Sons and Lovers (with an introduction by Mark Schorer)

By D H Lawrence

First published in 1913, “Sons and Lovers” is D. H. Lawrence’s provocative semi-autobiographical novel. The work is based in part on his own family, his mother married a miner like the matriarch of the novel and consequently felt constrained by being relegated to a working class life. The story reflects the struggles of Paul Morel, an artist who cannot reciprocate love for other women while under the influence of his stifling mother. Unconsciously taught to despise his father and eschew other women, Paul comes even further under his mother’s psychological grip after the death of his older brother. When he eventually does fall in love, the results of his confused affection and desire are painful for all concerned. What follows is a tragic struggle for Paul between the desire for a normal loving relationship and the innate sense of love and fidelity he feels for his mother. While “Sons and Lovers”, for its Oedipal allusions and conflict with contemporary views on sexuality, was considered scandalous when first published, it has come to be regarded as one of Lawrence’s greatest works, his earliest masterpiece. This edition is printed includes an introduction by Mark Schorer and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781420958126

D H Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence, (185-1930) more commonly known as D.H Lawrence was a British writer and poet often surrounded by controversy. His works explored issues of sexuality, emotional health, masculinity, and reflected on the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Lawrence’s opinions acquired him many enemies, censorship, and prosecution. Because of this, he lived the majority of his second half of life in a self-imposed exile. Despite the controversy and criticism, he posthumously was championed for his artistic integrity and moral severity.

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SONS AND LOVERS

By D. H. LAWRENCE

Introduction by MARK SCHORER

Sons and Lovers

By D. H. Lawrence

Introduction by Mark Schorer

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5811-9

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5812-6

This edition copyright © 2018. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of Lovers, c. 1932-35 (oil on canvas), by Henri Martin (1860-1943) / Musee de la Ville de Paris, Musee du Petit-Palais, France / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Part Two

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Biographical Afterword

Introduction

Sons and Lovers was the third and remains the best known of D. H. Lawrence’s ten full-length novels, and of all these books, it is the only one that is persistently and almost literally autobiographical. Like his hero, Paul Morel, Lawrence was born (in 1885) of an inharmonious marriage between a nearly illiterate coal miner and a schoolteacher. In their general outlines and in most of the details, the circumstances of his childhood and youth were those that he ascribes to Paul, and the first great struggle of Lawrence’s life was the same struggle that we follow in Paul’s story—the attempt to liberate his young manhood from the stranglingly possessive love of his mother, to break from the womb-like confines of childhood into the independence and self-responsibility of mature relationships. This is, indeed, the subject of Sons and Lovers, and, in one way or another, the struggle for self-responsibility was to be the subject of everything Lawrence wrote.

It is the story of the conflict of two women, the mother and the girl called Miriam, for the spiritual allegiance of the son and lover, and the failure of both, finally, to obtain it. With the introduction of Miriam into the novel, it continues to follow faithfully the general outlines of Lawrence’s own experience, but it apparently departs from it in some of the psychological details. In real life, Miriam was a young woman named Jessica Chambers, and those who are interested in the relation of actual experience to fiction should read her heartbroken account of this friendship, written after the publication of what she regarded as the betrayal of Sons and Lovers. Her book, called D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Reminiscence, published under the initials E. T., argues persuasively that Lawrence falsified their relationship in his insistence that Miriam was an idealist who could not bring herself to recognize Paul’s physical needs, and that in doing so, Lawrence was really exempting his mother of the burden of blame, since in fact her continuing possessiveness made Lawrence himself unwilling to face a complete relationship with Jessica Chambers or any woman. Thus, E. T. says, the book is really an author’s confused attempt to exonerate the very source of his difficulty, and, being that, perpetuates his psychological bondage.

Certain inconsistencies and ambiguities in Sons and Lovers suggest that, as biographical argument, Jessica Chambers’ case is sound, and while these uncertain points in the novel do exclude it from the category of perfect works of art (except for some of his shorter fictions, Lawrence never wrote what we may call perfect works of art), the argument does not seriously impair the power of the novel or reduce Lawrence’s stature as the kind of novelist he was. Certainly we may say that as a novelist, Lawrence was as well within the bounds of creative legitimacy in altering the actual relationship with the girl for the purposes of the book, as he was in creating Clara, who, according to E. T., was a clever adaptation of elements from three people, or as he was in changing his own primary art from writing to painting.

