Chapter 8 ‘A fire fed on books’: books and reading in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers

Reading as cooperation

Sons and Lovers can be read in the context of some of the various movements concerned with working-class self-education in the late nineteenth century. Paul Morel’s mother Gertrude is involved in the Co-operative Women’s Guild, an organisation that brought working-class women together and encouraged them to help themselves and each other. The Guild encouraged wide reading: the concluding chapter of the 1931 anthology Life As We Have Known It is a collection of extracts from the writings of Guildswomen, many of which list and describe books that the authors have read.² When Paul leaves school it is the Co-op reading room that he visits to search the newspapers for job advertisements; earlier in the novel his elder brother William’s first job was as a clerk in the Co-op office. Lawrence also describes the ‘decent little library’ in Bestwood: a subscription library open one evening a week in two small rooms in the Mechanics Hall, ‘warm with a great fire in the corner’ (ch. 7, p. 190), where Paul and Miriam meet each other when they go to change books for themselves and their families.³ Clara Dawes, Paul’s later lover, has acquired what Lawrence describes as ‘a fair amount of education’ (ch. 10, p. 306) through her involvement in the women’s movement. Miriam Leivers owns a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, a popular anthology first published in 1861 and compiled by Francis T. Palgrave and the then poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson. The Golden Treasury was highly influential in developing the tastes of the largely self-taught: ‘Racing to make up educational deficits, autodidacts often resorted to prepackaged collections of classics.’⁴ In her memoir D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Jessie Chambers explains that the Golden Treasury became ‘a kind of Bible’ to them both: ‘Lawrence carried the little red volume in his pocket and read to me on every opportunity, usually out in the fields.’⁵

In his book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose describes what he calls ‘mutual improvement’: ‘Education was a social activity, not essentially different from the fellowship of the pub, chapel, or trade union. Knowledge was something to be shared around.’⁶ Paul and the Leivers family have ‘bitter debates on the nationalising of the land, and similar problems’ (ch. 7, p. 189). Later, they read Macbeth, using ‘penny books’ and taking parts. Together they go to meetings of the Literary Society in Bestwood. William Morel exchanges lessons with a Frenchman and Paul learns French and algebra from his godfather, who is a clergyman. He in turn attempts to teach these subjects to Miriam, with complicated and often painful results.⁷

Episodes where one character reads aloud to another are ostensibly an act of love or companionship but can be similarly complicated or unsuccessful. Paul’s father makes ‘an effort to come back somewhat to the old relationship of the first months of their marriage’ by attempting to read the newspaper to his wife as she sews: ‘slowly pronouncing and delivering the words like a man pitching quoits. Often she hurried him on, giving him a phrase in anticipation. And then he took her words humbly’ (ch. 3, p. 63). The reading is an offering that Mrs Morel accepts reluctantly. She is impatient with Morel’s clumsy attempt to enter into her world of words and ideas; she has already rejected him. Later in the novel, Paul reads a narrative poem that mentions Mablethorpe, the Morel family’s holiday destination, aloud to Miriam, but of necessity the rest of the family also listen and their responses are lukewarm. Mrs Morel wishes that everything written were not so sad and then interrupts Miriam’s attempts to discuss the poem with Paul, taking the conversation off at a tangent. Morel, who has listened as if the reading had been a sermon, responds dismissively: ‘I canna see what they want drownin’ theirselves for’ (ch. 7, p. 212).

However, the act of reading itself is most often not shared and cooperative, but solitary and silent.

‘She sat reading alone, as she always did’

There are several occasions in the novel where solitary reading is mentioned or described, usually quite briefly. These include glimpses of Gertrude Morel consulting books as she writes a paper for the Co-operative Women’s Guild and of Clara Dawes sitting reading in the parlour during a visit to Miriam’s family. These scenes illustrate the intellectual independence of both women, but they also subtly indicate their isolation. Mrs Morel is supported and mentally stimulated by the Guild, but it is resented by ‘hostile husbands who found their wives getting too independent’ (ch. 3, p. 69). Clara is apparently reading because she has momentarily been left alone and this points to her self-sufficiency and detachment, but she is separated from her husband; her situation is discussed and her unhappiness speculated on in detail later in the chapter. Miriam’s elder brothers do not share or understand her literary tastes; they ridicule her for never daring to do anything except recite poetry. ‘She can do nowt’ but go about thinkin’ herself somebody – “The Lady of the Lake” – yah!’ (ch. 6, p. 156). Reading can also be a defensive measure or a deliberate means of shutting other people out. When during a seaside holiday Mrs Morel criticises Paul and Miriam for coming in late from a walk together, both of them retreat uncomfortably in this way: ‘And she took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself’ (ch. 7, p. 216). In the following chapter, Paul returns home from an evening with Miriam to his mother’s (at first) silent reproaches: ‘She sat reading, alone, as she always did’ (ch. 8, p. 228). After Paul is late home yet again, he pretends to read in an attempt to avoid the inevitable confrontation with his mother and his sister: ‘He knew his mother wanted to upbraid him’ (ch. 8, p. 250). A book may be a weapon, as well as a shield.

