Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

INTRODUCTION

An introduction to this book is as superfluous as a candle in front of a searchlight. But a convention of publishing seems to require that the candle should be there, and I am proud to be the one to hold it. About ten years ago I picked up from the pile of new books on my desk a copy of Sons and Lovers by a man of whom I had never heard, and I started to race through it with the immoral speed of the professional reviewer. But after a page or two I found myself reading, really reading. Here was—here is—a masterpiece in which every sentence counts, a book crammed with significant thought and beautiful, arresting phrases, the work of a singular genius whose gifts are more richly various than those of any other young English novelist.

To appreciate the rich variety of Mr. Lawrence we must read his later novels and his volumes of poetry. But Sons and Lovers reveals the range of his power. Here are combined and fused the hardest sort of "realism" and almost lyric imagery and rhythm. The speech of the people is that of daily life and the things that happen to them are normal adventures and accidents; they fall in love, marry, work, fail, succeed, die. But of their deeper emotions and of the relations of these little human beings to the earth and to the stars Mr. Lawrence makes something as near to poetry as prose dare be without violating its proper "other harmony."

Take the marvellous paragraph on next to the last page (Mr. Lawrence depends so little on plot in the ordinary sense of the word that it is perfectly fair to read the end of his book first):

"Where was he? One tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun, stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the 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."

Such glorious writing (and this lovely passage is matched by many others) lifts the book far above a novel which is merely a story. I beg the reader to attend to every line of it and not to miss a single one of the many sentences that haunt, startle, and waylay. Some are rhapsodical and cosmic, like the foregoing; others are shrewd, "realistic" observations of things and people. In one of his books Mr. Lawrence makes a character say, or think, that life is "mixed." That indicates his philosophy and his method. He blends the accurately literal and trivial with the immensely poetic.