himself to the great hunger and impersonality of passion. He must be brought back to a deliberate, reflective creature. As if from a swoon of passion, she called him back to the littleness, the personal relationship. (SL 328)

(In manuscript ‘swoon’ replaces ‘magnificent sleep’ MS 401.) In Lawrence, at least in Sons and Lovers, passion always means sexual desire, and in this passage we see that it is independent of, or even antithetical to, recognition of the other person. Taken in isolation this passage seems to be suggesting that Miriam’s insistence on the personal is an abnormality that blocks their sexual fulfilment. However, the possibility of seeing it as diagnostic of Paul is strengthened when it is mirrored in his relationship with Clara. With Clara he is able to achieve ‘the great hunger and impersonality of passion’: ‘But then Clara was not there for him, only a woman … And she took him simply, because his need was bigger either than her or him’ (SL 397). The cliché is symptomatic. At the time Clara ‘felt it was great’, but not long afterwards she complains, exactly as Miriam might, ‘I feel … as if all of you weren’t there—and as if it weren’t me you were taking’ and tells him, ‘You can’t come out of yourself ’ (SL 407). As the Cambridge editors point out, this phrase is echoed in a story Lawrence wrote the following year, ‘New Eve and Old Adam’: ‘She said he could not come out of himself, that he was no good to her, because he could not get outside himself ’ (LAH 179). This story is clearly based on Lawrence’s relationship with Frieda, and gives us a clue to one way in which Frieda shaped the character of Clara. At some time during the first year of their relationship, probably, according to Worthen, in May–June 1912, before he began

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the final draft of Sons and Lovers, Frieda left a trace of her rage at, as she saw it, his inability to love. It was written in a page of a notebook in which was transcribed (by Louie Burrows) a draft of ‘The Virgin Mother’, one of the poems that Lawrence wrote at the time of his mother’s death. Frieda was particularly enraged by this stanza: My little love, my dearest Twice you have borne me, Once from the womb, sweet mother. Once from myself to be Free of the hearts of people Of each heart’s home-life free. The draft ends, ‘And who can bear me a third time? /—None love—I am true to thee.’ Frieda wrote, ‘Yes, worse luck—what a poem to write! yes, you are free, poor devil, from the heart’s homelife free … I have tried I have fought, I have nearly killed myself in the battle to get you into connection with myself and other people, sadly I proved to myself that I can love, but never you’ (EY 412). Clearly Frieda did not think that the poem’s sickly celebration of the inability to love anyone but his mother was a condition that he had outgrown, and her admirable outburst has a bearing both on her assertion that ‘L. quite missed the point in “Paul Morel”. He really loved his mother more than any body, even with his other women, real love, sort of Oedipus’, and on Paul’s complaint to his mother, apropos of his affair with Clara, that ‘I can’t love’, and ‘I never shall meet the right woman while you live’ (SL 395). If Clara uses language that Frieda used to Lawrence, she is more assertive than Alice Dax, who confessed to Frieda, ‘Unlike you, I could never quarrel with D.H.’6 But Clara is not Frieda. Nor, of course, does Paul’s affair with Clara end, as Lawrence’s with Alice did, because he met a woman like Frieda. Unlike later autobiographical heroes such as Rupert Birkin and Richard Lovat Somers,

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Paul represents a past and (at least in aspiration) outgrown self: the new self who was born of his relationship with Frieda called for a new novel and a new style. Lawrence’s way of ending the affair with Clara is one of the least convincing aspects of the novel. From an early stage in their relationship Paul asserts, without presenting any evidence, that Clara’s marriage had failed because she treated her brutal husband Baxter badly. In the end she meekly accepts this and returns to her husband. Lawrence is not the kind of writer for whom the term ‘plot device’ is usually appropriate, but in this case he has to end the novel with Paul alone, facing either (as he put it immediately after finishing the novel) ‘the drift towards death’ or a redemptive future (L1 477). But Clara’s return to her husband is a plot device, with the interesting additional feature that her acceptance that she treated her husband badly could be seen as a displaced acknowledgement of latent feelings about his mother’s treatment of his father. We have seen that in ‘Paul Morel III’ Lawrence significantly changed the scene in which Paul and his mother kiss after she coerces him into saying that he doesn’t love Miriam, making it much more emotionally disturbing than in ‘Paul Morel II’, and expunging the sentimentality with which the scene is rendered in that draft. He reused the ‘Paul Morel III’ pages in the final draft, but made some emendations which further change the emotional tenor of the scene: ‘I am no longer of any use to you’ ‘You only want me to wait on you—the rest is for Miriam.’ He could not bear her to be like that it. Instinctively, he realised that he was life to her. And after all she was the chief thing to him, the only supreme thing. ‘You know it isn’t, mother, you know it isn’t.’ She was moved to pity by his cry. ‘It looks a great deal like it,’ she said, half putting aside her despair.

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‘No mother—I really don’t love her. I talk to her—but I want to come home to you to be quiet.’ He had taken off his collar and tie, and rose, barethroated, to go to bed. As he stooped to kiss his mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering voice, so unlike her own that he knew how great her suffering must be to shake the words out of her so writhed in agony: ‘I can’t bear to lose you—I can’t bear her to have you. I could let another woman—but not her—she’d leave me no room, not a bit of room—’ Which Paul in his heart knew to be true. And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly. ‘And I’ve never—you know, Paul—I’ve never had a husband—not really—’ He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat. (MS 299–300; interpolated material in bold) In what Lawrence originally wrote, the emphasis is on Mrs Morel’s suffering. Paul’s perspective is one of sympathetic understanding of what she is feeling. He ‘knew how great her suffering must be’ and when she complains that Miriam would leave no room for her he ‘knew [it] in his heart to be true.’ The revisions transfer the emphasis to Paul’s feelings. The statement that he was life to her is complemented by ‘she was the chief thing to him’; ‘he knew how great her suffering must be’ becomes ‘he writhed in agony’; and, most tellingly, ‘Paul knew in his heart to be true’ becomes ‘immediately he hated Miriam bitterly.’ Paul’s knowledge of his mother’s feelings is transformed into intense and painful feeling on his own part. These changes give the scene much greater emotional depth and complexity; while the first version could be said, in Jessie’s words, to hand the mother the laurels of victory, the revision shows the emotional damage that she is wreaking on her son. The sentence ‘And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly’ has

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often been cited as an example of hysterical extremity in Lawrence’s writing. When we read it in the context of the revision we can see that he has deliberately rejected an objective sympathy with Mrs Morel, and substituted an irrational and self-damaging emotional response. These changes are further evidence that, influenced by Frieda, Lawrence was increasingly placing the emotional damage caused by the mother–son relationship at the centre of his novel. On 15 October, he wrote to Garnett that he had done three-fifths of the novel, and for the first time suggested calling it Sons and Lovers (L1 462). The scene between Paul and his mother is on page 300 of a 540-page manuscript, so he must have made this suggestion not long after revising it. At the end of October, Lawrence interrupted the novel for three days to write the play The Fight for Barbara, closely based on his current situation with Frieda. The play is another comedy, and evades the most serious cause of conflict by making Barbara childless. If, as seems likely, writing the play was a holiday from the emotional demands of the novel, it is not surprising that he chose not to dramatise a theme that was only too close to the novel’s concerns. On 30 October, he wrote that he had completed all but a hundred pages of Sons and Lovers, ‘and those I funk’ (L1 466). A hundred pages before the end of the manuscript is the beginning of Paul’s affair with Clara, but the latter pages of the novel are far more closely written than earlier ones, so page-counting isn’t a reliable way of assessing how far he had reached when he said this. In any case, what he ‘funked’ was almost certainly the last illness and death of Mrs Morel. Frieda later wrote, ‘when he wrote his mother’s death he was ill and his grief made me ill too.’7 The last 120 pages of the manuscript, including the whole of the last four chapters, are all new, and no ‘Paul Morel III’ pages have survived for this section of the novel, so that it is impossible to say how the two versions compare. John Worthen has suggested that in ‘Paul Morel III’ Mrs Morel might not have died at all or, more likely, that she did die but her death was not ‘the haunting and significant

