BY K. S. PATRY

"It is difficult to think of any other among the very great writers of the world who is appreciated in such a variety of degrees, and for such a variety of reasons, as Rabelais. There are those who worship him, there are those who frankly cannot put up with him at all. He is read by many as a great humanist and moral teacher, by many more probably as a teller of stories and in particular of improper stories; others are fascinated by his language, and others by the curious problems–literary, biographical, allegorical–which his book suggests."…..These observations by Strachey in regard to Rabelais and world literature apply with equal aptness to D. H. Lawrence and modern English literature. The appreciation of Lawrence falls into various grades from the restrained estimation of Murray to the ardent admiration of Huxley. The variety of appeal is plainly the result of the multiplicity of affective interests in Lawrence's life and works. The only interest that can eschew the grinding rigours of criticism incidental to literary, artistic, philosophic or humanistic preconceptions is the personalistic or psychological interest.

The motto of Lawrence, as he has in one of his letters declared, is "Art for my sake." The words reveal not only the meaning of his art, but also the significance of his life. He lived his own life as he evolved his own art. In art as well as life he was a thorough-going individualist. There is not a single line of his writings that is not self-exposure, self-flagellation, self-gratification and self-justification. Huxley states, "Like Blake, like any man possessed of great special talents, he was predestined by his gifts…..That Lawrence was profoundly affected by his love for his mother and by her excessive love for him is obvious to any one who has read ‘Sons and Lovers.’ None the less, it is to me at any rate equally obvious that even if his mother had died when he was a child, Lawrence would still have been essentially and fundamentally Lawrence. Lawrence’s biography does not account for Lawrence’s achievement, or rather the gift that made the achievement possible accounts for a great deal of his biography." This is a questionable attitude. No one doubts the special gifts of Lawrence. His emotional susceptibilities, imagination, intuition and original literary talent are all established beyond cavil. Explanations of these innate capabilities by the psychological method would be like attempting an explanation of the Universe by an outworn mythology. These are taken for granted as the very basic beginning. But the way the native capacities work, the setting they receive, the landscape they have to course over are purely extraneous and circumstantial. And the question, then, is whether the Lawrencian individuality is the outcome solely of his faculties or the result of their inter-action with the conditions of his early life. That Lawrence had prodigious powers of love is an undisputed natural fact. But the fixing of his emotions and the direction of their activity are all conditional results. Capacity for inordinate adoration may be a native gift. But Lawrence’s adoration for his mother, towards a particular individual, was a conditioned reaction. Had not his father been a drunkard, a fool and an irresponsible person, and had he been a respectable, loving, caring, and cultured being, Lawrence might not have had to adore his mother, for the importance of the mother would dwindle into insignificance when juxtaposed with a comparably wholesome influence. Had his mother died leaving Lawrence but a child, his whole life-history would probably have been far different from the tragedy of emotional disequilibrium it had come to be. Lawrence’s biography accounts for Lawrence’s achievement, and his achievement counts only when it is accounted for by his biography. How far early life is instrumental in fixing the emotional interests of any sensitive mind is a valuable personal study, and Lawrence is a case in point.

As a boy Lawrence manifested amazing mental qualities. He had a very sensitive mind where sensitiveness almost means sensuousness. Whatever he grasped, he did with the relish and indelible realism of physical pleasure. His nature was emotionally high-strung, naive, luxuriant, unrestrained almost to an animality. An observant and delicate spirit as he was, he spared not any experience that came within his sensuous reach. His curious disposition and bashful aloofness gave him a peculiar perch wherefrom to view all life and nature and his mental impressions bore the stamp of unique genius. He would take in, as it were, everything with his eyes, whether it be the simple boiling of eggs in the farm kitchen or the sublime grandeur of landscape around his cottage. His father was a collier and an incurable drunkard. His mother, who came of a decent lower middle-class family, was the leading figure in the household and the most important force that confronted young Lawrence. She was shrewd, painstaking, full of commonsense, and diverted the maimed interests of her ill-matched marital life to the nurture and training of her children of whom David was one of the best-loved. She manifested a grave and intelligent concern for her children. To the extent her husband was negligent and irresponsible, she grew indefatigably zealous and purposive–by sheer psychic opposition–and fostered an unbounded love as a challenge to the drunken callousness of her husband. The waywardness and the undesirableness of the latter’s influence seemed so forbidding that the former set up in herself a counteracting force that compensated for the pecuniary and social distress of the household and guaranteed the security and dignity of a lower-middle-class family.

