DH Lawrence

(1885–1930)

The Daughter-in-Law by DH Lawrence

Theatr Clwyd, 1995

“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”

Sigmund Freud

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on 11 September 1885, the third son and fourth child in a family of five. His father, a miner at nearby Brinsley Colliery, was a ‘buttyman’ whose wages fluctuated with the output of the group of men under his charge. Although good-hearted, he was not overly generous and the indignity of the family’s financial poverty was to prove a constant source of bitterness to the young Lawrence – as was the impression of need given out by his mother, who had been used to better things.

Lydia Lawrence, née Beardsall, had married Arthur Lawrence in 1875, against her family’s wishes, and possibly on the rebound. A small, bright, vigorous woman, she was well-read, accomplished, and soon came to realise that she had married, in haste, beneath her. Presumably it had been the attraction of opposites. She was educated, a reader and a teacher. He lived his life among miners. He liked a drink; she was puritanical. Arthur Lawrence, although rugged, dark and attractive, was fundamentally a working man of his time who couldn’t have lived up to her standards even if he had wanted to. In Lawrence’s words, his mother insisted on making “a tragedy out of what was only a nuisance”.

But if the parents’ relationship suffered because they had so little in common, Lydia sublimated her disappointment by living for her sons. She was determined to provide the best education she could for them in order to prevent them following their father down the mine or into the pub. The eldest, George, went on to become a textile engineer. Ernest, seven years older than Lawrence and their mother’s first favourite, was held up as a model to other pupils by his headmaster. Lawrence himself was compared unfavourably to him when he first started at Beauvale Board School in 1893, not least because, at seven, he was two years older than the rest of the intake and, unlike his robust brother, had always been skinny and frail with a weak chest.

But his brain was good, and with his mother’s persistent encouragement he was soon making up for lost time. In 1898 Bert, as he insisted on being called buy his intimates, won a c ounty scholarship to Nottingham High School. The grant barely covered his tuition fees and travelling expenses but Lydia strove to economise for his sake. For a time he eked out his finds by becoming a pupil-teacher at the British School in his home town, then in 1904 he came top out of the whole of England and Wales in a King’s Scholarship examination which earned him a free place at a teacher training college.

Lawrence was a typical bright adolescent. He reacted badly to criticism and was taunted for his sensitivity by his schoolfellows who called him “mardarse”. Debarred from games by his physical shortcomings, a good scholar and a bad mixer, he made few male friends at school but got on very well with girls, being particularly drawn towards those who were good-looking and of a vivacious disposition. But he reserved his most intense devotion for his mother.

He gave her the love she couldn’t get from her husband and, as he was the weakest of her brood, she reciprocated his feelings with equal force. On the death of his brother Ernest from pneumonia in 1901, the young Lawrence became the sole focus of her attention, and after he contracted the same illness himself a few weeks later, had it not been for Lydia’s unstinting ministrations he too would soon have followed Ernest to the New Eastwood cemetery.

On his recovery, Lawrence began to spend increasing amounts of his time at Haggs Farm, the home of the Chambers family, a few miles north of the village. Mrs Chambers was a friend of Lydia’s from the days when they were neighbours at the Breach in Eastwood, and Bert became like one of the family. He would unselfconsciously pitch in to help with menial tasks about the house, while his knowledge and enthusiasm for nature made their frequent excursions into the surrounding woods and fields a source of education and pleasure for them all. It was Lawrence who led the expedition to Skegness to give the Chambers children their first look at the sea. “No task seemed dull or monotonous to him,” Jessie Chambers recalled later, for he “brought such vitality to the doing that he transformed it into something creative.”

Jessie, a year younger than Lawrence, shared his love of literature. Together they would devour volumes from the Mechanics’ Institute library, and it was their closeness which caused not only Lawrence’s mother but Lawrence himself much anguish over the next few years. On Lydia’s side it was jealousy pure and simple; on his, the dilemma of being torn between two women. But his sensitivity to others’ feelings could be hurtfully selective: “You see,” Lawrence told Jessie after they had read Coriolanus together, “it’s the mother who counts, the wife hardly at all. The mother is everything to him.”

At Easter 1905 Lawrence began writing the novel that would become The White Peacock. He had already made stories and poems out of incidents he and Jessie had shared together, and as this latest manuscript grew, he sought her views on it as he had on the others. But while he valued her mind, he could not aspire to her body. He was all too aware of “the purely animal side” in himself but Jessie, probably because she had more to lose, shrank back from taking the ultimate step.