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event it would become in Sons and Lovers’ (EY 354). Hence his anguish when writing these chapters, which he would not have felt if he had merely been revising work already done. This of course has a bearing on Jessie’s belief that Lawrence ‘handed his mother the laurels of victory’. Although in some respects—the unconvincing ending of the affair with Clara and the rather formulaic friendship between Paul and Baxter—the latter parts of the novel are weaker than earlier sections, the death of Mrs Morel is one of the most powerful pieces of writing in Lawrence.8 Worthen’s word ‘haunting’ is appropriate. The reader is possessed by the conflict between Paul’s love for his mother and an awareness of the emotional damage that it causes him, and by the ambiguity of his final killing of her—whether he is motivated by the desire to spare her pain or to end his bondage to her. Lawrence might well have ‘funked’ this writing because in it he is revisiting the scene of ‘The Virgin Mother’, both the time when he wrote the poem and the feelings that it enshrined. She lay like a maiden asleep … The mouth was a little open, as if wondering from the suffering, but her face was young, her brow clear and white as if life had never touched it. He looked again at the eyebrows, at the small, winsome nose, a bit on one side. She was young again. Only the hair as it arched so beautifully from her temples was mixed with silver, and the two simple plaits that lay on her shoulders were filigree of silver and brown. She would wake up. She would lift her eyelids. She was with him still. He bent and kissed her passionately. But there was coldness against his mouth. He bit his lip with horror. Looking at her, he felt he could never, never let her go. No! He stroked the hair from her temples. That was too cold. He saw the mouth so dumb and wondering at the hurt. Then he crouched on the floor, whispering to her: ‘Mother—Mother!’ (SL 443)

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Natural grief for a dead mother is mixed with the insidious desire to transform her into a young woman, and above all a woman who has not had a sexual relationship with his father—the virgin mother of the poem. There is no narrative distance in the writing, any more than in ‘The Virgin Mother’. But this writing has a context, and the reader who has read the novel in a certain way will be as much repelled as moved by it. It is Lawrence’s achievement to allow such a response while revealing Paul’s emotional condition quite nakedly. Lawrence sent the manuscript to Duckworth on 19 November. The next day he wrote a letter to Garnett which has become a classic statement of the novel’s theme. Lawrence is actually insisting that the novel has form, and it is clear that by form he means thematic coherence. This defensive motive needs to be borne in mind when considering the statement. He represents the novel as entirely about the destructive effect of a mother’s love on her sons. She ‘selects them as lovers’ so that when they grow up ‘they can’t love’. William responds by giving ‘his sex to a fribble’ and dying from the split between his sexual life and his spiritual attachment to his mother. In this account of the novel Miriam is just ‘a woman who fights for his soul’, and their relationship fails not because of any lack in her but because ‘[t]he mother gradually proves stronger’. The mother dies because ‘almost unconsciously, [she] realises what is the matter’ and Paul is left ‘naked of everything, with the drift towards death’ (L1 477). This account of the novel is very different from Helen Baron’s ‘relentless interpretative drive’ at Miriam’s expense or John Worthen’s ‘pattern of manipulative and frustrated desire’. But neither is it a persuasive account. In places it is plainly misleading: far from dying because she realises what is the matter, Mrs Morel clings to life so that her children have to dispatch her; and the novel ends not with ‘the drift towards death’ but with Paul’s determination (albeit not entirely convincing) that he ‘would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her’ (SL 464). This last detail shows how uncertain Lawrence was even

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about the novel’s ending, and the process of composition reveals many other uncertainties. But they are creative uncertainties: the novel has the undecidability of life that can never be packed into a thematic summary.

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fortnight after sending the manuscript Lawrence received a letter from Garnett telling him that it needed to be cut. Lawrence called the letter a ‘wigging’, suggesting that Garnett meant more than that the novel was too long, and said it made him ‘sit in sadness and grief ’. Nevertheless, he considered that a postcard was enough for his reply, in which he gave Garnett permission to take out what he thought necessary, and even apologised for the burden of this task (L1 481–82). A day later he wrote to his friend Arthur McLeod saying the novel was ‘quite a great work’ and hoping the nation would not ‘rend’ him for ‘having given them anything so good’ (L1 482). It is uncharacteristic of Lawrence to be so submissive about the fate of a work he deeply believed in, and the effect on the novel was fairly drastic. Garnett cut it by 10 per cent, and except for the facsimile edited by Mark Schorer in 1977 this was the only version available to the public until 1992. Lawrence’s stance is explained by his comment on the postcard that Duckworth’s terms were ‘quite gorgeous’. He would earn a royalty of 15 per cent rising to 17.5 per cent after 2,500 copies with, most importantly for a man in immediate need of money, an advance of £100. Even when Garnett had made his cuts and Lawrence had the proofs, he wrote that he didn’t 159

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mind if ‘Duckworth crosses out a hundred shady pages … It’s got to sell, I’ve got to live’ (L1 526). In fact, Garnett’s editing was very little a matter of ‘shady pages’. Considering how low the threshold of acceptability was, sexual explicitness caused surprisingly few problems, and these changes scarcely disturb the novel’s overall effect. When Paul makes love to Miriam the word ‘thighs’ is replaced by ‘body’, and ‘naked’ is deleted, as is the information that Paul ‘threw off his things’ (MS 408–09, SL 333). It is still perfectly obvious what is happening, but Garnett, greatly experienced in dealing with publishers, clearly thought that less visualisation was more acceptable. The censorship of Paul’s lovemaking with Clara is a little stronger: Garnett cut Paul’s holding and kissing Clara’s breasts, and her quivering when he touches her. Given the reputation that Lawrence was already accruing, and would in future be far more harassed about, as an erotic writer, this is very mild indeed. Garnett judged well, and complaints about sexual explicitness did not figure prominently in the novel’s reception. There is an example of what looks like self-censorship when, in the manuscript, Baxter Dawes says of the fourteen-year-old Paul, ‘Has he got his mother’s drawers on?’ Lawrence deleted ‘mother’s’ in manuscript and the whole sentence in proof (MS 268). Much more extensive and significant were the cuts that Garnett made in order to shorten the book and, perhaps, in his opinion improve its form. In a few cases it is probable that he simply thought a passage was weak or redundant. This was probably the case with a passage of feeble humour that he deleted from the excursion to Wingfield Manor (SL 203–05). Few readers will feel that this was much of a loss to the novel. More significant, but perhaps also welljudged, was his severe pruning of Paul’s letter to Miriam at the end of Chapter 9. As it stands in the Cambridge text this is a three-page illustration of Paul’s capacity for affectation and, as Lawrence the narrator calls it, ‘flatulence’ (SL 291). Garnett cut more than half of this, However, as John Worthen points out, it is unfortunate

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that Garnett removed Paul’s acknowledgement that Miriam ‘played a fundamental part in [his] development’ (SL 292). As we have seen, the novel’s neglect of this aspect of their relationship was one of Jessie’s strongest objections. In Chapter 10, he cut a passage of dialogue between Paul and Clara that recalls his earlier stricture on ‘cheap’ talk that didn’t ‘ring true’ (SL xli). Garnett made some improvements but in the vast majority of cases it is not at all obvious that his cuts are advantageous to the novel. In many cases it is likely that he was motivated by more rigorous criteria of formal and thematic coherence than Lawrence’s later admirers would think appropriate. There are, for example, two very interesting passages of dialogue illustrating aspects of Mrs Morel’s character. In one she is advising the idealistic young minister about his sermon on the Marriage at Cana, deprecating his symbolic and spiritual interpretation of the miracle, and suggesting that Jesus was behaving as a good neighbour helping his impoverished hosts (SL 45–46). A reduction of explicitly religious motivation, and increasing emphasis on rationality and secular values, is a marked feature of the development of Mrs Morel’s character through the drafts. Garnett may not have noticed this. In another deleted passage Paul and his mother discuss Miriam’s wish that she were a man, with which Mrs Morel doesn’t sympathise (SL 186). The social position of women is an undercurrent throughout the novel, with a bearing on Miriam and Clara’s situations, as well as Mrs Morel’s, and an important contextualising element.1 The views of Mrs Morel, representing the attitude of an older generation of women, have a place here that might not have been obvious to Garnett. A number of passages that Garnett cut are lighter in tone than much of the novel. These include moments of ‘local colour’ such as the visit of the yeast-vendor (‘Barm-O’) and lighter domestic incidents like the dialogue between William and his mother about a patched shirt (SL 65, 72). One can see why Garnett might have thought such passages inessential, but their omission might have

