She was then approaching forty, the mother of her one child David and settled into a marriage in which Edward also took the role of son rather than husband. Her background was this. The Russian connection went back to her grandfather, an engineer and shipbuilder who worked in the Baltic, providing the first regular steamship service between St Petersburg and Lübeck in the 1820s. Her father was a lawyer, his grim character made grimmer by a paralytic illness that struck him down in middle life, and which he wrongly believed to be syphilitic; her mother, delightful, artistic and a free-thinker, died when Constance was only thirteen. ‘To live a single day without our mother seemed like having to live without air to breathe or bread to eat,’ she wrote. The loss also ended any acceptance of her father’s religious beliefs; thereafter she was ‘increasingly sceptical of all dogma, relying upon a stoic rationalism tempered by an affectionate and generous nature’.
Constance attended the Brighton High School for Girls in its first year, 1876, and went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, with a scholarship. After Cambridge she settled in London, met Shaw and Morris and the Fabians, and became a pioneering woman librarian, living and working in the East End. Edward, who was seven years younger, had no plans for a career when they met. They became lovers, and Constance began to think of marriage only when his sister warned her not to take him seriously because he was a hopeless character and would never earn a living. If this was so, thought Constance, she might as well look after him.
And so she did; they married, she nursed him when he was ill, encouraged him in his work and formed a close affectionate bond with the mistress he soon took and kept till his death: Nellie Heath, another good and self-effacing woman. Constance was always tolerant about irregular behaviour, though she would not discuss it and dreaded gossip and scandal. Edward emerges as less admirable altogether: clever but spoilt, the sort of person who puts on a mask of artistic sensibility to cover what is more probably simple selfishness. But he introduced her to the man who encouraged her to learn Russian, the political exile Felix Volkhovsky.
The Garnetts were always adopting needy friends whom they entertained, first in a tiny cottage in the Surrey woods, later in the house they built for themselves in the same remote and leafy place, later nicknamed Dostoevsky Corner. Volkhovsky became one of the family; he gave Constance a Russian grammar and dictionary; he also earned her gratitude by taking her for long, healthy walks during her pregnancy. By the time David was born, she was already translating Goncharov pages at a time. Edward was also interested in Russian literature, though he never learnt the language, and he too encouraged her to take up the work of translation seriously; his connections in publishing were useful here. She was eager to do so, partly to be financially independent (‘till women were on the same money basis as men it was hopeless to talk of their rights’, she wrote) and partly because Russia and the Russians had won the heart neglected by Edward. Through Volkhovsky the Garnetts became intimate with a whole circle of exiled revolutionaries: one was Sergius Stepniak, who looked like a bear and had assassinated a chief of police, but was possessed of a gentle charm to which Constance succumbed. He died when he failed to hear an approaching train as he crossed a railway line.
In 1893 she travelled to Russia, alone, and had several talks with Tolstoy. She did not meet Chekhov, but read his work and saw its greatness at once. Three years later she wrote to him asking if she might translate The Seagull; he gave permission, but no one in England was then interested. Several decades later she complained of the difficulty of translating even the title, since the bird was really a Lake Gull: ‘You can’t have a heroine drawing tears from the audience by saying “I am a Puffin!”’
Constance had nice judgement. For instance, she saw the danger to D. H. Lawrence’s work when he moved abroad and lost contact with his early environment. It wasn’t only literature she judged shrewdly; all her early faith in the values of the Russian Revolution did not blind her to the true nature of Stalinism, and in 1933 she wrote an impassioned letter to the New Statesman pointing out that ‘after sixteen years of Communist rule the disqualifications due to birth and education and the inequalities of rights (even down to the right to a food card) are far more oppressive than ever in the past (since 1861 anyway)’. It was a long and splendid political statement, which the NS, to its shame, failed to print. Her political sanity was matched by her tolerant humanism – she saw religion as ‘a sort of contagious insanity’ but admired the Gospels, especially in the beautiful English of the King James version. She did not fear death, and gardened steadily while the Blitz and then the doodle-bugs raged overhead. She was a much loved friend, teacher and grandmother. She rejoiced in the creation of the Third Programme, and one of her last acts was to discuss her work as a translator with her son David, who made notes which were used in a programme she did not live to hear. She died at eighty-four, a great woman and an example to us all.
Independent on Sunday, 1991
Another Life
D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 by John Worthen
When Lawrence died in 1930, E. M. Forster praised him as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’. This elicited a sneer from T. S. Eliot, who asked Forster to define his terms. Forster wrote: ‘Mr T. S. Eliot duly entangles me in his web. He asks what exactly I mean by “greatest”, “imaginative” and “novelist”, and I cannot say. Worse still, I cannot even say what “exactly” means – only that there are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider, and that the death of D. H. Lawrence is one of them.’ As journalists say, Lawrence gives good copy. In death as in life he has generated scandal, gossip and furious controversy. It has made him a hugely popular subject for biography and polemical study.
