Life before Frieda

This chapter begins by describing the deep impression made on Lawrence by Schopenhauer’s essay on `The Metaphysics of Love’, with its reduction of all love to a sexual, or more precisely reproductive instinct. When Lawrence discussed this essay with Jessie Chambers, it helped him recognise that he was less sexually attracted to her than to her brother Alan (see The White Peacock). Lawrence’s growing awareness of his bi-sexuality did not prevent him from deciding that he wanted to write about sex in more detail than previous English novelists, and from feeling increasingly frustrated, therefore, by his complete lack of personal experience. This build-up of sexual frustration became one of his major early subjects, especially as two of the more familiar methods of relief — masturbation and prostitution — were closed off to him. In desperation, he turned back to Jessie and cruelly recorded the failure of what was his first experience of sexual intercourse in the chapter of Sons and Lovers unfairly entitled `The Test on Miriam’. It was his almost immediately subsequent liaison with a dissatisfied married woman from his home town which helped him to describe his protagonist’s relations with Clare Dawes in that novel.

New world but not so new thoughts

Lawrence’s New World writings exhibit tendencies already apparent before he set sail. In Kangaroo, that the Lawrentian hero is `a she-man’ for the Australians helps determine an apparently definitive rejection of further yearning after the blutbrüdershaft Birkin was seeking in Women in Love. In the one male bonding ritual in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence’s suspicion that intimate relations with a man would entail problems similar to those he experienced in sexual contacts with women is allayed by one of the participant’s acceptance of the other’s natural superiority. When this individual (Cipriano) begins a relationship with the novel’s female protagonist, his `phallic power’ induces `prone submission’ so that she abandons her need for what is clearly defined as clitoral satisfaction. Because Kate Millet deserves credit for having denounced the misogyny of this male fantasy, it is unfortunate that her accounts of several texts associated with this period are misleading. Of these texts, the most interesting is St. Mawr and shows a character who, having failed to find erotic satisfaction with other humans, looks for it in Nature. This development of a narcissism often found in Lawrence takes many bizarre forms (several of which are analysed in this chapter).

A change of heart

Returning to Europe in 1925, Lawrence abandoned politics and went back to love and sex as his principal concerns. In The Virgin and the Gipsy, sex’s transforming power takes a semi-allegorical form but then, in three successive versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence recast the essentials of his story in a more realist mode. The decision to publish privately allowed him to describe sexual intercourse explicitly and produce passages which, in the 1960s, helped to make him an unlikely hero of sexual liberation. Some of these are indeed beautiful yet, in `the night of sensual passion’ episode, the old concern with anal intercourse re-appears and passages from the novel which defence witnesses at the trial took care not to read out include Mellors’s unpleasant account of his sexual history, with its bitter complaints about women who `grind their own coffee’. There is some romantic nostalgia in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, perhaps relating to the fact that Lawrence was impotent when he wrote it; but its evident flaws make it unfortunate that the interest it incites distracts attention from the fine writing he did afterwards, in Etruscan Places or The Man Who Died, for example, or in the later poetry.

Love’s progress

This begins by describing how one dissatisfied wife was quickly replaced by another in Frieda Weekley. With the aid of Freudian ideas borrowed from a previous lover, Otto Gross, she helped in the final revision of Sons and Lovers, and also identified Lawrence’s continuing love for his dead mother as a reason why their relationship was often so tempestuous. But without her, he could not have written the astonishingly original description of how the sexual relations of Will and Anna Brangwen develop in The Rainbow. Meanwhile, however, Lawrence’s attraction to men remained and, after an outburst of hysterical disgust following an encounter with practising homosexuals in Cambridge, he began to formulate a more moderate position. This was in Cornwall where, for Women in Love, he wrote a `Prologue’ where Birkin is described as only aroused by men’s bodies. In the novel as eventually published, Birkin insists that he needs a male alternative to his relationship with Ursula, and that, in their own sexual dealings, each of them must retain individuality (`stellar polarity’). How this can happen is suggested in prose which is markedly obscure nature and in which, not for the first time in his writing, anal intercourse figures prominently.

A propos

This chapter looks at how illogically, in A Propos, Lawrence defends his use of the four-letter words. No more logical is his surprising praise for Catholicism and the importance it attaches to the indissolubility of marriage. This can be associated with a contradiction running throughout his life and career between a belief in free love and a need for stability. A Propos shows Lawrence as confused as ever on this issue, despite his readiness to lecture the young on sexual matters. It could be claimed that what nevertheless makes his writing on love and sex so valuable is not its coherence but his often startling willingness to offer his own experience as an example. But a sine qua non of valuable self-exposure is honesty and there are worrying signs in Lawrence’s dealings with his erotic feelings for men, and his fear of dominance in relations with women, of rationalisation. All this leaves critics who admire him with a dilemma. Love and sex in Lawrence cannot be ignored, because it is at the centre of so much of his work. On the other hand, his real distinction lies less in that direction than in other displays of his exceptional gifts.

The road to disillusion

The theme here is the attack on `love’ Birkin inaugurates; but the starting-point Lawrence’s interest in nerve centres (`chakras’), and how these function, in an unpublished essay on Whitman, to endorse sexual relations between men. His suspicion of the dominance women can assume in sex is illustrated with episodes from The Lost Girl. How this problem relates to the extra-marital affair he had around this time with Rosalind Baynes could never be known, although it seems significant that this was when he was writing his tortoise poems with their talk of being `crucified into sex’. The backdrop is always his difficult relationship with Frieda yet his ability to occasionally treat that with wry humour is obvious from Mr. Noon, and the much more successful `The Captain’s Doll’. Travelling round Europe after 1919, Lawrence met Maurice Magnus who described him as on the lookout for bi-sexual individuals like himself. His movements are reflected in the protagonist of Aaron’s Rod who participates in a bonding scene with another man (comparable to the naked wrestling in Women in Love), but also in various episodes of sexual intercourse with women which leave him painfully conscious of having yielded them his power.