It could also be argued that the readers in the book are themselves separated from the readers of the book. Many of the central characters in the novel have clearly done a great deal of silent, solitary and quite intense reading; this is implied by the titles of the books that Lawrence alludes to or that his characters mention in conversation, such as the works of Herbert Spencer, Ernest Renan’s biography Vie de Jésus and the novels of Honoré de Balzac. Yet Lawrence never enters into the mind of characters as they engage with a text in the act of solitary reading. In contrast, James Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus savours the sentences in Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book that are ‘like poetry’. As a student Stephen searches for ‘the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or of Aquinas’. He remembers learning to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid ‘in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon’; this leads him on to other memories of learning Latin and the ‘ragged book’ that he learned it from; he thinks that other human fingers touched the pages, fifty years ago. ‘The dusky verses were as fragrant as though they had laid all those years in myrtle and lavender and vervain.’⁸ In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse Mrs Ramsay browses through an unnamed book of poetry, chanting the lines to herself and noticing the images that they call up: ‘She felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up over petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red.’⁹ In Sons and Lovers we may be told that characters are reading, but not what they are reading or what the physical text or the words themselves evoke for them in the moment of reading.

‘He went on reading, but she did not hear’

On two occasions the novel enters into the mind of Miriam as Paul reads aloud to her. The first of these occurs in the chapter ‘Strife in Love’ and will be discussed later in this essay. The second occasion comes during a period of tension in their relationship, after they have agreed not to get engaged. One Sunday evening after chapel Paul reads a chapter of the Gospel of St John while the couple are momentarily alone in the Morel kitchen:

As he sat in the arm-chair, reading, intent, his voice only thinking, she felt as if he were using her unconsciously, as a man uses his tools at some work he is bent on. She loved it. And the wistfulness of his voice was like a reaching to something, and it was as if she were what he reached with. She sat back on the sofa, away from him, and yet feeling herself the very instrument his hand grasped. It gave her great pleasure.

Then he began to falter, and to get self-conscious. And when he came to the verse: ‘A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow because her hour is come’, he missed it out. Miriam had felt him growing uncomfortable. She shrank when the well-known words did not follow. He went on reading, but she did not hear. A grief and shame made her bend her head. Six months ago, he would have read it simply. (ch. 9, p. 268)

Miriam’s response is to the act of Paul reading, rather than to the actual words being read. The first paragraph recalls the more positive and productive aspects of their literary relationship: sharing his own response to the Gospel and his thoughts about religion (they have been discussing the sermon) enables Paul to work out and clarify his own ideas. Miriam is content to be used in this way. She has realised that her ability to listen makes her of value to Paul. She is a tool and he has reached for her, he has reached out to her, he holds her. Yet this image of emotional connection and fulfilment follows closely after a passage written from Paul’s point of view in which the language is aggressive and almost punitive. ‘Miriam was the threshing floor on which he threshed out all his beliefs. While he trampled his ideas upon her soul, the truth came out for him … Almost impassive, she submitted to his argument and expounding’ (ch. 9, p. 267). Paul uses Miriam in both senses of the word. And in the second paragraph above it is the words themselves, but words that must be suppressed, that recall them both to what divides them and obstructs their relationship: the issues of biology, birth and begetting.

