He paid hardly any outward attention to his surroundings, but sat involved in himself.
(The D.H. Lawrence posture, Aaron Sisson riding a train across northern Italy in chapter 14)
‘What’s the good of running after life, when we’ve got it in us, if nobody prevents us and obstructs us?’
(Motto of the gnarly little writer, Rawdon Lilly, p.337)
‘Aaron’s Rod’ isn’t a very good book. Well down the D.H. Lawrence reading list. Richard Aldington’s introduction to the Penguin edition does a good job of putting you off reading it. He describes it as a confused pot-boiler, a minor work. This is for two reasons:
1. The books consists of two halves which were written at different times: Lawrence began writing ‘Aaron’s Rod’ early in 1918 but abandoned it after writing the first eleven chapters, and you can see why: it’s not really clear what it’s about or where it’s going: the lead character keeps changing, from Aaron, to Jim Bricknell, to Rawdon Lilly for a while and only at the end back to Aaron again. Three years later, in 1921, Lawrence picked it up again and wrote the remaining ten chapters, in which he abruptly whisks his English protagonist off to Italy. But it’s not to much that: the problem is not just the change of scene but the drastic change of atmosphere and, above all, of style. It abruptly switches from being thin social satire of the first half to something more long-winded and earnest like the densest parts of ‘Women in Love’.
2. In his biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess quotes a letter in which Lawrence described rewriting ‘Women in Love’ seven times. This effort shows in the novel’s astonishing depth of characterisation and in the densely written depictions of human beings stripped back to elemental level. The highly wrought nature of the prose completely matches the theme and aim. By contrast, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ is not only inconsistent in tone and details (the kind of thing you’d correct by rewriting) but, for the first 11 chapters, is much, much thinner in texture and effect.
It’s the first of Lawrence’s really satirical works. As the war was starting (1914), the success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ (1912) and the scandal of ‘The Rainbow’ (1915) gave Lawrence an entrée into London’s literary and artistic society, a far cry from the colliers and farmers of Eastwood where he grew up. Soon he was hobnobbing with Lady Ottoline Morell and Bertrand Russell, meeting lots of other writers, artists and poets, and discovering just how horribly competitive, mean and backbiting they could be.
There were two results: 1) satire, taking the mickey out of the new, posh people he was meeting, their empty lives, their boredom and superficiality; 2) but satire is itself a superficial medium, ridiculing people’s appearance, behaviour and speech; it generally doesn’t attempt to reach the depths of human experience.
So it’s not just the fact that it’s a novel of two distinct parts, or the lack of consistency in tone or details, it’s the almost complete abandonment, in the first 11 chapters, of the flayed, primeval depth which The Rainbow and Women in Love achieved so awesomely. Instead, the first half is closer to the silly, social satire of Lawrence’s friend, Aldous Huxley but – crucially – without the comedy.
Lawrence invents a small group of bored bourgeois – a couple of rich couples, an artist, a painter, their wives and mistresses – and then invents half a dozen scenes for them to display their shallow worthlessness and silly affairs. But maybe in doing so he discovered that this really wasn’t his metier and, by chapter 11, had gotten understandably bored of the whole thing and dropped it.
The finished published novel isn’t cast in two parts but because that’s what Aldington and Burgess say about it, and also because there’s such an obvious break in the reading, I’ve divided this summary of it into two parts.
The title
In the Old Testament Aaron is the older brother of Moses. Unlike Moses, Aaron had a place at Pharaoh’s court and acted as Moses’ spokesman. His rod features in several stories. It was a divine symbol of Aaron’s authority as the first high priest of the Israelites. When Moses called up the first three of the plagues he brought down upon Egypt, it was via Aaron’s use of his magic rod. Later, when free and wandering in the wilderness, there was argument among the different tribes as to who deserved primacy. To emphasize the validity of the Levites’ claim to the offerings and tithes of the Israelites, Moses collected a rod from the leaders of each tribe in Israel and laid the twelve rods overnight in the tent of meeting. The next morning, Aaron’s rod was found to have budded and blossomed and produced ripe almonds. The rod was then placed before the Ark of the Covenant to symbolize Aaron’s right to priesthood (Wikipedia).
All these overtones are contained in the novel’s title. Within Lawrence’s story, ‘Aaron’s rod’ refers to the flute played by the central character, Aaron Sisson. The comparison is made, explicitly, by the writer Rawdon Lilly, in chapter 10. Here is the exchange in full. As you can see, like a lot of things in the novel, it starts with the promise of wit and deep meaning but peters out into inconsequentiality.
Aaron suddenly took his flute, and began trying little passages from the opera on his knee. He had not played since his illness. The noise came out a little tremulous, but low and sweet. Lilly came forward with a plate and a cloth in his hand.
‘Aaron’s rod is putting forth again,’ he said, smiling.
‘What?’ said Aaron, looking up.
‘I said Aaron’s rod is putting forth again.’
‘What rod?’
‘Your flute, for the moment.’
‘It’s got to put forth my bread and butter.’
‘Is that all the buds it’s going to have?’
‘What else!’
‘Nay—that’s for you to show. What flowers do you imagine came out of the rod of Moses’s brother?’
‘Scarlet runners, I should think if he’d got to live on them.’
‘Scarlet enough, I’ll bet.’
It ought to mean something, shouldn’t it, but like a lot of things in the novel, is heavy on promising rhetoric but, in the end, means nothing. Periodically there are discussions of music in the novel but not as many as you might expect. Lady Williams prefers Bach and Beethoven. In his pensione in Florence, Aaron:
studied some music he had bought in Milan: some Pergolesi and the Scarlatti he liked, and some Corelli. He preferred frail, sensitive, abstract music, with not much feeling in it, but a certain limpidity and purity. Night fell as he sat reading the scores. He would have liked to try certain pieces on his flute. But his flute was too sensitive, it winced from the new strange surroundings, and would not blossom. (p.251)
But the term really comes into its own in chapter 18, where it comes to symbolise the flowering of Aaron’s lust for the Marchesa (see summary of chapter 18, below). Here it is equated with his maleness and transparently symbolises the male member.
Part one. Beldover, Hampshire and London
Chapter 1. The Blue Ball
It is Christmas Eve after the First World War. We are in an ugly little mining town of Beldover, in the small home of Aaron Sisson. Aaron is a ‘men’s checkweighman’ at the local coalmines mines. He is 33 and a noted amateur player of the flute. He is blonde with a fair moustache and quite handsome.
He watches his two girls playing and squabbling over Christmas tree decorations. One of them finds a glass blue ball which has been handed down to him as a family heirloom. In the way of children the two sisters wonder how strong it is, what would happen if you drop it (it survives), what would happen if you throw it in the air and let it fall on the tiled floor – it breaks, angering their father.
Chapter 2. The Royal Oak
The children want candles for their Christmas tree so when Aaron sets off for his nightly visit to the pub, his wife, Lottie, asks him to buy some, and this is an opportunity for Lawrence to describe Christmas Eve in the main shopping street of a miners’ town like Beldover. Lawrence makes a point of stating: ‘The war had killed the little market of the town.’ Aaron buys eight candles in a shop.
Then he goes on to the pub, the Royal Oak. It’s a small space with benches and a couple of tables. Conversation with the men. This morphs into conversation with the local doctor who is, surprisingly, an Indian. Discussion of Indian independence. Strong hint that Aaron is close to, has slept with, the pub landlady. But the Indian conversation puts him in a bad mood, to the landlady’s irritation. At 10pm, chucking out time, she invites him into the back parlour to share a mince pie but he refuses. Reluctant to go home, on an impulse Aaron sets off down Shottle Lane.
Chapter 3. The Lighted Tree
Scene cuts to Shottle House, owned by Alfred Bricknell, ‘one of the partners in the Colliery firm. His English was incorrect, his accent, broad Derbyshire, and he was not a gentleman in the snobbish sense of the word. Yet he was well-to-do, and very stuck-up.’ His son, 6-foot Jim Bricknell, almost bald, ugly, ‘a cavalry officer and fought in two wars’. Josephine Ford, the girl Jim was engaged to. Alfred’s daughter, Julia Bricknell. Julia’s husband, Robert Cunningham, a lieutenant about to be demobilised, when he would become a sculptor once more. House guest Cyril Scott,
They’re rich and bored. They decide to place live candles in a big tree outside and are in the middle of doing this when Sisson strolls up, wearing a bowler hat and buttoned-up greatcoat. They are surprised but pleased to have someone interrupt the tedium. they invite him back into the house, give him drink and fete him, all of which Aaron greets with surprising sang-froid and indifference.
