A Short Biography of D.H.Lawrence – Steve Newman
In 1960, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the only
book Lawrence had ever written was Lady Chatterley's Lover, and only
then because of the Old Bailey obscenity trial where the prosecuting
council, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones, asked the all male jury - who had been
allowed to read the unexpurgated version of the novel - if they would,
allow their wives, or servants [and that was the clincher], to read
such a book? That pompous, class-ridden statement, plus the
defence witnesses, including such brilliant writers and academics as E. M.
Forster, Helen Gardner, and Raymond Williams - ensured Penguin Books won
the day. It was a landmark decision that helped to liberate not only the
publishing and film industries, but society itself. It was the end of
the rather stifling 1950s, and the start of what became the 'Swinging
Sixties.'
When Penguin published the unexpurgated paperback version on the 10th
November 1960, 200,000 copies were sold nationwide that day - at 3/6
each - with London's largest bookstore, Foyles, selling 300 copies in
the first fifteen minutes of opening. By the end of the day Foyles had
placed orders for a further 3,000 copies.
For the collector that first Penguin edition can today, in fine
condition, fetch £10. And those early Penguin paperbacks (and Penguin
had printed virtually the whole of the Lawrence canon ready for the
bookshops by the end of the trial) with their distinctive orange and
cream covers, with Stephen Russ's iconic design of the phoenix rising
from the flames (itself taken from a drawing by Lawrence), is as good a
place for the new collector of Lawrence to start, with most titles
readily available, in good condition, for between £2 - £5.
Sadly Lawrence never experienced the kind of free society that in the
end allowed, even welcomed, a completely unexpurgated version of his
final, explicit, novel to take its rightful place on the bookshelves,
but instead had to spend his last years surviving off the small advances
he received for his books, loans from friends, and the earnings from
dozens of essays, magazine features, and short stories he managed to
somehow fit in between the novels. And when we compare the not
insubstantial sum of £4,000 Lawrence left at his death, to Hemingway's
$15,000 (about £5,000) advance from Scribners in 1928 for the magazine
rights to A Farewell to Arms we begin to realise that Lawrence was,
in1930, probably considered a risk by publishers, and out of date by a
reading public increasingly enthralled by the new literary voices of
America.
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born on September 11
th
, 1885, in the drab mining village of Eastwood, just north of Nottingham, which honours its most famous son in a less than an enthusiastic way. He was the fourth child of cousins, Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall, who'd married ten years earlier. The tall, fully bearded Arthur Lawrence, was a hard working miner (he was actually a team leader with six men working under him), and Lydia a forthright former school teacher who constantly criticised Arthur's heavy drinking, and what she saw as his uncouth habits and bad language. Nonetheless Arthur was a good provider who was only driven to verbal retaliation. The young David observed well, and the couple's difficult relationship is explored in all its emotional tension, and rawness, in his magnificent novel, Sons and Lovers, and in his unforgiving play, A Collier's Friday Night (published 1934) where, in an early scene, the married couple have been arguing over the merits of serving a rice pudding: FATHER (shouting): You're a liar, you're a liar! A man comes home after a hard day's work to folks as never a word to say to 'im, an' shuts up the minute 'e enters the house, as 'ates the sight of 'im as soon as 'e comes in th' room! MOTHER (with firmness): We've had quite enough, we've had quite enough! Our Ernest'll be in in a minute and we're not going to have this row going on; he's coming home all the way from Derby, trailing from college to a house like this, tired out with study and all this journey: we're not going to have it, I tell you. This is writing that foreshadows the gritty British dramas of the of the late1950s, and early 1960s, and the novels of Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe, and David Storey. Although an unhealthy child, who was constantly bullied at school, Lawrence nonetheless gained a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham, and began his teaching career in Croydon. But his heart, and lungs, weren't in it. The gangling, red-headed, Lawrence desperately wanted to be a writer, and sought advice and help wherever he could find it, which, in the early days was at Haggs Farm, on the outskirts of Eastwood. The farm was the home of Jessie Chambers, the well educated daughter of tenant farmer, Edmund Chambers, and Jessie gave Lawrence huge encouragement (she may also have been his first lover), and endless lists of books she insisted he must read. Jessie re-appears throughout Lawrence's fiction, perhaps most obviously in such early novels as The White Peacock (1911), and The Trespasser (1912), and again, as Miriam, in Sons and Lovers. When not at Hagg's Farm Lawrence also sought the advice of his old English Professor, Ernest Weekley, and it was at the professors home, in 1911, that the aspiring writer not only found literary inspiration, but also the love of his life: Professor Weekley's German wife, Frieda. Frieda, in her autobiography, writes passionately, and with clarity, about the first time she and