Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen - Hardcover

Michael Squires; Lynn K. Talbot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299177505 ISBN 13: 9780299177508

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Synopsis

Dashingly told and meticulously researched, this double biography of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen is the first to draw fully on Frieda’s unpublished letters and on interviews with people who knew her well. It explores their collision with an industrial world they hated and chronicles the stormy relationship between husband and wife. The strong sexual vitality that inspired Lawrence’s art brought both joy and anguish to his marriage. Here, the Lawrences emerge as proud but not conceited in their unconventional lives, staunch in the face of fierce opposition from a conformist society.
    Living at the Edge follows the separate lives of Lawrence and Frieda up to their first meeting in 1912. Tracing their new life together, it depicts their grateful escape from the English Midlands; their discovery of exotic places where they made temporary homes—Italy, Cornwall, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico; Lawrence’s courageous battle against illness; and, after his death in 1930, Frieda’s success in recreating the simple life on ranches near Taos, New Mexico, where she died in 1956.
    At the center of their story is Lawrence’s literary career. Biographers Squires and Talbot see Lawrence’s major novels—The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover—as a fresh way to understand his turbulent and conflicted life. They reveal the extreme care with which he rewrote his personal experience to satisfy his deepest needs, and they introduce the many influential people who entered the Lawrences’ lives and work. The rich materials from Frieda’s letters reveal a different Lawrence—more difficult as a man but more interesting as an artist; they also reveal a different Frieda—more vibrant as a woman, more substantial as a companion. This superb biography gives both Lawrence and Frieda striking new dimensions.

About this title

About the Authors

Michael Squires is professor of English at Virginia Tech. A past president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of America and recipient of the Harry T. Moore Distinguished Scholar Award for Lifetime Achievement in D. H. Lawrence Studies, he is the author and editor of numerous other books about D. H. Lawrence, including the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Lynn K. Talbot is professor of Spanish at Roanoke College.

From the Back Cover

"The most evocatively detailed narrative yet written about the marriage of D. H. and Frieda Lawrence. This unusual double biography offers eye-opening new perspectives on Lawrence s writings as it chronicles the troubled but passionate union of this fascinating couple whom we knew perhaps less well than we thought." Dennis Jackson, past editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review

Reviews

Biographers have long trafficked in secrets and revelations from literary marriages, those wellsprings of talent and drama: consider the Brownings, or Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon, to name just two. In their joint biography of D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, scholars and husband-and-wife team Squires and Talbot (who are also editing Frieda's letters) proceed with a bit more decorum than is common in the trade. Their volume may offer the last word on the Lawrences' volatile partnership, which was famously beset by sexual identity crises (his) and infidelities (hers). But compared to the carryings-on of the Bloomsbury group, with whom the Lawrences occasionally associated, their marriage was a model of stability. And while one might imagine that D.H. Lawrence, who became the novelist of sex for his generation (and many to follow), would have had a fascinating marital and romantic life, the authors present the Lawrences' quarrels as human-scaled the inevitable clash of two strong temperaments. Squires and Talbot's literary analyses are occasionally impenetrable (Despite the strange artificiality of the narrative design, the motif of insecurity broods plangently over the novel), but they do draw compelling parallels between the couple's romantic life and Lawrence's imaginative work, giving particular attention to Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence aficionados will find something to enjoy in this carefully realized work, even if Squires and Talbot don't overturn the prevailing view that D.H. never strayed from his spouse, and even if the Lawrences' saga is not nearly as precipitous and climactic as the title suggests. 40 b&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Squires, a Lawrence scholar and professor of English at Virginia Tech, and wife Talbot, coeditor with him of a projected edition of Frieda's letters, have written a joint biography of two distinctive individuals as well as a portrait of a marriage. They examine in great detail the lives of Lawrence and Frieda, showing how their different personalities were nevertheless blended into a partnership that endured despite arguments, occasional infidelities, and periods of separation. Though Lawrence's major novels and short stories are examined closely, the criticism focuses more on how the fiction reflects the couple's lives and experiences rather than on the works' literary devices or themes. The section on Lady Chatterley's Lover is especially illuminating. The many illustrations add to this general-interest book. While it does not supplant previous biographies of the couple, such as Brenda Maddox's D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage, this book's sympathy and understanding of the Lawrences' lives and the use of many unpublished letters as well as personal interviews contributes to its usefulness and readability. Recommended for large public libraries. Morris A. Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Living at the Edge

