Sons and Lovers (Barnes & Noble Classics - D. H. Lawrence [8]
Part One describes all aspects of lower-class life: the births, the deaths and marriages, the holidays and fairs, the courting rituals and wooing practices, the trouble with money, the trouble with health, the fear of injury, the aspirations for social advance. Part One is simple and straightforward; it progresses along at a good clip and follows a realistic timeline. It is simple but not dull, realistic but not storybookish. It is, in short, a triumph of Victorian social realism.
Part One closes with William’s death and Paul’s illness. As Paul recovers, during the interlude between the two sections, he is reborn as a man, capable if not ready for romantic love, in a fresh relationship with his mother. Part Two opens. Miriam appears in the doorway at Willey Farm, “sixteen and very beautiful.” With the characters already firmly in place, Lawrence starts writing the novel that he was born to write.
It could be coincidence, or it could be that Lawrence had discovered his subject, but in any event it is not without note that all of the romantic and sexual scenes in the novel occur in Part Two. These scenes allowed Lawrence to write in a language that was, for him, most natural. This is the language that would later be called Lawrencian, a language elusive and vague, but yet so true. “Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together.... Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her” (page 185).
But then, too, there is Lawrence’s other language, the language of symbol. “Paul and Miriam walked in silence. Suddenly he started. The whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he could scarcely breathe. An enormous orange moon was staring at them from the rim of the sandhills. He stood still, looking at it” (page 197). This language pervades the book: Paul tossing cherries at Miriam; the memorable scene in which Mrs. Morel holds her unnamed infant up to the setting sun. This language predicts the excursions Lawrence made into the sublime with The Rainbow and Women in Love.
In Lawrence’s mind the sexual/romantic language and the symbolic language were not at all separated. Through it, he described what cannot be described, indirectly naming what cannot be named: a sense of the spiritual. Perhaps, too, it is this language that Lawrence felt filled the unspoken need of the British public: the need to live, unfettered and unconstrained, in the face of a great mystery. He had an unfailing sense of the real, in life and in man. He understood that love could be explained more completely and more subtly by pointing out the pollen on a woman’s cheek, deposited there as she turned away from her lover, a smudge of yellow on her white skin. But he didn’t understand just intellectually. There is a sense, with Lawrence, that he wrote with his entire body, not just his pen, viscerally explaining where lesser authors explain simply with their minds.
Though often these passages are annoyingly indistinct and, for all their spiritual beauty, difficult to get through, the reader remembers the sense of them years later. They stick to you, like pollen on a cheek, a sense of mystery, a sense of the wonderful and the unknown. It is this sense, frustratingly unnamable, that was Lawrence’s genius and his legacy to letters.
Victoria Blake is a freelance writer. She has worked at The Paris Review and contributed to The Boulder Daily Camera, a number of small literary presses in the United States, and several English-language publications in Bangkok, Thailand. She currently lives and works in San Diego, California.
TO EDWARD GARNETT
PART ONE
1
The Early Married Life of the Morels
“THE BOTTOMS” succeeded to “Hell Row.” Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away.1 The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II,a the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,b straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.2