Even as a child Lawrence had watched the brutal outbursts of his father. His frequent absence from home, his staying away at public houses, his insane freaks and personal assaults on his mother had inspired in him a strange horror. The father had so completely revealed the hideous brutality of his nature that his children, especially Lawrence, lost all respect and consideration for him; and Lawrence’s belief in the paternal position was shaken to its roots. For Lawrence, there was only one personality, the elderly lady, the mother and father in one, fulfilling both the roles with competence and zeal. The mother’s secret horror for her husband sought satisfaction in the caressing solicitude for her sons; and two of them, the eldest and the youngest, responded to her call. The children, in their turn, defrauded of the sweetness of paternal love, evolved in themselves a strange affinity to their mother, for she was the pivot of the family, the sole guarantor of the peace and security of the household.

It was not sexual precocity that hitched his imagination to his mother as some critics have been beguiled to infer but sheer sense of security and peace. It is here that one incidentally realises the pleasant necessity of substituting the Adlerian method for the Freudian in understanding the orientation of early emotional life. The strain on Lawrence of his mother’s love for him was all the more aggravated by the death of his elder brother, Ernest, who divided equally with him the love of their mother. Dammed up by the depravity of the father and the death of the promising son, the mother’s affections burst the bounds and deluged the imagination of the other fellow. Such was the background of Lawrence’s boyhood.

When he was about sixteen, he met the girl known to the world as "Miriam", to whom he was linked for well over ten years. She was the daughter of a farmer whose farm valley was situated three miles away from the miner’s cottage at Eastwood. This farm Lawrence often frequented, seeking the fullness and freedom of natural existence. There he found the solace and exhilaration that he missed in his home. The girl was of a nearly equal age and was seized with a surprised bashfulness when the frail fair boy stepped into the kitchen keenly following with his eyes the movements of the cottage girl in the performance of the various culinary operations. Lawrence was too young and shy to be drawn into the circle of adults who ceaselessly indulged in their eternal domestic chat, but would glide into the field beyond the stackyard and stand still, gazing at the wood, the hills and the lake. "Miriam" felt a strange mixture of fear and respect for him; and often, not without a qualm, imagined that she was deficient in courtesy in not attempting to move freely with him. Lawrence had at last found out a great haven of peace and salubrity, where his emotions could have the unimpeded access to free expression and enjoyment. He often visited the place and almost became one with the family. He even made a candid confession that he would like rather to stay there as one of the family than return to his home at Eastwood. He was looked up to by "Miriam’s" father with reverential affection, the admixture of reverence obviously being the result of his esteem for Mrs. Lawrence the excellent house-keeper. Settled in a wholesome and harmonious atmosphere. Lawrence was supremely gay and cheerful, and often took delight in the performance of such domestic work as could give him a niche in the family affections and pitch his movements with those of other young folk, especially "Miriam," her sister, and her brother.

"Miriam" was the most interested student of Lawrence’s activities. The charm of his personal features, the zest and vitality with which he pealed onions or read lessons, the luxuriance and amplitude of his sensibilities, struck a sympathetic chord in her, and she conceived an undemonstrated delight in his fellowship. The fellowship grew more and more close, and Lawrence was reluctant to sever himself from her. He would often say to "Miriam" in caressing reproach, "Why, you won’t come; it is because of father," and, in spite of "Miriam’s" heartening protestations, would still insist, "There is nothing for you to be afraid of, you would never see him, he’s hardly ever in." The bonds grew inseparable. An outing in the open field was often the experience which the two unfailingly shared. There was a sense of immediacy between them. It was in one of those walks that Lawrence revealed himself in a strange light. "Miriam" had just gone ahead a few steps admiring the tints on the hedge-row, while Lawrence stood baffled in the middle of the road, bending over an umbrella. On glancing back, she was surprised at his strange posture and inquired of him eagerly what the matter was. "It was Ernest’s umbrella, and mother will be wild if I take it home broken," was Lawrence’s reply. The situation brings out clearly the main relationship between him and his mother, the frail sensitive creature in the protective grip and relentless surveillance of his indomitable mother.

