The Facts of Fiction (27 page)

Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could not afford a nurse. He grew worse, and the crisis approached. One night he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly feeling of dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense
irritability to be breaking down, and consciousness makes a last flare of struggle, like madness.

“I s'll die, mother! ” he cried, heaving for breath on the pillow.

She lifted him up, crying in a small voice:

“Oh, my son—my son! ”

That brought him to. He realised her. His whole will rose up and arrested him. He put his head on her breast, and took ease of her for love.

Mercifully Lawrence was romantic and not realistic. That passage otherwise would have been intolerable.

And so this son grew to worship his mother like a god, and to have adopted her like the slave of his bosom; which is bad theology. And Lawrence's strangely beautiful funeral poem to his mother, beginning:

My little love, my darling,

and running on to:

I kiss you good-bye, my dearest,

It is finished between us here.

Oh, if I were as calm as you are,

Sweet and still on your bier!

Oh God, if I had not to leave you

Alone, my dear.

is a poem in which even the language has changed from that of the son to that of the lover. Anyone who is not aware of a rare beauty in these passages must be insensitive to the facts of writing. But anyone who is not aware also of a strange ugliness must be blind to the facts of life.

If Lawrence's love for his mother is full of shadows there
is a corner of his mind that already by the time he was sixteen is midnight black. In
Sons and Lovers
he is as frank about Paul Morel's fornications as about his affections. At sixteen Lawrence was pestering a girl of his own age to have sexual intercourse with him. This is the fictional account:

I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. The serpent in the grass was sex. She somehow didn't have any; at least, not where it's supposed to be. I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we'd got to be lovers. I talked her into it. So she let me.

She let him. But it was not enough. She did not encourage Lawrence in his persuasive rape. And Lawrence left her in the first of those disgusts that were to sweep through his soul like a whirlwind scattering and destroying all that was good, all that was beautiful, in his mind.

Mr. Middleton Murry has penetratingly and exactly explained Lawrence's desertion of the passive partner in this adolescent escapade by saying that while Lawrence's mother still lived, “he was incapable of giving to another woman the love without which sexual possession must be a kind of violence done; done not to the woman only, but also and equally to the man: above all to a man like Lawrence.” And not only while his mother lived. After her death Lawrence could still look back to that embracing love, the only utterly satisfying love that he had known in his life, with regret heightened by his present awful hunger. A Freudian might explain the whole thing by saying that what Lawrence was really longing for, with an insatiable desire, was the blissful twilight of the womb, where perfect union was the natural state of life.

Lawrence's books, in one important particular are by no means the mirror of his life. There was only one woman—a passionate school-teacher, a tempting Sue Bridehead—who came between the incident of the farmer's obliging daughter and the woman who became Lawrence's wife. “Now, why ”—the reader must inevitably ask—” did Lawrence, the liver of this comparatively placid life, write novels which were simply proud and protracted phallic hymns? With Lawrence, as with St. Augustine did the strength of the Devil lurk, roaring in his loins? “The answer apparently, is, ” no.” On Mr. Murry's authority, founded on intimacy, we are assured that Lawrence was “almost a sexual-weakling.” All those colossal strainings of which his novels are full, which seem to shake and shatter the very foundations of sex, are obviously not the emotions of a man to whom accomplishment brings rest. There is always a hint, rising in some places to an articulate suggestion, and in others—
The Rainbow
is one of them—to a shout, that Lawrence's novels are the work not so much of a potent novelist as of an impotent man.

If we compare the work of a novelist whose manhood
was
an affliction, Tolstoy, with that of Lawrence, I think we might guess that Lawrence was not the great husband but the small lover; a physically bankrupt man, ashamed of living on a woman's charity.

Tolstoy begat a family, and ploughed the fields of Yasnaya Polyana, and danced Cossack dances, and defied the Church and the State, and wrote
War and Peace.
Life roared through his veins like a stream in flood. His sexual pleasures and remorses were as great as Lawrence's. But sex to him was simply a sudden and usually uncontrollable outburst of his tremendous vitality. With Lawrence, it was sex for which he lived and sex which kept him alive. Sex
with him is not only a means but an end. It was an inescapable circle; a vicious circle which he blindly saw as a magic circle.

It is not possible to write of Lawrence merely as an urgent and intense story-teller, though there is some strangely emotional compulsion within all his best work that drives the reader irresistibly onwards. Neither is it possible to think of him merely as one of the supremely imaginative writers whose language (when he could forget the dismal jargon of psychology with its hyphens, like stiles that have to be climbed) could soar without effort and remain aloft without fatigue.

True, both these qualities do occur within his good work, and even break through in his bad like a pure note in the voice of a platform speaker. But the story is always a story with a moral, even though the moral may happen to be a bad one. And the prose at its most persuasive is never without a purpose, usually a dark purpose, in its persuasion. The moral and the purpose are that man has ceased to worship sex as it should be worshipped, that only through sex can man arrive at the true understanding of life, and that it is the duty of man 'to repair the great rent in the cloth of nature that Christ had made in tearing body and soul apart; in dividing the body by a girdle of chastity.

