Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (68 page)

In later life, Lawrence had no doubt on the matter: institutional education kills. In
The Rainbow
he is eloquent about the ‘marsh stagnancy’ of universities. Ursula Brangwen finds in her course at Nottingham that ‘the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naïveté of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer’s shop, and one bought an equipment for an examination.’ The well-equipped Lawrence sailed through his exams. More importantly, at the same period, 1907, he published his first short story, ‘A Prelude’ – submitted under the name ‘Jessie Chambers’.

Now qualified, Lawrence left home to take up a teaching post in far-off Croydon. He was good in the classroom and had affairs with fellow teachers – all stored away for later fictional use. In his spare time he was reading widely in philosophy and religion, forming an idiosyncratic worldview. Faithful Jessie again proved her usefulness by posting some of his work to the country’s leading literary magazine, the
English Review
. Ford Madox Hueffer recognised its quality and, having seen the manuscript of
The White Peacock
, helped secure publication for the novel with Heinemann.

The years 1910 to 1911 saw crisis and breakthrough. His mother fell ill with cancer. In
Sons and Lovers
, which he began writing at this time, Gertrude Morel is killed – humanely but graphically – by her son. Lydia Lawrence died naturally, but for her son, traumatically – more so since part of him wanted her death. Shortly afterwards, he became briefly engaged to a woman he had known at college. In winter 1911, his lungs again collapsed – dangerously. In his convalescence he dashed off
The Trespasser
for a new patron, Edward Garnett at Duckworth publishers. School teaching was now no longer an option. His near-death illness had branded him an infectious danger to the young (a charge which would recur, in other guises, throughout his life). He would now be an author, or nothing. As an author he had, one of Duckworth’s advisers said, ‘every possible fault’ and ‘genius’. The title pages of his fiction introduced what would be his public name from now on. He hated his birth-names. Baptism, like Resurrection, was, he had decided, something to be Lawrentianised. He would be ‘D. H.’ to the world and ‘Lorenzo’ to his intimates.

Lawrence had resolved to travel and consulted a professor he had known at Nottingham for advice and addresses. Ernest Weekley was a Germanist and an etymologist. His wife, Frieda, born von Richthofen, was ten years younger than her husband and six years older than Lawrence. They had three children. At first sight almost, Lawrence and Frieda fell in love, and a few months later eloped. It meant the scandal of divorce and painful separation for Frieda from her children. There was no question who were the guilty parties – except, of course, that Lawrence did not see it as guilt. In Europe, with Frieda now beside him, he wrote ‘Paul Morel’ (as
Sons and Lovers
was called). Heinemann found the sex too hot for their list but Duckworth accepted the novel and published it in 1913 to strong reviews and modest sales. Lawrence was, at the same time, writing plays, essays and – most successfully – short stories, and forming long-lasting literary friendships: most significantly with Middleton Murry and his partner, Katherine Mansfield.

Lawrence’s growth as a creative writer over these years was amazing. He was embarking on the project which would eventually see print as
The Rainbow
and its sequel,
Women in Love
(called conjointly, in their earlier form, ‘The Sisters’). He forged a new, hypersensitive ‘feminine’ technique for the project. Publishers, encouraged by the reception of
Sons and Lovers
, had taken notice of him and new friends and patrons were talking him up. He and Frieda had married four months before the outbreak of war. Lawrence was in no immediate danger of call-up – Kitchener did not need invalids, yet. But they would be confined to England for the duration of hostilities and, given Frieda’s nationality (the flying ace, the ‘Red Baron’, Manfred von Richthofen, was a distant relative), they would also be hard up. Lawrence’s response was to withdraw into the shelter of a utopian community: he called his
‘commune’ by the ancient Hebrew name (borrowed from one of his new literary friends, S.S. Koteliansky) ‘Rananim’. Primitive Teutonic elements were mixed in, most spectacularly the blood-mixing
Blutbrüderschaft
immortalised in the wrestling scene between Birkin and Crich in
Women in Love
. Rananim was set up in coastal Cornwall where, in one of the more comical episodes in a very uncomical era, he and Frieda were accused of signalling to U-boats with semaphoric underclothes on their washing line. Persecution as spies coincided with Lawrence’s prosecution as a pornographer when
The Rainbow
(1915), his finest novel to date, was confiscated and banned in September 1915. There was no great mobilisation of support from the enlightened – wartime was not propitious for the assertion of literary freedoms. Instead, his publisher, Methuen, meekly took their medicine.

