382
ALFRED KAZIN
ful, and that Lawrence leaves arrested in their pain and conflict.
When Jessie Chambers said of the first draft of
Sons and Lovers
that "Lawrence had carried the situation to the point of deadlock
and had stopped there," she may have been right enough about it
as an aborted novel. But Lawrence's primary interest and concern as
a novelist, his sense of the continuing
flow
of relationship between
people, no matter how unclear and painful, no matter how far away
it was from the "solution" that the people themselves may have longed
for, is what makes this whole last section of the novel so telling.
But of course it is the opening half of
Sons and Lovers
that makes
the book great. The struggle between husband and wife is described
with a direct, unflinching power. Lawrence does not try to bring
anything to a psychological conclusion. The marriage is a struggle,
a continuing friction, a relationship where the wife's old desire for
her husband can still flash up through her resentment of his "lowness."
That is why everything in the "common round" can be described
with such tenderness, for the relationship of husband and wife sweeps
into its unconscious passion everything that the young Lawrence loved,
and was attached to. Living in a mining village on the edge of old
Sherwood Forest, always close to the country, Lawrence was as
intimate with nature as any country poet could have been, but he
was lucky to see rural England and the industrial Midlands in relation
to each other; the country soothed his senses, but a job all day long in
a Nottingham factory making out orders for surgical appliances did
not encourage nature worship. "On the fallow land the young wheat
shone silkily. Minton pit waved its plumes of white steam, coughed,
and rattled hoarsely." Lawrence is a great novelist of landscape, for
he is concerned with the relationships of people living on farms, or
walking out into the country after the week's work in the city. He
does not romantitcize nature, he describes it in its minute vibrations.
In
Sons and Lovers
the emotional effect of the "lyrical" passages
depends on Lawrence's extraordinary ability to convey movement and
meaning even in non-human things. But in this book nature never
provides evasion of human conflict and is not even a projection of
human feelings; it is-the physical world that Lawrence grew up in,
and includes the pit down which a miner must go every day. Paul
in convalescence, sitting up in bed, would "see the fluffy horses feeding