A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von RichthofenBy Michael Squires Lynn K. Talbot

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Copyright © 2002 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-17750-8

Contents

Illustrations...................................................xiPreface.........................................................xiiiPART 11. Lawrence in the English Midlands.............................32. The Apprentice Schoolteacher.................................133. Frieda Finds Her Destiny.....................................344. Their Adventure Begins.......................................505. Exploring the Unknown........................................716. The Dawn of The Rainbow......................................897. Crisis.......................................................1058. Disappointment...............................................1239. The Discovery of Cornwall....................................13810. Women in Love: The Masterpiece..............................15811. Suspicion...................................................17312. Wartime Castaways...........................................186PART 213. The Sun Rises Again.........................................21314. Farewell to Fontana Vecchia.................................23215. The Voyage Out..............................................25016. The Lure of the Indians.....................................26117. Reconciliation..............................................28018. The Mysteries of Oaxaca.....................................29719. What Lawrence Discovered....................................31120. Lady Chatterley's Lover: The Last Novel.....................33021. The End and the Beginning...................................35022. A New Life for Frieda.......................................36823. Frieda and Angelo at Los Pinos..............................38824. Port Isabel, Peace, and Marriage............................407Acknowledgments.................................................429Notes...........................................................433Works Cited.....................................................475Index...........................................................485

Chapter One

Lawrence in the English Midlands

1885-1902

* * *

Near the end of his third year of teaching, he grew restless, with a fierce longing for change. He had come to feel shackled by fifty boys whose poverty of character appalled him. He could not last. Nevertheless, bred to stern duty, he could not bring himself to quit his teaching job in the London suburb of Croydon. He had worked too hard to get there. But his body, with its own secret knowledge, could quit. In November 1911 it did. A grave illness shattered him. For two and a half months he slowly mended. But he was never the same again. He had turned his face against the humming town, against the harness that its lights and streets and red brick buildings had laid on him. He would not go back. He had broken from all that held him-respectability, duty, upward mobility. His momentous decision, so riveting and final, grew directly out of his unsettled childhood. It was a childhood of tempest and opposition.

* * *

David Herbert Lawrence, nicknamed "Bert," was born in England on 11 September 1885, in the small mining town of Eastwood. It lay about 8 miles from the industrial center of Nottingham and 126 miles from London. The town, crowded with dozens of small shops, was grimy and dark. Every day its nearby mines, at Moorgreen and Brinsley, spewed coal dust. Lawrence's good friend Enid Hopkin, who also grew up in Eastwood, remembered the mines as oily and ugly, "grow[ing] in the fields like dirty mushrooms, always there, the town's livelihood yet an unspoken threat." While the ventilating fans sang monotonously, the winding engines unleashed a metallic racket, bruising the stillness. True, the town of nearly five thousand people provided jobs and, for miners' families, some company housing; but in 1927 Lawrence, who had come to hate it, described Eastwood's grimy little brick houses, topped with slate roofs, as the fruit of a "fathomless ugliness."