For some reason Jim warms to him and offers to put him up on the couch in his room, leads him off to his room, everyone goes to bed.
Chapter 4. ‘The Pillar of Salt’
Aaron has run away and abandoned his wife, Lottie. He’s sent her letters giving her access to money. The chapter opens with him having returned to the house at night, and now watching it hidden in the garden. He sees the comings and goings of Lottie and children through the window. Finally he sneaks inside to retrieve his flute, piccolo and music, and their case. Hiding, he overhears the visit of the Indian doctor, because one of his daughter’s is sick in bed and Lottie is scared. Aaron overhears the doctor’s rather over-familiar reassurance of his wife. When the doctor leaves and his wife goes upstairs to the sick girl’s room, Aaron silently slips out of the house and over the low garden wall.
Chapter 5. At The Opera
The same group of bored posh people we met in chapter 3 are lolling in a box at the opera in London, bored and sniping at each other. In addition there’s Rawdon Lilly, a writer, a dark ugly man, ‘bare-headed wispy, unobtrusive Lilly’, married to Tanny. Tanny is half Norwegian. And Struther, a painter.
The big topic of conversation is whether Julia Bricknell will take up the invitation of Cyril Scott to run off and leave her husband of eight years, Robert Cunningham, to have an affair. Robert is there, present, while the others discuss it. they all encourage her to have an adventure, and Robert doesn’t much mind, but she just can’t decide.
Incidentally, they all loathe the opera itself, hate the music and despise the fat oafish singers. It’s hard to make out whether Lawrence is satirising them for a bunch of philistines, or this is Lawrence’s own attitude to the opera. Either way, Lawrence completely lacks the gift for comedy. Although the characters laugh a lot at each others’ jokes or behaviour.
Argyle was somewhat intoxicated. He spoke with a slight slur, and laughed, really tickled at his own jokes.
But none of it is actually funny, none. Instead of comedy, the best Lawrence can usually deliver is acidulous contempt, jeering., something which is unconsciously echoed in the way so many of his characters are described as jeering. It’s a favourite word of his.
Chapter 6. Talk
Jim spots Aaron playing in the orchestra. After the opera he finds Aaron and invites him along with the rest of his party to his rooms at the Albany, decorated in fashionably Bohemian style. They are joined by a Mrs Browning, Clariss. A lot of pointless banter. Jim is convinced he is dying because no-one will love him. He asks Aaron whether he believes in love. Lilly has the larky idea of writing down the Grand Truths they are discovering in marker pen on the fire mantlepiece, choice insights such as LOVE IS LIFE and LOVE IS THE SOUL’S RESPIRATION. Jim is a champagne socialist.
Jim had been an officer in the regular army, and still spent hours with his tailor. But instead of being a soldier he was a sort of socialist, and a red-hot revolutionary of a very ineffectual sort.
This partly explains why he’s attracted to Aaron who he imagines is a proletarian. When he finds him after the opera, Jim walks Aaron to his rooms ‘talking rather vaguely about Labour and Robert Smillie, and Bolshevism. He was all for revolution and the triumph of labour.’ Then again, several of the little group of posh wastrels share a laughable attraction to ‘revolution’, notably sad Josephine:
‘My, wouldn’t I love it if they’d make a bloody revolution!’
‘Must it be bloody, Josephine?’ said Robert.
‘Why, yes. I don’t believe in revolutions that aren’t bloody,’ said Josephine. ‘Wouldn’t I love it! I’d go in front with a red flag.’
Callow. The party breaks up, they all go to Embankment tube station and then head off in their different directions. Aaron is rooming in Bloomsbury.
Chapter 7. The Dark Square Garden
A while later Josephine Ford hosts Aaron to dinner in a Soho restaurant. She quizzes him about his background, his family and why he left them. Aaron comes over quite appealingly as a man who just wants to be left alone. They walks across the Charing Cross Road past the British Museum to a Bloomsbury Square. There’s a high wind in the trees. Josephine talks about marriage, wanting to be loved etc. She was engaged to Jim Bricknell but has gone off him. She starts crying though Aaron doesn’t notice partly because of the storm in the trees. Then she asks him to kiss her, but he refuses. He doesn’t want to be forced into caring. He just wants to be left alone. She’s understandably insulted. They walk out of the garden and he sees her to the door of her lodging in offended silence.
Chapter 8. A Punch in the Wind
Lilly and Tanny live in a labourer’s cottage in Hampshire. They are poor. One day Jim Bricknell cables that he’s coming to visit. He brings sausages and fish paste. They gossip. Julia did go off with Taylor, leaving Robert alone. He’ll probably have a pop at Josephine. Jim’s started seeing his divorced French wife again.
Jim’s work in town was merely nominal. He spent his time wavering about and going to various meetings, philandering and weeping. (p.93)
Jim is trying. He stuffs his face with food, takes a loaf of bread to bed, and argues with Lilly. They argue about Christianity, Lilly like a good modern writer finding it detestable, Jim declaring it’s ‘the finest thing humanity’s ever produced’ and saying he’s looking for the Christ-like in man. When he asks if he can stay the Saturday, Lilly bluntly says no, tells him he has to leave tomorrow (Thursday).
They send a telegram to a girlfriend of Jim’s (Lois) to meet him at a station en route back to London so they can walk together, walk through the woods. Jim’s thing is he needs to be falling in love otherwise he feels life is empty and drinks to fill the void.
Back at the cottage they consume the tea Tanny has prepared and sit round the fire. Tanny is exasperated that Jim can’t just lead his own life without needing a woman to hold his hand and Lilly continues his mockery of Jim’s attitudes, till the big man suddenly leaps at him and punches him several times in the torso, hard. The odd thing is this doesn’t lead to an argument, all the characters accept it as somehow natural, in fact Tanny regards this as a wake-up call to dark little Lilly for constantly criticising his friends. This has the true Lawrence weirdness.
Next day they walk Jim to the train station, he invites them to come and stay at his country place, but it’s the last time Lilly and Tanny ever see Jim.
Chapter 9. Low-Water Mark
Tanny goes off to see ‘her people’ in Norway and Lilly rents a flat in Covent Garden, spends days watching the comings and goings. Just as the focus of the novel seemed to be settling on Lilly, Aaron reappears. One day Lilly sees a posh gent cross through the busy market and then slip over. Running downstairs he arrives the same time as a policeman, recognises Aaron, gets the copper to help Aaron up the stairs to his flat. It’s cosy with a piano and bookshelves.
What emerges is Aaron ‘gave in’ to Josephine, allowed himself to have feelings for her, and as soon as he stopped being aloof, something in him snapped. He is ill and Lilly puts him in his spare bed and calls a doctor, but Aaron gets worse. The doctor diagnoses the flu. Days pass as Aaron declines. Suddenly, with Lawrentian irrationality, little Lilly decides to strip him and rub him all over with oil, which he does laboriously, then recovers him with blankets, and Aaron starts to slowly recover.
Meanwhile, Lilly is given an extended rant which sounds just like Lawrence, betting that Aaron will be ungrateful when he recovers, then wandering off to the principle that man must stick up for himself, be himself, not rely on women (like Jim), give into women (like Aaron). This morphs into a rant about the races of the world, which is worth quoting to give you the full Lawrence flavour of a serious point stifled by madness and bigotry.
‘I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for—they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics – even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers – the American races – and the South Sea Islanders – the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven – Europeans, Asiatics, Africans – everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hate them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases. Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That’s why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable. A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity. He should pivot himself on his own pride.’ (p.120)
Slowly Aaron recovers while Lilly goes about the household chores, making him tea and darning his socks, which he enjoys. The chapter ends with a joint rant against women, which is so weird / mad / entertaining that I’ve made it a separate post.
