DH Lawrence

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DH Lawrence (passport photo)
Photo portrait of the young D. H. Lawrence (1906)

David Herbert Lawrence (born September 11, 1885 in Eastwood , Nottinghamshire , † March 2, 1930 in Vence , France ) was an English writer who came from a working-class family as the first writer of rank in 20th century English literature.

Life

Lawrence was the son of a miner and former teacher who came from a middle-class family and was instrumental in her children's upbringing. The relationship between the very different parents was fraught with conflict. Lawrence had two brothers and two sisters. He was brought up in the spirit of Presbyterianism and as a teenager showed a keen interest in modern languages ​​(French, German, Italian, Spanish). From September 1906 to 1908 he studied among other things education at Nottingham University College. During this time, Lawrence took eugenic positions. In 1908 he wrote in a letter to Blanche Jennings that if it were up to him, a “death chamber as big as the Crystal Palace ” should be built in which all the sick, lame and crippled could be painlessly relieved of their suffering. After completing his studies, he got a job in Croydon near London on October 12, 1908 as a teacher, where he attracted attention with his anti-authoritarian teaching style. Lawrence fell ill with tuberculosis in 1911 and quit school in 1912, also to devote himself entirely to writing and thus earn a living for himself and his future wife Frieda, née von Richthofen.

From 1912 he had a relationship with the wife of his former French teacher, Frieda Weekley . He first met the then 32-year-old mother of three on April 6, 1912. After immediately initiating a correspondence, he followed her to Metz at the beginning of May 1912 , where she was born and where her father served as an officer in the Imperial Army. There Lawrence gathered the impressions of the German military, which was reflected in his short story The Prussian Officer , and worked on sons and lovers . He was finally accepted by Frieda's mother. Then both traveled together for the first time to Italy, where they stayed from the beginning of September 1912 to April 1913 on Lake Garda and until June 8, 1914 in Lerici , Liguria . On July 13, 1914, he married the now divorced Frieda in London. Both lived in Zennor for a short time , but soon had to leave Cornwall again on suspicion of espionage. Lawrence stayed for a long time in London, where he made the acquaintance of the Imagists , especially Richard Aldington , in whose magazine The Egoist he was able to publish a lot.

In 1913, Lawrence met the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield in the literary circles of London . Until Mansfield's untimely death in 1923, the two maintained a friendly relationship that was not always undisturbed. The ambivalent feelings that Mansfield aroused with her unconventional life and work in Lawrence found their literary expression in his portrait of Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love and also influenced his novel Lost Girl .

Tomb east of Taos, New Mexico, USA

In 1915, Lawrence met Bertrand Russell in Cambridge through Lady Ottoline Morrell's mediation . The initial friendship developed within months into an intimate, lifelong aversion, which was also reflected in the works of the two men. Lawrence Russell caricatured himself with a sharp pen in The Blind Man and Women in Love .

Since Lawrence had decided to devote himself exclusively to writing, he and his wife Frieda led an unsteady wandering life. From 1919 he and his wife traveled through various countries in Europe, such as Switzerland and Italy , as well as Ceylon and Australia, and then lived in New Mexico and Mexico . In Germany he stayed several times with his mother-in - law in Baden-Baden . In September 1922, the couple entered the United States . In 1924, DH Lawrence bought a ranch near Taos , New Mexico, in exchange for his Sons and Lovers manuscript . Finally he lived again in England as well as Italy and France. His health got worse and worse; he nearly died of pneumonia . In 1925 tuberculosis was diagnosed again. He then returned to Europe and from 1925 spent the last years of his life mainly in Italy. On February 6, 1929, his illness forced him to stay in hospital at the Ad Astra clinic in Vence . At the age of 44, Lawrence died of tuberculosis on March 2, 1930 in the Villa Robermond in Vence near Cannes , in the presence of his wife Frieda and his long-time friend Aldous Huxley . Frieda later had his ashes brought to the farm in Taos.

Lawrence was an extremely prolific writer: in addition to novels, he wrote poetry, essays, travelogues and texts for plays. In 1926 he also began to paint. Much of his work has an autobiographical reference and addresses the relationship between the sexes. Lawrence assigns an important position to the erotic and the sexual. This explains why he worked as an author during his lifetime. T. was highly controversial and some of his works (including his paintings) were banned as immoral. His most famous book is Lady Chatterley's Lover .

