Have been reading – and am now almost done with – D. H. Lawrence’s early novel Sons and Lovers (1913), a book I began at home some months ago but was not able or willing to make much progress with. Now, with the leisure afforded by this month-long vacation and the brilliant light of the Mexican highlands, I am flying through the novel enraptured.
The English writer D. H. Lawrence, pictured here in 1906.
Enraptured – a strong Lawrentian word, to be sure, that suggests the tone of the book altogether – Paul Morel’s raptures in love and learning, nature and art – which become our raptures, too, impossibly, as we enter into the text and are swept away by it.
This despite the faults of plot and narrative – Lawrence’s ungodly preaching and didacticism; his inconsistencies in describing his characters’ states of mind; his falling, all too frequently, despite railing against the demotic values, into the pit of sentimentality (the psychological coal mine he would hack at and exploit).
Yet even now, almost 100 years after Sons and Lovers was published, this book and others by Lawrence retain an elemental force and power to move us up and out of our mundane tempers. Chief in his arsenal of artistic weapons may be his nature writing – a clumsy term to express how keenly observant Lawrence is of all the forces of nature around him (or his character Paul Morel) and that includes the independent life of plants and flowers; the force of rivers, streams, and ponds; the insistence on animal life and living, whether dog’s or man’s.
Naturally, his insistence that man is an animal is what made – and makes – Lawrence revolutionary. Long before he wrote Lady Chatterly, that cause célèbre, he was showing us how we too are subject to and frequently overmastered by natural forces; how the blood rises up in us, as in Morel the young virgin, and carries us away, a flood far, far stronger than all the polite words we might muster to represent, or conceal, our human condition.
So even when Lawrence preaches about his characters’ emotions, telling us, for example, with almost shocking frequency how one character hates the other, we realize the characters are being borne on tides of passion and emotion, natural forces that will go far toward washing away the muck of Victorian repression and dishonesty that plagued those times – and that continue, in only slightly altered forms, to plague ours.
Even if the young Paul Morel’s painting does not much suggest an ablution of the old values, Lawrence’s prose is a perfect flood – a hundred-year event, we might say, to cleanse the floodplain of both art and life, and make both possible once again on a higher plane.
(Last August, in Chapala, just a few miles down the road, I finished Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, the first draft of which he had finished in the very house, now a B & B, in which we were staying. I thought the book both wondrous and preposterous, so much passion and melodrama, so much preaching and protesting against false European and bourgeois values. The heroine, an American lady, gives in to the force of a Mexican revolution in cultural and sexual mores, sacrificing herself on the altar of respectability to the force of the new Quetzalcoatl.)
He was skinny, leathery, a bit of dried skin or spittle flecking his lower lip. He talked excitedly, in country dialect, and gesticulated wildly. Yes, he was selling us the goods — to be precise, the contents of his cardboard box, which he advertised as he untied the twine as an elixir past all others. It would cure gastrointestinal distress, backache, and, of course, cancer. It was country-fresh and country-raw, the ingredients a country secret. But for a mere 10 pesos, less than a buck, it would do all this for us and more. 