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Not I, But The Wind… by Frieda Lawrence (1935)

We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp.

I believe the chief tie between Lawrence and me was always the wonder of living . . . every little or big thing that happened carried its glamour with it. (p.60)

D.H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence in the south of France on 2 March 1930. His wife and soul-mate Frieda Lawrence tells us that she initially meant to pay her husband the tribute of complete silence about their 18 turbulent years together. But someone obviously prevailed on her to write a memoir and this book was published in 1935.

I owe it to him and to myself to write the truth as well as I can.

Ceaseless travelling

It’s an odd, uneven, patchwork but compelling work. On the factual front, it is arranged in simple chronological order with a chapter apiece about each of the main eras of their marriage. In particular you learn a lot about the extraordinary number of places they lived in. They were tramps, hobos, perpetual itinerants. At two or three places they seem to have lived for a couple of years, maximum, but some of the chapters describe half a dozen places they moved between, and they are always moving, travelling. After the war to Florence, then Capri, then several different residences in Sicily, before they took up Mabel Luhan’s invitation to join her in Taos, New Mexico, which triggered their round the world journey by ship across the Mediterranean, to Ceylon, to Australia, where they stay at a place on the west coast, before a few days in Sydney, then moving to a cottage 50 k south. Even when they arrived in Toas they moved locations till Mabel kindly gifted them a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. But after a hard winter Lawrence took Frieda south to Mexico where, again, they never settled, staying in Mexico City, then to a place on Lake Chapara, then somewhere in Oaxaca.

Here it gets complicated because Frieda wanted to go back to Europe to see her mother, so they travelled together to New York, where she caught a ship for Europe (after a flaring argument on the quayside). After heading west to Chicago, then back to Taos, we suddenly find that Lawrence has taken ship for England, where he stays a bit in London, before heading south to France to a quiet place on the Italian border named Spotalino. They take a breather here, but only a few pages later are heading for Switzerland, then jaunts back to Germany to see her family.

What I found mind-boggling about all this is that they were poor, really poor, dirt poor, and yet could afford to up sticks and travel round the world and stay at a bewildering number of places, many if not most of which were in lovely settings. The world they moved through seems in this account to have been simpler and much, much, much cheaper than the world I grew up in fifty years later, and vastly more free and easy than the super-expensive Euro world we live in today.

Domesticity

What comes over is how, at every place they settled in, Lawrence and Frieda set about washing and cleaning and scrubbing, throwing out the awful old furniture and buying old native furniture or even making their own, painting the walls and crockery, turning every place they stayed into a home, no matter how transiently. Whether laying the pipes from a spring or carving a rocking chair, or making sure there were vases of flowers everywhere, the book is flavoured with a lovely sense of beautifying domesticity.

Arguments

Not that it was all sweetness and light. For feminist readers, or anyone looking for ammunition to attack Lawrence, Frieda gives plenty of examples of his temper tantrums, his bullying and abuse: he ridiculed her painting, mocked her in letters to her own mother, threw a glass of wine in her face at a dinner with her own family. He could be a very difficult man to live with. It’s not only ridiculous that such a weedy, frail specimen wrote so cockily about the need for men to be men, about the need for male culture and male struggle and so on – at some points it becomes creepy when he demands her submission to him.

Living intensely

But then, there are two things which redeem the situation. For all his demanding nature, Lawrence let Frieda live as no-one before or since had done. So when they kissed and made up, on the sunny days, she experienced a fullness of life, a richness in moment-to-moment living unlike anything else, wonderful incandescent.

Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being. (p.31)

Wherever Lawrence was, the surroundings came alive so intensely. (p.99)

Travelling with him was living new experiences vividly every minute. (p.101)

Living with a genius

The other thing she makes clear is that Lawrence was a genius and genius is difficult.

As for pretending to understand Lawrence or to explain him, I am neither so impertinent nor such a fool. We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp. As Lawrence and I were adventurers by nature, we explored.

I only know that I felt the wonder of him always. Sometimes it overwhelmed me, it knocked out all my consciousness as if a flame had burnt me up. I remained in awe and wonder.

Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather. Here’s a spring day, glorious sunshine, what a joy!…

I learned that a genius contains the whole gamut of human emotions, from highest to lowest. I learned that a man must be himself, bad or good at any price.

Patchwork

I mentioned it being a bit of a patchwork. This is because it contains quite a few of Lawrence’s letters. A standard biography would consist mostly of the author’s text with selected quotations from the subject’s letters to demonstrate a point. But here Frieda gives you 6, 7, 8 pages describing the events of a particular period (their time in Cornwall during the Great War, say, or their stay in Australia) and then a block of 7, 8, 9, 10 letters from Lawrence in their entirety. There are so many letters, quoted in full, that it’s almost like reading two books, Frieda’s version of events, then Lawrence’s dashed-off letters, side by side.

And not just letters but poems, the text includes half a dozen or so poems which she associates with particular places and times. Towards the end she just includes an essay of Lawrence’s about nightingales. So it’s a sort of mosaic. Or maybe a scrapbook of memories.

Mother

If Frieda was by his side most of their lives who were these letters to? Her mother. Lawrence developed a close relationship with Frieda’s mother and wrote her long, considerate, informative and funny letters describing their latest adventures in Australia or New Mexico or Mexico. He regularly addresses her, jocularly, as die Schwiegermutter (German for mother-in-law). But there are also letters to Frieda’s older sister, Else. Most if not all of these he wrote in German and Frieda has translated.

At moments it almost feels like an edition of Lawrence’s letters with a little light commentary from Frieda. For example, the chapter called ‘Going away together’ has just 2 pages of Frieda and 21 pages of Lawrence’s letters and the ‘Back to Europe’ chapter includes an epic 70 pages of letters. But then again, other chapters are entirely Frieda with no letters at all. So it varies.

Lack of specificity about Lawrence’s writings

About Lawrence’s actual writing, Frieda is often quite vague. She mentions particular works which were written at particular places but rarely goes into any detail, about characters, plot or meaning. Here’s a typical example:

We spent some weeks at Zell-am-See with Nusch, her husband and children at her villa. We bathed and boated and Lawrence wrote his ‘Captain’s Doll’ there. (p.84)

Or:

He wrote ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ at Fontana Vecchia, and also ‘The Lost Girl’. ‘Sea and Sardinia’ he wrote straightaway when we came back from Sardinia in about six weeks. And I don’t think he altered a word of it. (p.100)

Anybody looking for insight into particular works will be disappointed. I was particularly disappointed that there was no detail about the three big legal controversies: the banning of ‘Women in Love’, the banning of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, and the shutting down of the exhibition of his paintings in London.

She does the general psychological impact rather than the details. So in several places she comments on Lawrence’s ability to utterly focus.

Then he would sit in a corner, so quietly and absorbedly, to write. The words seemed to pour out of his hand onto the paper, unconsciously, naturally and without effort, as flowers bloom and birds fly past. His was a strange concentration, he seemed transferred into another world, the world of creation. (p.38)

And, later:

Often before he conceived a new idea he was irritable and disagreeable, but when it had come, the new vision, he could go ahead, and was eager and absorbed. (p.173)

Chapters

Foreword
We Meet
Going Away Together
Isartal
Walking to Italy
1913 to 1914
The War
Lawrence and My Mother
After the War
America
Going Back to Europe
Nearing the End
Conclusion

1. Foreword

Frieda establishes the setting where she is writing the book. She is back on the ranch, the Kiowa Ranch, which Mabel Luhan gave to them, and where she, Lawrence and, later, the artist Brett, lived together, in 1924 and 1925. Many of the chapters start with her describing the peaceful rural scenery around her, before she starts describing the events of each chapter.

It was still cold last night, though it is the middle of May.

Here the ranch, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind it to the northeast, slopes to the desert. The big pine trees stand like dark sentinels in the night at the edge of the twenty acre alfalfa field. Beyond them floats the desert. You can see far. A few lights twinkle at Ranches de Taos. A shepherd’s fire glows. All is covered by an enormous sky full of stars, stars that hang in the pine trees, in Lawrence’s big tree with his phœnix on it that the Brett painted, stars that lean on the edge of the mountains, stars twinkling out of the Milky Way. It is so still. Only stars, nothing but stars.

This morning early there was still ice on the edge of the irrigation ditch from the Gallina Canyon. There is such a rush of water. The ice is melting high up in the mountains and the water sings through one’s blood.

But now, about midday, it is warm. The desert below circles in rings of shadow and sunshine. The alfalfa field is green, during these last days of sunshine it has turned green.

I am in the little cabin that Lawrence built with the Indians. I sit in the chair that he made with the ‘petit point’ canvas that we bought in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and that I embroidered. It took me a long time, and when I got bored, he did a bit.

It is a nice chair, although a bit rough, carved as it was with only a penknife.

So here I sit and try to write.

2. We Meet

Three and a half pages. Frieda was 33 and had everything a woman was meant to hope for, a respectable marriage to a man successful in his field (the notable philologist Ernest Weekley), a nice home and three lovely children. But a friend had recently been teaching her the new theories of Sigmund Freud which had begun to make her think about the search for an authentic self. So the door was already ajar when Lawrence came to lunch with her husband. They had some time alone together chatting before the meal and found themselves on the same wavelength. Rather vaguely, Frieda describes three or four further meetings, often with the children. The following appears to be the crunch moment:

One day we met at a station in Derbyshire. My two small girls were with us. We went for a long walk through the early-spring woods and fields. The children were running here and there as young creatures will. We came to a small brook, a little stone bridge crossed it. Lawrence made the children some paper boats and put matches in them and let them float downstream under the bridge. Then he put daisies in the brook, and they floated down with their upturned faces. Crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely. Suddenly I knew I loved him. He had touched a new tenderness in me.

3. Going Away Together

Two pages of Frieda’s narrative, 21 pages of his letters to her. They meet at Charing Cross station, take ship across the Channel, travel to Metz. Lawrence met Frieda’s father just the once, and they sat in glowering silence, the hostile aristocrat facing the miner’s son.

4. Isartal

Isartal is a name given to the valley of the River Isar, near Munich, in Bavaria, south Germany. Here, after delays, they met up and started their life together, living cheaply in a little flat lent them by a friend.

This morning I found the wild red columbines that I had first found with him. There they were at my feet, in the hollow where the workmen have been cutting the logs for the new house. A delicate blaze of startling red and yellow, in front of me, the columbines, like gay small flags. A rabbit stood still behind an oak shrub and watched me. A humming-bird hummed at me in consternation, as startled at me as I was at him. These things are Lawrence to me…

When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness, its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being.

Lawrence talked about his embattled boyhood, whereas Frieda had a lovely childhood in the garrison town of Metz.

Lawrence’s thriftiness

One day I bathed in the Isar and a heel came off one of my shoes on the rough shore; so I took both shoes off and threw them into the Isar. Lawrence looked at me in amazement. ‘He’s shocked, as I must walk home barefoot, but it’s a lonely road, it doesn’t matter,’ I thought. But it wasn’t that; he was shocked at my wastefulness. He lectured me: ‘A pair of shoes takes a long time to make and you should respect the labour somebody’s put into those shoes.’ To which I answered: ‘Things are there for me and not I for them, so when they are a nuisance I throw them away.’

Frieda’s children

She is mortally wounded about having to abandon her children. Her husband vowed she’d never see them again. Her mourning irritated Lawrence. Selfishly, he wanted her to devote herself to him alone, and have no rivals for her love.

Lawrence’s changeableness

He’d have quick changes of mood and thought. This puzzled me. ‘But Lawrence, last week you said exactly the opposite of what you are saying now.’ ‘And why shouldn’t I? Last week I felt like that, now like this. Why shouldn’t I?’

5. Walking to Italy

In August 1913 they set off to walk from south Germany across the Alps into Italy. It was Lawrence’s birthday en route. It took about 6 weeks. Sometimes they slept in haylofts. They were tramps.

I remember Lawrence saying to me: ‘You always identify yourself with life, why do you?’ I answered: ‘Because I feel like it.’

They danced and sang with the peasants they met en route.

6. 1913 to 1914

Back in London their best friends are John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, a perfect friend. When they finally got married at a registry office, JMM and KM were the witnesses. Lawrence quickly bought a new wedding ring and Frieda gave her old one to Katherine, and it was buried with her when she died (wretchedly young, in 1923) (p.66). Cynthia and Herbert Asquith became friends and Cynthia stuck with them during the bad times of the war and legal prosecution.

They went back to Italy and found a cottage at Lerici and got to know the housekeeper and her family. Here he wrote The Rainbow, originally titled ‘The Sisters’. He was upset when his literary mentor, novelist, literary critic, editor and reviewer of the day, David Garnett, didn’t like it (p.61).

Rejection

When I think that nobody wanted Lawrence’s amazing genius, how he was jeered at, suppressed, turned into nothing, patronized at best, the stupidity of our civilization comes home to me. How necessary he was! How badly needed! Now that he is dead and his great love for his fellowmen is no longer there in the flesh, people sentimentalize over him. (p.63)

Frieda’s lack of social stuffiness

With the dangerous quality of his work he accepted his more than doubtful financial position and I think one of my merits in his eyes was my never being eager to be rich or to play a role in the social world. It was hardly merit on my part, I enjoyed being poor and I didn’t want to play a role in the world.

7. The War

War breaks out. They are in London. They meet Eddie Marsh and Rupert Brooke who already looks doomed. One night they see a zeppelin over Hampstead Heath. They take a cottage in Berkshire. They have a Christmas 1914 meal with guests Gordon Campbell, Koteliansky, the Murrys, the artist Mark Gertler and Gilbert and Mary Cannan.

He goes to meet Bertrand Russell and is introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell and her clique at Garsington Manor. The Rainbow is published then prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result 1,011 copies were seized and burnt. After this ban, it became unavailable in Britain for 11 years. Lawrence was very bitter indeed and took it out on Frieda and vowed not to write another book.

‘The Rainbow’ appeared and was suppressed. When it happened I felt as though a murder had been done, murder of a new, free utterance on the face of the earth. I thought the book would be hailed as a joyous relief from the ordinary dull stuff, as a way out into new and unknown regions. With his whole struggling soul Lawrence had written it. Then to have it condemned, nobody standing for it—the bitterness of it! He was sex-mad, they said. Little even now do people realize what men like Lawrence do for the body of life, what he did to rescue the fallen angel of sex. Sex had fallen in the gutter, it had to be pulled out. What agony it was to know the flame in him and see it quenched by his fellowmen! ‘I’ll never write another word I mean,’ he said in his bitterness; ‘they aren’t fit for it,’ and for a time the flame in him was quenched. (p.71)

They move to a cottage in Cornwall, along with the Murrys who come to live nearby. Charming details of domestic life. They plan a commune of like-minded artists. But they are spied on and suspected. Their house is repeatedly searched. These sorry events are chronicled in great detail in the famous Nightmare chapter of ‘Kangaroo’. Eventually the authorities gave them three days to pack their bags, and expelled them from Cornwall.

When we were turned out of Cornwall something changed in Lawrence for ever. (p.78)

They go to London to stay with the poet H.D. and Richard Aldington, who would edit so many of Lawrence’s writings and provide introductions to the Penguin editions of his works. Then they go to stay at a cottage in Berkshire which partly heals Lawrence, but even here they are surveilled and followed. Then the Armistice (11 November 1918).

8. Lawrence and My Mother

A short chapter detailing the close relationship between Lawrence and Frieda’s mother who was the much-loved matriarch of the Richthofen household, wonderful mother to her and her two sisters. How much Lawrence enjoyed the company of the three women.

9. After the War

Lawrence doesn’t want to visit Germany immediately after the war so he goes direct to Florence. Frieda meets him there. She arrives at 4am and he insists on taking her on a carriage ride tour of the city in the mist: ‘and ever since Florence is the most beautiful town to me, the lilytown, delicate and flowery’.

Frieda makes passing reference to what I think she implies is the community of gay Brits in Florence but Frieda wasn’t impressed by their ‘wickedness’.

The wickedness there seemed like old maids’ secret rejoicing in wickedness. Corruption is not interesting to me, nor does it frighten me: I find it dull.

They move on to Capri but Frieda didn’t like it.

From Florence we went to Capri. I didn’t like Capri; it was so small an island, it seemed hardly capable to contain all the gossip that flourished there. So Lawrence went to Sicily and took Fontana Vecchia for us, outside Taormina. Living in Sicily after the war years was like coming to life again.

Frieda gives half a dozen letters Lawrence wrote to her mother. One of them is interesting from a literary point of view:

I am not working at the present time. I wrote three long stories since we are here—that will make quite a nice book. I also collected my short stories ready for a book. So, for the moment I am free, I don’t want to begin anything else…

This is interesting because it confirms the sense you have, reading his works chronologically, that after ‘Women in Love’ was published, and the three novellas and the short stories arranged – there was a hiatus. There is a distinct pause and change of pace in Lawrence’s output. And when he resume writing novels they feel considerably different from the pre-war ones, with all three of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’ feeling below par, what Richard Aldington called improvisations.

Frieda briefly describes their travels and experiences in Sicily. She doesn’t explain any of the reasoning for why they decided to take up Mabel Luhan’s invitation to go and stay in her artists’ colony in Toas, New Mexico, and why Lawrence decided to travel there Eastwards, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, onto Ceylon and then stopping at Australia. Frieda gives us five of Lawrence’s letters to her mother and daughter, in which he gives wonderfully spooky descriptions of Australia’s uncanniness which haunt his novel ‘Kangaroo’.

Australia is a weird, big country. It feels so empty and untrodden. The minute the night begins to go down, even the towns, even Sydney, which is huge, begins to feel unreal, as if it were only a daytime imagination, and in the night it did not exist. That is a queer sensation: as if life here really had never entered in: as if it were just sprinkled over, and the land lay untouched. (p.115)

10. America

16 pages of text, 22 of letters.

A brisk account of settling at Taos and some of the friends they made. The chief point is the battle with Mabel Dodge for Lawrence’s soul. After just a few pages she’s whisked us off to Mexico.

Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There Lawrence began to write his ‘Plumed Serpent’. He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. (p.122)

After six months or so in Mexico, they went back to the States, going to New York where she caught a ship back to Europe, while Lawrence headed west then south, back to Taos. Then he was persuaded to go back to England. As so often, it descends into a bewildering list of destinations: London, then to Paris, to Strassburg and Baden-Baden, back by ship to America, New York then back to Taos.

Here they had an idyllic summer. Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield came to stay nearby. They laid pipes from the freshwater spring. they had a cow and chickens. In the autumn they went back to Mexico City. Brief anecdote about a lunch with Somerset Maugham who Frieda thought was an acid, unhappy man. Then they rented a house in Oaxaca where Lawrence quickly write ‘Mornings in Mexico’ and revised ‘The Plumed Serpent’. Interestingly, Lawrence later told Frieda he wished he’d ended the novel differently. Anthony Burgess doesn’t like its hanging, indeterminate ending, either. But I think it’s entirely appropriate to Lawrence characters’ endless vacillations.

Here he becomes ill and they go back to Mexico City where a specialist tells them Lawrence has tuberculosis and only a few years to live (p.133).

They had returned to New Mexico with Brett, the artist, and Frieda devotes a couple of pages to describing how unhappy she was at Brett’s slavish devotion to Lawrence so that it turned into a competition for his approval. Throw in Mabel Luhan, the American patron, and you had three women vying for Lawrence’s affections.

11. Going Back to Europe

Leaping over times and details, Frieda says Lawrence wanted to return to Europe and lo and behold they take a house in Spotorno which had been recommended to them by the published Martin Secker. Her grown-up daughter Barbara comes to stay and there is an almighty argument between the three of them with Lawrence throwing a glass of wine in Frieda’s face and Barbara telling Lawrence he doesn’t deserve Frieda. Compounded when Lawrence’s sister, Ada, turns up, and forms an anti-German alliance with her so that Lawrence for a while locks his bedroom door to Frieda.

That spring, they move again, this time to a villa outside Florence – the Villa Mirenda – and, for the first time, she thinks she gets the Italian feel for life. It’s here that he starts writing ‘Lady Chatterley’. This is everything she has to say about it.

Then he wrote ‘Lady Chatterley’. After breakfast – we had it at seven or so – he would take his book and pen and a cushion, followed by John the dog, and go into the woods behind the Mirenda and come back to lunch with what he had written. I read it day by day and wondered how his chapters were built up and how it all came to him. I wondered at his courage and daring to face and write these hidden things that people dare not write or say.

For two years ‘Lady Chatterley’ lay in an old chest that Lawrence had painted a greeny yellow with roses on it, and often when I passed that chest, I thought: ‘Will that book ever come out of there?’

Lawrence asked me: ‘Shall I publish it, or will it only bring me abuse and hatred again?’ I said: ‘You have written it, you believe in it, all right, then publish it.’ So one day we talked it all over with Orioli; we went to a little old-fashioned printer, with a little old printing shop where they had only enough type to do half the book — and ‘Lady Chatterley’ was printed. When it was done, stacks and stacks of ‘Lady C …’, or Our Lady, as we called it — were sitting on the floor of Orioli’s shop. There seemed such a terrific lot of them that I said in terror: ‘We shall never sell all these’. A great many were sold before there was a row; first some did not arrive at their destination in America, then there came abuse from England… but it was done… his last great effort.

He had done it… and future generations will benefit, his own race that he loved and his own class, that is less inhibited, for he spoke out of them and for them, there in Tuscany, where the different culture of another race gave the impetus to his work. (p.172)

Lawrence takes up painting, with absolutely no training. In one of the letters he says:

I seem to be losing my will-to-write altogether: in spite of the fact that I am working at an English novel – but so differently from the way I have written before! I spend much more time painting – have already done three, nearly four, fairly large pictures. I wonder what you’ll say to them when you’ll see them. Painting is more fun than writing, much more of a game, and costs the soul far, far less. (p.196)

Aldous and Maria Huxley come to stay nearby and become good friends. Huxley tried to teach Frieda how to ski but her legs got tangled up and she was always falling over.

But Lawrence gets tired of the country and wants the sea so he goes and finds a place to stay at Port Cros, an island off the south of France. He’s become friendly with Richard Aldington and Frieda tells us it was here that Aldington began his classic novel ‘Death of a Hero’. Then they move to Toulon and spend the winter in the Beau Rivage hotel. Here Lawrence wrote his series of poems titled ‘Pansies’ (p.175).

In the spring they went to Spain, to Barcelona then to Mallorca. See what I mean by their restless, endless travelling? She barely mentions the publication and legal proceedings against Lady Chatterley (‘…what with the abuse of Lady Chatterley and the disapproval of the paintings…’ is as much detail as we get). They both travel to London to see the exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery. It’s not clear from her account whether they’re still there when the paintings were confiscated by the police.

Suddenly Lawrence is in Florence and falls ill again. So Frieda takes him north, to Germany, to the Tegernsee, where they stay in a rough peasant house. From now on it was all about tending to his ill health.

It’s here that Frieda inserts a seven-page essay about the nightingale, which is a sort of commentary on John Keats’s famous poem on the same subject, followed by a huge section of letters, 70 pages, 46 letters, in total! They contain lots and lots about travel arrangements, and all kinds of boring details about publishers and translations and fees and contracts. One of the most striking passages is in a letter to Else where Lawrence gives his response to prosecution brought against his paintings in London.

You hear the pictures are to be returned to me on condition that they are never shown again in England, but sent away to me on the Continent, that they may never pollute that island of lily-livered angels again. What hypocrisy and poltroonery, and how I detest and despise my England. I had rather be a German or anything than belong to such a nation of craven, cowardly hypocrites. My curse on them! They will burn my four picture books, will they? So it is decreed. But they shall burn through the thread of their own existence as a nation, at the same time. Delenda est Cartago – but she will destroy herself, amply. Che nuoia! (p.248)

12. Nearing the End

Moving and upsetting description of Lawrence’s steady decline in the villa Beau Soleil at Bandol, her pity for his painful coughing, the wearisome drawing of breath as his TB progressed, and their mutual forgiveness.

I can only think with awe of those last days of his, as of the rays of the setting sun . . . and the setting sun obliterates all the sordid details of a landscape. So the dreary passages in our lives were wiped out and he said to me: ‘Why, oh why did we quarrel so much?’ and I could see how it grieved him… our terrible quarrels… but I answered: ‘Such as we were, violent creatures, how could we help it?’

It was here, on his deathbed, that he wrote his final work, ‘Apocalypse’. A doctor sent by their friend Mark Gertler, advises he move to a higher altitude, and so he took the exhausting train journey from Toulon to Antibes and then by car up to Vence, to a sanatorium named ‘Ad Astra’ (Latin for ‘To the stars).

There’s no indication how long this all took, though time for lots of visitors, close friends bringing varieties of food to find something he could keep down. I was intrigued to learn he was visited by H.G. Wells. Sometimes he was cruel to her.

One day he said to my daughter: ‘Your mother does not care for me any more, the death in me is repellent to her.’ (p.262)

The fact that she sets this down suggests how much it hurt her. They took him out of the sanatorium to a villa, putting him to bed. Right at the end he was in such pain he cried out for morphine. Fascinating that Aldous and Maria Huxley were there in these last days and it was Aldous who went off to find a doctor to get the drug. He returns with a doctor who injected morphine, he grew calmer, his breathing slowed, became interrupted, then stopped. He was dead. Frieda’s account of her loss, the completeness of her loss, the extinction of someone so full of life, made me cry.

13. Conclusion

In its entirety, this last section consists of a disclaimer:

Now that I have told my story in such a condensed way, letting blow through my mind anything that wanted to blow, I know how little I have said – how much I could say that perhaps would be more interesting. But I wrote what rose up, and here it is.

So there you go.

Thoughts

As I’ve said, there are fascinating biographical titbits scattered throughout, such as Frieda freely admitting she was useless at housework and Lawrence did it all, the strong implication that he was really unpleasant to her during the war years, some upsetting accounts of his nastiness to her – then again, loads of descriptions of bucolic happiness at Taos or their various villas.

But what stands out head and shoulders above all that is their extraordinary freedom to travel. All the world seems to be their oyster. There are hundreds of descriptions of wonderful places that turn the reader quite green with envy.

We are on the top of the island, and look down on green pine-tops, down to the blue sea, and the other islands and the mainland. Since I came I have not been down to the sea again – and Frieda has bathed only once. But it is very pretty. And at night the lights flash at Toulon and Hyères and Lavandou.

Or:

I think of Bandol and our little villa ‘Beau Soleil’ on the sea, the big balcony windows looking toward the sea, another window at the side overlooking a field of yellow narcissus called ‘soleil’ and pine trees beyond and again the sea. I remember sunny days when the waves came flying along with white manes, they looked as if they might come flying right up the terrace into his room.

I wish I’d had even one holiday as fresh and scenic and lovely as Lawrence and Frieda seemed to enjoy on almost every day of their blessed existence.

Credit

‘Not I, But The Wind… by Frieda Lawrence was published in 1935 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1983 Granada paperback edition.

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by Simon on March 17, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Biography, English literature, Great War

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Posted by Simon on March 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/17/not-i-but-the-wind-frieda-lawrence/

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence (1920)

‘I do think,’ he said, ‘that the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people — a bond. And the immediate bond is between man and woman.’
(Rupert Birkin, sounding like his creator, Women in Love, page 169)

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’
(More Birkin wisdom)

‘One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free.’
(Gudrun, voicing Lawrence’s fundamental position)

‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ are not so much novels as overwhelming, mind-blowing experiences.

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which would have been as long as War and Peace. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works of 500 or so pages each. In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the official banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel, in fact Lawrence had trouble placing it until the American publisher Martin Secker brought it out, in a privately subscribed edition, in 1920.

‘The Rainbow’ is a masterpiece at least in part because the first half describes the lives of farmers in their part of the West Midlands in a kind of timeless, elemental style, making the figures almost like mythical figures who live close to the land, and this legendary power is carried over into the more modern, mundane life of the final figure in the novel, Ursula Brangwen, who carries echoes and shades of the murky ancestors with her.

‘Women in Love’, by contrast, starts in the recognisable modern world of cars and collieries, trains and trams and work, making its lead figures, the two oldest Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, thoroughly modern women, at home in the world of universities, art school, managers, cities, trains, London and Paris. So it lacks the mythical depth and resonance of the first novel.

It starts some years after ‘The Rainbow’ ends because Ursula has been teaching at Willey Green grammar school ‘for some years’ (p.9), whereas she hadn’t started that job at the end of ‘The Rainbow’, and Gudrun is back from three years art school in London, whereas she hadn’t left in ‘The Rainbow’.

Ursula is 26, Gudrun is 25. They are wondering what to do with their lives and the novel opens with them having a half-hearted conversation about marriage.