"Miriam" was seventeen when she attended the pupil-teacher centre. She was at the turning point of her girlhood. Her childlike naivete and emotional naturalness had not yet been transformed into adolescent prurience. By that time Lawrence had been weaned from his ineffectual boyhood, and had taken to more concentrated and determined pursuits. The two developing minds, set in free and indulgent circumstances, found occasions of mutual understanding and sympathetic identification. They read and worked together and appreciated each other’s emotions and ideas. He said on one occasion when his imagination was in its full swing, "I shall be something, someday, I mean a bit more than ordinary. If ever I am, I should like to have a big house–you know there are some lovely houses in the Park with gardens and terraces. Wouldn’t it be fine if we could live in one of those houses, mother and all the people to live together? Wouldn‘t it be fine!" This delicate outpouring of fancy brings to light the native idealism of Lawrence which had not yet been smothered into the sickening self-division of the later years. He softly unmasked his love for "Miriam" in an ecstasy of exuberant feeling. Ever since Lawrence and "Miriam" became pupil-teachers they helped each other in their lessons, Lawrence often taking a pedagogic attitude towards his girl-companion who did not mind giving in to such dominance. The exceptional capabilities of the one were given form and shape as a result of the fructifying contact with the other. An inviolable love took shape on one side while an ineradicable loyalty grew up on the other. Their vital impulses were in unison. Lawrence unconsciously withheld the natural culmination of their intimacy although both were aware of its threatening imminence.

Then descended the blight upon the natural bloom of their comradeship. "A shadow seemed to fall at Christmas when Lawrence said, inviting me (Miriam) to a party at his home: ‘I would come and meet you, but already they are beginning to say I care more for you than for them. It isn’t that,’ he continued earnestly, ‘they don’t understand’." This scene unearths the most pregnant indication of the gradual onset of inward contradiction, a split in his own self, a disruption in his erstwhile harmonious emotional nature. He has found a true life-mate; but other fears deflect him from the cherished goal; he succumbs, and conjures up a strange self-delusion suspecting his own sincere interests. During the holidays they read Coriolanus, and Lawrence significantly appreciated the character of Coriolanus’s mother and exclaimed with good cheer, "You see, it is the mother who counts; the wife hardly at all. The mother is everything to him." It is quite plain that this is nothing but the individual’s repressed fancy raised into an independent and accredited truism. On another occasion, while sowing seeds of flower in the garden, Lawrence said to "Miriam", "Charles Lamb says, if a childless man would know the joys of fatherhood, let him sow seeds and watch them grow. So here are the joys of fatherhood in a penny packet of seeds!" Such utterances are packed with psychological meaning. These clearly direct one to the emotional landslide that set in in Lawrence’s mind then. Lawrence was all too consciously attracted towards "Miriam," and by a strange concatenation of repressions and inhibitions sought to defile the faultless relationship of a husband to a wife by tricking himself into believing in fatherhood without husbandhood, motherhood without wifehood, and creative activity without physical relationship.