Lawrence met, and their subsequent meetings: “He came on Easter Sunday. It was a bright, sunny day. The children were in the garden hunting for Easter eggs. “ What I couldn't understand is how he could have loved me and wanted me at that time. I certainly did have what he called 'sex in the head. My real self was frightened and shrank from contact like a wild thing. “ So our relationship developed. “ One day we met at a station in Derbyshire. My two small girls were with us. We went for a walk through the early spring woods and fields. The children were running here and there as young creatures will. “ We came to a small brook, a little stone bridge crossed it. Lawrence made the children some paper boats and put matches in them and let them float downstream under the bridge. Crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely. “ Suddenly I knew I loved him. He had touched a new tenderness in me. After that things happened quickly.” Less than a month later Frieda left her son with her unsuspecting husband, took her two daughters to stay with their grandparents in Hampstead Heath and, “... blind and blank with pain, dimly feeling I should never again live with them as I had done...”, meet Lawrence at Charing Cross Station, where they caught a train for Dover, crossed the English Channel and, a day later, ended-up at Frieda's mother's home at Metz, in Germany. Lawrence made an instant hit with Frieda's mother, who was at the height of her aristocratic beauty, and always dressed in the most 'chic' of Paris fashions. “ You can go with him. You can trust this man.” She told her daughter. Lawrence and Frieda then began to live the life of the leisured classes ( paid for by Frieda's mother of course) and travelled widely across Europe. They'd walk in the Alps, and then down into Italy. And it was on such trips, and staying in smart hotels, that they met such people as the writer and critic, Middleton Murry. And in today's terminology Lawrence began to network his talents as a writer, eventually being introduced to London editors, and writers such as Edward Garnett (who in turn introduced him to the Asquiths, and the Morrells), where he could build on the original success he'd had with the poems Jessie had sent (secretly) to the editor of the English Review, Ford Maddox Hueffer (later, Ford Maddox Ford), where they were published in the November edition of 1909. A copy of that edition (which are as rare as hen's teeth) would today set the collector back a small fortune. After lengthy divorce proceedings, and a promise from Professor Weekley that Frieda would never see her children again (she did manage to see them on several occasions) Lawrence and Frieda married at Kensington Register Office, in London, on July 13th, 1914. It was an unconventional, and stormy marriage from the outset, but always passionate, with Frieda the ideal companion, and champion of her husband's work. And Lawrence did - with three published novels under his belt - settle into the life of the freelance writer. With the declaration of war, in August 1914, Lawrence began to look for a place where they could escape the patriotic overload going on around them, and after completing The Rainbow, and The Prussian Officer (no doubt based on some of his new in-laws) Lawrence and Frieda found themselves the centre of attraction in Cornwall, whereas, in London they had at least able to loose themselves in the crowd. When D.H. Lawrence first moved with his wife, Frieda, to Cornwall in the summer of 1916, he saw it as a first step toward emigrating to America, and away from a Britain with which he had become disaffected, and from a war he did not support. But the travel restrictions, and the fact that the new Military Service Act of 1916 meant he was in danger of being called up for military service himself, made it impossible for him to even consider leaving the country. And it wasn't only the travel restrictions brought about by the war that made him feel dreadfully trapped (in fairness he felt trapped wherever he lived), no, this time it was also because of the suppression, due to its 'obscene' content, of his recently published, and best novel, The Rainbow, that Lawrence knew he had to get away somewhere, anywhere, otherwise his understandable anger and growing depression could lead to a nervous breakdown. He chose Cornwall. After much searching, in a pony and trap, around the Penzance area, the couple eventually came to rest in a small cottage (rented for £5 a year from a retired sea captain) on the wild north-west coast of the county, less than a mile from Zennor, and a half dozen miles or so from St Ives. The cottage, at Upper Tregerthen, was set high, and overlooked the sea (the very busy, and very dangerous western approaches where dozens of British merchant ships were being sunk by German U-Boats), which, even at the height of the war was - U-Boats not withstanding - filled with small fishing vessels trawling for pilchards. In their extraordinary naivete (call it innocence if you prefer) neither the green corduroy suited Lawrence, or Frieda, in her long flowing dresses, realised they had chosen one of the most security sensitive areas in England to settle. Frieda describes (and it can't be bettered), in her 1935 autobiography, 'Not I, But the Wind', how they made the cottage liveable: “ We had made it very charming. We washed the walls very pale pink and the cupboards were painted a bright blue. “ There was a charming fireplace on which lived two Staffordshire figures riding to market, 'Jasper and Bridget'. On the wall was a beautiful embroidery Lady Ottoline Morrell [a great champion of Lawrence and his work, and