Chapter 10. The War Again
We’re still in Lilly’s flat. It’s a week or so later. Aaron is much better. They chat. Lilly tells Aaron he’s signed on a merchant vessel sailing to Malta as a ship’s cook. Aaron, sounding like Lawrence, says what’s the point going anywhere if you remain the same, to which Lilly replies the with equally Lawrentian argument, ‘There are lots of me’s. I’m not only just one proposition. A new place brings out a new thing in a man.’
Then Lilly explains his theory of male and femaleness, that one must be absolutely oneself, in a relationship, but that makes the unity all the more profound: anyway, he despises most couples who are just a queasy oneness. When he talks about this unity being achieved after much fighting and sensual fulfilment, you strongly suspect he’s describing Lawrence and Frieda’s stormy relationship.
The two men have been living together for a fortnight. They have discovered a close sympathy.
The two men had an almost uncanny understanding of one another—like brothers. They came from the same district, from the same class. Each might have been born into the other’s circumstance. Like brothers, there was a profound hostility between them. But hostility is not antipathy. (p.129)
Lots more bickering then a friend of Lilly’s turns up, Herbertson, a captain in the Guards, had been right through the war, 45 and getting stout, very posh (p.137). Turns out he has a compulsion to talk about the war, and has found Lilly a good listener.
It was the same thing here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly had sat in a cowshed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn’t know where to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by a vision that the soul cannot bear.
In this officer, of course, there was a lightness and an appearance of bright diffidence and humour. But underneath it all was the same as in the common men of all the combatant nations: the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved. The experience gradually cooled on top: but only with a surface crust. The soul did not heal, did not recover.
Five pages of very intense war stories are given to Herbertson, some very gruesome indeed (headless bodies) all told in the posh pukka way of an officer on the edge of hysteria. Damning indictment of war. In amid the gore, Herbertson expresses his belief that all the men who were killed had a presentiment of their deaths.
Then he lifted his face, and went on in the same animated chatty fashion: ‘You see, he had a presentiment. I’m sure he had a presentiment. None of the men got killed unless they had a presentiment – like that, you know….’
Herbertson nodded keenly at Lilly, with his sharp, twinkling, yet obsessed eyes. Lilly wondered why he made the presentiment responsible for the death – which he obviously did – and not vice versa.
Herbertson implied every time, that you’d never get killed if you could keep yourself from having a presentiment. Perhaps there was something in it. Perhaps the soul issues its own ticket of death, when it can stand no more. Surely life controls life: and not accident.
It’s two in the morning before he leaves, leaving Lilly and Aaron depressed and arguing about the war. Lilly takes the Lawrence line that the war was, in some sense, false because it didn’t happen to him, it didn’t occur at the really deep level.
‘Damn all leagues. Damn all masses and groups, anyhow. All I want is to get MYSELF out of their horrible heap: to get out of the swarm. The swarm to me is nightmare and nullity—horrible helpless writhing in a dream. I want to get myself awake, out of it all—all that mass-consciousness, all that mass-activity—it’s the most horrible nightmare to me. No man is awake and himself. No man who was awake and in possession of himself would use poison gases: no man. His own awake self would scorn such a thing. It’s only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass-psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene.’
When Aaron demurs, Lilly tells him he (Aaron) has to leave tomorrow (in the same peremptory way he demanded that Jim Bricknell leave his Hampshire cottage ahead of time). He’s serious about it, and turfs Aaron out the next morning. When Aaron pops round a few days later to say a final goodbye before Lilly sails, Lilly makes sure to be out. It is a serious breach in their friendship.
Chapter 11. More Pillar of Salt
The opera season ended, Aaron was invited by Cyril Scott to join a group of musical people in a village by the sea. He accepted, and spent a pleasant month. It pleased the young men musically-inclined and bohemian by profession to patronise the flautist, whom they declared marvellous. Bohemians with well-to-do parents, they could already afford to squander a little spasmodic and self-gratifying patronage. And Aaron did not mind being patronised. He had nothing else to do.
The chapter is titled ‘More’ because Aaron returns to the Midlands, to his town, and to his house. First crouching in the garden at the night, then walking up the garden path and into the house to surprise and dismay his wife. She, obviously, is upset and hurls reproaches at him which he is too vague to formulate replies to. The style reverts to the ‘Women in Love’ style of lots of repetition of key phrases and the man and the woman conceived as primal archetypes, along with that fundamental Lawrentian characteristic, of conflicting and contradictory emotions. His wife berates him, but then gives way to floods of tears, comes, kneels by his side her head on his thigh, wailing.
Him it half overcame, and at the same time, horrified. He had a certain horror of her. The strange liquid sound of her appeal seemed to him like the swaying of a serpent which mesmerises the fated, fluttering, helpless bird. She clasped her arms round him, she drew him to her, she half roused his passion. At the same time she coldly horrified and repelled him. He had not the faintest feeling, at the moment, of his own wrong. But she wanted to win his own self-betrayal out of him. He could see himself as the fascinated victim, falling to this cajoling, awful woman, the wife of his bosom. But as well, he had a soul outside himself, which looked on the whole scene with cold revulsion. (p.154)
So this fraught scene receives the full Lawrence treatment but… it doesn’t really work. The satirical or light characters, the effusions of vapid dialogue which have filled the intervening chapters, have undermined the ‘Women in Love’ vibe, invalidated it. He can’t write 150 pages of thin, surface stuff then suddenly turn on the primeval style and expect the reader to fall in line. ‘Aaron’s Rod’ demonstrates how the Lawrentian style, when applied to an unworthy object (or undeveloped characters) fails.
Anyway, Aaron tears himself away from his weeping wife and simply walks out, down the garden, over the wall, across fields till he finds a hay rick and makes up a bed and lies on it under the September stars. And formulates the fundamental Lawrence theme:
Love was a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul. So far, man had yielded the mastery to woman. Now he was fighting for it back again. And too late, for the woman would never yield. But whether woman yielded or not, he would keep the mastery of his own soul and conscience and actions. He would never yield himself up to her judgment again. He would hold himself forever beyond her jurisdiction. Henceforth, life single, not life double.
Part two. Italy
Chapter 12. Novara
So Aaron goes back to London and gets gigs playing the flute. He plays for the famous socialist Artemis Hooper, in her boudoir, attended by various other high society guests. He becomes tired of being a plaything of the idle rich, one minute talking to the latest socialite at a posh reception, the next walking home to his shabby lodgings in the rain. So he does what many the hero of an Edwardian novel does, and leaves England for Italy.
Lilly had written saying he was staying with a Sir William Franks in a place in Italy called Novara. So Aaron travels there. When he finally manages to get a cab to take him to the grand estate of Sir William, he is met at the gates, is met at the door, is shown up the stairs to a palatial bedroom, Lawrence makes space for a little dig at the degrading impact of cinema.
He had fallen into country house parties before, but never into quite such a plushy sense of riches. He felt he ought to have his breath taken away. But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendours of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. Connu! Connu! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn’t be known better, from the film. (p.163)
It is a grand house and when Aaron arrives Sir William, the frail old man, is in the middle of holding a grand dinner, servants serving up posh food to half a dozen eminent guests, including a couple of officers in khaki, namely:
- little Sir William
- Lady Sibyl Franks
- a young, slim woman with big blue eyes and dark hair like a photograph
- a smaller rather colourless young woman with a large nose
- a stout, rubicund, bald colonel, dressed in khaki
- a tall, thin, Oxford-looking major, tall and slim with a black patch over his eye, dressed in khaki
- a good-looking, well-nourished young man in a dinner-jacket
After dinner there is some fol-de-rol with pinning three medals he’s been awarded on to the old man’s chest. Then Sir William questions Aaron about his life, leaving his wife, having to earn a living and so on. He dwells on his and Lilly’s faith in a Providence to look after them, rather than have a job or career. Aaron takes it all with the same puzzling indifference he takes everything else in his life, a ‘fine, mischievous smile’ on his face.