In 1905, when he was twenty years old, Lawrence revealed to Jessica Chambers his ambition to be a writer, and the pictures that Paul shows to Miriam were probably Lawrence’s first poems. In 1906, when he enrolled at Nottingham University for a two-year teachers’ training course, he began work on his first novel, The White Peacock, and he continued to work at it and to work it over there and later at Croydon, a London suburb where he went to teach in 1908. Late in 1910, his first publisher rushed an advance copy of this book to him, so that his mother could see it just before she died. Thus simultaneously Lawrence began his life as a public figure and lost the person who, until then, had been of greatest importance in his private life.

The White Peacock was described by Lawrence’s first friendly editor, Ford Madox Ford, as containing every fault that the English novel can have, yet at the same time Ford assured Lawrence of his genius. It would be difficult to find a more faulty novel. It reads, indeed, like the work of a gifted young writer in search of a subject, almost as if he had to write the novel before he could discover why he wanted to write it. Yet for readers of Sons and Lovers it has a peculiar interest, since in many ways it foreshadows the characters and the themes and the settings of that later novel. Here, instead of Willey Farm, we have Strelley Mill. Instead of Miriam, we have Emily; instead of Clara, Meg; instead of Paul, Cyril; instead of either Edgar or Baxter Dawes, George; and instead of Walter Morel, an extraordinary and more articulate character named Annable. Mrs. Morel finds a faint equivalent in Mrs. Beardsall, Cyril’s mother (and Beardsall was Mrs. Lawrence’s family name), who has a considerable distaste for Emily, but her significance, if not her history and personality, shows forth more clearly in the character of Letty, who, rejecting the happy but uncouth George, is responsible for his deterioration in the arms of Meg; for herself, Letty chooses Leslie, a more manageable male whom she can easily dominate. As the novel finally works out, we can see that what the young Lawrence was struggling toward was a novel about tragic human relationships, in which aggressive, spiritual women dominate and destroy happy, forthright men who become, then, either brutes or spineless ninnies. There is the further suggestion, not explored but clearly there in the picture of the ruined feudal farm, Strelley Mill overrun by rabbits, and in the picture of Annable, who has turned his back on society and lives by choice in primitive squalor, that the fault lies in civilization, that with the invasions of an industrial way of life and a great, slow cultural convulsion, human responses have split into warring dualities and have thinned out, sound human passions have been enervated.

Before this novel was published, Lawrence had completed the first version of a new novel, The Trespasser. It is a much tighter book, but not a much better one, called in its early form, again by Ford Madox Ford, a rotten work of genius. More explicitly autobiographical than The White Peacock, it is a specialization and a narrowing of the same themes to be found there. A musician named Siegmund leaves his family for what is hoped to be an idyllic interlude with a girl named Helena; but their relationship is a long agony, and at the end of the story Siegmund kills himself. The frame is symbolical, but the central episode, the escape of two lovers from society to the Isle of Wight, is thought to be literal autobiography, and the whole brings us closer to Sons and Lovers in that the hero is an artist. Helena cannot yield to Siegmund’s passion, yet she wishes to use love as a means of asserting her power over him; the uneven relationship exhausts him, he plunges into death, and Helena is left in possession of his violin—his strength—as she turns to undo another man.

Lawrence placed small store by either of these novels, and when he began his next—which in the manuscript stage was always referred to as Paul Morel—he said of it and of them, "Paul Morel will be a novel—not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism." These are just evaluations. Now, with the death of his mother, he was ready to consolidate his artistic preoccupations: to solidify the loose atmospheric quality of The White Peacock and to channel the hysterically intense feelings of The Trespasser in a genuine story. At the same time, the themes of domination and dissolution were to find their embodiment in the experience that had actually first raised these themes to major prominence in Lawrence’s imagination. Furthermore, after a kind of psychic collapse into pneumonia that followed on his mother’s death, Lawrence had been freed of his teaching position; he had met his absolutely destined spouse, Frieda von Richthoven, and eloped with her to the Continent; he even had a little money from the first two novels and his earliest stories; and above all, he knew exactly what he wanted to write.

We have Lawrence’s own account of this novel in a long letter written to his editor, Edward Garnett, in 1912, just after he had sent off the manuscript:

... I want to defend it, quick. I wrote it again, pruning it and shaping it and filling it in. I tell you it has got form—form: haven’t I made it patiently, out of sweat as well as blood. It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers—first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother—urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. It’s rather like Goethe and his mother and Frau von Stein and Christiana.... As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul—fights his mother. The son loves the mother—all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.

