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'E. T.' (Jessie Chambers) D. H. LAWRENCE:
A PERSONAL RECORD (1935)
LAWRENCE began to write his autobiographical novel during 19II, which was perhaps the most arid year of his life. He did not tell me himself that he was at work upon this theme. I heard of it through 'Helen'. He had been working on it for the greater part of the year, and it was some time after our brief meeting in October that he sent the entire manuscript to me, and asked me to tell him what I thought of it.
He had written about two-thirds of the story, and seemed to have come to a standstill. The whole thing was somehow tied up. The characters were locked together in a frustrating bondage, and there seemed no way out. The writing oppressed me with a sense of strain. It was extremly tired writing. I was sure that Lawrence had had to force himself to do it. The spontaneity that I had come to regard as the distinguishing feature of his writing was quite lacking. He was telling the story of his mother's married life, but the telling seemed to be at second hand, and lacked the living touch. I could not help feeling that his treatment of the theme was far behind the reality in vividness and dramatic strength. Now and again he seemed to strike a curious, half-apologetic note, bordering on the sentimental. A nonconformist minister whose sermons the mother helped to compose was the foil to the brutal husband. He gave the boy Paul a box of paints, and the mother's heart glowed with pride as she saw her son's budding power. It was story-bookish. The elder brother Ernest, whose short career had always seemed to me most moving and dramatic, was not there at all. I was amazed to find there was no mention of him. The character Lawrence called Miriam was in the story, but placed in a bourgeois setting, in the same family from which he later took the Alvina of The Lost Girl. He had placed Miriam in this household as a sort of foundling, and it was there that Paul Morel made her acquaintance.
The theme developed into the mother's opposition to Paul's love for Miriam. In this connection several remarks in this first draft impressed me particularly. Lawrence had written: 'What was it he [Paul Morel] wanted of her [Miriam]? Did he want her to break his mother down in him? Was that what he wanted?'
And again: 'Mrs Morel saw that if Miriam could only win her son's sex sympathy there would be nothing left for her.'
In another place he said: 'Miriam looked upon Paul as a young man tied to his mother's apron-strings.' Finally, referring to the people around Miriam, he said: 'How should they understand her - petty tradespeople!' But the issue was left quite unresolved. Lawrence had carried the situation to the point of deadlock and stopped there.
As I read through the manuscript I had before me all the time the vivid picture of the reality. I felt again the tenseness of the conflict, and the impending spiritual clash. So in my reply I told him I was very surprised that he had kept so far from reality in his story; that I thought what had really happened was much more poignant and interesting than the situations he had invented. In particular I was surprised that he had omitted the story of Ernest, which seemed to me vital' enough to be worth telling as it actually happened. Finally I suggested that he should write the whole story again, and keep it true to life.
Two considerations prompted me to make these suggestions. First of all I felt that the theme, if treated adequately, had in it the stuff of a magnificent story. It only wanted setting down, and Lawrence possessed the miraculous power of translating the raw material of life into significant form. That was my first reaction to the problem. My deeper thought was that in the doing of it Lawrence might free himself from his strange obsession with his mother. I thought he might be able to work out the theme in the realm of spiritual reality, where alone it could be worked out, and so resolve the conflict in himself. Since he had elected to deal with the big and difficult subject of his family, and the interactions of the various relationships, I felt he ought to do it faithfully - 'with both hands earnestly', as he was fond of quoting. It seemed to me that if he was able to treat the theme with strict integrity he would thereby walk into freedom, and cast off the trammelling past like an old skin.
The particular issue he might give to the story never entered my head. That was of no consequence. The great thing was that I thought I could see a liberated Lawrence coming out of it. Towards Lawrence's mother I had no bitter feeling, and could have none, because she was his mother. But I felt that he was being strangled in a bond that was even more powerful since her death, and that until he was freed from it he was held in check and unable to develop.
In all this I acted from pure intuition, arising out of my deep knowledge of his situation. I said no word of this to him because I thought it must inevitably work itself out in the novel, provided he treated the subject with integrity. And I had a profound faith in Lawrence's fundamental integrity.
He fell in absolutely with my suggestion and asked me to write what I could remember of our early days, because, as he truthfully said, my recollection of those days was so much clearer than his. I agreed to do so, and began almost at once, but had not got very far when word came that Lawrence was dangerously ill with pneumonia. I was sure he would get better and went on writing the notes for him. When he was convalescent'the first thing he wrote was a tiny pencilled message to me, saying: 'Did I frighten you all? I'm sorry. Never mind, I'm soon going to be all right.'
