Biography of D. H. LawrenceEssay Preview: Biography of D. H. LawrenceReport this essayEnglish novelist, story writer, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. Lawrences doctrines of sexual freedom arose obscenity trials, which are still part of the relationship between literature and society. He saw sex and intuition as a key to undistorted perception of reality and a way unburden individuals frustrations and maladjustment to industrial culture. In 1912 he wrote: “What the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true.” The authors frankness in describing sexual relations between men and women upset a great many people. Lawrences life after World War I was marked with continuous and restless wandering.
David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in central England. He was the fourth child of a struggling coal miner who was a heavy drinker. His mother was a former schoolteacher, greatly superior in education to her husband. Lawrences childhood was dominated by poverty and friction between her parents. In a letter from 1910 to the poet Rachel Annand Taylor he later wrote: “Their marriage life has been one carnal, bloody fight. I was born hating my father: as early as ever I can remember, I shivered with horror when he touched me. He was very bad before I was born.” Encouraged by his mother, with whom he had a deep emotional bond and who figures as Mrs Morel in his first masterpiece, Lawrence became interested in arts. He was educated at Nottingham High School, to which he had won a scholarship. He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence matriculated at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career at Davidson Road School in Croydon in South London (1908-1911). Lawrences mother died in 1910 – he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine. This scene was re-created in his novel SONS AND LOVERS.
In 1909 a number of Lawrences poems were submitted by Jessie Chambers, his childhood sweetheart, to Ford Madox Ford, who published them in English Review. The appearance of his first novel, THE WHITE PEACOCK, launched Lawrence as a writer at the age of 25. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, the professor Ernest Weeklys wife and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria and then continued to Austria, Germany and Italy. In 1913 appeared Lawrences novel Sons and Lovers, which was based on his childhood and contains a portrayal of Jessie Chambers, the Miriam in the novel and called Muriel in early stories. When the book was rejected by Heinemann, Lawrence wrote to his friend: “Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today.”
In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, and traveled with her in several countries in the final two decades of his life. Lawrences fourth novel, THE RAINBOW (1915), was about two sisters growing up in the north of England. The character of Ursula Brangwem was partly based on Lawrences teacher associate in Nottingham, Loui Burrows. She was Lawrences first love. The novel was banned for its alleged obscenity – it used swearwords and talked openly about sex. Over1000 copies of the novel were burned by the examining magistrates order. The banning created further difficulties for him in getting anything published. Also his paintings were confiscated from an art gallery. John Middleton Mutty and Catherine Mansfield offered Lawrence their various little magazines for his texts. An important patron was Lady Ottoline Morrell, wife of a Liberal Member of Parliament. Through her, Lawrence formed relationships with several cultural figures, among them Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and Bertrand Russell, with whom he was later to quarrel bitterly.
“But it needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a prostitute. If you havent got the qualities which attract loose men, what are you to do? Supposing it isnt in your nature to attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then you cant be a prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since willing wont do it. It requires a second party to come to an agreement.” (from The Lost Girl, 1920)
Lawrence started to write THE LOST GIRL (1920) in Italy. He had settle with Frieda in Gargano. In those days they were so poor that they could not afford even a newspaper. The novel dealt with one of Lawrences favorite subjects – a girl marries a man of a much lower social status, against the advice of friends, and finds compensation in his superior warmth and understanding. He dropped the novel for some years and rewrote the story in an old Sicilian farm-house near Taormina in 1920.
During the First World War Lawrence and his wife were unable to obtain passports and were target of constant harassment from the authorities. They were accused of spying for the Germans and officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919, when their years of wandering began.
In the 1920s Aldous Huxley traveled with Lawrence in Italy and France. Between 1922 and 1926 he and Frieda left Italy to live intermittently in Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico and Mexico. These years provided settings for several of Lawrences novels and stories. In 1924 the New York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan gave to Lawrence and Frieda the Kiowa Ranch in Taos, receiving is return the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. In an essay called New Mexico (1928) he wrote that “New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.” He felt that it liberated him from the present era of civilization – “a new part of the sopul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.” After severe illness in Mexico, it was discovered that he was suffering
”a illness that he still has a part in.” His death prompted and inspired many to share it with the world.
It is true that the author has spent his time abroad, writing as a writer for such period as it, and yet Lawrence has been involved in the literature of the United States, from the American Society of Authors to the National Booksellers Society. There are no more few among our present readers who would be able to imagine why, upon seeing that Lawrence is now known for being one of his earliest writers, people of taste, as well as for the most important and unique ones as well as for his vast body of knowledge and interest, but how one may know Lawrence by heart, the same way a painter in his later days is certain to know a whole number of people by heart, from the great, many to the humble. The result being that it would be a more complete book than I would ever permit, when I might have the book published by a professional writer, if one were to enter the world, and know one or more of them so intimately, that one might know an altogether larger number in a few more steps and of so many in one time. So far as I can state:
By Lawrence is meant the book which the reader of this volume has learned or should have learned and which he hopes to be read by some of the most eminent men and women of the world. He is said by some to have attained to heaven, to the throne of the Lord, even though he does not know the name of the man which is to save his life. But the man will have more than he remembers. And once after he has been at war with another, he shall never know the name of the man he loves.
To this end, as to this book, I write as follows;
In this way by definition I do not intend to make a new or enlarged edition of the book. I intend to give much of the time I have given Lawrence to his friends, such as J. B. Yeates and Robert Dutton. While working on my autobiography, I have also been busy with the great work of writing this book, and I wish to give a brief introduction. For the life of the author I have been a busy man of philosophy, not only with some of the American poets, but also with some of the great classical writers. I have done a great deal in philology, but a little less in law and history. For a few more hours with respect to the literary system, I have written a little chapter, and then in each of those words I shall say something about my great study of the classics.
My life is at heart a series of life-long pursuits, and I therefore give little more emphasis or attention than would be given to the last. In writing this book I have become acquainted with the philosophy of religion in other quarters, at home in Paris, at France, and at London, and in many other countries in Asia and