Perhaps in the same week in January, 1913, certainly in that month, Lawrence wrote the fantastic Biblical Foreword to the novel, never used, that ends:

The old son-lover was Oedipus. The name of the new one is legion. And if a son-lover take a wife, then is she not his wife, she is only his bed. And his life will be torn in twain, and his wife in her despair shall hope for sons, that she may have her lover in her hour.

If the first passage gives us the plot as Lawrence saw it, the second suggests the import of that plot. It suggests, too, the reason that the novel was to wield the considerable historical influence that we now know that it did. Published in 1913, it was perhaps the first work of twentieth-century fiction to impress many readers with the availability of modern psychological theory as a means of understanding human relationships. Today, when almost any whodunit and even many movies motivate their characters in situations derived from a debased understanding of Freud, and after hundreds of wooden novels have resulted from a slick, theoretical application of one or another of the archetypal situations, such as the Oedipus complex, with which Freud and his followers have familiarized us—today, we can hardly estimate the impact of a novel that in 1913 declared so clearly that a mother could be almost demoniacally determined to possess her son’s will, or that a son’s sexual character could be so corrupted by that possession. Such an impact Sons and Lovers did have, and it remains vital and real today because Lawrence’s was not a theoretical use of this situation, not a documentary case history, but an experienced human dilemma.

Lawrence had too strong a sense of his originality to accept any other man’s theory without question, and almost as soon as he came to be thought of as a novelist who had made psychic investigation his special province, he took occasion to repudiate the Freudian theory. With William Blake, he might just as well have said, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s, and in two books, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1920) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921), he developed an amazing and rather grotesque psychophysiology of his own. Of this system he warned his readers as follows:

One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of mine—pollyanalytics, as one of my respected critics might say—is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one’s pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one’s experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These pollyanalytics are inferences made afterwards, from the experience.

The important sentence here is the third—The novels and poems come unwatched out of one’s pen. Lawrence had an overwhelming faith in the trustworthiness of the spontaneous act, whether in creative activity or in daily life. While he rewrote nearly all his major works and some of them three and four times—not merely revising in the usual sense, but beginning entirely anew so that a second version of a novel might be quite a different story from its first version, and a third version still importantly different from both the others—every writing was apparently nearly as un-self-conscious, as unwatched, as those that preceded it. Such a method or lack of it, writing always at white heat and from an unhampered and often unexamined intuitional life, has several results in Lawrence: it means that while his work is very uneven, it is seldom uninteresting; that while it frequently fails in what we call form and lapses from what we call taste, it is never trivial; and that at its best, it is animated by a kind of passionate seriousness and burning sincerity that is not to be found in any other writer of this century.

All this is to be seen in Sons and Lovers, a novel like the others, written and rewritten, made . . . out of sweat as well as blood. Here, for the first and perhaps the only time, Lawrence was trying to write a conventionally even novel, a well-made novel, and to that end he chose one of the most familiar patterns of the nineteenth century, the Bildungsroman, the development novel, the novel that traces the growth of a hero. It falls, in fact, into an even more special category, that of the Künstlerroman, the novel that traces the growth of an artist and an artistic conscience. Yet even though he adopts and employs this familiar convention, in which the structural demands are not very severe (such novels characteristically have only the loose kind of unity provided by the constant presence, actual or felt, of a single character—the hero), even so, Sons and Lovers does not have the kind of form that Lawrence claims for it. Its proportions are not graceful; it is not economical; it is sometimes monotonous. Most important, however, is that flaw observed by E. T.—a failure in objective evaluation of the material, a failure that grows more evident and more intense as the novel reaches its climax.

Not only Paul but also the author protects the mother and abuses the girl, as if the author, like Paul, were not quite willing to be free, and this in spite of the fact that it was Lawrence himself who wrote, "I always say my motto is ‘Art for my sake,’ and One sheds one’s sicknesses in books, repeats and presents again one’s emotions to be master of them."