Chapter 13. Wie Es Ihnen Gefällt
Which is German for ‘As you like it’. Next morning Aaron is woken in his plush guest bed by a servant bringing coffee, rolls and honey. He dresses, wanders through the mansion observing the servants doing their chores, then out into the garden and up the grape terraces behind the house to a bench where he can admire the breath-taking view over the valley, the river, the town of Novara to the majestic Alps beyond.
Aaron walks down to the town and Lawrence vividly describes the sight and sounds and feel of an Italian town. He goes to the train station and finds out about trains to Milan, then back up to the Franks’ house. There’s a formal tea but we don’t hear much about it. Instead the evening finds Aaron in the hall, before the vast fire, tired and depressed, thinking about his wife, Lottie. And Lawrence gives him a vast screed about the eternal female, about fighting against woman’s smothering, how during their ‘terrible and magnificent connubial deaths in his arms’ (sex) he had always held back, never gave himself.
In other words, the novel mutates from the dialogue-heavy satire of the first 11 chapters into the long-winded, primeval, elemental archetype writing of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’. All this is combined with an unusually direct address to the reader, which feels rather clumsy. After pages and pages exploring Aaron’s coming-to-awareness of his own personality and limitations, the narrator says the man himself wouldn’t have put it into words like this, he would have expressed it as music.
The inaudible music of his conscious soul conveyed his meaning in him quite as clearly as I convey it in words: probably much more clearly. But in his own mode only: and it was in his own mode only he realised what I must put into words. These words are my own affair. His mind was music.
Don’t grumble at me then, gentle reader, and swear at me that this damned fellow wasn’t half clever enough to think all these smart things, and realise all these fine-drawn-out subtleties. You are quite right, he wasn’t, yet it all resolved itself in him as I say, and it is for you to prove that it didn’t. (p.199)
The thrust of this long delirious passage seems to be Lawrence’s latest belief, that, no matter how deeply in love you are, how deeply you commune with another person, you can give yourself, but you cannot and should not give yourself away. Something must remain indissolubly private. The best communion is of two people who, despite all the modern clichés about love, remain at the deepest level, rigorously separate.
The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman… It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living…
Then the tone cuts drastically back to social satire mode. Sunday evening dinner at Lord Franks’s house. Here Aaron gets into conversation with Lady Franks, who explains why she prefers old classical music to Strauss and Stravinsky: it has more depth and more religion. She’s also convinced she has a guardian spirit watching over her.
Dinner is described in excruciating detail, as the four men get drunk, then have a pointless conversation, then stagger drunkenly up the stairs. In the drawing room they have to submit to an agonisingly boring rendition of Schumann on the piano by Lady Frank and then Aaron is called on to perform on his flute, like a trained seal. Throughout he has the sense of licking the rich people’s boots.
Lawrence is slack about details. In part 1 the war had very obviously only just ended, was fresh. Here in part 2, is the sentence:
‘Now, Colonel,’ said the host, ‘send round the bottle.’ With a flourish of the elbow and shoulder, the Colonel sent on the port, actually port, in those bleak, post-war days!
Those bleak, post-war days – signalling that the author is now writing, or the book being published, at some remove from those days. A tiny indication of the later date at which Lawrence wrote the second half of the novel.
Chapter 14. XX Settembre
Next morning Aaron wakes into a scared feeling of heading into nothingness. All he knows is he has snapped his ties with the past, but he has no plan for the future. A servant brings in coffee and toast and he feels better. At 8am sharp Lady Franks’ car is ready to take him in upholstered luxury to the train station. He hates being in the car and is glad to climb out and into the busy, open air life of the common people.
He checks into the Hotel Britannia then goes wandering round the town giving a characteristically vivid but acidulous description of it, notably the famous cathedral with all its pointy bits. Lawrence doesn’t bother with history or scholarship, architectural knowledge or anything like that. Absolutely everything he encounters is described for the immediate impact it makes on his senses, senses stripped back. When he’s on form, these descriptions are amazingly vivid; when he’s not at the top of his game, they can sound repetitive and forced.
Back at his hotel he witnesses a big political march. There’s been a rally and now a march of workers is moving through the town and, for some reason, tearing the Italian flag – ‘the red, white and green tricolour, with the white cross of Savoy in the centre’ – down off buildings. the house bang opposite his hotel has the flag flying on the third floor. After arguing with the woman who keeps the shop on the ground floor but apparently has no access to higher floors, a young lad bravely climbs the outside of the building up to the third floor, tears the flag off and throws it to the crowd below, who cheer.
At that point a crowd of carabinieri (Italian police) charge into the square and start beating up and arresting anyone not quick enough to flee. The boy on the third floor is trapped and, with guns trained on him, meekly descends and is arrested.
Aaron becomes aware of two Englishmen looking out a nearby window of his hotel at the scene. He retreats into his room and plays the flute to calm down. At dinner he hears their posh voices discussing their holiday itinerary. Franz ‘Francis’ Dekker and Angus Guest (p.230). Remember how the snobbish English tourists in E.M. Forster’s Room With A View detested all the other English tourists? Twenty years later nothing has changed.
Said Francis, in a vehement whisper, ‘After all, we are the only three English people in the place.’
‘For the moment, apparently we are,’ said Angus. ‘But the English are all over the place wherever you go, like bits of orange peel in the street.’ (p.227)
Francis cross-questions Aaron about his origins. The two men are very camp in their speech, presumably gay. They simply adored his playing on the flute. Aaron explains he’s heading to Venice to meet up with Lilly but they’ve heard rumours that Lilly is in Munich being psychoanalysed. they ask him to come with them to Florence.
Chapter 15. A Railway Journey
I haven’t mentioned that the narrator voice is irritatingly intrusive and buttonholing – ‘ Behold our hero…’, ‘There sat our friend…’, ‘Our two young heroes…’, ‘our gypsy party…’, ‘Don’t grumble at me then, gentle reader…’
So Aaron goes with this gay couple to Florence. He rides in third class while they swank in first class, which triggers a long disquisition about class consciousness (see below). English versus Italian train passengers:
Sitting there in the third-class carriage, he became happy again. The presence of his fellow-passengers was not so hampering as in England. In England, everybody seems held tight and gripped, nothing is left free. Every passenger seems like a parcel holding his string as fast as he can about him, lest one corner of the wrapper should come undone and reveal what is inside. And every other passenger is forced, by the public will, to hold himself as tight-bound also. Which in the end becomes a sort of self-conscious madness. But here, in the third class carriage, there was no tight string round every man. They were not all trussed with self-conscious string as tight as capons. They had a sufficient amount of callousness and indifference and natural equanimity. True, one of them spat continually on the floor, in large spits. And another sat with his boots all unlaced and his collar off, and various important buttons undone. They did not seem to care if bits of themselves did show, through the gaps in the wrapping. Aaron winced – but he preferred it to English tightness. He was pleased, he was happy with the Italians. He thought how generous and natural they were
When he goes to have lunch with them, some peasant takes his seat, despite Francis’s outraged remonstrances, so he joins them in their first class compartment. When the train is delayed at Prato, they get water from the restaurant car, nip out for chestnuts and figs, and have themselves a tidy little picnic.
They arrive late in Florence and the two gays put up at a posh hotel, making it clear they’d prefer Aaron to push off. Next morning he’s up and exploring the great Florence, treading where hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists had oohed and aahed themselves. He finds a cheap pension, 10 francs a day, with wonderful views. A room with a ‘superb’ view (p.256).
Chapter 16. Florence
Life at the Pension Nardini which is cold and dreary, with a group of Scandinavian guests and a German family. Aaron likes being detached, solo. It is November and rainy. He tours Florence in the dark and wet and is inspired. The Palazzo Vecchio, the Piazza della Signoria, Michelangelo’s David, ‘the genius [in the sense of presiding spirit] of Florence’ (p.253). This triggers a bonkers paean to men and masculinity.