They decide to visit a wedding they know is taking place that morning. The walk to the church through the ugly industrial town places them class-wise, because they have to walk through working class miners’ areas where the miners’ wives stare at the pair in their bright fashionable clothes, and children shout abuse. They are both a class above their setting.

The wedding introduces us to three more key characters: firstly to the two young men the sisters fancy, being:

Gerald Crich who Gudrun passionately fancies. He is heir to the local mining business, a commanding man and presence – ‘fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost happy appearance’.

Rupert Birkin who Ursula fancies:

She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole… If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven.

Rupert is one of the school-inspectors of the county.

What’s a little surprising about both these men is we aren’t shown the girls first meeting them, bumping into them again, getting to know them and so on. The novel opens with both girls fully committed to their crushes on both men.

The third character is the dashing, fashionable, tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face, named Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches.

She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

And:

a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to her eyes.

The plot revolves around an apparently endless number of meetings, conversations and debates between these five central characters.

Lawrence’s hyperbole

A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness.

As with ‘The Rainbow’, the characters’ feelings are portrayed as evanescent, ever-changing and, crucially, extreme. They flash from one extreme to another even as we watch:

Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.

Or cohabit in extremes of contradiction.

A wonderful tenderness burned in him, at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time he was full of rage and callousness. (p.346)

She could not believe—she did not believe. Yet she believed, triumphantly (p.372)

Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! (p.493)

The simplest argument can lead to characters hating each other.

He could feel violent waves of hatred and loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. (p.116)

Some event or conversation leaves a character so tortured she wants to die. Hermione listens to Birkin explaining why he’s copying the design of a Chinese vase and her reaction is way over the top:

She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse… (p.99)

Ursula bursts into tears and doesn’t know whether from joy or misery. Rupert and Gerald sometimes love, sometimes hate, sometimes admire and sometimes despise each other, neither of them, nor the reader, can predict their ever-changing moods.

‘Gerald,’ Birkin said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald.

Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it. (p.231)

Hermione loves Birkin but at the same time:

She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul.

In fact the Italian Contessa staying with Hermione, explicitly points this out after dinner:

‘Look,’ said the Contessa, in Italian. ‘He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.’ (p.103)

Nobody has any control over their feelings. Nobody has the smooth detachment, the stiff upper lip, the gift for under-statement which was supposed to characterise the English. Lawrence’s metier is over-statement. I noticed early on that the most recurring emotion is fear.

If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving.

This kind of hyperbole occurs on every page.

Suddenly [Ursula] started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.

Sometimes she [Ursula] had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

Hermione and Ursula look at some luxury shirts but when Hermione comes near her, Ursula panics:

Hermione came near, and her bosom writhed, and Ursula was for a moment blank with panic. And for a moment Hermione’s haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other… overcome with dread… (p.104)

Why? Because this is how all Lawrence’s characters feel, constantly overwhelmed, falling into panics or despairs, tortured by the never-ending intensity of their feelings.

There are other feelings, lots of them, I just noticed how often fear dominated. One of the few criticisms I’d make of Lawrence is I dislike it when this hyperbole makes him use the word ‘insane’. He does mean feeling something to an extent which is almost deranged but use of the word makes me draw up short, and realise how preposterous he’s being.

The result was a nasty and insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening.

Why not just say ‘The result was a nasty scene with Halliday on the fourth evening’? Most of Lawrence’s hyperbole I can take, but his references to insanity and madness grated.

The book’s worldview

By chapter 4 I began to realise that every chapter (more or less) contains at its core an argument, two or more characters getting into a debate about something or other. Characters in other novels have conversations which move the plot along, but in Lawrence – certainly in this book – very often they start talking purely in order to have a 6th form debate about a Big Issue. The five central characters are all very opinionated and at the drop of a hat start arguing.

The fundamental premise of Lawrence’s worldview seems to be that God is dead and so people have to make their own values, figure out how to live their own lives. The God is dead premise is obviously key but only made explicit once, by Birkin, the Lawrence avatar.

‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (p.64)

Part of the statement’s impact is its throwaway nature. In the later nineteenth century hundreds of novels and autobiographies featured Great Debates about the existence of God or the devil, the protagonists’ agonising about their Loss of Faith etc. But here, around 1915, is Lawrence simply dismissing all of that. It’s a non-subject. Junk. Thus freed, we have to get on with living our best lives.

Mind you, Birkin goes quite a long way beyond a sensible atheist humanism. Lawrence gives him extreme views, regularly positing the end of humanity. With characteristically Lawrentian contempt, he wonders if humanity’s time has come? It would be a good thing.

Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away — time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.’

An opinion which is repeated right at the end of the novel. But this is just one character’s opinion, Birkin, the most negative of the quartet: ‘His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.’ (p.66)

Gerald’s worldview is less vivid and memorable because he lives it; he is the embodiment of masculinity, virile and in control, a manifesto in action. It’s easy to quote Birkin as if he represents Lawrence’s view, but really the book’s worldview is generated by the dialectic between Birkin the gloomy theoriser and Gerald the confident man of action; and that’s before you bring in Ursula, Gudrun and Hermione, who all contribute to its complex weft of opinions. The difference between a lecture or manifesto, and a work of art, is complexity and ambiguity.

Chapter 1. Sisters

Introducing Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, sitting chatting about whether they’ll ever get married before they set off walking through their ugly industrial town to see an actual wedding. This features the two men they fancy, coalmine owner Gerald Crich and county school inspector Rupert Birkin. The groom is late and there’s an odd moment when he arrives, sees, his bride on the path to the church, and then makes a mad dash to try and beat her to the door.

Chapter 2. Shortlands

The wedding reception is held at the Criches’ family home, Shortlands, where we see Gerald confidently hosting the party (his father retires ill) and see him and Birkin interacting with guests, notably the breezily confident Hermione Roddice. Gerald, Rupert and Hermione have a three-way argument about race and nationality:

‘Do you think race corresponds with nationality?’ she asked musingly…

Chapter 3. Class-room

Ursula at work teaching children about the structure of catkins. She is startled by the arrival of Birkin and then, unexpectedly, Hermione. Hermione and Birkin have an argument, she saying education makes children too conscious and stops them behaving spontaneously.

‘Isn’t the mind—’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’
‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.
‘Are you sure?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.’
‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he cried.

So far, every chapter has featured a kind of central debate or argument. I wonder if this is the pattern for the book.

Chapter 4. Diver

Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the local lake, Willey Water, come to a lake and see a naked man run off a jetty and dive in. It is confident Gerald. They’re both jealous of men’s freedom.

‘God, what it is to be a man!’ [Gudrun] cried.
‘What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.
‘The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’

Ursula tells Gudrun the terrible story of Gerald accidentally shooting his brother dead with a rusty old gun when they were boys. Then they comes across Hermione out for a walk with Laura. After Hermione greets, converses a bit then wanders off, Gudrun says how much she admires her, but Ursula is dead set against her.

The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other. (p.56)

The sisters jokily tell each other that they are a thousand times more intelligent and beautiful than Hermione, let alone the masses in the street.

‘Strut,’ said Ursula. ‘One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.’
‘Exactly,’ cried Gudrun, ‘a swan among geese.’

Chapter 5. In the Train

Birkin has to go to London by train. On the platform he bumps into Crich and they’re more or less obliged to travel together. As in every preceding chapter there is a debate. Gerald has been reading a newspaper leader which argues that ‘there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin’. This triggers Birkin to say all such announcing of plans is just playing; what we need to do is tear up society, starting by tearing up ourselves. Lawrence’s characters’ opinions are always vehement but often don’t really make sense:

‘We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers.’ (p.60)

Disappointingly this morphs into Birkin asserting that the meaning of life is love, that he wants the finality of a definitive love.

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’

It’s on this journey that Birkin expresses his dislike of people and his contentment if all of humanity were wiped out, quoted above.

He tells Gerald he stays with a man in Soho, Halliday, and mixes with a Bohemian crowd. Interesting to read how little the profile of this type has changed in the last hundred years:

‘Painters, musicians, writers – hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.’

The most significant changes would be that nowadays such a crowd would be 1) diverse and multicultural and 2) LGBTQ+ and gender fluid.

Chapter 6. Crème de Menthe

Later the same day Gerald meets Rupert in a Bohemian cafe. The latter is chatting to Minette (Minny) Darrington, small, bobbed hair, with a lisp, nicknamed ‘the Pussum’.

Her ex-boyfriend, Halliday, an old Etonian, turns up. He chucked her and told her to go to the countryside when he learned that she’s pregnant but she refuses. Others join the table, Maxim Libidnikov and Julius who Lawrence has Minette rather unnecessarily tell us is a Jew.

Gerald is more and more attracted to her wanton behaviour and sits pressed up against her in the taxi they get to Halliday’s house (the flat where Birkin bunks down when in London) where they are surprised by the illiterate Arab servant he’s taken in off the streets. Bohemia, darling.

Chapter 7. Totem

Next morning in the same apartment, Gerald wakes up. Going into the main room he is surprised to find Halliday and Maxim naked in front of the fire. Bohemia. Rubert has his bath and, after he’s followed, Gerald adopts the manners of the house and comes out naked. He goes into the bedroom where he obviously slept with Minette. Her eyes are chaotic. She is like ‘a violated slave’ which arouses Gerald all over again but he realises he has to separate himself from her.

They go about their business for the day, and all reassemble to go to a music hall that evening, then back to Halliday’s flat. Gerald hangs on for two more days but the group become more fractious until Halliday provokes Gerald one evening and Gerald is on the verge of punching his face in before he turns and leaves.

Thus Minette achieves her aim, which was to make Halliday jealous and make him love her again and, hopefully, get him to marry her. This she has achieved by the time Gerald leaves.

Chapter 8. Breadalby

Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. It is Hermione Roddice’s family home, set in landscaped ground. She invites Ursula and Gudrun to stay. Also staying are Birkin, a young Italian Contessa, young athletic-looking Miss Bradley, Sir Joshua, a dry Baronet of fifty, and a woman secretary, a Fräulein März, young and slim and pretty. Later arrive Hermione’s brother, tall debonaire Alexander Roddice, a Liberal MP, who arrives along with Gerald Crich.

Edwardian lunch presented by servants under the lovely old elm tree in the garden while the characters witter about education. Tea and a walk round the grounds. Hermione loves Birkin but realises that he’s come to hate her and a break is coming.

Gorgeous dinner with all the ladies wearing fashionable dress. Followed the staging of an impromptu ballet in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky, the servants bringing down Hermione’s gorgeous Oriental costumes, Alexander playing the piano.

Next morning they go skinny dipping in the ponds in the grounds, except Ursula and Gudrun and Birkin. Gerald gets his kit off at the drop of a hat. He knows how handsome and male he looks. After lunch a discussion about whether the old social values have collapsed in which case, what news ones are emerging? Gerald thinks people should and will be defined by the role in society, their job. Their private lives will remain private. Birkin objects that there is no social equality. Birkin feels people are as different and self sufficient as stars.

Later, he goes to Hermione’s boudoir, feeling he had been rude. He sits quietly and reads while she writes letters but in fact she is flooded by a vast wave of hatred, suddenly she realises Birkin is standing in her way and only eliminating him can she be free. So she takes a lapis lazuli paperweight and cracks it down on his skull with all her might. Fortunately her fingers get in the way masking a lot of the blow. She raises it again but Birkin ducks under his book and crabs out of the room.

Instead of going looking for medical help he walks out of the house across the grounds and into a wood where he strips naked and rolls in the grass and flowers then walks through a young pine wood deliberately letting the needles sting him, experiencing an epiphany of the post-human world. Is he mad? Who cares.

He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

Eventually, dressed again, he staggers to the railway station and catches a train home where he is laid up in bed with concussion.

Chapter 9. Coal-dust

Two scenes. In the first Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk to the coalminers’ town, are delayed at a closed level crossing while a long train shunts by and up rides Gerald Crich on a horse, a beautiful mare, which panics at the very loud noise of the clanging carts and rears and bucks and terrifies the sisters while Gerald enjoys mastering the poor terrified beast.

The second half describes Gudrun’s addiction to walking the working class colliers quarters, especially in Friday night when they get paid and get pissed in the pubs. She pairs off with an electrician named Palmer, a fairly educated man, they promenade, go to the movies, but are never really an item.

Chapter 10. Sketch-book

The sisters go to a remote part of Willey Water to sketch. Who should appear but a rowing boat rowed by Gerald containing Hermione. Domineering Hermione asks to have a look at Gudrun’s sketchbook but bickers with Gerald and the book falls into the lake, Gerald reaching out and into the water to retrieve it. Hermione makes a dramatic show of being sorry, while Gudrun wants the book back, and Gerald a) despises Hermione b) is taken with Gudrun’s pride. And this incident establishes a link between them. it establishes Gudrun’s ascendancy over Gerald.

Chapter 11. An Island

Meanwhile Ursula has wandered along a stream which feeds the lake up to a big mill pond where she finds Birkin trying to fix a punt. Only leaking a little the punt bears him and Ursula out to a muddy little island. Here Birkin lets rip with his nihilistic misanthropy.

‘I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of mortal lies.’
‘So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said Ursula.
‘I should indeed.’
‘And the world empty of people?’
‘Yes truly.’

Ursula stands up for the importance of love (alas) while Birkin rudely dismisses it as just another human emotion, appropriate in some situations not in others. She starts to dislike and even to hate him, ‘priggish and detestable’.

Birkin says he’s renting rooms at the mill which is empty. If he could he’d chuck in his job (school inspector) and live there by himself like a hermit, away from the mankind he loathes so much. Hermione’s threatened to furnish the rooms for him. He tells Ursula it’s over between him and Hermione, not that there was anything anyway. Ursula tells him she hates Hermione anyway.

Chapter 12. Carpeting

Still at the mill they find Gerald and Hermione in the building itself. Hermione offers to help Birkin measure the rooms and then offers him a valuable carpet which he tries to reject. He hates being dominated and owned by her. Neither of them mention her attacking him with the paperweight.

The landlady of the mill, Mrs Salmon, makes tea for them all. Over tea Ursula brings up Gerald’s beastly behaviour to the mare at the level crossing which triggers a debate about whether animals have lives of their own or exist solely to serve human purposes.

Birkin comes in with the idea that horses have two wills, one which wants to submit utterly to man, another which rebels and wants to be completely free. Not uncontroversially, he goes on to say the same about women.

Hermione and Ursula wander of while the men bicker about horses, and agree that they both dislike Birkin’s anatomising and botanising, he’s always opening and dissecting rather than leave life be.

Chapter 13. Mino

The Mino is Birkin’s cat. Following their ‘clicking’ at the watermill, Ursula goes to visit Birkin at his flat. They almost immediately start arguing. Birkin insists he doesn’t believe in love but in something much deeper, in penetrating to your essential self and making a primeval bond with another essential self.

The argument is interrupted when Birkin’s tom cat goes through the French windows into the garden to confront a wild she-cat and cuffs her. Ursula yells at it to stop being a bully but Birkin sympathises with his cat’s wish to create a stability.

‘It is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding rapport with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos.’

Back in their flat, they carry on their argument, Birkin demanding something far beyond love, Ursula unable to see it and saying he’s being obstinate and obtuse. Eventually she wins, beating him down and getting him to say ‘I love you’ in the classic style, embracing and kissing her.

Chapter 14. Water-party

The Criches hold a big midsummer party on the lake, with a motor launch and some rowing boats, all sporting lights and lanterns, the launch letting off fireworks, people laughing aboard the boats or strolling through the grounds or sitting in groups. The water side of things is being hosted by manly Gerald.

Ursula and Gudrun attend, walking there with their mother and father (Will and Anna from The Rainbow). They are intimidated by all these strangers and ask Gerald for a hamper and a canoe and paddle far away from the crowds. They beach it in a hidden spot, strip off and skinny dip, finally emerging, drying themselves. Then Ursula sings while Gudrun performs a eurhythmic dance.

Ursula interrupts this by pointing out some cattle have approached but undaunted Gudrun confronts them, dancing, outfaces them and makes them run off. At this point Gerald and Rupert appear, having tracked them down. Gerald and Gudrun go up the hillside in pursuit of the cattle leaving Ursula and Rupert to fall deeper in love.

Up the hill Gerald tells Gudrun that it’s dangerous to drive the Highland bullocks, she says ‘I suppose you think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t you?’, Gerald asks her ‘why’ and, for answer, she hit him round the face. These passionate Bohemians.

Back at the lakeside the quartet clamber into two dinghies to head back and are laughing and joking when they hear shouts across the water. It’s quite dark now and someone has fallen overboard the launch. Gerald makes Gudrun row fast to the place, the skipper of the launch tells him about where the girl went overboard. She was followed by her young doctor boyfriend who jumped in to save her. Gerald strips down and jumps into the freezing water.

In brief, he dives again and again till he’s exhausted but can’t find them. Birkin pulls him out and rows him to the jetty, where he can barely stand. Gerald apologises to his father who’s appeared, and orders Birkin to drain the lake. So Rupert sets off with Ursula to the lock-keeper’s cottage where he gets the key to the sluices and laboriously opens them, releasing the lakes water into overflow channels. Slowly the levels sink.

Walking back, Birkin explains to Ursula his odd ideas about death, about needing to escape this life, slough it off like an old shell etc.

Unexpectedly in the middle of the road he stops and gives her exquisitely gentle and sensitive bunny kisses. A bit further down the road, not to be outdone, she pulls him towards her and gives him more traditional passionate kisses. They both experience an efflorescence of lust.

Then she goes home and Birkin goes back to the lake to find Gerald still supervising the search and the scouring of the water. He says he can’t sleep till they find the bodies which they eventually do. The young woman, Diana Crich, had panicked and thrown her arms round the boy’s neck so tight it choked him, and so they both drowned.

A page describes how, on that Sunday morning, word spreads throughout the colliery community and all the working class men, women and children are abuzz with the tragedy, imagining the feelings of the people at Shortlands, ‘the high home of the district.’

Chapter 15. Sunday Evening

All that day and into the evening Ursula waits for Birkin to come. She is now fully in love with him. But he doesn’t and as dusk comes she sinks into a deep depression, really deep, page after page thinking about dying and death and what comes after death, thus:

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death.

Eventually, at the children’s bedtime, he arrives, coming in out of the rain. He helps Ursula get a few of the younger children ready for bed. Then her mum and dad return from church. She is furious with him and gets into an argument about him neglecting his body, making it poorly (i.e. neglecting the battery by Hermione). When he finally leaves she is overcome by hatred of him. See what I mean by Lawrence characters veering from burning love to virulent hatred, from snogging Birkin on Sunday morning to hating his guts by Sunday night.

When he was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.

Chapter 16. Man to Man

Birkin has a recurrence of illness. He lies in bed which allows Lawrence to give him a great fantasia of wild thoughts. Birkin hates lots of things. He hates the idea of married love, ‘horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction’. He hates sex because it is so limiting, it makes the sexes dependent on each other. He hates women’s need:

always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant.

In the ideology of love and sex men and women are considered fragments who can only be made whole by the other. Birkin dreams of a world where men and women are always whole and voluntarily associate as entirely whole.

Gerald comes to visit. The death of the young couple triggers a discussion about death, about the impact on Gerald’s family, then on whether the youngest daughter, Winifred, should be sent away to school.

Both men feel such a closeness that Birkin, bubbling with silly ideas, suggests they swear Blutbruderschaft like the old German knights used to, to swear to love each other all their lives. The novel is titled ‘Women in Love’ but the complicated love between Birkin and Gerald is just as central.

Birkin floats the idea of Gudrun being hired as a private tutor to young Winifred. Aha.

Chapter 17. The Industrial Magnate

After experiencing such closeness, Gerald now fades out of Gudrun’s mind. She dreams of getting away from England. She writes to friends in Munich and Petersburg to see if they could help or put her up.

Ursula and Gudrun visit a working woman who makes honey, ‘Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath.’

Mrs Kirk was also a wet nurse to the Crich children and remembers what a little devil Gerald was. Any normal person might find this sweet and funny but Gudrun, with Lawrentian melodrama, has a fit, is overcome with rage, and wants the woman ‘ taken out at once and strangled’. Sometimes you feel like telling Lawrence’s characters to calm down, take a breath, count to 10 and everything will be better. But there’s no point. Everything about his world is ramped up to maximum. The spectacular insights into complex human nature, the moments of intense feeling, as well as the staggering nature poetry, all are part of the same package.

Up at Shortlands Mr Crich the patriarch, Thomas Crich, is slowly dying and Lawrence describes his retreat from the world and his own life. He had always treated his workers well, considering them as superior to him, closer to God. But in this had to fight his wife, Christiana, ‘like one of the great demons of hell’. Specifically, he encourages the poor to come and claim charity while Christiana, filled with hatred, drives them away like a witch. Something like hatred and terror exists between them (!)

The dying father’s last thoughts are to secure the wellbeing of Winifred, his youngest, favourite child, several pages on her wilful, anarchistic character. Meanwhile, as his father dies, Gerald feels more and more exposed. He’s managed the business well with his father as mentor and protector. Once he’s gone, Gerald will be fully exposed. We learn what wasn’t obvious up to now, which is that the last few months have changed Gerald: under the influence of 1) the death of Diana 2) Birkin’s visions and 3) Gudrun’s love he’s ceased to be a mechanical old Tory, doors have opened in his mind, he’s become confused.

The chapter goes back to describe Gerald’s boyhood, education, wanderlust, off to uni in Germany, serving in the war, exploring in the Amazon, before returning to take up the family business. He sees the world as instrumental to the will of man. This is the exact opposite of Birkin, who fantasises about nature freed by the complete extermination of man.

Man was the archgod of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man’s will was the absolute, the only absolute. (p.251)

Lawrence describes industrial strife, the colliers striking for more pay which led to lockouts which led to marches, riots, and soldiers being sent to the most troublesome pit, Whatmore, shots fired, a miner shot dead. This broke old Man Crich’s heart but excited Gerald, who was a boy.

In brief: as Gerald takes over the business he reforms it from top to bottom, sacking all the old managers, bringing in new professionals and equipment from America, scrapping all the perks and charities his father had introduced, overhauling it and making it a modern profitable business.

Lawrence presents it in moralising, general terms, as the triumph of the modern machine ethic over the old organic one. The triumph of Gerald’s heartless Fordian mechanical efficiency over his dying father’s old-fashioned Christian Victorian paternalism.

Chapter 18. Rabbit

Mr Crich agrees for Gudrun to come to Shortlands regularly as an art tutor for Winifred. The latter expects her to be yet another servant but quickly learns they are to be equals. They sketch Einnie’s Pekinese dog, Looloo. Gerald turns up after a few days and they realise they are both in love. The strange incident of them getting out the family’s huge pet rabbit from its hutch. It’s called Bismarck and is a monster, going into a frenzy wherein it badly scratches both Gudrun and Gerald before they get it to a courtyard with grass where it settles down to feed.

Chapter 19. Moony

Birkin goes to recuperate in the South of France leaving Ursula bereft.

She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people.

She takes a walk up to the mill pond as night is falling and sees the big moon reflected in the water. Then it is smashed by someone throwing a stone in, and another, repeatedly breaking the moon into fragments. It is, of course, Birkin, who has come back without telling anyone.

She makes themselves known and they have a hell of an argument because she simply wants him to say I love you while he has a difficult-to-understand, rarefied theory of two people existing together without needy things like ‘I love you’ etc, he wants ‘the paradisal unknowing’. He mocks it as her war cry.

But then she reaches out her hand to his and their bodies take over. They kiss again and again and Birkin gives in and says ‘I love you’.

Next day Birkin has doubts about his entire attitude. It’s connected with a 2-page meditation on the truth revealed by the African sculptures in Halliday’s flat, some truth cold northerners have reached. Suddenly he knows he must propose to Ursula so goes to Beldover. She’s out so he explains his intentions to her father, Will Brangwen.

This goes badly. While they wait, Brangwen and Birkin get into an argument. Brangwen has raised his children Christian like him and doesn’t want to see the girls throw themselves away. Birkin is nettled by all of this. When Ursula arrives from the library it’s her father who tells her Birkin is there to propose, reducing Birkin to inaudible mumbling. This inauspicious manner leads Ursula to bridle and then accuse them both of trying to railroad her, at which Birkin gets up and leaves.

Over the next few days Ursula and Gudrun are very close and dissect Birkin’s character, a preacher. But then there’s a reaction against her sister and she finds herself pondering what kind of love she wants from Birkin.

She wanted unspeakable intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down—ah, like a life-draught… But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon.

This is a central crux so worth lingering on:

She believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was more than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was everything.

Birkin has a model of the self where love is one among many attributes which bring out and complete the self. For Ursula, love is bigger than all individuals and we must submit ourselves to it.

Chapter 20. Gladiatorial

The famous chapter describing Rupert and Gerald wrestling in front of the fire. Straight after walking out of Ursula’s house after the proposal fiasco, Birkin walks up to Shortlands, to find Gerald standing in front of the fire in his drawing room, bored to tears.

They get talking about how to alleviate boredom: there’s work, intoxicants, women or… Birkin suggests fighting. Gerald says he shared a house with a Japanese wrestling expert in Heidelberg and offers to show Birkin jiu-jitsu. So Gerald gets the butler to bring sandwiches and soda, to close the door and leave them undisturbed.

And so they strip naked and wrestle. Modern sensibilities look for the homoerotic in the scene, which may well be there, but Lawrence is primarily concerned with the spiritual or psychological aspects. The actual wrestling lasts just four paragraphs. In the fifth one Gerald lies back on the carpet exhausted, faints and Birkin passes out over his body. When Birkin comes to, he props himself up and his hand accidentally touches Gerald’s, who seizes it. A strong male clasp. Gerald asks if this was the Bruderschaft Birkin wanted. It’s certainly something.

They get dressed (Gerald nips upstairs to dress in a luxury dressing gown) before settling in front of the fire to eat the sandwiches the butler brought. Birkin tells him he came hotfoot from proposing to Ursula. He loves her. Which triggers them to discuss the nature of love and for Gerald to worry that he might never find it.

Chapter 21. Threshold

Gudrun goes to London to attend a show of her artwork. On her return Winifred has a bouquet for her. Gudrun goes to sit with the dying old man. He arranges for a stable to be converted into a studio for Winifred and Gudrun to work in.

Birkin arrives driving his car to collect Winifred, Gudrun and Gerald. The two latter sit in the back and ripely satirise Birkin’s ideas about an association of man and woman which leaves them separate and distinct, as stars. Gudrun and Gerald agree they want passionate love between committed partners. (Gudrun gives her opinion of marriage being a purely social form – ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love’ – which I imagine was shocking in the late 1910s.)

Chapter 22. Woman to Woman

Only at this point do we learn Birkin was driving Gerald to the railway station, then taking the other two on to his place for tea before disappearing off somewhere. Hermione turns up and she and Ursula have a long dissection of Birkin’s character, Hermione strongly advising Ursula not to marry him.

Like the rabbit in his chapter, the star of this one is Rupert’s cat which Hermione feeds cream and speaks to in Italian. Hermione is of that class of gentlewoman who know Italy, and Florence in particular, so exquisitely well. Her dear mama died in Florence. (Cf A Room with a View.)

Chapter 23. Excurse

Next day is a half holiday at the school so Birkin calls by in his car and takes Ursula for a spin. He hands her a tissue which turns out to be full of rings he’s giving her. But this has the unintended consequence of making her feel like she’s being bought, making her very angry and she launches into pages and pages criticising him, calling him a perverse death-eater (p.346) before getting him to stop the car, throwing the rings at him, getting out and walking off. He stoops to pick the rings out of the mud and acknowledges some of her criticisms are true.

Then she comes back. She asks for the rings again. Everything which made the fight, disappears and now they are both soppily in love and do lots of kissing. Get back in the car and drive to Southwell, home of Southwell Minster and have a grand high tea at The Saracens Head. Here, in a scene which would be easy to over-interpret, she kneels on the hearth

And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneeling on the hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round his loins, and put her face against his thigh. Riches! Riches! She was overwhelmed with a sense of a heavenful of riches.
‘We love each other,’ she said in delight.
‘More than that,’ he answered, looking down at her with his glimmering, easy face.
Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was tracing the back of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his life-motion, there, at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other, something more.

There’s more than a page of her kneeling and tracing the outline of his loins and feeling his primal power. Very easy to give a sexual interpretation to. Utterly entranced, he decides they must both quit their jobs and travel. In a mad enthusiasm they both write letters to their bosses quitting with immediate notice. Birkin posts hers first so they don’t arrive at the same time. I smell trouble.

Then back into the car and touring the lanes absolutely transformed by total love. He feels like an Egyptian Pharaoh. They end up driving through Sherwood Forest, then stop at a circle of grass near a stream. It is darkest night. He throws down a rug, they strip off and make love, the first sex in the book, described in high mystical magical terms.

