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You can’t silence D.H. Lawrence Spurned by feminists and silenced for decades, his work is more relevant than ever

"One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it" said Lawrence. Credit: Keystone/Getty

"One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it" said Lawrence. Credit: Keystone/Getty


April 19, 2021   6 mins

Had D.H. Lawrence still been alive when Penguin Books were prosecuted at the Old Bailey, in 1960, for their unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he would have been 75 years old. An unlikely age, perhaps, for a mascot of the sexual revolution, but then he was always out of tune with the times. After the Chatterley trial, Lawrence blazed throughout Sixties like a torch and then spontaneously combusted.

The battle between Lawrence and the rest of the world started in 1915 with the censorship of The Rainbow. He called it his “big and beautiful book”, a biblico-mythico epic about the sexual awakening of three generations of women on the borders  of Nottingham-Derbyshire. Beginning in 1840, when men were still in wordless communication with nature, it closed in 1905 when railway lines, mineshafts, and a rash of new houses were corrupting the landscape. The novel was sentenced to death before the bench at Bow Street magistrate’s court, where Dr Crippen had recently been charged with murdering his wife; the 1,011 remaining copies were removed from the offices of Methuen, Lawrence’s publisher, and burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.

The Rainbow, the court concluded, was “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” although the prosecutor had difficulty specifying precisely what it was he had found so obscene. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written 12 years later when Lawrence had nothing left to lose (he died in 1930) contained words like fuck and balls and arse, but The Rainbow was about as offensive as Thomas Hardy.

The real problem with the novel was the author himself, a working-class upstart with a German wife whose own morals were debatable. Frieda Lawrence, it was rumoured, had left her middle-class husband and three children in order to run away with this sex-obsessed miner’s son. Added to which Frieda’s cousin, Baron von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, was the only German fighter pilot whose name was known to every Englishman.

After The Rainbow fiasco, Lawrence began a new life as an outlaw. “One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it” he announced, and as soon as the war was over he exiled himself to Europe and then America, firing bombs all the way.

Like Blake, D.H. Lawrence spoke in prophecies, many of which have been proved — not least his anticipation of his own afterlife. This is dramatised for us in a remarkable scene in The Rainbow’s sequel, Women in Love, published 100 years ago this May. Birkin, Lawrence’s alter-ego, is reading quietly in the drawing room when his girlfriend, Hermione Roddice, approaches him from behind with a lapis lazuli paperweight which she brings down with full force on his head. When she sees he is still breathing, she brings it down again but Birkin takes cover beneath his book. It is curious that Hermione Roddice did not become a cult heroine, because women have been bashing Lawrence on the head ever since.

The most lethal blow was delivered by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), which was effectively the first list of “Shitty Men” in Literature.  Millett argued that Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer were guilty of misogyny and while Miller and Mailer rode the storm,  Lawrence did not.  He became, and remains, one of those writers whose name triggers a mental lockdown; in the Seventies and Eighties, for a woman to reveal that she liked D.H. Lawrence was akin to saying that she liked being roughed-up by her boyfriend. Until Burning Man, I kept my own interest in him quiet.

Kate Millett’s bludgeoning of Lawrence was based on her reading of a short story called The Woman Who Rode Away. Written in 1924, when Lawrence was living — or rather dying — in New Mexico, the tale is a dreamlike parable about a bored American housewife who rides off into the desert in order to offer the Chilchui people her heart. Her death, an offering to the Gods, will save the tribe. She is taken by them on a long climb to a cave behind a frozen waterfall where she is laid out for her sacrifice. Lying on the rock slab, she watches for the sun to hit a column of ice, at which point the blade of the knife will be struck into her. It is here that the story ends.

