In the spring of 1914 Henry James contributed to The Times Literary Supplement two long and characteristically sibylline articles on 'The Younger Generation'. At that date it was still possible to include in the category of 'younger' Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr Maurice Hewlett, Mr Galsworthy, Mr H. G. Wells, and Mr Arnold Bennett, though, as the veteran admitted, these had 'not quite, perhaps, the early bloom of Mr Hugh Walpole, Mr Gilbert Cannan and Mr D. H. Lawrence'.
Proceeding, by way of mixed metaphor, we learn that Mr Wells and Mr Bennett have 'practically launched the boat in which we admire the fresh play of oar of the author of The Duchess of Wrexe and the documented aspect exhibited successively by Carnival and Sinister Street and even by Sons and Lovers, however much we may find Mr Lawrence, we confess, hang in the dusty rear'.
That last phrase sounds ungracious, but was perhaps not so ungraciously meant. It was hardly in character for Henry James to back anybody as a winner, even while he might set himself to describe the field in its order as viewed through the prism of his Jamesian binoculars. Still less was it in character for him to back the dark horse of the field. But we may give him this credit at least. He perceived that there was a dark horse. The figure he employs would further lead us to conclude that by his admission he found it difficult to report on the contours of that entrant.
There were, however, some onlookers, younger, less cautious and not at all burdened with responsibility, who felt that in this case there was a duty of more definite prophecy upon anyone professing to be a judge of form. In 1911 these had read The White Peacock, in 1912 The Trespasser, and in 1913 Love Poems and Others and Sons and Lovers - especially Sons and Lovers. They had also read 'Goose Fair' and 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' in The English Review, and the poems under the same signature appearing from time to time there and in the Saturday Westminster Gazette. After Sons and Lovers it appeared to them - as indeed it had already appeared to several persons more powerfully placed - that no other writer was producing work of a like importance. Of a small group of these I was a comparatively passive member. One who was more impetuous, however - Ivy Low (now the wife of Commissar Litvinoff) - was moved to repudiate the Jamesian pronouncement in the person of 'The Younger Generation'. She wrote to Lawrence through his publisher, and Lawrence answered. Lawrence always answered. His first letter, short but friendly, was triumphantly read aloud to me. I remember nothing about it now except that it was written from Fiascherino, near Lerici, upon coroneted notepaper; that the coronet had been crossed through with a pen stroke; and that beside it Lawrence had written the words, 'My wife's father was a baron.' Even this I might not now remember were it not that precisely the same thing was repeated on the second letter - which made us smile. We wondered how large the store of notepaper might be, and if Lawrence felt bound to repeat the formula every time he wrote a letter. This we were unable to test, however, as I don't think there was any third letter, but merely postcards, which confirmed the invitation extended to our representative in the second letter and gave travelling directions. Ivy Low accepted the invitation at once. Ivy always accepted invitations. She spent what money remained from her own initial literary efforts (this being all she had) on a return ticket to Fiascherino, was rigged out for the journey in my only tailor-made ('so as to make a neat impression if possible') and seen off by me with best wishes. She returned after about a month, very full of her visit, which we gathered had been of memorable but mixed quality. Not long afterwards Latence and Frieda arrived in London and almost at once called on me in Hampstead. Ivy was there, and Viola Meynell, who was a friend of Ivy's and a warm admirer of Sons and Lovers, came to meet him.
By then I knew in outline what Lawrence's history had been. A miner's son, born on September 11th, 1885, in the village of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, he had described his early life clearly enough in his three novels. And in the poems there had been the deeper, briefer expression of his youthful experience. More precisely, I knew that he had won a scholarship at Nottingham High School at twelve, at sixteen had worked for a short time as a clerk in a manufacturer's office at thirteen shillings a week, and after being seriously ill with pneumonia had become a pupil teacher at Eastwood. I did not know till recently that, when he left the Eastwood school a year later and went to Nottingham University College, he had passed first in all England and Wales in the Uncertificated Teachers' Examination. He remained for two years at college, after which he went as a certificated master to the Davidson Road Elementary School at Croydon.
He was still at Croydon when his mother died. That was at the end of 1910. The White Peacock appeared immediately after, in January, 1911. He had been able to place an advance copy in her hand, but she was too ill to read it. Off and on he had been engaged on it for over four years.
It was not Lawrence's mother, but the girl he was in love with - the Miriam of Sons and Lovers - that had encouraged his writing. Over a year before, in the autumn of 1909, she had sent on her own initiative the poems 'A Still Afternoon', 'Dreams Old and Nascent', 'Discipline', and the two 'Baby Movements' to the English Review. All Lawrence's future is contained in these five poems. Ford Madox Hueffer, who was then editor, accepted them and got into correspondence with Lawrence. It was to Hueffer that Lawrence sent the manuscript of The White Peacock, and Hueffer got it accepted by Heinemann. When the book appeared Violet Hunt wrote a glowing review in the Chronicle and invited the author to her literary club. It was a succès d'estime. To Lawrence's amusement his work was taken for a woman's in several quarters.
This interest, and the appearance at intervals of poems in periodicals, had brought him the acquaintance of Edward Garnett. Garnett's well-meaning hand was stretched out with those of the Hueffers, and Lawrence grasped it gladly. Here, without his seeking, was an opening from an existence which had grown ever less tolerable. But he had none of the conventional notions of a literary career. It signified much to him that his dying mother had been unable to read his book. Books to him would never mean what they do to most writers. They would mean both much more and much less. He never read one of his own published works. 'Books to me,' he wrote much later, 'are incorporate things, voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn, and visions that don't blot out the sunflowers.'
After his mother's death he continued for another year at Croydon, but after a second attack of pneumonia he decided to leave school-mastering for good. He had been at the Davidson Road School for five years, and his work was highly spoken of. After a visit to Garnett he spent three months at home.