He went out, he found the Piazza della Signoria packed with men: but all, all men. And all farmers, land-owners and land-workers. The curious, fine-nosed Tuscan farmers, with their half-sardonic, amber-coloured eyes. Their curious individuality, their clothes worn so easy and reckless, their hats with the personal twist. Their curious full oval cheeks, their tendency to be too fat, to have a belly and heavy limbs. Their close-sitting dark hair. And above all, their sharp, almost acrid, mocking expression, the silent curl of the nose, the eternal challenge, the rock-bottom unbelief, and the subtle fearlessness. The dangerous, subtle, never-dying fearlessness, and the acrid unbelief. But men! Men! A town of men, in spite of everything. The one manly quality, undying, acrid fearlessness. The eternal challenge of the unquenched human soul. Perhaps too acrid and challenging today, when there is nothing left to challenge. But men – who existed without apology and without justification. Men who would neither justify themselves nor apologize for themselves. Just men. The rarest thing left in our sweet Christendom. (p.254)
The gays invite him to a posh dinner which consists of Francis and Angus, and a writer, James Argyle (‘a finely built, heavy man of fifty or more’), and little Algy Constable (‘small and frail, somewhat shaky,’), and tiny Louis Mee, and deaf (Jewish) Walter Rosen. They get drunk and talk rubbish. Lawrence is really bad at middle class dinner conversation. He takes to old Argyle.
Next day he goes to a group lunch at Algy’s, talks to some ancient Italian beau, Signor di Lanti, then the Marchesa del Torre, an American woman from the Southern States, who had lived most of her life in Europe, who seems to Aaron like a modern Cleopatra brooding, bereft of her Anthony, although her husband is there, Manfredi, the Marchese, a little intense Italian in a colonel’s grey uniform, he fought in the war the full four years. He and his wife are musicians (piano and singer) but when Algy asks the nervous Marchesa to play she refuses. Something to do with the war.
The tea party breaks up and the Marchesi and Marchesa invite Aaron to walk to their rented palazzo. it has a grand music room which used to be filled with Saturday mornings of classical music. The small, bosomy (‘a full-breasted, soft-skinned woman’), nervous, chainsmoking Marchesa confides in Aaron that music makes her feel sick: it’s the clutter of notes in chords, it feels like too much. At which point Aaron reveals that he has his flute in his coat pocket and she asks him to play. He goes into the big empty music room, tells the colonel to leave the lights off to continue the mystique, and plays. This is the only description of his playing in the book.
There, in the darkness of the big room, he put his flute to his lips, and began to play. It was a clear, sharp, lilted run-and-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody, a bright, quick sound of pure animation, a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing. It was like a bird’s singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning—a ripple and poise of animate sound. But it was unlike a bird’s singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop… What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer. (p.271)
All this melts something in the Marchesa and Aaron and she have an unspoken bond. Now we learn that she feels horribly trapped by her kind, rational husband and wants to escape from the dungeon of human conventions. Are she and Aaron going to have an affair?
Aaron takes his leave, promising to return another evening with his flute, and flies out into the dark town with a rush of excitement. He is jostled by mobs of soldiers and then realises someone has picked his pocket. Once back at his hotel room he double checks all his coats but it’s definitely gone, his wallet with some letters and personal things about £12 in sterling and lire, all his money. And it happened because he rushed out into the streets in a state of excitement, of emotion, having opened himself, exposed himself, let his guard down.
This reminds us of his ramblings back in part one, when Lilly found him collapsed in Covent Garden, where he blamed his fever not on the flu but on having given in to Josephine’s emotions. If this novel is anything it is (half-heartedly) about one man’s attempt to remain aloof, independent, and self contained.
And Aaron never forgot. After this, it became essential to him to feel that the sentinel stood guard in his own heart. He felt a strange unease the moment he was off his guard. Asleep or awake, in the midst of the deepest passion or the suddenest love, or in the throes of greatest excitement or bewilderment, somewhere, some corner of himself was awake to the fact that the sentinel of the soul must not sleep, no, never, not for one instant. (p.275)
Chapter 17. High Up Over The Cathedral Square
Still in Florence. With no explanation Rawdon Lilly the writer has appeared and the chapter opens with him and Aaron sitting on the balcony of Argyle’s loggia, in the autumn sunshine, rhapsodising over the beauty of Florence. Apparently they just bumped into each other in the street, in the Via Nationale. The little Marchese arrives and is shown through the low window onto the balcony. Argyle serves the last of his whiskey, then tea. They have a rubbish Lawrence conversation, for example when Aaron says he came to Florence by accident the others tut and say there is no such thing as accident: a man is drawn by his fate. Worse, the Marchese launches into a long, a really long, disquisition about the imbalance of male and female desire in marriage.
‘Our Catholic religion tried to keep the young girls in convents, and innocent, before marriage. So that with their minds they should not know, and should not start this terrible thing, this woman’s desire over a man, beforehand. This desire which starts in a woman’s head, when she knows, and which takes a man for her use, for her service. This is Eve. Ah, I hate Eve. I hate her, when she knows, and when she wills. I hate her when she will make of me that which serves her desire.—She may love me, she may be soft and kind to me, she may give her life for me. But why? Only because I am hers. I am that thing which does her most intimate service. She can see no other in me. And I may be no other to her…’
And much more in the same ilk.
‘You are quite right, my boy,’ said Argyle. ‘You are quite right. They’ve got the start of us, the women: and we’ve got to canter when they say gee-up. I—oh, I went through it all. But I broke the shafts and smashed the matrimonial cart, I can tell you, and I didn’t care whether I smashed her up along with it or not… And women oh, they are the very hottest hell once they get the start of you. There’s nothing they won’t do to you, once they’ve got you. Nothing they won’t do to you. Especially if they love you. Then you may as well give up the ghost: or smash the cart behind you, and her in it. Otherwise she will just harry you into submission, and make a dog of you, and cuckold you under your nose. And you’ll submit. Oh, you’ll submit, and go on calling her my darling. Or else, if you won’t submit, she’ll do for you. Your only chance is to smash the shafts, and the whole matrimonial cart. Or she’ll do for you. For a woman has an uncanny, hellish strength – she’s a she-bear and a wolf, is a woman when she’s got the start of you. Oh, it’s a terrible experience, if you’re not a bourgeois, and not one of the knuckling-under money-making sort.’ (p.286)
This is misogynist tripe, isn’t it? When something similar – the struggle between the sexes – is dramatised in ‘Women in Love’, it feels vital and penetrating to some archetypal depth. Here, in the mouths of a bunch of grumpy old men sitting round drinking whiskey, whining that ‘these days’ women are in charge and men come running like dogs, it sounds like sexist bullshit.
The Marchese goes on to explain that in the good old days a man could retreat from his bitch-wife and go after a younger woman, innocent, easier to dominate. But nowadays even the young women are ‘modern women’ – ‘Terrible thing, the modern woman,’ put in Argyle. Then Lilly repeats what we take to be Lawrence’s position, because it has recurred throughout the novel, is its central theme (insofar as it has one):
‘Can’t one live with one’s wife, and be fond of her: and with one’s friends, and enjoy their company: and with the world and everything, pleasantly: and yet know that one is alone? Essentially, at the very core of me, alone. Eternally alone. And choosing to be alone. Not sentimental or lonely. Alone, choosing to be alone, because by one’s own nature one is alone. The being with another person is secondary…’ (p.289)
Chapter 18. The Marchesa
Aaron goes for dinner with the Marchese and Marchesa. She is so made-up he is scared of her and her sexy outfit.
Her beautiful woman’s legs, slightly glistening, duskily. His one abiding instinct was to touch them, to kiss them. He had never known a woman to exercise such power over him. It was a bare, occult force, something he could not cope with.
Aaron says he’s been to the Uffizi Gallery and seen Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus which gives rise to (yet another) discussion about womanhood, specifically whether Venus is a type of the ‘modern woman’ in her fake innocence, pretending not to know too much. There is a heavy atmosphere of seduction and Aaron feels himself being seduced, no matter how hard he knows he needs to remain aloof, separate and independent.
After an exquisite dessert of persimmons, they go out onto the palazzo terrace. The Marchesa stands so close she is touching him as she points out the window of his apartment in the pensione, not too far away. ‘My window is always open,’ says Aaron as she stands so close they’re touching, and he knows they will become lovers. He goes into the music room and plays the flute again, which has a powerful physical impact on her.