In the 1950s the greatly pugnacious Dr Leavis carried a whole generation of Cambridge English graduates into Lawrence idolatry. Leavis felt as Forster did about Lawrence’s pre-eminence as a novelist, but further claims were made for him as a prophet or priest with a ‘reverence for life’ who would set us all on the right path, in touch with our natural selves and enjoying ‘Valid’ sexual relationships, in which the man should be responsible for keeping woman in a position of proper awe towards him. Relations between men and women were, according to Leavis, Lawrence’s ‘central interest’.
One result was that, amongst the student generation of the 1950s, marriages were entered into with the intention of achieving the Lawrentian ideal of ruling husband and passionate but submissive wife. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were one couple embarked on marriage in this spirit; they even named their first child for Frieda Lawrence. Since then, the influence of Leavis has dimmed, and Lawrence’s ideas on marriage have been overtaken by events: amongst them, feminism and gay power. Lawrence, who claimed he would change the world for a thousand years, was a poor prophet; but he remains a marvellous writer. He forged his own language from an intensive reading of his great predecessors; he observed the natural world with scrupulous attention and applied a bold and witty imagination to what he saw; and, at his best, he gave the same sort of scrutiny to his own responses and human relations.
This Lawrence, who wrote that ‘in the moments of deepest emotion myself has watched myself, is John Worthen’s subject. His book is the first of three volumes to be published by Cambridge University Press, aiming to give a definitive account of Lawrence’s life. Worthen has almost certainly got the best part with the early years; and he could hardly have handled them better. He has researched deeply, reading everything even remotely relevant, and is able to be authoritative where others have conjectured. It is a warm as well as a serious book, for he clearly loves his subject, and makes us share his feeling. He is both alert and scrupulous in relating Lawrence’s fiction to his life, and properly cautious in his use of memoirs and reported conversations. The theme of the development of the miner’s son and sickly scholarship boy with warring parents is a wonderful one, and he grasps all its possibilities in the five hundred pages of his narrative.
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bsp; Even a reader already familiar with the main facts is likely to be surprised and moved by this account of the culture of a late-nineteenth-century mining community in the Midlands, so much richer than anything found in England today, both in its forms and its aspirations. It was made up of poverty and snobbery and frustration and ambition and crude religion and repression and sexual unhappiness and violence, not always confined to the pits; but the intellectual curiosity, the passion for education, for philosophical questioning, for writing and painting and the theatre, that flourished within all this, give it the allure of a lost paradise. Eastwood was a frightful place; it was also a magnificent one.
Worthen establishes the exact social level of father, who read nothing but cheap papers but knew the names of all the flowers, and mother, who dreamed and willed herself up a social rung; and of each of the terraced houses in which they lived with their family, which grew to five for all the bitterness between them. He shows chapel and shops and schools, he gives us the dialect (particularly good, this) and the children’s games and the sermons preached, the cooking and the library list, the floor-scrubbing and the skimping and scrimping when new clothes were needed. He has found that only three miners’ sons attended Nottingham High School between 1882 and 1899; they were excluded from games, because the sports’ outfits were beyond their families’ means. He tells us that Lawrence’s father called poetry ‘pottery’, and that though Mrs Lawrence wrote verse herself, her ambitions for her sons did not envisage any of them becoming a writer; but that Bert or Bertie, as Lawrence was known at home, signed himself ‘D. H. L.’ or ‘D. H. Lawrence’ from the age of eighteen, as though consciously distancing himself from the family’s Bertie, and renaming himself for another life.
Worthen does not make villains of any of his cast. The power struggle between Mrs Lawrence and her son’s sweetheart Jessie Chambers, in which Lawrence used, loved, depended on Jessie and yet repeatedly broke with her – in 1906,1908,1910 and twice in 1912 – is a shade less sympathetic to Jessie than she surely deserves, though it concedes that Lawrence finally behaved disgracefully and left her devastated. There is no doubt that she bore the blame for what he felt his mother had done to him with her determined refinement and rejection of the natural life; but how would he have developed intellectually without his mother? Or without Jessie?
Any full and honest account of youthful sexual adventures and experiments – and Worthen has turned up more information on this score than any previous biographer – is likely to reveal ruthless-ness and treachery. Lawrence was so outstanding, so attractive, so engrossing to clever and beautiful young women, and at the same time so absorbed and exasperated by his own bodily needs, that there was bound to be a tragedy for someone. As it turned out, the tragedy became first Jessie’s and then Louie Burrows’s, with whom he broke his engagement; and Lawrence escaped scot-free and laughing into the arms of his German baroness.
Worthen writes as though destiny intended Frieda for Lawrence, and as though she was necessary for the development of his genius. The effect of his conviction is to make me wonder. She gave him what he most wanted at the time they met, being probably the first woman who positively wanted to go to bed with him without guilt or inhibition; she was not only older, and married, but bored with her husband, and had been encouraged to believe in the therapeutic power of sex by an earlier lover, one of Freud’s disciples. Lawrence was bowled over by this, but Worthen stresses how casually she intended the affair at first, how little of an elopement their journey abroad was, how nearly she returned to her children. Whether her decision to throw in her lot permanently with Lawrence contributed positively to his development as a writer is at least open to question. There could have been a different story, in which Lawrence married someone like the intelligent Louie; in which he settled in England and lived a quiet, healthy – and longer – life, cherished by his wife and family; in which his novels continued more in the pattern of Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, social and psychological studies of the country and people he knew best… etc.