Lawrence was not meek, however, and forged ahead with
Women in Love
, whose manuscript was everywhere turned down. The novel was seen as dangerously unpatriotic. In its published form Lawrence would add, on the last page, what looked like sympathy for the Kaiser and his reported comment: ‘Ich habe es nicht gewollt’ (I didn’t want it). For Lawrence all this was proof that the tree of life, Ygdrassil, was dead in England. Vitality must be found elsewhere. It got worse. Following the Universal Conscription Act in 1917, as the war looked very grim for the allies, Lawrence was called up for a medical. Clearly unfit to serve in any capacity, he suffered the indignity of the digital-anal violation he later described, with undiminished fury, in ‘The Nightmare’ section of
Kangaroo.

With the war over, and as soon as their passports arrived, the Lawrences took what would be a permanent farewell from his home country. He left, as a parting present,
Women in Love
: finally publishable, not yet appreciated. The remainder of his life was a pilgrimage in search of sun, elemental contact, or simply motility for the sake of moving (‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move’ opens his finest travel book,
Sea and Sardinia
, 1921). Health was another motive force. No word, certainly not ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’, frightened him as much as ‘tuberculosis’. Whatever his physicians said, he persisted in calling his chronic, ever worsening condition ‘bronchials’. The Lawrences voyaged and journeyed to and through Italy, Mexico, New Mexico, Australasia, Ceylon and the US. Novels, like
Kangaroo
, were hurled off in weeks not months. He was ever alert to the appeal of primitivism. But his ‘eye’ for small scenic detail is unrivalled among novelists. Botanists, zoologists and ornithologists might envy that eye. As David Ellis notes: ‘one critic has worked out that in his first novel,
The White Peacock
, 145 different trees, shrubs or plants are identified and 40 different kinds of birds.’

Lawrence was, as ever, dependent on rich patrons. The kindest, richest and most useful was Mabel Dodge Luhan, who gave the Lawrences the run (and eventually
the title deeds) of her Kiowa Ranch, in Taos. Lawrence’s ashes now repose there, reportedly. In his last phase, during travels to primitive places, he largely switched from earthy men heroes to airy women heroines (it is
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, not ‘The Gamekeeper’s Mistress’). In 1925, while reading aloud his long short story about a magnificent stallion and his female rider,
St Mawr,
he spat up a gob of blood. The dreaded word was no longer avoidable, but such was his formidable vitality that he kept death at bay, defying the predictions of his doctors, for five more years.

Lawrence and Frieda returned to Tuscany. His last years saw the completion, after three drafts, of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
– his last English novel. Its plea for new, ‘hygienic’ sexuality was the more urgent given its author’s now years’ long impotence. Lawrence’s fiction is at its most interesting when he weaves the conflicting elements of religion and sex. Awaiting death, he produced his Gospel of St Lorenzo, ‘The Escaped Cock’, later retitled ‘The Man Who Died’. The first part of the story fantasises Christ (never named, and distinctly Lawrentian) coming back to life in the tomb where his corpse has been laid. No miracle, he has been ‘taken down too early’. An Aesopian prelude, which gives the piece its first title, describes a ‘dandy’ cockerel whose vital energies are tethered by the peasant (clearly Italian) who owns him. It escapes as Christ rolls away the rock from his tomb.