One day Lawrence came to "Miriam’s" house completely changed in his attitude, and said in a perturbed voice, "This–the friendship between us–is it keeping even, is it getting out of balance, do you think? I am afraid that the balance might be going down on one side. You might, I thought, I don’t know, you might be getting to care too much for me." "Miriam" asked him, "Why are you saying this?" Lawrence concluded, "While they were talking last night, mother and E-, E-asked mother if we were courting? They say we either ought to be engaged or else not go about together. It’s the penalty of being nineteen and twenty instead of fifteen and sixteen." Lawrence had been completely metamorphosed from an unsophisticated, emotionally free and unrestrained spirit into a mother-ridden, wavering and self-divided one. "Miriam" rejoined with alertness, "Ah–I always thought your mother didn’t like me." Lawrence cut in, saying, "It isn’t that, you must not think that; mother has nothing against you, it is for your sake she spoke. She says it isn’t fair to you…..I may be keeping you from getting to like somebody else. She says I ought to know how I feel; I have looked into my heart and I cannot find that I love you as a husband should love his wife. Perhaps I shall, in time. If ever I find I do, I will tell you. What about you? If you think you love me, tell me, and we’ll be engaged. What do you think?" This special pleading of Lawrence deserves the most searching commentary. He has evidently switched away from the straight track of his natural desires, and submitted himself helplessly to a multitude of sub-conscious devices. He dares not confess his inordinate love for her, and his desire to have "Miriam" for his wife is terrorised by the spectre of Mother-worship. His reiterated reference to an ostensible platonic fellowship is a convincing testimony to the seeds of love that have already lodged in the fertile region of his heart. "Miriam" would not have yet felt such love for Lawrence, for her attitude had already been formulated into one of admiration and hero-worship. When "Miriam" told him plainly that she had thought about love, and that anyhow she could not become engaged under such circumstances. Lawrence heaved a sigh of relief and said, "Very well, then, we’ll decide what we are to do!" "Miriam" understood by that time the significance or his references, and, a calm, patient and balanced nature as she was, determined within herself not to arouse the susceptibilities of Lawrence by confessing to an ardent love for him, and replied resignedly, "There is nothing to decide. We’ll have nothing to do with one another." But Lawrence would not brook such a resignation. He would have her and have not at the same time, for he insisted pathetically, "We shall have something to do with one another. We have much in common, we can’t give it all up. Life is not so rich in friendship that we can afford to throw it away. And this is the only friendship that’s ripened." Lawrence came to recognise that "Miriam" was indispensable to him. He could cease to overtly exhibit amorous longings towards her but could never sunder himself away, for she formed the seed-bed in which the faculties of Lawrence were found to live and thrive. "Miriam" was a prey to mental suffering for she realised that life had completely changed, that disruption had set in, and that the edifice of their relationship was shaken to its foundations by the incursion of the issue of love in its crudest aspect into the mellow region of unformed union. The same feeling was later confirmed by Lawrence himself when he wrote to "Miriam" describing it "as the slaughter of the foetus in the womb."

Lawrence had shed much of his spontaneous gaiety and went to "Miriam " often in brooding melancholy. His sunny nature had been eclipsed by a growing complexity of his inner problems. His attitude towards "Miriam" entirely changed, but the two maintained an unruffled formal relationship. A barrier stood between them. Lawrence took to no genuine self-revelation but sheltered behind a bulwark of sub-conscious strategy. Whenever "Miriam" stooped to touch a flower she loved, he would protest with vehemence: "Why must you touch in order to enjoy? I can see how beautiful the daffodil is, but I don’t want to touch it. What you need to cultivate is detachment." Lawrence was trying to improvise a justificatory hypothesis for his estrangement from, if not total rejection of, "Miriam" by praising the quality and utility of the spirit of detachment.

