^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.

A Review of The RSC’s Production of David Edgar’s New Play, Written On The Heart, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, November 2011.