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contributed to the response of some reviewers that the novel was excessively intense and (a word use by several of them) ‘morbid’ (SL lxix). Garnett also cut a lengthy episode (SL 190–94) in which Paul meets Miriam in the library and walks home with her. He is shown on tenterhooks, like any young lover, because of her late arrival, resulting in teasing by the librarian; when he walks her home they discuss books and Paul’s developing outlook on life. It is one of the most harmonious episodes in the portrayal of their relationship, and its emphasis on their shared intellectual life is especially significant in view of Jessie’s response to the book. (We have no way of knowing if it was in ‘Paul Morel III’: if it wasn’t, Garnett’s deletion meant she could not have read it.) After leaving her to return home Paul ‘forgot her in the knowledge that his mother would be angry’, a fear that is justified: ‘Do you mean to say you’ve been walking home with Miriam Leivers on a night like this?’ (SL 194). The whole episode is entirely consistent with Jessie’s version of their relationship before Easter 1906. However, the most important single category of Garnett’s deletions concerns the development of William and his relationship with his mother. It may be that he had a preconception that the novel was a Bildungsroman focused on Paul. He may not have registered the significance of the change of title from ‘Paul Morel’ to ‘Sons and Lovers’, though it is surprising that he overlooked the emphasis on William in Lawrence’s letter summarising the book’s theme. Lawrence had almost completely rewritten Chapter 3, discarding the business between Walter and Jerry, and focusing on William’s development as a child and young man. To reflect this, he retitled the chapter, ‘The Casting off of Morel, the Taking on of William’. Most of this new material, pages 70–80 in the Cambridge edition, was deleted by Garnett. This follows a pattern of deletions at the beginning of the novel, which mute the emphasis on William’s relationship with his mother. On the day Walter spends walking to Nottingham and

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drinking with Jerry, Gertrude is ‘depressed and wretched’; William ‘grieved for her, because he knew something was the matter … his love for his mother vexing his young growth’ (SL 29–30). This anticipates Paul’s empathy with his mother and its effect on his emotional development. By the time of Paul’s birth, in Chapter 2, ‘Already William was a lover to her’, the first direct allusion to the novel’s new title (SL 44). In Chapter 3, William tells his mother that he won’t get married till he meets a woman like her—not till he’s thirty (SL 74). Again there is a direct anticipation of Paul’s assertion that he won’t marry till after his mother’s death, when he will be in his forties. As William grows up the bond between him and his mother is counterpointed by her fear that he is growing to be like his father. He enters a cycle race to please his father and, even though he wins, his mother makes him promise not to do so again. He plays billiards and dances, provoking Walter to make the boast that the young Lawrence once uncharacteristically repeated to the Chambers family: ‘I could turn on a threp’ny bit’ (SL 73; ET 30). All this causes anxiety to his mother and tension between them. She wanted him to ‘bring to fruit all that she had put into him’ but sometimes ‘he lapsed and was purely like his father’ (SL 77–78). When William hires a Highlander’s costume for a fancy-dress ball he poses in front of Paul, priding himself on his fine physique, but his mother refuses to compliment him because she fears it is a sign that he resembles his father. William is dejected: ‘all his pride was built on her seeing him’ (SL 76). The emphasis on his physical splendour and prowess, in contrast to Paul’s sickliness, broadens the scope of the ‘sons and lovers’ theme: his mother’s rejection of everything his father stands for undermines his natural youthful masculine energy and spirits. These deletions seriously diminish the strongest example we have (given how little of ‘Paul Morel III’ survives) of Lawrence’s thematic development in the final draft. They tip the balance somewhat against the dominance of the mother-love theme. Yet

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Lawrence never protested, or even commented on what Garnett had done. He needed to publish for financial reasons and, much as he knew that Sons and Lovers was by far his greatest achievement yet, he was moving on to a completely different phase of creative development. However, even after accepting Garnett’s deletions he worked intensively on the proofs, not merely correcting but continuing the process of revision. He was working on galley proofs for at least a month between early February and early March. Only a small proportion of the corrected galleys have survived, equivalent to about thirty-eight pages or somewhat more than 8 per cent of the Cambridge text. Lawrence made more than forty substantive revisions to these pages including additions, deletions and substitutions. The Cambridge editors estimate that there are in total more than 670 substantive differences between the manuscript and the page proofs (which were set up from the galleys) and that the great majority of these were by Lawrence himself. A further 260 substantive changes must have been made on the page proofs (the corrected copy of which has not survived), and again most of these must have been by Lawrence. We see him reinterpreting details of key relationships across the whole novel, in both galley and page proofs. For example, in manuscript Paul ‘regretted but did not mind’ Clara’s superior swimming ability. In the surviving galley proofs we see him changing this to ‘begrudged her’.2 Some of the revisions I have already discussed were made as late as the page proofs, on which Lawrence was working in April. It was then that he changed ‘nobility’ to ‘worth’ in his account of Lydia’s conflict with Walter, and deleted ‘He had thought the love had been innocent and good’ from the scene in which Paul breaks with Miriam (SL Textual Apparatus 594, 648). We have seen that the composition of Sons and Lovers was shadowed and punctuated by the writing of plays. In fact, if we consider A Collier’s Friday Night to be a first draft of the ‘Strife in Love’ chapter, all but two of Lawrence’s completed stage works were written between the beginning of work on Sons and Lovers and its

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publication. He wrote The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd by November 1910, when he had abandoned ‘Paul Morel I’, and The Merry-goRound at his mother’s deathbed the following month. The Married Man was written immediately after the composition of ‘Paul Morel III’ and The Fight for Barbara shortly before he completed the final draft. In the January after finishing the novel he wrote his sixth and possibly best play, The Daughter-in-Law. As the Cambridge editors point out, Lawrence was regularly attending the local theatre in Gargnano at this time (as recorded in the ‘Theatre’ chapter of Twilight in Italy), and still in urgent need of money. However, The Daughter-in-Law is no potboiler, and is a fitting tailpiece to Sons and Lovers. It is perhaps Lawrence’s greatest accomplishment in working-class realism, and his swansong to that mode. He described it to Garnett as ‘objective’ (L1 501). One meaning of this word is that Lawrence returns to the intensely personal theme of motherlove but distances it by displacing the autobiographical elements. Mother and son are both straightforwardly working-class, and Mrs Gascoyne’s dialogue is his most extended feat of dialect speech. It is the daughter-in-law, Minnie, who reflects Lydia Lawrence’s social aspiration. It is also distanced in the sense that the situation is portrayed primarily from the women’s point of view: the central conflict is between Minnie and Mrs Gascoyne. The son/ lover, Luther, is weak, passive and resentful, and there is nothing of the creative element that complicates any judgement of Paul Morel’s relationship with his mother. Luther is also a miner with no aspiration to be anything else. In its portrayal of gender-conflict in the mining community against the background of a strike The Daughter-in-Law is more directly influenced than Sons and Lovers by Lawrence’s mining sketches of early 1912. Mrs Gascoyne is the direct successor of Mrs Hemstock in The Merry-go-Round. Like her predecessor she is a fount of vivid and pithy dialect satire against marriage (‘Marriage is like a mouse trap, for either man or woman— you’ve soon come ter th’end o’th’cheese’ Plays I 306). Indeed, The Daughter-in-Law can be seen as the much more successful dramatic