And the music of the flute came quick, rather brilliant like a call-note, or like a long quick message, half command. To her it was like a pure male voice—as a blackbird’s when he calls: a pure male voice, not only calling, but telling her something, telling her something, and soothing her soul to sleep. It was like the fire-music putting Brunnhilde to sleep. But the pipe did not flicker and sink. It seemed to cause a natural relaxation in her soul, a peace. Perhaps it was more like waking to a sweet, morning awakening, after a night of tormented, painful tense sleep.
But when he asks the Marchesa to sing, she does a couple of verses of a French song, but with her voice faltering and then failing. So Aaron takes up the music and plays it on the flute and after a moment she joins in and is wafted on his notes, is liberated, experiences a wonderful creative elation. This is the song.
When the song is over there is an embarrassed silence. The Marchesa is liberated and exultant but there is tension between the men because the Marchese knows Aaron has achieved what he could never manage, and Aaron feels he now ‘owns’ the woman.
And Aaron said in his heart, what a goodly woman, what a woman to taste and enjoy. Ah, what a woman to enjoy! And was it not his privilege? Had he not gained it? His manhood, or rather his maleness, rose powerfully in him, in a sort of mastery. He felt his own power, he felt suddenly his own virile title to strength and reward. Suddenly, and newly flushed with his own male super-power, he was going to have his reward. The woman was his reward. (p.300)
Aaron is consumed with lust but the husband is sitting right there (like a wizened old monkey, in Aaron’s view) so he politely takes his leave. Back in his room, he regards his flute and humorously recalls Lilly calling it Aaron’s rod. Well, it’s about to flower alright!
He reflects that he has for so long been hard and unyielding but now is being melted. This would be more effective if we hadn’t observed him not really being hard and unyielding but just good-naturedly indifferent, floating and drifting from place to place.
And now came his desire back. But strong, fierce as iron. Like the strength of an eagle with the lightning in its talons. Something to glory in, something overweening, the powerful male passion, arrogant, royal, Jove’s thunderbolt. Aaron’s black rod of power, blossoming again with red Florentine lilies and fierce thorns. He moved about in the splendour of his own male lightning, invested in the thunder of the male passion-power. He had got it back, the male godliness, the male godhead.
Deeply in lust he goes back the next morning to see her, politely asking to see her book of chansons, and she stands close to him as he leafs through them, and he offers to play her one. But the connection of the day before isn’t there. He stops, they sit, the tension becomes unbearable and he asks straight out: Shall we be lovers? She says yes. Where? She says in her bedroom. She takes him upstairs and shows him the door then asks him to wait ten minutes. He gives her fifteen then opens the door and enters. She is in bed with her back to him.
But the sex isn’t as he’d hoped. In bed she isn’t full and womanly but clings to him like a child. And – the great issue which has resonated through the book – doesn’t surrender herself to him. Which explains why, after a doze, he wants to get away, to escape, to disentangle himself. She begs to see him again but he wants to flee. Silly man.
He gets out as quickly as he can and, in the classic Lawrence style, decides he hates her but, just as characteristically, tries to resist his impulse.
And in his male spirit he felt himself hating her: hating her deeply, damnably. But he said to himself: ‘No, I won’t hate her. I won’t hate her.’
He had received a wry letter from Sir William asking how his providence or fate was turning out. Aaron goes to the post office and writes a bitter reply.
‘I don’t want my Fate or my Providence to treat me well. I don’t want kindness or love. I don’t believe in harmony and people loving one another. I believe in the fight and in nothing else. I believe in the fight which is in everything. And if it is a question of women, I believe in the fight of love, even if it blinds me. And if it is a question of the world, I believe in fighting it and in having it hate me, even if it breaks my legs. I want the world to hate me, because I can’t bear the thought that it might love me. For of all things love is the most deadly to me, and especially from such a repulsive world as I think this is…’ (p.308)
And so dinner and to bed, alone, in blessed independence. If he didn’t want to feel like this, why did he cave in to lust? In the words of the song, ‘if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’
Chapter 19. Cleopatra but not Anthony
Not knowing what to do, Aaron takes a train out to the countryside and has a vision.
He lay and watched tall cypresses breathing and communicating, faintly moving and as it were walking in the small wind. And his soul seemed to leave him and to go far away, far back, perhaps, to where life was all different and time passed otherwise than time passes now. As in clairvoyance he perceived it: that our life is only a fragment of the shell of life. That there has been and will be life, human life such as we do not begin to conceive. Much that is life has passed away from men, leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing. Men have known as we can no more know, have felt as we can no more feel. Great life-realities gone into the darkness. But the cypresses commemorate. In the afternoon, Aaron felt the cypresses rising dark about him, like so many high visitants from an old, lost, lost subtle world, where men had the wonder of demons about them, the aura of demons, such as still clings to the cypresses, in Tuscany. (p.310)
Whether you like this goes a long way to answering whether you like Lawrence or not. It reminds me of the passages in St Mawr where its owners sense that the horse has seen more, known more, than they ever can; or again the opening of England, My England, where the old cottage has seen more traumatic events than the current occupants can hope to understand.
Anyway, there are pages of Aaron rationalising his feelings to himself, lengthy justifications that he is a husband, even if it’s to a woman who was trapping him (Lottie) and so cannot be a lover, and all women want nowadays is a lover, and so blethering on. He cannot see what is obvious to us which is that he was blinded by lust, seduced the woman, had one shag and, having achieved his aim, is happy to dump her. Standard male behaviour, in other words.
But next day he goes to see her, finds her with guests, is polite till they leave, and then asks if they can just be friends, not lovers. You see, he is married etc etc. And she says yes. Then they play some music together, the husband comes home and finds them, he joins in on the piano, then the men go through sheet music finding things to play at the next music Saturday.
The Lillys and many others are at the Saturday morning music and it irritates him to see her playing the hostess, treating him like everyone else. She invites him for dinner the next day, Sunday. It’s a week since they slept together and all his caution is being over-ridden by his loins. The old lust rises, hoping his ‘rod’ will blossom again.
So imagine his frustration when he arrives for dinner and discovers the guest of honour is the venerable old English authoress, Corrina Wade, talking of the old ideas and old ways as if no cataclysmic war had shattered them forever; plus an old English snob, Mr ffrench, fussy and precious like an old maid. These feel like caricatures of real people.
Eventually these old fossils leave our lovers alone and the Marchesa asks if he will stay. He says yes. Gives her 15 minutes to get ready. Sleeps with her. Once again is overcome by a desperate need to get away, to be alone.
Lawrence goes into detail on two points. She is scared of his penis.
Strange, she was afraid of him! Afraid of him as of a fetish! Fetish afraid, and fetish-fascinated! Or was her fear only a delightful game of cat and mouse? Or was the fear genuine, and the delight the greater: a sort of sacrilege? The fear, and the dangerous, sacrilegious power over that which she feared. (p.318)
I’ve slept with women who refused to acknowledge that the whole thing involved a penis, refused to touch it, mention it, or acknowledge what was going on, so I identify with Aaron’s perplexity. Second thing is that almost the best bit, for la Marchesa, is afterwards curling up on his chest, snuggling into his chest, like a child wanting to be protected. He speculates that maybe the sex is the means to what she really wants, which is this comfort and reassurance. Daddy.
In line with the book’s theme of women triumphing over men, Aaron feels she uses him and his rod to achieve her pleasure. He is a tool, a means, a ‘magic implement’. She uses him with the skill of a high priestess, sacrificing a victim. He associates himself with the many lovers Cleopatra was said to enjoy and then have killed in the morning.
Chapter 20. The Broken Rod
Next day it rains and he stays indoors copying out music. Well into the evening, 9pm, he ventures out towards the cafe in the Piazza Vittoria Emmanuele which is the centre of Florence’s nightlife. En route he sees three men crouching suspiciously over a dark form with a flaming torch. He avoids them but they come trotting up the ally he takes and he panics that he’s going to be mugged but they just trot by carrying a stretcher and, presumably, a body.
At the cafe he is spotted by 50-something Argyle, drunk, who hauls him over to a table where sit Lilly and a newcomer named Levison. Levison tells them there was a big socialist protest earlier in the day and when the head of the carabinieri told them not to go down a half-built road, someone shot him dead on his horse after which all hell broke loose.
