Books
Steel in his soul. Once, the English didn't dare mention the phallus; now that they have the right to use the word, they do so with a smirk. It was this national sickness that contorted and constricted D H Lawrence's great talent. By George Walden
Published 14 March 2005
D H Lawrence: the life of an outsider
John Worthen Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 518pp, £30
ISBN 0713996137
Martin Amis wrote that Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin gave the impression that Larkin was "somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion", and that "one can almost hear Motion begging Larkin to seek professional help". John Worthen, Professor of D H Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham, is the expert in his field. Yet except in restrained and perceptive elucidations, he does not give us "his" Lawrence, and unlike biographies by Motion - serenader of the TUC and Diana, Princess of Wales - at no point do we hear what Amis called his "political pager" calling. How easy it would have been for Worthen to fawn over his subject's working-class upbringing, or erect him into a peerless sexual liberator, the better to hold his own authorial virtue aloft. Instead, he shows rather than tells how his subject's background and ardent nature conditioned his fiction, and leaves us to judge.
My own conclusion, after reading this superb book, is that the erotica for which Lawrence has chiefly become famous worked to his detriment as a writer. Class and sex are the ball and chain that shackle the English novel. Being against the first and in favour of the second does nothing to answer the aesthetic question. Orwell the Etonian wrote honestly about coaling communities. Lawrence, whose father was a miner, had comparatively little to say on the subject, but was furiously in favour of sex. Social preoccupations made George Orwell a poorer novelist than he would have been anyway, but what Lawrence called "phallic consciousness" contorted and constricted his far superior talent.
His attitude to England was torn between "devouring nostalgia" and "infinite repulsion". He lived half in and half out of a country that both disgusted and (in a negative sense) inspired him: Lady Chatterley's Lover was conceived and written during a trip home. Alternately self-isolating and gregarious, suffocated by his surroundings and exuberantly alive, especially in physical labour, he drifted between England, Italy and America in a kind of perpetual elopement with his stolen wife, Frieda, a liberated German aristocrat and ur-woman who provided him with love, sex, a relative devotion and bouts of fisticuffs.
Misfit and outsider he certainly was; beside him, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, for all their demonstrative disillusion with Britain, were winking collaborators. And yet what society - what world - could he fit into? It was not that his literary contemporaries cold-shouldered the miner's son; a long list of people recognised his talents and (so far as his and Frieda's marital battling would allow them) helped and encouraged him: they included Ottoline Morrell, John Middleton Murry, the Huxleys. But there was no place he could settle. His homelessness was often literal, his writer's penury extreme. Except for a small ranch, given to him and Frieda by a rich American admirer in the wilds of New Mexico, he never owned a house. His Bergsonian exultations about the life force would be more tiresome were it not for the spectacle of him haymaking, building, cow-milking and cooking, not because he was living out some fantasy existence, but from necessity. The only real money he made, from the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in Paris, came at the end of his life. Meanwhile he wrote obsessively, sometimes turning out three or four thousand words a day.
How many of them are read now? The subsidence of his reputation as a novelist is said to be connected with his unacceptable views on women, but I suspect the truth is worse. His fiction could have a glint of the obsessive, and, like the paintings of Stanley Spencer, of something quirkily provincial. Phrases such as "the living made power in my soul" (from Kangaroo) were not destined to last. Though how fine and yet forceful his descriptive prose could be, with its spotlighting directness, as if what he was seeing were bathed in an exalted light. And how arresting his letters: "It is just life outside, and the outside of life," he writes of America. "It is all a form of running away from oneself and the great problems." Later he became more sympathetic, hankering until the very end of his life after a return to New Mexico.
Despite (and to an extent because of) reservations about his fiction, your sympathy for Lawrence grows steadily. Stuff about elan vital can irritate, but he certainly had it, albeit warped by England. If you want to read him today, you go for his wonderful essays. His studies in American literature, drafted in England in 1918, were rewritten in America to reflect the more direct style of that country. He is direct about Walt Whitman all right, though you wonder how far his argument is with the poet and how far with himself. In the physicality of Whitman's verses he sees "a certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts . . . They talk of his splendid animality. Well, he's got it on the brain, if that's the place for animality . . . 'I embrace all,' says Whitman. 'I weave all things into myself.' Do you really! There can't be much left of you when you've done." This from the man attracted to animism, and who wrote of his "great belief" that "the blood is wiser than the intellect".
We need no heavy-handed lessons in the strangulating repressions of Edwardian England that produced him, and Worthen offers none. Leaving the country for the first time in 1912, Lawrence said that he felt vogelfrei: he meant free as a bird, but, as Worthen points out, its chief meaning is "outlawed". And with book after book, that was to be his fate. The sheer malevolent ignorance and stupidity of the prosecution of exhibitors of his drawings (one of which showed pubic hair; the works narrowly escaped being burned), and the fact that it was a third of a century before Lady Chatterley could be published in his homeland, remind us of how the steel in his soul was forged. But the notion that sexual censoriousness must produce masterpieces is like the idea that political repression invariably gives rise to great novels. Everything turns on the worth and longevity of the writing. We all want the right to say "phallus", but it does not amount to much when we've got it, and we would have had it eventually, with or without Lawrence. The struggle can diminish the struggler, as the universe becomes subsumed in the right to name bodily parts; and given his squib about Whitman, one suspects that Lawrence knew it.
More naturally sensual cultures do not have to work at it the way he did. (In Russia, he would have sated his adolescent lusts with a peasant woman; in France, he would have visited the local brothel; in Britain, he remained an agonised virgin until the age of 23.) If there is one thing more narrowing than sexual cant, it is the reaction against it. Nabokov, too, was forced to publish his best work in Paris, but not a single part of Lolita is named. The suppression of the bodily truths about life is a sickness in the blood, but the rage for absolute sexual freedom can turn into a secondary disease. The solution is not to have the sickness.
Worthen, one feels, understands all this. This is one of those books where you cannot see how it could be better done. His conclusion on the prototypes of the Lady Chatterley characters is that Lawrence himself is the incapacitated intellectual Clifford, Frieda is Constance, and her peasant lover Angelo Ravagli is Mellors. All this flows naturally and persuasively from the evidence. That Worthen's coolly sophisticated analysis should have given rise to lubricious headlines in the press shows how little we have moved on from Lawrence's world. Now we are free to say "phallus", but we smirk when we say it. The sickness is still with us.
George Walden's latest book is Who's a Dandy? (Gibson Square)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