Lawrence's father, Arthur John (1846-1924), was a miner who sweated underground at Brinsley for twelve hours a day, hacking seams of coal with his pick. He had started when he was only seven. Not until 1893-after he was grown-was the minimum age for leaving school set at eleven in England (in 1899 it was raised to twelve). Arthur's father and mother lived in a cottage in Brinsley, a mile from Eastwood. As a boy his father had been apprenticed to a tailor and grew to be a tall, strong, shambling man whose ready snuffbox was a sure sign of friendship; Arthur's mother, ill tempered and rife with complaints, sold aprons and shawls and handkerchiefs from her husband's tailor shop. From her Arthur learned to tolerate scolding as a staple of female behavior.

Some years later, Arthur became a "butty," or foreman, charged with getting the coal, section by section, out of the mines. He had hardened himself to endure the kneeling and stooping and perpetual dust. Impressed, his friend Arthur Coleman remembered him as a first-rate workman. On Friday and Saturday nights Arthur eased his physical exhaustion by joining his drinking pals at the local pub, the Three Tuns. He loved the camaraderie and sometimes stayed till closing. Dark eyed and dark bearded, he was rough, fun loving, and uneducated. Unlike his wife, he spoke an English Midlands dialect, using "thee" for "you," "coom" for "come," "s'll" for "shall," and "nowt" for "nothing."

Lawrence's mother, Lydia Beardsall (1851-1910), was a small, prim, slightly cultured, self-righteous woman. Five years younger than her husband-and born a rung higher-she instilled in her children a strong pride, a fervent religiosity, and an intense need to achieve. Her own mother, also named Lydia, was, by contrast, a pitiable drudge-was always "worse and fading fast," Lawrence remembered. George Beardsall, her puritanical father, had assembled engines until 1870 when he suffered an injury and could no longer work. Lydia (still at home with her two younger sisters) labored in the Nottingham lace industry until she met Arthur in 1874. Impressed by his muscular physique and his good wages of about one hundred pounds a year, she married him in 1875.

The couple's pleasure in each other was brief. Lydia's wonderfully comic phrases were soon edged with disappointment or tart disapproval. Her dream of a better life had been crippled. While she kept house in a gloomy, cramped, company row house called the Breach, she proved herself to be thrifty, tidy, intelligent, proud, and reserved. She was a woman whose aversion to liquor almost matched her growing aversion to her husband.

Their mutual dislike had remarkable consequences. It forged a powerful bond between Lydia Lawrence and her five children, allowing her to measure the value of her life by her children's successes, and it made Lawrence distrust his father and emulate his mother's strength, control, and certainty-qualities he might, under other circumstances, have emulated in his father. Most important, his parents' brutal disrespect for each other left him with a peculiar legacy: early, he understood active relationships as bonds of strife, as mechanisms of manipulation, as vehicles of emotional violence and abuse. Love and affection flourished in moments of peace. As a writer, Lawrence never forgot this initial conception of human interaction, even as his penetrating intelligence allowed him to transcend the abusive model his parents offered.

Like the place where one is born, birth order also affects one's nature-responsible, ambitious, spoiled, rebellious, or affectionate. Lawrence, the fourth of five children, was the youngest son, and a youngest son, especially one who is ill, merits special treatment. The oldest son, George, born in 1876, was a handsome, common lad who left school at fourteen and went to work as an apprentice. "He always spoke dialect," his niece Margaret recalled. A wild youth, fond of drinking, a lad forced to get married, he provided a poor role model for a young boy like Bert. Years later, Frieda Lawrence remembered a story about his dishonesty: "when he was young George took some money once and his poor mother had to replace it."

Within ten years, the Lawrences had four more children. Ernest, the second son, born in 1878, fared better than George. Combining his mother's hunger for success with his father's robust physical vitality, Ernest was the prize. The first daughter, Emily, was born in 1882. She was less gifted but dependable, kind, and the most conventional of the children. Lawrence himself, the next to arrive, was a frail child, never robust or strong. He and his younger sister, Ada-born less than two years apart-bonded tightly. Clever and upright, lively and pretty, Ada, the baby, assumed the role of her brother's confidante. The five children, surprisingly different in temperament and achievement, had one thing in common: all of them escaped direct contact with the mines.