She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness. (p.361)

Chapter 24. Death and Love

Old Thomas Crich is a long time a-dying. And the impact on his son, Gerald? Characteristically Lawrentian hyperbole.

Day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.

He takes to hanging round the studio watching Gudrun. One day he asks her to stay on into the evening for dinner. As he explains how he is suffering, the void his father’s illness makes him feel, she feels powerfully attracted. A strong soldierly type obviously suffering brings out the mothering instinct.

Interlude when Gerald’s cold mother comes down, tells him not to take it all on himself, then departs. Gerald insists on walking Gudrun down the drive to the gates. He puts his arms round her and draws her near and she melts. Under the railway bridge, where the colliers snog their sweethearts, they kiss:

So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant. Her arms were round his neck, he kissed her and held her perfectly suspended, she was all slack and flowing into him, and he was the firm, strong cup that receives the wine of her life…

But then she checks herself, as all women do; you don’t want to be thought ‘too easy of winning’.

How much more of him was there to know? Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body. Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge. But for the present it was enough, enough, as much as her soul could bear. (p.375)

Gudrun doesn’t come next day because she has a cold. The day after, Gerald is sitting by his father’s bed when the old man gasps and arches and coughs up a gout of blood and dies. The mother makes a weird speech, telling her children none of them must look so beautiful and young on their deathbeds. Next day Gudrun goes to Winifred and the studio where Gerald pays a meek visit and shares their coffee.

The funeral is barely described. Instead the three horrible days when Gerald feels like a prisoner chained over an abyss of darkness. On the third evening he can’t bear it any more and goes for a vast walk in the darkness, which eventually brings him to the graveyard where his father’s grave is, and then he conceives a mad notion of seeing Gudrun. She is the only one who can save him.

So he asks directions from a drunk miner emerging from the town pub at chucking-out time (10pm) and makes his way to the Brangwen house. In a coincidence he arrives just as Birkin and Ursula step out, and hides from them in the shadows. Then he sneaks into the house – father William is asleep in the living room, his wife is in their bedroom – sneaks on tiptoe upstairs. There’s a comic digression when he figures he has the right room, sneaks over to the bedroom only to find the sleeping form of a boy, one of the brothers and has to tiptoe back out onto the landing.

Long story short, he finds Gudrun’s bedroom, wakes her. At first terrified, she locks her door, makes him take off his wet things and lets him have sex with her. He falls deeply asleep, as men do, while she lays for hours in the dark wondering what has just happened, what it means, remembering all her life up to this point.

She waits till the church bell rings 5 o’clock, then wakes him and urges him to go. In fact she has a nausea of him, needs him to be gone.

Chapter 25. Marriage or Not

Birkin has taken out a marriage licence but Ursula keeps delaying. She is in the third week of notice to the school. Christmas is coming. Gerald jokes that maybe he and Gudrun should hurry up so they can make it a joint wedding. Birkin isn’t sure marriage will suit Gerald.

Gerald and Birkin compare theories of marriage. For Birkin it is a social convention which denotes the partnership of free and equal lovers. Gerald has a more fatal view.

Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. (p.398)

Chapter 26. A Chair

Birkin and Ursula go to the flea market. They buy a beautiful old wooden chair but then argue about whether the present is accursed (Birkin) or the past was just as crudely materialistic (Ursula). This triggers Birkin into expressing Lawrence’s dogma of never having a home, of permanent travel.

‘The truth is, we don’t want things at all,’ he replied. ‘The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.’
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
‘So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.’
‘Not somewhere – anywhere,’ he said. “One should just live anywhere – not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone… You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.’

Ursula had earlier noticed a working class couple, the woman heavily pregnant, sifting through the junk on display. On an impulse she decides to give them the chair they’ve just bought. Lawrence dwells on the pair’s working class appearance, the woman short and stocky, the man thin like a rat. The repeated word is ‘slinking’. In fact this is the longest description of working class people in the book. Gerald takes direction from a drunk miner. Working class women mock Ursula and Gudrun on their way to the wedding. There are the servants, of course. This is the longest description of proles and the key words are ‘slinking’ and ‘rat’.

Our couple find the whole place grim and miserable and low and wretched, ‘cold, somehow small, crowded, and like the end of the world.’ They catch a tram and agree that they need to get away, to wander the world.

‘And we will wander about on the face of the earth,” he said, “and we’ll look at the world beyond just this bit.’ (p.408)

Chapter 27. Flitting

At dinner, Ursula tells her family she’s getting married tomorrow. Her father is furious at not being told, not being given any notice. She says it’s her life, he says she owes her family and her parents the information. She defies him, makes him furious and he smacks her. She leaves the room, goes upstairs, packs her bags, comes downstairs, says goodbye, marches out of the house, down to the station, catches a train to where Birkin is staying, walks past his landlady into his room. (Birkin appears to be living in rented rooms as well as sometimes at the Mill which Hermione so wanted to decorate for him, thus retaining her hold over him.)

Rupert is non-plussed but reckons something like this was inevitable, embraces her and tells her he loves her. That is the reassurance she needs, but she can’t really see how deeply she is rescuing him from the fallen world, from his own doubts and incompleteness. They marry the next day (p.417). The wedding ceremony is not described in the slightest because it doesn’t matter to Rupert, Gudrun or Lawrence.

A few days at the Mill, while Rupert is away, Gerald and Ursula discuss marriage. He says she looks well on it. He asks her whether he should propose to Gudrun. They both have their doubts. Later when Rupert comes home, they agree that Gudrun is more the mistress type than the wife type, and Gerald a born lover rather than faithful husband. But Gerald floats the idea that they should all go away somewhere, somewhere abroad, as a foursome, which Ursula loves.

The Brangwen family have moved out of the house in Beldover. Will Brangwen needed to move to Nottingham for his work. They leave Ursula’s belongings behind for her to collect. She and Ursula walk over one afternoon. They’re both appalled by how bleak the empty house is. Birkin shows up with his car and shares the general horror at the bleak empty rooms.

Birkin drives Ursula back to the Mill with him, dropping Gudrun at the cottage she’s now renting in Willey Green. She watches them go, haunted by their happiness. Next day she goes to the Mill and finds Ursula alone, asks if she doesn’t think Gerald’s suggestion they all go away together is a cheek. Gudrun thinks the menfolk are treating her like a chattel, like a type (French for ‘trollop’).

Chapter 28. Gudrun in the Pompadour

The trip abroad begins. Gudrun and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall, and afterwards to the Pompadour Café. Gudrun hates this place because all the tight little groups of artists and bohemians hang out here.

Minette is there, the girl from chapter 6 who was pregnant and slept with Gerald in order to get back her target, Halliday. She comes over from a group of the gang and asks him to join them but he suavely refuses. She says just enough to indicate to Gudrun that she’s one of his mistresses.

The bohemian set (Halliday, Maxim, Julian and Minette) start slagging off Birkin, then Halliday finds a letter to him written by Rupert, full of his ripest pontificating, and reads it out loud to general ridicule. Gudrun is worked into a frenzy by their mockery, gets up, walks over to their table, politely asks if she may read the letter, takes it, turns and walks out of the cafe. The others can’t believe what is happening then start to boo. This makes her walk all the slower and more superior. Outside she hails a cab as Gerald catches up with her, thinking her magnificent. Gudrun thinks they are ‘dogs’ and calls Rupert a fool ‘to give himself away to such canaille.’

(According to Anthony Burgess’s biography of Lawrence, this scene is closely based on fact. The setting was the Café Royal where Lawrence’s enemy Philip Heseltine, started reading out Lawrence’s poems from the volume Amore in a mocking voice, and so infuriated Katherine Mansfield that she snatched the book out of his hands and stormed out, followed by her embarrassed husband, John Middleton Murray, Burgess page 97.)

Chapter 29. Continental

By far the longest chapter, 60 pages long, almost a novella.

Description of Birkin and Ursula’s voyage across the Channel, curled up in the prow of the ship in the absolute darkness. They disembark in Ostend by night. In a dream they take their bags through customs to the railway station, grab a sandwich and horrible coffee (nothing changes) then onto the train which travels through Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, through Luxembourg, through Alsace-Lorraine, through Metz, arriving at Basle. Overnight in a hotel, then another train to Zürich and then their final destination, Innsbruck.

They catch an open sleigh to the hotel where they see Gudrun. Ursula and Gudrun go to her hotel room to gossip, talking about mutual friends in Paris. Then everyone dresses and comes down for dinner where they agree how wonderful it is to be out of England, a country with the damper permanently on.

Next morning they take a small train to Hohenhausen, up in the snow, and then take sledges higher, higher into the snowy mountains, arriving at another, more remote hotel. In the hotel room, Gudrun is overcome, looking out the window at the snowy landscape and mountains she cries and Gerald embraces her.

They go down for coffee and cake, delicious. There are ten other guests, all German. They are introduced to the group who are listening to an odd man-child give a performance of the Cologne accent. When he’s finished Ursula is invited to sing the song, Annie Lowrie, with Gudrun accompanying her on the piano.

After dinner Ursula wants to go out into the darkness. She is intoxicated by the wonderful cold and the primal scenery. When they return to the hotel lounge, the Reunionsaal, they discover the other guests dancing the Schuhplatteln, the Tyrolese dance of the clapping hands and tossing the partner in the air at the crisis, with jumping and clapping, to the music of three zithers.

To no-one’s surprise, Gerald quickly learns the steps and becomes a demon. He dances with the Professor’s youngest daughter who is incandescent with awe at this Real Man holding and twirling her. Gudrun is lusted after by one of the young men who is to shy to ask to dance with her. Twas ever thus.

In their bedroom, Gudrun has a panic attack about Gerald, is completely alienated from him. Luckily he doesn’t notice. She mocks his dancing with the young girl, he doesn’t understand her. They sleep separately and she wakes superior to him. Looking at him asleep, she realises he can solve any practical problem, all challenges fall before his will. She imagines marrying him, supporting him as he becomes a Conservative MP, goes into politics, becomes Prime Minister.

But then she mocks her own girlish dreams. Who cares about politics? It’s all so old. And somehow, through this interior monologue, she becomes convinced to marry him. She wakes him with kisses, telling him he’s convinced her and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow. (p.473)

Loerke

One day they’re snowed in. Gudrun and Ursula get to know Loerke, the puny little sculptor, who tells them his backstory, a broken home and deprived background, hitching to Italy, learning to sculpt the hard way. Now he is a professional with well-paid commissions and is working on a frieze in granite for a new factory in Germany. He gives an impassioned defence of art beautifying new industrial buildings that has a Bauhaus ring. Anyway, it puts Gudrun’s funny little clay models in the shade.

Lawrence’s antisemitism

Gerald and Rupert both dislike Loerke and the girls’ interest in him. Birkin, as always the most virulent and malicious, gives an extended slagging of Loerke which ends up with an unexpected, unnecessary and dismaying antisemitism. I could leave it at that but I’ll quote the entire passage so you can see for yourself the vehemence of Lawrence’s dislike and racism.

‘What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?’ Gerald asked.
‘God alone knows,’ replied Birkin, ‘unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.’
Gerald looked up in surprise.
‘Does he make an appeal to them?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Birkin. ‘He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.’
‘Funny they should rush to that,’ said Gerald.
‘Makes one mad, too,’ said Birkin. ‘But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.’
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
‘What do women want, at the bottom?’ he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.’
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind today, horribly blind.
‘And what is the end?’ he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
‘I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.’
‘Yes, but stages further in what?’ cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
‘Stages further in social hatred,’ he said. ‘He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.’
‘Probably,’ said Gerald.
‘He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.’
‘But why does anybody care about him?’ cried Gerald.
‘Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.’ (p.481)

Not a good look, as the Yanks say.

So Loerke is also a sculptor. As she looks at his pieces and hears his stories, Gudrun is beguiled. Loerke shows them a photo of a sculpture of a young girl sitting on a horse. Ursula says the horse is oddly distorted which triggers a little harangue.

‘It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.’ (p.484)

They all have different reactions. Gudrun agrees on the difference between the artist and the work, but Ursula insists the horse and the girl are reflections of the artist’s horrible personality. Gerald strolls up, takes a look at the photo and, characteristically, says he likes the look of the girl, Gudrun saying ‘wouldn’t he just’. But in a further development, when Loerke tells them the girl was an art student Gudrun immediately leaps to the conclusion that she was a naive and innocent young girl from a good family exploited and used by her wicked male teacher. #metoo. The sisterhood. As outraged by masculine abuse in 1920 as 2020.

But there’s more. Loerke freely admits he had to regularly smack and hit the girl before she’d sit still in this pose. And then, to make himself even more despicable, says that he only likes his models young:

‘I don’t like them any bigger, any older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – after that, they are no use to me.’

Furious, Ursula goes out into the snowy night and suddenly realises she hates it. Five pages back, they were all snow gods and snow artists, now, with Lawrentian abruptness, she’s shifted to the other extreme. She wants to go south to warmth and olive groves. She goes back into the hotel and finds Birkin in their room, reading and tells him. He laughingly agrees.

Next day they tell the other couple and can tell Gerald and Gudrun are relieved to hear of their departure. The men have been riling each other a bit. The two genders have last meetings. When Ursula explains that she and Birkin want to continue moving on, into new freedoms, Gudrun irritates her by saying that wherever you go you’ll always be with the same person, ‘only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.’

The men chat and Birkin asks Gerald when he’ll leave and Gerald replies maybe never. Maybe he’ll never go back to England. The sledge arrives, picks up Birkin and Ursula and off they go, leaving Gerald and Gudrun dwindling in the snow, waving.

Chapter 30. Snowed Up

The second longest chapter at 38 pages. Taken together, the two ‘abroad’ chapters make about 100 pages.

Left to themselves, Gudrun and Gerald fall into a fierce and bitter war for supremacy. They rage and argue. She moves into a separate bedroom. They fight all the time. She begs him to tell her he loves her. He feels like he has been ripped open. He has fantasies of murdering her. They both go mad.

While Gerald’s off skiing, Gudrun become friendlier with Loerke over their shared aesthetic, particularly the basic principle that the artist and the art exist in different realms.

The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.

One time Gerald is bullying Loerke in argument like an arrogant Englishman and when Loerke turns to her for appeal, she angrily tells him to stop calling her Mrs Crich. She is not Mrs Crich. She is not married. A light goes on in Loerke’s eye and Gerald is mortified.

Perversely he is so self contained about this insult that she loves him and goes to his bedroom that night to have sex, gladly. ‘And she had extreme pleasure of him.’ But she withholds her soul. Any couple eventually reach the end of fleshly pleasure and everything is just repetition. Gudrun unconsciously knows that the next step, for her, is alliance with Loerke. Loerke is very patient and encourages long conversations about Mozart and Goethe et al, to win her over.

She and Gerald have a massive argument when Gerald asks her what on earth she sees in Loerke and she bluntly tells him the little German understands women and is not a fool. Stunned, Gerald asks if that is the end of their relationship. She says either of them are free to leave at any time. For some reason the bluntness of all this arouses Gerald, she sees it, is disgusted, and walks out.

And so on. After a long campaign Loerke subtly suggests that she might go with him to his studio in Dresden. Not to be his mistress. But because he admires her company and her intelligence. She is flattered though a little chagrined that he doesn’t flatter her beauty.

Gerald is out all day skiing, feeling king of the mountains up in the high slopes. He doesn’t want to come back to the hotel and people. As soon as he sees Gudrun he fantasises about murdering her, the sheer pleasure of strangling the life out of her. They dine and later, in his room, she says the experiment is over. They gave it a try and it failed. Why, he asks. Because you cannot love, and I could never love you.

At this Gerald feels the pure desire to kill go down his arms and into his hands and turns towards he but, sensing his rage, she nips out the room, across to hers and locks the door. Cue pages of her pondering her whole life and above all the patheticness of men, of Gerald, Birkin, all of them, of the mining business with all its managers. Babies, all of them. And the sheer tedium of doing the same thing day after day. Gerald stays up all night reading, mortally afraid of lying sleepless in the dark.

Next morning over breakfast she announces she’ll be leaving the following day. Gerald says he’ll make the necessary arrangements then goes out for a day’s skiing. Gudrun feels wonderfully empowered. The long vigil and pondering her life situation has clarified everything. She lets Loerke take her out tobogganing even though he looks like a ridiculous pixie. He doesn’t take the tobogganing very seriously which she finds an immense relief from Gerald’s intense seriousness about all activities. Lightness and irony are what she needs.

At the end of the day he crashes them in the snow, laughing, then produces a coffee thermos, some Schnapps and biscuits. They are merrily discussing where Gudrun will go the next day – she doesn’t know and doesn’t care – when Gerald looms whitely up out of the snow.

Crack! Gerald punches Loerke aside, then punches him again. Gudrun brings her fist down on his face and chest which prompts him to turn and, finally, fulfil his deepest wish, to strangle her to death. His hands grip her throat and strangle the life out of her as she thrashes and then starts to go limp which is the moment when Loerke comes to himself and makes one of his sarcastic remarks, in French: ‘Monsieur! Quand vous aurez fini –’ ‘Sir, when you have quite finished…’ and the mockery of it brings Gerald back to his senses.

Not in horror, but futility. What is he doing? Who cares if this silly woman lives or dies? Oh what’s the point? And he drops Gudrun, looks round in a daze, then stumbles off into the snow. He has had enough. He wants to sleep. He wants it to end. He climbs higher and higher into the land of sheer cliffs and rockslides. He slips in a snowslide but that doesn’t wake his daze. Onwards and upwards. He comes across a crucifix almost buried in the snow and is overcome with terror that he is going to be murdered, looking all round him in his fear, raising his arm to ward off the blow. And thus walking he slips over the edge of a deep bowl,

surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep. (p.533)

Chapter 31. Exeunt

Gerald died. They bring the body back to the hotel. Next morning they bring the body back to the hotel. A woman comes to tell Gudrun. She is amazed by how cold and unaffected she is. Like Mersault and his mother. She finds Loerke in the main room but he is not pleased to see her. She telegrams to Birkin and Ursula who arrive the next day but she is cold with them. In fact after five minutes the sisters have nothing to say to each other.

The final pages focus on Birkin. He makes all the practical arrangements and deals with the authorities. He visits the frozen corpse then treks up the hill to the snowy bowl where Gerald dies, then comes back to the hotel and confronts the corpse again. This time he breaks down in hysterical tears, and Ursula sees him. Birkin is distraught that Gerald didn’t love him. He says he offered him his love but he didn’t take it. He remembers their hands clutching each other as they came round from the famous wrestling scene. If only that moment had lasted, if only Gerald had loved him, maybe he would still be alive.

Birkin and Ursula and one of Gerald’s brothers accompany the body back to England where the family insists he be buried. Ursula and Birkin remove to the Mill and live very quietly. (Gudrun has gone to Dresden and ‘writes no particulars of herself.’)

On the last pages of this vast book, Ursula and Birkin argue. She says, Aren’t I enough for you and he says, No. You are all women to me but I wanted something more, I wanted a male kind of love, I wanted one true friend, and I had him but he rejected me. Ursula says she doesn’t believe Birkin’s notion of an eternal love between men, ‘It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity’ and he replies ‘I don’t believe that’ and that’s the end of the book.

A war novel?

Lawrence rewrote the novel to achieve its final form, between 1915 and 1917, the central years of the First World War. In his foreword to the American edition, he said he wanted to the timeline of the novel to be unfixed. But critics at the time and ever since have pointed out the tremendous bitterness observable in many of the characters – most extreme in Birkin’s visions of exterminating humanity altogether – radiate the bitterness and anger and disillusionment which Lawrence was hardly the only one to experience during these years. If Birkin repeatedly express this, it is Gerald who in a sense acts it out, overcome with psychopathy at the novel’s bitter end. And the carrying of the body of a young Englishman, killed abroad, back to his home in England was, of course, something experienced by hundreds of thousands of families.

Lawrence at one point considered titling the book Dies Irae, Days of Anger.

Flouting conventional morality

‘The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.’
‘And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?’ said Gerald.
‘Pretty well that – seeing there’s no God.’ (Chapter 5, on the train to London)

Just to note the obvious:

1. None of the characters seem to believe in God, Christian teaching or Christian morality. The girls’ father, William, tells Birkin he expects it of his daughters, but nobody else even mentions it.

2. None of the quartet are bothered by pre-marital sex in the slightest. There’s nothing about sin, hell and damnation, nothing at all. It’s assessed solely on whether it is right for the individual and their relationship i.e. the ‘modern’ view.

3. Even marriage, which they all enter into, none of them really care about much. It’s a purely social convention which cements what has already been agreed between free individuals.

GUDRUN: ‘Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.’ (Chapter 21)

BIRKIN: ‘I’m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It’s a mere question of convenience.’ (p.396)

In fact Birkin has a violent objection to traditional ideas of marriage.

‘Marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Égoïsme à deux is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy—it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.’ (p.397)

In fact, you can easily misread him to be attacking the institution of marriage which, of course, for conservatives then and now, was sacred:

‘You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man – additional to marriage.’
‘I can never see how they can be the same,’ said Gerald.
‘Not the same – but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.’ (p.397)

4. And experimentation. Why not go whole hog? Here’s Gudrun fired up by the wild dancing in the Reunionsaal at the Tyrolese inn:

They might do as they liked – this she realised as she went to sleep. How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was degrading? Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he [Birkin] was so unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn’t it rather horrible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so – she balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added – so bestial? So bestial, they two! – so degraded! She winced. But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experienced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She was free when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her. (p.464)

You can see how old-fashioned moralists and social guardians would be outraged. For all these reasons Lawrence couldn’t find a publisher for the book in the UK and when it was, finally, published in the US, in 1920, it was to subscribers only. Such was the threat and illegality of what to us now appear completely harmless, indeed anodyne, opinions.

Summary of people and places

Ursula Brangwen

26, class teacher at Willey Green Grammar School. Always a bit flustered, always rushing in too soon. Greenish eyes. Pairs with Rupert Birkin. Favourite phrase: why not? which drives her father mad.

Gudrun Brangwen

25, artist and model. Dark hair. In London at art school she got to know the extended networks of Bohemia. The more conventionally beautiful of the two. Calm and confident on top, profoundly restless underneath. Ursula’s nickname for her is ‘Prune’. Pairs with Gerald Crich.

Rupert Birkin

‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’ (p.230)

School inspector. Tall, thin, tired misanthrope. Wishes all humanity could be exterminated. Prophet of individualism (someone should write a book comparing Wilde and Lawrence as proponents of unflinching absolute individualism.) An inveterate lecturer and preacher:

‘He isn’t sympathetic, he wants to dictate.’ (p.367)

Here’s Maxim slagging him off in chapter 27:

‘He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man.’ (p.433)

An emotional chameleon, ‘he is so changeable and unsure of himself’ or, as Ursula puts it late on:

‘He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally – I really don’t know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated – physically – not the human being. You see he says one thing one day, and another the next – and he always contradicts himself – ‘
‘And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,’ said Hermione slowly. (p.330)

Rupert is generally agreed to be a self portrait by Lawrence in which case he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. Here’s Hermione dissecting him:

‘He is so uncertain, so unstable — he wearies, and then reacts. I couldn’t tell you what his reactions are. I couldn’t tell you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day — a little latter he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant, always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good to bad, bad to good.’ (p.332)

At the start of the novel Birkin is going out with Hermione, under her thumb. Takes a long time to shake her off. The growing attraction between him and Ursula entails prolonged rivalry between Ursula and Hermione. After much arguing they finally surrender to each other and, on page 360, have sex in Sherwood Forest.

Gerald always feels a bit superior and protective towards him, thinks him ‘amazingly clever, but incurably innocent’. They stay in the London Soho flat together. They wrestle naked together (chapter 20).

Gerald Crich

31, coalmine owner, superb physical specimen, fair hair and moustache, blue eyes. His ‘gleaming blondness.’ Imperious, ‘very good-looking and self-contained.’ Former officer in the Army till he resigned his commission. Explored the Amazon so occasionally tells stories about the Indians. Compelled to become head of the family coalmining business as his father falls ill, Gerald clings onto his boyhood dreams of being Odysseus. In his imagination:

The world was really a wilderness where one hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a condition of savage freedom.

Tries to quell the mare he’s riding as the colliery train goes by, to Ursula and Gudrun’s horror. Wrestles naked with Rupert in front of the library fire (chapter 20).

Hermione Roddice

A friend of the Criches, ‘a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face.’ Upper class and used to dismissing people when she’s lost interest. Flat bosom. Long, grave, downward-looking face. Heavy, drugged, shadowy eyelids. Grey eyes. Her musing sing-song voice. Needs to dominate men: ‘It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being.’ (p.337)

The book starts with her going out with her partnered with Birkin, who is restless to escape her domination but it takes half the book for him to become free enough to commit to Ursula.

Beldover

The small colliery town in the Midlands where the Brangwen family live. Gudrun, fresh back from living in London, is repelled by its ‘amorphous ugliness’, the high street ‘part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid,’, ‘the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street’, ‘this shapeless, barren ugliness’, ‘the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside’. In chapter 9 Lawrence gives a vivid depiction:

This was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, cold and iron.

And the party atmosphere on Friday nights:

It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom.

Gudrun perceives Gerald as ‘her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers.’

Shortlands

Home of the Crich family. ‘It was a long, low old house, a sort of manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow that might be a park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood here and there, across the water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the colliery valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and picturesque, very peaceful…’

‘The panting and rattling of the coal mines could always be heard at Shortlands…’ (p.249) The drive is a mile long. ‘The dark drive that ran between close-cut hedges through sloping meadows’ (p.370).

Willey Water

‘The narrow little lake of Willey Water’, where Diana Crich and her lover drown at the annual water party (Chapter 14).

Based on real people

Publication of ‘Women in Love’ was delayed not only because publishers feared prosecution under the obscenity laws which ‘The Rainbow’ fell foul of, but also because of the threats of libel actions by people who thought they had been included and, generally, mocked in the novel.

1. In the version we read, the young woman Gerald sleeps with in Soho is named Minette. She was originally named ‘the Pussum’. This was because the Lawrence’s friend, Philip Heseltine (who appears as Halliday) had a mistress who was nicknamed the Puma’. Changing her name to Minette, and a payment of £50, staved off a libel case.

(Anthony Burgess’s entertaining biography of Lawrence tells us that Heseltine was very young when he came into Lawrence’s orbit. Under the name Peter Warlock he was to become a noted writer of classical songs. Coincidentally, he died in the same year as Lawrence, 1930.)

2. More important was Lady Ottoline Morrell who was furious that the rather pompous, opinionated and superior character of Hermione Roddice was based on her.

a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.

Hermione’s country house, Breadalby, is Lady Ottoline’s Oxford house, Garsington Manor, transplanted to Derbyshire. Not only her aloofness and cloying clinging to Birkin, but the scene where she attacks him with a paperweight, intending to kill him… No wonder she threatened to sue.

3. One of her lunch parties features ‘a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh, horse-laugh’. This is Bertrand Russell.

4. The notion of a quartet of two couples might be based on the attempt by Lawrence and Frieda to live in a joint household in Cornwall with the writers, John Middleton Murray and Katherine Mansfield. Murray is nothing like Gerald but Mansfield does have some similarities with Gudrun, an artist expert at working in miniatures, her loyalty: and also the fact that she was unfaithful to Murray, having an affair with the artist Mark Gertler who was, apparently, partly the basis for Loerke, both being German-Jewish.

5. Thomas Crich, owner and patriarch of the coalmine, is clearly modelled on Thomas Barber of Barber Walker Company in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, whose mines Lawrence’s father, Arthur, worked in.

Reviews

Anthony Burgess tells us the novel was met with review headlines including ‘A Book The Police Should Ban’ and ‘Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity Leading Youth to Unspeakable Disaster’ (Burgess, page 101). The stupidity, imaginative incapacity, and the obsession with sex in the crudest, most literal sense remain signs of the philistine mind to this day.

The rationale of Lawrence’s travels

At several points Birkin reiterates Lawrence’s own view about ‘settling down’ in a ‘nice little home’, namely that it’s death of the soul.

‘One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home.’ (p.397)

So as soon as the war was over and he was able to leave wretched little England, Lawrence was off!

