Sons and Lovers (Barnes & Noble Classics - D. H. Lawrence [7]
Lawrence returned to England with Frieda in 1914. Her divorce finally came through and they wed. Though their relationship was often tumultuous, the marriage lasted until 1930 when, suffering from a tubercular hemorrhage, Lawrence died at the age of forty-four.
If Sons and Lovers did not bring the fortune Lawrence had hoped for, it did put him on the literary map. After 1913 the English reading public, his admirers and his critics alike, knew Lawrence was a writer to be reckoned with. They treated him accordingly. He attracted the esteem of F. R. Leavis, an influential and bombastic literary critic, who said that Lawrence was “the great creative genius of our age, and one of the greatest figures in English Literature” (The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Frederick J. Hoffman and Henry T. Moore, p. 95). At the same time, he sparked an emotion near hatred from T. S. Eliot, who said Lawrence had a “lack of critical faculties which education should give, and an incapacity for what is ordinarily called thinking,” a sentiment that was echoed by some of the members of the bohemian Bloomsbury Group (Achievement, p. 98).
“I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not just what they fancy they want,” Lawrence wrote in a letter to Ernest Collings in January 1913 (Letters). “Gradually, I shall get my hold on them.” In quick succession, Lawrence wrote a collection of short stories, The Prussian Officer, and two novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. By the time Women in Love was published, in 1921, Lawrence had indeed gotten his hooks into the English public. Unlike so many other Nottinghamshire youths who were destined for the pit, Lawrence, it became clear, was destined for the canon.
At the same time in literary history, James Joyce had published his Dubliners and was hard at work on Ulysses, Virginia Woolf was developing her “tunneling” technique through The Voyage Out, T. S. Eliot had just conceived of The Wasteland and moved to England, Old Man Yeats was developing into his last spiritual phase and had just published Responsibilities and Other Poems, E. M. Forster had exhausted his first burst of creativity, Evelyn Waugh was gathering material for his Brideshead Revisited, and Ezra Pound, who had published five collections of poems, was busy being influential. Ford Madox Ford undertook the task of discovering Modernism and was collaborating with Joseph Conrad, who had given up the sea in favor of the pen, on his later novels. British Modernism, then, was just getting underway.
The beginning of Modernism is generally marked by the imprisonment and death of Oscar Wilde and the publication of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its end by the death of Virginia Woolf in 1941 and the conclusion of World War II. The movement is categorized by a loosening of the constraints of plot and characterization as well as the development of a more emotive language. It is sometimes said that Lawrence is matched only by Joyce in pulling the novel into the twentieth century, though a case can be made in support of some of their other contemporaries.
Sons and Lovers is not generally considered to be Lawrence’s best book, nor his most refined. It was, however, the most widely read of his novels, and though Lady Chatterley’s Lover gave him a certain degree of infamy, Sons and Lovers is perhaps the novel for which he is most famous. In addition, it has the distinction of marking the end of his youthful period. It is Lawrence’s birthing book, so to speak. In it, he ended his literary apprenticeship and wrote himself into his mature style. A careful reader can watch the shift as it happens. Like a pregnant woman in a maternity dress, Sons and Lovers is, in reality, two books under one jacket, the old and the new together.
The book opens with a description of the Morel family in the tradition of the social realism of Dickens, Hardy, or Fielding. Here is Mrs. Morel, spitting on the iron, going off to church. Here is Mr. Morel, making gunpowder tubes for the mine, humming as he works. Children come tumbling in, tearing collars and destroying dolls. But the characters are more than types: the abused wife, the drunk husband, a flock of browbeaten children. Although the reader decides relatively early on that Morel is a scoundrel and a rogue, Lawrence, with remarkable objectivity, presents the other side of Morel. To balance the cad, we see the man bringing his wife tea in bed and wanting a kiss. Lawrence treats these scenes tenderly, endowing them with emotion while managing to avoid sentimentality.