Burning Man, page 4
Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,
And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s
Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.
Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash
Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound
Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned
The other voice in a silence of blood, ’neath the noise of the ash.
The house on Walker Street gave him the first view that Lawrence ever owned. In Sons and Lovers, the novel based on his coming of age, he described the view as ‘spread out like a convex cockle-shell’ on the ‘brim of the wide, dark valley’,62 and in a letter to a friend written from Florence in 1926 he gave typically precise directions: ‘Go to Walker St – and stand in front of the third house – and look across at Crich on the left, Underwood in front – High Park woods and Annesley on the right: I lived in that house from the age of 6 to 18, and I know that view better than any in the world.’63 The view included the chimney pots of The Breach below, a sign that the Lawrences were rising in the world, ’Ooray. Rising was Mrs Lawrence’s principal objective, and she ensured that none of her sons would go down the pit. ‘We must all rise into the upper classes!’ she counselled. ‘Upper! Upper! Upper!’64
While Lawrence saw in Eastwood the England of Robin Hood, the coal-blasted earth held for him a biblical beauty. ‘When I was a boy,’ said Paul Morel, the Oedipal hero of Sons and Lovers, ‘I always thought a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night was a pit, with its steam, and its lights, and the burning bank – and I thought the Lord was always at the pit-top.’65 In Sons and Lovers, The Breach became The Bottoms where the Morels lived, and The Bottoms was positioned, like limbo, above the circles of hell: ‘The Bottoms succeeded to Hell Row’, the novel begins.
Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brook-side on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows.66
Lawrence liked to measure his terrain in prepositions: before, behind, between, above, below. Hell Row was beneath The Bottoms, the Erewash was between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, the brook ran under the alder trees, the coal below was brought above by donkeys treading their eternal circle.
‘What was there in the mines that held the boy’s feelings?’ Lawrence later wondered. ‘The darkness, the mystery, the otherworldliness, the peculiar camaraderie, the sort of naked intimacy: men as gods in the underworld, or as elementals.’67 In his 1918 poem ‘Miners’, written after the Minnie Pit Disaster in which 156 colliers lost their lives, Wilfred Owen hears in his ‘whispering hearth’ the moans of ‘the men / Writhing for air’ and sees ‘white bones in the cinder-shard’, and thinks of those ‘that worked dark pits / of war’. As he gazes into the burning coal, the miners and the soldiers become one. Lawrence, who searched all his life for a form of fraternity, also compared the camaraderie of the colliers with that of soldiers in the trenches. When he looked back on the ‘curious, dark intimacy of the mine’, it was as if, he reflected, ‘there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, in which we moved and had our real being’.68 He saw coal as a ‘symbol of something in the soul’ and never lost the sense that his real being belonged to this glossy inner darkness.
But before he romanticised his father as a collier-aesthete, Lawrence despised him as a semi-literate drunk. When Lawrence’s mother, Lydia Beardsall, first met Arthur Lawrence at a dance, he was handsome and graceful and told her that he was a contractor, which was true. Arthur Lawrence was a butty, a form of subcontractor who had charge of a section of the coalface. A butty was paid by the pit owner for the quantity of coal he dug and he in turn paid the wages of the men who worked under his direction, but Lydia understood by ‘contractor’ that Arthur worked at a desk in a collar and shirt and brought back a fixed salary, not that he went down the pit, came home black and was paid weekly by the load. This deception was the source of her lifelong bitterness. Lydia Lawrence was a snobbish and unhappy woman who wrote verse and liked reading; Arthur was a happy traditionalist who loved the intimacy of pub and pit. Their son later learned that for his father the upperworld of women was an uglier and more dangerous place by far than the underworld of men, which had about it a sublime and primitive splendour.
George Orwell, who went down a mine in the 1930s, found that ‘most of the things one imagines in hell are there: heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space’. Bent double in intense temperatures, Arthur Lawrence dug with his pick while the coal dust settled in his eyelids, throat and nostrils. Before even reaching the coalface, he had braved more dangers than most men do in a lifetime: dropped a thousand feet into the bowels of the earth, he crawled through corridors with his tools, cold tea and lunch of bread and lard; the scabs on his spine formed by banging against the roof of the mine were known by the colliers as ‘buttons on the back’. Above his head, supported by wooden props, was what Orwell described as a ‘tolerable-sized mountain’ composed of ‘hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints’ and ‘roots of growing things’.
