D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, central England. Lawrence’s career really took off when he left England for the first time in 1912, to elope to Germany with Frieda Weekley née von Richthofen, the wife of his former University of Nottingham professor.

"Sons and Lovers" was published in 1913 to positive reviews in England. As Lawrence entered fully into a relationship with his freethinking and often unfaithful wife (he and Frieda married in 1914 after her divorce was finalized) and explored new literary territory back home, Lawrence began to realize that Victorian England was not the best place to pursue his career. "The Rainbow,"a kind of prequel to "Women in Love," was published in 1915 and banned on obscenity charges. The book’s reputation basically eliminated Lawrence’s ability to earn money by writing.

During the First World War Lawrence and his wife were unable to obtain passports and were targets of constant harassment from the authorities. They were accused of spying for the Germans and officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919, when their years of wandering began.

Lawrence's best known work is Lady Chatterly's Lover, first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, and a man who works on her husband's estate. The book was banned for a time in both the UK and the U.S.

 The dialectic between man and woman is a chief theme in Lawrence. His novels and poetry explore the ills created by the Industrial Revolution and the role of sexuality in human relationships. The decay of the so-called "sexual revolution" today is an affirmation of Lawrence's theory of sexuality. Lawrence was most definitely a godfather of the 20th Century sexual revolution. In practice, the sexual revolution is or was a revolt against the depressing notion that our lives, controlled by growing governments and threatened by nuclear annihilation, are pre-ordained. Free will is just an empty metaphor inside this realm. The sexual revolution unleashed a potent rebellious impulse that contradicted the anxiousness of freedomless reality.

 While Lawrence's utopian vision matched the 1960's mantra of "make love not war" he would not have understood the purely hedonistic and narcissistic aspects of the sexual and cultural revolutions. For Lawrence, sexuality was primarily a moral issue. Those that denied and suppressed their sexuality subverted the hope of people coexisting peacefully and happily.

Lawrence's non-fiction works include Movements In European History(1921), Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious (1922) and Studies In Classic American Literature (1923). He also gained posthumous renown for his expressionistic paintings, bottom right, completed in the 1920s, which were also banned.

D.H. Lawrence died in Vence, France on March 2, 1930. He
was 44 years old.

QUOTES

"It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing."

On passion:

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it ... and the journey is always towards the other soul."

Meeting Among the Mountains

The little pansies by the road have turned
Away their purple faces and their gold,
And evening has taken all the bees from the thyme,
And all the scent is shed away by the cold.

Against the hard and pale blue evening sky
The mountain's new-dropped summer snow is clear
Glistening in steadfast stillness: like transcendent
Clean pain sending on us a chill down here.

Christ on the Cross! — his beautiful young man's body
Has fallen dead upon the nails, and hangs
White and loose at last, with all the pain
Drawn on his mouth, eyes broken at last by his pangs.

And slowly down the mountain road, belated,
A bullock wagon comes; so I am ashamed
To gaze any more at the Christ, whom the mountain snows
Whitely confront; I wait on the grass, am lamed.

The breath of the bullock stains the hard, chill air,
The band is across its brow, and it scarcely seems
To draw the load, so still and slow it moves,
While the driver on the shaft sits crouched in dreams.

Surely about his sunburnt face is something
That vexes me with wonder. He sits so still
Here among all this silence, crouching forward,
Dreaming and letting the bullock take its will.

I stand aside on the grass to let them go;
— And Christ, I have met his accusing eyes again,
The brown eyes black with misery and hate, that look
Full in my own, and the torment starts again.

One moment the hate leaps at me standing there,
One moment I see the stillness of agony,
Something frozen in the silence that dare not be
Loosed, one moment the darkness frightens me.

Then among the averted pansies, beneath the high
White peaks of snow, at the foot of the sunken Christ
I stand in a chill of anguish, trying to say
The joy I bought was not too highly priced.

But he has gone, motionless, hating me,
Living as the mountains do, because they are strong,
With a pale, dead Christ on the crucifix of his heart,
And breathing the frozen memory of his wrong.

Still in his nostrils the frozen breath of despair,
And heart like a cross that bears dead agony
Of naked love, clenched in his fists the shame,
And in his belly the smouldering hate of me.

And I, as I stand in the cold, averted flowers,
Feel the shame-wounds in his hands pierce through my own,
And breathe despair that turns my lungs to stone
And know the dead Christ weighing on my bone