Did Lawrence master his emotions sufficiently in Sons and Lovers to distribute his evaluations with coherence as well as with justice? If he did, what can we make of the discrepancy we seem to detect between what we are told about the mother and father, and how we are made to feel about them? For surely our sympathy, in spite of Paul’s feeling and Lawrence’s adjectives, goes to the father, not the mother. Likewise, can we judge the relationship between Paul and Miriam as Paul asks us to judge it, and as Lawrence, in Paul’s person, seems to ask us to judge it? Finally, what are we to make of the end of the book? In his letter, Lawrence says that Paul is left with the drift toward death, yet in the book itself, Paul is finally determined not to take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her, and, in a fixed resolution, moves, instead, toward life, towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly, as if he were free to live at last. It would seem fair to ask, at least, whether Lawrence did not fail to separate himself as the investigating analyst from himself as the subject of the book, and whether the result is not that he is left with his psychological problem at the end.

The answers to these questions are presumably to be found in the remainder of Lawrence’s career, but before we glance at those seventeen years, a few of the special merits of Sons and Lovers must be observed. It is almost the only one of his novels in which he was primarily interested in creating memorable characters as characters. Thereafter he was more interested in the essences of character, in states and ways of feeling, and although he gave these names, they are not characters in the conventional sense. They do not, as we say, live as personalities. This is a perfectly logical development in an artist who wanted personality to be immersed in something larger and older than itself, in the force of life itself, a force so feebly represented, as he thought, in modern urban civilization, so easily imagined to have existed potently in more primitive times and to exist potently now in more primitive places. Whatever was to come after, there can be no question that the elder Morels are superb characterizations, and they were to become the archetypes of all Lawrence’s central figures even though never again so lovingly but usually more abstractly developed. The two deserve a separate glance: Mrs. Morel, the aggressive, intellectually superior, sexually defeated, spiritual, nearly frigid female who dominates the emotions of others as she misdirects her own; and Walter Morel, gay (a singer and dancer), muscular, earthy, a laborer, free with his feelings, tender, made for an equal relationship, but frustrated by his wife, who has trapped him: these are to become the great exemplars in Lawrence’s later novels of the modern woman and of the heroic male.

Another element that should be observed because it is at the very heart of Lawrence’s genius is his ability to convey the quality of experience, the very ding an sich. This ability shows best of all in Lawrence’s descriptions of nonhuman things, in his writing of animals, flowers and grass, fish, birds, snakes—a genius for identifying and defining the individuated quality of life, the physical essences of things outside the personality, the not-me. Some of Lawrence’s poems, notably those in the volume called Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, reveal this ability in its most intense purity, but we see it flashing all the way through Sons and Lovers, in every natural description. It is even discussed there, in the scene where Paul is sketching and Miriam asks, Why do I like this so?

"Why do you?" he asked.

I don’t know. It seems so true.

It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it’s more shimmery, as if I’d painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside reality.

This shimmer, the inside reality in human individuals and relationships, in love no less than in natural forms, Lawrence pursued above all else, and of all the things he attempted as a writer, it is this that he most successfully achieved.

Yet this very achievement takes us back to those irresolutions of Sons and Lovers that we have noted, for his achievements no less than his failures are a portion of whatever his problem may have continued to be after his mother’s death and after the completion of Sons and Lovers. We should observe, surely, two large tendencies that continue throughout his career.

The effect on Paul of Mrs. Morel’s possessive love is to split his responses into two—spiritual and physical—and the split, represented outside himself by the two women, Miriam and Clara, cripples him. Both relationships are incomplete, as he is incapable of completeness, or integrity of response. The splitting up of human response, especially in love situations, was to become Lawrence’s major theme in all the work that follows, and as a concomitant of that theme, the theme of domination and further dissolution is of course a part. For it is only when a human being allows one impulse within himself to dominate another, when he is himself divided, that he is determined to dominate others, and, in turn, split them. Thus totality, or integrity, becomes impossible, and the plots of all Lawrence’s remaining novels, in so far as they may be said to have plots, were dramatizations of this conflict, or attempts by his heroes to overcome it. In only one of his ten novels, his tenth, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, does the conflict find a full resolution.

The splitting up of human impulse, the duality of physical and spiritual love, and any theory or behavior that decrees this split, that tries to make the spiritual higher than the physical, like Christianity, or assumes that the physical, as in sexual promiscuity, has any but a destructive value in itself—this splitting up, Lawrence constantly insisted, was not only the way to destroy individual life but to destroy the possibility of experiencing the shimmer, the inside reality of life in general. Reality is itself destroyed, and all that is left is the empty external, the husk. Husks, chiefly, he believed, were modern men, deprived by their inner divisions of vital connections with life outside themselves, ensnared in their partial and crippled personalities. This brings us to the second persistent tendency.