And so it is that the critic of Lawrence is driven away from such works as
Sons and Lovers
and
Women in Love,
which really established Lawrence as a novelist, to the
Fantasia of the Unconscious,
in which he could teach his lessons about sex without the accidental interruption of having to write fiction; lessons which would have startled the Serpent—who probably had not even thought of the sharper daggers of impotence at the time of the original temptation.

And from the
Fantasia
the critic is driven onwards to
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
in which Lawrence returned to the form of fiction without ever allowing it to interfere with the propaganda.

Consider one of the typical passages in which the imaginative mind of Lawrence endeavours to describe the supreme act of sex. One is inevitably rather appalled at the writer's courage in trying to describe such a thing at all. Even the vocabulary of description is missing and he must make his own. It is all curiously unrealistic. For Lawrence had the fastidious man's natural dislike of real flesh, no matter how much he worshipped it in his imagination. And it is all strangely unconvincing, like the prose description of a piece of music.

But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We know that in the act of coition the
blood
of the individual man, acutely surcharged, with intense vital electricity—we know no word, so say “electricity,” by analogy—rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, prolonged magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each—and then the tension passes.

Such was Lawrence's method of recollecting emotion, not in tranquillity but in a mood of remembered ecstasy. He was like a man taking a stiff whisky-and-soda to bring himself to the point of remembering exactly how it feels to be drunk.

Exactly what Lawrence's real lesson was in all this has never become quite clear. At least it became as clear as daylight. But like the daylight it was constantly changing. At the time of writing
Women in Love,
it was that the sexual act had been performed perfectly only when there had been “mingling and intimacy.” But by the time he wrote
Kangaroo
he was searching for something that could not come by nakedness alone.

All through his life Lawrence had not liked the flesh. He had merely been educating it to become a worthy servant of the soul. He had coached and instructed it in its athletics so that it might run level with the mind. And by the end of his life when, in writing
The Man Who Died,
he took the body of Christ down from the cross and put it into a woman's warm arms, he was still trying to make the body as rich in experience as the mind.

It made Lawrence furious to see anyone so startlingly and intelligently alive as Christ having developed so naturally without the assistance of Woman. Christ was the supreme example in history that exploded Lawrence's theory. That was why Lawrence hated him.

The Man Who Died
contains a lot of Lawrence that was his best. The description of the resurrection of Christ within the tomb is the writing of a man to whom sorrow and pain do not come as strangers to the mind:

Slowly, slowly he crept down from the cell of rock with the caution of the bitterly wounded. Bandages and linen and perfume fell away, and he crouched on
the ground against the wall of rock to recover oblivion. But he saw his hurt feet touching the earth again, the earth they had meant to touch no more, and he saw his thin legs that had died, and pain unknowable, pain like utter bodily disillusion, filled him so full that he stood up, with one torn hand on the ledge of the tomb.

To be back! To be back again, after all that! He saw the linen swathing bands fallen round dead feet, and stooping, he picked them up, folded them, and laid them back in the rocky cavity from which he had emerged. Then he took the perfumed linen sheet, wrapped it round him as a mantle, and turned away to the wanness of the chill dawn.

He was alone; and having died, was even beyond loneliness.

Lawrence at times could write prose that bleeds with compassion, as the last extract does, when the experience seems to have been drawn into him. And at times, especially when angry, he could write prose that simply explodes along the printed line. This kind of thing:

I would like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge primeval enemies, but now they are only shelter and strength. I lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree.

There we have that powerful impulsive prose corroded with sexual images. For Lawrence, despite his contempt for the Freudians, who find a sexual origin for all things as easily as a Bolshevik finds a capitalistic one, saw enough sex in ordinary life to make a Freudian gape.

Whether he was looking at a cat or at catkins he divided them, male and female, according to their kind. There is that passage in
Women in Love
in which Birkin trespasses into a class-room during a nature-study lesson and says to the teacher:

“Give me some crayons, won't you … so that they can make the gynæcious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I'd chalk them in plain, chalk and nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasise …”

that makes Lawrence appear to have the image of sex printed on the inside of his eyelids: whenever he closed his eyes to think, he saw it.

There are those horrid darknesses which over-cloud his mind from time to time, when Lawrence, like a war-horse, grows stamping and impatient at the smell of blood. As in
The Woman Who Rode Away,
he worships at red, stained altars.

There was also the mounting hatred of the world that would not attend to him, a hatred that changed the great teacher with the words of salvation in his mouth, to the nihilist with a bomb in his pocket. In the words of Birkin:

Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and the trees, I am satisfied. That which
informs it all is there, and can never be lost … let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn't embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as soon as possible.

Lawrence's contempt for the world accumulated within his mind until finally he could announce it only in thin, strident shrieks. His later poems are simply declarations of anger, often inarticulate in their rage. He had ceased to be a novelist; and unless something could have restored sympathy to his heart he would never have become a novelist again. And to recover his sympathy he would have needed to recover his sanity. His early books may seem terribly wrong to us. But they contain the tremendous errors of a man, fully articulate and finely intelligent; and so are in urgent need of correction. The later work is not so much in need of correction as of cure.