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development of the situation in the earlier play. Luther is another version of Harry (Lawrence even mistakenly called him Harry a couple of times in manuscript) and Minnie of the Nurse. Although the action centres on the revelation that Luther is the father of an illegitimate child conceived before he married Minnie, this is really no more than a plot device: the real theme is the conflict of mother and wife over Luther’s manhood. Lawrence told Garnett that the play was neither comedy (like The Merry-go-Round) nor tragedy (like The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd) but ‘ordinary’. This is its strength, especially in comparison with the artificial plot of The Merry-go-Round, but also perhaps one of its weaknesses as far as the commercial theatre was concerned. It ends: Minnie: Let me have you now for my own (She begins to undo his boots.) Luther: Dost want me? (She kisses his hands.) Minnie: Oh my love! (She takes him in her arms.) (He suddenly begins to cry.) (Plays 1 360) It is an ambivalent and unsettling conclusion: the apparent reconciliation has resolved nothing, Luther is still weak and passive, and Minnie’s only recourse seems to be to replace his mother. The scene echoes, in a more disturbing register, Harry exclaiming, ‘I want motherin’, Nurse’ in The Merry-go-Round (Plays 1 149). Another reason why the play did not appeal to the commercial theatre, the Cambridge editors suggest, is the large amount of dialect which ‘would have been impossible for many actors to speak and most audiences to understand’ (Plays 1 xxxvii). It wasn’t until a year later that Lawrence asserted that he would not write again in the manner of Sons and Lovers, ‘that hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation’ (L2 132). Even in the short period between finishing Sons and Lovers and writing The Daughterin-Law we see him starting and abandoning several projects that

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seem to be based on social realism. Before he had finished Sons and Lovers he was planning a novel ‘purely of the common people’ to be called ‘Scargill Street’ (the name of a street in Eastwood; L1 431, 466). If he ever began this, none of it has survived. It may have metamorphosed into the so-called ‘Burns novel’ on which he was at work during December. Two fragments of this have survived, and are published in the Cambridge volume Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories. The story appears to be set in the period of Burns but is transposed to the Midlands. Lawrence wrote that he thought Burns was somewhat like himself but ‘nicer’ and that the book might be ‘almost like an autobiography’ (L1 187). On the evidence of the surviving fragments it had the potential to be perhaps a counter-autobiography, since the hero lives in an all-male family dominated by a ‘stern-looking, hard-featured’ father ‘who had evidently wrung a living from the land by will and work’ (LAH 205). We also see the hero uncomplicatedly courting a young woman, in contrast to Paul Morel. By 24 December, Lawrence was describing his new novel as ‘more clever than good’ and by 29 December had started on yet another project which may have been the fragment published in the Cambridge Lost Girl as ‘Elsa Culverwell’ (L1 491, 496). In ‘Paul Morel II’, Lawrence had placed Miriam in the home of his Eastwood friend Flossie Cullen, the daughter of a grandiose and serially unsuccessful businessman. In ‘Elsa Culverwell’ he recreates the same family in a story narrated by the daughter. Though the milieu is much more middle class this is another piece of social realism. When Lawrence abandoned it and started again he evidently used the same source material, since his next novel is called ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’—the name of the heroine of The Lost Girl, in which Flossie’s fictionalised family eventually emerged before the public. ‘The Insurrection’ was the novel in which Lawrence finally left behind the aesthetic of Sons and Lovers: ‘all analytical—quite unlike Sons and Lovers, not a bit visualised’ (L1 526). It was also the novel in which Lawrence ‘the prophet’ emerged: ‘I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of

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today: to the real, deep want of the English people’ (L1 511). He abandoned it because he thought it was unpublishable, and turned his attention to a ‘potboiler’ which itself developed into an ‘earnest and painful work’ (L1 536). This was ‘The Sisters’, which, amid pains that Lawrence could not yet conceive of, was to become The Rainbow and Women in Love. The Rainbow, in particular, is probably a better guide to the character of ‘The Insurrection’ than The Lost Girl, which was at least partly an attempt to write something publishable after the disaster of the prosecution of The Rainbow. Lawrence had thus, by January 1913, two months after completing Sons and Lovers, embarked on a completely new artistic direction (Figure 6). Lawrence has a new self-confidence in this period, partly no doubt deriving from his relationship with Frieda, but also from the knowledge of having completed a major work. It is to the period December 1912 to February 1913 that some of his most iconic statements belong: ‘my motto is “Art for my sake”’, ‘I shall always be a priest of love’, ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood …’ and ‘One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist’ (L1 491, 493, 503, 519). One cannot imagine Lawrence writing like this a year earlier. The most substantial sign of this new confidence is the Foreword to Sons and Lovers that Lawrence wrote in January, sending it to Garnett with an assurance that he had not written it for publication. It is his first piece of extended metaphysical writing, somewhat in the form of a sermon, beginning ‘John, the beloved disciple, says, “The Word was made Flesh”’ (SL 467), but in a quasi-biblical style more reminiscent of seventeenth-century sermons than those he would have heard at the Congregational chapel. Its somewhat Nietzschean theme is that St John reversed the true relationship of the Word and the Flesh—in line with Lawrence’s belief in the blood as wiser than the mind. If the Word controls or interferes with the Flesh—as in a calculated murder or a willed sexual relationship—the ‘Father’ is denied. In the theology of this essay,

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anticipating the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ written the following year, the Father is the Flesh and the Son is the Word. The second part of the essay reverses Genesis as well as St John, with Woman giving birth to Man who utters the Word. It follows that the Father ‘should be called Mother’ (SL 470). Lawrence had of course always been the creature of women, though as he saw it his relationships with his mother and with Jessie were distorted by the intervention of the Word. ‘God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the Flesh, in Woman’: that, he implies, is by contrast the relationship he now has with Frieda (SL 471). Man is the Utterer whose utterance is only possible by renewal from his returns to Woman. As Mark Kinkead-Weekes points out, this does not allow the power of utterance to woman. The Foreword ends with its only direct allusion to the novel, saying that if the woman to whom the man goes for renewal is his mother he ‘wastes himself away in the flesh’ and ‘if a son-lover take a wife, then she is not his wife, she is only his bed’, and directly mentioning Oedipus (SL 473). In other words, Paul Morel was not fit for marriage, and one can imagine Frieda saying these words to Lawrence during the long struggle to establish their union—which was also, in part, the struggle to write Sons and Lovers. Kinkead-Weekes rightly says that this is a Foreword ‘not to Sons and Lovers but to a deeper fiction, still to be written, about both marriage and self-integration’.3 If that novel was The Rainbow it surpassed the vision of the Foreword since in it, as in nearly all Lawrence’s novels, the woman is granted utterance, regardless of what Lawrence wrote elsewhere.4 Sons and Lovers was published on 29 May 1913. Despite complaints of ‘morbidity’, a general dislike of the character of Paul and a few moral objections, the critical response was overwhelmingly positive. The Bookman’s opinion that it was ‘a novel of outstanding quality’ was fairly general.5 Some of the reviews are strikingly perceptive about the novel’s less obvious aspects. The reviewer in the Athenaeum, for example, suspected that ‘if the girl’s [Miriam’s] story had been written, we should have found her by no means so

