1923 They visit Mexico as well as New York and Los Angeles. Studies in Classic American Literature—in which Lawrence considers Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—is published.
1924- 1925 Mabel Dodge Luhan, a New York socialite, gives the Lawrences her Kiowa Ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in return for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, dies. While visiting Mexico City, Lawrence falls ill with tuberculosis and is forced to return to England.
1925- 1926 The Lawrences settle near Florence. Frieda begins an affair with Angelino Ravagli, a former Italian infantry officer whom she will marry in 1950. Lawrence visits his hometown of Eastwood for the last time. The Plumed Serpent, a political novel about Mexico and its ancient Aztec religion, is published.
1928 Lady Chatterley’s Lover is banned in the United Kingdom and the United States, creating a great demand for the book.
1929 Lawrence’s Expressionist paintings, for which he gains posthumous renown, are declared obscene and confiscated from an exhibition at London’s Warren Gallery.
1930 Lawrence succumbs to tuberculosis on March 2 in Vence, France. Frieda moves to Kiowa Ranch, New Mexico, where she builds a small memorial chapel that houses Lawrence’s ashes.
1960 An unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is published after Penguin Books is acquitted of obscenity charges brought under the Obscene Publications Act. The trial lasts six days; the thirty-five expert witnesses called to testify include E. M. Forster.
Introduction
THE STORY of how and why D. H. Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers is a love story as much as it is a story about literature. The story begins at D. H. Lawrence’s birth and ends just before the outbreak of World War One. Although it is a love story, it is not a story about amor, per se, the exclusive romantic love. Rather, it is about love in all its various guises—love for the Mother Country and the mother, love for the work of writing and, above all, love for life itself D. H. Lawrence was a passionate man; he threw himself into life. In his presence, his peers were aware of life lived more highly, of emotions felt more truly and of the rawness of human experience. Lawrence took life in huge gulps, personalizing it and, in the end, changing it to suit his own artistic goals.
“I remember seeing him sitting apart at a table doing matriculation work,” writes Jessie Chambers in her book D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (see “For Further Reading”). “He smiled across at me, and I saw again his uniqueness, how totally different he was from any of the other youths.... There was his sensitiveness ... his delicacy of spirit, that, while it contributed vitally to his charm, made him more vulnerable, more susceptible to injury from the crudeness of life” (p. 47).
Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s third novel. He began writing it when he was twenty-five years old, a young, sensitive schoolteacher with periodic bouts of pneumonia and a penchant for problems of the heart. The novel underwent four major revisions and a name change before being published in 1913. As conceived, it was to be a book based on fact: the story of the young man, Paul Morel, growing up in a coal-mining district of the English Midlands. As such, it would be a thinly disguised fictionalization of Lawrence’s own life, a portrait of the artist as a young man or, as the critic Harold Bloom suggests, a portrait of the artist as a young prig.
Lawrence was born in 1885 in a lower-middle-class town in Nottinghamshire during a time in English history characterized by repressive social mores, strict morality, and austere, even ascetic, religious practices. In other words, the author was born at a time and in a place particularly inclined toward priggishness.
Lawrence chaffed under the yoke of Victorian England. His gift of perception, which told him that life was a vast mystery and wonder, also told him that his country was ruining itself with its industrialization, its mechanization, and its impulse toward war. As he grew up, he grew intolerant. “Curse you, my countrymen,” he wrote to Edward Garnett, his publisher and friend, in a letter dated July 1912, “you have put the halters round your necks, and pull tighter and tighter from day to day. You are strangling yourselves, you blasted fools” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 1, edited by James T. Boulton). To borrow Lawrence’s own phrase, England suffered under a “Thou Shalt Not” mentality.