Throughout life, the Eastwood lad in Lawrence had loved jokes about ‘cocks’. His first work is called the ‘white peacock’ because a man’s cock is the only part of the body which normally never sees the sun, even when he pees. It is the same naughtiness that led him to call the second draft of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’. He had, all his life, been fascinated by one of the central paradoxes of the New Testament. When Christ is resurrected – not as a spirit but in the
flesh
(as will be all his followers) – what are the carnal implications? In the full version of ‘The Man Who Died’, the man goes on, after resurrection, to lose his virginity to a prophetess of Osiris. Both partners in the congress are religio-sexually fulfilled by their act. The story concludes with the ‘Man’ rowing away from the Temple where his flesh has truly ‘risen’:

The man who had died rowed slowly on, with the current, and laughed to himself: ‘I have sowed the seed of my life and my resurrection, and put my touch forever upon the choice woman of this day, and I carry her perfume in my flesh like essence of roses. She is dear to me in the middle of my being. But the gold and flowing serpent is coiling up again, to sleep at the root of my tree.’

‘So let the boat carry me. To-morrow is another day.’

As Anthony Burgess notes,
Gone with the Wind
ends with the same truism. There were, alas, very few days remaining for D. H. Lawrence.

‘King of the Pulps.’

If writing fiction were an Olympic event, the smart money would be on Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones. ‘Henry James’ throws back a peculiarly unhelpful echo in this context. In full flow, in the 1930s, the heyday of the pulp magazines, HBJ had four typewriters rattling away on his desk, a dozen
noms de plume
, a regular annual output of a million words, and he clocked up a lifetime score of some 1,500 magazine stories and close on a hundred novels. No one will ever know precisely because no one can see any good reason for exhuming and counting the stuff.

There were, of course, other production-line factories producing pulp: the Tom Swift franchise in the US, or Sexton Blake in the UK. But HBJ was a one-man factory – hence his kingly title. His name developed brand loyalty over the decades and he was paid well above the hack-rates of literary legend. As his biographer, Peter Ruber records: ‘During the height of the Great Depression, when even Bedford-Jones experienced setbacks and declining word rates, the editor of
Liberty
Magazine offered him a salary of $25,000 a year if he would write exclusively for them. He turned it down with a laugh. He was accustomed to earning $60,000 or more per year, which he needed to support his lifestyle, his family, several residences across the country, his book and stamp collecting. Anecdotes gathered around HBJ’s writing prowess: for example, ‘Henry can’t come to the phone,’ his wife is reported to have said on one occasion, ‘He’s working on a novel.’ ‘I’ll hold on until he’s finished,’ replies the caller. Ironic by nature, HBJ formally ceded his ‘royal’ title to Erle Stanley Gardner in March 1933, on receiving a complimentary copy of the other author’s first Perry Mason adventure,
The Case of the Velvet Claws
. The two men went on to be close friends.

Often dismissed as the poor man’s Edgar Rice Burroughs (which is unfair), what HBJ most obviously aspired to be was the Alexandre Dumas of his day. Dumas, of course, favoured the factory system and, much to the chagrin of his ‘ghost’ Auguste Maquet, he gave no literary credit to his assistant, who had to wait for a 2010 film (
L’Autre Dumas
) to make his case. Dumas once wrote a novel in three days for a bet.
HBJ did likewise, most days of the working week, for his living. Can one admire a writer who performs at this breakneck rate for anything other than his literary athleticism? Those who have read widely in HBJ’s pulpy corpus (there is no disgrace in having read only a small portion of it) have a high regard, as do I, for
D’Artagnan
(1928), one of his many Dumas
hommages
. The
faux
-scholarly preface conveys the slyness of HBJ, writing at his best and gently mocking his genre:

This story augments and incorporates without alteration a fragmentary manuscript whose handwriting has been identified as that of Alexandre Dumas, and as such authenticated by Victor Lemasle, the well known expert of Paris. So far as can be learned, it has remained unpublished hitherto … The publisher, who is the owner of the manuscript in question, is of course fully informed as to what portion of this novel is from the pen of Dumas, and what from the typewriter of

H. Bedford-Jones.

Ann Arbor, April 1, 1928

Had he stuck to one line of pulp, Ruber believes, HBJ would be better regarded than he is today – in the Rider Haggard class, perhaps. But he was too versatile for his own good as regards literary reputation. A random selection of his titles will give an idea of his range: