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ALFRED KAZIN
umtate. One reason, apart from the relationships involved, is the
very directness and surface conventionality of its technique. James
Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man,
published only
three years after
Sons and Lovers,
takes us immediately into the
"new" novel of the twentieth century.
It
opens on a bewildering series
of images faithful to the unconsciousness of childhood. Proust, who
brought out the first volume of his great novel,
A la recherche du
temps perdu,
in the same year that Lawrence published
Sons and
Lovers,
imposed so highly stylized a unity of mood on the "Ouverture"
to
Du cote de chez Swann,
that these impressions of childhod read
as
if
they had been reconstructed to make a dream. But
Sons and
Lovers
opens as a nineteenth-century novel with a matter-of-fact
description of the setting-the mine, the landscape of "Bestwood,"
the neighboring streets and houses. This opening could have been
written by Arnold Bennett, or any other of the excellent "realists"
of the period whose work does not summon up, fifty years later, the
ecstasy of imagination that Lawrence's work, along with that of
Joyce and Proust, does provide to us. Lawrence is writing close to
the actual facts.
In
his old-fashioned way he is even writing
about
the actual facts. No wonder that a young novelist with nothing but
his
own experiences to start him off may feel that Lawrence's example
represents the triumph of experience. Literature has no rites in
Sons
and Lovers;
everything follows as if from memory alone. When the
struggle begins that makes the novel-the universal modern story of a
"refined" and discontented woman who pours out on her sons the
love she refuses the husband too "common" for her-the equally
universal young novelist to whom
all
this has happened, the novelist
who in our times
is
likely to have been all too mothered and father–
less, cannot help saying to himself- "Why can't I write this good
a novel out of myself? Haven't I suffered as much as D. H. Lawrence
and am I not just as sensitive? And isn't this a highly selective age
in which 'sensitive' writers count?"
But the most striking thing about Lawrence- as
it
is about Paul
Morel in
Sons and Lovers- is
his sense of his own authority. Though
he was certainly not saved from atrocious suffering in relation to his
mother, Lawrence's "sensitivity" was in the main concerned with
reaching the highest and widest possible consciousness of everything
-"nature," family, society, books- that came within his experience