Sometimes reading itself is obstructed or does not happen. Early in the novel Morel makes an attempt at housework so that his heavily pregnant wife can sit and read her books, but after he has left for the pit, Mrs Morel finds the house tidy but dirty and cannot rest until she has thoroughly cleaned it. William’s fiancée, Lily, has to be left alone during a visit to the Morel family and Mrs Morel finds her ‘a little thing of Annie Swan’s’ to read.¹⁰ But Lily is a poor reader: ‘It was pathetic to see her, on a wet afternoon, wading in misery through a few lines. She never got beyond the second page.’ Morel sympathises with her: ‘’Er canna see what there is i’ books, ter sit borin’ your nose in ’em for, no more can I’ (ch. 6, pp. 160–161). Like Lily, Morel is virtually illiterate; he went into the pit when he was ten. He reads last night’s paper while he eats his solitary breakfast before setting off to work, ‘what of it he could, spelling it over laboriously’ (ch. 2, p. 38). Lack of literacy links these characters and emphasises that they are both outsiders within the family, as well as unsuitable and potentially unsatisfying partners for those who do read.

The original book

The first book mentioned in Sons and Lovers is a Bible that was given to Gertrude Morel by John Field, a friend with whom she walked home from chapel and who (it is implied) she might once have hoped to marry. Instead, he married ‘a woman of forty, a widow with property’ (ch. 1, p. 17). Gertrude has ‘preserved’ his Bible – Lawrence uses that phrase twice – although she never speaks of him. The Bible is positioned in the novel as the original book: the one that comes before all the others, in both senses. But for Gertrude, the Bible is associated with disappointment: ‘She understood pretty well what he might or might not have been.’ It is also associated, in the early chapters, with an attempt to preserve something of the intellectual and spiritual life that she might have enjoyed, had she not made what is now clearly a disastrous marriage. Gertrude befriends the Congregational minister, who has recently lost his wife in childbirth; he becomes Paul’s godfather. They discuss the wedding at Cana and the meaning of Christ changing water into wine: his ideas are ‘quaint and fantastic’ but she brings him ‘judiciously to earth’ (ch. 2, p. 45). This conversation enthuses them both, but it is then interrupted by the arrival home of Morel, drunk and in his pit dirt, demanding his dinner and more beer.

Later in the novel, religious belief (‘the Orthodox creed’) becomes something for Paul to question and debate with Miriam and a potential source of pain, yet biblical allusions and echoes sound through the whole narrative. During a childhood game in the street, Paul sees ‘a big red moon lift itself up, slowly, … steadily, like a great bird. And he thought of the bible, that the moon should be turned to blood’ (ch. 4, p. 101). Paul likens pine trunks glowing in the sunset to ‘God’s burning bush, that burned not away’ (ch. 7, p. 183). Miriam is described as being ‘like one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead’ (ch. 7, p. 184). A conversation about the nature of love ‘remained graven in her mind, as one of the letters of the law’ (ch. 7, p. 202). She ‘suffered exquisite pain, as, with an intellect like a knife, the man she loved examined her religion in which she lived and moved and had her being’ (ch. 8, p. 230; an echo of Acts 17.28) and later, when at last Paul confronts her with his need for physical intimacy, she thinks of an image that echoes the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye: ‘life forced her through this gate of suffering too, and she would submit’ (ch. 11, p. 328). Clara is likened to the Queen of Sheba, while Paul remembers that as a boy he ‘always thought that a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night was a pit, with its steam, and its lights and the burning bank – and I thought the Lord was always at the pit-top’ (ch. 12, p. 364). Even at the very end of the novel, outside at night after the death of his mother, Paul feels his grief and loss and despair in terms of an image from the Gospel of St John: he is ‘less than an ear of wheat lost in the field’ (ch. 15, p. 464). Paul has ‘shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him’ and yet he does not clear away the existence of the original book, the source of images and metaphors, the language that is so deeply embedded in the brain that it cannot be forgotten, although it can be appropriated for his (and Lawrence’s) own purposes, as when he uses a Pentecostal metaphor to describe sexual ecstasy: ‘a baptism of fire in passion’ (ch. 11, p. 399).¹¹

‘A fire fed on books’

As might be expected, references and allusions to books feature most heavily in the five central chapters that concern the relationship between Paul and Miriam. The character of Miriam is based very closely on that of Lawrence’s friend Jessie Chambers. Chambers’s memoir D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record devotes a whole chapter to the books that she and Lawrence read together in adolescence and Lawrence’s responses to them. They read widely and voraciously: novels by authors ranging from George Eliot and Charles Dickens to R. L. Stevenson, Rider Haggard and R. D. Blackmore, poetry, essays and plays. Later they read French authors.¹² Chambers’s account suggests that it was mostly Lawrence who chose the books they read, lending or occasionally giving them to her and finding others in the Mechanics’ Institute library, but the actual reading was very much a shared enterprise. Lawrence and Chambers discussed the books on their walks home from the library:

Our discussion was not exactly criticism, indeed it was not criticism at all, but a vivid re-creation of the substance of our reading.… The characters interested us most, and there was usually a more or less unconscious identification of them with ourselves, so that our reading became a kind of personal experience. Scott’s novels in particular we talked over in this way, and the scenes and events of his stories were more real to us than our actual surroundings.¹³

Later in her account, Chambers says: ‘To say that we read the books gives no adequate idea of what really happened. It was the entering into possession of a new world, a widening and enlargement of life.’¹⁴

However, as John Worthen points out in his biography, there is considerably less emphasis on shared reading in Lawrence’s fictional account than in Jessie Chambers’s memoir; instead of being primarily an intellectual companionship, the relationship is presented as an incipient love affair from the very beginning. We are told that Paul and Miriam read and discuss a wide range of books intensely together, and titles and authors and the names of fictional characters are thrown easily and almost carelessly into the narrative, yet we almost never actually see the reading or discussion happening.¹⁵ Lawrence does not attempt to describe or recreate the excitement and revelation or the sense of a widening world that Chambers recalls. Worthen also observes that the reference to Paul and Miriam’s affair being like ‘like a fire fed on books’ comes relatively late in the novel. In fact, it comes after their brief attempt at a physical relationship – and with it their intellectual friendship – has actually ended and follows almost immediately after the episode in which Paul consummates his affair with Clara. And ‘a fire fed on books’ is a complex and troubling metaphor. It carries within it an echo of the ‘baptism of fire in passion’ or ‘the real flame of feeling for another person’ that Paul considers to be essential for the complete development of every human being. Fire can be life-affirming, but it can also be destructive. It is the books themselves that are consumed and reduced to ashes – in many authoritarian communities burning books is the means of condemning or suppressing them.

When we do see shared reading, it is clear that Paul and Miriam do not approach the texts as equals, but as teacher and pupil. Here Miriam is described, as Paul begins to become aware of her, in terms of her favourite reading and what it represents to her:

The girl was romantic in her soul. Everywhere was a Walter Scott heroine being loved by men with helmets or with plumes in their caps. She herself was something of a princess turned into a swine girl, in her own imagination … Ediths and Lucys and Rowenas, Brian de Bois Guilberts, Rob Roys and Guy Mannerings rustled the sunny leaves in the morning …

She hated her position as swine girl. She wanted to be considered. She wanted to learn, thinking that if she could read, as Paul said he could read, ‘Columba’, or the Voyage Autour de ma Chambre, the world would have a different face for her, and a deepened respect. She could not be princess by wealth or standing. So, she was mad to have learning whereon to pride herself. For she was different from other folk, and must not be scooped up among the common fry. Learning was the only distinction to which she thought to aspire. (ch. 7, pp. 173–4)

The works of Sir Walter Scott were still popular in the late nineteenth century when Lawrence was growing up and were greatly admired by the writer and critic Leslie Stephen among others. As adolescents, Lawrence and Jessie Chambers were enthusiastic readers of Scott and identified with the characters in the novels. However, here, Scott’s novels (or Miriam’s readings of them) are summed up in a perfunctory and dismissive way, details like plumes and helmets are used metonymically to evoke a romantic ideal of chivalry and courtly love; there is a hint of banal cliché; the plots are reduced to the names of characters. In this context it is significant that most of Scott’s novels were historical novels; Ivanhoe, one of the best known and one of those to which Lawrence refers, was published in 1819 and is set during the reign of King John, while another, The Bride of Lammermoor (also published in 1819) is set in Scotland in the early sixteenth century. Lucy, one of Miriam’s heroines, is a character in this novel. Lawrence interweaves the references to Scott’s protagonists with tropes from fairy tales: the princess and the swine girl, King Cophetua and the beggar-maid.¹⁶ Lawrence subtly criticises Miriam’s approach to these texts by implying that the novels and poems are being used for consolation or as a means of escapism: Miriam views reading and learning at least partly as a means of self-advancement, as well as personal development. She hopes for a teacher who will also be a saviour.¹⁷

Paul helps Miriam to choose books in Bestwood library (although the reader is not told which ones) and teaches her French. One of the French lessons occurs on a very eventful evening during which Mrs Morel openly confronts Paul with her jealousy and resentment of Miriam and her misery in her marriage: ‘she’d leave me no room, not a bit of room … she exults so in taking you from me’ and which culminates in Paul almost coming to blows with his father (ch. 8, p. 252). The poets who are read and discussed, both French and English, underline the tensions, sexual and otherwise, that exist between Paul and Miriam and will eventually end their relationship.

