off with Frieda, the German wife of his old tutor at the University College. She left
Professor Ernest Weekley with their three children, went to Germany with Lawrence,
returning to England and marrying him in 1914; shortly after, her cousin became the
leading fighter pilot, Baron von Richthofen. Lawrence was a pacifist, and when police
kept an eye on his Cornish cottage, felt persecuted. He was already alienated – by
education from his family, by marriage from his society at home, by intransigence
from friends in London.His novels and paintings were often banned for indecency. He
travelled incessantly from 1919 until his death – to Italy, Australia, Mexico, New
Mexico, Italy and France – pouring out travel books, essays and sketches, as well as
Kangaroo (1923),The Plumed Serpent (1926) and other nove ls and novellas,in search
ofa natural life untainted by modern consciousness. Travel made his alienation and
his views more extreme: those who were not for him were against him.
As his ideas have bee n accepted (and others rejected: ‘The root of sanity is in the
balls’, for example, or Dostoievsky as ‘a rat slithering along in hate’), partisanship has
cooled. His writing is alive, uneven: the fresh accuracy of the first impression of
Sy dney in Kangaroo turns to turgidity and an incredible plot. His great talent flames
out in his poems and travel books, yet often he could not leave well alone. His efforts
to raise consciousness of sexuality have succeeded so well that his theories and
symbols can now seem insistent. (The modern disease was ‘sex in the head’, he said;
yet he wanted no children.) His preaching is curbed in his short stories, and absent
from his informal free-verse sketches, directly autobiographical, often of birds,
beasts and flowers; these will last. In such glimpses, and some late essays, he is more
playful and self-conscious than in his long fictions.The Rainbow
His best novel is The Rainbow (1915), a saga of three generations of a farming family,
the Brangwens. Social life gives way to individual personality; sexual relations are
made to express both historical and emotional developments; and there is much
symbolism.
Three of his modes – realism, symbolic projection and an exploratory expres-
sionism – are shown in the following passage. Anna Brangwen finds she is expecting
a child, but cannot tell her husband, though she loves him. She goes to tell her
parents. Her husband walks in:344 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55
D. H. Lawrence, in 1908, at Nottingham University
College, aged 23.