When Paul loses his mother, he has an overwhelming wish for extinction, he feels himself about to disintegrate, to drift into dark nothingness. But long before his mother’s death he has already said: To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort—to live effortless, a kind of conscious sleep—that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life—our immortality. And this theme comes to haunt Lawrence in all that he is to write afterward. It finds an immediate technical consequence after Sons and Lovers in his determination no longer to create social characters but, instead, something that is pre-personal and pre-social, the subterranean, psychic drives that are the essential elements under character. There is a force in life—the shimmer in all physical manifestations, the vital current of life itself, expressing itself in a myriad of individuated forms, human and nonhuman—there is a force that is larger than any individual; and it is only when the individual form is completely identified with that force inside, that the individual form has either integrity, or power, or peace. In the whole creation, only man chooses to cut himself off from his sources. This concept, everywhere in Lawrence, pulls in two directions.

The first is toward the desire for the extinction of personality, the complete dissolution of individuality in the larger force of earth, of nature, in the primitive conditions of life—the impulse called atavism; and this is not only the expressed wish of many of Lawrence’s characters, but it became the motive of Frieda and D. H. Lawrence in their own lives, which were a perpetual wandering to remote places—from the Continent to India, to Australia, to Mexico, and finally to New Mexico—in search of a better and more real existence than civilized society provided, and where, Lawrence always hoped, he could found an ideal colony of sympathetic and vital spirits. The second direction follows upon this. It is toward rebirth, regeneration, a belief in the reemergence, after dissolution, after the death of the partial, civilized man, of a new and a richer and an integrated being. The phoenix was his chosen symbol.

At the end of Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel, perhaps D. H. Lawrence, is left a divided being with the drift toward death; and it seems more than probable that Lawrence’s later literary concerns developed out of this unhealed condition. It is no occasion for smugness in us. Lawrence may have suffered from his own unresolved dilemma, but that does not mean that he did not expose ours. No writer has given our civilization such a vigorous challenge to examine its own assumptions about itself—all of them; assumptions which, in Lawrence’s view, had created not only a generation of Paul Morels, but a whole civilization with the drift toward death. Who can say that he was wrong? Psychology does not deny him; nor, certainly, many years after his death, does the example of science.

If his literary strength came out of a personal weakness, it was, nevertheless, a great strength, and Lawrence became, indeed, through his unrelenting attack upon the negations of modern society, one of the few truly affirmative writers of this century. What he affirmed was the possibility of an integrated human being and the value of life in the fact of life. In his last book, called Apocalypse, he wrote:

For man the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive ... I am a part of the sun as my eye is a part of me. That I am a part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is a part of the sea. My soul knows that I am a part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the stars.

So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connexions, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.

What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connexions, especially those related to money, and to re-establish the living connexions, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.

He said it over and over again, in many different forms, in travel books, in criticism, in novels and novelettes and short stories, in essays, in poems.

O! start a revolution, somebody!

not to get the money

but to lose it all for ever.

O! start a revolution, somebody!

not to instal the working classes

but to abolish the working classes for ever

and have a world of men.

A world of men did not mean, for Lawrence, a world of anonymous masses, democratic or otherwise, but a world of men who had discovered their true connections, their real selves. It is in this sense that one may say, as we have said, that the struggle for self-responsibility became the subject of everything Lawrence wrote.

He died in 1930, and we cannot know whether he won that struggle for himself. But this must be said: in the modern world, where all the pressures of history and of society seem to be directed at depersonalization, at the nullification of the individual self in the mass processes of industry and of warfare, the greatest and most desperate task is precisely the recognition and the salvation of our genuinely individual humanity. In all our serious literature today, this theme appears, but it is the glory of D. H. Lawrence that, as his personal life was a constant dramatization of this theme, so the whole of his literary life was dedicated to it. Lawrence is the greatest example we have of modern man in search of his soul. The search was his as it is our special agony, and we must always turn back to Sons and Lovers for its roots.