Literary work and historical connections

The development of DH Lawrence's entire literary oeuvre was shaped by two profound polarities from his youth: On the one hand, the insurmountable social, class-related differences in mentality of his parents led to continuous family conflicts, which only occasionally resulted from the cross-border power of the mutual erotic attraction between his father and his mother were toned down. Lawrence tried to deal with these conflicts self-therapeutically in his novels, short stories and in many of his literary productions. On the other hand, primarily in his later fictions of the 1920s, he projected the conflicts of loyalty that had arisen between his excessively strong, oedipal attachment to the possessive mother and his displaced or repressed attraction in view of the unconsciously dark, and in part suppressed, fascination for the male- In his late work, the virile energy or way of life of his father imaginatively affected that erotic fascination that the socially inferior, cultural otherness of his phallic-masculine male figures exerted on his socially superior protagonists.

Their decision mostly against social acceptance and for the outsider, such as that of Lady Chatterley for her gamekeeper Oliver Mellors in his most famous and at the same time most controversial works Lady Chatterley's Lover (1920) and Lady Chatterley (1939), made this very clear to expression. The corresponding decision of the protagonist by Lawrence in the text of these two works is presented and evaluated as an affirmative affirmation of life and a regressive act of female self-discovery. The permissiveness with which he treated the sexual relations between the two protagonists in the various versions of this novel meant that the novel was not allowed to be published in its original form in England until 1960.

In the complex constellations of the characters in the novel, class and gender-specific aspects overlap on a structurally deeper level, with class and gender hierarchies overlapping and influencing one another and thus creating an effective potential for symbolization. These constellations are not only prototypical for Lawrence's fictions, but also shaped several works by younger English authors such as John Osborne and David Storey in his successor .

In the same way, structure-forming for Lawrence's literary oeuvre, also in the sense of a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, is the contrasting and conflict-laden juxtaposition of a modern, capitalist-industrial civilization, the world of his father, and the idyllic-traditional way of life and time rhythms of an agrarian-rural England, as Lawrence experienced it topographically in Nottinghamshire, the place of origin of his influential childhood sweetheart Jessie Chambers. Lawrence tries to capture this in the third part of his generational novel The Rainbow (1915; German: The Rainbow , 1922) based on the constant vacillation of his protagonist Ursula Brangwen between backward-looking natural longings and forward-looking emancipation efforts in the modern world of work.

This deeply structured contradiction between the critique of civilization and the affirmation of life is also constitutive for the entire literary work of Lawrence, in which the radical fundamentalist criticism of modernity with regard to the rationalistic, but at the same time mechanistic omnipotence fantasies in the consciousness of the individual is based on Lawrence's orientation a pantheistic wisdom of organic natural processes and a bodily incarnated unconscious.

This connection is particularly evident in Women in Love (1920; German: Liebende Frauen , 1927) in the superimposition of narrator and character speech in numerous passages of experienced speech, in the complex interwoven nature symbolism and in the endeavor to make the Depth psychological sensitivities of the female characters in the novel. Both in genesis history as well as in thematic-motivic terms, this probably most elaborate novel by Lawrence together with The Rainbow a unit by the diachronic based perspective of a historical reconstruction of the deeper characters and encodings of the civilizing process by means of individual experience states or processing patterns representative characters in The Rainbow from the year 1915 followed by 1920 in Women in Love, supplemented by a synchronously oriented, structural-analytical diagnosis of the civilizational delusion context in the modern age and a sounding out of alternative creative options for meaning.

The concentration in Women in Love on the two contrasting development processes of the love affairs between Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich in a negative way and Ursula Bragwen and Rupert Birkin in a positive way makes, together with the individual microcosm of the protagonists, narrative at the same time the decisive shaping forces of the socio-cultural macrocosm transparent and in this respect links the critical negation of the doomed decadence of the first couple with the affirmation of individual creativity and the alternative way of life of the second couple.

If the essential motifs and structures of Lawrence's narrative work are already influenced or pre-shaped by his autobiographically experienced and attested adolescent conflicts, then his further literary work will in essential parts all the more fundamentally be determined by the close interrelationships between life and work, which in Lawrence's passionate relationship to his wife Frieda, whom he met in 1912 as a mother of three and at that time the wife of his university professor and who henceforth took him on all the changeful stages of his unsteady life, including his travels and stays abroad, etc. a. in Switzerland, Italy, Australia, the USA or Mexico, up to his early death due to his lung disease.

Without the close connection to the biographical experience and experience substrate resulting from this relationship, there are neither Lawrence's attempts to explore the mystery of sexual fulfillment nor the unconsciously dynamic overpowering through erotic desire or the numerous variations of international themes in his fictional world, for example the England-Italy theme in The Lost Girl (1920, German: The Lost Girl , 1939) or the Europe-Mexico theme in The Plumed Serpent (1926; German: The Feathered Snake , 1932) barely comprehensible.