‘Shall we read, or is it too late?’ he asked.

‘It is late – but we can read just a little,’ she pleaded.

She was really getting now the food for her life during the next week. He made her copy Baudelaire’s ‘Le Balcon’. Then he read it for her. His voice was soft and caressing, but growing almost brutal. He had a way of lifting his lips and showing his teeth, passionately and bitterly, when he was much moved. This he did now. It made Miriam feel as if he were trampling on her. She dared not look at him, but sat with her head bowed. She could not understand why he got into such a tumult and fury. It made her wretched. She did not like Baudelaire, on the whole – nor Verlaine.

‘Behold her singing in the field

Yon solitary highland lass – ’

That nourished her heart – so did ‘Fair Ines.’ And:

‘It was a beauteous evening, calm and pure,

And breathing holy quiet like a nun – ’

These were like herself. And there was he, saying in his throat, bitterly:

‘Tu te rappelleras la beauté des caresses.’ (ch. 8, p. 248)

Paul sometimes attempts to understand and explain the differences between himself and Miriam by placing qualities in opposition: a pine tree flaring up in the sunset rather than an ordinary tree, ‘with fidgety leaves’ (ch. 7, p. 183); the Gothic arch leaping up at heaven and losing itself in the divine (like Miriam), rather than the bowed Norman arch, the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul (like himself; ch. 7, p. 215). Here is another opposition: Romantic English poetry (Miriam’s taste) placed alongside sensual French verse (Paul’s taste). This scene in which Paul reads Baudelaire aloud is narrated from Miriam’s point of view and she does not consciously attempt to rationalise her feelings – for her, the difference between Wordsworth and Baudelaire is how they make her feel. Thomas Hood’s ‘Fair Ines’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ nourish her, but ‘Le Balcon’ does not. For Miriam, Baudelaire’s verse is difficult to listen to because it makes Paul aggressive and transforms him into a cruel predator. Only one line of the poem is quoted, but this is enough to evoke the rest and to make its erotic nature quite clear.¹⁸ There are other reasons why Miriam may prefer to concentrate on Paul, the reader, rather than on the words that he is reading. The poem begins:

Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses,

Ô toi, tous mes plaisirs! ô toi, tous mes devoirs!

Tu te rappelleras la beauté des caresses,

La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses!

(Mother of memories, loveliest of lovers,

You, all my pleasures, all the debts I owe,

Remember that perfection of caresses,

The evening charm, the gentleness of home,

Mother of memories, loveliest of lovers.)¹⁹

Later stanzas recreate softly firelit evenings, but also fragrant blood, the gathering night enclosing the lovers like a wall, sweetly poisonous breath and the lover clasping his mistress’s knees like a child clasping his mother. The woman whom Baudelaire commemorates in gratitude conflates the figures of Miriam’s two dangerous rivals for Paul’s attention and his love: Gertrude Morel, the idealised mother figure, and Clara, the sensuous mistress who can offer the passion that the young woman who (according to Lawrence) imagines herself as a solitary reaper or a pure heroine, cannot give him.

When Miriam thinks about her favourite poems that they are like herself, what she may mean is that they are familiar: that they have been written about a world that she knows, the English countryside and the ordinary people who live and work there. In Lyrical Ballads and elsewhere Wordsworth deliberately wrote about marginalised figures, children and the poor, and used ordinary language that at that time was not considered consciously poetic. As well as ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and ‘Lucy Gray’, Miriam’s copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury would have included the more reflective and philosophical ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’. However, the poems that Lawrence cites as her personal favourites are, like the Walter Scott novels, presented as a reflection of Miriam’s idealised self-image:

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.²⁰

What the heroines of the Scott novels and the subjects of the Romantic poems appear to have in common is that they are either rescued or they are recognised and acknowledged. Fair Ines, in the poem of that name, is mourned after her death in terms that, once again, adopt the language of chivalry:

Would I had been, fair Ines,

That gallant cavalier,

Who rode so gaily by thy side,

And whisper’d thee so near!