Lawrence's childhood, though far from ordinary, left him time to pursue whatever interested him. Roy Spencer, whose grandfather was Lawrence's schoolmate, remembered that many Eastwood residents "were struck by Lawrence's unusualness." Growing up in Eastwood at the turn of the century, Lawrence endured a gritty poverty and a puritanical code of behavior reinforced by the Victorian code of self-help that inspired the British working class. Frail and sensitive as a young boy-rough lads called him a sissy-he was, said his brother George, "petted and spoiled" from birth. William Hopkin, a longtime friend (and Enid's father), remembered that Lawrence in his early days "did not get on with other boys." He was not strong enough for combat sports. Like another gifted writer, Marcel Proust, Lawrence preferred indoor pursuits-copying pictures in watercolor and oil, performing charades, telling stories, baking bread. But he also relished long rambles into the splendid, rolling countryside of England, which he embroidered with bright, informed commentary for his friends. His long walks were a verbal excursion, a journey into the mysteries of nature.

Like most novelists, Lawrence had an early sense of himself as different, an observer set apart, marginalized, defined as a critical onlooker. Whereas the Eastwood bullies were street tough, Lawrence became a different kind of fighter. He learned to internalize the violence and brutality that he saw at home, at school, in his neighborhood. Words became a medium for negotiating what he witnessed. They became instruments of power. When just a boy, he used to extract comfort (he said) from "round little white pebbles we called 'milk stones', and sucked in the firm faith that one sucked milk out of them." From early childhood, he used the power of his imagination to transform what was ordinary, to reshape what was difficult or painful.

During Lawrence's boyhood the family moved several times within Eastwood-to the tenementlike Breach in 1887, to Walker Street in 1891, to Lynn Croft Road at the top of a hill in 1902, when Lawrence was sixteen. At Walker Street the family could boast a bay window and a good view of the hedgerows and fields; at Lynn Croft Road they proudly added a small entrance hall and could tend a fine garden set against an open field. Each new home announced the Lawrences' rising status, partly because George and Ernest-the older boys-had gone out to work. Emily, who sewed dresses to boost the family's income, lived at home until she married in 1904 at age twenty-two.

The Beauvale School, which young Lawrence attended from 1892 to 1898, was typical of provincial public education: very large classes, rote learning, strict discipline, occasional thrashings. The headmaster, William Whitehead, was responsible and efficient. Besides writing and reading and math, he taught poems such as The Lady of the Lake, history, geography, Bible readings, science, and songs such as "The Flag of England." On his own Lawrence read prodigiously and, much later, recommended to a friend books of adventure "like Treasure Island, or books by Henty, or Kingston, or Collingwood. I used to love them." Typical is G. A. Henty's Wulf the Saxon (1895), which young Bert might have read. As it follows Wulf from ages fourteen to eighteen, this engrossing story, full of sweeping action and historical pageantry, would have immersed Lawrence in the conflict between the eleventh-century Saxons and their Norman foes. Extended battles, male bonding, and political intrigue climax when William claims victory at the Battle of Hastings.

Outside of school Lawrence learned a great deal too. From his mother, a thrifty housekeeper, he learned to cook, sew, bake, and scrub. Writing much later, Frieda Lawrence thought that from his mother "he got the almost puritan sense of responsibility." That puritan sense included honesty and courage. From his mother he also drew his conviction of absolute self-worth. One careful observer was surprised to find Lawrence's mother "so certain of herself and of her own rightness." Unlike George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, Lawrence was rarely plagued by self-doubt. Once he started writing, he recognized-and submitted to-his own genius. It was his mother's gift.

His religious life grew also. On Sundays Lydia made sure her children attended the Congregational chapel in Eastwood. There, lessons from the Bible grounded them in Christian thought, swaddled them in hymns of salvation, and trained their young minds to believe that every choice is a moral challenge. The Congregationalists had inherited the Puritan belief in the inviolable bond between God and the individual. Lawrence learned to guard that bond with scrupulous intensity.

