The Creative Writing group at Maggie’s Nottingham has been invited to produce some work for an exhibition at the D H Lawrence Birthplace Museum in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. So for the last few sessions our writing exercises have been based around Lawrence’s life and work.
In the last blog post, we focused on some of his poems. In this session we’re going to look at a couple of the novels.
Part 1
Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers was Lawrence’s third published novel and widely regarded as a masterpiece.
Lawrence started writing the novel during his mother’s illness – while she was dying of cancer. It tells the story of Gertrude, a woman who marries below her class and struggles with reduced circumstances and lives vicariously through her sons. When her older son dies, she turns her attention to the younger son, Paul.
The controlling mother-son relationship has strong parallels between Lawrence’s own relationship with his mother. Paul struggles to form his own relationships and feels torn between his mother and his girlfriend.
Like much of Lawrence’s other work, the novel deals with themes of power struggle, class differences, and the ugliness of the modern industrialised world versus the beauty of nature.
Exercise 1
- Read the two excerpts from the novel below.
- Note the themes
- Write your own piece focusing on one of those themes.
Excerpt 1
Mrs. Morel was alone, but she was used to it. Her son and her little girl slept upstairs; so, it seemed, her home was there behind her, fixed and stable. But she felt wretched with the coming child. The world seemed a dreary place, where nothing else would happen for her – nothing but this dreary endurance–till the children grew up. And the children! She could not afford to have this third. She did not want it. The father was serving beer in a public house, swilling himself drunk. She despised him, and was tied to him. This coming child was too much for her. If it were not for William and Annie, she was sick of it, the struggle with poverty and ugliness and meanness.
She went into the front garden, feeling too heavy to take herself out, yet unable to stay indoors. The heat suffocated her. And looking ahead, the prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive.
The front garden was a small square with a privet hedge. There she stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the fading, beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate the stile led uphill, under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut pastures. The sky throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank quickly off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare the diminished commotion of the fair.
Sometimes, down the trough of darkness formed by the path under the hedges, men came lurching home. One young man lapsed into a run down the steep bit that ended the hill, and crashed into the stile. Mrs. Morel shuddered. He picked himself up, swearing viciously, pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.
She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She was beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed so far away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.
“What have I to do with it?” she said to herself. “What have I to do with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn’t seem as if I were taken into account.”
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
“I wait,” Mrs. Morel said to herself–”I wait, and what I wait for can never come.”
Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After which she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle flashed regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to relieve herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most of what she had, for the children’s sakes.
At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and very shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was pleased with himself.
Excerpt 2
‘She exults – she exults as she carries him off from me,’ Mrs Morel cried in her heart when Paul had gone. ‘She’s not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet – she will suck him up.’ So the mother sat, and battled and brooded bitterly.
And he, coming home from his walks with Miriam, was wild with torture. He walked biting his lips and with clenched fists, going at a great rate. Then, brought up against a stile, he stood for some minutes, and did not move. There was a great hollow of darkness fronting him, and on the black upslopes patches of tiny lights, and in the lowest trough of the night, a flare of the pit. It was all weird and dreadful. Why was he torn so, almost bewildered, and unable to move? Why did his mother sit at home and suffer? He knew she suffered badly. But shy should she? And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her – and he easily hated her. Why did she make him feel as if he were uncertain of himself, insecure, an indefinite thing, as if he had not sufficient sheathing to prevent the night and the space breaking into him? How he hated her! And then, what a rush of tenderness and humility!
Suddenly he plunged on again, running home. His mother saw on him the marks of some agony, and she said nothing. But he had to make her talk to him. Then she was angry with him for going so far with Miriam.
‘Why don’t you like her, mother?’ he cried in despair.
‘I don’t know, my boy,’ she replied piteously. ‘I’m sure I’ve tried to like her. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t – I can’t.’
And he felt dreary and helpless between the two.
Part 2
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Written close to the end of Lawrence’s life and published posthumously, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned until 1963 although an edited version was in circulation. In 1960 Penguin published the uncensored version, which led to them being sued under the obscene publications act. One objection was to frequent use of the ‘F’ word and use of the’C’ word as well as what was then seen as explicit description of sex. Penguin had to prove the book’s literary merit outweighed any concerns about the material it contained. Penguin won.
Lady Chatterley (Connie) is a frustrated young married woman. Her husband is paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. She feels sexually unfulfilled and emotionally neglected and has an affair with a game keeper (Oliver Mellors).
A strong theme in the novel is class difference and the dominance of the intellectual elite. Connie’s husband is more upper class than she is and she feels uncomfortable in the circles in which he moves. Her liaison with a man of a lower class is an additional taboo. Another theme is the search for integrity. The conflict between mind and body echoes the contrast between the natural world and industrialisation. Clifford, Connie’s husband, wants to reinvigorate the mines with new technology and is out of touch with nature. Connie sees the beauty of nature and the ugliness of the mines, and feels that living in the mind is not enough.
Exercise 2
- Read the extract and the quotes below
- Note the emotion
- Note the imagery/language used
- Choose one extract – or a line from one – and write your own piece.
Then she wondered, just dimly wondered, why? Why was this necessary? Why had it lifted a great cloud from her and given her peace? Was it real?
Was it real?
Her tormented modern-woman’s brain still had no rest. Was it real? And she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept herself for herself it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.
The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he thinking? She did not know. He was a strange man to her, she did not know him. She must only wait, for she did not dare to break his mysterious stillness. He lay there with his arms round her, his body on hers, his wet body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet not unpeaceful. His very stillness was peaceful.
She knew that, when at last he roused and drew away from her. It was like an abandonment. He drew her dress in the darkness down over her knees and stood a few moments, apparently adjusting his own clothing.
Then he quietly opened the door and went out.
Quotes from Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”
– D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“We fucked a flame into being.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover‘
