378
ALFRED KAZIN
But alas, it was me, not he, whom she loved. So for her too it was a
catastrophe. My demon
is
not easily loved: whereas the ordinary me
is.
So poor Miriam was let down." Lawrence's tone is exalted, but
he certainly justified himself in
Sons and Lovers
as a novelist, not as a
"son." That is the only consideration now. Jessie Chambers herself
became an embittered woman. She tried to find her salvation in
politics, where the fierce hopes of her generation before 1914 for a
new England were certainly not fulfilled. But Lawrence, taking the
new draft of
Sons and Lovers
with him to finish in Germany after
he had run off with Frieda, was able, if not to "liberate" himself
from his mother in his novel, to write a great novel out of his earliest
life and struggles.
That is the triumph Jessie Chambers would not acknowledge
in
Sons and Lovers,
this she could not see-the Lawrence "unable
to face
his
problem squarely" made a great novel out of the "prob–
lem," out of his mother, father, brother, the miners, the village, the
youthful sweetheart. Whatever Jessie may have thought from being
too close to Lawrence himself, whatever Lawrence may have said
about his personal struggles during the six-week frenzy in which
he launched the new draft, Lawrence felt his "problem" not as
something to be solved, but as a subject to be represented. All these
early experiences weighed on him with a pressure that he was able
to communicate-later he called it "that hard violent style full of
sensation and presentation." Jessie Chambers herself described Law–
rence's accomplishment when she said, speaking of the new draft of
Sons and Lovers
that she drove Lawrence to write, "It was his power
to transmute the common experiences into significance that I always
felt to be Lawrence's greatest gift. He did not distinguish between
small and great happenings. The common round was full of mystery,
awaiting interpretation. Born and bred of working people, he had the
rare gift of seeing them from within, and revealing them on their
own plane."
Lawrence's particular gift was this ability to represent as valuable
anything that came his way. He had the essential religious attribute of
valuing
life, of seeing the most trivial things as a kind of consecration.
In part, at least, one can trace this to the poverty, austerity and
simplicity of his upbringing. Jessie Chambers once watched Lawrence
and
his
father gathering watercress for tea. "Words cannot convey