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abnormal a person as represented’. The reviewer considered this ‘a tribute to the strength of the illusion created’.6 Admittedly, the Cambridge editors suspect that this review might have benefited from inside information, possibly deriving from Hueffer or Garnett (SL lxvii). The Saturday Review praised Lawrence for showing ‘the father as the good fellow whom the others never knew’, citing the sentence ‘He always sang when he mended boots because of the jolly sound of hammering’, which reveals ‘the human creature who should have had pure joy of life, and an author whose inspiration leaves behind the common artifices of the novelist’.7 Perhaps the most significant review was in the New Republic by Alfred B. Kuttner, who was later to translate Freud’s Reflections on War and Death, and who in 1916 expanded his review into an article in the Psychoanalytic Review. In this later article Kuttner asserted that Sons and Lovers ‘embodies a theory which it illustrates and exemplifies with a completeness that is nothing less than astonishing’.8 Given the strong evidence that at least a passing acquaintance with Freudian ideas helped to shape the final revision, and that Lawrence explicitly mentioned Oedipus in his Foreword, one might have expected him to welcome such an endorsement. On the contrary, he ‘hated’ Kuttner’s Psychoanalytic Review article, complaining that ‘“complexes” are vicious half-statements of the Freudians’, that his novel was ‘a fairly complete truth’ out of which Kuttner had carved ‘half a lie’ (L2 655). It is not actually surprising that Lawrence should object to the notion that his novel ‘embodie[d] a theory’. Kuttner’s article is by no means a crude or naive application of psychoanalysis to the novel, and he does state that ‘it would be fatal if the novel had been written with the express intention of illustrating a theory’.9 Nevertheless, the very idea that his novel could be understood in terms of theory, especially that of an increasingly fashionable movement, would have been anathema to Lawrence. Kuttner’s article may partly have motivated his later critique of Freud in Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.

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6 Lawrence in 1913

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I have deliberately passed over, in order to end with, the final chapter of Lawrence’s relationship with Jessie. In May 1912, while revising the novel in Waldbröl, he wrote to her, ‘I’m going through Paul Morel. I’m sorry it turned out as it has. You’ll have to go on forgiving me’ (ET 216). Recollecting this letter more than twenty years later, Jessie interpreted it as an apology for the novel. This may be so, but it is uncharacteristic of Lawrence to apologise for a work he believed in, even if it did cause pain to others. It seems to me at least as likely that he was apologising for the whole course of their relationship. The following month he wrote again, what Jessie described as ‘a hysterical announcement of the new attachment he had formed’, and swearing her to secrecy (ET 216). Jessie felt in the letter ‘the same passionate desire to be in love, an intense will to love, but it carried small conviction to me’ (ED 708). Given Lawrence’s emotional history Jessie’s response is not surprising, but her inability to believe in his love for Frieda was one factor that distorted her impression of Lawrence’s later life and work. She replied to him that his news didn’t surprise her and ‘In my heart I am glad, because it sets me free’ (ET 217). Lawrence didn’t reply to this letter. Despite her assertion about being set free, Jessie felt the ‘passing of Lawrence’ as ‘the extinction of my greater self ’ and ‘For a long time in a quiet and deliberate way I wished I had done with life’ (ET 217). Characteristically, her salvation lay in reading. She found The Brothers Karamazov in the library (possibly in the translation by Edward Garnett’s wife Constance, which was published in that year) and became ‘completely absorbed’ by ‘that clash of the spirit that was for me the real substance of drama. In some incomprehensible way I seemed to have known all the characters before.’ She felt that she had been living in another world and compared the effect of reading to that of deep sleep in illness. ‘It had placed a distance between me and the catastrophe of life.’ She was now ‘able to face my own inner chaos’ (ET 218).

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After Lawrence broke off their relationship in 1910 she had begun an autobiographical novel first called The Rathe Primrose and later Eunice Temple. She may have abandoned the original title because the line of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ from which it is quoted, ‘Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies’, was an uncharacteristically indulgently self-pitying comment on her situation. The later title is the origin of ‘E.T.’, the pen-name under which she published A Personal Record. Helen Corke had sent to Edward Garnett Jessie’s story ‘The Bankrupt’, based on a tragedy in an earlier generation of her family. It is the only surviving fiction by Jessie, and is published in the third volume of Edward Nehls’ Composite Biography. Attempts to publish the story were unsuccessful, but on the strength of it Garnett encouraged her to complete her novel, which she did during the winter of 1912–13. The writing was driven by ‘the terrible necessity to understand what had happened with regard to Lawrence and me’, to preserve her reason by getting the experience ‘somehow outside myself ’. She described it as ‘a very simple novel, without changing anything essential’. Garnett congratulated her (a little patronisingly?) on ‘a most charming and sincere story’ but recommended that she read Sons and Lovers before offering it to a publisher. She replied, unsurprisingly, that she was ‘only too well acquainted’ with Sons and Lovers. Garnett then suggested that Lawrence should see her novel, to which she agreed (ED 708–09). She ‘always intended that he should see it’ as ‘a matter of honour’ (LJC 28). It is a great pity that Jessie subsequently destroyed her novel since it will almost certainly have given a more immediate and reliable impression of her experience than her recollections twenty years later. By the time Garnett sent Jessie’s novel to Lawrence, Lawrence had sent her the proofs of Sons and Lovers. She recorded two slightly different versions of his accompanying letter in the draft of her memoir that she showed to Delavenay and the published text. He wrote, ‘I’ve had my ups and downs here with Frieda’ but that they planned to marry as soon as she was divorced,

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and settle down probably in Berkshire. He told her that he and Frieda ‘discuss you endlessly’ and would like her to visit them. In the Delavenay version, though not in A Personal Record, he explains signing off abruptly with the incongruous excuse that he is awaited ‘at tennis’ (ET 220; ED 709). Jessie shrewdly described the tone of this letter as an ‘off-handed attempt to be casual and matter-of-fact, and yet to appeal to my sympathy’ (ET 220). Of course, in her memory the letter might have metamorphosed to conform to her feelings about it, but Lawrence himself acknowledged that it was ‘stupid’ and Jessie’s sister May was as outraged as she was (L1, 553). A great deal of my account of the composition of Sons and Lovers, and of Jessie’s response to it, has hinged on the question how much she read of the proofs and, therefore, to what extent does her critique refer to the final text as opposed to ‘Paul Morel III’. Her earliest and so most reliable report is a letter to Helen Corke written on 23 March 1913, the day after the proofs arrived. Jessie writes: Yesterday morning came the proofs of Sons and Lovers, which makes no pleasant reading for me. I really can’t think why David should have wished me to read the proofs, since nothing now can be altered. He must be extraordinarily inconsiderate. I shouldn’t care if it didn’t make me so sick, all this torrent of emotionalism … I can neither eat nor sleep, and I sit in front of the fire and shiver as if I had ague fits. Indeed, after reading a bit of that accursed writing I am as flabby as even David could wish to portray me… The Miriam part of the novel is a slander, a fearful treachery. David has selected every point which sets off Miriam at a disadvantage, and he has interpreted her every word and action, and thought in the light of Mrs Morel’s hatred of her. (LJC 26–27)

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This letter gives us a strong and immediate impression of the effect reading the proofs had on Jessie. She does not say how much she has read, and her letter is consistent with her having read the whole text. However, someone suffering the extreme emotional turmoil that she reports would not want to read more than she felt was necessary to decide how much had been changed, and her state of mind doesn’t sound like that of someone capable of making a balanced assessment. As I have tried to show throughout my account of the novel’s life-history, however misleading the character of Miriam may be about Lawrence and Jessie’s relationship, she is emphatically not seen exclusively ‘in the light of Mrs Morel’s hatred of her’. Later, Jessie gave two slightly different accounts. In A Personal Record she writes I knew it far too well to have any desire to read it again. Indeed, I didn’t dare to risk a second reading, for I was by no means sure of my capacity to recover a second time. I did glance through some pages, however, hoping that in the interval his outlook might have mellowed and led him to soften some harshness. But I found both story and mood alike unchanged. (ET 220) Her earlier draft published by Delavenay reads, ‘I cannot believe that Lawrence ever re-wrote Sons and Lovers for I found the proof sheets tallied word for word with the Ms I had read. I didn’t dare attempt to read the whole thing. I only looked for changes in the parts where I most wanted to find them. But there were no changes’ (ED 709). Jessie is unlikely to have misremembered or misrepresented how much she read of the proofs. Indeed, no matter how much she read, her belief that Lawrence didn’t rewrite the novel makes her an unreliable commentator on the final text. We can’t know for sure which parts she did read, but they are likely to have included the

