Colm Tóibín on Sons and Lovers In another poem written even earlier, "Piano," the house is peaceful and the memory is filled with warm emotion: Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. But what is notable about this poem is the palpable absence of the father. The voice that "drowned/The other voice" in the earlier work is not there in a poem which allowed "the old Sunday evenings at home" to be remembered fondly, with all sense of violence absent. In some of his early short stories Lawrence explored the tension between his parents, which he sought to make almost elemental, a dispute between light and dark, as much as a difference that was merely domestic or temperamental. This tension, however, was complex. Lawrence sought to dramatise the ambiguity within the marriage, allowing the woman's fierce attraction to be an actual part of an instinctual social repulsion. "A Sick Collier," for example, written in 1912, opens: "She was too good for him, everybody said. Yet she still did not regret marrying him... He was in build what they call a tight little fellow; short, dark, with a warm colour, and that upright set of the head and chest, that flaunting way in movement recalling a mating bird, which denotes a body taut and compact with life. The woman in the story is "a tall, fair girl" who, wearing a white blouse and a white apron, is startled on the first day of marriage when her husband comes home from the mines "with a face indescribably black and streaked." He is happy to eat before he washes himself. She served the dinner and sat opposite him. His small bullet head was quite black, save for the whites of his eyes and his scarlet lips. It gave her a queer sensation to see him open his red mouth and bare his white teeth as he ate. His arms and hands were mottled black... There was the faint indescribable odour of the pit in the room, an odour of damp, exhausted air. His body is filled with sexual tension and uncertainty. As he washes in her presence, "she felt afraid of him again." He is "so intensely himself, like a vigorous animal. And as he stood wiping himself, with his naked breast towards her, she felt rather sick, seeing his thick arms bulge their muscle. The next paragraph, however, begins: "They were nevertheless very happy." Lawrence here established his fictional terrain; the study of his parents" marriage in 'Sons and Lovers', his third novel, will be filled with a recognition of sexuality as something raw and unpredictable, oddly elemental and powerful. Lawrence will, however, attempt to separate Paul Morel, the young sensitive protagonist, the son of the marriage, from such forces, offering him a more nuanced and uneasy response to the women he deals with, including his mother. In the novel Lawrence seeks both to recognise and to repudiate sexuality as mere dark instinct - darkness in Lawrence is often close to a sort of life-force - thus playing the father and the son against each other, one all element and instinct and the other all mind and conscience. In painting the father's transgressions, Lawrence will make them natural, oddly human, whereas Paul's failure to love is presented as a more radical overstep, albeit one in greater need of slow and layered treatment as the novel progresses. Paul is his mother's son and her gentle lover, but he is also fully aware that his father's sexual power is something he can never match. His father's voice and accent, his body, his arrival home at night are presented as menacing and rough, but all the more natural and attractive and masculine for that. Thus one of the struggles in the book is Paul's for his mother's love, and for his father's destruction. (Lawrence did not need Freud to write this; he knew it. Freud was, as Auden wrote, "a whole climate of opinion.") In a letter he wrote to the critic and editor Edward Garnett in November 1912, Lawrence was acutely conscious of the struggles, made "out of sweat as well as blood," he had dramatised: "A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers. In this portrait of the artist as a young man, Lawrence allows Paul's relationship with his mother to maim all other ones. "When they come to manhood," he wrote of Paul and his brothers, "they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them." What Paul attempts then is to achieve something close to spiritual communion with two women, something soulful as well as sensual. In a letter to a friend in 1908, Lawrence wrote that "most people marry with their souls vibrating to the note of sexual love," but love is finer "when not only the sex group of chords is attuned, but the great harmonies, and the little harmonies, of what we call religious feeling... and ordinary sympathetic feeling." In attempting to escape the net his mother has made for him, Paul tries and fails to find a new kind of love. In these relationships he seeks, Paul's sensibility is as far away from his father's as is his place of work. His problem is that these women do not attract him as much, or want him as badly, as his own mother. Sons and Lovers takes a strand in 19th-century fiction and offers it an Oedipal twist. In novels such as Trollope's 'Phineas Finn' (1869), George Eliot's 'Daniel Deronda' (1876) and Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady' (1881), the woman in an unhappy marriage needs a sensitive man to whom she can describe her unhappiness; this man will come to feel, as