D. H. Lawrence

Biography

In 1960 the Old Bailey in London heard the case against Penguin Books, which had published without cuts a novel that its author had finished thirty-two years earlier. The jury, nine men and three women, returned a verdict of “not guilty” on 2 November. By then Lawrence had been dead for thirty years.

He was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth child in the family. His father, Arthur Lawrence, a barely literate miner, wanted his sons to go down the pit. His mother, Lydia, a former pupil-teacher who had been obliged to work in a lace factory because of the family’s money troubles, was determined on something else, at least in David’s case. The strained relations between his parents became the raw material of his early work. In 1898 he became the first local pupil to win a county council scholarship to Nottingham High School; he left in 1901 and worked for three months as a clerk at a surgical appliances factory, until a severe bout of pneumonia ended that job.

From 1902 to 1906 he was a pupil-teacher at the British School in Eastwood, and in 1908 he received a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham. His first poems and stories date from those years. At the end of 1907 a story won him a competition run by a local newspaper. In the autumn of 1908 he went to London and taught at a school in Croydon. Jessie Chambers, a friend from his youth, sent his poems to Ford Madox Ford, editor of The English Review, who commissioned the story “Odour of Chrysanthemums”. His first novel, “The White Peacock”, came out in 1910. In November 1911 Lawrence had pneumonia again and, once recovered, gave up teaching for literature.

In March 1912 he met Frieda Weekley, née von Richthofen. She was six years older, married to his former professor, and had three children. They left together: first to Metz, where Lawrence was arrested as a suspected British spy and released only after Frieda’s father intervened, then to a village near Munich. From there they walked across the Alps to Italy. The journey is reflected in the essays “Twilight in Italy”. In Italy he finished “Sons and Lovers”: Edward Garnett, a publisher’s reader, at the request of the weary author cut about a hundred pages from the manuscript. The novel appeared in 1913. They returned to England and were married on 13 July 1914.

The war broke up the couple’s life. “The Rainbow” was published in September 1915 and banned in November, and by court order the copies were destroyed. Frieda was German, Lawrence made no secret of his contempt for militarism, and in Cornwall, where they lived at Zennor, they were suspected of signalling to German submarines. At the end of 1917 they were given three days to leave Cornwall. He later described this in an autobiographical chapter of the novel “Kangaroo”. “Women in Love” was finished in 1917 but appeared only in 1920, in a private edition in New York.

In November 1919 Lawrence left England for good, returning only twice, briefly. He called these years a “savage pilgrimage”. Italy came first: the Abruzzo, Capri, Taormina in Sicily. Then Ceylon and Australia, where with a local writer, Mollie Skinner, he wrote “The Boy in the Bush”, and at Thirroul he finished “Kangaroo”. In September 1922 they reached the United States and settled in Taos, New Mexico. He acquired the Kiowa Ranch in 1924 from Mabel Dodge Luhan in exchange for the manuscript of “Sons and Lovers”. From America came “Studies in Classic American Literature” (1923) and the essays “Mornings in Mexico”. “The Lost Girl” won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

In March 1925 he fell gravely ill in Mexico, and the diagnosis obliged him to return to Europe. He then lived mostly in a villa near Florence. There he wrote “The Virgin and the Gypsy” and several versions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”: the story of an aristocrat and her gamekeeper, told in language the author thought honest. The novel appeared in 1928 in a private edition in Florence, then in Paris. Lawrence answered the advocates of censorship with poems (“Pansies” and “Nettles”) and a tract on pornography and obscenity. In the spring of 1927 he had visited Etruscan tombs with the artist Earl Brewster, and the result was “Sketches of Etruscan Places”, which sets the past against Mussolini’s fascism.

In his last years Lawrence returned in earnest to painting. In 1929 his pictures were shown at the Warren Gallery in London; about thirteen thousand people visited the exhibition. The Daily Express called one of the works frankly indecent, while Gwen John, by contrast, praised “The Finding of Moses” and “Red Willow Trees”. After a complaint the police seized thirteen of the twenty-five paintings. He was able to recover them only by promising never to exhibit them in England again.

He wrote to the end, even as his health failed: poems, reviews, essays, and also “Apocalypse”.

Lawrence died on 2 March 1930 in Vence, in the south of France, at the Villa Robermond, after being discharged from a sanatorium. Frieda commissioned a headstone with a mosaic of the phoenix, his adopted emblem. She later settled on the ranch at Taos with Angelo Ravagli. According to the account of 1935, Ravagli was to carry the ashes there, but on boarding the ship learned that duty would be charged and scattered them over the Mediterranean; dust and earth are interred in the chapel on the ranch.