“I’ve met a man and I think he’s the one. I wanted you to know that I’m happy at last.” This message records one of many life events written into the guest book at the D.H. Lawrence Memorial, near Taos, N.M. It shows that, for some people, Lawrence never went away. Placed in the novelistic great tradition by classic critics like F.R. Leavis, Lawrence’s attention to his characters’ psychosexual development still speaks to readers.
And yet, for many in the academic world, and perhaps especially for women, Lawrence ceased to form part of any plausible conversation after Kate Millett’s landmark 1969 book, Sexual Politics, which compared Lawrence to Freud on the volatile subject of female orgasm. Lawrence’s fraught relationship to male-male bonding and to homosexuality has made things worse.
In recent years, gay marriage has become not just legal in many places, but also widely accepted. TV shows like Glee, Orange Is the New Black, and Transparent, and celebrity transformations like those of Bruce Jenner and Chaz Bono have opened minds to the possibilities and permutations of orientation and gender. Popular culture, best-selling erotica, and sex-toy merchandising recognize and celebrate female orgasm. We have entered an individualistic age beyond traditional sexual politics. It’s an age in which Lawrence’s late, narrower, cloudier work does indeed seem antiquated and constrained. But his early work and worldview, when he and his imagination were at their most robust, resonate powerfully and interestingly with our own time.
Millett correctly claimed that, especially in his late fiction, Lawrence believed that female orgasm depended on the penis, not on any organ a woman might call her own. She minced no words. Lawrence transforms “masculine ascendancy into a mystical religion,” in which “the male is displayed and admired” but there is barely any reference to female genitalia. Lawrence’s views seemed especially egregious when Sexual Politics first appeared, for the sexologists Masters and Johnson had just proved, in Human Sexual Response (1966), that female orgasm depends on the clitoris, not on the penis or on vaginal stimulation. Their work sent generations of women in search of that previously unmentionable organ — sometimes quite literally, with hand-held mirrors.
Lawrence’s demotion from prophet of sex to sexist pig reversed his reputation as a brave maverick speaking sensual truth to conservative political and publishing power. From World War I and continuing through 1960, Britain had banned many of his books for indecently representing and encouraging sex. Lawrence’s elegant generational novel, The Rainbow (1915), remained taboo for 11 years because it hints at a lesbian affair in its heroine Ursula Brangwen’s past and shows her taking lovers before marriage. Because he based Ursula on his wife, Lawrence believed that the ban conveyed a special animus for the German-born Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence, baroness and cousin of the notorious Luftstreitkräfte World War I pilot, the Red Baron.
Since Frieda undoubtedly served as Lawrence’s primary tutor in sexuality, re-examining Frieda forms an essential precondition for redeeming D.H.
Never one to bow to censorship, Lawrence followed suit with a volatile sequel, Women in Love (published in the United States in 1920 and in Britain in 1921), which was again considered dirty. With its abundant four-letter words and vivid adultery, including clear references to anal sex, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) circulated illicitly for decades until landmark court decisions in 1959, in the United States, and 1960, in England, made unexpurgated editions readily available. During the freewheeling 1960s, along with the pill, marijuana, and writers like Henry Miller, the newly unexpurgated Lawrence helped fuel the sexual revolution, and several of Lawrence’s fictions became popular films. Enter the feminist critique, which echoed earlier sentiments from Simone de Beauvoir, and D.H. Lawrence’s reputation plummeted.
In several of my critical books, especially Gone Primitive (University of Chicago Press, 1990), I accepted Millett’s ideas about Lawrence and criticized an author I had once admired. Lawrence’s overblown prose made it easy to reject relatively late books like The Plumed Serpent (1926), which advocates women’s slavelike submission to men and surrender of the drive toward orgasm, called “the beak-like friction of Aphrodite of the foam, the friction that flares out in circles of phosphorescent ecstasy.”