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‘Test on Miriam’ chapter. As we have seen, Lawrence did rewrite this chapter, but since the ‘Paul Morel III’ version no longer exists we can’t know how much or to what effect. We do know that he made numerous changes to ‘Lad and Girl Love’, responding to Jessie’s criticisms, but perhaps this was not a chapter that she felt she needed to read. She could not possibly have known that what she read ‘tallied word for word’ with ‘Paul Morel III’. It is most likely that she read some part, found it as upsetting as the earlier draft, had no desire to torture herself by reading more, and this feeling developed over the years into a belief that the texts were identical. John Worthen published an afterthought to D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years in which he addressed the question why Lawrence sent Jessie the proofs when it was too late to change anything. He proposes, convincingly, that as with Jessie’s own novel it was a ‘matter of honour’ to let her see the final text before it was published. He goes further and speculates that the ‘Test on Miriam’ chapter might have been much more sexually explicit in the final version than in ‘Paul Morel III’ and that what Jessie was reacting to when she read the proofs was a double betrayal: a travesty of their ‘sacred bond’ but also, more materially, a revelation of her private behaviour that could potentially have a disastrous effect on her career as a teacher. ‘Anyone who knew Jessie was, to an extent—literally and metaphorically—seeing her naked in the published Sons and Lovers.’10 This would explain why Jessie finally broke with Lawrence after reading the proofs, whereas she had not done so after reading ‘Paul Morel III’. Worthen suggests that in her later recollections Jessie was conflating her responses in 1912 and 1913, and that it was the proof that had the really devastating effect on her. The problem with this version of events is that Jessie very emphatically stated that she believed Lawrence hadn’t revised the novel. Her testimony may have been, as Worthen says, ‘unreliable’, but his hypothesis requires us to believe that the opposite was the case: that Jessie was distraught not because Lawrence hadn’t revised the novel, but

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because he had.11 It is hard to believe that her memory deceived her to this extent. Lawrence received the manuscript of Jessie’s novel in May. He said that he scarcely recognised her because ‘she never used to say anything’. But he thought it wasn’t bad, and it made him so miserable he ‘had hardly the energy to walk out of the house for two days’ (L1 551). She believed that he drew on it in writing parts of The Rainbow, probably the account of Ursula’s teaching experience. So both former lovers were made unhappy by each other’s fictionalisation of their relationship, though Lawrence’s suffering was almost certainly insignificant compared with Jessie’s. Jessie had, in any case, already struck a more telling blow. When she showed her sister May the letter he had sent with the proofs, May advised her to send it back. After some thought she did. She ‘grieved to think of his pain’ on receiving it, but felt that it ‘acted as a kind of release and let out all feeling of resentment’. This was at last the end of their twelve-year friendship: ‘I had gone with him as far as I could go. Nothing further was possible’ (ET 222).

Bibliography Baron, Helen. ‘Jessie Chambers’ Pleas for Justice to “Miriam”’. Journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society 4 (1987–88): 7–24 (reprinted from Archiv 137 (1985): 63–84). ––. ‘Sons and Lovers: The Surviving Manuscripts from Three Drafts Dated by Paper Analysis’. Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985): 289–328. Booth, Howard. ‘“They had met in a naked extremity of hate, and it was a bond”: The Later Chapters of Sons and Lovers, Psychoanalysis, and Male– Male Intimacy’. D.H. Lawrence Review 39.2 (2014): 59–76. Caserio, Robert L. ‘Beyond Oedipal Psychology in Sons and Lovers: Lawrence’s “Foreword” to Being and History’. D.H. Lawrence Review, special issue on Sons and Lovers. Eds. Keith Cushman and Richard Kaye, 39.2 (2014): 97–115. Chambers, J.D. ‘Memories of D.H. Lawrence’. Renaissance and Modern Studies 16 (1972): 5–17. Chambers, Jessie. ‘Letters of Jessie Chambers’. D.H. Lawrence Review 12.1–2 (1979): 1–223. Corke, Helen. In Our Infancy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ––. Neutral Ground. London: Arthur Barker, 1933. Delavenay, Émile. D.H. Lawrence, L’Homme et la genèse de son œuvre, les années de formation: 1885–1919. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1969. E.T. [Jessie Chambers]. D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Forster, E.M. Howards End. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941. Harrison, Andrew. ‘“I tell you it has got form, form”: Plot, Structure and Meaning in Sons and Lovers’. D.H. Lawrence Review, special issue on Sons and Lovers. Eds. Keith Cushman and Richard Kaye, 39.2 (2014): 11–24. Heath, Jane. ‘Helen Corke and D.H. Lawrence: Sexual Identity and Literary Relations’. Feminist Studies 11.2 (1985): 317–42. Hilton, Enid. ‘Alice Dax: Lawrence’s Clara in Sons and Lovers’. D.H. Lawrence Review 22.3 (1990): 275–85.

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Kaye, Richard L. and Keith Cushman (eds). Special issue on Sons and Lovers. D.H. Lawrence Review 39.2 (2014). Kearns, Barbara. ‘Getting it off his Chest: Some Implications of D.H. Lawrence’s Affair with Alice Dax’. Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies 4.1 (2015): 67–94. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lawrence, D.H. Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ––. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 1, 1901–13. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ––. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2, 1913–16. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ––. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 5, 1924–27. Ed. James T. Boulton and Lyndeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ––. Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ––. Mr Noon. Ed. Lyndeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. ––. Paul Morel. Ed. Helen Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ––. The Plays. 2 vols. Ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ––. The Poems. 2 vols. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ––. The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ––. ‘The Saga of Siegmund’. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, MSS 72/231z, D.H. Lawrence Collection, The Trespasser MS, MSI. ––. Sons and Lovers. Ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ––. The Trespasser. Ed. Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ––. The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories. Ed. N.H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ––. The White Peacock. Ed. Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Lawrence, Frieda. The Memoirs and Correspondence. Ed. E.W. Tedlock. London: Heinemann, 1961. ––. ‘Not I But the Wind…’. London: Heinemann, 1935. McDonald, Russell. ‘Revision and Competing Voices in D.H. Lawrence’s Collaborations with Women’. Textual Cultures 4.1 (2009): 1–25. Maddox, Brenda. The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence. London: SinclairStevenson, 1994.

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Miller, Jane Eldridge. ‘“The penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance”: Modern Women, the Edwardian Novel, and Sons and Lovers’. D.H. Lawrence Review, special issue on Sons and Lovers. Eds. Keith Cushman and Richard Kaye, 39.2 (2014): 77–96. Nehls, Edward (ed.). D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–59. Neville, George. A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence (The Betrayal). Ed. Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pinto, V. de S. (ed.). D.H. Lawrence After Thirty Years, 1930–1960: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held in the Art Gallery of the University of Nottingham, 17 June–30 July 1960. Nottingham: Nottingham University Art Gallery, 1960. Salgado, Gāmini (ed.). D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. A Casebook. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1968. Schorer, Mark, (ed.). Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Siegel, Carol. Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Tradition. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Sotirova, Violeta. D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Waterfield, Lina. Castle in Italy: An Autobiography. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961. Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ––. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. New York: Counterpoint, 2005. ––. ‘Orts and Slarts: Two Biographical Pieces on D.H. Lawrence’. Review of English Studies 46.181 (February 1995): 26–40.

Endnotes Notes to Introduction 1 Russell McDonald, ‘Revision and Competing Voices in D.H. Lawrence’s Collaborations with Women’, p. 1. 2 Andrew Harrison, ‘“I tell you it has got form, form”: Plot, Structure and Meaning in Sons and Lovers’, pp. 19–20.