It was only when he saw naked miners at work that Orwell realised ‘what splendid men’ they were. The miner was ‘a caryatid’, ‘superhuman’, as solid and black as an ‘iron statue’. It was ‘impossible’, said Orwell, not to feel ‘a pang of envy’ for his ‘toughness’. These were men with ‘the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere’. Orwell spoke for Lawrence not only here, but when he described how the work of the miner had forced him to confront his own ‘humiliation’ as an ‘intellectual’. It was only ‘because miners sweat their guts out’ that ‘superior persons’ were able to ‘remain superior’. Where, Orwell asked, would we be without coal? The underworld is as essential to the overworld as the root to the flower. Everything we do involves coal, from ‘crossing the Atlantic’ and ‘baking a loaf to writing a novel’.69
* * *
Little has been made of Lawrence’s sense of the underworld, which formed the backdrop of his youth and worked a seam through his writing. He was always aware of what lay beneath him: in London he lived above tube trains, in Cornwall he lived above tin mines; he lived above sepulchres in Italy and Malta, and kivas in New Mexico. He described Paul Morel, his fictional alter ego in Sons and Lovers, as born into the split between dark and light: when Mrs Morel went into labour, Mr Morel was down the mine, hewing away at a piece of rock that needed to be cleared for the next day’s work. In a passage he later cut from Sons and Lovers, Lawrence described his father’s daily cycle in terms of the Divine Comedy. ‘Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband. He rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from the pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms.’
A sickly child, Lawrence had not been expected to survive. He told Frieda that he had suffered from ‘bronchitis’ since he was two weeks old, and his childhood friend George Neville remembered that Lawrence, aged eight, ‘had that little, troublesome, hacking cough that used to bring his left hand so sharply to his mouth – a cough and an action that he never lost’.70 Lacking the energy for school sports, he read books instead and played with the girls. At home he was also to be found with the women: he liked smelling flowers, darning clothes, trimming hats and helping his sister make rag rugs. So completely did he inhabit the consciousness of the women in his world that reviewers of The White Peacock assumed that its author was female.
The fourth of fifth children, he was baptised David Herbert but known as Bertie or Bert because he refused to answer to his first name. ‘You don’t like the name of David!’ his headmaster thundered across the hall. ‘David is the name of a good and great man.’71 This was the point: the sole member of his own party, Lawrence preferred not to share his identity with another chosen one. It was Bertie’s elder brother Ernest who first bore the burden of their mother’s savage loving. George, her eldest child, took after his father and was therefore irrelevant to Lydia; then came sensitive Ernest, followed by Emily, Bert and Ada. The girls, like George, didn’t matter to Mrs Lawrence because she could not possess their souls and, when Ernest moved to London to work as a clerk, his visits home, in his frock coat and silk hat, were the high points of the month.
Lydia Lawrence was a martyr, and her children worshipped her for being so. She kept an immaculate house on the money left over from her husband’s pay after he had been to the pub, and she gave her children everything they needed to rise upwards. The English class system consisted of the subtlest gradations and Lawrence described his mother, whose own father was an engineer in the Sheerness dockyard with less money than Arthur Lawrence, as middle class. The Beardsalls, Lydia believed, were greatly superior to her husband’s people, and the central myth of Lawrence’s childhood was that his mother not only came from a different world but belonged to a different species; his parents even spoke different languages, his father employing the local dialect and Lydia speaking the King’s English. In his late poem ‘Red Herring’, Lawrence boiled his background down to a playground chant:
The Lawrence family: (back row) Emily, George, Ernest; (front row) Ada, Lydia, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur
My father was a working man
and a collier was he,
at six in the morning they turned him down
and they turned him up for tea
My mother was a superior soul
a superior soul was she,
cut out to play a superior role
in the god-damn bourgeoisie.
We children were the in-betweens
little nondescripts were we,
indoors we called each other you
outside, it was tha and thee.
But time has fled, our parents are dead
we’ve risen in the world all three;
but still we are in-betweens, we tread
between the devil and the deep sad sea.
In legend, the in-betweens – spawn of miscegenation – are always extraordinary and Lawrence was fascinated by hybrid forms: centaurs, satyrs, fauns, plumed serpents and men like King David who were both human and divine. Zeus and Leda created Helen, the most beautiful woman on earth; the father of Jesus was God, and the great god Pan, in whom Lawrence saw an image of himself, was the son of Hermes and a wood nymph.
His parents’ conflict was the story of Lawrence’s life; he internalised it, contained it and examined it from every perspective. His mother was all mind, his father all body; his mother was pure will, his father pure instinct. Having identified entirely with his mother, he then identified entirely with his father; he mined down into the experience of both and explored as no novelist had done before ‘the woe that is in marriage’. ‘Marriage is the great puzzle of our day,’ Lawrence wrote in ‘On Being a Man’. ‘It is our sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.’72 He had no interest in solving it through an understanding of his parents’ personalities. Their battle was not personal but elemental: Arthur Lawrence was Man, Lydia Lawrence was Woman. He did not ‘so much care about,’ Lawrence explained to Edward Garnett, ‘what the woman feels – in the ordinary usage of the word’. He cared only about ‘what the woman is … inhumanly, physiologically, materially … what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will)’.73 Accordingly, there was only one marriage for D. H. Lawrence, and that was between heaven and hell. His mother moved upwards while his father went down, and she took her children with her. ‘O I was born low and inferior’, Lawrence wrote in ‘The Saddest Day’,
but shining up beyond
I saw the whole superior
world shine like the promised land.
So up I started climbing
to join the folks on high,
but when at last I got there
I had to sit down and cry.
While Lawrence lived inside his parents’ conflict, it would be, wrote Jessie Chambers, ‘a great error to suppose that his early life was unhappy’.74 His childhood was happy, but with a worm at its heart. May, Jessie’s sister, who sometimes ate her tea with the Lawrences, described the happiness and unhappiness as coexisting. The Walker Street parlour would be filled with ‘banter and laughter’, she recalled, until Arthur Lawrence arrived. She then ‘felt Bert draw himself together’,
humping himself up and bending his head over his plate. When the father talked to me, the son twitched my dress or nudged me. He hardly answered when his father spoke to him. His mother kept her eyes down and spoke only in monosyllables. But the father talked, and ate and handled the food as the man who paid for it all. He chatted amiably with me, and his young daughter told of some prank that made us laugh. But his son nudged me so hard I felt I was misbehaving. There was such a hateful feeling coming from Bert that I was almost frightened. It was as if Prince Charming had turned into a toad.
The tension climaxed when Arthur Lawrence poured his tea into his saucer to cool it down before slurping it up, at which point the children stifled their giggles. When Arthur left the room, the ‘gaiety returned’. ‘He hates his father,’ Mrs Lawrence would announce, with such pride and regularity, that her son’s hatred became his badge of honour. ‘I tried to find a word to fit Bert’s attitude,’ May Chambers continued, ‘and discovered it was vengeful.’ Arthur Lawrence ignored the ‘jagged waves of hate and loathing’ emanating from his son but, said May Chambers, ‘the queer behaviour of mother and son made me tremble internally till I couldn’t swallow my food’.75
Raised in a violent family, Lawrence became a violent husband. His father beat his mother and when Lawrence was fifteen his father’s brother, who lived a mile away, killed his son with a kitchen pot and was found guilty of manslaughter. There was no evidence during these hellish meals in Walker Street that Bert revered his father’s glossy underworld or believed that the mines were where he had his real being, and Paul Morel prays every night to the Lord to ‘let my father die’. Years later, when he regretted his treatment of his father, Lawrence described the control his mother had wielded over the home, suggesting that it was Lydia rather than Arthur who had inflicted the worst damage. The nights when her husband was in the pub, Lydia Lawrence ‘would gather the children in a row’ where they sat ‘quaking’ in anticipation of his return. While they waited, she ‘would picture his shortcomings blacker and blacker to their childish horror’.
At last the father would come in softly, taking off his shoes, hoping to escape unnoticed to bed, but that was never allowed him. She would burst out upon him, reviling him for a drunken sot, a good-for-nothing father. She would turn to the whimpering children and ask them if they were not disgusted with such a father. He would look at the row of frightened children, and say: ‘Never mind, my duckies, you needna be afraid of me. I’ll do ye no harm.’76
Jessie Chambers said that Walker Street had a tension unlike anything she had known before. It was as though ‘something unusual might happen at any minute. It was somehow exciting, yet it made me feel a little sick … happenings there had sharp edges and a dramatic quality that made them stand out in one’s memory.’ This ‘strangely vibrating atmosphere’ was the result of ‘the strong emotional tension between mother and son, and in a directly contrary sense, between husband and wife, and father and son’.77
In Lawrence’s fiction, which is filled with the packing of bags and the slamming of doors, the waves of wrath tend to overwhelm those of love. Leaving home became his great subject, in some ways his only subject. After Lawrence left his father’s house, he made it a policy never to have a home of his own; he perched instead on the highest possible branch of the highest possible tree. Then, having recreated on his perch the strangely vibrating atmosphere of Walker Street, he flew to another branch as soon as he possibly could.
The Walker Street parlour was furnished with books, pictures and a piano, making it an unusual room for a collier’s family. Included among the books were the twenty-two green-bound volumes of the International Library of Famous Literature edited by Richard Garnett, father of Edward Garnett. The volumes were a gift from Ernest and thus regarded in the family ‘with reverence amounting to awe’.78 Here Lawrence discovered American literature in the form of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, extracts from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (‘Little Woman’ was the name Lawrence gave his mother) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. If the mining town was composed of young enthusiasts singing Mendelssohn duets and reading the Divine Comedy, this was partly thanks to Lydia Lawrence’s model of plain living and high thinking. Without her backing, Lawrence would not have won the scholarship to Nottingham High School which ensured that, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, his education was as good as that of any middle-class boy.
