Into the Fire
The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence. (Heinemann, 63s.)
I ENJOY so much writing my plays—they come so quick and exciting from the pen—that you mustn't growl at me if you think them a waste of time. At any rate, they'll be stuff for shaping later on, when 1"m more of a workman.' I believe that, just as an audience was found in Russia for Tchekhov, so an audience might be found in England for my stuff, if there were a man to whip 'ern in.' Thus Lawrence to Edward Garnett in 1913. Lawrence was no Chekhov when it came to the stage, and the English were not whipped in. But these plays are eminently worth reading and we are lucky to have them all (eight and two fragments) conveniently gathered in one volume. Most of them were written at a crucial time in Lawrence's life (around 1912), when he had started living with Frieda and when he was writing Sons and Lovers; and though they often do give the impression of having been effortlessly thrown off in sudden bursts of excitement, there are sufficient moments of vivid immediacy and compelling authenticity to remind us that this was the springtime of Lawrence's genius.
Reading them, no one, I suppose, will regret that Lawrence made the novel his major medium. His real interest was the inner hidden drama of men and women : not so much our audible words and visible acts, as the unspoken tensions or attractions which sway our passional lives, and that flickering inmost consciousness, somewhere between thought and instinct, which we seldom translate into clear gesture or speech. Like Henry James (a great novelist and an indifferent drama- tist), Lawrence had to be in constant attendance in his works so that his super-sensitive vision could perceive and convey to us those vital inward developments in his characters which, even sitting in the front stalls, we could never hope to see. In a way this makes the plays doubly interesting, for, precisely because Lawrence has to let external movements and words and things speak for themselves without adding his own amplifica- tion, we discover in a new way how delicate, attentive and penetrating Lawrence's sense of people and environment could be. Most of the plays are remarkably concrete and untendentious for a man who, in later years. sometimes gave the impression of being trapped inside the fury of his own rhetoric.
In particular three plays—all about mining families—reveal that uncontrived directuess in the portrayal of settings and situations which is part of the strength of the best novels. They also show that. from the start. Lawrence had a firm grasp of the inter-family tensions which he was to explore in his major fiction. His earliest play; A Collier's Friday Night, contains little drama but it gives a very real picture of the atmosphere in what must be Lawrence's own home. There already is the brutalised father, assertive and aggressive, yet also pathetic (Lawrence makes him slightly lame) and deeply unsure of himself in the company of his more cultured wife and their university-educated son. Ernest. Such incident as there is stems from the visit of an intense young girl (Jessie Chambers?) who dotes on Ernest's intellectual prowess. This arouses the jealousy of the possessive mother, and the play ends with a quietly intense emotional struggle between her and Ernest--the sort of scene Law- rence explored at much greater depth in Sons and Lovers.
The Widowine of Mrs. floiroyd also shows Lawrence's amazing eye and ear for the details of his childhood world (the dialogue in these early plays rings very true). Again, the miner husband is a slovenly tyrant who arouses feel- ings of loathing and contempt in the more refined Mrs. Holroyd and her sensitive friend, Black more. They plan to flee, but the some- what melodramatic death of the miner in a pit accident leaves Mrs. Holroyd immobilised by a strange guilt. We last see her cleaning the corpse.
The Daughter-in-Law hinges on the attempt of a young wife to free her husband from his emotional bondage to his mother. The Married Man and The Merry-go-Round are lighter and more discursive playsdealing fairly sportively with problems of sex and marriage through a variety of couples driven by a variety of needs and impulses. Occasionally the voice of Lawrence can be clearly heard: 'But do be honest with yourself. Don't cause a split between your conscious self and your unconscious—that is insanity.' More directly autobiographical is The Fight for Barbara, for Barbara has left her con- ventional husband to go and live with a young writer. To their Italian villa come Barbara's parents and husband to persuade her to return to her former life. The ensuing confusion and tor- ment experienced by Barbara and her lover must, to some extent, be a fair reflection of what Law- rence and Frieda were going through, and it is to Lawrence's credit that he handles the situation fairly and with a saving touch of humour.
A later, and more sombre play, Touch and Go, deals with the hostile relations between a mine owner and his workers. The owner, cold, unyield- ing, a figure of sheer will, is called Gerald and is clearly related to his more famous namesake in Women in Love. In a strange, rather expression- istic final scene, his workers force him to go down on his knees: the feeling of a stark power-war is strong here.
The last—and longest—play, David, was written during The Plumed Serpent phase. Lawrence was furious when it got bad reviews ('They say it was just dull. I say they are eunuchs, and have no balls'), but he later admitted that 'the whole play is too literary, too many words.' It shows how far Lawrence had come from the sensitive realism of the early plays, for it is a retelling of the bible story in Lawrence's own late incantatory rhetoric. It is a fascinating, impossible piece of writing, not least because of what seems to be a changing attitude to the figure of David. Clearly his name, his divine calling, his persecution by Saul, prompted a certain amount of self-identification on Lawrence's part. He gives the biblical David many of his own sentiment,. Yet at the end, Jonathan says: 'I would not see thy new day, David. For thy wisdom is the wisdom of the subtle, and behind thy passion lies prudence. And naked thou wilt not go into the fire.'
This turning away from the figure of David is perhaps a symptom of the intense atavism of this stage of Lawrence's writing. But one cannot be sure of the implications of the play since, by this time, Lawrence was moving beyond conven- tional drama and fiction altogether.
TONY TANNER
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