That this search begins in the most personal sources should not mislead us into thinking that it is therefore a problem peculiar to the author. One of Lawrence’s great contributions to the insights of the modern novel lies in his refusal to separate psychological from social processes, his skill in revealing them to us as simply different forms of the same impulses. Thus, if we wish to look at Walter and Gertrude Morel as literary representations of John and Lydia Lawrence, the first pulling their son Paul apart in their miserable marriage, as the second pulled their son, David Herbert, apart in theirs—if we wish, that is, to consider this an autobiographical novel of domestic tragedy, we may do so, certainly. But to fail to see the social tragedy that this domestic conflict figures forth, would be to lose the book for the life it came out of. The marital clash of the Morels represents peculiarly modern splits: not only between passion and intellect, the careless impulses of body and the narrow strictures of spirit, passion and bodily impulse somehow losing their natural dignity in the presence of intellect and spirit when these two are separated from the first, but also between Work and Culture, between Morel’s humble and unregarded skills and Mrs. Morel’s superior values, which, nevertheless, precisely because they are separated from the world’s work are somehow unreal.

Many social philosophers have pointed to the split between Civilization and Culture as the characterizing condition of modern society, and they have shown us eloquently enough how work, the reality, is today deprived of value, and how value, thus separated, has become empty pretension: how both, that is, deteriorate. The deterioration that this divorce brings about is shown with an equal if a different kind of eloquence in Morel, driven to self-negation and to drunken brutality, and in Mrs. Morel, driven to self-righteous tears and spiritual aggression. It is shown in Paul Morel, who pays most heavily for their division. And it is shown, of course, in D. H. Lawrence himself, even as he dedicates a whole career to revealing and to trying to heal the tragic disunities of men in our time, of which, after all, he was brilliantly one.

MARK SCHORER

1951.

Part One

Chapter I

THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS

The Bottoms succeeded to Hell Row. Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place, gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron field of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally opened the company’s first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had acquired an evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed away.

Carston, Waite & Co. found they had struck on a good thing, so, down the valleys of the brooks from Selby and Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until soon there were six pits working. From Nuttall, high up on the sandstone among the woods, the railway ran, past the ruined priory of the Carthusians and past Robin Hood’s Well, down to Spinney Park, then on to Minton, a large mine among corn-fields; from Minton across the farmlands of the valleyside to Bunker’s Hill, branching off there, and running north to Beggarlee and Selby, that looks over at Crich and the hills of Derbyshire: six mines like black studs on the countryside, linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway.

To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co. built the Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the Bottoms.

The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’ dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.

The houses themselves were substantial and very decent. One could walk all round, seeing little front gardens with auriculas and saxifrage in the shadow of the bottom block, sweet-williams and pinks in the sunny top block; seeing neat front windows, little porches, little privet hedges, and dormer windows for the attics. But that was outside; that was the view on to the uninhabited parlours of all the colliers’ wives. The dwelling-room, the kitchen, was at the back of the house, facing inward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at the ash-pits. And between the rows, between the long lines of ash-pits, went the alley, where the children played and the women gossiped and the men smoked. So, the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that was so well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury because people must live in the kitchen, and the kitchens opened on to that nasty alley of ash-pits.

Mrs. Morel was not anxious to move into the Bottoms, which was already twelve years old and on the downward path, when she descended to it from Bestwood. But it was the best she could do. Moreover, she had an end house in one of the top blocks, and thus had only one neighbour; on the other side an extra strip of garden. And, having an end house, she enjoyed a kind of aristocracy among the other women of the between houses, because her rent was five shillings and sixpence instead of five shillings a week. But this superiority in station was not much consolation to Mrs. Morel.

She was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. A rather small woman, of delicate mould but resolute bearing, she shrank a little from the first contact with the Bottoms women. She came down in the July, and in the September expected her third baby.

Her husband was a miner. They had only been in their new home three weeks when the wakes, or fair, began. Morel, she knew, was sure to make a holiday of it. He went off early on the Monday morning, the day of the fair. The two children were highly excited. William, a boy of seven, fled off immediately after breakfast, to prowl round the wakes ground, leaving Annie, who was only five, to whine all morning to go also. Mrs. Morel did her work. She scarcely knew her neighbours yet, and knew no one with whom to trust the little girl. So she promised to take her to the wakes after dinner.

William appeared at half-past twelve. He was a very active lad, fair-haired, freckled, with a touch of the Dane or Norwegian about him.

Can I have my dinner, mother? he cried, rushing in with his cap on. ’Cause it begins at half-past one, the man says so.

You can have your dinner as soon as it’s done, replied the mother.

Isn’t it done? he cried, his blue eyes staring at her in indignation. Then I’m goin’ be-out it.

You’ll do nothing of the sort. It will be done in five minutes. It is only half-past twelve.

