dh lawrence.qxp_Layout 1 23/09/2021 15:19 Page 1
CITY GUEST | INTERIORS | COLUMNIST
The relevance of Lawrence
On the centenary of the publication of Women in Love, Gerie Herbert takes on the literary defence of author and writer D.H. Lawrence who endured a searing critique and censorship in his lifetime and beyond – can his work be considered anew as a relevant voice?
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ove, love: why do I feel I would have known and loved Lawrence – how many women must feel this and be wrong!” It might have been intriguing to know if Sylvia Plath’s selection of Lawrence as a kind of literary forebearer, her appreciation of the leaves and earth and beasts and weathers in his work, could have withstood the intensity of the feminist critique that followed some decade or so after her death. A critique ensuring the work of Lawrence was not to be held up by any right-thinking woman, or one that held any scintilla of outward respect for herself. If Lawrence was censored in his lifetime, Kate Millett’s 1970’s classic Sexual Politics pinioned him down as a crucible of misogynism, and came as the last onslaught in a line of many, including the infamous 1960’s trial of Lady Chatterley. Lawrence’s reputation never fully recovered. And yet this writer from the most modest of backgrounds created almost 800 poems, a wealth of novels, short stories and some of the greatest travel writing. The son of a coal miner, he had taken his stint on the factory floor, before progressing to University College, Nottingham. Still Lawrence differentiated himself from most young men irrespective of class, becoming not just a good writer, but a truly great one according to F.R Leavis, the great critic of the age. A writer recognised by other great writers like Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Phillip Larkin, as well as by playwright Tennessee Williams, by Aldous Huxley and by Antony Burgess who held Lawrence up as a writer who had to prevail against the weight of a literary establishment that had him down as an interloper. It seems an amazement that a boy from a small mining community, ridden with tuberculosis could follow such a trajectory at all and at such a deeply conservative time.
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But then swiftly as he rose, Lawrence disappeared from syllabuses and bookshelves, and you weren’t supposed to like his work. He was filthy and facile and self-indulgent. Was there any point resuscitating a writer whose name has become synonymous with all the more salacious bits readers had gleaned from perhaps his thinnest work, Lady Chatterley, or the biographical knowledge gathered about his terrible marriage or his complex relationship with his mother. Lawrence had been held up as a pornographer in chief and a hater of women for a long time, he had put ideas so contentious in his novel The Rainbow that he had had it condemned in a court and burned publicly. At one point an innocuous Lawrence even fell under suspicion of spying and was accused later by readers of being a quasi-fascist despite the fact he had openly condemned Fascism as the worst kind of bullying. Lawrence, if readers had sense, should be discarded, and even if you could rekindle his reputation, why would you? Because even the most ardent admirer of Lawrence can’t deny some of the more uncomfortable parts of his writing or biography. There exists huge warmth, kindness, and a rare truthfulness, but reading Lawrence can be a bit like reading one of the more sublimely compassionate parts of the New Testament to uncover an Old Testament god of thunderbolts rampaging within it. Lawrence’s work in terms of opinions, emotion and tone contains multitudes. For many he is exhausting and polemical. And for a world in which nobody any longer reads digressive novels by anyone, let alone books where non-conformity is the only norm, societies where an eight-word tweet might cause offence, what relevance could Lawrence’s work still hold? For that very reason, quite a lot perhaps! Still if you want to tackle what remains
relevant in Lawrence you must first tackle the hurdle of gender. This autumn sees the release of two books with Lawrence as the central axis, Frances Wilson’s biography Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H Lawrence and Second Place by that most dispassionate of English writers Rachel Cusk. The interesting thing about both is not only are they written by intelligent women openly professing to loving the complexity and wildness of Lawrence, reintroducing discussion about his gender politics, both writers are forced to defend their interest in Lawrence openly. No woman can deny there are bits of Lawrence that induce eye-rolling or are so fantastical as to cause laughter (though ask if Mr Rochester or Mr Darcy have been the greatest of experiments in social realism!) but Lawrence’s heroines to the uninitiated hold far more complexity than you might imagine, and that perhaps is what attracts writers as first rate as Cusk, Wilson and Plath. There is good reason Sylvia Plath related to Ursula Brangwen of Women in Love, as a character mirroring her own fight for a fully realised autonomy. Lawrence’s female characters possess a genuine voice not simply because he is projecting his own puerile wishes onto them, which he sometimes is – Lady Chatterley is being written while his withered body is dying and failing him, Women in Love is being written by a man whose wife cuckolded him on his own honeymoon – but because there is genuine sympathy and kindness toward his female characters and a willingness for them to find equality. To some extent Lawrence’s female characters were projections of his own sexual fluidity and perhaps as a consequence their inner selves are richer and more believable.
