None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Lawrence, the collier's son who grew up in Eastwood watching his barely literate father emerge daily from Brinsley Colliery blackened to the bone, while his former pupil-teacher mother made clear that the pit was a fate to be escaped rather than inherited, packs more marital desolation into thirty pages than most novelists manage in three hundred.
He wrote this at twenty-four. It reads like a man who already knew everything worth knowing about how marriages die, which at that age is either genius or a very unhappy childhood. Ford Madox Ford, on first reading it, declared Lawrence a major writer in the making. Ford was right.
The Bates cottage squats three steps below the cinder track at the edge of Brinsley pit-yard, close enough to the winding-engine that its mechanical pulse marks every hour of domestic waiting. Elizabeth Bates is handsome, imperious, heavily pregnant, and entirely accustomed to her husband Walter's habit of stopping at the pub rather than coming home to his dinner. The chrysanthemums at the garden gate, dishevelled and pink, preside over the whole arrangement with the air of unwilling witnesses.
The evening proceeds with grim comic punctuality. Elizabeth's grey-bearded father pulls up his locomotive long enough to report that Walter was last seen in the "Lord Nelson" bragging about spending half a sovereign. The pudding spoils in the oven. The children are put to bed. The clock is consulted with increasing frequency. Then, somewhere in the dark shift between bitter certainty and something colder, the story changes register entirely, and Lawrence executes the turn with the calm of a much older, much sadder writer.
The pit is destiny. The winding-engine breathes, the coal-dust tattoos itself into living skin, and the mine eventually delivers its verdict on the Bates marriage. Two people can share a bed, a name, and several children while remaining as opaque to each other as strangers on a colliery train. The chrysanthemums that braided themselves through every significant event of Elizabeth's marriage, the wedding, the births, the first drunken homecoming, turn out to have been present at one more occasion she had yet to anticipate.
Lawrence died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having been banned, expatriated, and misread in equal measure. He left behind a body of work that his contemporaries called pornographic and posterity saw as visionary. He wrote his darkest truths closest to home. A physical world rendered with extraordinary precision, and an emotional world beneath it cracking open.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Lawrence, the collier's son who grew up in Eastwood watching his barely literate father emerge daily from Brinsley Colliery blackened to the bone, while his former pupil-teacher mother made clear that the pit was a fate to be escaped rather than inherited, packs more marital desolation into thirty pages than most novelists manage in three hundred.
He wrote this at twenty-four. It reads like a man who already knew everything worth knowing about how marriages die, which at that age is either genius or a very unhappy childhood. Ford Madox Ford, on first reading it, declared Lawrence a major writer in the making. Ford was right.
The Bates cottage squats three steps below the cinder track at the edge of Brinsley pit-yard, close enough to the winding-engine that its mechanical pulse marks every hour of domestic waiting. Elizabeth Bates is handsome, imperious, heavily pregnant, and entirely accustomed to her husband Walter's habit of stopping at the pub rather than coming home to his dinner. The chrysanthemums at the garden gate, dishevelled and pink, preside over the whole arrangement with the air of unwilling witnesses.
The evening proceeds with grim comic punctuality. Elizabeth's grey-bearded father pulls up his locomotive long enough to report that Walter was last seen in the "Lord Nelson" bragging about spending half a sovereign. The pudding spoils in the oven. The children are put to bed. The clock is consulted with increasing frequency. Then, somewhere in the dark shift between bitter certainty and something colder, the story changes register entirely, and Lawrence executes the turn with the calm of a much older, much sadder writer.
The pit is destiny. The winding-engine breathes, the coal-dust tattoos itself into living skin, and the mine eventually delivers its verdict on the Bates marriage. Two people can share a bed, a name, and several children while remaining as opaque to each other as strangers on a colliery train. The chrysanthemums that braided themselves through every significant event of Elizabeth's marriage, the wedding, the births, the first drunken homecoming, turn out to have been present at one more occasion she had yet to anticipate.
Lawrence died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having been banned, expatriated, and misread in equal measure. He left behind a body of work that his contemporaries called pornographic and posterity saw as visionary. He wrote his darkest truths closest to home. A physical world rendered with extraordinary precision, and an emotional world beneath it cracking open.
❤️ 🇮🇱