But when I wrote a fictionalized account of D.H. and Frieda Lawrence’s marriage, The Novelist’s Wife (The Modernist Press, 2015, under the pen name Sasha Bristol), D.H. Lawrence’s mercurial charm engaged me much as it had captivated my narrator, Frieda. The novel required me to imagine a couple mutually dependent and very much in love but subjected to intense stresses: a scandalous divorce; loss of Frieda’s three children from her first marriage; the decision to have no children of their own (possibly not a choice); a precarious income and dependence on domineering patrons; anti-German sentiment; Lawrence’s overheated friendships with figures like Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), John (Jack) Murry, and Mabel Dodge Luhan; restless movement from place to place around the globe; Lawrence’s long battle with tuberculosis. As I envisaged the couple navigating such treacherous terrain, I found myself reconceiving Lawrence, and his marriage to Frieda, herself the victim of sexist, sometimes scurrilous stereotypes among Lawrence’s most fervent admirers.
Murry, Lawrence’s best friend and the model for Gerald in Women in Love, originated a harsh view of the Lawrences and their union, seeing Frieda as stupidly “tyrannizing over him with her damnably false ‘love’ for her children.” Critics, like Leavis, who canonized Lawrence continued that trend, seeing Frieda as limiting his achievements. Some recent biographers agree, mocking Frieda for being stout (Lawrence was notoriously thin), for having lovers, and even, illogically enough, for getting old. According to the party line, the sensual and robust Frieda not just led Lawrence a merry dance, she also hobbled his genius.
I’ve always found that view illogical, since Lawrence not only chose Frieda to be his life partner but often wrote her into his books — as Ursula in The Rainbow and Women in Love, as the absent mother in The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930), as Harriet in Kangaroo (1923), and (though he had other models, too) as Connie Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence loved his wife and she remained his muse, first reader, and, often, amanuensis. As both D.H. and Frieda perceived, their reputations and their lives unrolled together. Since Frieda undoubtedly served as Lawrence’s primary tutor in sexuality, re-examining Frieda forms an essential precondition for redeeming D.H.
When they met, Lawrence compared Frieda to Sleeping Beauty. But just as she did not conform to the feminine norms of her time, Frieda does not fit today’s paradigms of romance heroines, whether of the Disney variety or of the Anastasia Steele school. Neither chaste. nor weak. nor victimized. nor dependent upon her man, Frieda inspired freethinkers of her time, like the psychoanalyst Otto Gross (an early lover), to hail her as “the woman of the future.” Other men agreed. After an evening of conversation (no more than that), Alfred Stieglitz wrote his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, about Frieda: “What a woman! … I never saw a greater inner freedom in anyone. — It is impossible to describe her. Impossible for me. — One might as well try to describe some overwhelming force of nature.” Even her enemy and rival for Lawrence’s attention, Murry, ended up in love with Frieda, declaring, “you gave me something then I needed terribly: as it were opened a new world to me.” The coarse among us may attribute male encomiums to Frieda’s sexual prowess — and I’m fine with that, since it ultimately supports my case. But I believe her allure involved something less obvious. Frieda’s jolliness, sometimes called childlike, and her drive toward happiness drew men like a magnet. It formed, I believe, the essential element in the Lawrences’ chemistry.
Frieda had many life- and sex-affirming theories about women as lovers and wives. At the legendary beginning of their relationship, Frieda was married to Ernest Weekley, Lawrence’s dry and proper professor in Nottingham, and she was vividly unhappy. David Herbert Lawrence and Frieda found love and lust almost at first sight, with David, or “Bert,” recognizing Frieda’s indifference to her husband even more readily than she herself did.
After they eloped, Frieda began a lifelong demonstration of principles she had absorbed from Gross, who had tutored her in Johann Bachofen’s theories of the great mother. Like Bachofen, Frieda believed females had once ruled a harmonious world based upon the happy promiscuity of goddesslike beings. Famously, Lenin adopted similar views when he observed that, as an institution, bourgeois marriage betrayed women. Multi-orgasmic, with many lovers, and remarkably frank, Frieda seemed like a revelation to the young D.H., whose previous sexual experiences (rendered in Sons and Lovers) would hardly have fueled his later career.
Everything one knows about Frieda’s sexuality suggests that she would hardly have left her lover and husband ignorant of the female genitals and how to please them. In fact, Lawrence’s fiction abounds in awareness of female orgasm and attempts to describe it at a time when many, including Freud and mainstream sexologists, deemed women’s sexuality a mysterious “dark continent.” Pornography has always registered voluptuous female “coming” at the behest of penises, single or multiple. Unlike pornography and even beyond the sexology of his time, Lawrence tried — usually prolixly and clumsily, to be sure — to describe female sexuality, often in oceanic terms. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for example, a “curious molten thrilling spread and spread till she was carried away with the last blind flash of extremity”; “there woke in her strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling like a flapping overlapping of soft flames. Soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells ringing up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the little wild cries she made at the last.”
