Back to the  Beginning: Re-Discovering England’s D. H. Lawrence

by Ross Robins

As my colleagues in English can attest, one of the surprising things about literary study is that the line between literature and biography eventually disappears. There’s a point at which our reading of an author sends us to the most personal material we can find — and the more of it, the better. Letters, memoirs, secret diaries: all of it becomes intensely, strangely interesting as we seek insights into the creative mind. Each new detail leads to a question, and then to another detail, in an apparently endless process of discovery. New books promise new understanding, and in the end the writers and their work become one and the same thing.

I dedicated most of my pre-Cate years — and there were a lot of them — to the study of the English writer D. H. Lawrence. For more than a decade I followed every lead on his remarkable career, poring over his poems and stories and learning everything I could about the man himself. More than anybody else, he was the one who made language sing for me, and his accounts of the emotional life of ordinary men and women made the whole world exciting and accessible. No detail of Lawrence’s own life was too small, too remote, if it led me closer to solving the mystery of his greatness! If at any time in the 1980s you’d asked me what the writer himself had been doing on a particular day in, say, August 1912, I probably could have told you. I no longer read him as consistently as I did; I just carry him around in spirit.

Unfortunately, in all those years of relentless study, I never got around to seeing firsthand the English coal-mining village where Lawrence grew up, and where most of his work is set. This past summer, however, I actually found myself climbing the cobblestone streets of the old town in the Midlands where I’d spent so many imagined hours, winding my way up to the red brick row-house where Lawrence was born. I had to shake myself as I looked up at the plaque over the low door and then peered through the window. Could it really be that I’d managed to get myself to this most humble of beginnings? with some help from the McBean Fund, in fact I had.

Lawrence was the freakishly intuitive product of an unusual marriage — a cultured, controlling mother and an illiterate, hard-drinking father — and from the very start he was a kind of outcast. He had very little interest in the boyhood games of the time, preferring a domestic life and the company of girls, and he was definitely unsuited for the hard work of the coal mines that was expected to be his fate. He began writing almost as soon as he could hold a pen, and by the time he was 25 it was impossible for the literary establishment to overlook him. He’d already produced some of the most perceptive stories ever written — magical pieces about marriage and family life — and he’d even become something of a pet in the pre-war world: the precocious kid from the mining country who had a finely- tuned ear for language and uncanny insight into relationships.

All of that fuss over him started to make sense to me as I walked around Eastwood, which lies on the eastern slopes of the Peak District where coal deposits are abundant. The countryside back then was dotted with the machinery of the mines: large spinning wheels sending cages of men deep under ground to work in tunnels so shallow the men couldn’t stand in them. Lawrence deplored the effect of industry on both the farmlands and the families who’d grown up on them; he knew and loved every detail of the natural landscape, and much of his writing documents the collision of the old farming life with the new mechanized one.

  

Although the mines are gone now and the town has grown, old Eastwood is still there to be found, row-houses and all. Nottingham Road is still the only thoroughfare — still the only way to get to Nottingham — and the narrow streets leading down to the river are still bound by red brick monoliths. Every town in those Midland foothills has a similar set of buildings; they were all constructed by the mining bosses to shelter their “pit men” 150 years ago. Each unit has a little yard and a little shed in back, to accommodate the life that spilled out of the “cottage,” and at the top of some rows it’s still possible to see the original pair of outhouses for the families who lived there. one for the men, one for the women.

No wonder Lawrence was starry- eyed as he found himself courted by rival literary camps in London just before the war. A true original, he’d anticipated many of the new developments in writing as he described the effect of industry on the Victorian working class. Nobody had ever gotten closer to capturing life as it feels in the flesh, physically and emotionally; nobody had ever placed men and women so firmly in the visceral world with their nobility intact. with very little at stake and with an extraordinary ability to sense the deep currents of electric attraction between people, he took a fresh look at love and family life, dragging literature by the hair into a new century.
 

Ross Robins is the O. Curtis Crawford Teaching Chair and English Department Chair.