So he turned his attentions elsewhere. Now studying at Nottingham University College, Lawrence became attracted to a fellow student, a “big, dark laughing girl” called Louie Burrows whom he had known in Eastwood as one of ‘the Pagans’, the group of like-minded young people Lawrence had gathered around him. In a letter to Jessie disingenuously praising her for her “nun-like” qualities, he mentioned this new attachment: “You must let me marry a woman I can kiss and embrace and make the mother of my children.”

Although his own mother in Eastwood continued to frustrate his development, in 1908, following a move to Davidson Road School in Croydon, Lawrence was further from her stifling influence and so able to adopt a new perspective. There were brief affairs with fellow teachers Agnes Holt and Helen Corke, both of whom shared an interest in his writing, but neither of whom were willing to join him on his quest for sexual experience. Jessie, from whom he could keep no secrets, was forced into delivering an ultimatum – complete union or a complete break. “Then I am afraid it must be nothing,” Lawrence replied and, explaining this decision to a friend later, said, “I should have had too easy a life, nearly everything my own way, and my genius would have been destroyed.”

His mother never lived to see that genius flower. Lydia Lawrence developed cancer in 1910, and her son Bert travelled back up to Eastwood from Croydon every other weekend to tend her. Then on 3 December, he abruptly proposed to Louie Burrows. In a letter to jessie Chambers he confesses he hadn’t meant to, but that now it was done, he would “stick to it”. Lydia reluctantly agreed to the marriage, but died before the year was out.

Lawrence sank into depression and ill health. He was adrift – “a leaf blown in the wind”. Late in 1911 he just as suddenly broke off his engagement claiming Louie was too ‘churchy’ for him, and not at all the headlong passionate women he was seeking. He had sent the manuscript of Sons and Lovers to Jessie for her comments, and although she dutifully made notes on it, she refused to discuss it with him, feeling he had traduced her utterly in the character of Miriam. They saw each other briefly, for the last time, in April 1912.

It was symbolic of the end of his association with Eastwood. On Friday 3 May he left England for Germany with Frieda Weekley, the wife of a lecturer at Nottingham University.

FRIEDA

When DH Lawrence first met Frieda Weekley, he was a man at the crossroads. His beloved mother had recently died, he had just broken off his engagement with Louie Burrows, and terminated an even longer relationship with Jessie Chambers. He had given up his teaching job in Croydon due to ill health, and he was further cast down at the failure of his first novel, The White Peacock.

Frieda, too, was looking for a change. Six years Lawrence’s senior, she was the daughter of the Baron von Richthofen of Metz, Germany, and a distant cousin of the First World War flying ace. In 1899 she had married Ernest Weekley, a Lektor at the University of Freiburg, whose work subsequently brought them to England. There, they had a son and two daughters, but Frieda found life in Nottingham dull: her outlook was emancipated and unconventional, the very opposite of her husband’s.

One April day in 1912, Lawrence arrived at the Weekleys’ house to discuss the possibility of becoming an English teacher at a German university. Frieda describes him on first sight as “A long thin figure, quick straight legs, light, sure movements.” He told her he was through with women and they discussed Oedipus while her children played on the lawn. Within half an hour, Lawrence later admitted to a friend, they were in bed together. Afterwards, he wrote to tell her she was “the most wonderful woman in all England”. She wrote back: “You don’t know many women in England, how do you know?”

But she quickly realised that here was a man on the same wavelength as herself. “From the first he saw through me like a glass, saw how hard I was trying to keep up a cheerful front. I thought it was so despicable and unproud and unclean to be miserable, bit he saw through my hard bright shell.”

Their next meeting took place in Derbyshire. As Lawrence kept the little girls engrossed floating paper boats down a stream, Frieda realised she loved him: “He had touched a new tenderness in me.” Shortly afterwards, on 3 May, she left her son with his father, delivered the two girls to their grandparents’ house in London, and left for the continent with Lawrence. They had known each other barely six weeks.

They married in Kensington Register Office on 13 July 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together.

PS

Can’t see what people see in him. Very dry and wordy. The Chatterley book is one of the few so-called classics I’ve waded through, more to see what all the fuss was about than anything else, and like everyone else who’s done that for the same reason, I got very little out of it.

But look how sensitive I tried to be to the women he dallied with: “Jessie, probably because she had more to lose, shrank back from taking the ultimate step.” You could see how much I despised him. Luckily there’s a trendy little internet word to describe the kind of man I was then and probably still am: simp. But never fear; it never works, and we never learn.