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4 (p. 439) water: With edema, a disease that is usually caused by malfunctions of the heart or the kidneys, large amounts of fluid deposit in the body.

Inspired by Sons and Lovers

Many filmgoers encountered the work of D. H. Lawrence for the first time in director Jack Cardiff’s 1960 adaptation of the author’s semi-autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. The film visually captures the contrast between a coal-mining backwater and London, where Paul Morel, played sensitively by a young Dean Stockwell, yearns to go. The screenplay maintains Lawrence’s subtlety as well as memorable dialogue, and two of the actors earned Oscar nominations for their powerful performances: Trevor Howard for his portrayal of Paul’s hard-drinking, oppressive father, and Mary Ure for her role as Paul’s lover, Clara Dawes. Sons and Lovers was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it won for black-and-white cinematography.

Lawrence proved to be an inspiration to his longtime correspondent and travel companion, the author and scientist Aldous Huxley, who wrote several portraits of Lawrence. These include a vitriolic sketch in his short story “Two or Three Graces,” and a more sympathetic one in his novel Point Counter Point (1928), in the figure of Mark Rampion. In Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s character John the Savage is based on Lawrence, and part of the novel is set in surroundings based on Taos, New Mexico, where Huxley visited Lawrence.

The works of D. H. Lawrence are sometimes associated with the “free love” sensibility of the 1960s, when the author’s works became enormously popular, but that association would have shocked Lawrence. He was a strict moralist and did not intend for his explicit language and sexual content to encourage or even suggest sexual freedom. Indeed, Lawrence was high-minded about sex. When performed with reverence, he believed, the sexual act connects one with spiritual mysteries and the natural powers of the universe.

Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

Lascelles Abercrombie

‘Odi et amo’ should have been on the title page of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. On the whole, the book may be said to contrast filial and maternal love with the kind of love which is called amour. A good many amours are described, involving several markedly diverse persons; but all the affairs and all the persons are unanimous in one matter—whatever kind of love it may be, some kind of hate is mixed up in it. A simultaneous passion of love and hatred is, of course, a well-known psychological fact; and certainly Mr. Lawrence makes its unfailing appearance in his story curiously credible. But it is not a very pleasant fact; is it not essentially a weakness of vitaility, a kind of failure—life failing to appreciate itself, hating itself because it cannot appreciate the splendour of its own fate? Whether or no, it is a fact one can easily have too much of. If Mr. Lawrence thought to give intensity to the whole length (the very considerable length) of his story by this mingling of contrary passions, he miscalculated seriously. The constant juxtaposition of love and hatred looks like an obsession; and, like all obsessions, soon becomes tiresome. You begin to look out for the word ’hate’ as soon as you have read the word ‘love’, like a sort of tedious game. ‘Odi et amo’ does marvellous well in an epigram; in a novel of four hundred odd pages it is a bore. The book has