Credit

‘Women in Love’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1921 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1970 reprint of the 1960 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 5, 2025 • Permalink

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Tagged Alexander Roddice, Annie Lowrie, Anthony Burgess, Antisemitism, Barber Walker Company, Bertrand Russell, Bismarck, Blutbruderschaft, Brangwen sisters, Breadalby, Café Royal, Christian morality, Christiana Crich, class system, coal mines, colliers, Cromford, D.H. Lawrence, Days of Anger, Derbyshire, Dian Crich, Dies Irae, Dresden, drowning, Eastwood, English literature, Fräulein März, Gaby Deslys, Garsington Manor, gender, Gerald Crich, God is dead, Goethe, Gudrun Brangwen, Halliday, Hermione Roddice, Hohenhausen, hyperbole, John Middleton Murray, Katherine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, libel, Loerke, Looloo, love, Mark Gertler, marriage, Martin Secker, Maxim Libidnikov, Mersault, Methuen, miners, Minette Darrington, Minny Darrington, Mino, Misanthropy, Mozart, Mrs Kirk, Mrs Salmon, naked wrestling, Nijinsky, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, novel, obscenity law, Odysseus, Pavlova, Peter Warlock, Philip Heseltine, Pompadour Café, Prune, racism, relationships, Reunionsaal, Rupert Birkin, Russian Ballet, Schuhplatteln, sex, Sherwood Forest, Shortlands, Soho, South of France, Southwell, Southwell Minster, the Pompadour, the Pussum, The Rainbow, the Ritz, The Saracens Head, Thomas Barber, Thomas Crich, tobogganing, Tyrol, Ursula Brangwen, Victorian paternalism, war novel, West Midlands, Whatmore, Willey Green grammar school, Willey Water, Women in Love, working-class

Posted by Simon on February 5, 2025

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The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915)

A flame kindled round him, making his experience passionate and glowing, burningly real.
(description of Will Brangwen falling in love, although it could be almost any Lawrence character, male or female)

What did the self, the form of life matter? Only the living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further complication.
(Ursula’s credo right at the end of the book, p.484)

This strikes me as a work of utter genius. Lawrence had an astounding gift for creating men and women who are more like pagan gods of the landscape, who live what seem primeval lives of extraordinary depth and intensity.

Other novelists build their narrative out of key scenes, scenes which move the story along or reveal people’s personalities, create way stations to the plot or highlight characters’ development. Many novelists work through extensive dialogue, designed to disclose people’s (clashing) personalities, sometimes to announce shocking revelations, as in a stage play or, alternatively, to be witty and amusing. Lawrence is extremely unlike all of that. This novel amounts almost to a repudiation of that entire tradition.

Instead, with relatively few well-defined scenes and tens of pages passing with no dialogue at all, Lawrence describes the inner lives of his characters at great length, to intense and penetrating depth, in rhapsodic poetic prose. At one point he gives a sense of what he’s about, in the perception of the newly-married Tom Brangwen:

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away… leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent bedrock… (p.150)

He does so not in a rational, analytical way. Instead there are page after page describing the complex, many-sided and continually changing quality of his characters. Their moods, emotions, feelings and qualities are described with incandescent vividness and they are always changing, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, sometimes sentence to sentence, in a dizzying, bewildering shimmer. Is this how people’s perceptions, moods and feelings change? It feels rather delirious and yet wonderful at the same time. Here are young Anna and Will falling in love.

A spell was cast over her. And how uneasy her parents were, as she went about the house unnoticing, not noticing them, moving in a spell as if she were invisible to them. She was invisible to them. It made them angry. Yet they had to submit. She went about absorbed, obscured for a while. Over him too the darkness of obscurity settled. He seemed to be hidden in a tense, electric darkness, in which his soul, his life was intensely active, but without his aid or attention. His mind was obscured.

(Note the repetition. I’ll come to that in a moment.) Or Ursula wanting to be back in love with Anton.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be able to love him.

Hundreds and hundreds of pages of characters keyed up to the most intense and exquisite emotional peaks and extremities.

Passion

‘The Rainbow’ follows three successive generations of the Brangwen family who inhabit and inherit the family farm, Marsh Farm, in rural Nottinghamshire, from the 1840s to the Edwardian era. But there is little or nothing about business dealings, the practical details of raising crops or cattle and so on.

Instead the book focuses in huge detail on two types of subject: first the childhood and adolescence of the key figure in each generation; but then, most particularly, on the love lives of these figures, described with astonishing, monomaniacal intensity. Here is just one among many, many such passages, in this case describing Ann and Will falling in love, in this scene embracing and kissing.

They would stand sometimes folded together in the barn, in silence. Then to her, as she felt his young, tense figure with her hands, the bliss was intolerable, intolerable the sense that she possessed him. For his body was so keen and wonderful, it was the only reality in her world. In her world, there was this one tense, vivid body of a man, and then many other shadowy men, all unreal. In him, she touched the centre of reality. And they were together, he and she, at the heart of the secret. How she clutched him to her, his body the central body of all life. Out of the rock of his form the very fountain of life flowed. But to him, she was a flame that consumed him. The flame flowed up his limbs, flowed through him, till he was consumed, till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.

Lawrence’s characters are continually being swept out into the spaces between the stars, bursting into flames, swooping cruel as a hawk, and generally being transported by stark, primeval, unstoppable passions. At numerous points the impassioned couples imagine themselves transported far from ‘civilisation’, like beings on a desert island, like Adam and Eve. At one point Lawrence makes this more than usually clear.

And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen felt that the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of the world of to-day, cities and industries and civilization, leave only the bare earth with plants growing and waters running, and he would not mind, so long as he were whole, had Anna and the child and the new, strange certainty in his soul. Then, if he were naked, he would find clothing somewhere, he would make a shelter and bring food to his wife. (p.193)7

Male and female created He them

He asserted himself before her, he felt himself infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted herself before him, she knew herself infinitely desirable, and hence infinitely strong. And after all, what could either of them get from such a passion but a sense of his or of her own maximum self, in contradistinction to all the rest of life? (p.302)

Above all, this enormous 500-page hymn to the life of the passions and emotions focuses on what, in Lawrence’s hands, is the primal dyad, duality and dichotomy between a man and a woman in love. Thousands of other writers have handled this worn-out subject but Lawrence does it unlike anyone else. Other novelists structure their stories through scenes, which generally include dialogue in which characters reveal their feelings, and the scenes are carefully calibrated to depict men and women going through the fairly well-recognised stages of acquaintance, friendship, admiration, affection, first feelings of love and so on. Think Jane Austen. Above all they have a social aspect and their characters conform to social norms.

Not so Lawrence. Lawrence works through page after page of prose poetry describing the characters’ feelings in the most primal, extreme, almost abstract way, sometimes with the simple profundity of the Old Testament.

She liked Anthony… All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses. (p.417)

His characters are like protagonists in a kind of Wagnerian drama of souls, endlessly battling for fulfilment.

She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself forth in its proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form, which seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud. It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order. All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality? (p.444)

Very often the drama rotates around ideas of completion. Male and female both feel a lack and want to be made complete and, once married, finally achieve this wonderful sense of completion, and yet all kinds of things can knock it sideways, create barriers, can make them hate each other, and brood and be distant, but then something snaps, one or the other begs forgiveness, there is joyful reunion and completeness again.

It was begun now, this passion, and must go on, the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined against him. She could limit and define herself against him, the male, she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one moment in exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme contradistinction to the male.

Something Lawrence does again and again is give each gender successive paragraphs – a paragraph to how the man is feeling, a paragraph to the woman. It’s one of the many ways he creates this sense of a primal male-female opposition or dyad.

He was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.

But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her conception, and because she was with child by him.

Sex

As that passage implies, there is a very strong sexual undertone to all this. For most of the book Lawrence nowhere explicitly describes sex, even when the couple are alone in their house, even alone in their bedroom, the language is never specific about undressing, boobs and willies and so on, it always remains at this level of abstract nouns, of ‘need’ and ‘completion’ and ‘union’ and suchlike.

But sex, heterosexual sex, the loss of self in the union of bodies making love, obviously underpins a great deal of the book’s psychology and, maybe, it’s aesthetic, its constant search for a kind of primitive intensity and physical communion between male and female.

At one point Will, a Christian, takes his wife Anna, a sceptic, to visit Lincoln cathedral. As he enters the soaring building he undergoes a great soaring of the soul but, as you can see, the whole thing is described in very thinly veiled sexual terms.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated… Every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch. (p.202)

More straightforwardly, Will returns from an evening in Nottingham after arguing with Anna, and they approach each other as strangers, which they find more arousing.

She watched him undress as if he were a stranger. Indeed he was a stranger to her. And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he touched her… They abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.

Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in, infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one man’s capacity. (p.235)

Still described in general or euphemistic or categorical terms. Whereas, 25 or so years later, here are Ursula and Anton.

She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her fingers on the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his back, when he made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles developed very strong through riding; and she had a great thrill of excitement and passion, because of the unimpressible hardness of his body, that was so soft and smooth under her fingers, that came to her with such absolute service. (p.460)

‘With such absolute service,’ what a thrilling phrase. Once they have slept together once, the descriptions of Anton and Ursula become more, not explicit exactly, more frank. More honest, maybe, though still couched in poetic rather than naturalistic details.

He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast against him.

As you can see, it’s not really the sex, it’s the complete picture of closeness or otherwise between people, which Lawrence is after.

Married love

Tens of thousands of novels, from Jane Austen to Bridget Jones, depict the process of finding a mate, of falling in love, as leading up to the great plot climax of marriage and ending there.

Lawrence is notable for carrying right on into the state of married love, in fact he only really blossoms once a couple are married and the real struggle begins, the struggle for complete physical and spiritual union, which is so overwhelming when achieved and experienced, which obliterates the outside world in its intensity, and yet is so fragile, so easily punctured by the slightest whims of jealousy or irritation or misunderstanding on the part of either spouse. And then the days and nights of alienation and coldness and apartness, sometimes rising to active hatred of the other, before some route is found back to apologise and forgive.

A large amount of the first half of the text is made up by this endless battle of the two sexes, conceived in a kind of elemental abstraction.

Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne. (p.189)

Joy

If there are black moments of hatred and scorn, Lawrence’s work is also, and mostly, coloured by an extraordinary primeval joy. Here’s the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen, left alone during the day while her husband, Will, goes to work in Nottingham.

She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations. As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit was somewhere far off.

She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no one to exult with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced before the Unknown.

Suddenly she realized that this was what she wanted to do. Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had chosen her, to Whom she belonged.

She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.

It’s not joy, is it, it’s exultation, and this note of fantastic joy and psycho-physical excitement recurs again and again, the fantastic excitement of being alive!

To Ursula it was wonderful. She felt she was a new being. The darkness seemed to breathe like the sides of some great beast, the haystacks loomed half-revealed, a crowd of them, a dark, fecund lair just behind. Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. She wanted to let go. She wanted to reach and be amongst the flashing stars, she wanted to race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this earth. She was mad to be gone. It was as if a hound were straining on the leash, ready to hurl itself after a nameless quarry into the dark. And she was the quarry, and she was also the hound. (p.317)

Aspects of Lawrence’s style

Plain prose

Lawrence doesn’t achieve his effects through fancy vocabulary. It’s striking how ordinary most of his vocabulary is. It’s really the power of his perceptions which startle you. Lydia gets a job caring for an old vicar who keeps a parish by the sea.

Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.

Repetition within paragraphs

Who knows how conscious it was but Lawrence employs a very definite strategy of repeating two or three key words within each paragraph. Each paragraph has one or two key words which are repeated two or three times. The effect is to make each paragraph feel… feel like it has an identity of its own, stands distinct from its neighbours. Each one seems to be ringing its own bell. Look at the repetition of ‘very’ in the paragraph above. There are thousands of similar and often more striking examples.

It’s as if Lawrence has struck out a phrase encapsulating a perception and then wants to examine it from various sides, repeats the phrase, repeats it with slight variations, to see what happens as he walks round it, to observe the changing light giving it different perspectives.

To pick a paragraph more or less at random: young Anna Brangwen has gone to church accompanied by her cousin, Will Brangwen. They are both sitting in a pew as the service begins. First read it for the sense:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew. (p.110)

And then pick out the repetitions:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew.

It’s not the consciously poetic prose of an Oscar Wilde because it avoids Wilde’s gossamer vocabulary, all silver and emeralds, and instead deliberately uses very plain ordinary language (except, I suppose for luminous, maybe). But the key words are the opposite of recherché – on the, hands, knees, strange. You could hardly get commoner words. Yet this kind of sounding repetition is without doubt poetic in technique and it’s absolutely everywhere, in every single paragraph.

Direct repetition

Generally, the repeated words or short phrases are scattered throughout a paragraph, separated by other phrases. But sometimes he wants to be so emphatic that he just repeats a phrase side by side.

She felt his power persisting on her, till she became aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was forcing her, he was forcing her. (p.181)

Why could he not leave her? Why could he not throw himself into the hidden water to live or die, as might be? He could not, he could not. (p.187)

Hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. (p.322)

Ursula was beside herself. She could not endure till the Saturday came, her thoughts burned up like a fire. If only it were Saturday, if only it were Saturday. (p.339)

On a macro level, certain words or images become associated with certain characters through repetition: foreign and foreignness with Lydia; Tom Brangwen’s blue eyes; flame with Anna; Will the hawk.

Dialect and surprise words

He does, occasionally, deploy dialect, or unusual words, or (colloquial?) phrases, mostly in direct speech.

Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.

‘Sit you down,’ said Tom Brangwen, ‘an’ take a bit off your length.’

What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young family that needed fettling for? (p.275)

‘Isn’t it a nasty morning,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not much of weather.’ (p.370)

‘Pens don’t melt into the air: pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What has become of them then?’

The main motor of the text is his staggering imagining of people’s primeval lives and feelings; but the proximate cause is his extraordinary sentences. On page 30 or 40 I realised that nearly every sentence comes with an unexpected phrasing which knocks the wind out of you, extraordinary unexpected vividnesses in sentence after sentence, smacking your imagination like a sheet of rain across a lake.

He held her in his arms, and his bones melted. (p.119)

The days went by, they ran on dark-padded feet in silence. (p.120)

The air was all hoary silver. She looked around her. Trees stood vaguely at their distance, as if waiting like heralds, for the signal to approach. In this space of vague crystal her heart seemed like a bell ringing.

Tom Brangwen wanted to make a speech. For the first time in his life, he must spread himself wordily. (p.137)

Lawrence is an astonishing spendthrift of beautiful lines, throwing away hundreds of casually brilliant and inspiring lines.

The firelight glowed against the darkness in the room.

He had worked for many years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were utterances of himself. (p.355)

He seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. (p.443)

And the mood in the build-up to Christmas.

Everywhere was a sense of mystery and rousedness. Everybody was preparing for something.

Nature poetry

The period just before the First World War saw an efflorescence of nature writing, a gaggle of so-so poets jostling to describe what was coming to feel like the disappearing landscapes of rural England. Edward Thomas was probably to emerge as the best of these but he only started writing his magical poetry once the Great War commenced. Anyway, Lawrence describes nature with the same bright vivid intensity he depicts his humans. They’re relatively rare, his straight nature descriptions, but when they occur, they are like the brightest nature photography.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud…

And yet a deep characteristic of Lawrence is that he doesn’t describe nature as an outsider, as a bourgeois tourist, but always relates it to the hard, muddy lives of the farmers he’s depicting. Sparkling nature is embedded in the world of human labour.

For me, reading the first version of this paragraph without the final sentence lacks something. When you add in those final nine words, the whole rhythm of the paragraph seems complete. Here’s a selection of his nature writing.

Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. (p.121)

The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow. She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight. (p.178)

How lovely was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent on the meadows.

The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the corn-harvest. To Ursula, it was as if the world had opened its softest purest flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant, almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red button-chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a drunken dance. (p.308)

There was a place where she went trespassing to find the snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed. Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of night. And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight of the ground.

The plot = four generations of the Brangwen family

The Marsh farm in the valley of the river Erewash, not far from the village of Cossethay in one direction and the town of Ilkeston further away. In the 1840s a canal was built across their land and then a railway on a viaduct.

At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that occasionally a man’s figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse traversed the sky.

First generation – Alfred Brangwen

Alfred Brangwen of this period married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the ‘Black Horse’. They had four sons and two daughters. The eldest boy ran away to sea and did not come back.

The second boy, Alfred, became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in Nottingham, stifling his native creativity. He married the daughter of a chemist, became something of a snob, in later life took to womanising.

The third son, Frank, became a butcher, at eighteen married a little factory girl, who bore him numerous children. In later life he became a drunk and a bore.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger, remained at home.

Second generation – Tom Brangwen marries Lydia

The story follows the youngest son, Tom Brangwen, from boyhood to manhood. He struggles at school. When he was 17 his father fell and broke his neck, leaving just him, his mother and Effie in the farm. When he was 23 his mother died leaving him and Effie. They quarrel a lot. He takes a corner at the local pub to keep out of the way. Then Effie got married and moved out, leaving Tom with Tilly, the cross-eyed servant girl.

The story describes him having pre-marital sex several times, first time with a prostitute, next time with a girl he meets from a group at the pub, the glory and bewilderment of it. One day he sees a small woman dressed in black shepherding a child, walking the other way up the hill. One thing leads to another and he starts to woo her.

She is Lydia Lensky, of German descent, who married a Polish doctor who got caught up in the Polish Rebellion (spring 1863), was forced to flee, arriving in London (recapped pages 256 to 258). The doctor died and she threw herself upon charities who found her work caring for old single vicars, first one in Yorkshire, now one in Derbyshire.

Tom woos her over months, then one evening carries a bunch of daffodils he’s picked to the vicarage to propose to here. They are married. Account of his winning over Lydia’s feisty young daughter by her deceased doctor husband, Anna Lensky. Lydia bears him a son but Tom always stays closer to Anna.

She [Anna] was, however, only eighteen when a letter came from Mrs Alfred Brangwen, in Nottingham, saying that her son William was coming to Ilkeston to take a place as junior draughtsman, scarcely more than apprentice, in a lace factory. He was twenty years old, and would the Marsh Brangwens be friendly with him.

Will Brangwen, comes to visit and the narrative describes their slowly falling in love, till they are regularly meeting for illicit hugs and kisses in the cowshed. One time father Tom spies them, doesn’t interfere but is upset at the thought of losing his beloved daughter.

Third generation – Anna marries Will Brangwen

Will and Anna marry. It is a very stormy relationship, Anna being independent and headstrong but Will subject to black rages. Tom leases them a cottage of their own, Ivy Cottage.

Tom Brangwen had taken them a cottage at Cossethay, on a twenty-one years’ lease. Will Brangwen’s eyes lit up as he saw it. It was the cottage next the church, with dark yew-trees, very black old trees, along the side of the house and the grassy front garden; a red, squarish cottage with a low slate roof, and low windows. It had a long dairy-scullery, a big flagged kitchen, and a low parlour, that went up one step from the kitchen. There were whitewashed beams across the ceilings, and odd corners with cupboards. Looking out through the windows, there was the grassy garden, the procession of black yew trees down one side, and along the other sides, a red wall with ivy separating the place from the high-road and the churchyard. The old, little church, with its small spire on a square tower, seemed to be looking back at the cottage windows.

Will retains a lifelong interest in Christianity and church architecture, he feels liberated into eternity by it, whereas Anna sees only the finite stone building which feels man-made and cramped next to the wide universe.

Fourth generation – Ursula and Gudrun

Anna bears several children. The first is a daughter, Ursula. Will is still just 22 (p.214) and falls helplessly for this first daughter. Barely a year later another girl, Theresa. Two years later, Gudrun (p.219). Then Catherine. By the time he’s 26, Will has four children. By the time he’s 30, five (p.238).

Anna becomes totally self sufficient in being a mother which drives him to seek fulfilment elsewhere. But after failed attempts to chat up girls in Nottingham, he returns home more ironic and alienated and, paradoxically, this makes him more attractive to Anna, and they embark on a renewed sex life.

(Anna’s father, Ursula’s grandfather, Tom, dies in a flood, when torrential rain bursts the canal bank and floods the Marsh, he being drunk and riding back from a day in town. His son, Tom, works away and so the second son, Alfie, inherits the Marsh.)

Ursula is 8 when her father, Will, sets up woodwork classes in the local church for village boys (p.239). Ursula is conscious of a difference from the poor families in the village and gets into fights. Her parents send her to Nottingham Grammar School where she is thirsty for knowledge but not systematic. As she hits adolescence she undergoes intense religious experiences, though contradictory, rebelling against the literal interpretation of Jesus, wanting a more sensual religious rapture or ecstasy.

She feels hampered by being the eldest in a house full of children, by ‘the perpetual tyranny of young children’.

She’s just short of 16 (‘a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent… sensitive in the extreme, always tortured, always affecting a callous indifference’) when young Anton Skrebensky, son of the friend of the Brangwen family’s, turns up, aged 21 and in the army and wonderfully confident and self possessed.

History, breasts, the rest of England

History With the arrival of Ursula something happens: the narrative seems to emerge from a kind of unspecified timelessness, from ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, and into something more like the modern, historical, recorded world. This is signalled by specific historical references: at first the vague one to ‘the Mahdi’, which could derive from a long period, but then the extremely specific one marking the exact start of the (second) Boer War (October 1899) and intermittently chronicles the progress of the war via letters from Anton Skrebensky who serves in it.

Breasts I’ve added ‘breasts’ to this heading for a specific reason. When Lawrence described the previous generations of womenfolk – the woman from Heanor, Lydia Lensky, Anna Brangwen – there was a great deal of Lawrence’s characteristically ripe and florid prose about their love affairs but it was all described in general terms, about completion and fulfilment, even when she clasped his firm body or he pulled her towards him, it’s in a generalised kind of way, very rarely is there a reference to physical particularities (apart from height, body shape, facial features).

My point is that when Ursula arrives, she does so accompanied for the first time by 1) specific historical references and 2) by the word ‘breasts’. We learn that women have, not a vague ‘bosom’ which heaves with passion, but two breasts which are revealed when they strip naked. Ursula strips for her lesbian lover and they both have breasts. Thus the women cease being almost abstract principles of femininity (although they retain all those aspects) but now become real, physical women. You have for the first time real nudity.

The rest of England And the rest of England starts to appear. Up till now, a little over half-way through, the narrative took place in an almost abstract rural background with very limited horizons. The nearby village of Cossethay, the town of Ilkeston on its hill which can be seen from Marsh Farm, those are the borders of the narrative’s world, that is all the country the characters know or need to know.

But with the arrival of Ursula, suddenly we are turfed out of the primal dream of the first half and dumped into contemporary England, the England of economics and coal mines and imperial wars, of politicians in London. It is a shock when Skrebensky’s barracks at Salisbury is mentioned, or the fact that Fred Brangwen’s bride, Laura, attended Salisbury Training College. Naming mundane places in England seems like a crashing come-down after the primal semi-abstract setting of the first half. Even more so when Ursula applies for teaching jobs at Gillingham in Kent or Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey. I’d spent so long in Lawrence World that I’d forgotten such boring and mundane places existed. As with the history and the breasts of naked women, it feels like the narrative emerges from a kind of ahistorical dreamtime into the modern world of real people with physical bodies scrabbling for jobs.

Ursula’s story

Anton goes to war Ursula has a romantic involvement with the dashing son of friends of the family, Anton Skrebensky, but comes to see he is too conventional. By the time he is called on duty to serve in the Boer War (started October 1899) Ursula is over him. He writes a few letters which she loses.

Lesbian Miss Inger She has a schoolgirl crush on her grammar school teacher Miss Winifred Inger, which develops into a lesbian affair. Miss Inger invites her to stay with her at a bungalow with a lake where they go swimming, kiss and appear to have sex. But after a while Ursula comes to find her too ‘hippy’ and ‘clayey’ and stops feeling so intensely. In fact, she manages to marry Winifred off to her Uncle Tom. There’s a vivid portrait of an extended visit to Uncle Tom Brangwen, who is the manager of a horrible modern filthy colliery in the brand new red-brick town of Wiggleston. He explains how the coalminers are like faceless units who have adapted themselves to their horrible work and their horrible homes, They stay for weeks. Uncle Tom is experienced and cynical, he just wants someone to breed with (p.352). One night Miss Inger slips into Ursula’s bed to ask her whether she should accept Tom’s proposal. Coldly, Ursula say yes. Miss Inger goes back to her own bed to cry.

Applying to become a teacher When school ends Ursula is dumped back in the cottage (Yew Cottage) overflowing with kids and babies and hates it. She writes to her headmistress who advises her to become a teacher. She should earn in the region of fifty pounds a year. (Interestingly, her father estimates that, from his work and a private income of Anna’s, he earns about £400 a year. Compare with Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who each have annual unearned income of £600 pa i.e. £1,200 combined.)

Ursula applies through a central agency and receives interested replies from schools in Gillingham, Kingston and Swanwick (p.362). But her father (Will Brangwen), now well entrenched in restoring the church next door, playing the organ and supervising the choir, refuses to let her go as far away as London. Instead he finds a school in the slum quarter of Ilkeston, St. Philip’s Church School in Brinsley Street (p.367).

(Incidentally, 2 years earlier her grandmother, Lydia, had died; seeing as old Tom died in the flood years earlier, Marsh Farm passes to their second son, Uncle Fred and his wife whose marriage Ursula attended with Skrebensky, where she wanted to expose her breasts to the huge moon, p.368.)

Teaching The headmaster, Mr Harby, ‘a short, thick-set, rather common man’ with complete control of the school and its hundreds of boisterous children. She is a hopeless failure at keeping discipline and standards with her 55 (!) small children. The head master comes to loathe her. She is still only 17 (p.393).

She hates teaching. The pupils are wildly disobedient and violent, kicking her, throwing stones at her. In a major learning she loses her temper and thrashes a boy to a whimpering wreck. Then does it again to another. Now the children are scared of her, but she has hardened her heart.

Suffragettism and feminism

She and Maggie, in their dinner-hours and their occasional teas at the little restaurant, discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in the vote. To Ursula the vote was never a reality. She had within her the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far transcending the limits of the automatic system that contained the vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman meant something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something, she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.

That deeply-felt sense of injustice, that you’re put down and held back merely by virtue of being a woman, explains feminism’s deep and abiding and universal hold over billions of women, but also why it is so incoherent, contradictory and impractical as anything like a set of beliefs or demands. Because it’s a deep gut conviction which can express itself in a myriad different ways.

Maggie Schofield She becomes friends with another young teacher, Maggie Schofield. They eat packed lunches together in the nearby churchyard. Ursula goes to stay at Maggie’s home, in the grounds of a fine house where her brothers are caretakers and gardeners. She is set a-flutter by Maggie’s older brother, Anthony, with his eyes like a goat, and walks and talks with him, but when he proposes she gently says no. She knows she is a wandering spirit.

She buys a bicycle I’ve repeatedly read that bicycles were the great liberating invention of the 1890s. There was a widespread bicycle craze and countless cycling clubs were set up. The device was especially important for women because it allowed women, for the first time in history, to travel widely and freely beyond their homes and without male chaperones. A paragraph indicates that Ursula and Maggie fully participate in this new freedom.

She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy, finding, discovering.

(Compare the bicycle as agent for freedom in H.G. Wells’s novel, Ann Veronica, and the brief mention and photo of lady bicyclists in my review of Oscar Wilde’s London.)

Outgrowing Cossethay The Brangwen clan have always felt themselves superior to the villagers. In fact it’s one of the earliest themes, sounded in the book’s opening pages. When her parents decide to move away from Cossethay Ursula is delighted. She, too, needs to leave. The locals:

They quoted this and that about her. And she was ashamed because she did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet — and yet — one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it. So Cossethay hampered her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to her own height. (p.419)

Will Brangwen gains a position After decades of plugging away at his wood carving, Will Brangwen is invited to apply for the job of Art and Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. His salary will be £200 a year (p.429). To do this he will have to be located more centrally and so he, Anna and the remaining children leave Yew Cottage and move to a big red-brick villa at a place named Willey Green, on the edge of the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover. Will Brangwen, like the novel as a whole, since Ursula arrived, ‘must become modern’ (p.421). Ursula, as the eldest, helps with the move to the new house (we are told the astonishing fact that the Brangwen family now numbers ten! – no wonder Ursula complained about the tyranny of children, toddlers and babies everywhere).

Ursula starts college She completes her two years at St Phillips school and enrols to do an art degree at University College Nottingham (a constituent college of the University of London which didn’t become the University of Nottingham until 1948).

She studies for three years. At first the college seems a magical place of learning, linking back to the medieval origins of education. But by the second year she’s come to realise the lecturers are not priests of higher wisdom but retailers of second hands goods. All the subjects come to bore her. Cynically, she realises they are just being trained to add to their commercial value.

In her third year she is 22. She gets a letter from Skrebensky. It is six years since their last meeting, so, since he went off to the war in October 1899, it must be 1905.