Were there no bonny dames at home,

Or no true lovers here,

That he should cross the seas to win

The dearest of the dear?²¹

The figure of the Solitary Reaper also continues to haunt the poet:

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.²²

A soul and a beast

Scott and Wordsworth may once have been Paul’s favourite reading, too. In the early part of the novel he has admired and romanticised the red hair of one of the girls who winds stockings in the factory where he works. ‘You remind me of Elaine in the Idylls of the King. I’d draw you if I could’ (ch. 5, p. 137). The Idylls of the King was one of Tennyson’s retellings of the Arthurian tales and it commemorates another virginal heroine. Elaine, the Fair Maid of Astolat, died of love for Sir Lancelot, and despite his dalliance with Guinevere, Sir Lancelot acknowledged her love for him and mourned her sorrowfully. And Sons and Lovers itself could be said to show the pervasive influence of Lawrence’s poetic forebears, the Romantic poets that he read aloud ‘over and over again’ to Jessie Chambers.²³ It is about working people (or at least, some people of working-class origins), it uses dialect, and it is full of detailed evocations of the natural world.

But in Sons and Lovers French is the language of aspiration. It is Paul’s ability to understand French that gets him his first job as a clerk at Jordan’s, transcribing and translating orders from French customers: the job that saves him from having to follow his father into the pit and which eventually contributes to his social ascent. Paul begins to use French phrases as he thinks to himself and occasionally in conversation. Miriam’s brothers seem to him like ‘les derniers fils d’une race épuisée’ (ch. 7, p. 180) and he believes that Clara has deliberately chosen to be ‘une femme incomprise’ (ch. 12, p. 361). After his mother dies, the weeks pass as a ‘nuit blanche’ (ch. 14, p. 445). Miriam reads Balzac with Paul and learns to write French compositions, which Paul corrects but also praises, albeit rather patronisingly. Paul accidentally observes that Miriam’s rival Clara is reading Lettres de mon Moulin, by Alphonse Daudet and he then discovers that Clara has ‘taught herself French and could read in that language with a struggle’ (ch. 10, p. 306, emphasis added). He later mocks her for not recognising an allusion to a poem by Victor Hugo, but Clara’s openness to French literature is a sign that she may be more receptive to those aspects of his personality from which Miriam shrinks, even though Lettres de mon Moulin consists of light sketches and tales set in the French countryside, rather than darkly erotic poems. In the following chapter, ‘Defeat of Miriam’, Miriam picks up ‘her favourite’ Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but Paul instead chooses Tartarin de Tarascon, a satirical novel also written by Alphonse Daudet, to read aloud to her.²⁴ This is an ominous sign. Their subsequent conversation results in a temporary rift in their relationship. Later in the chapter he sends her a letter in which he says: ‘See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun’ (ch. 9, p. 292). This is a cruel echo of the William Wordsworth sonnet that is apparently one of Miriam’s favourites, ‘breathing holy quiet like a nun’.²⁵

At the very beginning of their friendship, Miriam associates Paul with two French novellas, possibly without knowing more than their titles: Prosper Mérimée’s ‘Columba’ and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma Chambre. ‘Columba’ is set in Corsica and concerns a blood feud that ends in murder (possibly a veiled reference to Miriam’s coming difficulties with Mrs Morel). In Voyage autour de ma Chambre the narrator, who is under house arrest, conducts an imaginary journey around his room, contemplating the furniture and other objects that the room contains and using them as the starting point for anecdotes and reminiscences and meditations. It is an exercise in seeing the familiar world differently and strangely, in making the best of the material to hand, which may be why it originally interested Lawrence and might conceivably have interested Miriam, if she read it. But it also contains a particularly suggestive passage:

I have come to the conclusion, by way of various observations, that man is composed of a soul and a beast. These two beings are absolutely distinct, but so closely fitted together, or one on top of the other, that the soul must have a certain superiority over the beast to be in a position to draw a distinction between them.… The soul can make the beast obey it, and contrariwise, the beast often forces the soul to act against its inclination.²⁶

The struggle between the soul and the beast – an idea to which de Maistre returns at intervals through the book – is one way of describing the conflict that often goes on within Paul himself, apparently caught between the values of his middle-class mother and his working-class father, between the life of the mind and the life of the body, between the Word and the Flesh. His mother may appear to have won the battle, but in Paul’s taste for French literature the connection with his father persists and survives. His father, the sensual dancer, intemperate in both senses of the word, is part French, the grandson of ‘a French refugee who had married an English barmaid – if it had been a marriage’ (ch. 1, p. 17).²⁷

