LITERATURE & HUMANITIES

Meetings chaired by Peter Rex Valentine unless otherwise stated

D.H. Lawrence: The Flowering of a Genius

Christine Crossley

BRLSI Member

18 November 2003

The years 1912 – 1914 were important for D.H. Lawrence. A new chapter had begun in his personal life and his literary work reached final maturity during this period of great creativity. In the summer of 1912 he had eloped with Frieda Weekley and together they set off to walk across the Alps and into Italy. During their journey Lawrence wrote the first poems for the collection, Look! We have come through. These form a personal testament to the lovers’ newly-found freedom and give an impression of the paradise they had found. However, Lawrence was also deeply affected by the journey itself through Bavaria leading into Italy.

Lawrence was forming a ‘sense of place’, i.e. a careful consideration of the social, philosophical and spiritual temper of the different areas they had visited. He met local people and observed the way they lived, prayed, worked and co-existed. Significantly, as an artist and ‘a religious man’ (his own description) the many crucifixes erected by the roadsides along their way became symbols that stimulated his thoughts to consider deeper, spiritual and philosophical issues that had been troubling him for some time. These can be summed up as follows: he drew carefully observed comparisons with the life of the European peasant and the life of ‘industrial’ man; he felt a need to reassess his religious beliefs; he wanted to explore the possibility of physical and spiritual rebirth, and, finally he wanted to define the role of art in understanding pain and death.

Following the publication of Sons and Lovers in 1913 and during his stay in Italy, Lawrence had declared that he would not write another novel like that again. He was reacting against the notion of ‘idealistic form’. In other words, he no longer wanted to create vivid scenes, nor approach the writing of a novel as a descriptive account. Instead he was interested in exploring characterisation at a deeper level. Lawrence wanted to get away from describing characters in a way that concentrated on recognisable traits that explored human, physical appetites and emotional needs. Instead, thought processes, the internal workings of the human mind and how to express individuality and identity were to deeply affect his style of writing. In addition, the relationship between men and women and the instinctive drive for renewal each from the other were notions that were worked and re-worked throughout his oeuvre.

Lawrence had already decided on a different course for his writing. In addition, the effect of his travels with Frieda were to provide him with important themes which he worked and re-worked, first in his poetry, then his travel sketches (published in Twilight in Italy) and finally, creatively realised in the major novels which quickly followed: The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

In the collection of sketches published in Twilight in Italy, Lawrence worked and re-worked his notions of spiritual and physical redemption and rebirth. The roadside crucifixes led him to consider the spiritual significance of Christ’s death on the cross and he linked the symbolism of the various depictions of Christ to people he had met on their journey: people of the soil, poor peasants, yet living and vibrant. Some of the Christs were strong, sturdy, and rugged figures that reminded Lawrence of the peasant farmers and their qualities: ‘fighting slowly and meanly, but not giving in’. Lawrence seems to be considering the suffering of Christ on the cross and drawing a parallel with man’s suffering on earth. He considers that the men who carved these figures are attempting to understand the meaning of their own soul’s anguish. Through art they associate with the suffering of Christ and, in an almost cathartic act, can rid themselves of their own torment through these carvings.

Other Christs are depicted as large, mature and strangely brutal. One face is set with pain, bitterness and despair. Christ is in the fullness of life and the bitterness of this depiction Lawrence sees as a reflection of the carvers and their fear of pain and death-in-life. Lawrence described the crucifixes as ‘monuments to physical pain’ rather than symbols of spiritual rebirth. Aesthetically, the symbol of Christ on the Cross brought together Lawrence’s notions on rebirth, the life of the peasants and the role of art in understanding pain and death. ‘Christs in the Tirol’ is his own working out of the promise of rebirth in the physical, rather than spiritual life.

The implications of the bitterness and pain of physical life, in other words a death-in-life experience are more fully explored through the character of Gerald Crich in the mature novel, Women in Love. Gerald had lost his sense of identity, his sense of what it was to be English and his faith in what it was to be vitally alive. When Gerald finds a half-buried crucifix in the snow the symbolism of Christ has greater significance. In contrast with the Bavarian peasants who carved their own pain in the image of Christ and somehow found peace, Gerald cannot and does not try to alleviate his own suffering. Paradoxically, he is and yet is not connected to Christ’s anguish on the cross. He cannot connect physically to pain and suffering as the Bavarian peasant carvers: this is spiritual suffering, which ends in death and nullity.

In a period of three years, Lawrence’s experiences in Bavaria and Italy had led him to re-examine the spiritual basis of his faith. He was no systematic philosopher but his position can be described as ‘moral’, although generally we tend not to apply this term to Lawrence. He examined how man lives and how the life of man is related to the life of society. More importantly, he showed through his literary work how these concerns could be aesthetically realised.

In these brief years of personal happiness, far from the mining town of Eastwood he finally worked and re-worked his art. The early poetry and literary travel sketches formed a symbolic journey towards the major novels. In the next few years, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover developed stylistically and aesthetically from Sons and Lovers and are acknowledged as three of his major novels. However, the poetry and travel writings also stand alone as testaments to Lawrence’s imaginative and deep response on the nature of man and how he can live in his environment.