Lawrence the Anti-Autobiographer

Although it is a critical commonplace that most of his early fiction is radically autobiographical, in fact, D.H. Lawrence evolved, almost at the beginning of his career, a very different relationship between his fiction and his personal history. It obtains even in his Künstlerroman, with Joyce’s the most famous novel in this century about the forming/education (Bildung) of a young person whose name is different from the author’s, whose life experience closely duplicates the author’s, and who adopts the vocation of artist.

His evolution of a practice in fiction radically different from what has been generally assumed antedates that novel; but Sons and Lovers documents his practice. Young Lawrence completed his first novel, The White Peacock, before 11 April 1910, ¹ and by October 18 he had “plotted out” and begun a draft of his third, as “Paul Morel” (Letters, I, p. 184). He abandoned the (lost) draft by the end of the year, but began a second one in March 1911. ² By the summer he found himself unable to finish it (pp. 297–300). And “some time after our brief meeting in October” 1911 he sent the manuscript to Jessie Chambers, the young woman with whom he had had a decade-long intellectual and emotional relationship, “and asked me to tell him what I thought of it”: “So in my reply I told him I was very surprised that he had kept so far from reality in his story. . . . Finally I suggested that he should write the whole story again, and keep it true to life.” ³

Although he was the ostensible subject of his Künstlerroman, he had (in her phrases) “invented,” with little concern for “what had really happened.” Moreover, his attitude to personal history as the material of the autobiographical “Paul Morel” was strictly pragmatic: as his abortive second draft reveals that he had no artistic commitment to his own life experience for its own sake, so his response to Chambers affirms that he was ready to use his life for the sake of his art:

He fell in absolutely with my suggestion and asked me to write what I could remember of our early days, because, as he truthfully said, my recollection of those days was so much clearer than his. ⁴

And her assertion that he had undertaken his historically inaccurate novel fragment about a facsimile of himself, while knowing that he lacked adequate “recollection,” further confirms his pragmatic attitude to the relations of a writer’s life and art, for he showed it to be well-founded. On 3 November 1911, was shortly after his request that she “write what I could remember,” he began “the third and last” draft of his autobiographical novel (Letters I, p. 321), then came down with double pneumonia. Convalescing, he went to see her in February 1912, secured the pages of “recollection” that she had written over the three months, and resumed work on “Paul Morel.” ⁵ She reports that “His descriptions of family life” became not only “vivid” but also “exact.” ⁶

What is revealed by the young writer’s work on the aborted 1911 second draft of his autobiographical novel is that he was subordinating self-presentation to a pragmatic concern with making effective art. And the same artistic end caused him readily to accept Chambers’ recommendation and make himself the true subject of his next and final draft. Lawrence’s process of composition documents the status which he was giving to the facts of his young life by the time he began composing Sons and Lovers.

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D.H. Lawrence appears to have been the subject of more biographical writing than any other English(-speaking) author of this century. ⁷ The value of this small library of biographical material for a study of Lawrence and autobiography is apparent; but two points about it need to be made. Although the facts of Lawrence’s life are generally accepted in the formal biographies, a few originate in the testimony of a single witness. And all who mention his early fiction consider it to be basically autobiographical, not...