This triggers Argyle to make the ludicrously drunken statement that what the world needs is the revival of slavery, for pretty much everyone in society. Earnest young Levison asks who would be these slaves?
‘Everybody, my dear chap: beginning with the idealists and the theorising Jews, and after them your nicely-bred gentlemen, and then perhaps, your profiteers and Rothschilds, and all politicians, and ending up with the proletariat,’ said Argyle.
‘Then who would be the masters? — the professional classes, doctors and lawyers and so on?’
‘What? Masters. They would be the sewerage slaves, as being those who had made most smells.’
You can see how, in a world shattered by war, where all traditional values have been overthrown, and where the huge experiment of Bolshevik communism in Russia was just commencing, all social theories are up for grabs and many of them would involve overthrowing the useless ‘democracy’ which triggered the war and instituting something more scientific, the rule of one really strong man. Out of this melee emerged Mussolini’s Fascism a few years later.
Levison cuts across this ludicrous suggestion and earnestly points out that ‘socialism is the inevitable next step…’ This also must have been a widespread belief among the kind of people who waste their time thinking about politics. This ‘discussion’ clearly only exists so that Lilly can ridicule both types of talk, in classically Lawrentian – that’s to say irrational and subjective – language.
LILLY: ‘The idea and the ideal has for me gone dead — dead as carrion —’
LEVISON: ‘Which idea, which ideal precisely?’
LILLY: ‘The ideal of love, the ideal that it is better to give than to receive, the ideal of liberty, the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the ideal of the sanctity of human life, the ideal of what we call goodness, charity, benevolence, public spiritedness, the ideal of sacrifice for a cause, the ideal of unity and unanimity — all the lot — all the whole beehive of ideals — has all got the modern bee-disease, and gone putrid, stinking. — And when the ideal is dead and putrid, the logical sequence is only stink. — Which, for me, is the truth concerning the ideal of good, peaceful, loving humanity and its logical sequence in socialism and equality, equal opportunity or whatever you like.’
Concepts like ‘stink’ and ‘slime’ were to appear more and more in Lawrence’s writing as he became more disgusted with the world and everyone’s turning away from what he saw as the real, primitive, pagan life forces.
Lilly goes on to say that people are insects and instruments and will, eventually, vote for their own slavery as a refuge from facing reality: inferior beings will elect their superior to rule them. This sounds mad but, arguably, is what the German nation did ten years later.
But then Lawrence pulls a trick by having Lilly say he doesn’t believe what he’s just said. He could easily say just the opposite. All he cares is about the primacy of the individual to himself.
‘I’ll tell you the real truth,’ said Lilly. ‘I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, never to be violated; I think there is only one thing I hate to the verge of madness, and that is bullying.’ (p.328)
Things are getting heated when a bomb goes off! That’s not something you expect in a Lawrence novel. The cafe is bombed, glass and chairs and clothes and blood flying everywhere. Stunned, Aaron staggers to his feet, sees men fighting over coats in a corner, finds his amid the pile and discovers the flute is smashed beyond repair.
He staggers out into the street with Lilly (no mention of Argyle or Levison) and they stagger away from the scene down to the river. Nothing in the book so far has effected Aaron like the loss of his flute. Lilly tells him to chuck it in the Arno, which he does. Lilly tells him he’ll grow a new one, until then he’ll have to do without a rod.
Chapter 21. Words
Aaron wakes from a long complicated dream. Over breakfast he realises he is done. The destruction of his flute-rod marks the end. He could call on numerous contacts (the gay painters, Sir William, the Marchese) and they would simply buy him a new one.
But instead he wants to make a new start in life. And this takes the form of realising he must submit to one man. And the man he chooses is the funny little, ugly, cantankerous Lilly. Not to ‘the quicksands of woman or the stinking bogs of society’, to one odd man.
Burgess and Aldington explain this dramatises the real-world situation in which, during the war, Lawrence lured John Middleton Murray and his wife Katherine Mansfield to live with them on a commune in Cornwall, and tried to persuade Murray to become blood brothers with him. It reflects the extremely intense notion of male camaraderie which Lawrence espoused, and dramatised more successfully in the very close relationship between Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin in ‘Women in Love’.
At that moment Lilly pops round. He explains he’s going away. Screw society and politics, he can’t influence any of that. He has to be true to himself like a migrating bird. Maybe he’ll go to a different continent, he’s tired of this one.
He persuades Aaron to catch a train with him out to the country and they have lunch at a lovely rural inn by a stream where Italian boys are swimming. Aaron asks Lilly what he’s going to do and this is the trigger for Lawrence’s last great sermon of the book. Lilly tells him he can’t lose himself in a woman, in humanity or in God. At the end of the day you only have yourself.
‘You can’t lose yourself. You can try. But you might just as well try to swallow yourself. You’ll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.
‘You can’t lose yourself, so stop trying. The responsibility is on your own shoulders all the time, and no God which man has ever struck can take it off. You ARE yourself and so BE yourself. Stick to it and abide by it. Passion or no passion, ecstasy or no ecstasy, urge or no urge, there’s no goal outside you, where you can consummate like an eagle flying into the sun, or a moth into a candle. There’s no goal outside you—and there’s no God outside you. No God, whom you can get to and rest in. None.
‘There is no goal outside you. None.
‘There is only one thing, your own very self. So you’d better stick to it. You can’t be any bigger than just yourself, so you needn’t drag God in. You’ve got one job, and no more. There inside you lies your own very self, like a germinating egg, your precious Easter egg of your own soul. There it is, developing bit by bit, from one single egg-cell which you were at your conception in your mother’s womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die—if then. You’ve got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it’s the only thing you have got or ever will have, don’t go trying to lose it. You’ve got to develop it, from the egg into the chicken, and from the chicken into the one-and-only phoenix, of which there can only be one at a time in the universe. There can only be one of you at a time in the universe—and one of me. So don’t forget it. Your own single oneness is your destiny. Your destiny comes from within, from your own self-form. And you can’t know it beforehand, neither your destiny nor your self-form. You can only develop it. You can only stick to your own very self, and never betray it. And by so sticking, you develop the one and only phoenix of your own self, and you unfold your own destiny.’
‘If your soul’s urge urges you to love, then love. But always know that what you are doing is the fulfilling of your own soul’s impulse. It’s no good trying to act by prescription: not a bit. And it’s no use getting into frenzies. If you’ve got to go in for love and passion, go in for them. But they aren’t the goal. They’re a mere means: a life-means, if you will. The only goal is the fulfilling of your own soul’s active desire and suggestion. Be passionate as much as ever it is your nature to be passionate, and deeply sensual as far as you can be. Small souls have a small sensuality, deep souls a deep one. But remember, all the time, the responsibility is upon your own head, it all rests with your own lonely soul, the responsibility for your own action.
‘Your soul inside you is your only Godhead. It develops your actions within you as a tree develops its own new cells. And the cells push on into buds and boughs and flowers. And these are your passion and your acts and your thoughts and expressions, your developing consciousness. You don’t know beforehand, and you can’t. You can only stick to your own soul through thick and thin.
‘You are your own Tree of Life, roots and limbs and trunk. Somewhere within the wholeness of the tree lies the very self, the quick: its own innate Holy Ghost. And this Holy Ghost puts forth new buds, and pushes past old limits, and shakes off a whole body of dying leaves. And the old limits hate being empassed, and the old leaves hate to fall. But they must, if the tree-soul says so…’
But this isn’t all. This is just the sermon about love. There’s an equal amount about the centrality of power. Lilly sees power not as a superficial will to power like Nietzsche’s, not as a conscious thing, but as a submission to the deep power urge in our core. And this power urge comes out of our deep core and we (men) must submit to it and then women, too, must submit to the man’s power urge.
‘Once the love-mode changes, as change it must, for we are worn out and becoming evil in its persistence, then the other mode will take place in us. And there will be profound, profound obedience in place of this love-crying, obedience to the incalculable power-urge. And men must submit to the greater soul in a man, for their guidance: and women must submit to the positive power-soul in man, for their being.’
Aaron the sceptic, says this will never happen. Lilly says oh yes it will. And the book ends on an ominous and cryptic note.