One might say that a penis remains instrumental in these passages from Lawrence’s late and most notorious novel, and that Lawrence idealizes a subsequent and quieter female climax — quite true. But I don’t need for Lawrence to name a biological organ to identify female orgasms. Even in Chatterley, the Lawrentian hero deems sex less good when the couple does not come together and “no good” when Connie does not climax at all.
Like other authors who code too easily as paternalist and sexist, Lawrence had, I believe, not just a healthy respect for female sexuality but also a fascination with women’s sexual potency. But that changed over time in ways that must have wounded Frieda and have, in fact, damaged Lawrence’s reputation. What was it that made Lawrence and his work less sex-affirmative? What left him liable to charges along the lines of Millett’s?
In 1912, when Lawrence met Frieda, he was 26 and she was 32 — the kind of age difference that seems ho-hum today but was suspect then. He had recently recovered from a serious bout of pneumonia and always had what people called weak lungs. Otherwise, though, he was handsome, virile, charismatic, and brimming with creative energy. During World War I, which he spent mostly in Cornwall, Lawrence experienced numerous long colds and bronchial troubles. He also explored an attraction to men that had formed part of his sexuality at least since age 16, when he had a mysterious friendship with a dark-haired coal miner. His attraction inflected his friendships in Cornwall with Murry (who may have been abused as a teen and identified himself afterward as heterosexual) and a farmer named William Henry Hocking. Lawrence may have had (I think did have) a homosexual affair with Hocking, followed shortly by an army exam for hemorrhoids that was intended to humiliate Lawrence and that defensively sharpened his animus toward Bloomsbury “buggers.”
Meanwhile, Frieda — who never hid her belief in sexual freedom — continued to acquire lovers, a situation Lawrence seemingly did not mind when he was young, saying, in letters, that she should, if she wanted a particular man “or anybody, have him.” Throughout their marriage, Lawrence apparently believed, as Frieda did, that her infidelities, promised in advance, did not damage the core of their relationship while his — with Hocking, with a model for Lady Chatterley named Rosalind Baynes, and almost certainly with Hilda Doolittle — did damage it, given his protestations of “ultimate marriage” and reputation for monogamy.
As Lawrence’s tuberculosis progressed from at least 1924 (some would say earlier) toward his death, at age 44, in 1930 — an unusually long period — his sexual potency would have declined. During this period, the fictions most guilty of Millett’s critique — “The Woman Who Rode Away,” The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover — unrolled. Meanwhile, Frieda stayed by his side heroically and unquestioning, a loyalty that softens the edges of her affair with her later consort, Angelo Ravagli, who helped her get through extremely difficult years.
Charismatic and possessed of a genius for fiction that matched his wife’s zest for life, Lawrence wrote one of the loveliest tributes to marriage I know in the “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” afterword to an edition that Frieda helped arrange, as she did much of his career in the years leading to his death. “Supposing that I see the soul as something which must be developed and fulfilled throughout a life-time,” Lawrence wrote, “sustained and nourished, developed and further fulfilled, to the very end; what then? Then I realize that marriage, or something like it, is essential.” He concludes that “the rhythm of marriage … matches the rhythm of the year” and offers “the clue to human life.”
The Lawrences’ marital karma remains heavy. When asked to read a literary passage at my daughter’s recent wedding, I considered one from that afterword but opted for a much-safer sonnet by Shakespeare.
Still, Lawrence had at least some things right: Couples change; sexuality differs from time to time and over time; and the universe of whom we can love and marry is large. To use Arundhati Roy’s supple phrase, “the Love Laws” have altered in ways that Frieda Lawrence would clearly have relished and that might have freed D.H., too.
Whatever the mores of his time, whatever his physical and psychological afflictions, whatever anatomical ignorance he and his peers may have suffered, Lawrence, at his best and happiest, bravely, and ahead of his time, sought and gorgeously described an equality of pleasure and transcendence, the connections of love as “the secret music of life.” In that, he speaks to us still.