I saw him during the Christmas holiday sitting by the fire in his bedroom, grievously thin, but yet somehow so vital. Whenever I looked at him, I seemed to see the naked flame of life. It was so as he sat in his room on that sunny Saturday morning, from time to time putting a scrap of linen to his lips, and then dropping it into the fire. He looked at me with eyes in which a light would leap, then sink, and leap again. I was staying with 'Helen'. Lawrence asked me where we were going for lunch, and in the way he suddenly turned his head when I told him, I saw the whole bitterness of his illness and his enforced severance from activity.
He asked me if I had written the notes I promised to do, and I told him I had begun to write them before he was ill and just went on. He said he was going to Bournemouth as soon as he was strong enough, and after that he would come and fetch them. This was our first real talk since his mother's funeral. Some of the old magic returned, the sense of inner understanding which was the essence of our friendship ....
The writing of the novel (still called 'Paul Morel') now went on apace. Lawrence passed the manuscript on to me as he wrote it, a few sheets at a time, just as he had done with The White Peacock, only that this story was written with incomparably greater speed and intensity.
The early pages delighted me. Here was all that spontaneous flow, the seemingly effortless translation of life that filled me with admiration. His descriptions of family life were so vivid, so exact, and so concerned with everyday things we had never even noticed before. There was Mrs Morel ready for ironing, lightly spitting on the iron to test its heat, invested with a reality and significance hitherto unsuspected. It was his power to transmute the common experiences into significance that I always felt to be Lawrence's greatest gift. He did not distinguish between small and great happenings; the common round was full of mystery, awaiting interpretation. Born and bred of working people, he had the rare gift of seeing them from within, and revealing them on their own plane. An incident that particularly pleased me was where Morel was recovering from an accident at the pit, and his friend Jerry came to see him. The conversation of the two men and their tenderness to one another were a revelation to me. I felt that Lawrence was coming into his true kingdom as a creative artist, and an interpreter of the people to whom he belonged....I began to realize that whatever approach Lawrence made to me inevitably involved him in a sense of disloyalty to his mother. Some bond, some understanding, most likely unformulated and all the stronger for that, seemed to exist between them. It was a bond that definitely excluded me from the only position in which I could be of vital help to him. We were back in the old dilemma, but it was a thousand times more cruel because of the altered circumstances. He seemed to be fixed in the centre of the tension, helpless, waiting for one pull to triumph over the other.
The novel was written in this state of spirit, at a white heat of concentration. The writing of it was fundamentally a terrific fight for a bursting of the tension. The break came in the treatment of Miriam. As the sheets of manuscript came rapidly to me I was bewildered and dismayed at that treatment. I began to perceive that I had set Lawrence a task far beyond his strength. In my confidence I had not doubted that he would work out the problem with integrity. But he burked the real issue. It was his old inability to face his problem squarely. His mother had to be supreme, and for the sake of that supremacy every disloyalty was permissible.
The realization of this slowly dawned on me as I read the manuscript. He asked for my opinion, but comment seemed futile - not merely futile, but impossible. I could not appeal to Lawrence for justice as between his treatment of Mrs Morel and Miriam. He left off coming to see me and sent the manuscript by post. His avoidance of me was significant. I felt it was useless to attempt to argue the matter out with him. Either he was aware of what he was doing and persisted, or he did not know, and in that case no amount of telling would enlighten him. It was one of the things he had to find out for himself. The baffiing truth, of course, lay between the two. He was aware, but he was under the spell of the domination that had ruled his life hitherto, and he refused to know. So instead of a release and a deliverance from bondage, the bondage was glorified and made absolute. His mother conquered indeed, but the vanquished one was her son. In Sons and Lovers Lawrence handed his mother the laurels of victory.
The Clara of the second half of the story was a clever adaptation of elements from three people, and her creation arose as a complement to Lawrence's mood of failure and defeat. The events related had no foundation in fact, whatever their psychological significance. Having utterly failed to come to grips 'with' his problem in real life, he created the imaginary Clara as a compensation. Even in the novel the compensation is unreal and illusory, for at the end Paul Morel calmly hands her back to her husband, and remains suspended over the abyss of his despair. Many of the incidents struck me as cheap and commonplace, in spite of the hard brilliance of the narration. I realized that I had naively credited Lawrence with superhuman powers of detachment.
The shock of Sons and Lovers gave the death-blow to our friendship. If I had told Lawrence that I had died before, I certainly died again. I had a strange feeling of separation from the body. The daily life was sheer illusion. The only reality was the betrayal of Sons and Lovers. I felt it was a betrayal in an inner sense, for I had always believed that there was a bond between us, if it was no more than the bond of a common sp.ffering. But the brutality of his treatment seemed to deny any bond. That I understood so well what made him do it only deepened my despair. He had to present a distorted picture of our association so that the martyr's halo might sit becomingly on his mother's brow. But to give a recognizable picture of our friendship which yet completely left out the years of devotion to the development of his genius - devotion that had been pure joy seemed to me like presenting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. What else but the devotion to a common end had held us together against his mother's repeated assaults? Neither could I feel that he had represented in any degree faithfully the nature and quality of our desperate search for a right relationship. I was hurt beyond all expression. I didn't know how to bear it.