‘All men say, they want a leader. Then let them in their souls submit to some greater soul than theirs. At present, when they say they want a leader, they mean they want an instrument, like Lloyd George. A mere instrument for their use. But it’s more than that. It’s the reverse. It’s the deep, fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man. You, Aaron, you too have the need to submit. You, too, have the need livingly to yield to a more heroic soul, to give yourself. You know you have. And you know it isn’t love. It is life-submission. And you know it. But you kick against the pricks. And perhaps you’d rather die than yield. And so, die you must. It is your affair.’
There was a long pause. Then Aaron looked up into Lilly’s face. It was dark and remote-seeming. It was like a Byzantine eikon at the moment.
‘And whom shall I submit to?’ he said.
‘Your soul will tell you,’ replied the other.
Thoughts on part 1
The thinness of satire
The first part feels like a try-out of Huxleyan social satire. Lawrence has the characters, alright, but he has completely the wrong temperament for satire, because Lawrence is rarely if ever humorous. Mostly he radiates seething contempt for the upper class types he portrays.
His dialogue is rarely acute, deft and skewering. All his characters tend to speak in the blunt, assertive tones of their author. Almost any other author I can think of is sharper, with the possible exception of Conrad. Instead of using dialogue for precise or witty digs, stabs and insights, Lawrence gives his characters endless arguments, which aren’t funny or particularly informative: take Josephine’s pointless vapourings about revolution, or Lilly and Jim’s squabbling about Christianity, or Lilly and Aaron’s argument about the ‘true’ meaning of the war. Or just works up the dialogue through pointless repetition and has characters laugh at their own non-existent jokes. In part two the dinner party conversation at Lord and Lady Franks feels heavy and contrived and absolutely unfunny.
Snobbishness
Alongside the supposed satire, Lawrence the miner’s son displays a rather shameful wish to be in-the-know with the fancy foreign tags and exaggerated slang of the upper middle classes. Burgess freely accuses him of snobbishness.
Thus Lawrence has not just his characters but the narrator himself drop into French: poupée, pas seul, de haut en bas, merde, amour, a la bonne heure, bonne bouche, coeur à coeur, dégagé, seul, moue, comble, eprise, maquereau, pis-aller, ebloui, littérateur – or, in the Italian half of the book, into Italian: natura morta, bella figura, milordo, signori, a riverderci, salota, niente – with some splashes of German thrown in.
And alongside all this, the jolly slang of the Edwardian posh: good egg, champion idea, I say, rather, and so on, which often sounds ludicrous alongside the primeval, hyperbolic passages.
Class consciousness
Connected with Lawrence’s social climbing impulse is his unremitting sense of class consciousness. With Jim Bricknell and his friends, with Sir William and his guests, with the two young gay artists, Aaron is never for a moment unaware of coming from a different class. It’s vivid the way he is deeply uncomfortable being driven in Sir William’s chauffeur-driven car and what a relief it is to get out into the piazza full of common people. Or entering the train:
Aaron got his seat, and the porter brought on his bags… Aaron gave the tip uneasily. He always hated tipping – it seemed humiliating both ways. (p.236)
The issue is then spelled out:
Aaron had lived long enough to know that as far as manhood and intellect went, nay, even education – he was not the inferior of the two young ‘gentlemen’. He knew quite well that, as far as intrinsic nature went, they did not imagine him an inferior: rather the contrary. They had rather an exaggerated respect for him and his life-power, and even his origin. And yet – they had the inestimable cash advantage – and they were going to keep it. They knew it was nothing more than an artificial cash superiority. But they gripped it all the more intensely. They were the upper middle classes. They were Eton and Oxford. And they were going to hang on to their privileges. In these days, it is a fool who abdicates before he’s forced to… They were being so awfully nice. And inwardly they were not condescending. But socially, they just had to be. The world is made like that. It wasn’t their own private fault. It was no fault at all. It was just the mode in which they were educated, the style of their living. (p.236)
References to the war
The First World War had only just finished and haunts the book which is peppered with references to its aftermath. The opening sentences of the novel are:
There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air.
Aaron feels everything has changed but nothing has changed.
To Aaron Sisson, this was home, this was Christmas: the unspeakably familiar. The war over, nothing was changed.
But the appearance and atmosphere have changed.
He crossed the fields towards the little town, which once more fumed its lights under the night. The country ran away, rising on his right hand. It was no longer a great bank of darkness. Lights twinkled freely here and there, though forlornly, now that the war-time restrictions were removed. It was no glitter of pre-war nights, pit-heads glittering far-off with electricity. Neither was it the black gulf of the war darkness: instead, this forlorn sporadic twinkling.
Here’s the impact on the town’s Christmas market.
The war had killed the little market of the town. As he passed the market place on the brow, Aaron noticed that there were only two miserable stalls. But people crowded just the same. There was a loud sound of voices, men’s voices. Men pressed round the doorways of the public-houses.
In the scene at Jim’s Albany apartments:
All the men, except Aaron, had been through the war in some way or other. But here they were, in the old setting exactly, the old bohemian routine.
Overall, there’s a sense the war has spoiled and degraded things and yet the people carry on in the same old routines, only shabbier. Like Vladimir and Estragon in part two of Waiting for Godot.
And then the character of Herbertson, the bluff, posh Guards officer who has been damaged by the war and has to talk to Lilly, five pages of genuinely harrowing war stories. (Like a lot of the book) this passage feels like it’s been arbitrarily shoe-horned into the narrative, but is harrowing nonetheless.
In Italy, something comparable.
At the little outdoor tables of the cafes a very few drinkers sat before empty coffee-cups. Most of the shops were shut. It was too soon after the war for life to be flowing very fast. The feeling of emptiness, of neglect, of lack of supplies was evident everywhere.
An Italian waiter asks:
‘What would you like to drink? Wine? Chianti? Or white wine? Or beer?’—The old-fashioned ‘Sir’ was dropped. It is too old-fashioned now, since the war. (p.226)
Angus:
‘Have a Grand Marnier,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how bad it is. Everything is bad now. They lay it down to the war as well. It used to be quite a decent drink. What the war had got to do with bad liqueurs, I don’t know.’ (p.230)
Aaron likes Florence because it is half empty:
Altogether Aaron was pleased with himself, for being in Florence. Those were early days after the war, when as yet very few foreigners had returned, and the place had the native sombreness and intensity. So that our friend did not mind being alone. (p.255)
The Marchesa del Torre refuses to sing at Algy’s tea party because the war has ended her ability to sing in a heartfelt carefree way – ‘another disaster added to the war list.’
Summary criticism
The character of Aaron Sisson is never properly developed. Through the first 11 chapters he is a kind of bumbling, well-meaning non-entity. His appeal is his smiling indifference to the people he meets and whatever they say to him, up to and including not caring much when Josephine asks him to kiss her, and not being very upset when Lilly kicks him out after his bout of flu.
In the second half everything changes and he is given pages of deep soul stuff like the male protagonists of the Rainbow and Women in Love but it fails to persuade. The light triviality of the satirical scenes undermines, renders implausible the would-be deep moments.
Beneath all this lurks the fundamental problem: the theme most frequently expressed, and so the ostensible theme of the book, seems to be this thing about men and women, consisting of two parts: 1) that modern women have the whip hand over men, who submit themselves like dogs; and 2) the best philosophy of life is to remain absolutely independent, free of ties, untrammelled – even if you have a sexual affair with a woman not to submit but to keep your essential core intact.
These are potentially interesting, if often garbled and sometimes laughable, themes but the book’s problem is that Aaron Sisson is too flimsy a character to bear them.
In his introduction, Richard Aldington says ‘Aaron’s Rod’ was a hastily written text, similar in this respect to Lawrence’s novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Kangaroo (1923). What these lesser novels demonstrate is the immense rewards achieved by Lawrence in the books he did rewrite, over and again – ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’. In those books there is a great unity of characters and themes and scenes in which the themes are fully and deeply dramatised. By contrast, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ contains characters and scenes and themes which are fairly memorable but fall apart like pick-up sticks; remain fatally unintegrated and fragmentary.
Credit
‘Aaron’s Rod’ by D. H. Lawrence was first published in the UK by William Heinemann in 1922. Page references are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.
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