Ursula finds the meaning of life Pages 441 to 442. In science classes, Ursula is given a lecturer, Dr Frankstone, who puts forward the extreme rationalist argument that, from a scientific point of view, there is nothing special about life which, after all, follows the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. But Ursula rebels against this scientific materialism, in these terms:

Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity. (p.441)

Ursula loses her virginity Anton Skrebensky writes to say he’s in England, does she want to meet? They meet in Nottingham and go for many walks. She is transfigured by his presence and he declares he still loves her. He tells her stories of his years in Africa and weaves a spell, a mystique around the darkness of the African night, ‘massive and fluid with terror’, and this becomes the motif of their meetings, ‘darkness’ and the ‘fecundity’ of the night become the key words of these passages. They appear to fall in love all over again and kiss in kisses described with great sensual beauty by Lawrence.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness. It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction. They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.

See what I mean about the poetry of Lawrence’s primal, elemental view of human existence, transformed and transported into a mystical realm. One walk leads them to a shade of an old oak tree and it is here that they finally go beyond kisses and Ursula appears to lose her virginity.

He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark, and again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses, and there was the silence between them…

They walk on to an old oak tree, swaying in the wind, and lie down under it, and this, I think, is Lawrence’s description of Ursula losing her virginity:

Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted. She was caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man, what was he? — a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality. (p.451)

1) Note how ungraphic this is, how hedged around and muted and euphemised. I take it the sentence describing the act is ‘The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted’ which is the opposite of explicit. Lawrence characteristically turns it into an elemental moment, fraught with Biblical overtones (the ‘agony’ of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane) which would have infuriated Christian traditionalists. 2) But barely is the sentence over before we are swept away on a great wind of gassy abstractions, off into paradise.

(When E.M. Forster does this, moves from the concrete moment up into one of his pagan or classical references, it is objectionable because it feels so limp and polite. By contrast I find Lawrence’s deployment of a similar trajectory, from the concrete to the abstract, convincing because he is so sincere. He really means it.)

Contemporary Edwardian readers would have been scandalised that Ursula feels absolutely no shame or regret about having pre-marital sex: ‘She was not ashamed — why should she be?’ But it’s worse than that because Lawrence portrays sex as the main way to become fully human, to complete yourself. And in so doing, achieve that annihilation of the external world which all his characters seek.

When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong… She had taken him, they had been together… But it was as if she had received another nature. She belonged to the eternal, changeless place into which they had leapt together… Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of artificial light. As they went up the steps of the foot-bridge over the railway, and met the train-passengers, she felt herself belonging to another world, she walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing her from them… This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and pride of night, never forsook her. She had never been more herself. (p.452)

Instead of being a dirty, shameful act which requires ages of guilt and atonement, Lawrence depicts unmarried sex as a complete liberation of her, a fortification, a making of her character, a giving of strength and inner certainty which will never leave her.

She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong — she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense: — she existed supremely. (p.452)

This is a powerfully non-conformist point of view, in our own times as much as Lawrence’s. Sex has completed her and now they both stand outside all conventional values, free and utterly independent.

They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence was like a possession upon them. They were possessed. Perfectly and supremely free they felt, proud beyond all question, and surpassing mortal conditions.

Holiday in London Anton proposes marriage (the decent thing) but Ursula, strong-headed as always, refuses. Instead they go for an extended holiday to London, where they live under false pretences as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky in a hotel in Piccadilly. Living in sin, as the Establishment would call it until the 1970s or ’80s, maybe still in some Christian or religious communities.

To France On a whim Ursula demands they go to France. They catch the train to Paris, which isn’t described at all, then she wants to go to Rouen, and the one-sentence description of the great cathedral for a moment revives the reader’s memory of Will and Anna in Lincoln cathedral. As their short break draws to an end she beings to draw apart from him.

Back in England she goes back to Nottingham and Anton is left bereft in London. He drinks at his club. He pesters her to get engaged. He has six months before his posting to India and wants to take her as a bride. He writes to her father, gets his permission, they are formally engaged, she gives him a ring.

Her final exams These have to be taken in London so she goes to stay in a pension near the British Museum. Anton sleeps with her. They go out west to a restaurant on the river near Richmond which is a disaster because Anton asks when she wants to be married and she says she doesn’t, and he starts crying, gets up and walks away crying, till she runs after him to dry his eyes and calm him down before they get a memorable cab back into London, getting out to walk through Hyde Park.

Failure and decision Ursula fails her third year exam. She does not get her BA. Anton is leaving for India in September. Ursula faces a decision: marry him and go to India to live the life of an army officer’s wife; or remain unmarried and become a spinster teacher. She consults Dorothy, pointing out she doesn’t believe in love, love isn’t the be-all and end-all, why shouldn’t she love many men? Dorothy points out how promiscuity ends badly. So, out of fear, she acquiesces and agrees to marry Anton.

The house party In August Anton invites her to a house party on the Lincolnshire coast being given by his great aunt, golf, tennis etc (p.476). Ursula is intimidated by all these worldly people, described with characteristic Lawrentian hyperbole.

She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. (p.476)

She and Anton go for walks beside the sea and have sex among the sand dunes. These scenes, right at the end of this huge novel, feel like the most shameless and permissive. We are repeatedly told how Anton sneaks out of the room he’s sharing with another man, sneaks down the big house’s corridors and into Ursula’s room ‘when it’s safe’.

She let him take her, and he seemed mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. (p.477)

But the point of these fornications is they slowly drive the pair apart until Ursula is utterly detached from them while Anton revels in his savage triumphs. When the time comes for her to catch a cab to the station they part as strangers. All this is interesting – the way you can have mad sex with someone and yet, on an emotional level, become more and more alienated. It’s a strange, uncanny thing which I think I’ve experienced myself and couldn’t be described by an author who politely omitted the entire sexual side of life.]

Anton marries Left bereft and empty, tortured by nights without the mad passion of Ursula, Anton acts decisively. He writes to the grown-up daughter of the colonel of his regiment, and proposes. Initially surprised, she replies, they correspond, she accepts, they are married in a fortnight, and Anton sails off to India a respectable married man. All this has a peculiar psych-sexual logic. It makes no rational sense but perfect emotional sense.

Ursula realises she’s pregnant Back at the (relatively new) family home in Beldover, Ursula repents her hardness to Anton. She realises she is pregnant with his child which transforms here view. She has an epiphany about the deep truth of motherhood, how it brings stability and identity. For the first time she realises the achievement of her mother, Anna, with her endless babies. She writes to Anton apologising, saying she will become his wife and come out to India, then waits for a reply. And waits…

The walk in the rain and the horses This extraordinary novel ends with an extraordinarily, hallucinatorily powerful scene. One windy rainy day Ursula goes for a walk across fields in the rain and has a terrifying encounter with a pack of horses, depicted as vast elemental, mythical forces. She becomes terrified and has to climb up a tree, through its branches and drop the other side of a hedge to escape them. After lying in a stupor against a tree in the rain, she finally makes it home and takes to her bed where she develops a fever that lasts for weeks.

Freedom In her delirium, she yearns for freedom from everything, society, the world, her lover, her parents, even from her own body.

If she could but extricate herself, if she could but disengage herself from feeling, from her body, from all the vast encumbrances of the world that was in contact with her, from her father, and her mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance. Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: ‘I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.’

The fundamental Lawrence position: denial of the entire world in order to achieve complete freedom.

The rainbow In her recovery she realises she is not pregnant. She gets a brisk cablegram from Anton telling her he’s married. She doesn’t care, he is part of the old life. She sits in the windowseat watching the world go by, the shabby colliers and constrained women and watches the new housing estates being built across the hillsides, ‘a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land’, and is sickened by the world, she dreams of a new life, of a new germination, of new seed waiting to burst into life. And suddenly she sees a rainbow forming in the rainy skies, a symbol of hope for a new life.

And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

God, what a magnificent, hallucinatory, overwhelming work of genius!

Memorable scenes

The description of Frank watching farm hands carrying fresh sides of beef from the slaughterhouse.

Tom taking a bouquet of daffodils to woo Lydia Lensky.

Married Tom Brangwen taking toddler Anna to the market with him, how she outbraves the other farmers.

Tom Brangwen takes toddler Anna out to the cowshed to stop her crying.

Young toddler Ursula running across the fields to meet her daddy, Will, from work.

Her father, Tom, drowning in the great flood.

Married Will, after an argument with Anna, picks up a young woman at the theatre and takes her to a dark park where they kiss and he is dazed with lust but she says no and breaks away.

Anton Skrebensky takes Ursula to a funfair in Derby. Weeks later, on his last day, they go to town then he brings her home in a crazy car ride.

Ursula thrashing the rat-like schoolboy Williams.

The walk through the snowy park when Maggie Schofield’s brother, Anthony, proposes to her. The snow and birds in the snow are beautifully done.

Anton and Ursula in Lincolnshire, she dancing in the waves, he caressing her body through her long Edwardian dress, sex in the sand dunes.

Lawrence and imperialism

Skrebensky is in the British Army, the Royal Engineers or Sappers, to be precise (p.474). When Ursula asks whether he enjoys the army Anton explains the need for an army and references the triumph of the Mahdi in Sudan. The Mahdi’s forces took Khartoum after a year-long siege and killed the British barrack, including General Gordon, on 26 January 1885. The British public clamoured for revenge but it was a long time coming and the extensive Mahdist state wasn’t overthrown by British forces until 1899. Ursula and Anton’s conversation takes place sometime during this long interval, 1885 to 1899.

I’ll quote Ursula and Anton’s dialogue in its entirety because it demonstrates Lawrence’s relentless focus on the personal. There may be wars and fighting and such, but they mean nothing next to his characters’ quest to find themselves and be themselves. Ursula is talking and Anton replies:

‘It seems just as much a game.’
‘If you call war a game.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s about the most serious business there is, fighting.’
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
‘Why is fighting more serious than anything else?’ she asked.
‘You either kill or get killed — and I suppose it is serious enough, killing.’
‘But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,’ she said.
He was silenced for a moment.
‘But the result matters,’ he said. ‘It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not.’
‘Not to you — nor me — we don’t care about Khartoum.’
‘You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.’
‘But I don’t want to live in the desert of Sahara — do you?’ she replied, laughing with antagonism.
‘I don’t — but we’ve got to back up those who do.’
‘Why have we?’
‘Where is the nation if we don’t?’
‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’
‘They might say they weren’t either.’
‘Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should still be myself,’ she asserted brilliantly.
‘You wouldn’t be yourself if there were no nation.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d just be a prey to everybody and anybody.’
‘How a prey?’
‘They’d come and take everything you’d got.’
‘Well, they couldn’t take much even then. I don’t care what they take. I’d rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire who gave me everything you can buy.’
‘That’s because you are a romanticist.’
‘Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go away, and people just living in the houses. It’s all so stiff and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really?’
‘I would fight for the nation.’
‘For all that, you aren’t the nation. What would you do for yourself?’
‘I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.’
‘But when it didn’t need your services in particular—when there is no fighting? What would you do then?
He was irritated.
‘I would do what everybody else does.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.’
The answer came in exasperation.
‘It seems to me,’ she answered, ‘as if you weren’t anybody — as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.’

You can see why they both become irritated with each other. There is no breaking down Ursula’s focus on the personal and her light mockery of Anton’s earnestness, which is mockery of his entire profession and commitment. You can pick different bits to make different points, but for me the key statement is Ursula saying: ‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’ It is a manifesto for complete irresponsibility. Whatever it is, other people will do it while we concentrate on living our best lives, discovering ourselves, expressing ourselves.

I thought that this dialogue happened any time during that 14 year period of Mahdist rule, as indicated above, until page 326 when, the narrative tells us, war is declared against the Boers i.e. 11 October 1899. This triggers a couple of pages repeating Anton’s belief that individual needs and feelings must be subordinated to the needs of the whole, the state, the community.

Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all.

Which is, of course, the precise opposite of Lawrence’s position. For Lawrence, the community or ‘civilisation’ is an abstract term which is derived from individuals but individuals are concrete entities while civilisation is a word. Later on, we are told Uncle Tom Brangwen’s similarly cavalier attitude.

About all the rest, he was oblivious, and entirely indifferent — even about the war. The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great adherent.

From what I know this was Lawrence’s essentially unpatriotic attitude to the Great War (when this book was published) and contributed to his bad reputation and unpopularity.

(Note: interesting that both classics, ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, contain fragments of imperialism. In ‘Howards End’ Mr Wilcox’s company made its fortune in West Africa – when Margaret visits his London office there’s a big map of West Africa on the wall – and the youngest son, Paul Wilcox, goes out to Nigeria as an imperial officer. Here in ‘The Rainbow’, Skrebensky is in the British Army and serves in the Boer War, remains in Africa for three more years, before being posted to India.)

Why Lawrence’s attitudes to sex, morality and Christianity got him into trouble

1. Lawrence’s sexual worldview

There’s not a lot of graphic sexual description – a quick check shows the word ‘breasts’, for example, only appears seven times in this huge text – but, as you’ve seen, Lawrence’s entire conception of human personality is based on this hyperbolic, super-exaggerated depiction of extremes of emotional and psychological and spiritual delirium and a crucial, central component of this is the vision of couples achieving an extraordinary physical and emotional communion. Sex sets them free.

The fact of their own consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they were free. (p.452)

This is described again and again, with Tom and Lydia, Will and Anna, Ursula and Anton, in rhapsodies of bodies meeting and achieving consummation, which are modelled on and continually hint at sexual intercourse.

Although sex nowhere appears explicitly, a hyper-sexualised frame of mind, page after page of rhapsodic descriptions of psycho-physical unions, underpins the entire book.

This explains why, just a few months after its publication, ‘The Rainbow’ was prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result, the book was banned and 1,011 copies were seized and burned. It became unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the United States.

2. Lawrence’s characters’ complete indifference to social morality

Arguably, though, just as important in the Establishment’s widespread criticism of the book as its sexualised worldview, is the complete indifference of all his characters to conventional morality, and often their active rejection of it. They are barely aware of it, it never hampers or controls their behaviour. Of Anna, he writes:

She adhered as little as he to the moral world. (p.235)

And she stands for all the main characters: frankly, none of them give a damn what society thinks. Here are Ursula and Anton:

She gave the complete lie to all conventional life, he and she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living lie to the dead whole which contained them.

Lawrence goes out of his way to explain how each successive couple lives life on their own terms, heedless of any outside comments or values. When young Tom Brangwen loses his virginity to a prostitute at a pub, and then has sex with a woman he’s picked up in a pub out in the woods, he shows no remorse or Christian guilt. Lawrence just explores the impact on his emotions.

After Ursula loses her virginity, Lawrence goes out of his way to say she was not ashamed or embarrassed, just as she had the lesbian affair without any thought of outside values or strictures. When Will Brangwen tries to have his way with a girl he’s picked up at the theatre, in a dark public park, all this is described frankly and openly with none of the Christian or moralising commentary the Edwardian world demanded.

And after Ursula and Anton become lovers, they go on holiday to London and live in sin, unmarried but masquerading as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky, which was not only scandalous but probably against the law. They don’t care, they revel in their blithe rejection of all society’s values.

If I was an Edwardian moralist, preaching the stern requirements of Empire and Duty and Christian morality, the uniform indifference of all the main characters to social norms and values would upset me just as much as the impassioned sexualised descriptions.

(A side note on this: Uncle Tom Brangwen the colliery manager’s open cynicism about ‘morality’ when Ursula and Winifred go to stay with him i.e. the working classes can’t afford morality and don’t care. They leave that sort of thing to their betters who can afford ‘morality’, p.349.)

3. Lawrence and Christianity

This is too big a subject for me. It would take a book to describe and disentangle because all the main characters have complex responses to Christian teachings which change and develop over time. Lawrence is not unsympathetic to Christianity’s message and cultural significance. He was raised on it and it shows. It’s important that Will Brangwen is made very sympathetic to Christian belief, maintains the church next door to Yew Cottage, repairs the organ, leads the choir and so on. But it is all done in the Lawrentian style i.e. in terms of rhapsodies and ecstasies, depicting a kind of utterly amoral, sensual and rhapsodic type of Christianity which must have horrified contemporary churchmen.

For example, take the extraordinary scene set in Lincoln Cathedral where Will experiences a deeply religious experience and yet it is couched in unmistakably sexualised terms, with the soaring arches coming together in great climaxes of fulfilment. Not only that, but at the climax of that chapter, in an extraordinary narrative manoeuvre, the narrator himself becomes Jesus for the last few pages (281 to 282).

Lawrence has a lot of time for the historical, cultural and spiritual importance of the church and its traditions but it is a profoundly Lawrentified Christianity. He is clearly soaked in the Biblical tradition and from time to time makes Biblical comparisons, mentioning Pisgah or David or Samuel. But these have a different flavour to his citations from Jesus, which are weighed and assessed by characters.

In particular, an entire book could be written about the changing, evolving attitude of Ursula to Christianity. In her, Lawrence describes in some detail the changing beliefs of a sensitive young girl, from girlhood, through adolescence and into young adulthood. At one point there’s a passage of several pages where Ursula considers one by one the main teachings of Jesus and relates them to her own life.

‘Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.’
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys?

This seems a fair thing for a novelist to do, to describe how their characters respond to Christian teaching and how that response changes as they grow and mature; something similar must have occurred in thousands of other coming-of-age novels. What most of them probably didn’t have so much is the earlier passages where the adolescent Ursula responds to Christian belief in purely sensual terms.

‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous yearning to respond to Christ. If she could go to him really, and lay her head on his breast, to have comfort, to be made much of, caressed like a child!

Recap

So I’d have thought it was not just 1) the deeply sexualised worldview which underpins the entire book and is present in so many passages, which offended contemporary readers, but also 2) the characters’ complete indifference to convention values and social morality, and 3) Lawrence’s having an ostensibly serious, earnest feel for Christian teachings but again and again converting these into his hyper-sensualised worldview. I’d have thought it was all three aspects of this deeply unconventional and aggressively non-conformist writer which offended the powers that be, triggered scathing reviews and landing him in court.

Can a male author write women characters?

In quick succession I’ve read ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, both long novels written by men with strong women as the central figures, extended depictions of the deepest thoughts, feelings, sensations of strong characterful women, written by men.

More than once, as I read Forster and Lawrence’s descriptions of the deepest thoughts and feelings of their women characters, I’ve wondered, ‘Is any of this true? Or likely?’ As a heterosexual man living with a wife and daughter my experience is of being continually bewildered by the lack of communication or understanding between man and woman. And yet many women readers, for over a century, have loved the characters of Margaret Schlegel and Ursula Brangwen.

This is too big a question for me to work through or settle, I’m just pointing out the oddity of reading such extended depictions of the most private, intimate thoughts and feelings of women, written by men.

Criticisms

Unrealistic

The obvious criticism is that this is ludicrously unlike how people in the real world think, behave or speak. The defence is, How do you know? How do any of us know how other people are feeling, especially at the deep, emotional level Lawrence is obsessed with depicting?

Boring

Another obvious criticism is that it’s boring – 500 pages of characters all living on a kind of high wire of emotional intensity, described in page after page of rhapsodic prose-poetry, get pretty exhausting. You’d have thought so – all I can say is I found it exhilarating right up to the end.

You can’t ignore the world

A stronger criticism is to do with the tension between the characters and the real world. In a nutshell, Lawrence characters try to ignore and keep the real world at bay. Again and again his couples create a private world, often centred in the intimacy of their bedrooms, extending at most to other rooms in their household, and completely ignore the outside world. This works perfectly for Tom Brangwen whose farm is a sort of microcosm. For a long time it works for Will and Anna who make Yew Cottage and the nearby church into their entire world. But it breaks down in the figure of Ursula who, as I’ve described, brings real physicality, along with history, and then the harsh contemporary world of work into the novel, in the blunt form of the horrible school she teaches at, then Nottingham College.

Lawrence kept reminding me of the Jacobean poet John Donne, whose love poems are devoted to making ‘one little room an everywhere’. His characters are so intensely solipsistic that even when they’re out and about, going about their business, even when Tom Brangwen goes into Ilkeston on market day or Will Brangwen commutes to his office in Nottingham or Ursula takes the train to Nottingham Grammar School, still, somehow, they take their ‘one little room’, their imaginative universe, with them.

The criticism is that this is not a sustainable attitude. The world is the world, demands that we take it seriously, if only to earn a living, at which point we have to interact with all manner of other people, and, generally, lots of them. All of that Lawrence tries to keep at bay.

Seen from this perspective, the novel reflects a kind of primal conflict between the one little room of the characters’ intensive loves and the wider world of jobs and people. Viewed thus it falls into two halves. In the first half, the book succeeds in inhabiting a kind of timeless country idyll, almost untouched by the outside world, in which Marsh Farm is a kind of universe of its own, scene of Tom’s single and then married life, just as Yew Cottage represents the world created by Will and Anna, and all their children.

In the second half the novel emerges, with Ursula, into the light of day, engaging far more fully with the real world in all its complexity, father Will getting his inspectorate, the girls commuting to grammar school, Ursula getting her ill-fated teaching job, the children, the other teachers and so on.

But it isn’t a complete transformation. Ursula still battles hard against the influence of the outside world. She loathes the redbrick town where Uncle Tom has gone to live and is appalled by the empty shadow lives lived by its broken coalminers, just as she is appalled by the lives of the poor children she teaches, and the hard hearts of the other school teachers.

In the first half the characters live in an ahistorical world which is like a timeless dream, which is why I liked it so much. In the second half, the Ursula half, the mix is more half and half, Ursula’s many moods and rhapsodic emotions are more kettled by the real world, which all the time she tries to hold at bay.

I imagine critics have discovered all kinds of dichotomies in the text. The obvious one is between men and women. Then another obvious one, between town and country. But I suggest yet another dichotomy which dominates the text, echoing the town and country one in places, but lying deeper: this is the dichotomy between the ‘little room world’ each of the characters creates and treasures, and their rejection of and resistance against the Outside World. Again and again the characters seek to ridicule, belittle and abolish the outside world. Here’s Ursula walking through Nottingham, with its bright street lights and busy trams and panting trains, rejecting the lot:

‘The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it? — nothing, just nothing.’

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or sat were only dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper ships in their motion. (pages 447 to 448)

And here’s Anton, from the same passage, rejecting the city and all its people:

He despised it all — it was all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good political speakers, their good, earnest women — all the time he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance! (p.449)

Lawrence characters don’t just criticise the external world, they seek to annihilate the outside world in order to let their inner worlds triumph, become the universe.

They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed. The world was a world of servants whom one civilly ignored. Wherever they went, they were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride of the senses.

They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest lived on a lower sphere.

She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent, at one’s ease. Vaguely, in a sort of silver light, she wandered at large and at ease. The bonds of the world were broken. This world of England had vanished away. (p.472)

But England hasn’t vanished, London hasn’t disappeared, the world of work and trains and trams resumes day after day, without respite.

Lawrence characters continually focus on their inner lives, feelings and emotions, scorning and rejecting almost everything about the outside world, and yet are still subject to its presence and pressure, which sometimes overwhelms them, but at other points they successfully obliterate. This, I think, is the fundamental dynamic driving this book.

The sequel

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which he considered titling ‘The Sisters’ and ‘The Wedding Ring’. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works (both about 500 pages long). In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the legal banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel.

Credit

‘The Rainbow’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1915 by Methuen and Co. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

D.H. Lawrence reviews

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by Simon on February 3, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel, Second World War

Tagged Alfred Brangwen, Ann Veronica, Anna Brangwen, Anna Lensky, Anthony Schofield, Anton Skrebensky, Beldover, Boer War, Bow Street Magistrates' Court, Brangwen family, Brinsley Street, British Army, British Empire, British Museum, Christianity, Cossethay, D.H. Lawrence, Derbyshire, Dialect, Dr Frankstone, E.M. Forster, Effie Brangwen, England, English literature, farming, Feminism, fiction, Frank Brangwen, Fred Brangwen, Garden of Gethsemane, Gillingham, Gordon of Khartoum, Great War, H.G. Wells, Howard's End, Hyde Park, Ilkeston, India, Jane Austen, John Donne, Khartoum, Kingston-on-Thames, Lincoln, Lincoln cathedral, love, Lydia Lensky, Maggie Schofield, Married love, Marsh Farm, Methuen, Miss Inger, Miss Winifred Inger, morality, Mr Harby, Mrs Alfred Brangwen, narrative, nature poetry, Nottingham, Nottingham Grammar School, Nottinghamshire, novel, obscenity, Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s London, Piccadilly, Polish Rebellion, prose style, Repetition, river Erewash, Royal Engineers, Salisbury, Salisbury Training College, sex, Southwell, St. Philip’s Church School, Sudan, suffragettism, Surrey, Swanwick, the Mahdi, The Rainbow, The Sisters, The Wedding Ring, Tilly, Tom Brangwen, Uncle Tom Brangwen, University College Nottingham, Ursula Brangwen, Wagner, Wiggleston, Will Brangwen, Willey Green, Women in Love, Yew Cottage

Posted by Simon on February 3, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/02/03/the-rainbow-d-h-lawrence/

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte: Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain @ Autograph ABP

This is a fabulous, complicated, interesting and inspiring exhibition. Although it occupies just one room (gallery 2, upstairs at Autograph ABP in Shoreditch) and consists of just eight photos, an installation and a video, it is overflowing with ideas, creative juxtapositions and wonderful imaginings.

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte is a Mexican-British artist and the installations in this room tackle a whole raft of contemporary issues around history, colonialism, imperial knowledge systems, but with a wit, intelligence and beauty I rarely find in contemporary art. I was dazzled, overwhelmed.

Installation view of ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing the eight photos on the side walls, the big one at the end, and the installation in the centre of the room

1. Systems of knowledge

The room contains three distinct works or set of works but first I think I need to define the elements from which Alcázar-Duarte has concocted these wonderful pieces. Running through them all is an interest amounting to an obsession with problems of knowledge:

How do we know what we know? How does anyone know what they know? Predominantly by relying on the knowledge systems and values of our society and culture. But how do we know these are correct? When one system exterminates another, how we can be confident the right one has triumphed? What happened to the world when European imperialists crushed, burned and destroyed native systems of knowledge and value? How many indigenous ways of seeing the world have been lost and at what cost?

What if we are all living inside a system of knowledge and meaning which is seriously awry, consenting to values which are destroying the world? In fact what if (as I believe) we are living amidst the fantastically complex wreckage of numerous value systems and theories of knowledge (paganism, various forms of Christianity – Catholicism, Anglicanism, Puritanism, non-conformity, Enlightenment atheism, industrial capitalism, industrial socialism, Liberalism, imperialism and so on), which partly explains the difficulty of thinking through any idea to a logical conclusion, given the clamour of opposing systems and ideas which spring up at every thought.

An enormous amount of the modern world, its banking and economic and transport systems, not to mention all the cultural fol-de-rol of the internet and social media, are all utterly reliant on new-ish digital technology – but what if this, also, in its way, is a delusion, an artificial set of systems and values imposed on a natural world in order to control and exploit it in new ways? And imposed on us, its users, to exploit us? What if it is as compromised as all previous systems of knowledge have turned out to be?

In the artist’s words:

‘How is it that the knowledge of my ancestors has been completely disassociated from contemporary knowledge systems?… I find myself wondering if there could be different approaches to tackling the important questions of our time?’

David

And before proceeding, a shout-out to the lovely Autograph visitor assistant, David. He and I spent about 45 minutes discussing the works, teasing out their elements to reach interpretations and conclusions neither of us could have made by ourselves. Half of the insights detailed below derive from him. Thank you, David.

2. Issues and ideas in Alcázar-Duarte’s works

1. Mayan ancestry

Mayan culture, language, religion and history are invoked by the works. The 8 photos are named after Mayan gods. The Mayans, in other words, had their own complex, integrated systems of knowledge, language, ritual and ceremony. To quote Wikipedia:

The Maya elite were literate, and developed a complex system of hieroglyphic writing. Theirs was the most advanced writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. The Maya recorded their history and ritual knowledge in screenfold books… In addition, a great many examples of Maya texts can be found on stelae and ceramics. The Maya developed a highly complex series of interlocking ritual calendars, and employed mathematics that included one of the earliest known instances of the explicit zero in human history.

2. Spanish conquest

Predictably, this was wiped out with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the mid-1500s. The Spanish adventurers wanted gold but the Spanish Catholic Church, more culturally curious, encountered a complete religion and knowledge system not previously known in Europe. Some wanted to record it but one of the most notorious actions of the Spanish religious authorities was to burn the Mayan holy books, in a conscious bid to extirpate this rival, blasphemous, ‘evil’, pagan value system.

This event is memorialised in the film installation here (see below).

3. Casta paintings

During the first centuries of the Spanish occupation there was a lot of ‘interbreeding’ which created new types of ethnicity. Like colonial authorities everywhere, the Spanish were keen to name and categorise all aspects of their conquered peoples and developed a thorough-going system of caste. According to the Wikipedia article on Casta:

Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an Indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African.

