Ernest Hemingway and DH Lawrence: A vital connection
In April 1927, while composing Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), DH Lawrence praised the characters, compression and intensity of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925): “The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent . . . These few sketches are enough to create the man and all his history: we need to know no more.”
Lawrence also perceived that the stories in In Our Time foreshadowed the theme of The Sun Also Rises: “Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it.” Though I’ve written biographies of Hemingway and Lawrence, I had not noticed until recently the striking similarities that reveal Lawrence was influenced by The Sun Also Rises (1926) while writing his last novel.
The first sentence of Lawrence’s work — “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically,” — applies with equal force to Hemingway’s novel. Both Jake Barnes and Clifford Chatterley have been injured and destroyed by the war. Barnes, hit in the groin, appears outwardly normal but is sexually impotent. Clifford, paralysed below the waist, is confined to a mechanical wheelchair.
Like Jake, the naked and despairing Connie stares at her own sad reflection. Jake undresses and says, “I looked at myself in the mirror… It was a rotten way to be wounded… I put on my pajamas and got into bed… I was thinking about Brett… Then all of a sudden I started to cry.” In a similar scene, Connie “looked at herself naked in the huge mirror… And she thought as she had thought so often: what a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a naked human body is: somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!… She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed bitterly.”
Like Jake, who’s literally incomplete without his sexual organ, Connie realises how vulnerable, pathetic and incomplete she is without love and the fulfillment of motherhood. Both characters cry as they confront their useless bodies and their longing for a sexual life.
Both Hemingway and Lawrence satirise homosexuals whose perverse lives reflect and infuriate the sexually dysfunctional characters. Jake exclaims, “They always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure”. Lawrence’s apparently manly General Tommy Dukes rejects heterosexual relations and conventional marriage, and declares, “I neither marry nor run after women… My-husband-my wife sort of love? No my fine fellow, I don’t believe in it at all!” The homosexual painter Duncan Forbes, a peculiar man, agrees to acknowledge paternity of Connie’s child in order to absolve Mellors, avoid scandal and facilitate her divorce. Connie’s feisty, sensual father asks her:
“Well I’m damned! Poor Duncan! And what’s he going to get out of it?”
“I don’t know. But he might rather like it, even.”
“He might, might he? Well he’s a funny man, if he does. Why you’ve never even had an affair with him, have you?”
“No! But he doesn’t really want it. He only loves me to be near him, but not to touch him.”
“My God, what a generation!”
Though both Jake and Clifford are sexually incapacitated, they manage to get some sexual gratification. In a brief moment in The Sun Also Rises, which is usually overlooked, Brett asks Jake, after a discreet interval in the novel, “Do you feel better, darling? Is the head better?” “It’s better.” “Lie quiet”. In Lady Chatterley, Ivy Bolton clings to Clifford and gives him the sympathy and physical pleasure that Connie fails to provide: “Clifford became like a child with Mrs. Bolton. When she sponged his great blond body… she would lightly kiss his body, anywhere, half in mockery… Then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exaltation, the exaltation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man”.
Though Clifford’s torso is still attractively masculine, Lawrence portrays his sexual exaltation with Ivy Bolton as childishly regressive and perverse in order to contrast it to Connie’s relations with Mellors.
Both Lady Ashley, age thirty-four, and Lady Chatterley, age twenty-seven, received their titles from their baronet husbands. Both Ashley and Chatterley (whose names sound similar) have been severely damaged by the war. Mike Campbell tells Jake that Brett’s soon-to-be-divorced husband is shell-shocked, violent and crazy: “Ashley, chap she got the title from, was a sailor, you know. Ninth baronet. When he came home he wouldn’t sleep in a bed. Always made Brett sleep on the floor. Finally, when he got really bad, he used to tell her he’d kill her. Always slept with a loaded service revolver. Brett used to take the shells out when he’d gone to sleep. She hasn’t had an absolutely happy life”.
Brett and Connie (before she meets Mellors) are sexually liberated but physically dissatisfied and deeply unhappy; Jake and Clifford are emotionally drained and passive. Jake and the alcoholic and promiscuous Brett Ashley love each other. But he is forced to observe her disastrous sexual encounters with a diverse group: the Scottish Protestant Mike Campbell, the American Jew Robert Cohn and the Spanish Catholic bullfighter Pedro Romero. In the end, after sacrificially forcing the teenaged Romero to leave her, Brett summons Jake and counts on him for emotional, if not sexual, support. Neither Brett nor Jake is psychologically or physically fit for marriage.
Clifford represses his feelings for Connie and wants to use her mainly as a broodmare to produce a male heir who will inherit his title, vast estate and prosperous coal mines. He encourages her to find a suitable upper-class stud, but disapproves of the lower-class Mellors who had served under him in the war. Hemingway’s novel ends tragically, Lawrence’s — despite formidable obstacles — happily. Brett, with no redemptive saviour, remains alcoholic, tragically unfulfilled and miserable about her wrecked marriage and doomed passion for an impotent lover. Mellors and Connie have transcended class barriers and he gives her everything that Clifford has failed to provide. They have ecstatic sexual relations and plan to marry; she’s secure in her love, the prospect of a child and the promise of future happiness.
Three dominant themes in The Sun Also Rises recur in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The regenerative power of nature is portrayed when the characters fish in the mountain steams of Burguete and raise pheasants in the secluded woods. Jake and Clifford suffer tragic sexual wounds that cannot be healed. And after the war these traumatised soldiers cannot adjust to civilian society. Hemingway’s famous epigraph from Gertrude Stein, “You are all a lost generation,” which refers to men who have lost their youth in the war and have not found a new life, is echoed in Lawrence’s recurrent references to Connie’s tragic “generation.”