There was yet another incident. "On an evening that same spring (when Lawrence was in his 21st year) his sister cycled up to the farm. She had come to tell me something that shocked us all very much. A friend of theirs in deep disgrace–in A’s conventional phrase he had ‘got a girl into trouble’. On the following evening Lawrence came himself, looking white and upset. As soon as we were alone he asked me if I had heard about his friend–they had been high-school boys together. He seemed relieved that I knew. He said his mother had told him about it that morning. He was very distressed. His mother had said how terrible be the consequences of only five minutes’ self-forgetfulness. And it seemed to add to the tragedy that the young people had only seen one another on Sunday evenings after the chapel–so Lawrence said. He told me these things in a voice that sounded sick with misery, and I felt very concerned, wondering why he should take it so to heart. Then he startled me by bursting out vehemently, ‘Thank God–I’ve been saved from that…..so far.’ I was puzzled, feeling in the dark about the whole business, and very sorry for Lawrence’s distress. He seemed relieved after he had told me about it." This incident shows in clear relief the horror in the mind of Lawrence of the simple mutual fact of love. It was brewed from the prudish over-emphasis laid by his mother and other relatives and friends on an innocent abrogation of conventional reticence in love affairs. The inner change in Lawrence’s attitude grew more marked and he dreamed, "If only ‘Miriam’ had been a man, things might have been perfect." He felt very miserable. A bitter struggle waged within. He repressed the rising tide of sweeping love and repudiated the yearning of his own soul. He began to belittle that which overpowered him and nourish the fiction that his feeling for "Miriam" was entirely intellectual and spiritual and had nothing to do with the physical and organic side of life. He said, "I come to this, you know, you have no sexual attraction at all, none whatever, you are absolutely lacking in sexual attraction, and that is the truth of the matter." He fortified his statement by citing from Schopenhauer: "Because the kernel of passionate love turns on the anticipation of the child to be born and its nurture, it is quite possible for friendship without any admixture of sexual love to exist between two young, good-looking people of different sex if there is perfect fitness of temperament and intellectual capacity." Schopenhauer is definitely wrong in his Metaphysic of Love. The kernel of passionate love does not turn on the anticipation of the child to be born and its nurture, although the child and its nurture may later become the objects of one’s attention, by themselves having been already the result of unthinking impulse. Love recks not the fruits, and stands on its own basis. And, as Schopenhauer seemed to imagine, is it possible for friendship, without any admixture of sexual love, to exist between two young good-looking people of different sex if there is perfect fitness of temperament and capacity? Certainly impossible! For firstly, sexual love, being a physical passion, is bound to subsist and grow between two young people of different sex, irrespective of the fitness of their temperament and intellect; and secondly, perfect fitness of temperament and intellect does not preclude the possibility of sex love, and as a matter of fact augments the ardour of love by supplementing the physical passion by an intellectual harmony all too favourable.

The autumn of Mrs. Lawrence’s death was the dreariest period in Lawrence’s early life. His personality was heading towards a complete disaster. The only power that ruled his emotional domain passed away and the result was chaos. Poor Lawrence was the sport of nature–an unmanned ship, a leaf blown in the wind. Timidity gave way to tumultuousness and sensitiveness to sensualism. During the same year he wrote to "Miriam" a letter wherein he said, "I am not strong like you. You can fight your battle and have done with it, but I have to run away, or I couldn’t bear things. I have to fight a bit, and then run away and then fight a bit more. So I really go on fighting–only it has to be at intervals…..At times I am afflicted by a perversity amounting to minor insanity. But the best man in me belongs to you. One me is yours, a fine, strong me…..I have great faith still that things will come right in the end." Nothing can lay bare so transparently the inherent fatuity and self-contradiction of Lawrence. He had no unified personality, no balanced disposition, no maturity of outlook, no sternness of purpose, no system of sentiments that would ensure him a solution for the simplest of personal problems. He confessed his incapacity to stand on his own will, firm and square, and yearned for a support that would free him of the burden of thought. He could not face the world with the courage and dauntlessness of robust youth, but liked to flee away eternally from the hard facts of experience. He sank into a quivering infantilism; and a personal force that would bring about an atmosphere of free emotionalism and keep every fatiguing grasp of reality away from his frail nature was the most urgent demand. And that Lawrence secured in Frieda whom he met in 1912.

She was of German aristocratic descent, the wife of an academic professor, aged thirty one and a mother of three children. "She is ripping–she is the finest woman I’ve ever met," wrote Lawrence to Edward Garnett in an outburst of admiration after his first acquaintance with her. She had already found her life with an English University Professor all too drab and desiccated, and had long since been pondering how to rid herself of this life-long tedium. Lawrence appeared and proposed; Frieda responded. The next day they fled to Germany in a fit of passional liberation. Though Lawrence was a weakling and an invalid, he possessed the rude and untamed energy of a primitive being. Frieda was a chip of raw nature that rejuvenated Lawrence’s stifled emotions and pampered him with the joys of pagan love. The result was a regression to primitivism that drove the two to the recesses of Sardinia and Australia. "It is astonishing how barbaric one gets with love…..What Blasted Fools the English are, fencing off the big wild scope of their nature"–Such was the fashion in love that Lawrence prescribed for the age. The story of the early life of Lawrence is the story of the disruption of a great imaginative genius. It is the tragedy of emotional anarchy.¹

1 The biographical detail relied on in this article is mostly cited from "D. H. Lawrence" by E.T., published by Jonathan Cape.

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