What Alcázar-Duarte is interested in is that the Spanish developed an entire genre of art devoted to the caste system, the so-called Casta paintings. These illustrated the different ‘types’ of ethnicity which had been created by the Spanish occupation and the system eventually became awesomely complicated.

The point for this exhibition is that Alcázar-Duarte has used these paintings as the basis for most of the works here, in two ways: 1) in all eight photos she has dressed up and is adopting a (usually quite florid) pose taken from a Casta painting 2) she has used a modern artificial intelligence programs to analyse the poses, reduce them to shapes and patterns, then extrapolate these patterns as dotted silver lines across the photos.

4. The language of flowers

Throughout history human cultures have assigned meanings and symbolism to flowers. In these photos Alcázar-Duarte wears masks made of flowers. Like everything else they have multiple meanings because they are both part of Spanish colonial flower symbolism, itself a sub-set of European systems of symbolism; but at the same time she has selected flowering plants which were important foodstuffs for Mayan bees (see section 10, below).

So just to recap, in this photo you can see Mónica Alcázar-Duarte: 1) standing in the woods (in fact, apparently, in a stand of Queen Anne’s lace); 2) wearing an old-fashioned outfit which I imagine is taken from the colonial-era Casta paintings; 3) holding her arms in a hieratic pose taken from a Casta paintings; 4) her face hidden by a mask of symbolic flowers; 5) while a system of silver dotted lines waves and wiggles across the image. Then 6) there’s the orange lines weaving in and out of the dotted lines, and I’ll explain those in section 7, below.

K’aaxal ja’ – Mayan Thunder deity’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (2021) © copyright Monica Alcazar-Duarte

The deep point is that these Casta paintings are yet another system of human categorisation, taxonomy of knowledge creation.

5. British ancestry and the Industrial Revolution

Alcázar-Duarte is half British. On the face of it, for once, the British Empire is not involved. The Mayan culture covered the territory of modern-day Guatemala and its suppression, as that of most of central America, was a solely Spanish affair.

But the works in the exhibition demonstrate a link nonetheless. This is because Britain is the country which invented the industrial revolution and, arguably, everything which derives from it, the complex system of values and practices which we still inhabit, including ideas like: industrial capitalism; mass production; universal timekeeping; the proletarianisation of work; the capitalist extraction of raw materials regardless of cost; the conquest of poor countries in order to exploit their mineral resources and expand our markets. And so on. See the writings of Karl Marx.

Alcázar-Duarte has an oblique approach to all this, because the eight photos are all taken in rural Derbyshire. Why, I asked myself. David and I discussed this for a bit. The wall labels clearly state that Derbyshire was chosen because its valleys and towns were the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, why not set the photos in ruined mills and workshops and warehouses?

6. Environmentalism

Because underneath the hi-tech gloss of the photos, installation and film there is a running thread of concern for the environment. Rereading the label I see it says all the photos are set among the ‘dying trees‘ of Derbyshire. Aha. So the idea of decay, death and ruin are here, but not in buildings, instead subtly symbolised by dead and dying trees.

And this decay is symbolic not only of the past, the industrial ruins which litter the British landscape (although most urban Victorian buildings have these days been converted into bougie apartments) but of the present and future because we are, of course, in the middle of a slow-motion holocaust of the natural world. It’s not as dramatic as cutting down the rainforests or oil spills in the Niger Delta, but the British countryside is slowly steadily becoming degraded. Once common types of trees are dying out, species of birds which used to be rare are now endangered. Our rivers and coasts are now all tainted by human faeces. Slowly the pan of water is heating up and we’re sitting like stupid frogs enjoying the warmth, oblivious of the disastrous future.

All the photos are, at first glance, warm and attractive, but contain these coded portents of future loss.

7. Digital technology and copper

And of course we are living through an age of rapid technological change, the Digital Age, kick-started by the spread of the internet during the late 1990s, ramped up by the rapid proliferation of smart phones in the Noughties, and then the wildfire spread of social media. Nowadays most people are wired into this grid (like me writing this blog and you reading it) and this has two consequences for Alcázar-Duarte: one is artistic but behind it stands a vast system of meaning.

Remember I pointed out the orange lines which weave across the photo I included? They are made of copper and they symbolise at least two things. For a start, the historical perspective: copper was one of the rare metals mined by the Spanish using native forced labour. On one level, the use of copper filaments sheets across all the works on display here points towards colonial atrocity.

But it’s copper cables which have historically linked the world, first in 19th century telegraph cables, then in the phone lines laid across developed nations. Nowadays it’s copper cable which carry digital technology and link all of us in a vast web of knowledge, information, data, exchange, commerce and everything else which happens on the web.

Alcázar-Duarte has used artificial intelligence programs (see below) to scan the faces of Casta paintings in order to create datasets and then used programs to develop the patterns which wave and shimmy across the face of her photos.

Thus the symbolism of the photos suggests that, even in the most beautiful and rural setting, we are still enmeshed in the digital world which, of course, more than any previous technology, has created its own taxonomies and systems of knowledge. Think of all the articles you read explaining how the content delivered to us is driven by algorithms based on our previous choices. The internet has created digital simulacra of ourselves, which have become so complex and, in many cases, so accurate, that they’re almost more lifelike than our ‘selves’.

Squabbling about Spanish Catholic ideology (systems of knowledge and belief) wiping out Mayan ideology seem bookish and obscurantist compared with where we are, and the wholesale creating of new digital systems of knowledge all around the world, part of which process is the stomping out of local and national differences as everyone in the world starts documenting their lives via Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or their Russia or Chinese equivalents and everyone, to some extent or other, validates their lives and selves online.

8. The fleur-de-lis

There’s an aspect of the flower symbolism I haven’t covered yet because it’s done in copper. This is her use of the motif of the Fleur-de-lis. For a thousand years the fleur-de-lis has been stylised into a visual motif which has variously denoted royalty, French cultural heritage, Christianity, light, defence, female virtue and much much more. As such it was used by the Spanish in their coats of armour and official insignia and so on.

But Alcázar-Duarte has, as usual, incorporated it into her work in such a way as to create ambiguity and new resonances. For the wall labels tell us that this shining image of monarchy and virtue and whatnot was also used as a brand which was burned into the skin of slaves as a punishment. This knowledge sheds a radical new light on the whole thing, and can’t help but make you shudder.

But there’s a third level because Alcázar-Duarte scatters the motif of the fleur-de-lis very freely across the photographs, rendered in the copper foil which, as we have seen, is already a complex symbol in itself, denoting the copper which was mined by forced labour but also, at the same time, a bang-up-to-date symbol of the digital world we all inhabit.

So, having worked it through, we can see that these copper renderings of fleur-de-lis bear a complex freight of historical, cultural, moral (and immoral) meanings, as they gaily cavort across the surface of her photos.

Close-up of one of the photos in ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing clouds of intricate fleurs-de-lis drawn onto the surface of the photograph in copper © copyright Monica Alcazar-Duarte

9. Artificial intelligence

But of course technology never sleeps, in fact it seems to be speeding forward at ever-increasing pace. We appear to have moved beyond the Digital Age, the Internet Age and the Social Media Age into the worrying new era of the Artificial Intelligence Age.

And here again we are seeing a ramping up, a taking to the next level, of the digital systems which already mesh and define us, because artificial intelligence (if such a thing really exists) has the ability to invent new systems of knowledge and taxonomy, originating in the systems we program into it, but with the potential to create entirely new worlds of information, definition and control.

And this, too, is not just touched on but central to Alcázar-Duarte’s art works. Because all the works on display here use artificial intelligence programs. I’ve mentioned that she used some kind of program to ‘read’ the gestures in the Casta paintings and extrapolate from them patterns, in this case of dotted silver lines, which loop across the beautiful photographs like pearl necklaces lacing across their surfaces.

‘Itzamna – Mayan Time Deity’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (2021) © copyright Monica Alcazar-Duarte

So to recap the story so far:

colonial flower symbolism mask
colonial dress
pose taken from a Casta painting
setting amid dying trees in the heartland of the Industrial Revolution
dotted lines generated by AI
copper lines symbolising the digital mesh we are all entangled in
copper fleurs-de-lis symbolising beauty and atrocity

10. Non-human systems of knowledge and organisation: bees

So far we have been isolating and defining the historically consecutive systems of knowledge which Alcázar-Duarte is interested in. But, to state the obvious, they have all so far been human. But what about the natural world? One of the big things we’ve learned over the past generation is that all kinds of living organisms have systems of communication which are far more subtle and far-reaching than previous generations of scientists imagined. Two areas where amazing discoveries have been made are in the methods of communication among trees and fungi.

Anyway, Alcázar-Duarte focuses in on one particular species which has long been famous for its advanced and complicated systems of organisation and communication, bees. To be more precise, and as you would expect, she chooses a species of bee which comes laden with historical and cultural symbolism.

This is Mexico’s endangered stingless bee, Xunan-Kaab, the Regal Lady bee. This was first cultivated in the Mayan civilisation 3,000 years ago and the Spanish conquerors discovered than its honey was considered (and still is) a delicacy.

So there’s a colonial legacy aspect here, but, characteristically, Alcázar-Duarte doesn’t rest on historical grievance but drives her vision into the future, in a film which points towards the completely alien, non-human forms of ‘knowledge’ which bees, like so many thousands of other species, possess and which humankind is only barely starting to understand.

The bee element (mostly captured in the film; see below) in a way sheds a new perspective back over the cavalcade of knowledge systems and technological advances which the works embody: because it suggests the possibility that all of them are wrong simply by virtue of being human, and thus, more often than not, exploitative and coercive.

What if all human values are erroneous and, despite giving us more knowledge and power than ever before in human history, what if modern, up-to-the-minute technology, knowledge and taxonomies are entertaining and distracting us while the planet goes to wrack and ruin around us? What if we’ve been wrong all along, and the fungi, the trees and the bees are much wiser than us?

3. The works

1. The photos

I’ve comprehensively covered the ingredients which make up the photos and what you can see in them, how dense and multi-layered they are with systems of meaning and symbolism, in sections above. As mentioned each one is named after – or assigned to – one of the major gods of the Mayan pantheon. And, since you ask, here’s a list:

Kukulkan, Mayan serpent deity
Ixchel, Mayan moon and birth deity
Itzamná, Mayan time deity
Kinich Ahau, Mayan sun deity
Ah-Muzen-Cab, Mayan deity of bees
Ah pu’uch, Mayan death deity
Yum Kaax, Mayan jungle deity
K’aaxal ja, Mayan thunder deity
Ek Chuaj, Mayan deity of Cacao

2. The film: ‘U K’ux Kaj/Heart of sky, Mayan god of storms’

While we’re on the subject of Mayan deities, the short film on show here is titled after one, ‘U K’ux Kaj / Heart of sky, Mayan god of storms’ (2023 to 2024). It’s only 8 minutes long. It was produced at Maní in the Yucatán Peninsula and why here? Because this is the town where, in 1562, the Spanish authorities in the form of the Church. assembled the largest ever collection of Mayan codices, books containing knowledge of the Maya religion, language and history, piled them up and burned them to ashes.

The film features slow shots of a wrecked building, the foundations of a long abandoned building surrounded by the lush greenery of the jungle, in which stands a statuesque woman clad from head to foot in a light flowing pink garment while a voiceover explains the events that took place here in Maya, the language of the first peoples. This is intercut with very slow close-ups of a native (non-white) hand slowly turning and rotating against a blue background.

But that’s not all. There are the bees. Remember I mentioned Mexico’s endangered stingless bee, Xunan-Kaab, the Regal Lady bee and how it was first cultivated in the Mayan civilisation 3,000 years ago? Well these bees also feature in the film, for the conquerors destroyed Mayan culture at one of the epicentres of Mayan apiculture, and the film includes references to the beekeeping skills, themselves rooted in a profound appreciation of the flora and fauna of the region, which the Spanish couldn’t extirpate.

3. The installation:

At the centre of the room is a new installation ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’. It consists of a sort of low ‘fence’ arranged on short posts in the shape of a hexagon, with one bar missing to allow visitors to enter the central space. Why a hexagon? Think about it. Because that is the shape of the cells in a beehive and, once again, the work incorporates aspects of Mayan bee lore.

Installation view of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, part of ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ at Autograph ABP. Photo by the author

What’s she’s done is combine three things: 1) using an algorithm inspired by the collective intelligence of bee colonies, Alcázar-Duarte 2) has merged the fleur-de-lis motif with 3) fragments from the Casta paintings. What this means in practice is you have no fewer than fifty-six artificial lilies, created by modern 3-printing technology, all gilded with the same copper leaf colour we saw in the photos and – here’s the kicker – each one contains a face or hand or pair of hands recreated from some of the Casta paintings we’ve heard so much about. Bees. Copper. Digital technology. Casta. Lost culture. All these themes come together in this fragile’ garden of technology, based on the multiple historical classification systems which I’ve outlined above, and given form by the latest digital technology.

You don’t really need to know any of this, or not much, to find the ‘face lilies’ haunting and poignant.

Installation view of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing the 3-D-printed face lilies. Photo by the author

4. Augmented reality

But that, of course, is not all. There is a bit of augmented reality included in the installation. On the floor at the centre of the broken hexagon is a pattern in black and white, apparently based on a map of the Yucatan area of modern-day Mexico, once part of Mayan territory.

Diagram on the floor of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, at Autograph ABP. Photo by the author

The visitor assistant (in my case, the lovely David) has a big ipad which he loans to you. As you walk into the hexagon and focus the camera of the ipad on this floor diagram, something happens. A spangly tree grows up out of the floor, outlined in the same ghostly white dots as cover the eight photographs.

Installation view of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing the ipad on whose screen appears the ghostly outline of a digital tree growing and spreading. Photo by the author

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. It seems to me an elaborate gimmick. It didn’t really add to my understanding or enjoyment of the photo, the film or the installation with its scary poignant face lilies. I saw it as an example of the cheapjack gimmicks people are trying to piggyback onto the digital world, including the numerous pointless headsets you can get which allow you to interact with the digital world (for example, Facebook’s ill-fated Meta VR headsets which were obviously going to be a failure before they were even release).

Possibly Alcázar-Duarte thinks this kind of thing is an exciting new development in digital art but two obvious points: 1) the visitor assistant only has one ipad so the entire thing is premised on only a tiny number of people ever experiencing it. 2) For me it is an extension of the deep question raised at the start which is, Might the entire digital world which everyone is helping to create, curate, and spread over the entire globe, might this digital matrix turn out to be the latest, most intrusive, most controlling and most delusory of all the systems of knowledge which Alcázar-Duarte has spent the exhibition investigating?

Conclusion

I can express what I want to say best by comparing this (relatively small) exhibition with the huge one currently at the Royal Academy, ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change‘. The RA show is, in effect, a major art institution washing its dirty laundry in public, owning up to its profound and multifarious links with the slave trade and then, once the trade was abolished, to its the enduring, institutional racism which ran through a lot of its work like a poisoned thread.

It’s a massive show full of loads of interesting and often beautiful art works but it feels like it is staggering under the weight of History and the burden of guilt which is why (apart from the horrors of some of the subject matter) it has an overall lowering and depressing effect.

By striking contrast, in this exhibition by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, inheritor of an oppressed people and a suppressed culture, it feels like she has owned her historical legacy, assimilated it, mastered it, mastered all the insidious legacies of history, come out and top and transformed it to her advantage. The exhibition at the Royal Academy is crushed under the weight of its historical legacy. Mónica Alcázar-Duarte has taken her cultural legacy and transformed it into something fascinating, strange and new. She has made History fly.

And now you can see why I started my review by saying how dazzled I was by her work’s complexity and interest and depth and control and mastery of its material, in awe of the complexity and beauty of Alcázar-Duarte’s vision. It’s FREE. Do your mind a favour and go see both this and the Wilfred Ukpong in Autograph’s other gallery space. They’re both blisteringly good, but Alcázar-Duarte’s has a depth and vision you genuinely don’t often come across.

Related reviews

The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009)
Spain and the Hispanic World @ the Royal Academy (April 2023)

More Autograph ABP reviews

More Autograph ABP reviews

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by Simon on March 29, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Latin America, Photography

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Posted by Simon on March 29, 2024

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The short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 to 1930) wrote some hundred and twenty short stories, excluding the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories and the 17 or so Brigadier Gerard stories. The excellent Société Sherlock Holmes de France website estimates the total number of all Conan Doyle’s fictions as 239, for he also wrote some 20 short novels. His first story was published when he was 20, the last when he was 70.

For boys

The overall affect is rip-roaring adventures for boys. None of them are really for adults, none of them have much psychology, much interiority, and the plots – though superficially gripping – are all wound up in a brisk few final paras. They anticipate hundreds of adventure movies and comics and graphic novels. They are short and punchy and great fun.

Reassuring

Even the horror and science fiction stories, though they ostensibly deal with the bizarre and grotesque, are ultimately reassuring because there is never any doubt as to the good sense and decency of the narrator(s). It is always a man and he is always soundly for the Empire and the natural fair play of the British, innately superior to all other nations and divinely ordained to rule vast tracts of the world and over their occasionally troublesome natives (and, quite often, over the great unwashed back here in Blighty).

Many of the stories exemplify that specially British sense of justice and fairmindedness which, in the mind of Imperialists, justified, indeed demanded, our Imperial role and which, similarly, justified the existence of a landed aristocracy with its Justices of the Peace, Lord Lieutenants and whatnot.

(For a thorough depiction of this deeply conservative worldview see my review of Andrew Young’s biography of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902.)

G.M. Young, historian of the Victorian era, writes about ‘the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity’, and Conan Doyle is a kind of quintessence of this, a charmingly unreflective, unquestioning, untroubled supporter of everything British.

Conan Doyle comes over as everyone’s favourite uncle, full of rattling good stories and anecdotes – but nobody for a minute takes any of his opinions seriously. He is Mr Chips.

Magazines

The stories were written for money to be published in the impressively wide variety of magazines which flourished in the 1890s. They were reprinted in numerous subsequent collections. One of the collections was titled Round the Fire Stories and that perfectly captures the Boy Scout ambience of so many of them.

The 1880s and 90s were a golden age of little magazines, created to feed the appetite of the middle and lower classes who had been taught to read as a result of the 1870 Education Act and its sequels, who, due to the wealth-creating effect of the Second Industrial Revolution, increasingly had the means to buy cheap titles.

Conan Doyle’s most effective outlet was the Strand magazine (established 1891), packed with articles, news and stories by leading writers of the day, all for the bargain price of one shilling in which he continued to publish to the end of his career.

These magazines demanded sensational storylines, glamorous protagonists, short, sharp doses of the mysterious, the macabre, the haunting or the humorous, and this well-defined format and sensation-seeking audience should be kept in mind when reading Conan Doyle’s stories.

Themes

Patriotism

‘I do not go so far as to say that the English are more honest than any other nation, but I have found them more expensive to buy.’ (The Lost Special)

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!’ said the captain, at last. ‘He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’ (The Slapping Sal)

No more striking example could be given of the long arm and steel hand of the British law than that within a few months this mixed crew, Sclavonian, negro, Manila men, Norwegian, Turk and Frenchman, gathered on the shore of the distant Argentine, were all brought face to face at the Central Criminal Court in the heart of London town. (The Tragedy of Flowery Land)

The British Empire

The colonies, especially Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, are the playground of white men – the justification of the Empire goes without saying i.e. that native peoples should have their land taken and their goods stolen doesn’t occur. See Doyle’s good-humoured and open-handed pamphlets justifying the Second Boer War, which simply don’t consider the possibility that the British might have been motivated solely by power politics and greed. In The Green Flag even mutinous Irish republicans, when faced with the fuzzy wuzzies, turn out to be the stoutest defenders of the British Empire.

London

‘…now gradually overtaken and surrounded by the red brick tentacles of the London octopus.’

London is always growing, throwing out ever-expanding avenues of redbrick terraces. The ones so many of us still live in to this day.

Women

Chivalry is the way the patriarchy, men, reassured themselves that they deserved to be in charge, that it was OK to keep women in powerless subjugation. Chivalry was men’s reply to women demanding the vote or control of their own lives: look, we defer to you in everything sweet ladies, why on earth would you need the vote?

‘Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both.’ (Doctors of Hoyland)

Women in Conan Doyle are tall, stately, and the most beautiful woman in England. Defending their ‘honour’ is the motivation for quite a few of the stories.

Diamonds

Diamonds seem to be the treasure and currency of choice, the bigger the better, and feature in his very first story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley as well as The Stone of Boxman’s Drift, Our Midnight Visitor, The Club-Footed Grocer.

Comedy

A constant throughout is Conan Doyle’s bluff good humour. Rising to overt comedy in the GP reminiscences and Brigadier Gerard stories, or just lying low, purring in the background. Constantly, pervasively there is his confidence and solidity, as ubiquitous as his splendid Edwardian moustache.

Crime

Crime of the most sensational and puzzling sort, of course, for example, The Story of the Lost Special or The Story of the Lost Watches.

Sensation

The stories were published in popular magazines which often contained sensational news or features. The stories take this tone from their surroundings. Nothing is subtle or underplayed. Everything is the most sensational scandal in London or England or the world.

Stanniford, the banker! I remembered the name at once. His flight from the country some seven years before had been one of the scandals and sensations of the time. (The Sealed Room)

Such was the position of affairs when, upon the evening of Monday, June 21st, there came a fresh development which changed what had been a mere village scandal into a tragedy which arrested the attention of the whole nation. (The Black Doctor)

It’s the same breathless sensationalism which characterises the Holmes stories and give them their delightful, thrilling sense of (utterly spurious) importance.

Scandal

Scandal and the fear of scandal is a motivation in these and the Holmes stories to a degree which is hard for us to understand. The reputation of upper middle class people was so important that they were willing to kill or die to preserve it. Just the hint that some misbehaviour in a former life abroad might revisit someone in respectable England causes numerous Conan Doyle protagonists to drop dead of horror. The Jew’s Breastplate is a particularly preposterous example of a story driven by this ludicrous sentiment.

Secret societies

Secret societies flourished in the 1880s and 1890s. They merged in the public mind with terrorist groups such as nihilists, anarchists, Fenians, even the violent suffragettes. They are routinely offered as explanations when some crime, especially a murder, goes unsolved and were so familiar a subject that Conan Doyle can make a comic story about a chemist who is mistakenly invited to give a lecture about dynamite to a group of nihilists.

Murder

Plenty of people get murdered and the murders are horrible and yet, in some difficult-to-define way, romantic and exciting. They upset the characters – but they don’t upset us, because they are so transparently the engines of a rattling good yarn.

Horror

The great horror trope of the pale ghastly face at the window occurs in scores of the stories – Uncle Jeremy’s Household, A Pastoral Horror – and melodramatic horror is one of the commonest emotions: ‘… and she realized, with a thrill of horror, that what she had taken to be a glove was the hand of a man, who was prostrate upon the floor.’

And now I come to that portion of my story which fills me even now with a shuddering horror when I think of it (The Striped Chest)

This could be the epigraph to many of the collected stories.

The 1880s

The Mystery of Sasassa Valley (September 1879)

‘Tell it? Oh, certainly; but it is a longish story and a very strange one; so fill up your glass again, and light another cigar, while I try to reel it off.’

The opening words sets the tone for the entire oeuvre. Jack Turnbull as an old man recalls how he and Lucky Tom Donahue, two young lawyers who packed in study to emigrate to South Africa, took their cue from a native tale of a haunted valley and discovered the weird glowing was given off not by demons but by diamonds!

The American’s Tale (December 1880)

“Deuced rum yarn!” said young Sinclair. Hard core Western redneck Jefferson Adams regales a posh English literary club with a tall tale about a feud in 1870s Arizona between cool Brit called Scott and short-fused Alabama Joe which ends with Joe being eaten alive by a giant Venus flytrap plant!

A Night Among the Nihilists (April 1881)

‘By the way,’ he remarked, as we smoked a cigar over our wine, ‘we should never have known you but for the English labels on your luggage.’

Robinson, a clerk in a corn merchant’s, is sent to Russia to open up trade with a major landowner. There is a mix-up and he is introduced into a secret society of Nihilists and saved just as he is rumbled, when the police burst in!

That Little Square Box (December 1881)

‘Dick was just the man I wanted; kindly and shrewd in his nature, and prompt in his actions, I should have no difficulty in telling him my suspicions, and could rely upon his sound sense to point out the best course to pursue. Since I was a little lad in the second form at Harrow, Dick had been my adviser and protector.’

The narrator is a nervous, solitary, literary type who, when he boards the ship from Boston to London, overhears two foreign men whispering about a secret box and when to set it off, thinks he is hearing anarchist/terrorists. In fact, they are releasing racing pigeons!

The Gully of Bluemansdyke: A True Colonial Story (December 1881)

‘The two men lapsed into silence for some time, moodily staring into the glow of the fire, and pulling at their short clays.’

New Zealand in the 1850s. A posse is formed to hunt down seven men who bushwhacked the young sons of two old-timers. A paean to the rugged spirit of the emigrant colonial trooper. Trooper Braxton and his capture of the Bluemansdyke murderers. The Australia stories are linked.

Bones, The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice (April 1882)

Comic tale. ‘

Boss, with the keen power of calculation which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent concentration.’

Another tale of derring-do in the New Zealand outback, but lightened with romance and humour, as two English miners, posh John ‘Boss’ Morgan and herculean Abe ‘Bones’ Durton save the life of pretty young Miss Carrie Sinclair who transforms the life of mining shanty Harvey’s Sluice.

‘With these few broken words the strangely assorted friends shook hands and looked lovingly into each other’s eyes.’

Reminiscent of Paint Your Wagon. Climaxes with a big shootout as the pals save Miss Sinclair from bushrangers.

Our Derby Sweepstakes (May 1882)

Two men compete for the hand of the fair Miss Eleanor Montague and decide the winner of the Derby will win her hand. Told in 1st person by Eleanor in an impersonation of a Victorian airhead.

That Veteran (September 1882)

Very amusing. A gentleman on a walking holiday in Wales pulls into an inn where he is regaled with stories of the Crimean War and a soldier’s career by one sergeant Turnbull until his head is swimming and he passes out. The soldier is a fake, a criminal, who has drugged him and stolen his watch.

My Friend the Murderer (December 1882)

A further New Zealand story: the prison doctor narrator (Conan Doyle/Watson) hears the life story of Maloney, the Bluemansdyke murderer who escaped the rope by turning queen’s evidence and had sundry adventures trying to escape revengers as he fled to Australia, England, France and then back to Oz where he finally dies in a bar brawl.

The Captain of the Polestar (January 1883)

‘Being an extract from the singular journal of John McAlister Ray, student of medicine’. He is the doctor on the Polestar which travels unwisely far into the northern, Arctic ice fields, supposedly in search of whales, but in fact driven by the haunted captain Nicholas Craigie who is pursuing the phantom of his murdered sweetheart which flees across the ice.

See an interesting article about the story’s origins in Conan Doyle’s actual Arctic voyage aboard the whaler Hope.

Gentlemanly Joe (March 1883)

The narrator is a young man working at a bank along with four other blue-bloods and the vulgar, jumped-up son of a bookie who they ironically name Gentlemanly Joe. They mercilessly rib him, especially when he falls in love with little Miss Cissy who is in fact engaged to one of them. Then comes the night of the great fire when the Newsome house burns down and it is big strong Gentlemanly Joe who breaks down the door and rescues Miss Cissy. Though she marries her fiancée she and the others will never forget Gentlemanly Joe!

The Winning Shot (July 1883)

A genuinely eerie supernatural story. One Octavius Gaster arrives at a charming upper class household in Dartmoor where Lottie Underwood is due to marry her sweetheart. He casts clouds over the gathering, defends spiritualism, has a newspaper cutting implicating him in black magic, falls in love with Lottie, which leads to a fight with Charley and he is evicted. Then the great shooting match between soldiers at locals where Gaster turns up and, at the climax of the match, appears to make Charley shoot through a phantasm of himself, killing himself. The spookiest thing is that after weeks of delirium Lottie is seen getting into a train with him.

Selecting a Ghost (December 1883)

Comic story told by a preposterously pretentious narrator Mr d’Odd, a successful grocer who has bought a big old house and now wants a ghost to go with it so he asks his brother-in-law in London to find one, resulting in a crook from London coming down and pretending to be a purveyor of ghosts who audition for him as he drinks some magic potion. When he awakes, he has of course been robbed.

The Silver Hatchet (December 1883)

‘On the 3rd of December 1861, Dr. Otto von Hopstein, Regius Professor of Comparative Anatomy of the University of Budapest, and Curator of the Academical Museum, was foully and brutally murdered within a stone-throw of the entrance to the college quadrangle.’

Then another victim is found. Then the friendship of two medical students who stumble across a silver-handled ax and, as he holds it, one goes homicidally mad. They are arrested it and the police inspector handling it also becomes homicidal. It is cursed:

‘Ever evil, never good, Reddened with a loved one’s blood.’