Worthen does not indulge in any such fantasy, of course, but he does signal some regrets for the path Lawrence abandoned. He points to a letter Lawrence wrote to a woman friend in December 1912, in which he said he wanted to ‘do my work for women, better than the suffrage’. ‘That is,’ writes Worthen, ‘he would commit himself to writing about how women managed to break through the social and emotional barriers hemming in their existence.’ Worthen points out that this would be a new theme for Lawrence, but that he did not in fact take it up.’…from 1912 onwards he almost always linked such a breakthrough with erotic liberation; he wrote the novels and stories which the partner of Frieda Weekley would most naturally write. Work which was “better than the suffrage” also ignored the suffrage, as Frieda ignored it.’ Worthen goes on to insist just how well qualified Lawrence was, by background and experience, to write about the situation of women of his generation ‘who failed to make that breakthrough; women who did not think sex was very important, however much it gratified the men who demanded it. Those were the novels which, after Sons and Lovers, he did not attempt to write.’
Lawrence is a writer who forces you think about the novels he did not write, and the life he did not live, because the break in his development is so marked. Yet at the end of his volume, Worthen declares himself convinced that Frieda became an essential part of Lawrence’s creative life, and that ‘a profound instinct for his own psychic health… demanded that he make his relationship with her the centre of his life.’ Perhaps we have to try to believe this, since history cannot be changed; but I am grateful for the passing vision of that other D. H. L. who might have been.
Independent on Sunday, 1991
Gnawed by Rats
G. H. Lewes: A Life by Rosemary Ashton
George Henry Lewes was a close contemporary of Dickens, born five years after him, in 1817, and dying eight years after him, in 1878. Both men worked themselves to the limits of their strength and endurance, and probably shortened their lives by doing so; both tend to be seen as prototypical Victorians, whereas they were formed by the Regency period and kept a certain flamboyance and a dislike of the insularity and hypocrisy to which they saw England succumbing. Dickens, the idol of the public, grumbled and was forced into secret strategies; Lewes, with much less at stake, proclaimed his atheism and radicalism and braved out his unorthodox marital situations, though even he finally destroyed the letters and journals that would allow us to understand his private history as we should like to. He is best known as the consort and enabler of George Eliot, for which he deserves our homage, but he was far more than that. Although he has been the subject of earlier biographies, he has not been written about with the depth and sympathy that Rosemary Ashton brings to him.
‘Always at the leading edge of Victorian culture, innovative, even shocking, in some aspects of his life and works, but nevertheless typical of the Victorian age at its progressive, energetic best’: this is Ashton’s introductory claim for Lewes, which she proceeds to justify. She gives a full and entertaining picture of the world of professional writers, publishers and journalists in which he was perpetually active; and although she cannot restore those parts of his story which he and his friends determined to black out, she uses her detailed knowledge of the period to striking effect.
She can be very funny in the process. I particularly like her account of the remarks sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’. Bulwer Lytton pronounced, ‘You have not yet written a Book as clever as the Author.’ And Dickens, who rarely elsewhere gives the impression of a man chewing his pen as he desperately seeks for something to say, ground out, ‘I would I saw more of such sense and philosophy in that kind of Literature – which would make it more what i
t ought to be.’ He went on, ‘This may not seem much to read, but I mean a great deal by it in the writing.’ On receiving Lewes’s second novel, Dickens was reduced to explaining that the troubles he was having with rehearsals for one of his theatrical enterprises had ‘swallowed up’ the great many ‘striking things’ he had intended to tell Lewes about the book. Not surprisingly, that was the end of the budding novelist’s career.
Lewes was the grandson of an actor and illegitimate son of a man who abandoned the families of both his wife and his mistress. He therefore grew up fatherless, though there was a detested stepfather. He learnt French as a boy through periods when his mother lived in Jersey and France; adored and attended the theatre from an early age; went to school in Greenwich, may have been a medical student, and at twenty was a radical and a convinced atheist with Shelley as his idol. Lewes actually wrote a biography of Shelley, encouraged by Leigh Hunt, though not by Mary Shelley. It was never published, he himself soon deciding it was a poor piece of work, and it disappeared. I have always regretted this lost book, but Ashton convinces us that Lewes’s low opinion of it was the right one.
It was, however, a preparation for what is still a highly regarded biography of Goethe, for which Lewes became as conversant with German language and culture as he was already with French. His range and versatility were extraordinary. As a young man he turned out journalism, theatre and book reviews and plays, as well as the ill-fated novels; he translated, studied philosophy, corresponding with Comte and Mill, and produced the standard textbook on the history of philosophy, which continued to be reprinted throughout the century. Without attending a university he took up science, did some original research of his own, and wrote immensely successful popular science books. No wonder he was described as ‘Windmill of the hundred arms’ by a poet, attacking him in the belief that he had given her a bad review. In fact the review was not by him at all – it was by Marian Evans – and the description seems if anything laudatory. It was certainly apt; in these less heroic times, Lewes’s sheer output can make you feel quite faint.
Several Strangers Page 19