Unlike the prosecutor of The Rainbow, Millett was able to say what she found obscene in The Woman Who Rode Away. It was, she argued, “sadistic pornography”, a snuff movie in “MGM technicolour”. She is right that the story is sick but then, as Lawrence said, “we shed our sicknesses in books”. But should it be read as a story? Lawrence also said that if we read his stories “simply as stories we should not get much satisfaction from them”. This is because he thought in symbols. His own symbol was the phoenix and The Woman Who  Rode Away is another allegory of regeneration: modern America sacrifices itself for the cosmic world it has lost. The woman’s death ensures the movements of the planets; the movements of the planets ensure the life of the tribe, and the tribe connects capitalist America to its roots.

The savagery of the tale was its purpose. Lawrence argued in Studies in Classic American Literature, the most dazzling experiment in literary criticism ever written, that the distinguishing feature of American literature was “unconscious duplicity”. In each case a nice-as-pie upper-consciousness disguised a turbulent under-consciousness: “Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness,” Lawrence wrote, “Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. and the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.” In The Woman Who Rode Away his quintessentially American tale, Lawrence makes us hear the destruction underneath. It is Uncle Sam’s ego, and not the woman’s heart, that is being knifed out.

In another of the insights of Studies of Classic American Literature, Lawrence counselled critics “to save the tale from the artist who created it”. And ye gods, does his own writing need saving.

Lawrence had the same concerns as we do today: democracy, free speech, sexuality, the sickness of the modern world, the decay of civilisation, how to be alone. But the voice in which he expressed himself was more startling and original than that of any of his peers.  Take the opening sentence of his essay on free verse: “It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity.” Lawrence, too, is breaking into song here. A lifelong claustrophobic, forward movement was his great subject: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”, begins his travelogue Sea and Sardinia.

His oeuvre largely confounds genre, but if we have to categorise it we can say that he wrote 10 novels, three of which, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, were recognised as game-changers while two — Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo — are, I suggest, the first examples of autofiction. He also wrote 70 short stories, four of the most innovative travel books of the century, two bonkers studies of the unconscious,  thousands of poems, dozens of essays on subjects ranging from syphilis to the novel of the future, a collection of plays set in miners’ cottages that anticipate the work of the Angry Young Men, a history book for school children and, of course, the incomparable Studies in Classic American Literature.

He was less a modernist than the last of the Romantics: Byronic in his audacity, Wordsworthian in his ego, Coleridgean in his mysticism, and Blakean in his insistence that there is no progress without contraries. Contraries were what Lawrence was built upon: remove them, and you take away the structure of his being. His contradictions were numerous: he was an intellectual who valued “mindlessness”, he was a profoundly religious agnostic, he both revered and feared homosexuality. The greatest contradiction of all, however, was his belief in the wisdom of the very body that was failing him. Lawrence had consumption from his youth, and every winter was a near-death experience.

No novelist before him had considered the body as a part of consciousness, but the Lawrentian body bore little relation to the anatomy described by doctors. Lawrence believed, for example, that the solar plexus was the home of the unconscious and source of all wisdom: “I just don’t feel it here”, he said of Darwin, pointing to his stomach area. He similarly believed that we are composed of magnets which lead us hither and thither, and that tuberculosis comes from an excess of maternal love. In other words, Lawrence believed that his mother had literally crushed his lungs.  Denouncing science in what his friend Aldous Huxley described as “the most fantastically unreasonable terms”, Lawrence would refuse to be vaccinated today. But at the heart of his eccentricities lay the need to hold onto the mystery and wonder that were fast disappearing from the mechanised world.

So what does the most silenced male writer of the modern age have to tell us? He wrote his own epitaph is in his late poem, ‘Phoenix’:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

Lawrence suffered all of those things, but he will rise again.

Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence’ is available to pre-order


Frances Wilson is an author, academic and critics. Her latest book is Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence. 


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Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

Reading this sort of article makes me feel like I failed in my life as I can not go along with it, get it, as I do not think I ever read all of one of his books, picked them up, know of them, yet D H Lawrence is pretty much one of the required writers if one is to be ‘well read’ and I did not read him.

T E Lawrence I read a good bit though… Anyway I thank Unherd for having this sort of article, I really liked it, although did not really get most of it. More please, it is great to get away from news stuff, and more arts, aesthetics, Literature, because I do rarely now.

