Look We Have Come Through: Living With D. H. Lawrence by Lara Feigel

Author:Lara Feigel [Feigel, Lara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, General, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary Figures, Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781526650320
Google: mnt7EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2022-08-18T21:43:35+00:00

6

Religion

September comes and we get stuck in a field that P tells me is being harrowed. According to the map, we should walk through it, but we can’t find a way out. The tractor drives up and down systematically, breaking up the soil, churning it, chewing it up with its huge teeth and spitting it out. We talk about the harrowing of hell, Christ’s descent to ‘the lowest parts of the earth’. Christ was killed, the earth shook and darkened, he plunged down to hell and rescued the righteous. As we talk, I picture the dead in the underworld chewed up by the teeth of this ruthlessly industrial harrow and thrown back out again, destroyed and renewed.

I think of Lawrence, watching the fields being harrowed in Eastwood. Perhaps he helped Jessie Chambers’s brothers with the harrowing as well as the harvesting. And I think of how much he hated Christ, and how this antipathy began even then, when he spent much of his time in chapel, or at chapel-related reading and social groups. The language of the Bible ran through his thoughts then, like the language of the hymns that he later described as having ‘penetrated through and through my childhood’, glistening in the depths of his consciousness in ‘undimmed wonder’. His was a world, a class, whose daily hopes and fears were inflected by the examples offered by God in his different manifestations. But Lawrence couldn’t go along with the New Testament. ‘At the present moment I do not, cannot believe in the divinity of Christ,’ he wrote to the minister of his Congregationalist chapel in Eastwood in 1907, aged twenty-two. He wasn’t giving up on God altogether. He was announcing himself as an outsider and turning his back on the puritanism he would never quite renounce. He told the vicar that he could still believe in a ‘Cosmic God’ but not in the Christian Father and Son. I think, though, he’d have liked Jesus’s harrowing of hell. He liked things to be shaken up.1

We have been walking through the water meadows. Our feet are sodden and I feel continually on the verge of tears. Yesterday a judge sent my son back to London to return to school there until she makes a final decision about whether I can move the children to the countryside. I hadn’t expected this. These are my children, I say to myself, as Frieda said about hers. This weekend I feel only half myself without them; my body feels amputated in their absence. Our house has been harrowed, but not by a loving and forgiving Christ. This is the impersonal law of the Old Testament, as ruthless as the tractor making its way methodically up and down alongside us, the law of the Father that Lawrence thought was preferable to the love of the Son. I have submitted to Solomon, only to find that though these children are both mine, and though I love them both with a mother’s love, he is prepared to divide them after all.

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