Lawrence Whole
by Anthony Burgess
SONS AND LOVERS by . Cambridge University Press, $24.95.
WE AND OUR parents (if they were literate) have been reading Lawrence’s masterpiece in a truncated and bowdlerized form. After eighty years the Cambridge collected edition permits us to understand the title: we were always puzzled by the plural, because the oedipal situation of the story seemed to apply only to one son, Paul Morel; now we find two Oedipuses for the one Jocasta. Bowdlerization robbed us of passages like this:
Her breasts were heavy. He held one in each hand, like big fruits in their cups, and kissed them, fearfully. . . . Suddenly he saw her knees, and he dropped, kissing them passionately. She quivered. And then again, with his fingers on her sides, she quivered.
We believed Lawrence had written this:
He sat up and looked at the room in the darkness, his feet doubled under him, perfectly motionless, listening.
What he actually wrote was
He sat up and looked at the room in the darkness. Then he realised that there was a pair of her stockings on a chair. He got up stealthily, and put them on himself. Then he sat still, and knew he would have to have her. After that he sat erect on the bed, his feet doubled under him, perfectly motionless, listening.
The man responsible for the sanitization of Sons and Lovers as well as the excisions (about fifty pages), which both cleansed and rendered the novel sufficiently brief for public acceptance, was Edward Garnett, a reader for the British publishing firm of Duckworth and a dedicatee of the work. Lawrence desperately needed the £100 advance, and his gratitude that the book should be published at all outweighed his agony at the misrepresentation of his art. Garnett has a lot to answer for. He edited Almayer’s Folly but earned Conrad’s gratitude at getting the work into print. He rejected Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as “unconventional” and provoked Ezra Pound’s vituperation. Virginia Woolf saw through him, but history has treated him kindly. A man who gets a book published, even if this entails partial misrepresentation of the author’s intention, has to be a hero of sorts.
I think that the Anglo-American publishing tradition needs, at this point, to be taken to task. The editor, who lacks the creative gift but is compensated with artistic taste, has been overmuch lauded. Some of us would like to know what Thomas Wolfe wrote before Maxwell Perkins got hold of him, or what Catch-22 was like before the editorial finesse of the former editor of The New Yorker licked it into shape. Editors never emend orchestral scores or panoramic paintings; why should the novelist be singled out as the one artist who doesn’t understand his art? Anyway, it has taken a long time for the ravagings of Garnett, however well intentioned, to be canceled out, and we ought to be grateful that at last we can read entire one of the seminal novels of the century, however much we may rage at the unavoidable insufficiency of the critical assessments that some of us Laurentians have made in the interim.
I T WOULD BE otiose to consider Sons and Lovers, as it were, from scratch. From a literary point of view it stands in a tradition we may term Edwardian, essaying none of the modernist tricks that the arch-modernist Joyce, three years older than Lawrence, would soon be ready to consider. It is realistic, but it very remarkably converts the realistic to the mythical, so that the characters take on a poetic life far above the exigencies of plain narrative. In this respect it is Hardyesque. The faculty for observation—the cover design of this edition reminds us that Lawrence had painterly ambitions—is highly idiosyncratic. But it is the theme itself that startled the book’s first readers, and we are not yet so blasé as to be impervious to the shocks it imparts. Lawrence, as we know, eloped with Frieda Weekley, a German baroness who had read Freud, something few British intellectuals had yet done, and she knew all about the oedipal situation from its clinical aspect. But Lawrence had the Shakespearean faculty of intuitively recognizing the eternal truth of what Adlerians were to call family constellations, and he did not need Frieda’s gleanings of Viennese theory. The book is based not on a theory but on a sharp-eyed direct knowledge of the sexual harmonics of a claustrophobic working-class household. The congratulations of the upper-class Freudians could come later.
The sexuality of the novel, apart from the hints of the incestuous, was a new thing in fiction, and it frightened Garnett, as it would have frightened an audience given it unedited. What makes Lawrence, dead of tuberculosis too young in 1930, an essentially modern, if not modernist, novelist is his awareness of the sexual impulse as an aspect of nature, not a diversion of the bourgeois bedroom. And yet this impulse is not philoprogenitive: it is important in itself, not a device for breeding. Lawrence had nothing of the paternal in him, and he was savage at Frieda’s mourning for the children from whom her elopement had cut her off. She, in turn, mocked Lawrence when, in exile, he was working on Sons and Lovers, writing a skit called Paul Morel, or His Mother’s Darling. The near-incest it depicts is unfulfilled and hence, unlike the classical Oedipus coupling, sterile. It seems that Lawrence himself was sterile and later impotent: the marital relationship was to be essentially a tempestuous duet, a hostile symbiosis that produced nothing except a kind of grand opera without music.
So, without benefit of contraceptives, the men and women in Lawrence’s novels conduct erotic relationships complete in themselves. Lawrence was the first literary artist to emphasize the huge importance of sex as a means of human fulfillment, and here in Sons and Lovers there is an astonishingly frank (so at last we are permitted to know) delineation of its ecstasies and agonies. The frankness was to attain its limit in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but it is there in The Rainbow and in Women in Love (banned or suppressed in their time, like the more notorious and far inferior swan song), raised to an epic-mythical level, so that mere human characters become priapic gods and infertile goddesses. But perhaps Sons and Lovers is the more profound in presenting the pains of sexual initiation, not the assured loves of the mature, with the chains of maternal possession rattling on every page. Lawrence did not yet know that this was to be characterized as a Jewish, and also a Latin, morbidity; it was there throughout the British working-class community, and he was probably right to intuit that it was universal.
We owe Lawrence much because of this sexual candor, a new thing in AngloAmerican fiction, but we ought not to forget that he applied the irrational impulse of sex to life in general. He rejected the intellect. When assured that the doctrine of the earth’s going round the sun was confirmed by science, he tapped his solar plexus and said, “I don’t feel it here.” He was a poet of the instincts, and he was convinced that instinct gave him the right to profess what it felt like to be a horse or a frog or a fish, to say nothing of a peach or a fig. He was bold, and this boldness drew him on occasion to total absurdity. But there is no absurdity in Sons and Lovers. It is, on the level of realism, an exact testament of British working-class life, the rebellious aspirations of the misfits, the power of the mother, and circumambient nature, made filthy by coal mines, which claims man and woman as part of itself.
To read Sons and Lovers as Lawrence wrote it is a revelation. The Cambridge edition is a masterly work of scholarship, and its clearing away of the negativities that presented the book as an acceptable dish for the neo-Georgians is an admirable act. The entire emerging edition of the Lawrence oeuvre is opening our eyes. If you have not yet read Mr Noon, the lost novel that the Cambridge editors produced several years ago, you ought to rush to it as the emanation of a more humorous, more self-deprecatory Lawrence than the bigger works will give you. It is a picture of the Paul Morel who has thrown off the chains and entered a free world. Meanwhile, there is this chronicle of a world striving for emancipation and not finding it. □