Love, marriage and Lawrence
STRAINED relations between his parents resulted in love and marriage becoming central to DH Lawrence’s work.
The Brangwen sisters muse about marriage at the opening of Lawrence’s novel Women In Love. Ursula wonders if “it need be an experience?”. It’s “bound to be an experience of some sort,” Gudrun feels. “Not really,” Ursula responds. “More likely to be the end of experience.”
If she “were tempted”, Ursula would “marry like a shot”. But she’s “only tempted not to”. How “strong the temptation is, not to!” Gudrun cries. They laugh, although “in their hearts they were frightened”.
Lawrence’s essay, A Propos Of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, an “afterthought” to his daring novel, does little to allay such fears. Love has become a “counterfeit feeling,” Lawrence claims. However, “Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle.”
It “lashes out against counterfeit emotion” and “false love”.
“Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love” occurred when it lost the “magical connection” we all had with the pagan rhythm of the year and became a “merely personal feeling”. Love’s a “poor blossom” plucked from “the tree of Life” but we expect it “to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table”, he laments.
“Marriage is the clue to human life,” Lawrence insists. It’s “the secret music of life”. And, as “blood is our deepest consciousness”, it’s by the conjunction of blood that marriage is “truly marriage”.
“Sex is the great unifier,” he says. We see this everywhere in Lawrence.
A Propos concludes with a wisecrack. Among “storms of vituperation” over Lady C, “an American woman” condemned Sir Clifford Chatterley and Oliver
Mellors... ”Well, one of them was a brainy vamp, and the other was a sexual moron, so I’m afraid Connie had a poor choice – as usual!”
100 years ago, on December 3, 1921, Lawrence complained to Jan Juta about the “silly jibberjabber” of “piffling pleasant people” in Taormina. The Corsa’s just “junk shops”. If only Etna would pour “60,000,000,000 tons of boiling lava on the place and cauterise it away”. On December 4 ,he thanks Mabel Sterne for sending a history of psychoanalysis. Unaware that wealthy, unstable Mabel spends fortunes on “shrinks”, Lawrence lambasts “therapy – doctors, healers, and all the rest”, cursing all neurotics as “devils” better “dead”. On December 7, he advises agent Curtis Brown he’s sending “true” short story Samson And Delilah, along with seven others (we’ll investigate this strange tale next week).