The inclusion of the students makes it seem like the short melodramatic plot of an Austrian operetta.

An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (December 1883)

Odd tone of tale about a short bespectacled Herr Doctor Otto von Spee to whom lots of accidents occur, the final one being kidnapped on Christmas Eve to deliver a lecture on gunpowder to a secret, presumably revolutionary, society which climaxes with some sample guncotton being detonated and Dr von Spee escaping.

J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement (January 1884)

Remarkably powerful fiction which claims to be a true account of what happened on the Marie Celeste (discovered drifting December 1873): the boat is slowly taken over by an evil half-caste – Mr. Septimius Goring – who along with two black sailors murders all the white crew and passengers, steering to a remote African settlement where he lords it over the natives instead of to Portugal. When the natives see the lucky charm an old slave gave him in America their superstitious reverence forces Goring to set Jephson adrift and so be picked up by a passing ship.

The Heiress of Glenmahowley (January 1884)

First person narrative. Bob Elliott and John Vereker are two unsuccessful lawyers marooned in a pub in the west of Ireland, passing the time being unpleasantly racist about the locals when the publican tells them of a local widow who is fabulously wealthy and her beautiful young daughter the heiress. Comedy as both men pretend not to be interested but next day climb over the big spiked wall, tumbling into the ditch and scrambling through briars to try to woo and win the beauty. It is made plain he English narrator is a pompous preening twerp.

The Blood-Stone Tragedy: A Druidical Story (February 1884)

The narrator begins to discuss the recent case of Williams the druid when the other man in the railway carriage says, Hush, don’t mention the word, it might wake my sleeping wife. And then proceeds to tell the story of how his then fiancée got lost in the mountains and fell into the clutches of a maniac who thinks he is a druid and plans to sacrifice her at midnight.

John Barrington Cowles (April 1884)

Longer and more psychologically penetrating than usual: the narrator’s friend falls for an ice cold beauty who is associated with two men who went mad, with cruelty to her dog, with tyranny over her mother, the daughter of a soldier in India who indulged in black magic. She beats a mesmerist at a public lecture and then, at the height of their engagement, she reveals something hideous to John Barrington Cowles. He raves that she is a werewolf. He goes down with brain fever and then is taken by the narrator to the Isle of May to recover. One night with a storm approaching, JBC hears her calling and runs to his death over a cliff.

The Cabman’s Story: the Mysteries of a London ‘Growler’ (May 1884)

A London cabbie tells a few of his colourful experiences like carrying a corpse, and carrying a forger. Nice ventriloquism of the cabbie, similar to My Friend The Murderer.

The Tragedians (August 1884)

Young Mr Barker the narrator enters the happy life of the Latour family in Paris, the widowed Madame, young Rose and brother Henry the would-be actor. In another part of town the famous actor and seducer of women, Lablas, wins at cards and plans the abduction of Rose. Barker and the brothers are walking home late when they encounter Lablas and accomplices abducting Rose. Fight. Broken up with the promise of a duel. And, as Henry had just got the role of Laertes opposite Hamlet, the duel is fought for real onstage in a scene which rises to real intensity and power.

Crabbe’s Practice (December 1884)

Pure comedy as two medical students cook up a fake drowning and electrical resuscitation to boost Crabbe’s practice.

The Man from Archangel (January 1885)

1st person narrator. Lonely young scientist John M’Vittie inherits money and a barren stretch of property in Scotland to which he moves to carry out his obscure experiments. One stormy night a schooner is shipwrecked on the shore and, out of character, he rows out and saves a beautiful young damsel who doesn’t speak English. Days later a tall, brown-faced, red-shirted, leather-booted pirate-type comes snooping claiming the woman is his bride. But she hates him. He and his crew kidnapped her from her wedding.

The Lonely Hampshire Cottage (May 1885)

3rd person. Very moody landlord John Ranter is advised by his doctor to retire and moves to a remote cottage where he beats his wife and is a byword. Then a strange sailor appears, walking to Southampton, in need of a bed for the night. Ranter offers it and slowly unravels that the stranger has struck it rich in California and bears dollars and gold. In the middle of the night he creeps up the stairs to murder him but is caught by the stranger who reveals himself as Ranter’s runaway son.

The Great Keinplatz Experiment (July 1885)

Professor von Baumgarten is an expert on mesmerism and spiritualism and carries out an experiment with his daughter’s fiancé and his student, Fritz von Hartmann, to see if souls leave the body during hypnosis. They do, but re-enter the wrong bodies, the professor’s soul entering the student’s body and vice versa, with hilarious consequences. Played for laughs, this reminded me of a Laurel and Hardy short.

The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch (December 1885)

1853 in this rough mining settlement 150 miles from Ballarat when a pastor arrives and wins over the miners by reading the Bible whenever they blaspheme. His campaign climaxes with the first ever sermon in the back of the pub where he proceeds to lock them in and reveal himself to be the noted bushranger Conky Jim while his partners rob the assay office of its entire haul of gold.

The Fate of the Evangeline (December 1885)

1st person. John Vincent Gibbs reveals the true story behind the loss of the ‘Evangeline’, namely that, rejected in love he had become an anchorite on a remote Scottish island when who should turn up but his erstwhile fiancée, mercenary father and calculating suitor, all of whom he overhears, before swimming out to the yacht Miss Lucy is sleeping aboard, cutting the painter and absconding with her. The schooner is run down in the Irish Sea by a freighter bound for Australia where they make a new life and, ultimately, write this ‘true account’. Quotes the Scotsman quoting Edgar Allen Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the necessity of eliminating the impossible etc.

Touch and Go: A Midshipman’s Story (April 1886)

1st person. It is 1868 and the narrator was a lad of 14 back on the banks of the river Clyde from his first journey as a seaman. He, his sister and cousin fool old Jock their minder and take a sailing boat out for a pleasure run alone and on impulse decide to sail to the mouth of the river where a storm pushes them out into the Irish Sea. Caught in heavy waters they are like to drown when they are rescued by a steam launch, dried and slept and dropped on the beach of the Isle of Man.

Cyprian Overbeck Wells : A Literary Mosaic (December 1886)

1st person. Humorous: the narrator Smith fancies himself a writer and after 10 years a clerk leaves his job to write a masterpiece, decides to read all English literature to give himself a boost: then one night hallucinates a tableful of the great novelists who proceed to tell a story in tag.

Uncle Jeremy’s Household (February 1887)

1st person. Long one. Student Hugh Lawrence goes to Dunklethwaite House in Yorkshire to stay with his friend John Thurston who is staying with old eccentric, poetry-obsessed Uncle Jeremy and the nanny, Miss Warrender, an attractive Indian young woman, orphan of a famous Indian chief, and Uncle J’s amanuensis, the tall creepy Copperthorne. Hugh becomes curious about the troubled relationship between secretary and nanny and puzzled by her sometimes savage demeanour until one night, he overhears their conversation in the greenhouse and discovers she is the daughter of a Thuggee leader, worships a goddess of murder, killed her adopted father’s daughter and the little girl Uncle J had adopted; and now they both plan to murder old Uncle J as the secretary has got himself named in the will. In the end a) Miss Warrender escapes having b) tasked a wandering Indian stranger in the village to murder Copperthorne.

The Stone of Boxman’s Drift (December 1887)

3rd person. The early 1870s in the Vaal valley near Kimberley, South Africa, barren land except for the diamonds and therefore wild prospectors from all over the world.

Headley Dean, with his crisp, neatly-trimmed hair and beard, his quick, glancing eyes, and his nervous, impulsive ways, had something of the Celt, both in his appearance and in his manner. Eager, active, energetic, he gave the impression of a man who must succeed in the world, but who might be a little unscrupulous in his methods of doing so. Big Bill, on the other hand, quiet, unimpressionable, and easy-going, with a sweeping yellow beard and open Saxon countenance, may have had a stronger and deeper nature than his partner, but was inferior to him in fertility of resource, and in decision of character in all the minor matters of life.

A morality tale whereby the Celt comes over selfish and greedy when they find a huge carbuncle. In their struggle it bounces into a bottomless pit. The dim Saxon reveals he had found it earlier and placed it for the Celt to discover, who is then covered in guilt and shame.

John Huxford’s Hiatus (June 1888)

John works in a cork factory in Brisport which is forced to close down by competition from south America. He is offered a job in Canada and leaves his weeping fiancée, promising to write. Within days of arriving he is attacked and beaten over the head in a low dive. He recovers but has amnesia. He rises by hard work to be a rich man and, upon hearing Devon voices down at the docks, suddenly remembers everything. He sails over the sea and is reunited with his sweetheart who has stayed true to him these past seventy years.

The 1890s

The Ring of Thoth (January 1890)

Third person. An Egyptologist in the Louvre stumbles upon a 4,000 year old Egyptian who discovered the secret of eternal life and now is going to end his life in the arms of his mummified love.

A Physiologist’s Wife (September 1890)

3rd person. Social comedy/satire in which cold-hearted rationalist and scientist Professor Ainslie Grey marries one Mrs. O’James. A younger colleague is due to marry his daughter, until he meets the new Mrs Grey and is stunned to realise she is his first wife from Australia who ran off and left him and was drowned in a shipwreck. In fact she didn’t take the boat but came to England to start a new life. Cold rationalist Professor tells them to go be happy and reunited. He dies of a broken heart.

A Pastoral Horror (December 1890)

1st person. Murder in a beautiful Alpine valley. An Englishman awaiting the outcome of a bankruptcy case in England has moved to the isolated village of Laden where he is witness to several gruesome murders of peasants. The one other educated man in the village is the curé, Father Verhagen. So imagine everyone’s horror when it turns out to be him, going insane.

The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (December 1890)

1st person. 1885. James Upperton moves to an isolated cottage on the Yorkshire Moors to study but becomes embroiled with several mysterious people, Miss Cameron, the Italianate beautiful young woman staying in the boarding house he puts up in, and the self-styled surgeon of Gaster Fell who is the only neighbour, who warns him to bolt his door at night and who he sees cruelly mistreating a wizened old man. One stormy night his front door creaks open and a ghastly evil figure is revealed by lightning. Chased off by another man. In the cold light of day it turns out the old man is clinically and violently insane and being ‘cared’ for by his son and daughter, the surgeon and mysterious young lady.

Our Midnight Visitor (February 1891)

1st person. A long atmospheric story set on the small isle of Uffan near Arran. The scenery and mood painted very well in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson. A stranger appears, a wealthy American calling himself Digby, dropped by his yacht who comes to stay with young MacDonald and his bad-tempered father. The narrator’s suspicions mount until a newspaper cutting reveals that Digby is Frenchman who has stolen a fabulous diamond and is on the run.

A Straggler of ’15 (March 1891)

A patriotic portrait of Corporal Gregory Brewster, last survivor of the battle of Waterloo. Superpatriotic and vivid description of working class Chatham. This was turned into a play, as describe in Andrew Lycett’s biography of Doyle.

The Voice of Science (March 1891)

3rd person. Drawing room comedy as Mrs Esdaile’s son Rupert takes advantage of the new ‘phonograph’ to record a message listing the conquests and cheating of his sister Rose’s fiancé, Captain Beesley, who mysteriously runs out the French windows and down the drive never to be seen again.

The Colonel’s Choice (July 1891)

Colonel Bolsover marries young Miss Hilda Thornton despite rumours and the attempt of friends to dissuade him. Several years of happiness follow but then Captain Tresillian appears from India and, in a confrontation scene, he reveals that he and Hilda were engaged but he was penniless. A fire breaks out at Melrose Lodge and the colonel saves his wife then nobly steps into the flames to give her a better life.

A Sordid Affair (November 1891)

A hymn to honest working women. Mrs Raby is trying hard to support her ex-drunk husband by dressmaking. She makes a beautiful dress for a posh client but her husband steals it, pawns it and gets blind drunk, forcing Mrs Raby to spend all her savings buying the original dress from its Bond Street shop in order to keep her promise to her client. Then she recovers her husband from the gutter and takes him home.

Oh, blind, angelic, foolish love of woman! Why should men demand a miracle while you remain upon earth?

A False Start (December 1891)

3rd person. Comedy about young Dr Horace Wilkinson who has several false starts of first patients including the gas man and an impoverished gypsy before he called quite by mistake to the house of the local millionaire. Turns out to be a comedy case of mistaken identity in which Wilkinson shines nobly.

Out of the Running (January 1892)

Pretty young Dolly, farmer’s daughter, has two suitors Adam and Elias and in a number of scenes we meet them and hear her mother’s opinion about which one to take. Dolly thinks it is Adam leaves a dog rose on her window sill every morning and so accepts him. There is an accident with the hayrick which crushes the orphan inarticulate farmhand Bill. Next morning, unable to walk, he crawls to her window to leave another rose sprig and is found there dead. Dolly distraught. Hardy territory.

The Great Brown-Pericord Motor (March 1892)

3rd person. Short, grotesque story of two inventors who fall out over a flying machine they’ve created. They fight and one is killed in the struggle. Pericord attaches Brown’s body to the machine and sends it off out to sea, then goes mad. ‘He walked swiftly down the stair and was quickly reabsorbed into the flood of comfortless clammy humanity which ebbed and flowed along the Strand.’

De Profundis (March 1892)

Strange and gruesome. Starts with a hymn to the British Empire and its insatiable need for British men. Then the tale of John Vansittart a planter from Ceylon who visits the narrator, goes staying with his friends, marries suddenly but just before departing comes down with smallpox. He sails early and is due to be met by his wife and friend at Falmouth; the ship goes on to Madeira and JV appears in a vision to the narrator out of the calm Atlantic waves…

A Regimental Scandal (May 1892)

A tale of our fine men in the Army, specifically rich Major Errington who tries to help Colonel Lovell when his shares crash by cheating against himself at cards – until it is revealed. Far from being a scandal this is a hymn to how jolly decent the British Army is.

A Question of Diplomacy (summer 1892)

Comedy. The Foreign Secretary, laid up with gout, is outwitted by his wife who arranges for his daughter’s fiancé to get a position in Tangiers and for the daughter to accompany him and for them to get married asap, all against the FS’s wishes.

Lot No.249 (September 1892)

At an old Oxford college a fat evil undergraduate has been conducting experiments, bringing a 4,000 year old mummy back to life, and increasingly using it to terrorise his enemies – before a steady young sporting chap steps in and stops it.

Jelland’s Voyage (November 1892)

Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy get into serious debt in a trading port in Japan, and steal the money from their employer who’s on a long trip. When he unexpectedly returns they steal more money to buy a yacht, which is then pursued by the irate employer until the men shoot themselves but their empty yacht is then carried by storm into the wastes of the Pacific.

The Los Amigos Fiasco (December 1892)

A very short light-hearted comic-horror piece about a town which tries to execute a man with electricity by increasing the voltage, but only succeed in giving him superhuman life.

The Green Flag (June 1893)

The Irish Question:

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the mad Joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades.

In faraway Sudan a British force is overcome by attacking dervishes, the square collapses, things are going badly, when the Republican leader Dennis Connolly unexpectedly rallies the Irish contingent and dies saving the day. Propaganda how even dissidents within rally to the Empire when faced with opponents from without.

The Slapping Sal (August 1893)

An 18th century yarn.

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!” said the captain, at last. “He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’

A British man o’war is struggling against a more powerful French ship but is saved by the mutineers of another British boat, the Slapping Sal and their fierce leader Hairy Hudson who turned out to be a true Brit.

The Case of Lady Sannox (November 1893)

A dashing surgeon is having an affair with a high society lady, is called late at night to operate on the wife of a Turkish merchant; he horribly disfigures the woman, then it is revealed it is his high-born lover and the merchant her husband who has taken a horrific revenge.

The Lord of Château Noir (July 1894)

During the Franco-Prussian War a French aristocrat terrorises a Prussian officer in vengeance for his dead son.

Round The Red Lamp (1894)

A collection 15 stories themed around medicine, the red lamp being the sign of a GP.

A Medical Document (October 1894)

Three old doctors – a GP, a surgeon and an alienist – sit around discussing eerie cases. There’s passing reference to the way popular fiction uses very rare or vague conditions (‘brain fever’) but rarely actually common diseases (typhoid). And how fiction rarely uses those outbreaks of vice which are so common. I think he’s talking about sex.

Behind the Times (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of an old-fashioned doctor way behind modern scientific times, but with a magical healing touch and bedside manner.

His First Operation (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of a young student attending his first operation and fainting.

The Third Generation (October 1894)

Seasoned Dr Horace Selby is visited by Sir Francis Norton who, it quickly transpires, is infected with syphilis. He explains the taint comes from his hard-living Regency grandfather. He is due to marry the following week. The doctor suggests creating a sudden reason to go abroad and cancel the nuptials. But next morning Dr Selby reads that the noble aristocrat has thrown himself under the wheels of a heavy dray and died, in order to spare the damsel and kill the hereditary taint. True Brit.

Sweethearts (October 1894)

The doctor in a seaside town meets an old man on a bench who wastes and declines over three consecutive days. Finally he reveals it is because he is waiting for his wife, his childhood sweetheart, to return. I wonder whether Conan Doyle’s readers found this sickly sweet, or lapped it up.

The Curse of Eve (October 1894)

The nondescript life of Robert Johnson, gentleman’s outfitter, is turned upside down when his wife begins her labour. He chase all over town for one doctor, and then again for a second opinion. After an all-night vigil, his son is delivered.

Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was still working out its dim and tragic destiny.

The Doctors of Hoyland (October 1894)

Dr James Ripley of Hoyland in Hampshire is astonished when a lady doctor moves to the town. Quickly she establishes herself a practice and ends up treating Ripley himself after he fractures his leg falling from a carriage. His initial sexist resistance to a female doctor is completely overcome by close experience of her ability and he inevitably falls in love with her. Thankfully, Conan Doyle foresees the utter hopelessness of such a resolution and has her remaining devoted to Science, departing for further education in Paris, leaving the country doctor sadder and wiser.

The Surgeon Talks (October 1894)

Like A Medical Document this consists of paragraph-long anecdotes: how they removed the ear from the wrong patient; how most people receive the diagnosis of impending death nobly etc. The woman who hides her cancer form her husband.

‘…Besides, [a doctor] is forced to be a good man. It is impossible for him to be anything else. How can a man spend his whole life in seeing suffering bravely borne and yet remain a hard or a vicious man? It is a noble, generous, kindly profession, and you youngsters have got to see that it remains so.’

The Parasite (December 1894)

‘He has to thank his phlegmatic Saxon temperament for it. I am black and Celtic, and this hag’s clutch is deep in my nerves.’

A Foreign Office Romance (December 1894)

Introduces the figure of the comically garrulous old Frenchman who would mutate into Brigadier Gerard. Here he is named Alphonse Lacour, assistant to the French ambassador who is finalising a treaty with the English Foreign Secretary when a messenger arrives to say the French have handed over Egypt i.e. lost their bargaining power; at which Alphonse kidnaps the messenger and drives him up and down in a carriage reciting the Koran until it is too late, the treaty is signed, and Alphonse flees back to France a national hero.

The Recollections of Captain Wilkie (January 1895)

On a train an experienced doctor carries out some Holmesian analysis of the man sitting opposite. He reveals himself to be a reformed professional thief and recounts a number of his adventures. The collection-of-anecdotes story.

The Three Correspondents (1896)

Incredibly Kiplingey. Three newspaper correspondents riding through the heat of Egypt to join the army. Racial stereotypes:

‘Mortimer was Saxon—slow, conscientious, and deliberate; Scott was Celtic—quick, happy-go-lucky, and brilliant. Mortimer was the more solid, Scott the more attractive. Mortimer was the deeper thinker, Scott the brighter talker.’

And Anerley the nube. They are attacked by four Arabs who they shoot, Anerley is wounded. But it is he who finds the Arabs’ camel and beats his colleagues back to the telegraph station to send a famous despatch to his paper.

Tales of the High Seas: I. The Governor of St. Kitt’s (January 1897)

Set in the early 18th century, time of pirates in the Caribbean and among all the pirates the most feared and savage is Captain Sharkey. Captain Scarrow of the ship Morning Star is told that: a) Sharkey is captured and due to hang next morning, b) ordered to take the governor of St Kitts back to London.

The governor is duly rowed out the next morning and off they set and he proves a jovial guest who can hold his liquor and tell a good yarn. Having crossed the Atlantic to Beachy Head he rips off his disguise to realise that he is Captain Sharkey, who had cut the governor’s throat and stolen his clothes! With his loyal mate he departs on the only seaworthy boat left and Scarrow watches them commandeer a fishing barque and disappear.

Tales of the High Seas: II. The Two Barques (March 1897)

Stephen Craddock, an American Puritan gone bad, volunteers to the governor of Kingston to lead an expedition to trap Sharkey when his boat is reported as drydocked on a remote island, with a similar boat painted to look the same. Doubles. Craddock and crew go hunting for him ashore for several days, then return to their own ship, only to find it is Sharkey’s own Happy Delivery. They imprison him and sail to Kingston where they are greeted as victorious heroes and are about to capture the governor and leading citizens, when heroic Craddock breaks free of his bonds, dives into the sea, and raises the alarm before being shot and drowned by Sharkey.

Tales of the High Seas: III. The Voyage of Copley Banks (May 1897)

Captain Sharkey murdered Copley Banks’s wife and two children. He plans his revenge, hiring a crew of wrong ‘uns and himself becoming a pirate then fast friends with Sharkey before tricking him aboard his ship, tying him to the muzzle of a gun and booby trapping it all with gunpowder. Boom! End of Captain Sharkey.

The Striped Chest (July 1897)

Captain Barclay and mate Allardyce go aboard a Portuguese barque which has foundered in a storm. It is abandoned except for a corpse they find. They carry to portable cargo aboard their ship, including an enormously heavy chest which has a note on saying, Don’t open. The second mate, overcome by greed, is discovered dead with his head cloven in like the corpse on the wreck. As the first mate goes to open it Captain Allardyce pulls him back just as a mechanism springs out to crush his head. This is a genuinely atmospheric and powerful story.

The Fiend of the Cooperage (October 1897)

Mr Meldrum, skipper of the private yacht The Cooperage, puts into an island off Sierra Leone where two Brits are maintaining a trading outpost (compare with Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands). The nautical terms and atmosphere of the island very well described. But something evil is haunting the island, scaring the negro servants, and stealing away a man every third day… Meldrum and Dr Spelling stay up all night in a tropical thunderstorm to find out what…

The New Catacomb (1898)

Two archaeologists in Rome, one of them a dashing bounder just returned from a failed elopement with an English girl. His colleague takes him at night to a new catacomb then traps him there; for he had loved the girl he had ‘ruined’.

The Confession (January 1898)

She looked down at the grating, and shrank in terror from the sight. A convulsed face was looking out at her, framed in that little square of oak. Two terrible eyes looked out of it—two eyes so full of hungry longing and hopeless despair that all the secret miseries of thirty years flashed into that one glance.

Very short. A Jesuit priest accidentally reunited with his long-lost love who has herself taken the veil, and they bemoan the doomed love affair which separated them.

The Story of the Beetle-Hunter (June 1898)

This and the following stories make a set in the Strand of longish, factual stories about mysterious crimes, Holmes stories without Holmes. An unemployed doctor answers an advert in the Standard and goes for an interview with Lord Linchfield who requires a strong man with a good knowledge of beetles. They go by train to Pangbourne to Delamere Court, home of tall eccentric beetle expert Sir Thomas Rossiter. In the middle of the night Rossiter sneaks into their bedroom and attacks the dummy figure in the bed. They are able to accost him and show that he is subject to mad fits, as his wife had claimed.

The Story of The Man with the Watches (July 1898)

A long puzzle concerning that could almost be a Holmes mystery. A man and lady enter a train to Manchester, having refused to enter a carriage with a bearded man smoking. At Manchester all three are gone, and a young man no-one can account for is found shot dead. The article describes the various theories of police detectives before quoting a long letter form one of the protagonists which explains what happened. It is one of Doyle’s favourite tropes, the ‘revenge from overseas’. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The King of the Foxes (July 1898)

The setting is a crew of old fox hunters telling yarns and one tells the story of Wat Danbury, whose doctor had told him to lay off alcohol before he began hallucinating, who goes an epic hunt, finally being the only rider left as he enters spooky woods to find himself confronted by a monster giant fox, the king of foxes, killing the hounds. He flees home and never touches a drop again.

The Story of The Lost Special (August 1898)

‘It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning, that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.’

A foreigner hires a special train from Liverpool to Manchester. it never arrives but vanishes into thin air. As in The Man with the Watches the story takes the form of an official report, collating the puzzling crime and then revealing the unriddling solution.

The Story of the Sealed Room (September 1898)

‘It was in the course of one of these aimless rambles that I first met Felix Stanniford, and so led up to what has been the most extraordinary adventure of my lifetime.’

Lawyer sees a young man nearly run over by a cab and helps him into his decayed big house. Discovers his father was the banker who ruined lots of people and disappeared. There is one room sealed shut which the absconded father wrote the son not to open till he was 21. A few months later the young man arrives at that age and the lawyer is present at the unsealing of the door where they find the father’s body, dead these seven years. He committed suicide in shame but didn’t want his poorly wife to know.

The Story of the Black Doctor (October 1898)

Another very detailed and forensic crime mystery which the narrator examines in detail, weighing all the evidence in the mysterious murder of the dark-skinned doctor of Bishop’s Crossing near Liverpool. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The Story of The Club-Footed Grocer (November 1898)

‘With every fresh incident I felt that I was moving in an atmosphere of mystery and peril…’

Stephen is invited by letter to visit his disreputable uncle who used to be a ship’s chandler in Stepney but was attacked and beaten and, when the attacker was gaoled, moved to a remote cottage in the Lake District. Thence Stephen goes to discover the pirate has been released from gaol, gathered his crew and is besieging the uncle. There’s a showdown in which the uncle leaps to his death and the stolen diamonds are – cunningly – discovered to be hidden in his club foot boot heel.

The Brazilian Cat (December 1898)

The protagonist visits his cousin, Everard King, at his country pile where he has housed his large collection of Brazilian flora and fauna, especially the prize exhibit, a huge black puma. Despite warnings from the collector’s wife, the protagonist allows himself to be locked in to the animal’s cage. He manages to survive and when evil Everard returns in the morning it is he and not the protagonist who is killed. And as a result, the protagonist inherits the land, house and title.

The Retirement of Signor Lambert (December 1898)

A grim and sadistic story in which, like The Case of Lady Sannox, a jealous husband arranges the disfigurement of a lover; in this case the strong-minded self-made man Sir William Sparter discovers a letter from his wife to a celebrated tenor, Signor Lambert. He teaches himself about neck anatomy, goes to the tenor’s house, chloroforms him and permanently damages his vocal cords.

A Shadow Before (December 1898)

‘Before’ meaning before the Franco-Prussian War. We are in Ireland, 1870, and City financier (i.e. gambler) John Worlington Doddshorse, ordered by his doctor to treat the stress of incipient bankruptcy, stumbles across the biggest horse fair in the land. He sees two different men in the hotel opening lengthy telegrams which appear to be in code. Then witnesses them paying way over the odds for the horses brought to sale. He telegrams his colleague in the City – sells all French and German stocks – there’s going to be a war.

The Story of The Japanned Box (January 1899)

The old crumbling Thorpe Place in the Malverns in the heart of England, where the narrator goes as tutor to the children of old weathered Sir John Bollamore. He was a hellraiser in his youth but reformed by his sweet wife who died. But the narrator hears a woman’s voice coming from his rooms, and so do the servants. He thinks Sir John a reprobate and hypocrite until he falls asleep in an alcove of the room (ah, that old ruse, like the narrator of The Ring of Thoth) and accidentally sees Sir John open and play a phonograph of his dying wife’s voice.

The Story of The Jew’s Breastplate (February 1899)

Preposterous chauvinist tosh in which a young curator is given responsibility for a museum of antiquities only to receive an anonymous letter warning that it might be burgled. Which it duly is the the urim and thurim breastplate of the ancient Hebrews tampered with. The narrator lies in wait with the young curator and they are astonished to discover it is the eminent archaeologist and former curator, Professor Andreas, who is damaging the breastplate. Why? Because his daughter is in love with a cad who had already stolen the jewels and the former curator is ham-fistedly tying to replace them in order to prevent a ‘scandal’, shame and disgrace.

The Story of B.24 (March 1899)

Cast entirely as a written submission to a court of appeal, it is from a burglar who is tempted to burgle the grand house of Lord Mannering but discovers Lady Mannering waiting to aid and abet him so furious is her hatred of her husband and she then proceeds to stab him to death and blame the burglar.