In view of this context, in Lawrence's late work, besides Lady Chatterley's Lover , The Plumed Serpent in particular has a special place, insofar as Lawrence seeks in this book to depict the regeneration of an entire society on the basis of mythical-religious forces.

Regardless of the autobiographical impulses or references to experience, Lawrence is able to establish his generally recognized rank in English literary history as an important novelist and culture-critical narrator, because he succeeds in transforming the individual topics in the foreground into his own artistic language with the creative and imaginative transformation sustainable, the constructive integration into a comprehensive ideological system in the sense of an alternative, philosophically founded anthropology with the effort to provide answers to a disastrous and decadent doom of modern civilization in an impressive literary way.

The in-depth interpretations of the intercultural encounters with foreign peoples or cultures and religions presented by him and processed in literary terms, with their diverse symbolizations of foreign alterity as “natural cultures” and the experiences of the foreign as one's own, also substantiate the literary historical relevance of Lawrence's international fictions and travelogues, such as Twilight in Italy (1916) or Mornings in Mexico (1927), and thus open up a fruitful literary examination of self and external images, which at the same time creates a critical distance from the value paradigms of the English and also Western cultural system.

Against this background, in Lawrence's idiosyncratic philosophical anthropology, which he also tried to underpin through theoretical speculations such as in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1922) or Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), ultimately it is not sexuality that functions as a transcendent force. Rather, its vitalistic-organicistic interpreted life substrate forms the actual signified or meaning center. In his work, the biographically based interpretations of individual existence and manifestations of sexuality become metaphors of a life process determined by lack and difference in a decadent or sick civilization, which, through a blind striving for power, the symbiotic rooting of the individual in living nature through rational domination and Control of internal and external nature is suppressed and in this way dominated the fate of man. Lawrence contrasts this with his alternative anthropology of life affirmation , which not only seeks to regain the dignity of people and their individual existence as a complex balance of body and mind, nature and culture, as well as sensual experience and abstract thinking, across the existing divisions and divisions in order to find your way back to the original human potential.

In the context of the various individual topics that Lawrence dealt with in his entire work, what should ultimately be emphasized above all is his endeavor to empathize with passion in natural processes and to grasp cosmic laws that humans, animals and plants are subject to in order to the gaze of his readers and to sharpen readers for the respective inherent laws of these natural as well as cosmic coincidences. From the specific rhythm of the world of experience he portrayed, in addition to the literary form of the narrative, the form of expression of the poem resulted for him at the same time, whereby he avoided a method of composition that obeyed the rules of a given normative poetics. He found suitable means of expression in his poems, especially in vers libre , whereby this relaxed form of poetic representation made it possible for him to express his lyrical work with the same intensity as in the outstanding scenes of his novels or in the grandiose ones Descriptions of nature in his travel diaries succeeded.

Lawrence confirms in all his literary work, also from the point of view of contemporary literary criticism, through his emphatic portrayal of the passionate movement of inner human processes and the ease of the transition from the soul to the cosmic or from the moral to the metaphysical as well as through the breadth of his outlook on the everlasting drama of becoming und Vergehen still maintains his outstanding position as a poet and author, whom the renowned English writer and man of letters EM Forster honored in his 1930 obituary as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation” .

Works

Loving women, German first edition, Insel, Leipzig 1927

The University Press Cambridge University Press since 1979 working on a scientific edition of Lawrence's oeuvre, which strives for a reconstruction of those text versions that Lawrence would have released if he had no regard for the censorship and the wishes of his publishers need to take.

Novels

Published manuscripts
  • The First Lady Chatterley. Completed 1926, published posthumously in 1944 (" The First Lady Chatterley "; first version by Lady Chatterley's Lover )
  • John Thomas and Lady Jane. Completed in 1927, first published in 1954 ("John Thomas and Lady Jane"; second version by Lady Chatterley's Lover )

Narratives (selection)

  • The woman who rode away and other tales. European Educational Community, Stuttgart 1968
  • The man who loved islands . Stories. Diogenes, Zurich 1990 ISBN 3-257-20187-7
  • Thoughts on the death of a porcupine. Ed. & Translator Reinhild Böhnke . Reclam, Leipzig 1992
  • The blue moccasins. Stories. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996 ISBN 9783499220739 , online
  • The Prussian officer and other stories. Diogenes, Zurich 1997 ISBN 3-257-20184-2
  • Übers. Andreas Kellermann: Hail in the Rhineland. In: "With its gold and fog". The Bergisches Land in the mirror of literature. Bücken & Sulzer Verlag , Overath 2004 ISBN 3-936405-13-1

Poetry (in German translation)

  • Take my word in hand: Poems , English / German, translations by Werner von Koppenfels. Munich: Stiftung Lyrik-Kabinett, 2018, ISBN 9783938776513 .