Notes to Chapter 1 1 J.D. Chambers, ‘Memories of D.H. Lawrence’, p. 9. 2 D.H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, Late Essays and Articles, p. 288. 3 J.D. Chambers, ‘Memories of D.H. Lawrence’, pp. 5, 10. 4 D.H. Lawrence, ‘Myself Revealed (Autobiographical Sketch)’, Late Essays and Articles, p. 177. 5 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 300. 6 D.H. Lawrence, ‘Autobiography’, Late Essays and Articles, p. 112. 7 George Neville, A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence (The Betrayal), p. 188. 8 George Neville, A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence (The Betrayal), p. 42. 9 E.M. Forster, Howards End, p. 109.

Notes to Chapter 2 1 2 3 4

Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, pp. 245–48. Enid Hilton, ‘Alice Dax: Lawrence’s Clara in Sons and Lovers’, p. 276. Jane Heath, ‘Helen Corke and D.H. Lawrence: Sexual Identity and Literary Relations’, pp. 340–41. D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, pp. 383–89, 60, 76.

183

184 5 6 7

Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, pp. 65–66. D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, pp. 68, 77, 78. D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Saga of Siegmund’, pp. 180–81.

Notes to Chapter 3 1 2

George Neville, A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence (The Betrayal), p. 152. Lina Waterfield, Castle in Italy, p. 139.

Notes to Chapter 6 1 2 3

Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, pp. 245–46. Enid Hilton, ‘Alice Dax: Lawrence’s Clara in Sons and Lovers’, p. 279. Nottingham University Manuscripts and Special Collections Hil 2/12. For an argument in favour of the importance of Lawrence’s affair with Alice Dax, and her refusal of him, see Barbara Kearns, ‘Getting it off his Chest: Some Implications of D.H. Lawrence’s Affair with Alice Dax’. 4 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 247. 5 Enid Hilton, ‘Alice Dax: Lawrence’s Clara in Sons and Lovers’, p. 280. 6 Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 247; Nottingham University Manuscripts and Special Collections Hil 2/12. 7 Violeta Sotirova, D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint, pp. 137–38. 8 Violeta Sotirova, D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint, p. 137. 9 Helen Baron, ‘Jessie Chambers’ Pleas for Justice to “Miriam”’, p. 16. 10 Helen Baron, ‘Jessie Chambers’ Pleas for Justice to “Miriam”’, pp. 15, 21.

Notes to Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I But the Wind…’, p. 52. Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 351. Helen Baron, ‘Jessie Chambers’ Pleas for Justice to “Miriam”’, p. 15; John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years, p. 449. Carole Siegel, Lawrence Among the Women, p. 20. Frieda Lawrence, letter to V. de S. Pinto, 30 January 1953, quoted in V. de S. Pinto (ed.), D.H. Lawrence After Thirty Years, p. 19. Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, p. 246. Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I But the Wind…’, p. 52. However, for a more positive, psychoanalytically informed account of Paul’s relationship with Baxter, see Howard Booth, ‘“They had met in a naked extremity of hate, and it was a bond”’.

Endnotes

185

Notes to Chapter 8 1 For a fuller account of this context, see Jane Eldridge Miller, ‘“The penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance”: Modern Women, the Edwardian Novel, and Sons and Lovers’. 2 Nottingham University Manuscripts and Special Collections La L 7. This may be an instance of Frieda’s part in the character of Clara. See Gilbert’s response to Johanna swimming in Mr Noon, p. 211, ‘As she rolled over in the pallid, pure, bluey-effervescent stream, and he saw her magnificent broad white shoulders and her knot of hair, envy, and an almost hostile desire filled him.’ 3 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922, p. 64. 4 See Robert L. Caserio, ‘Beyond Oedipal Psychology in Sons and Lovers’ (p. 99) for an argument that the Foreword represents ‘an attempt by Lawrence to regain from Frieda his authority over the novel’, implicitly looking back to the letter to Garnett, which, in Mark Kinkead-Weekes’ words, was written by ‘Frieda’s Lawrence’ (Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922, p. 43). 5 Gāmini Salgado (ed.), D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. A Casebook, p. 59. 6 Gāmini Salgado (ed.), D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. A Casebook, p. 55. 7 Gāmini Salgado (ed.), D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. A Casebook, p. 57. 8 Gāmini Salgado (ed.), D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. A Casebook, p. 70. 9 Gāmini Salgado (ed.), D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. A Casebook, p. 70. 10 John Worthen, ‘Orts and Slarts: Two Biographical Pieces on D.H. Lawrence’, p. 38. 11 John Worthen, ‘Orts and Slarts: Two Biographical Pieces on D.H. Lawrence’, p. 38.

Index

Athenaeum, The 169–70 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2 Balzac, Honoré de Le Père Goriot 132 Baron, Carl 4, 108, 122, 126 Baron, Helen 4–5, 108, 122, 124–26, 139, 156 Baudelaire, Charles ‘Le Balcon’ 29 Beuerberg 128 Blackpool 59 Bookman, The 169 Booth, Howard ‘“They had met in a naked extremity of hate, and it was a bond”’ 184 Bournemouth 93–94 Brewster, Achsah 136 Brontë, Emily 17 Burrows, Louie 20–21, 44, 57–58, 63, 66–67, 69–74, 81–82, 84, 90, 93–95, 99–100, 108, 151 Caserio, Robert L. ‘Beyond Oedipal Psychology in Sons and Lovers’ 185

Chambers, Ann 9 Chambers, David 10 Chambers, Edmund 9 Chambers, Jessie 2–5, 7–10, 12–26, 31–35, 39, 41–46, 50–55, 57, 62–63, 65–67, 69–73, 76–77, 79–86, 89, 91–109, 112, 114–28, 132, 134, 136, 139, 144, 146–49, 153, 169, 172–77 ‘Bankrupt, The’ 173 contributions to Sons and Lovers 102–04, 115, 118–26, 147–48 D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record 3–4, 8, 14–20, 22, 24, 26, 31, 33–35, 42, 45, 55, 66–67, 76, 82–86, 98–99, 102–08, 121, 123, 127, 144, 163, 172, 174–75, 177 early draft of D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record see Delavenay, Émile, D.H. Lawrence, L’Homme et la genèse de son œuvre ‘Letters of Jessie Chambers’ 44, 106, 139, 173 Rathe Primrose, The / Eunice Temple 173, 176–77 Chambers, May 8, 71, 107, 177

187

188

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Chekhov, Anton 90 Chesterton, G.K. 20 Clarke, Ada see Lawrence, Ada Congregational Church 7, 72, 168 Conrad, Joseph 83 Corke, Alfred 36–37 Corke, Helen 36–52, 61–62, 69–70, 83, 90, 93–94, 105–06, 127, 173–74 ‘Freshwater Diary’ 41–42, 46–48, 51 In Our Infancy 36–42, 47, 61 Neutral Ground 37, 39–41, 46–47 Corke, Louisa 36–37 Crawford, Grace 31, 49, 57, 59 Croydon 24, 26, 36, 44, 54, 58, 62, 93, 98 Cullen, Flossie 60 Dax, Alice 31, 43–45, 81, 94, 100–02, 105, 107, 151, 184 Delavenay, Émile 3 D.H. Lawrence, L’Homme et la genèse de son œuvre 35, 42–43, 55, 70, 98, 106, 128, 172–75 D.H. Lawrence Society of North America 6 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 90 The Brothers Karamazov 172 Duckworth publisher 129, 156, 160 Eastwood 4, 7–8, 12, 18–19, 43, 54, 57, 62, 81, 97, 100, 102, 105, 109 Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser 18 Eliot, George 23 Flaubert, Gustave 12 L’Éducation sentimentale 57 Madame Bovary 61 Ford, Ford Madox see Hueffer Forster, E.M. Howards End 31 Room With a View, A 22