A True Story of the Tragedy of Flowery Land (March 1899)

Grim unrelenting account of the mutiny of rebellious Malays aboard a British barque, they murder the captain and captain’s brother and first mate and Chinaman, pilot the ship to South America, scuttle it and go ashore. Nonetheless they are betrayed and end up standing in a London court and are hanged.

The Story of the Latin Tutor aka The Usher of Lea House School (April 1899)

The narrator gets a job at a dodgy sounding school in Hampstead and is astonished at the rudeness with which the only other master treats the Head. Things come to a head when he hears them fighting and intrudes, only to discover the repellent master is the Head’s son!

The Story of The Brown Hand (May 1899)

After a successful career in India a surgeon retires to England where he is haunted by the ghost of an Indian whose hand he promised to keep safe after having to amputate it. the hand was lost in a fire. the ghostly Indian searches for it every night. The protagonist goes to a surgeon in the East End and obtains a hand recently amputated from an Indian sailor and returns with it to the country house where the ghostly Indian finds it, politely bows to the surgeon, and departs for ever. Which is why the protagonist is made the surgeon’s heir.

The Croxley Master (October to December 1899)

A long and very persuasive account of a poor but educated doctor’s assistant, starved of funds, who is persuaded to take part in a boxing match against the local champion. If the plot is contrived the writing conveys real atmosphere. Depiction of the mining community reminds me of DH Lawrence whose first novel, The White Peacock, was published only 12 years later.

‘Work was struck at one o’clock at the coal-pits and the iron-works, and the fight was arranged for three. From the Croxley Furnaces, from Wilson’s Coal-pits, from the Heartsease Mine, from the Dodd Mills, from the Leverworth Smelters the workmen came trooping, each with his fox-terrier or his lurcher at his heels. Warped with labour and twisted by toil, bent double by week-long work in the cramped coal galleries or half-blinded with years spent in front of white-hot fluid metal, these men still gilded their harsh and hopeless lives by their devotion to sport. It was their one relief, the only thing which could distract their minds from sordid surroundings, and give them an interest beyond the blackened circle which enclosed them. Literature, art, science, all these things were beyond their horizon; but the race, the football match, the cricket, the fight, these were things which they could understand, which they could speculate upon in advance and comment upon afterwards. Sometimes brutal, sometimes grotesque, the love of sport is still one of the great agencies which make for the happiness of our people. It lies very deeply in the springs of our nature, and when it has been educated out, a higher, more refined nature may be left, but it will not be of that robust British type which has left its mark so deeply on the world. Every one of these raddled workers, slouching with his dog at his heels to see something of the fight, was a true unit of his race.’

The 1900s

The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce (January 1900)

Sent out to command one of the front line garrisons in south Egypt against incursions by the Mahdists, young Joyce is taken in by a wandering Arab who they nearly torture to get him to speak and turns out to be the senior head of intelligence in disguise. They all joke about it over a fine meal then cigars. No irony when Doyle writes that, in riposte to the successes of fanatical Islam, ‘ten years of silent work in Cairo, and then all was ready, and it was time for civilisation to take a trip south once more, travelling as her wont is in an armoured train.’

Playing with Fire (March 1900)

Account of a séance including an artist who had been painting a unicorn. At the height of the séance the ectoplasm forms a unicorn which goes rampaging through the house!

An Impression of the Regency (August 1900)

A brief powerful vignette of the Prince Regent and his gross companions larking about when the mad George III bursts in, lowing like an animal, to appal them all.

The Leather Funnel (1902)

The narrator visits a friend in Paris who suggests objects which have witnessed powerful scenes affect our dreams. As an experiment the narrator sleeps with a battered leather funnel by his bed and has a nightmare of a woman being tried and then beginning a course of water torture. Screaming himself awake, his friend shows the historical documents proving he has witnessed the torture of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a real historical woman, a poisoner and murder!

There’s a hiatus in my list of Conan Doyle’s short stories between 1902 and 1908, as this is a period when he wrote and published six Brigadier Gerard stories as well as 13 Holmes stories (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere) and two novels, Waterloo and Sir Nigel. Then:

The Pot of Caviare (1908)

Set during the Boxer Rebellion (overlapped with the Boer War 1899 to 1901) in the absurd little legation of Ichau where a handful of white men and woman hold out against the encroaching fanatics. The American professor tells the German colonel about the last time he survived a siege because he was a doctor but he was forced to witness rape and torture. Never again. They both realise the relief column is delayed three days. Almost certainly they will be overrun. The colonel bids the professor put arsenic in the prized caviar. The others think it is a celebration dinner. They all eat it and die but, in is dying moments the professor hears the shots of the relief column which does arrive to save them!

The Silver Mirror (August 1908)

Classic diary format. A boring accountant is set a demanding task of combing 20 big ledgers to find evidence against a forger but, as the work intensifies he begins to feel he is going mad because he starts to see visions in the big old mirror he keeps on his side table. Each night the same scene emerges from a mist, assuming steadily clearer shape and showing some atrocity from remote history…

The Home-Coming (December 1909)

The first of the historical stories. 528 AD in Constantinople. 10 year old Leon is the daughter of the Empress Theodora, her love child who she abandoned at a monastery before rising to become consort to the great Emperor Justinian. When the old Abbot brings Leon to Constantinople the wicked eunuch sees his chance to control the Empress, and she must make a cruel choice…

The Lord of Falconbridge (August 1909)

1818. Tom Cribb has retired from prize fighting to become a publican but his son is in the fancy. A strange woman enters and offers the son £50 to train for a fight. Despite misgivings Tom Spring trains, then is instructed by the woman to catch a stagecoach to Tonbridge where he is taken to a remote country house. Here walks the brutish husband of the mystery woman and it is he she wishes Tom to fight, and so they fight, Tom eventually overcoming the brute. He is abandoned by the fair lady but rescued by the landlord of the pub he change coaches in, a devoted fan of the fancy.

The 1910s

The Terror of Blue John Gap (August 1910)

Dr John Hardcastle is on a rest cure in Derbyshire, and finds out the hard way that local lore about a monster inhabiting a deep ancient cavern is in fact true.

In 1911 Conan Doyle published a collection bringing together a number of historical tales, The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales. His interest in history is stimulating, even if he used the different settings for more or less the same tales of derring-do and romance. In the preface he wrote:

It has seemed to me that there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give, and fictitious characters and conversations might illustrate them; but none the less the actual drama of history and not the drama of invention should claim the attention of the reader. I have been tempted sometimes to try the effect upon a larger scale; but meanwhile these short sketches, portraying various crises in the story of the human race, are to be judged as experiments in that direction.

Fine words, but what they mean in practice is Doyle selects tableaux from the past which form an improving picture, in which noble sentiments may be vapoured forth. His ‘history’ stories are the equivalent of the luxuriously smug, hyper-realistic paintings of the late Victorian Olympians such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederick Leighton and Albert Moore. They are pre-Modern in that there is no threat to the narrator’s psyche, to his sturdy Edwardian values. No matter how gruesome or bloody the events described, they are profoundly unthreatening. This is their main selling point and appeal, as it is of the Holmes stories.

The link with contemporary art is also pointed by the way the stories are, mostly, illustrated by fine late-Victorian and Edwardian illustrators who depict a world of tall, manly men and lovely chaste Victorian women, threatened by stunted foreign or working class villains.

The Last Galley (November 1910)

146 BC. Boy scout tableau of the final Phoenician galley returning to Carthage after the fleet has been destroyed by Rome. Watched by Carthaginians from their terrace, one of them has met a strange prophetess in the Land of Tin (Cornwall) who predicted that the Romans would succeed Carthage as Queen of the Sea but that people form her own island would, in time, become rulers of a great empire. It ends with the Romans destroying and sowing salt into the ruins of Carthage, and with the same message as Kipling’s Islanders:

And they understood too late that it is the law of heaven that the world is given to the hardy and to the self-denying, whilst he who would escape the duties of manhood will soon be stripped of the pride, the wealth, and the power, which are the prizes which manhood brings.

Through the Mists I: The Coming of the Huns (November 1910)

Unusually detailed impression of the Christian heresies of the mid-fourth century, the Donatists, Arians and Trinitarians, is the backdrop to a Greek leaving his city to go be a hermit in the mountains beyond the river Dniester where, one day, he witnesses the arrival of the Huns. He kills a Hun who enters his cave then rides in a frenzy to the nearest Roman outpost to warn them.

Through the Mists II: The First Cargo (1910)

A Roman who’s remained behind in Britain writes to one who’s returned to Italy to describe his first meeting with the Saxons who British king Vortigern has invited to come and defend them. There is strong racial stereotyping as the narrator contrasts the strong, practical, democratic Saxons with the weak-minded, impetuous, unwarlike Britons (who will go on to become the Welsh and Cornish).

The Last of the Legions (December 1910)

The last Roman governor receives the order to leave (410) and then, ironically receives a deputation of Britons calling for independence. When they learn that they suddenly are going to become independent the beg the Romans to stay but it is too late. A parable on the various movements demanding independence from the British empire i.e. Ireland, India.

Through the Mists III: The Red Star (January 1911)

630 in Constantinople, three successful merchants reminisce, and one remembers being on a long caravan trail through Arabia when they meet the caravan of Mohammed and his followers and how he stays up all night listening to the charismatic leader. Interesting insight into how 1911 saw the Prophet.

The Contest (March 1911)

A comic story of Nero who set sail to Greece with an army of supporters to compete in singing competitions and is bested by a peasant goatherd who, however, is hustled off by his friends. A canny courtier tells Nero it was none other than the great god Pan in disguise which pleases the megalomaniac.

An Iconoclast (March 1911)

The year 92 in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in Rome. Senator Emilius Flaccus returns from boozing with the emperor to find his priceless statue has been damaged by a fanatical Christian. When the emperor arrives Flaccus decides to show him mercy and release Datus from his chains if he will only pray to the statue. But once again he attacks it, to the emperor’s amusement.

The Blighting of Sharkey (April 1911)

1720. Return to the antihero wicked pirate Jack Sharkey from the three Tales of the High Seas from 1897. The crew are mutinying when a rich merchantman is seen and boarded. They kill all the passengers except a fine Spanish maiden but back in Sharkey’s cabin she strokes them all with her leprous hand. This clinches the crew’s decision to mutiny and they set Sharkey and the girl adrift in an open boat.

Through the Veil (April 1911)

A decent married Scottish man and wife are shown round he recent excavations of a Roman fort and later that night they both dream powerfully that they are participants in the storming of the fort by Picts some 1800 years previously.

Giant Maximin (July 1911)

210 AD. The fate of the eight-foot giant Theckla told in three scenes: who sees the Roman Army marching by and runs down to join it, becoming the bodyguard of the Emperor; 25 years later who is there when the Army mutinies against the emperor Alexander and is unexpectedly proclaimed emperor himself; who fails to cultivate Rome and the politicians and loses the love of the army as it starves, and so is killed by the very legionaries who raised him to the purple.

One Crowded Hour (A Pirate Of The Land) (August 1911)

A light dash of social history. On the Eastbourne-Tunbridge road one Sunday night a masked man holds up three cars, taking the slim pickings of a don’t-you-know posh young chap, of two screechy actresses, and then he assaults a rich man in a big Daimler beating him insensible before stealing everything of value. Next morning the dashed young chap walks into the morning room of Sir Henry Hailworthy, of Walcot Old Place, Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and accuses him of being the highway robber. He admits it. The first two robberies were to disguise the third one, of a loathsome City spiv who diddled him out of his savings. The dashed young chap shakes his hand and agrees to forget about it. The title refers to the poem and the usually staid, respectable Deputy Lord Lieutenant and JP quotes it to express his excitement at pretending to be a highway robber.

Most of 1912 was taken up with the serialisation in the Strand of the great adventure novel, The Lost World.

The Fall of Lord Barrymore (December 1912)

Very entertaining story about London man about town Sir Charles Tregellis during the Regency. His sophisticated nephew appears and promises to do down his rival about town, the thuggish Lord Barrymore. And proceeds to do it. Told with great wit and gusto!

The spring of 1913 was taken up with the serialisation of the novella The Poison Belt.

How It Happened (September 1913)

Haunting short account of a man who is in an early car crash, recalling the lead-up to it and then, in the final sentences, realising he is dead!

Borrowed Scenes (September 1913)

A peculiar squib which seems to be satirising the style and the character of the contemporary author George Borrow.

The Horror of the Heights (November 1913)

Brilliantly gripping account of Captain Joyce-Armstrong, an airman who flies higher than any man before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters.

Danger! being the Log of Captain Sirius (July 1914)

A strange and disturbing story. The Captain Sirius works for a ‘small country’ which offends Britain which issues an ultimatum. He persuades his king to let him take his eight submarines and destroy British merchant navy, thus starving her. Predicts German tactics in both World Wars – but why was it published within days of the Great War breaking out?

As the Great War began, for September 1914 to May 1915, Conan Doyle was serialising the last of the four Sherlock Holmes novellas, the Valley of Fear.

The Prisoner’s Defence (January 1916)

An intense melodrama set in the present day, during the War. An officer is charged with murdering a beautiful woman but refuses to defend himself. Only a month later does he read out a prepared statement. He was in love with tall French blonde. On leave she pushed him so hard, he was indiscreet and mentioned an Allied offensive. Later he discovers she has written it all up and is posting it to her control: she is a German spy! They lock her in a room and he goes to alert the cops but on his return she tears past him on her motorbike (!). He shoots his revolver and kills her. The prisoner’s defence rests.

In 1917 Doyle published only one story, the Holmes spy tale His Last Bow.

Three of Them (April 1918)

After 3 and a half years of war, Conan Doyle could only bring himself to write five ‘stories’ which are really just chats between a kindly middle aged dad and his three adorable middle class children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. If you were in a cynical mood the tweeness of these little sketches might make you puke. They certainly capture a fantasy of professional upper middle class living. The titles sum them up. I. A Chat About Children, Snakes and Zebus (April). II. About cricket (April) III. Speculations [about God and the Devil] (July). IV. The Leatherskin Tribe (August). V. About Naughtiness and Frogs and Historical Pictures (December).

‘Oh, Daddy, come and talk about cricket!’ Daddy was pulled on the side of the bed, and the white figure dived between the sheets. ‘Yes; tell us about cwicket!’ came a cooing voice from the corner. Dimples was sitting up in his cot.

A Point of View (December 1918)

An odd short squib wherein an American journalist, staying at an English country house, writes a piece wondering why any self-respecting man would be a servant. At a later stay the valet this was based on takes exception and makes it very plain that servants have self-respect and deserve respect: ‘I wish you would make them understand that an English servant can give good and proper service and yet that he’s a human bein’ after all.’

The 1920s

The Bully of Brocas Court (November 1921)

1878. Bareknuckle fighting has been outlawed but special rings and gloves not come in. Sir Fred Milburn is despatched to London to find someone who can stand up to Farrier-Sergeant Burton. He chooses the London fighter Alf Stevens. They are returning to Luton when their coach is stopped by an oddly-dressed pair of men in a dark dell who challenge them to a fight. So they fight and it’s honours even when they hear a howling from the woods and clear off. Later, at an inn, the landlord says they were fighting the ghosts of Tom Hickman and Joe Rowe, both killed in a carriage accident in the 1820s.

The Nightmare Room (December 1921)

A room is all Victorian sumptuous rugs and curtains at one end, completely bare at the other, with a divan upon which a beautiful but immoral woman is lounging. In bursts her husband declaring he knows about her affair with young Douglas; she must choose one of them. In bursts Douglas and the husband produces poison: Let’s play cards for her, old man. All written in the highest pitch of melodrama with everyone gasping or turning white. In the final line the director steps forward and shouts, Cut! It was all a scene from a movie 🙂

The Lift (June 1922)

Flight-Commander Stangate with his sweetheart has a premonition of evil. They ascend the big funfair lift with a motley crew of civilians. It jams 500 feet up. The wild-eyed bearded engineer reveals, from the girders, that he has arranged for it to plummet to their deaths as a sign to this wicked generation. At the last minute Stangate kicks down the wooden walls of the lift and helps the passengers onto the girders just as the madmen jumps into it and the cable snaps!

The Centurion (October 1922)

[Being the fragment of a letter from Sulpicius Balbus, Legate of the Tenth Legion, to his uncle, Lucius Piso, in his villa near Baiæ, dated The Kalends of the month of Augustus in the year 824 of Rome.] wherein he witnesses the siege and fall of Jerusalem, 70AD, and then talks to a centurion who was there when Jesus was crucified.

A Point of Contact (October 1922)

Tyre. 1100BC. In the noble stereotypes to which we are accustomed, Doyle paints a tableau, the moment when King David of the Israelites, come to buy building material for Jerusalem, meets Odysseus, refitting his ship before sailing on to Troy.

One of these men was clearly by his face and demeanour a great chieftain. His strongly-marked features were those of a man who had led an adventurous life, and were suggestive of every virile quality from brave resolve to desperate execution. His broad, high brow and contemplative eyes showed that he was a man of wisdom as well as of valour.

Billy Bones (December 1922)

One more in the twee three of Them series about Daddy and his three adorable children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. Written as practical advice to daddies about how to create a Treasure Hunt.

The years 1923 to 1928 were taken up with a reduced turnover of 11 Sherlock Holmes stories and a couple of Professor Challenger novellas.

Spedegue’s Dropper (October 1928)

The Death Voyage (September 1929)

A long and detailed counterfactual in which Doyle envisions the Kaiser not abdicating but travelling to Kiel to inspire his Navy to set out for a final epic battle against the joint British and American fleets. What a strange story. And, like so many Great War fictions, it had to wait 11 years to be born.

The Last Resource (August 1930)

Kid Wilson is an American gangster in hiding in Soho. Late one night he tells his English crook hosts about an American town whose citizens form a committee, tell the chief of police to go away for a few days, round up all the crooks in town and machine gun them to death in a dance hall. It was only a dream 🙂 Interesting though, that that’s the kind of solution which people invoked to the out-of-control gangster violence of the Prohibition era.

The End of Devil Hawker (August 1930)

Back to the Regency period and another boxing story.

It was in these very rooms of Cribb that this little sketch of those days opens, where, as on a marionette stage, I would try to show you what manner of place it was and what manner of people walked London in those full-blooded, brutal and virile old days.

The Parish Magazine (1930)

Very funny light-hearted story set in the present day of a printer who is persuaded to publish an addendum to the parish magazine. Only when he receives letters from outraged local worthies and their lawyers does he actually read it and realise it is full of scandalous allegations and innuendoes about half the parish. After a sleepless night he is called to a mysterious meeting which turns out to be of the ‘Rotherheath Society of Bright Young People’ who have, in fact, not sent it out, fabricated the outraged letters to him, and did it all as a practical joke.

It is very fitting that his last published story should be one which continued to show the jovial good-humour which makes Conan Doyle such a good companion.

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by Simon on February 10, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Short stories

Tagged 1870 Education Act, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, A Chat About Children, A False Start, A Foreign Office Romance, A Medical Document, A Night Among the Nihilists, A Pastoral Horror, A Physiologist's Wife, A Point of Contact, A Point of View, A Question of Diplomacy, A Regimental Scandal, A Shadow Before, A Sordid Affair, A Straggler of '15, A True Story of the Tragedy of Flowery Land, Abe 'Bones' Durton, About cricket, About Naughtiness and Frogs and Historical Pictures, adventures for boys, Alabama Joe, Albert Moore, Alf Stevens, Allardyce, Alphonse Lacour, amputation, An Exciting Christmas Eve or My Lecture on Dynamite, An Iconoclast, An Impression of the Regency, Anarchists, ancient Britons, ancient Greece, ancient Hebrews, ancient Rome, Andrew Lycett, Arabia, Arctic, Arctic ice fields, Arians, Arran, Arthur Conan Doyle, Atlantic Ocean, Australia, Baby, Baiae, Ballarat, Bareknuckle fighting, Battle of Waterloo, Beachy Head, Behind the Times, Billy Bones, Bishop's Crossing, Bob Elliott, Boer War, Bond Street, Bones: The April Fool of Harvey's Sluice, Borrowed Scenes, Boston, Boxer Rebellion, Boy Scouts, Brigadier Gerard, Brigadier Gerard stories, Brisport, British Empire, bushrangers, c. 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Posted by Simon on February 10, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-short-stories-of-arthur-conan-doyle/

Tales of Unease by Arthur Conan Doyle

Conan Doyle packed an amazing variety of activities into one life (1859 to 1930): doctor, author, sea voyager, played cricket for the MCC, enlisted age 40 to serve in the Boer War, public campaigner against miscarriages of justice, bombarded the Ministry of Defence with technical and strategic innovations during the Boer War and Great War, and devoted his later years and sizable fortune to promoting Spiritualism.

His writing output was similarly prodigious and varied: novels, short stories, articles, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and in genres like history, detective, horror, melodrama, science fiction. What unites them all is the easy confidence of his style.

I prefer these stories of fantasy and the bizarre to the Sherlock Holmes tales, because Conan Doyle is less trapped by the iron format of ‘puzzle – investigation – explanation’ which constricts the detective stories. Doyle’s imagination is set free to roam widely.

The result is short tales of horror, fantasy, of the macabre, alive with vivid descriptions – melodramatic moments – nightmare scenes of the bizarre or grotesque – each one a little twilight zone.

Qualities

Speed

They move at great speed. Mises-en-scenes are quickly set up with comprehensive descriptions of places and peoples, and then we are plunged into the action.

Vivid

They are very vivid because a) the tales themselves are melodramatic ie designed to purvey extreme moments b) Conan Doyle has a great gift for the telling image. The detail of the undergraduate’s room lined with Egyptological specimens. The colour of the setting sun on the great Northern ice packs. The flicker of the candlelight in the Roman catacomb.

Uncanny

They are uncanny because they begin so solidly in the dull workaday before beginning to blur the boundaries. Because the characters of predominantly stuffy, bluff Edwardian types who would never be suspected of frivolity. What is so Conan Doyle about them is the comfiness of the original settings – the educated class, public school chaps, the world of Edwardian normality, pipe and clubs. So when the impossible occurs, we have already bought into the fictional world; their very bluffness lends credibility when the situation turns bizarre and extraordinary.

For example, the outlandish story of Sosra, the Egyptian who discovered the secret of immortality, is made credible (within the fiction) by the slow, detailed build-up of the character of Vansittart Smith, the mundane but steady Egyptologist, the typically bluff Victorian chap who narrates it. Because he is so reliable and believable, we suspend disbelief for the duration of the brief, fantastical story, which so clearly isn’t.

I’ve seen John Wyndham’s science fiction novels described as ‘cosy catastrophes’. Something similar applies to Conan Doyle whose prose never loses the calm confidence of a sturdy Victorian gentleman. Almost every story features cigars and a bottle of fine wine in front of a roaring fire: as readers we enjoy two levels of pleasure: the thrill of the often pretty hokey plot (although some of them do rise to a level of genuine hair-raising uncanniness) and the permanent bass note of the reassuring, unimaginative, pre-twentieth century worldview.

It was ten o’clock on a bright spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his arm-chair, his feet upon the fender, and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men – men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust.

No matter how grim the ostensible plots, all Conan Doyle’s oeuvre is fundamentally innocent, child-like, deeply comforting and reassuring.

Papers, fragments and accounts

The earliest novels (Defore, 1720s) used the forms of diaries, journals and, of course, letters, so there is nothing new in these short stories, 150 years later, using the same strategy – the tales frequently masquerade as journals, accounts, newspaper reports and so on. But there is something specific to horror stories of this period in using the fragment. Remember that the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886 i.e. one year before Holmes appears) climaxes with the letter from the doomed Jeckyl.

‘The following account was found among the papers of Dr James Hardcastle.’
The Horror of the Heights which includes the manuscript known as the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment
‘And such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular events which occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of ’84.’

A story basing itself on one of these forms has multiple purposes:

It adds authority and credibility; it lends the lustre of another (albeit fictional) name to validate the narrative.
It allows the text to be short and pithy, as diaries, journals and letters generally are, and to focus only on key moments.
It gets right inside the mind of the protagonist without limiting the narrative to a first person account. In other words, it allows the author to combine first person and 3rd person points of view, often itself part of the drama, often revealing the true state of affairs which lies behind all the weird occurrences (as in Jeckyll).
Precisely by being fragments, they can often end melodramatically, as in the last entry in Joyce-Armstrong’s until-then sober and careful account, which are words of horror scribbled in pencil and splashed with blood!

The stories

Conan Doyle wrote some 120 short stories, as well as the 56 Holmes stories, and numerous novels, plays and pamphlets. This selection of 15 tales was made by David Stuart Davies, a specialist in this genre and this period, who has compiled a number of similar selections for the bargain Wordsworth imprint.

The Ring of Thoth (1890)

An Egyptologist in the Louvre stumbles upon a 4,000 year old Egyptian who discovered the secret of eternal life and now is going to end his life in the arms of his mummified love.

The Lord of Château Noir (1894)

During the Franco-Prussian War a French aristocrat terrorises a Prussian officer in vengeance for his dead son.

The New Catacomb (1898)

The Case of Lady Sannox (1893)

The Brazilian Cat (1898)

The Brown Hand (1899)

The Horror of the Heights (1913)

Brilliant account of Captain Joyce-Armstrong, an airman who flies higher than any man before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters.

The Terror of Blue John Gap (1910)

Dr John Hardcastle is on a rest cure in Derbyshire, and finds out the hard way that local lore about a monster inhabiting a deep ancient cavern is in fact true.

The Captain of the Polestar (1890)

‘Being an extract from the singular journal of John McAlister Ray, student of medicine’. Doctor on the Polestar which travels unwisely far into the northern, Arctic ice fields, supposedly in search of whales, but in fact driven by the haunted captain Nicholas Craigie who is pursuing the phantom of his murdered sweetheart which flees across the ice.

How It Happened (1913)

Haunting short account of a man who is in an early car crash, recalling the lead-up to it and then, in the final sentences, realising he is dead!

Playing with Fire (1900)

Account of a séance including an artist who had been painting a unicorn. At the height of the séance the ectoplasm forms a unicorn which goes rampaging through the house!

The Leather Funnel (1902)

Lot No.249 (1892)

The Los Amigos Fiasco (1892)

A very short light-hearted comic-horror piece about a town which tries to execute a man with electricity by increasing the voltage, but only succeed in giving him superhuman life.

The Nightmare Room (1921)

By far the most overwritten piece in which a room is all Victorian sumptuous rugs and curtains at one end, completely bare at the other, with a divan upon which beautiful but immoral woman is lounging. In bursts her husband declaring he knows about her affair with young Douglas; she must choose one of them. In bursts Douglas and the husband produces poison: Let’s play cards for her, old man. All written in the highest pitch of melodrama with everyone gasping or turning white. In the final line the director steps forward and shouts, Cut! It was all a scene from a movie 🙂

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by Simon on January 12, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, Short stories

Tagged Abercrombie Smith, Arthur Conan Doyle, Boer War, Brazil, Captain Nicholas Craigie, catacombs, Conan Doyle, Daniel Defore, David Stuart Davies, Derbyshire, Dr James Hardcastle, Dr John Hardcastle, egyptology, Everard King, fantasy stories, Franco-Prussian War, Great War, grotesque, horror, horror stories, How It Happened, India, Jephro Hastie, John McAlister Ray, John Wyndham, Lot No.249, macabre, Oxford, Playing with Fire, Rome, science fiction, Sherlock Holmes, short stories, Sosra, spiritualism, Tales of Unease, The Brazilian Cat, The Brown Hand, The Captain of the Polestar, The Case of Lady Sannox, The Horror of the Heights, the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment, The Leather Funnel, The Lord of Château Noir, The Los Amigos Fiasco, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, The New Catacomb, The Nightmare Room, The Ring of Thoth, The Terror of Blue John Gap, the uncanny, Vansittart Smith

Posted by Simon on January 12, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/tales-of-unease-arthur-conan-doyle/

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Books & Boots

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Not I, But The Wind… by Frieda Lawrence (1935)

Ceaseless travelling

Domesticity

Arguments

Living intensely

Living with a genius

Patchwork

Mother

Lack of specificity about Lawrence’s writings

Chapters

1. Foreword

2. We Meet

3. Going Away Together

4. Isartal

Lawrence’s thriftiness

Frieda’s children

Lawrence’s changeableness

5. Walking to Italy

6. 1913 to 1914

Rejection

Frieda’s lack of social stuffiness

7. The War

8. Lawrence and My Mother

9. After the War

10. America

11. Going Back to Europe

12. Nearing the End

13. Conclusion

Thoughts

Credit

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The book’s worldview

Chapter 1. Sisters

Chapter 2. Shortlands

Chapter 3. Class-room

Chapter 4. Diver

Chapter 5. In the Train

Chapter 6. Crème de Menthe

Chapter 7. Totem

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Chapter 9. Coal-dust

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