Les fleurs du mal

It is not only books that Paul and Miriam share. As adolescents, they spend much time appreciatively contemplating a wren’s nest, a sunset, daffodils, primroses, a manor garden with sheaves of shut-up crocuses. Celandines are ‘scalloped splashes of gold’ and Paul describes them as ‘pressing themselves against the sun’ (ch. 7, p. 179). A little later, Paul and Miriam look together at a wild rose bush:

Its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point, the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses. (ch. 7, pp. 195–6)

These early flowers are sources of spiritual light, flowing generously outwards, golden, splashing, spilt stars, gleaming. The flowers are ivory and give off ‘a white, virgin scent’. But the scene in which Paul finally decides to break off for good with Miriam, is, in one sense, his choice of Baudelaire’s way of seeing the world rather than Wordsworth’s. He makes his decision in the Morel garden, at night:

And then, like a shock, he caught another perfume, something raw and coarse. Hunting round, he found the purple iris, touched their fleshy throats, and their dark, grasping hands. At any rate he had found something. They stood stiff in the darkness. Their scent was brutal. The moon was melting down upon the crest of the hill. It was gone, all was dark … Breaking off a pink he suddenly went indoors. (ch. 11, pp. 337–8)

These purple irises are fleurs du mal, decadent, embodied, livid, predatory.

An ear of wheat lost in the field

By the end of the novel Paul has parted from Clara and his mother is dead. He cannot resume his old relationship with Miriam. He is alone. When Miriam briefly visits his lodgings, she looks to see what books he is reading: ‘Evidently just an ordinary novel’ (ch. 15, p. 459). If, earlier in the novel, reading could be a form of cooperation and mutual aid, of sharing, of making connections, by the end, at least for Paul, it has become a solitary activity, possibly little more than a way of passing the time. ‘Where was he? – one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field’ (ch. 15, p. 464). On the final page of the novel, mourning his mother, Paul returns, subconsciously, to the original book: ‘except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone’.²⁸ There follows an apocalyptic vision which seems to emerge from the Bible verse, even though that is not directly quoted:

Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

… But no, he would not give in.

In the final paragraph of the novel, Paul turns away from the darkness, towards ‘the city’s gold phosphorescence’. No books are explicitly mentioned here, and Paul is walking, not reading, but the echo of the imagery and rhythms of the Bible seem to have inspired a resolution, an urge to survive, even though this takes the form of a reaction against the verse and the ideas that it evokes.

As a young man Lawrence ‘read omnivorously, but books and ideas were never solitary experiences for him: he continually challenged the ideas he met, and discussed books and their ideas with others. He had thus come into full possession of his reading.’²⁹ For Paul Morel, as well as for Lawrence, books and reading hold the promise of drawing closer to others and creating communities, but in practice the act of reading makes differences more acute and divides people from one another. As John Worthen observes, Lawrence paid a price for his scholarship in ‘loneliness and self-conscious difference’. In the novel, this seems to be most true of the female characters: Gertrude Morel, Clara Dawes and most of all Miriam Leivers are separated from others by their reading. It is Miriam, rather than Paul, who apparently pays the price; she gains a degree of independence but loses Paul’s love and intellectual companionship.

In Sons and Lovers, the actual experience of engaging with a text is less important than what a book represents and how it can be used. Books can be a way of preserving a time that has been lost, or a means of self-education and social and worldly advancement. For Paul Morel they are sometimes the latter, but perhaps most of all they are something to respond to and challenge and, by doing so, develop his own ideas and define himself.

Notes

1. 1.  D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. by Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 12, p. 360. All future references to Sons and Lovers will be given in the body of the text.

2. 2.  Life As We Have Known It, ed. by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (London: Hogarth Press, 1931), pp. 114–29. The books listed include novels of all kinds, poetry, biographies, history and scientific and political works, including Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Joseph Hyder’s The Case for Land Nationalisation and Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Life.

3. 3.  The mechanics’ institutes provided manual labourers with facilities for self-education, including libraries and night classes in reading, writing and practical subjects. They also provided some social facilities. William Morel plays billiards at the Mechanics Hall (ch. 3, p. 73).