Freud, Siegmund 133 Reflections on War and Death 170 Galsworthy, John 83 Gargnano 2, 4, 6, 165 Garnett, Constance 90, 172 Garnett, Edward 3, 83, 90, 93, 100, 108–09, 128–29, 131–33, 142, 154, 156, 165, 170, 172–73 editing of Sons and Lovers 159–64 Garnett, Richard International Library of Famous Literature 83 Greiffenhagen, Maurice Idyll, An 35 Gross, Otto 133 Haggs Farm 7–8, 24, 54, 81–82 Hardy, Thomas Far From the Madding Crowd 19 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 10 Harrison, Andrew 3, 6 Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas 6 Hauptmann, Gerhart Elga 52 Heath, Jane 47 Heinemann publisher 59, 61, 72, 82, 84, 93, 97, 128 Hemlock Stone 102–03, 105 Hilton, Enid 43–44, 100 Holbrook, May see Chambers, May Holt, Agnes 33, 41 Hopkin, William 18, 43 Hueffer, Ford Madox (Ford Madox Ford) 26–27, 31–2, 48, 61–62, 83, 93, 170 Hunt, Violet 31 Icking 128 Ilkeston Pupil-Teacher Centre 20 Jaffe, Else 111, 128, 135 Jennings, Blanche 31, 49, 65

Index Jones family 93 Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies 6 Kearns, Barbara ‘Getting it off his Chest: Some Implications of D.H. Lawrence’s Affair with Alice Dax’ 184 King, Emily see Lawrence, Emily Kinkead-Weekes, Mark D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 169, 185 Krenkow, Ada 108 Krenkow, Fritz 108 Krenkow, Hannah 108, 112 Kuttner, Alfred 170 Lawrence, Ada 19, 57, 69–72, 90, 94–95, 97 Lawrence, Arthur 7, 57, 62, 71–72, 78–79, 86, 97, 110, 136 Lawrence, D.H. Boy in the Bush, The 46 ‘Bride, The’ 65 ‘Burns Novel’ 167 Collier’s Friday Night, A 12, 28–33, 48–49, 71, 76–77, 164 Daughter-in-Law, The 64, 165–66 ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ see ‘Two Marriages’ ‘Elsa Culverwell’ 167 ‘English and the Germans, The’ 112 Fantasia of the Unconscious 170 Fight for Barbara, The 154, 165 ‘Fragment of Stained Glass, A’ 21 ‘French Sons of Germany’ 112 ‘German Books’ (review of Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig) 61 ‘Goose Fair’ 67, 72 ‘Harassed Angel, The’ 90–94, 98 ‘Her Turn’ 109–10, 165 ‘How a Spy is Arrested’ 112

189

‘Insurrection of Miss Houghton, The’ 167–68 Kangaroo 151 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 110 ‘Lilies in the Fire’ 53 Lost Girl, The 81, 167 ‘Love Among the Haystacks’ 10, 42, 82 ‘Love Song, A’ 66 Married Man, The 111–12, 165 ‘Matilda’ 57–59 Merry-go-Round, The 64–66, 111, 165–66 ‘Miner at Home, The’ 109–10, 165 ‘Modern Lover, A’ 22 Mr Noon 185 ‘Myself Revealed (Autobiographical Sketch)’ 19 ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ 150 ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ 8, 136 ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ 28, 30–32, 48, 64 ‘Prelude, A’ 21, 28 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 170 Rainbow, The 58, 86–87, 110, 168–69, 177 ‘Shades of Spring, The’ 90–93 ‘Sick Collier, A’ 109–10, 165 ‘Sisters, The’ 168 Sons and Lovers final draft 4, 7, 14, 28–29, 46, 52–53, 58–60, 64, 67–68, 71, 75–76, 78–81, 83, 87–89, 91, 99–100, 102, 104, 106–07, 110, 115–16, 119–27, 131–57, 159–67, 174, 176 ‘Foreword’ 168–69 ‘Paul Morel I’ 4, 59–63, 71, 86, 165 ‘Paul Morel II’ 4, 15, 29, 57, 60–61, 72–85, 87, 102,

190

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116–17, 122, 133, 135–37, 152, 167 ‘Paul Morel III’ 2, 4, 15, 17, 67, 84–90, 93, 97–99, 102–110, 112, 114–29, 131–34, 151–55, 162–63, 165, 174, 176 proofs 3, 105–07, 128, 136–40, 147–49, 164, 173–77 reviews 169–70 ‘Scargill Street’ 167 ‘Strike Pay’ 109–10, 165 Trespasser, The 22, 41–42, 45–47, 58–59, 61–62, 72, 78, 83, 93–94, 108–09, 127, 129 Twilight in Italy 165 ‘Two Marriages’ 82 ‘Virgin Mother, The’ 65, 151, 155–56 White Peacock, The 10, 19, 21–24, 26, 30, 32, 35, 42–43, 58–59, 67, 71–72, 74, 79, 97 Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, The 64, 165–66 ‘Witch à la Mode, The’ 48–49 Women in Love 58, 86–87, 151, 168 Lawrence, Emily 8, 57, 97 Lawrence, Ernest 10, 15, 79–80, 89 Lawrence, Frieda 2–4, 9, 43, 65, 72, 82, 94, 100–01, 105, 108–09, 111–13, 127–29, 131–36, 148, 150–52, 154, 169, 172, 185 Lawrence, George 10, 15, 57, 83–84 Lawrence, Lydia 10–15, 18, 20, 32, 36, 57–60, 62–63, 66, 71–72, 78, 106, 108, 110, 115, 124, 136, 165, 169 Lawrence, Walter 78 Lutoslawski, Wincenty 106 Mablethorpe 17 Macartney, Herbert 36, 38–41, 47, 54 McDonald, Russell 2

McLeod, Arthur 66, 159 Maddox, Brenda The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence 1 Mary Queen of Scots 102 Meredith, George Diana of the Crossways 12 Metz 111–12 Miller, Jane Eldridge ‘“The penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance”: Modern Women, the Edwardian Novel, and Sons and Lovers’ 185 Milton, John ‘Lycidas’ 173 Murry, John Middleton 3 Nation, The 109 Nehls, Edward D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography 9, 31, 71–72, 89, 136, 173 Neville, George 107, 110–11 A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence (The Betrayal) 20, 59 New Republic, The 170 Nietzsche, Friedrich 121, 168 Nottingham 12 Nottingham High School 8, 79 Nottingham University College 23–24, 79, 109 Nottinghamshire Guardian 20 Oedipus complex 133–34, 169 Orage, A.R. The New Age 12 Pawling, Sydney 59–60 Payne, Iden 111–12 Plowman, Max 3 Pound, Ezra 31 Psychoanalytic Review, The 170 psychoanalysis 133, 170

Index Puritanism 112, 135 Richthofen, Anna von 111 Richthofen, Friedrich von 112 Saturday Review, The 170 Schopenhauer, Arthur 121 Schorer, Mark 5, 159 Shirebrook 100 Schreibershofen, Johanna von 111, 135 Siegel, Carol Lawrence Among the Women 2, 140 Skinner, Mollie 46 Sotirova, Violeta D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint 2, 116, 119–20 Spencer, Herbert 121 Stendhal Le Rouge et le Noir 73 Symonds, John Addington 91 Taylor, Rachel Annand 31, 62–63, 65–66, 69, 71, 80 Tennyson, Alfred ‘Lady of Shallott, The’ 38 ‘Palace of Art, The’ 38

191

Tolstoy, Leo 90 Turgenev, Ivan 61 University of Nottingham 6 Waldbröl 108, 112, 126–27, 177 Waterfield, Aubrey 67–68 Waterfield, Lina 67–68 Weekley, Ernest 23, 108, 112, 129, 134 Wight, Isle of 40, 47, 54 Wilde, Oscar 91 Wingfield Manor 102–03, 105, 114, 160 Wood, Mrs Henry East Lynne 12 Worthen, John 6, 21, 24, 43, 58, 156, 160 D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 2, 4, 18, 22, 42, 46, 53, 62–63, 72, 94, 97–98, 100, 109–10, 135, 139, 148–49, 151, 154–55, 176 D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider 4 ‘Orts and Slarts: Two Biographical Pieces on D.H. Lawrence’ 176