Lawrence had said that he never took sides; but his attitude placed him tacitly on the side of those who had mocked at love - except mother-love. He seemed to have identified himself with the prevailing atmosphere of ridicule and innuendo. It was a fatal alignment, for it made me see him as a philistine of the philistines, and not, as I had always believed, inwardly honour¬ing all unspoken bond, and suffering himself from the strange hostility to love. He had sometimes argued - in an effort to convince himself - that morality and art have nothing to do "with one another. However that might be, I could not help feeling that integrity and art have a great deal to do with one another. The best I could think of him was that he had run with the hare and hunted with the hounds....His significance withered and his dimensions shrank. He ceased to matter supremely.
I tried hard to remind myself that after all Sons and Lovers was only a novel. It was not the truth, although it must inevitably stand for truth. I could hear in advance Lawrence's protesting voice: 'Of course it isn't the truth. It isn't meant for the truth. It's an adaptation from life, as all art must be. It isn't what I 'think of you; you know it isn't. What shall I put? What do you want me to put...?' in a mounting crescendo of irritation and helplessness. I felt that words could only exacerbate the situation. The remedy must be left to time. And as I sat and looked at the subtle distortion of what had been the deepest values of my life, th"e one gleam of light was the realization that Lawrence had overstated his case; that some day his epic of maternal love and filial devotion would be viewed from another angle, that of his own final despair.
The book was written in about six weeks, under the influence of something amounting almost to frenzy. Although he avoided me Lawrence wanted to know what I thought of the novel. So, after I had studied the last sheets of the manuscript, I suggested that, as I had a holiday on a certain Monday in March, I should spend the week-end with my sister and we might meet and talk about the book. Lawrence replied that he had promised to go on a visit to a schoolmaster friend in Staffordshire on that particular weekend, but he would try to get back in good time on the Sunday. From the tone of his letter I judged that he intended me to have an opportunity of saying anything I wished to say, but it was to be a limited opportunity. I made some notes on minor points and took the manuscript with me....
We went out into the cloudy afternoon and walked past Greasley Church, then took the footpath through the fields where he and my brothers had wOi"ked together at hay harvest. Lawrence kept a sharp look-out for violets in the hedgerows. He said there must be some about because A. [Ada, Lawrence's sister] had seen youths coming home from the pit with bunches of violets and celandines in their hands. At the mention of violets and celandines I had hard work to keep the tears back, because it seemed as if springtime and spring flowers had gone out of my life for ever. Until then his manner had been bleak and forbidding, but now he softened a little and said almost wistfully:
'I thought perhaps you would have something to say about the writing.'
I felt as if I was sinking in deep water. But it was now the eleventh hour, and the time for speaking had gone by, and I merely said:
'I've put some notes in with the manuscript,' and he replied quietly, as though he was suddenly out of breath, 'Oh, all right. I thought you might like to say something. That's all.'
It was not that I would not speak but simply that I could not.
Between pride and anguish I found it impossible to tell him that the account he had given of our friendship amounted to a travesty of the real thing. His defensive attitude had kept me at bay, as he intended it should, and now the time was gone. It was too late. I could only remain silent. We spoke no more about the novel and soon turned back towards the cottage....
There was no further attempt at discussion of the novel. Lawrence made no approach to me nor I to him. I returned what few books of his I had, and he replied in a casual note. The more I thought about the situation - and' it was impossible to think about anything else - the more certain I became of the futility of attempting to reason the matter out with him. I realized that the entire structure of the story rested upon the attitude he had adopted. To do any kind of justice to our relationship would involve a change in his attitude towards his momer's influence, and of that I was now convinced he was incapable. It was the old situation in a new setting, the necessity for the mother's supremacy. More than a year before he had told me so in exact words, only without referring directly to his mother:
'You are the irremediable thing,' he had said, looking at me as though he would consume me with his eyes. 'You are what has to be. You are what cannot be helped. The great thing now is that you should not become bitter.'
It roused my irony that he should take my doom for granted, and in spite of my misery I laughed, and replied:
'No, I don't think I shall turn bitter.' But Lawrence was in such deadly earnest he did not perceive why I laughed. Now, in the novel, he had taken up the same position, and appointed himself judge and executioner. He held over me a doom of negation and futility. It pressed upon me like a weight, making the nights and days a torture. I dreaded lest I should come to fulfil it, as he seemed convinced I must.
Note: The first parts of this writing are referring primarily to the first novel drafts of 