I have 250 lineal feet of built in bookcases I just made this year, 1 X 8 clear yellow pine, (42, 10 ft long, 1″ x 8″ boards in all) polyurethaned, actual carpenter built and excellent, and am bringing together my books, and all the ones from my parents house are being shipped here, (which survived the cull), and will have an actual library, many really great books indeed – and even my boyhood science fiction that I loved. I know there is some DH Lawrence in the boxes – And some PG Wodehouse I look forward to, and all kinds of things, going back all my life.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I’ve never been sure about the rest of his oeuvre, but Women in Love is fantastic.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago

Lawrence was a bit of a plonker in some respects, but I remember reading The Rainbow for A-level and being inspired (like Salvador Dali and Hermann Hesse, he inspires adolescents). That would have been 1977, so he hadn’t been cancelled then. I don’t remember any mention of Kate Millett, or the ideas behind her book, which I suspect reached only a minority. Sadly those ideas are now not just mainstream, but de rigueur. As Fraser B says, many of DH’s strongest characters were women, and that I suspect is part of ‘the problem’. As a ‘s h i t t y’ male, Lawrence cannot have shared in the ‘lived experience’ of women. Millett and all the other single-issue fanatics that plague our lives today admit no possibility of nuance, empathy, creativity, complexity or contradiction. How dull their world must be, and how dull and unpleasant is the world they’re imposing on the rest of us.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

I spent a lot of my childhood in the area where Lawrence grew up and would still visit regularly until about 20 years ago. Certain surnames that peopled his life and books, including that of my own relatives (Severn), can still be seen on signboards etc.
I have read pretty much everything he wrote – including Sons And Lovers for A level – along with various biographies and studies etc. I even have a book called D H Lawrence Fifty Years On Film by Louis K Greiff.
I revere him and find it strange that he should have been cancelled by the feminists when he so often wrote from the female point of view and created many strong female characters, celebrating their ‘life force’ or whatever in the process.
In fact, the female characters in his books are invariably stronger than the male characters. For instance, Gudrun Brangwen (or is it the other sister?) is surely the strongest character in Women In Love and defeats the man who walks off into the Alpine snow to his death.

Last edited 3 years ago by Fraser Bailey
Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

It is indeed Gudrun who drives Gerald Crich to his suicide. Her sister Ursula ends up hitched to Rupert Birkin.

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago

Great article, thank you Frances Wilson.
I have always liked D H Lawrence, never read Kate Millet and never will.
The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers, two of my favourite books when I was younger. Sometimes I find DH’s urgings and surgings a bit much but that’s alright, it was brave writing.
Snake has to be one of the greatest poems ever written.
poetryfoundation.org/poems/148471/snake-5bec57d7bfa17
(Not sure how to create a link I’m afraid, best I can do)

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Mickey John
Mickey John
3 years ago

Great to read my favourite opening line again. “Sea and Sardinia” is both one of his most neglected works and the best writing on the Mediterranean that you will ever see.

Alan Jackson
Alan Jackson
3 years ago

Yes we live in an era which seems incapable of appreciating the great Lawrence yet which needs to find out more about him. I think the writer here gets it right that he is the last of the great Romantics: he shares much with Blake. In the sixties opinions were shaped by F. R. Leavis’ wonderful book on him bringing out the greatness of Women in Love and The Rainbow. Leavis helped us see why these novels were so much greater than the rather sadly limited Lady Chatterley which is the only novel most have heard about because of the notorious trial. Yes we badly need to start re-reading him.

dommckeever3
dommckeever3
3 years ago

A friend of mine had a number of the books written by Ernest Weekley, first husband of Frieda. He loved those books which were on the origin of names, word etymology etc;
He couldn’t understand how she could have left a genuine scholar for a writer of ‘silly nonsense’ as he called Lawrence.

David Reid
David Reid
3 years ago
Reply to  dommckeever3

I visited San Christobel recently..anyone interested?