the reader does, a loathing for the husband, as well as a greater tenderness for the woman who must share her bed with a brute. In Eliot's novel there is, however, also an abiding sexual attraction between Gwendolen and Grandcourt, who are unhappily married, which Daniel, despite his sensitivity and innate goodness, cannot match; in 'The Portrait of a Lady', Ralph Touchett is in bed and dying by the time he hears the full extent of Isabel's unhappiness, an unhappiness which does not prevent Isabel from returning to her husband. Rewriting his novel in the years after his mother's death, Lawrence sought to replace his father in her affections by the force of his sentences and a heightened use of imagery. Since the most private matters are being explored, this gives the book a strange and insistent and oddly disturbed aura. Lawrence wrote quickly; the awkwardness in the narrative, the staccato repetitions are matched by a sort of urgency, as though he were writing to save his life. At the time when his mother was dying, Lawrence complained to a friend that his father never went into the room to see her. "He was once her lover," Lawrence said. The novel becomes a way of treating his mother tenderly and slowly sexualising her son's relationship to her, as Mrs Morel feels not only motherly love for Paul, but sexual jealousy and something close to sexual desire. She flirts with him and enters into a romance with him, while his father stays in the pub. After his mother's death, Lawrence wrote to a friend: "She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman... as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain. This feeling for his mother goes against the sort of emotion which Paul feels for the two women who are his other lovers in the book. The mother, in her vast dissatisfaction and her need for an intense relationship with her son, is drawn in Sons and Lovers with clarity and complexity. The other two women, Miriam and Clara, are stranger, more elusive, more oddly distant. They are Ophelias to Mrs Morel's Gertrude. It is as though Lawrence is enacting in the novel his own failure to move out of his mother's engrossing embrace. He portrays the mother with precision; she is the one who matters. While she lives, no escape from her is possible. For Lawrence, as he wrote the book, this was not merely pressing but unresolved experience. Trying to find a stable form for it would, because of its rawness and its closeness to him, be very difficult. Although there are echoes of the book in a novel he began in late 1908, he started working on the novel with the title "Paul Morel" in earnest in the last months of 1910. (His mother fell ill in August and died of cancer in December of that year. In August 1910 he broke off his engagement with Jessie Chambers, on whom the character of Miriam is based, and began a relationship with Louie Burrows.) In 1911 Lawrence continued writing fitfully, beginning a fresh version, working sometimes with immense speed and then stopping. He sent pages to Chambers, who made many suggestions for improvements while she read this version of her own doomed relationship with Lawrence. He asked her for notes, which she provided, about their early years together. As she read some of the manuscript, she was angry about how much he had changed and distorted. She even rewrote some of his pages to make them closer to her memory of how things had actually been. Lawrence then did revisions early in 1912, by which time he had also broken off his engagement with Burrows and met Frieda von Richthofen, with whom he would share the rest of his life. As he made the last revisions, Frieda, who knew something of Freud, became his reader and adviser. In September 1912, she wrote to Edward Garnett that Lawrence "reads bits to me and we fight like blazes over it." This meant that the very life described in the book, with Paul caught between his mother and two young women, and Paul slowly separating from his origins, was untidily coming to a conclusion as the book itself was being untidily created. On June 9 1912, Lawrence sent the manuscript to Heinemann, his publishers. On July 1 he received a rejection letter, complaining of the book's lack of unity and "its want of reticence." He wrote to Edward Garnett about William Heinemann: "May his name be used as a curse and an eternal infamy." A few days later he sent the manuscript to Garnett, who had advised him on his novel The Trespasser, and it was Garnett who edited the manuscript for him, making many cuts. "Take out what you think necessary," Lawrence wrote to him in December 1912. By that time, the book was called 'Sons and Lovers'. While making many improvements, Garnett was also conscious of what readers and libraries would not tolerate. He removed a scene, for example, where Paul, on the night after the opera when he stays in Clara's house, tries on a pair of her stockings and "sat erect on the bed." 'Sons and Lovers' was finally published by Duckworth in May 1913, when Lawrence was 27. He wrote to Garnett from Germany: "The copy of 'Sons and Lovers' has just come - I am fearfully proud of it. I reckon it is quite a great book. I shall not write quite in that style any more. It's the end of my youthful period. Sons and Lovers, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín and illustrations by Anne-Marie Jones, is available from August 20 at foliosociety.com (£39.95)