D. H. Lawrence from Island to Glacier

D. H. LAWRENCE FROM ISLAND TO GLACIER HERBERT HOWARTH Lawrence's second novel, The Trespasser, is an instructive case of cultural cross-breeding. The FIaubertian theme of bovarism, that greedy, reckless, courageous, disastrous attempt to escape reality and live a beautiful dream, and the complementary FIaubertian theme of sentiment , that indulgence of the dream without the payment of the price, are both implied in its fable Ca fable which, appropriately, has the air of hallucination but is grounded in fact)' Threaded across these themes, and demanding at least equal attention, is Lawrence's life-long topic: the contemporary maladaptation of the male-female relationship and the possibility of its reform. Entering Ford Madox Hueffer's circle almost at the same date that he began writing The Trespasser, it was perhaps inevitable that Lawrence should read and in some guise emulate FIaubert, the writer whom Hueffer at all times praised as the supreme model; and it is ironic, and typical of Lawrence's will to remain himself in the presence of the great, that he produced a draft which caused Hueffer to throw up his hands and leave the "genius" to his own measures.' But Lawrence's interest in FIaubert's theme of reality and illusion was not only a response to the talk of the Hueffer coterie. There was a larger consideration. The question of bovarism was important to Lawrence because it was an English problem urgent among people of his Own kind: that is, among the men and women who were the first ripe growth of the Education Acts, which for forty years had been compulsorily feeding the energies of the children of working England? The consequences of those Acts, from D. H. Lawrence to Alan Sillitoe, from Philip Snowden to Harold Wilson and Enoch Powell, are still to be chronicled-still indeed to be completed before they can be chronicled. But it is evident that the Acts have released new powers in England, have strewn benefits, and have also brought losses and unhappiness. Some of the unhappiness has taken the shape of bovarism. Children and adolescents, taught about lives richer than their narrow lives, and inducted into certain fulfilments of art which, richer than any real life whatsoever, tell us that we are dying Volume XXXVII, Number 3, April, 1968 216 HERBERT HOWARTH without having lived,s drive for the higher existence; sometimes fulfil the ambition; often fall short, and then sometimes console themselves by cultivating the arts or reverie to the neglect of reality. Of this temptation, the retreat into illusion, Lawrence was keenly aware. He could see its inroads among his acquaintances in 1909. He was to be of all the men of his generation the rejector of mere dream and mere talk, was to react angrily against a split society and against the bribes of luxury and art, was to remember his origins and his nation's past and to work for the recovery of values buried there. But he knew the dangers of the educational aftermath, and his own liability to succumb to them; and he was angry with anyone who succumbed. In Helena of The Trespasser he anatomizes a dreamer of the Education Acts. I An island is a stock image for man's escape: there he is lapped in lIuid and fancies himself in the womb; there he is spared the collisions of society. The Trespasser is the story of a four-day love-idyll on the Isle of Wight. Helena and Siegmund lIee from the grating roar and attrition of the humdrum lower middle-class life of London. Twelve pages of Chapter 2 quickly describe Siegmund's slatternly home and suggest twenty years of discouragement (though not without counterstrokes: the appeal of his young children, the dry suffering of his wife). Then for a hundred and fifty detailed pages the lovers attempt a Wagnerian ecstasy. Then comes the anti-climax which attends all holidays from reality: Siegmund goes back to the trials of the house and the punitive disapproval of his wife and children. Two days later he commits suicide. As this synopsis suggests, Lawrence disposes his material very simply. Hueffer, reading a first draft, grumbled that the tale was formless...