SONS, LOVERS, MOTHERS
377
monia at seventeen (when his brother died), could be easily lost.
With so much at stake, Lawrence put into ultimate terms,
life or death, the struggle between Paul Morel's need to hold onto
his mother and his desire to love Miriam Leivers as well. The
struggle in
Sons and Lovers
is not between love of the mother and
love of a young woman; it is the hero's struggle to
keep
the mother
as
his
special strength, never to lose her, not to offend or even to
vex her by showing too much partiality to other women. This is
why the original of "Miriam Leivers," Jessie Chambers, says in her
touching memoir
(D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record:
by "E. T.")
that she had to break with Lawrence after she had seen the final
draft of the book, that "the shock of
Sons and Lovers
gave the death–
blow to our friendship," for in that book "Lawrence handed his
mother the laurels of victory."
That is indeed what Lawrence did; it would not have occurred
to him to do anything else. And Jessie Chambers also honestly felt
that she minded this for Lawrence's sake, not her own, since by
this
time there was no longer any question of marriage between them.
Jessie, who certainly loved Lawrence for his genius even after she
had relinquished all personal claim on him, had launched Lawrence's
career by sending out
his
poems. When Lawrence, after his mother's
death, wrote a first draft of
Sons and Lovers,
he was still unable to
work out
his
situation in a novel. Jessie encouraged him to drop this
unsatisfactory version of the later novel and to portray the emotional
struggle directly. At
his
request, she even wrote out narrative sections
which Lawrence revised and incorporated into
his
novel. (Lawrence
often had women write out passages for his novels when he wanted
to know how a woman would react to a particular situation; Frieda
Lawrence was to contribute to his characterization of Mrs. Morel.)
Lawrence sent Jessie parts of the manuscript for her comments and
further notes. Mter so much help and even collaboration, Jessie felt
betrayed by the book. Lawrence had failed to show, she said, how
important a role the girl had played in the development of the young
man as an artist.
"It
was his old inability to face his problem squarely.
His mother had to be supreme, and for the sake of that supremacy
every disloyalty was permissible."
Lawrence
is
quoted in Harry T. Moore's biography,
The Intel–
lizent Heart,
as saying of Miriam-Jessie, she "encouraged my demon.
