I was twenty years old the day a philology professor put in my possession Children and lovers. At that time, the term “initiation novel” didn’t sound like anything to me, although not because I hadn’t read more than one and more than two; and DH Lawrence treated the genre so starkly and dramatically that, even at that tender age, I found myself communing with the primitive conflict that beats at the heart of the story. I read the book in one gulp, returned to class in a trance, and from that day on, Children and lovers it became a sacred text. In the next fifteen years, I read the novel three times, and each time I identified with a different main character: the protagonist, Paul Morel; his mother, Gertrude; his youthful loves, Miriam and Clara.
The first time was with Miriam, the daughter of a peasant with whom Paul loses his virginity. I stamped it on the spot. She goes to bed with him not because she wants to, but because she is afraid of losing him; During their intimate relationships, she is so terrified that, instead of surrendering to the experience, she lies beneath Paul — absorbed in his own sexual delirium — while he thinks: “Does he know it’s me?” Miriam’s fundamental need is to know that she is wanted, and only for who she is. The dilemma was devastating: I felt the heat, the fear, the anguish that devoured them both, but the most peculiar thing was that it felt as if I were Miriam myself. He was twenty years old: he needed the same thing that she did. The next time I read the book, I was Clara, the sexually passionate working-class woman who wants to lead a love life, but is still acutely aware of the potential humiliation behind her need to feel like it is her. who they want and, also in their case, only because of who they are. The third time I read the book, I was in my mid-thirties – married and retired, divorced and redivorced, just “freed” – and I identified with Paul himself. More absorbed then in desiring than in being desired, I took pleasure in surrendering myself totally to the astonishing pleasure of one’s own sexual experience – substantial, fulfilling, transporting – and finally imagining myself, like Paul towards the end of the novel, as the protagonist of My own life.
When not long ago I had the opportunity to reread Children and loversAs I was in advanced maturity, so to speak, what I discovered was not so much that I had misinterpreted many details (which I had done), but rather that the memory I had of the dominant theme – sexual passion as the central experience of a woman. life – did not conform to reality. That, I realized then, was not what the book was really about; And I found it even cooler and more moving to have held the novel in my heart for a handful of reasons not exactly unfounded, but not exactly grounded. It was also one of the first times that I understood clearly that it had been I, as a reader, who had had to travel towards the more substantial meaning of the book.
Set at the dawn of the 20th century in a mining town in the English Midlands, the narrative follows the evolution of the Morels and their four children. Gertrude (a school teacher with romantic sensibilities) and Walter (a fun-loving miner) meet at a dance, and she is quickly drawn in by his good looks, his joie de vivre, his talent for dancing, while that Walter is attracted to her by the receptivity she shows to his sensuality. A reciprocal passion is born and they get married. He promises her a house of her own, a good salary, loyalty and affection. It will not take long for her to discover that he is not capable of fulfilling any of these aspects: “He was a man without tenacity, she said to herself bitterly. The feeling of the present minute was everything to him. He wasn’t able to stick to anything with a modicum of consistency. Behind all its facade there was nothing ”. He, for his part, is puzzled to see that she does not handle disappointment well: it makes her bitter and severe. It won’t take long for Walter, perplexed by the constant sense of being judged that he lives in his own home, to set out to escape to the pub at the first change.
If you want to support the development of news like this, subscribe to EL PAÍS
Subscribe
Eight years pass (and here the book begins), and Mrs. Morel is thirty-one, pregnant with her third child, lives in unimaginable poverty, both material and emotional, and feels repulsed by her husband, whom she now sees (she and his children too) just like a violent, drunken lout. Since the romantic sensitivity has not abandoned Mrs. Morel, it is to her sons that she turns for that company necessary to alleviate the emotional famine. At first it appears to be William, the eldest, whom she hopes to make her soul mate, but it soon turns out that it is Paul, the second, with whom she is destined to fuse. (…) We are before the thoughts and feelings of a woman who sees her spiritual salvation linked to that of that child, who, preyed upon by her mother’s adoration, will declare, as a teenager, that she will never abandon her, although, as she goes Coming into early adulthood, he inevitably discovers that the inner life draws him into the kind of self-discovery that demands that she be left behind. Needless to say, the metaphor Lawrence uses for Paul’s heartbreaking dilemma is erotic love. As that need grows in him — and the two women, Miriam and Clara, become the instruments of his awakening and initiation — he turns more and more into that extraordinary strength, until he realizes that passion has the capacity to to mimic liberation (I did remember this well), but not to promote it (of that I did not have any memory). The struggle within the novel is not between Paul and his mother, but between Paul and the illusion of sexual love as liberation. It was the latter that it had taken me forever to understand.
At the time I was raised, in the fifties, culture was still flesh and blood with those restrictions of bourgeois life that kept the erotic experience at a safe distance. That distance fueled a dream of transcendence coupled with a promise of self-discovery interspersed in turn with the power of sexual passion. What happened, however, was that at that time we did not call it passion, but love; And the whole world believed in love My mother, a communist and romantic, told me: “You are a smart girl, do something useful, but always remember that love is the most important thing in a woman’s life.” (…)
In the ideal life – in the cultured life, the brave life, the life out there, out there in the world – love was seen as not only something to aspire to, but to be achieved without fail; and once achieved, it would transform existence; it would create a rich and deep prose, with reliefs, from the inarticulate reports of the inner life that we exchanged daily. The promise of love alone gave us the courage to dream of leaving those cautious limits, to turn our gaze outward toward genuine experience. Furthermore, only if we indulged in romantic passion — that is, love — without any contractual guarantee, would we have a true experience.
Subscribe here to the weekly Ideas newsletter.
Sign in to continue reading
Just by having an account you can read this article, it’s free
Thanks for reading EL PAÍS
#Writer #Vivian #Gornick #talks #illusion #sexual #love #liberation