They’ll be beginnin’, the boy half cried, half shouted.

You won’t die if they do, said the mother. Besides, it’s only half-past twelve, so you’ve a full hour.

The lad began hastily to lay the table, and directly the three sat down. They were eating batter-pudding and jam, when the boy jumped off his chair and stood perfectly stiff. Some distance away could be heard the first small braying of a merry-go-round, and the tooting of a horn. His face quivered as he looked at his mother.

I told you! he said, running to the dresser for his cap.

Take your pudding in your hand—and it’s only five past one, so you were wrong—you haven’t got your twopence, cried the mother in a breath.

The boy came back, bitterly disappointed, for his twopence, then went off without a word.

I want to go, I want to go, said Annie, beginning to cry.

Well, and you shall go, whining, wizzening little stick! said the mother. And later in the afternoon she trudged up the hill under the tall hedge with her child. The hay was gathered from the fields, and cattle were turned on to the eddish. It was warm, peaceful.

Mrs. Morel did not like the wakes. There were two sets of horses, one going by steam, one pulled round by a pony; three organs were grinding, and there came odd cracks of pistol-shots, fearful screeching of the cocoanut man’s rattle, shouts of the Aunt Sally man, screeches from the peep-show lady. The mother perceived her son gazing enraptured outside the Lion Wallace booth, at the pictures of this famous lion that had killed a negro and maimed for life two white men. She left him alone, and went to get Annie a spin of toffee. Presently the lad stood in front of her, wildly excited.

You never said you was coming—isn’t the’ a lot of things?—that lion’s killed three men—I’ve spent my tuppence—an’ look here.

He pulled from his pocket two egg-cups, with pink moss-roses on them.

I got these from that stall where y’ave ter get them marbles in them holes. An’ I got these two in two goes-’aepenny a go-they’ve got moss-roses on, look here. I wanted these.

She knew he wanted them for her.

H’m! she said, pleased. "They are pretty!"

Shall you carry ’em, ’cause I’m frightened o’ breakin’ ’em?

He was tipful of excitement now she had come, led her about the ground, showed her everything. Then, at the peep-show, she explained the pictures, in a sort of story, to which he listened as if spellbound. He would not leave her. All the time he stuck close to her, bristling with a small boy’s pride of her. For no other woman looked such a lady as she did, in her little black bonnet and her cloak. She smiled when she saw women she knew. When she was tired she said to her son:

Well, are you coming now, or later?

Are you goin’ a’ready? he cried, his face full of reproach.

Already? It is past four, I know.

What are you goin’ a’ready for? he lamented.

You needn’t come if you don’t want, she said.

And she went slowly away with her little girl, whilst her son stood watching her, cut to the heart to let her go, and yet unable to leave the wakes. As she crossed the open ground in front of the Moon and Stars she heard men shouting, and smelled the beer, and hurried a little, thinking her husband was probably in the bar.

At about half-past six her son came home, tired now, rather pale, and somewhat wretched. He was miserable, though he did not know it, because he had let her go alone. Since she had gone, he had not enjoyed his wakes.

Has my dad been? he asked.

No, said the mother.

He’s helping to wait at the Moon and Stars. I seed him through that black tin stuff wi’ holes in, on the window, wi’ his sleeves rolled up.

Ha! exclaimed the mother shortly. He’s got no money. An’ he’ll be satisfied if he gets his ’lowance, whether they give him more or not.

When the light was fading, and Mrs. Morel could see no more to sew, she rose and went to the door. Everywhere was the sound of excitement, the restlessness of the holiday, that at last infected her. She went out into the side garden. Women were coming home from the wakes, the children hugging a white lamb with green legs, or a wooden horse. Occasionally a man lurched past, almost as full as he could carry. Sometimes a good husband came along with his family, peacefully. But usually the women and children were alone. The stay-at-home mothers stood gossiping at the corners of the alley, as the twilight sank, folding their arms under their white aprons.

Mrs. Morel was alone, but she was used to it. Her son and her little girl slept upstairs; so, it seemed, her home was there behind her, fixed and stable. But she felt wretched with the coming child. The world seemed a dreary place, where nothing else would happen for her—at least until William grew up. But for herself, nothing but this dreary endurance—till the children grew up. And the children! She could not afford to have this third. She did not want it. The father was serving beer in a public house, swilling himself drunk. She despised him, and was tied to him. This coming child was too much for her. If it were not for William and Annie, she was sick of it, the struggle with poverty and ugliness and meanness.