What Lawrence drew from his father in these early years is more complex to assess. Given his dislike of the man (often expressed), Lawrence drew more than he ever acknowledged. "Adolf," a vivid biographical sketch that Lawrence wrote in middle age, offers an affectionate but rare portrait of Arthur, who, walking home from the last shift at Brinsley Colliery, "loved the open morning" as he observed every bird and "tweeted to the wrens," who never scolded in reply. Says the narrator: "He liked non-human things best." His sudden arrival home, though it sent shivers through the children, brought a silent, crouching present from his pocket-a tiny brown rabbit, an orphan whose wild insouciance, though it distressed Lydia, filled both Arthur and the sympathetic narrator with joy. The rabbit, like the solitary man who filched him, stands for what the narrator calls "the inconquerable fugitive." Arthur, like his son Bert, always insisted on being himself, on staking out a separate path to follow. Much later Frieda laughingly recalled one of Arthur's colorful phrases: "'May all their rabbits die' as Lawrence's old miner father would have said." It was a curse on whatever invaded one's territory. Frieda thought that Lawrence got from his father "the fun of the immediate living, quick and often violent in reaction." Emotions, quivering under the surface, lay ready to leap. They might strike anywhere.

But from this unpredictable man Lawrence also imbibed a silent affirmation of himself as male, empowered by his gender, endowed with expectations of success, and accepting the patriarchal claim to dominance. Despite his uneasy dislike of his father, Lawrence was silently aware of rough miners bonding together in their work, drinking and laughing on Friday and Saturday nights, tramping across the fields on weekends, and instilling in their sons a fierce resistance to middle-class modes of thought. Covered with pit dust at the end of each day, these men required their wives to wash them but otherwise, as the boy would have observed, remained aloof, aglow in their manly independence and indifference. "When I was a boy," Lawrence remembered near the end of his life, "a [miner] who was a good husband was an exception to the rule." As Lawrence daily witnessed his parents' codes in conflict, he drew confidence and ambition from his mother's code but always longed for the easy male solidarity of his father's. Struggling to shed his hurtful childhood conditioning, he challenged himself, scaled his privations, even reveled in provincial life and its small joys, but propelled himself away from a painful past.

* * *

As Lawrence matured, schoolwork came more easily. Had he been his father's son, he might have left school and, at a tender age, followed the paternal footsteps into the mines. He did not. Yielding both to his mother, who caustically maligned the coarse work of the "pits," and to Whitehead, his fierce old headmaster, Lawrence on 23 July 1898 sat for (and surprised his family by winnng) a County Council scholarship worth fourteen pounds to attend Nottingham High School, whose faculty offered strong academic training. Having completed what the Beauvale School could offer, Lawrence on 14 September began commuting daily to Nottingham, wearing an Eton coat and collar, and taking the train in the company of a few friends. He had just turned thirteen. To his better-off contemporaries he seemed withdrawn. As biographer John Worthen remarks, "He was mixing with the middle classes without actually rising into them." At the end of his first year he had excelled in English and drawing, earning third place in both. He also studied French, German, writing, and Scripture; in 1900 he even won a mathematics prize.

His days were long. He awakened each morning about six, walked to the station at seven to catch the train (his mother having packed his lunch), reached class by nine, caught a train again at five, arrived home by seven, and after supper faced two hours of lessons which had to be done amid the noise of a discordant family living together in four rooms. Lawrence learned early to concentrate on a task against the grain of interruption. He was diligent. Yet after 1900 the rigid pace and strict preparation wearied him, and since high school fees took most of his scholarship money, the expense of his schooling drained the family too.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Living at the Edgeby Michael Squires Lynn K. Talbot Copyright © 2002 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System . Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299177505
• ISBN 13: 9780299177508
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 520