4. 4.  Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 128. Several of Rose’s subjects include Palgrave’s Golden Treasury among the books that were their favourite or formative reading. For the popularity of the Golden Treasury, see Martin Spevack, The Golden Treasury: 150 Years On, eBLJ (2012), article 2, especially pp. 1–4.

5. 5.  Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E. T., 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1965), p. 99.

6. 6.  Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 89 and ch. 2, ‘Mutual Improvement’.

7. 7.  Informal teaching such as this was an important method of mutual improvement. William Morel also tutors pupils at home after learning shorthand at night school.

8. 8.  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 10, 180, 182–3.

9. 9.  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), pp. 183–4.

10. 10.  Annie S. Swan (1859–1943) was a prolific romance novelist, many of whose books appeared in serial form in the women’s magazine The People’s Friend. Her novels and stories were generally undemanding and sentimental, dealing with women’s domestic lives and hardships. See B. Dickson, ‘Swan [married name Burnett Smith], Annie Shepherd (pseud. David Lyall)’ (1859–1943), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/40374. By showing that Lily is unable even to read ‘a little thing of Annie Swan’s’, Lawrence confirms that her standard of literacy is very low indeed.

11. 11.  One very striking example of Lawrence’s appropriation of the Bible comes in the foreword to Sons and Lovers, which was omitted from the original 1913 edition but has been included in the 1992 Cambridge edition (Appendix 1, pp. 467–73). Here, Lawrence adopts not only the language but the rhythms of Bible verses in a response to, or a reversioning of, the beginning of the Gospel of St John.

12. 12.  See Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, ch. 4 ‘Literary Formation’, pp. 91–123.

13. 13.  Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, pp. 93–4.

14. 14.  Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, p. 96.

15. 15.  John Worthen, The Cambridge Biography (Vol. 1): D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 351–2. A further point to note is that Edward Garnett made significant cuts to Lawrence’s manuscript when he published the original edition in 1913 and these tended to strengthen the emphasis on the love affair at the expense of the intellectual companionship. For example, Garnett excised the account of Paul’s and Miriam’s choosing their books in Bestwood Library and abridged some of their conversations about books and ideas.

16. 16.  This is probably intended as a reference to Tennyson’s poem ‘The Beggar Maid’, which Miriam might well have read (and which inspired Pre-Raphaelite paintings), see note by Helen Baron and Carl Baron in Sons and Lovers, p. 534).

17. 17.  ‘Even in those days Lawrence used to declare that the main purpose of education was to teach people how to use their leisure, or rather how to use themselves’ (Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, p. 80).

18. 18.  Les Fleurs du Mal was condemned as offensive to public morality when it first appeared in 1857.

19. 19.  Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. by Anthony Mortimer (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2016), pp. 70–1.

20. 20.  The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. by Francis T. Palgrave, 4th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 287.

21. 21.  The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, ed. by Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913) p. 43.

22. 22.  Golden Treasury, pp. 287–8.

23. 23.  Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, p. 99.

24. 24.  Tartarin de Tarascon is the story of a native of Provence who boasts of his ability as a hunter. He only succeeds in shooting an old, blind lion, but this is presented as a triumph.

25. 25.  Golden Treasury, p. 303.

26. 26.  Xavier de Maistre, A Journey around My Room, trans. by Andrew Brown (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2013), p. 10.

27. 27.  ‘(Lawrence) tended to make France, and French – like the vermouth and absinthe he drank in cafes – symbolic of the decadent poet’s life, of witty cultivation and an amoral pose; but still more it was a reminder of how far he aimed to travel from the limitations (and language) of Eastwood, and of how cultivated (in a non-Eastwood sense) he was’ (Worthen, Early Years, p. 62). Lawrence liked to imagine that he had a French ancestor and Chambers recalls him saying: ‘If English people don’t like what I write … I shall settle in France and write for the French’ (Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, p. 106).

28. 28.  John 12.24.

29. 29.  Worthen, Early Years, p. 346.

Bibliography of secondary literature

• Chambers, Jessie, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E. T., 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1965)
• Davies, Margaret Llewelyn (ed.), Life As We Have Known It (London: Hogarth Press, 1931)
• Dickson, B., ‘Swan [married name Burnett Smith], Annie Shepherd (pseud. David Lyall’ (1859–1943), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), http://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/40374
• Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001)
• Spevack, Martin, The Golden Treasury: 150 Years On, eBLJ (2012), article 2
• Worthen, John, The Cambridge Biography (Vol. 1): D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)