Plays

  • A Collier's Friday Night. 1907.
  • The Daughter in Law. 1912.
  • The fight for Barbara. 1912.
  • The Married Man. 1912.
  • The merry-go-round. 1912.
  • The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. 1914.
  • Touch and Go. 1920.
  • David. 1926.

Travel diaries

  • Twilight in Italy , 1916 ("Italian Twilight", TB)
  • Sea and Sardinia , 1921 ("The Sea and Sardinia", TB, ISBN 978-3-257-21312-6 )
  • Mornings in Mexico , 1927 ("Mexican Morning", TB)
  • Etruscan Places , 1932 ("Etruscan Places", TB)

Literary criticism

  • Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923

Film adaptations

See film versions of The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley there.

  • 1960: Sons and Lovers (Sons and Lovers)
  • 1967: The Fox
  • 1969: Women in Love (Women in Love)
  • 1970: The Virgin and the Gipsy
  • 1979: On Forbidden Paths (The Trespasser)
  • 1984: Jack Grant goes his way (The Boy in the Bush)

literature

  • Richard Aldington: DH Lawrence in self-testimonies and image documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1961
  • Armin Arnold: DH Lawrence . Colloquium, Berlin 1972, table of contents
  • Anthony Burgess : DH Lawrence. A life of passion . Kellner Verlag, Hamburg 1990
  • Michael W. Weithmann: Lawrence of Bavaria. The english writer DH Lawrence in Bavaria and beyond. Collected essays. David Herbert Lawrences travels in Bavaria and the Alpine countries . Passau 2003 full text
  • John Worthen: DH Lawrence: the life of an outsider. Penguin Books, London 2006 ISBN 0-14-100731-1
  • David Game: DH Lawrence's Australia. Anxiety at the Edge of Empire. Ashgate, Farnham 2015 ISBN 978-1-4724-1505-9
  • Andrew Harrison: The life of DH Lawrence: a critical biography , Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2016 ISBN 978-0-470-65478-1

Web links

Commons : DH Lawrence  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files
Wikiquote: DH Lawrence  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 251.
  2. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 251 f.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Marcel Marnat: David-Herbert Lawrence . In: Dominique de Roux (ed.): Classiques du XXe siècle . No. 77 . Éditions Universitaires, Paris 1966, p. 23-47, 112 .
  4. ^ Rod C. Taylor: Modernism and the Wreck of Education. Lawrence, Woolf, and the Democratization of Learning . Dissertation, University of Indiana 2007, p. 70. See also
  5. ↑ See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 338. See also Bernhard Fabian : Die englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 251 f.
  6. ↑ See Sandra Jobson Darroch: Katherine Mansfield: DH Lawrence's Lost Girl - A Literary Discovery. In: Rananim - The Journal of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia , 2009. Online [1] . Accessed on June 9, 2015. See also Metzler Lexicon of English-Language Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 377., as well as Bernhard Fabian : Die englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 252.
  7. ↑ Ronald W. Clark: Bertrand Russell, Philosopher - Pacifist - Politician. Heyne-Verlag, 1984, p. 169 ff.
  8. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 252.
  9. ↑ See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 338 f. See also Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 253.
  10. ↑ See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 339 f.
  11. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 253.
  12. ↑ See Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 339 f. On the connections presented here in Lawrence's literary work, see also Hans Ulrich Seeber: Vormoderne und Moderne . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 314–359, here pp. 357ff, as well as in detail Bernhard Fabian : Die englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , pp. 251-254.
  13. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 253.
  14. ↑ See Horst Oppel : DH Lawrence: St. Mawr . In: Horst Oppel (ed.): The modern English novel - interpretations . Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2nd rev. Edition Berlin 1971, ISBN 3-503-00701-6 , pp. 115-134, here p. 132. Forster's quotation is taken from this point; the original was published in Nation and Athenaeum on March 29, 1930 . See also the entry and reprint of the quote on Poetry Foundation [2] , accessed on January 15, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Lawrence, DH
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lawrence, David Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Eastwood near Nottingham , Nottinghamshire
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 1930
Place of death Vence , France