Inspiring Older Readers
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
I was never gripped by Lawrence when I was a teenager. I dipped into one or two novels but they didn’t ‘take’. More recently I tried some of the short stories and found them intense, poetic, but with an almost hysterical tone and a weird undertow of dark mysticism that I didn’t find attractive.
I must also have been influenced by wider debates about Lawrence. While his novels were hot film properties in the 1970s, his literary stock seemed at an all-time low by the 1980s and he was under assault from feminist critics for his sexism and patriarchal attitudes, and from the left for his anti-democratic politics, colonial attitudes, anti-semitism and perhaps even fascist sympathies.
Anyway, for a combination of reasons, I grew up feeling that DHL wasn’t for me, and so I was a bit surprised to find myself reaching recently for an Everyman classic of his third novel Sons and Lovers and putting these prejudices to the test.
It is, to all intent and purpose, a working class family saga – perhaps the first – and it explores a culture, sensibility and world-view which was rarely seen in literature when the novel was published in 1913, and which remains rare even now. It is the story of the Morels, a Nottinghamshire mining family. Walter, the father, is boorish and repressed, a violent drunk. Gertrude, his wife, is more refined, led by passion to marry into the working class. William, the eldest son, is shallow and materialist and dies young from pneumonia. Paul, the second eldest son, is priggish, artistic and morbidly sensitive and is Lawrence’s alter-ego and the focal point of the novel. The youngest children, Arthur and Alice, feature relatively little. The sons are Gertrude’s passion and salvation and through them she loves and lives. But much of the book revolves around Paul’s attempts to love other women as much as he loves his mother.
It is Lawrence’s most intensely imagined and autobiographical book and is rooted in a real, observable world. I read the early part with mounting admiration and a growing conviction that my earlier judgements of Lawrence had been fundamentally wrong. His descriptive writing – the pit lights twinkling in the hills, the stars wheeling overhead, dusk smoking upwards from the snow-covered moors, the meagre street lamps that merely emphasise the isolation and darkness – burns on the page and is a pleasure to read.
But as the book progressed my patience grew thin and I began to feel that my early misgivings were justified. The central problem is that Lawrence sets out a marvellous canvas of concerns and themes and events to explore but then focuses hundreds of pages on the tedious soul-searching and self-examination involved in Paul’s love affairs. They dominate the book but are its least interesting aspect.
So much more could have been said about the mother-children relationship, class, the emerging social and political ideas of the time, and especially the father’s world of work and the virtually unexplored and alien landscape of early industrialised mining. These elements are there, indeed they are central to the fabric of the book, but by comparison they are diminished on almost every page by the overwhelming emphasis that is put on Paul’s relationships and the analysis of those relationships. There is never the slightest doubt about who and what Lawrence himself considers most important.
I found much to enjoy in Sons and Lovers and many of its scenes will stay with me. But while it exemplifies Lawrence’s greatness it also reveals his deepest weaknesses.
His greatness rests on immense labour and a determination to expose the roots of what represses and limits freedom. But this greatness is squandered and its application misjudged and he was so obsessed with self and his own towering ego that ultimately he could only view the world through a personal lens and I think it proved inadequate to the task. What made Lawrence so uniquely Lawrence – his personal vision – is also his weakness and it seems you can’t have the great bits of Lawrence unsullied by the bad. He has to be swallowed whole – the so nearly marvellous novelist along with the crankiest of opinions – and I think that’s why I can’t get on with him.
But whatever you think of Lawrence, if this moves you to read Sons and Lovers then at least do the man the courtesy of avoiding the 1991 Everyman Library edition of the novel. It was clearly never spell-checked let alone copy-edited and is riddled with scores of the most basic of typos. It almost single-handedly trashes the reputation of the Everyman Library and also does little for Lawrence’s.
Alun Severn
July 2016