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David Herbert Lawrence, the son of Arthur Lawrence, a miner, was born in Eastwood near Nottingham on 11th September, 1885. His father was barely literate, but his mother, Lydia Lawrence, was better educated and was determined that David and his brothers should not become miners.

After attending a local board school, David won a scholarship to Nottingham High School. He left at sixteen and found work as a clerk with a firm producing surgical goods. In 1902 he left his office job and became a pupil-teacher at a school in Eastwood. During the three years teaching miner's children, Lawrence saved enough money to attend Nottingham University College.

In 1908 Lawrence qualified as a teacher and found employment at Davidson Road School in Croydon. The following year he had some of his poems published in The English Review. The editor of the journal, Ford Madox Hueffer, also helped Lawrence to have his first novel, The White Peacock, published.

When Lawrence nearly died of pneumonia in 1911, he was advised to give up teaching. He now decided to become a full-time writer. The next couple of years saw the publication of The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and Lovers (1913). After Lawrence met Frieda von Richthofen, the German wife of his old professor at Nottingham, the couple eloped to Europe.

In 1914 the couple returned to England. On the outbreak of the First World War the authorities became concerned that Frieda was a spy. The couple settled at Zennor in Cornwall, local people reported that the Lawrences were using the clothes hanging on their washing line to send coded messages to German U-boats. After searching their cottage, the authorities forced the Lawrences to leave the area.

Lawrence was also having problems with the authorities over his writing. His novel, The Rainbow (1915), was prosecuted for obscenity by the Public Morality Council. Lawrence was furious when his publisher decided to withdraw the book from sale.

Lawrence, who was opposed to the war, was twice called up for military service but was rejected on health grounds. He caught influenza during the pandemic in November 1918, and once again he nearly died. It was not until a year later that he was fit enough to leave England.

Diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis, Lawrence went to live in Sicily. Over the next few years he also spent time in Australia, North America and Mexico. This included a stay in Taos with Mabel Dodge, a wealthy American. Novels published during this period included Women in Love (1920), Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926). He also wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover but unable to find a publisher, he had it printed privately in Italy.

His health continued to decline and in February 1930, entered a sanatorium in France where he was visited by friends from England, including H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. David Herbert Lawrence died of tuberculosis on 2nd March, 1930.

 

 

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D. H. Lawrence

 

 

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(1) D. H. Lawrence, The Manchester Guardian (18th August, 1914)

The Reservists were leaving for London by the nine o'clock train. They were young men, some of them drunk. There was one bawling and brawling before the ticket window; there were two swaying on the steps of the subway shouting, and ending, "Let's go an' have another afore we go." There were a few women seeing off their sweethearts and brothers, but, on the whole, the reservist had been a lodger in the town and had only his own pals. One woman stood before the carriage window. She and her sweetheart were being very matter-of-fact, cheerful, and bumptious over the parting.

"Well, so-long!" she cried as the train began to move. "When you see 'em let 'em have it."

Last autumn I followed the Bavarian army down the Isar valley and near the foot of the Alps. Then I could see what war would be like - an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is the part of a rifle.

I remember standing on a little round hill one August afternoon. There was a beautiful blue sky, and white clouds from the mountains. Away on the right, amid woods and corn-clad hills, lay the big Starnberg lake. This is just a year ago, but it seems to belong to some period outside of time.

On the crown of the little hill were three quick-firing guns, with the gunners behind. At the side, perched up on a tiny platform at the top of a high pair of steps, was an officer looking through a fixed spy-glass. A little further behind, lower down the hill, was a group of horses and soldiers.

Every moment came the hard, tearing hideous voice of the German command from the officer perched aloft, giving the range to the guns; and then the sharp cry, "Fire!" There was a burst, something in the guns started back, the faintest breath of vapour disappeared. The shots had gone.

I watched, but I could not see where they had gone, nor what had been aimed at. Evidently they were directed against an enemy a mile and a half away, men unseen by any of the soldiers at the guns. Whether the shot they fired hit or missed, killed or did not touch, I and the gun-party did not know.

Only the officer was shouting the range again, the guns were again starting back, we were again staring over the face of the green and dappled, inscrutable country into which the missiles sped unseen.

What work was there to do? - only mechanically to adjust the guns and fire the shot. What was there to feel? - only the unnatural suspense and suppression of serving a machine which, for ought we knew, was killing our fellow-men, whilst we stood there, blind, without knowledge or participation, subordinate to the cold machine. This was the glamour and the glory of the war: blue sky overhead and living green country all around, but we, amid it all, a part in some iron insensate will, our flesh and blood, our soul and intelligence shed away, and all that remained of us a cold, metallic adherence to an iron machine. There was neither ferocity nor joy nor exultation nor exhilaration nor even quick fear: only a mechanical, expressionless movement.

And this is how the gunner would "let 'em have it." He would mechanically move a certain apparatus when he heard a certain shout. Of the result he would see and know nothing. He had nothing to do with it.

It is a war of artillery, a war of machines, and men no more than the subjective material of the machine. It is so unnatural as to be unthinkable.

Yet we must think of it.

 

(2) D. H. Lawrence, The Manchester Guardian (4th March, 1930)

We regret to announce the death of Mr. David Herbert Lawrence, the novelist, which occurred in a sanatorium at Venice, near Nice.

Mr. Lawrence was a writer who has exercised a more potent influence, perhaps, over his generation that any of his contemporaries. Born (on September 1, 1885) and rear in a mining village near Nottingham, he was early exposed to the life-killing conditions in which a mechanistic industrialism has entangled mankind.

He was educated at Nottingham High School and University, and, after a short period as a teacher, went to Germany. he had already written some poetry, but it was not until 1913 that he published a novel, "Sons and Lovers," which at once marked him as a writer of unusual power.

The war intensified his loathing of the "huge, obscene machine," to the effects of which his childhood and youth had been prematurely exposed. It made him a rebel against all the accepted values of modern Western civilization, one who challenged the disintegration not only of those who were actually caught in the blind mechanism of industry but of all who reflected a stultifying materialism either in a hard possessiveness, a soft emotionalism, or a sterile intellectualism.