the lover of H.G. Wells, amongst others] had embroidered, after a drawing by Duncan Grant, [of] a tree with big bright flowers and birds and beasts. Behind the sitting room was a darkish rough scullery, and upstairs was one big room overlooking the sea, like the big cabin on the upper deck of a ship. And how the winds from that untamed Cornish sea rocked the solid little cottage, and howled at it, and how the rain slashed it, sometimes forcing the door open and pouring into the room. “ I see Katherine Mansfield and Murry [ John Middleton Murry, writer, and husband of the Kiwi novelist] arriving sitting on a cart, high up on all the goods and chattels, coming down the lane to Tregerthen. Like an emigrant Katherine looked. I loved her little jackets, chiefly the one that was black and gold like bees. “ It was great fun buying very nicely made furniture for a few shillings in St Ives, with the Murrys. The fishermen were selling their nice old belongings to buy modern stuff. Our purchases would arrive tied to a shaky cart with bits of rope, the cart trundling down the uneven road. I think our best buy was a well-proportioned bedstead we got for a shilling. Then, such a frenzy broke out of painting chairs and polishing brass and mending old clocks, putting plates on the dressers, arranging all the treasures we had bought.” At first all went well, with the Murrys renting the cottage next door in what Lawrence hoped would be the start of a commune, his so called 'Rananim' with Lawrence helping out at Lower Tregerthen Farm ( most of the farm's workers were in the army), and cultivating his own garden, where he grew much needed vegetables. And there has been some speculation that Lawrence had a homosexual relationship with the handsome young farmer, William Henry Hocking, who owned Lower Tregerthen, a speculation reinforced by Frieda in a statement to that effect she made after Lawrence's death. After four weeks Lawrence and the Murrys fell out (plus the climate was not doing Katherine Mansfield's TB much good ether) with the Murrys returning to a London now under threat from nightly bombing raids by German Zeppelins. But they were probably safer than the Lawrences, who, soon after, came under suspicion of spying when Frieda - who was a cousin of the celebrated German air-ace, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron - was heard singing 'German' songs (most of which were in fact Scottish ballads sung in Gaelic), had the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper delivered very week (a bad move, and logistically quite amazing), and was seen hanging her red stockings on the washing line in what were thought to be coded signals to passing German U-boats. To a 21st century ear and eye that attitude of suspicion may now sound ridiculous, but it must be understood that, back in 1916 - with the ever longer lists of the British war dead taking up more and more space in the daily, and local newspapers - the residents of St Ives and the surrounding area were in shock and felt threatened, and not unreasonably took against the strange bohemian couple who acted as if the war could never touch them. A dreadful resentment began to build. Helen Dunmor's evocative novel, Zennor in Darkness, gives a wonderful, and moving account, not only of the Lawrences time in Cornwall, but of the negative effect the war had on a small, vulnerable, and tightly knit community; a vulnerability capitalized upon by the authorities who were always looking for handy scapegoats: “ If the cottage ever had that virginity of lostness and secrecy which Lawrence once thought it possessed, it is gone now. The red floor is printed with clumsy bootmarks from yesterdays search. The searchers did not care what traces they left. They wanted the Lawrences to know that their lives had been stripped bare and pawed over. Drawers had been pulled open, small belongings tipped out and searched. Letters and manuscripts have been taken. “ The Lawrences were not at home when the men came yesterday. The first search is over, and nothing that follows it can shock them as sharply. Frieda came home humming to herself, pushed her door open absently, thinking of something else, and found her home broken open like an egg.” Go to Zennor today and there is a somewhat reluctant acceptance that Lawrence, and Frieda once lived nearby. The local Wayside Museum in the village has an informative, but rather small, exhibition about Lawrence (which is more than St Ives has), with the cottage, less than a mile from the village, itself bearing no outward sign of its historic tenants. Take a drink in the Tinners Arms at Zennor (where the Lawrences stayed before moving into the cottage) and you feel the place hasn't really changed much, nor the attitude, which is less than wholly welcoming. One can imagine the consumptive Lawrence sitting hunched by a barely smouldering, cheerless open fire, working on a short story, or writing to the Murrys back in London asking them desperately to come and visit. The man was already at his wits end. One of the few places in Zennor where there is a welcome, of sorts, is the church of St Senara ( next to the pub) where you can still see, and caress, as Lawrence did, the Mermaid carved onto the side of a small mediaeval oak bench that was considered - and probably still is - as corrupting and evil. In no way is this ancient piece of folk art protected (it would be the easiest thing in the world to steal), nor is there any reference, anywhere in the church, of the Lawrence connection – and the building was, even for the agnostic Lawrence, a place of peace and contemplation. The time Lawrence spent in Cornwall would haunt the writer for the rest of his life, and make him increasingly bitter in his attitude toward the working classes, and their - as he saw it - intolerance toward art and literature. In Zennor, and St Ives, a whispering campaign began to build around them, vilifying them in the same way the mermaid in Zennor church was vilified, making them almost the scapegoat for the war, and most certainly for the deaths that came as a result. Such was the determination, such the zealotry, of the local inhabitants against the Lawrences that the military were quick to act, and had, by October 11th, 1917, ordered the couple out of the county. It was a shameful episode. After the war Lawrence and Frieda left Britain to pursue the nomadic lifestyle that lasted until Lawrence's death. In those peripatetic years after the First World War Lawrence wrote some of his most thoughtful, angry, and beautiful books, most notably, Women in Love (1920) which was a sequel to The Rainbow, where he first introduced the tantalising Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, who are, without question, two of the strongest, and most appealing women in 20th century English literature. In 1921 came several essays, and travel pieces for various magazines, and journals. 1922 saw the publication of, Aaron's Rod, followed by more essays, and perhaps his finest collection of short stories, England, My England. The following year saw the publication of his most disturbing novel, Kangaroo, which in essence is an essay on the power, and appeal, of fascism. He also published a collection of wonderful poetry entitled, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. The years 1924, an 1925 saw more essays, stories, and his co-written novel (with M.L. Skinner), The Boy in the Bush. In 1926 Lawrence begin work on his most infamous of novels, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and by the May of that year Lawrence and Frieda had moved into the Villa Mirenda, situated at San Polo, just to the south-west of Florence. They rented the top half of the villa for £25 a year, a villa which Lawrence described as, “...rather big, bare, and comfortless.” He did little writing that first spring, which may have been because he was nervous as to the reception his latest novel, The Plumed Serpent, might receive. And he was right to be nervous: it was not well received at all, with the Times Literary Supplement describing it as “...rather feeble.”, with P.C. Kennedy, of the New Statesman, labelling it as negative, barren, and empty. If we read the novel today it is, as it was then, a beautifully crafted piece of work that was obviously beyond the critics of the day. Lawrence vowed he would never again write a novel, which is a bit like a fish saying it will avoid water. The poet and biographer, Richard Aldington, visited Lawrence in the autumn of 1926, whose good company, and continuous encouragement, undoubtedly inspired Lawrence to continue with Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel, according to Aldington, that was probably inspired by a motoring trip Lawrence had made to Nottingham in 1925, where he had a high old time at the Goose Fair. Lawrence wrote, and re-wrote, very quickly, and we know that the novel went through three versions before Lawrence was happy with it. And because of its explicit sexual content, he also realised that his regular publishers would be unable to take it on. So, with the novel finished Lawrence decided to publish the book himself and, “...earn myself a thousand pounds, which I can do very well with.” Eventually Lawrence found a printer in Florence - the bookseller Giuseppe Orioli - who was prepared to print and bind the book. Lawrence placed an order for a thousand copies which he then planned to sell, by private subscription, for 2gns each. And such was Lawrence's bargaining skills that Oriol - who effectively became joint publisher - agreed that Lawrence could take 90% of the profit on each sale. After Lawrence's death Oriol became rather resentful of the fact that Lawrence was just as good a businessman as he was a novelist. With the book published, and the villa Mirenda looking more like a warehouse, all went well with orders coming in from Lawrence's many friends in Britain - most especially the Bloomsbury Set - and America. Lawrence wrapped and posted many of the books himself - under plain brown cover of course - and the money started to come in. But as always happens word got out that a salacious publication was being sent through the public postal systems. Customs officers in Britain, and the US, began to seize copies, as they had done with Joyce's Ulysses just a few years earlier. But Constance Chatterley, and her gamekeeper, were now out of the bag and it wasn't long before pirated copies of the book were appearing in Germany, and other European countries, as well as the US. The first commercial, abridged version, appeared in Britain in 1932, and became an instant best-seller, with the readers no doubt wondering what all the fuss had been about. A copy of that first, self-published, edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, from 1928, recently sold at auction for £3,200, some £700 above its reserve. First editions of all of Lawrence's novels, in fine condition, now often fetch between £300 and £1500. Lawrence's death robbed English literature of one of its most influential, most passionate, and sadly, most reviled of authors. I doubt if any writer worth his, or her, salt - although many have denied it - who came to prominence in the years after the First World War, was not, in some small way influenced by David Herbert Lawrence.