She went into the front garden, feeling too heavy to take herself out, yet unable to stay indoors. The heat suffocated her. And looking ahead, the prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive.

The front garden was a small square with a privet hedge. There she stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the fading, beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate was the stile that led uphill, under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut pastures. The sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank quickly off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare the diminished commotion of the fair.

Sometimes, down the trough of darkness formed by the path under the hedges, men came lurching home. One young man lapsed into a run down the steep bit that ended the hill, and went with a crash into the stile. Mrs. Morel shuddered. He picked himself up, swearing viciously, rather pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.

She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She was beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed so far away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.

"What have I to do with it? she said to herself. What have I to do with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn’t seem as if I were taken into account."

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

I wait, Mrs. Morel said to herself—I wait, and what I wait for can never come.

Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After which she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle flashed regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to relieve herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most of what she had, for the children’s sakes.

At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and very shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was pleased with himself.

Oh! Oh! waitin’ for me, lass? I’ve bin ’elpin’ Anthony, an’ what’s think he’s gen me? Nowt b’r a lousy hae’f-crown, an’ that’s ivry penny—

He thinks you’ve made the rest up in beer, she said shortly.

An’ I ’aven’t—that I ’aven’t. You b’lieve me, I’ve ’ad very little this day, I have an’ all. His voice went tender. Here, an’ I browt thee a bit o’ brandysnap, an’ a cocoanut for th’ children. He laid the gingerbread and the cocoanut, a hairy object, on the table. Nay, tha niver said thankyer for nowt i’ thy life, did ter?

As a compromise, she picked up the cocoanut and shook it, to see if it had any milk.

It’s a good ’un, you may back yer life o’ that. I got it fra’ Bill Hodgkisson. ‘Bill,’ I says, ‘tha non wants them three nuts, does ter? Arena ter for gi’ein’ me one for my bit of a lad an’ wench?’ ‘I ham, Walter, my lad,’ ’e says; ‘ta’e which on ’em ter’s a mind.’ An’ so I took one, an’ thanked ’im. I didn’t like ter shake it afore ’is eyes, but ’e says, ‘Tha’d better ma’e sure it’s a good un, Walt.’ An’ so, yer see, I knowed it was. He’s a nice chap, is Bill Hodgkisson, e’s a nice chap!

A man will part with anything so long as he’s drunk, and you’re drunk along with him, said Mrs. Morel.

Eh, tha mucky little ’ussy, who’s drunk, I sh’d like ter know? said Morel. He was extraordinarily pleased with himself, because of his day’s helping to wait in the Moon and Stars. He chattered on.

Mrs. Morel, very tired, and sick of his babble, went to bed as quickly as possible, while he raked the fire.

Mrs. Morel came of a good old burgher family, famous independents who had fought with Colonel Hutchinson, and who remained stout Congregationalists. Her grandfather had gone bankrupt in the lace-market at a time when so many lace-manufacturers were ruined in Nottingham. Her father, George Coppard, was an engineer—a large, handsome, haughty man, proud of his fair skin and blue eyes, but more proud still of his integrity. Gertrude resembled her mother in her small build. But her temper, proud and unyielding, she had from the Coppards.

George Coppard was bitterly galled by his own poverty. He became foreman of the engineers in the dockyard at Sheerness. Mrs. Morel—Gertrude—was the second daughter. She favoured her mother, loved her mother best of all; but she had the Coppards’ clear, defiant blue eyes and their broad brow. She remembered to have hated her father’s overbearing manner towards her gentle, humorous, kindly-souled mother. She remembered running over the breakwater at Sheerness and finding the boat. She remembered to have been petted and flattered by all the men when she had gone to the dockyard, for she was a delicate, rather proud child. She remembered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had become, whom she had loved to help in the private school. And she still had the Bible that John Field had given her. She used to walk home from chapel with John Field when she was nineteen. He was the son of a well-to-do tradesman, had been to college in London, and was to devote himself to business.

She could always recall in detail a September Sunday afternoon, when they had sat under the vine at the back of her father’s house. The sun came through the chinks of the vine-leaves and made beautiful patterns, like a lace scarf, falling on her and on him. Some of the leaves were clean yellow, like yellow flat flowers.

Now sit still, he had cried. "Now your hair, I don’t know what it is like! It’s as bright