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By Root 14743 0

’s not good enough to spend time and ink in describing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut; we all know them too well. There’s genius in the book, but not in that part of the book. The body’s never worth while, and the sooner Lawrence recognizes that, the better—the men we swear by—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Maupassant, Flaubert, France—knew that great truth, they only use the body, and that sparingly, to reveal the soul. In Lawrence’s book the part that irritates me most is the early part with Miriam, whence the body is rigidly excluded, but in which you smell the prepossession which afterwards takes possession. But most of the Mother’s death is magnificent.

—from a letter to Edward Garnett (April 13, 1914)

D. H. Lawrence

Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being.

The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.

—from his foreword to Women in Love (1920)

Virginia Woolf

Perhaps the verdicts of critics would read less preposterously and their opinions would carry greater weight if, in the first place, they bound themselves to declare the standard which they had in mind, and, in the second, confessed the course, bound, in the case of a book read for the first time, to be erratic, by which they reached their final decision. Our standard for Mr. Lawrence, then, is a high one. Taking into account the fact, which is so constantly forgotten, that never in the course of the world will there be a second Meredith or a second Hardy, for the sufficient reason that there have already been a Meredith and a Hardy, why, we sometimes asked, should there not be a D. H. Lawrence? By that we meant that we might have to allow him the praise, than which there is none higher, of being himself an original; for such work as came our way was disquieting, as the original work of a contemporary writer always is.

—from the Times Literary Supplement (December 2, 1920)

T. S. Eliot

One writer, and indeed, in my opinion, the most interesting novelist in England—who has apparently been somewhat affected by Dostoevsky—is Mr. D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence has progressed—by fits and starts, it is true; for he has perhaps done nothing as good as a whole as Sons and Lovers.

—from The Dial (September 1922)

Questions

1. Galsworthy compares Lawrence to Tolstoy. Is it the breadth of Sons and Lovers alone that warrants immediate comparison to Tolstoy, or is there a deeper connection between the two writers? How do the two authors’ treatments of morality differ? Does Lawrence more closely resemble Dostoevsky, as T. S. Eliot suggests?

2. Does Paul Morel have an Oedipus complex?

3. To what do you attribute the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Morel? There is, of course, the difference in class and education. Is that the whole of it? Paul sides with Mrs. Morel, as the young Lawrence sided with his mother. The older Lawrence sided with his father, on whom Mr. Morel is modeled. Whose side are you on?

4. Lawrence’s natural settings are often symbolic. They color, reflect, or suggest the meaning of what happens in them. Analyze one instance.

5. In a preface to his novel Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “In point of style, fault is often found with continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination.