SONS, LOVERS, MOTHERS
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Lawrence's brimming delight in all these simple things." Delight in
simple things is one of the recurring features of the working-class
existence described in
Sons and Lovers.
We can understand better
the special value that Lawrence identified with his mother's labor–
iousness and self-denial in the scene where Mrs. Morel, wickedly
extravagant, comes home clutching the pot that cost her fivepence
and the bunch of pansies and daisies that cost her fourpence. The
rapture of the commonest enjoyments and simplest possessions is
represented in the mother and father as well as in the young artist
Paul, the future D. H. Lawrence. This autobiographical novel rooted
in the writer's early struggles is charged with feeling for his class, his
region, his people. Lawrence was not a workingman himself, despite
the brief experience in the surgical appliances factory that in the novel
becomes Paul Morel's continued job. Chekhov said that the working–
class writer purchases with his youth that which a more genteel
writer is born with. But Lawrence gained everything, as a writer, from
being brought up in the working class, and lost nothing by it. In
Sons and Lovers
he portrays the miners without idealizing them, as
a socialist would; he relishes their human qualities (perhaps even a
little jealously) and works them up as a subject for his art. He does
not identify himself with them; his mother, too, we can be sure
from the portrait of Mrs. Morel, tended to be somewhat aloof among
the miners' wives. But Lawrence knows
as a writer
that he is related
to working people, that he is bound up with them in the same order
of physical and intimate existence, that it is workers' lives he has
always looked on. Some of the most affecting passages in this novel
are based on the force and directness of working-class speech. "'E's
niver gone, child?" Morel says to his son when William dies. Paul
answers in "educated" and even prissy English, but the voice of the
mines, the fields and the kitchens is rendered straight and unashamed.
Lawrence, who knew how much he had lost as a man by siding with
his mother in the conflict, describes the miner Morel getting his own
breakfast, sitting "down to an hour of joy," with an irresistible ap–
preciation of the physical and human picture involved: "He toasted
his
bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then
he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with
a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy."
The writer alone in Lawrence redeemed the weaknesses of being
