St Mawr isn’t a place or a person, it’s the name of a horse, a great bay stallion, high spirited, dark and dangerous, whose image and personality dominate the narrative.
The story is set in 1923 (p.126). St Mawr is purchased by Mrs Witt, a rootless, wandering American millionaire widow (life story summarised on page 102), for her son-in-law Rico (real name Henry Carrington). She buys the horse for him so that he can join her and her daughter, Rico’s wife, Louise (Lou), on their rides along Rotten Row in London’s Hyde Park as part of London’s horse-riding upper class. Lou is American by passport but was sent to posh private schools across Europe with the result that she knows Rome better than any American city.
Louisiana family, moved down to Texas. And she was moderately rich, with no close relation except her mother. But she had been sent to school in France when she was twelve, and since she had finished school, she had drifted from Paris to Palermo, Biarritz to Vienna and back via Munich to London, then down again to Rome. Only fleeting trips to her America.
Rico is an Australian, son of a government official in Melbourne, who had been made a baronet. When his father dies, Rico becomes Sir Henry Carrington. Lou and Rico meet and fall in love in Italy, separate, their paths cross again at the resorts of the international rich. They make a handsome pair and so, despite misgivings, marry, and she becomes Lady Carrington, and they settle in a little house in Westminster (maybe not far from the town house of Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway). In other words, they belong to the privileged international jet set of the 1920s.
Satire
Lawrence starts out deeply satirising them. Mrs Witt is an ungrateful monster who hates every city she settles in (Rome, Paris, London) while Lou is portrayed as wilful and spoilt. But Lawrence’s greatest scorn is reserved for Rico because he is the type of privileged but talentless ‘artist’ who infested the international scene (and, I imagine, still does) and which Lawrence loathed.
He and Lou manage to become ‘fashionable’ in London, although his painting never does. It is symptomatic that a relatively short time into their marriage, Lawrence tells us the couple stop having sex, it’s just too exhausting! Now for Lawrence sex is an indicator of a person consummating themselves, their lives, and so the couple’s sexlessness indicates their sterility.
So that’s how it starts off. However, as the narrative progresses, against the odds, the two American women, Mrs Witt and Lou, emerge as the main protagonists and most sympathetic figures in the story.
Geronimo/Phoenix
Like a certain type of international rich widow, Mrs Witt has acquired an ethnic pet, Geronimo Trujillo, an American, son of a Mexican father and a Navajo Indian mother, from Arizona. Characteristically, Mrs Witt refuses to call him by his given name (Geronimo) but insists on calling him Phoenix. He possesses the stereotypical Indian silence and remoteness.
Part 1. England
Rotten Row
So that’s the setup. The narrative gets going with Mrs Witt established in London and deciding to dress up to the nines and ride a horse along Rotten Row, joining but at the same time mocking and scorning the native English upper classes, ‘her eyes became dagger-like as she watched the clipped, shorn, mincing young Englishmen.’
Mrs Witt quickly coerces her daughter to join her and their striking appearance makes the papers. At which point they round on Rico and bully him into joining them. Mrs Witt having only brought two horses from her place in the country, they need to buy him a horse.
Enter St Mawr
The ladies keep their horses in a stable in a mews in Westminster. Next time she’s there, the owner, old maid-ish Mr Saintsbury, tells Lou he has a new horse for sale, St Mawr, seven and a half years old. Lou is immediately attracted to the skittish, rather dangerous big horse. It is a symbol.
She was already half in love with St. Mawr. He was of such a lovely red-gold colour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him. But in his big black eyes there was a lurking afterthought. Something told her that the horse was not quite happy: that somewhere deep in his animal consciousness lived a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility. She realised that he was sensitive, in spite of his flaming, healthy strength, and nervous with a touchy uneasiness that might make him vindictive.
St Mawr as symbol of untamed life
In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Lawrence’s friend, biographer and critic Richard Aldington, says St Mawr is Lawrence. The other characters get the Lawrentian treatment (paragraphs describing their moods and feelings described in great detail, with much repetition of key words); but St Mawr is the only character which is worth that treatment.
The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her Awn world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question, while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of his inhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power.
What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question and containing a white blade of light like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn’t know. He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him.
And much more in the same vein. Lou very consciously contrasts her pretend artist husband, all ‘attitude’ i.e. fake, with the horse, whose demonic darkness is the real thing. The horse comes from another world, from Lawrence’s dark world of ancient gods.
She realised that St. Mawr drew his hot breaths in another world from Rico’s, from our world. Perhaps the old Greek horses had lived in St. Mawr’s world. And the old Greek heroes, even Hippolytus, had known it. With their strangely naked equine heads, and something of a snake in their way of looking round, and lifting their sensitive, dangerous muzzles, they moved in a prehistoric twilight where all things loomed phantasmagoric, all on one plane, sudden presences suddenly jutting out of the matrix. It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed.
It speaks to something deep in Lou.
When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her. And there she wanted to go.
Unlike all the posh rich happy people they know and which Lawrence cordially detests.
People, all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard let’s-be-happy world. Their wills were fixed like machines on happiness, or fun, or the-best-ever. This ghastly cheery-o! touch, that made all her blood go numb.
Events
Banned When out riding in the Park, Mrs Witt crowds St Mawr against a railing and he rears and nearly throws Rico. Rico scrambles off and Phoenix mounts and calms the horse. He terrified so many bystanders that the Park police are called and ban him from the Park.
Shropshire The Witt household decamp to Shropshire. Mrs Witt has rented a tall red-brick Georgian house looking onto a churchyard, and the dark, looming church, and moves there with Phoenix and her horses. Not far away live the Manbys, at Corrabach Hall, rich Australians returned to the old country and set up as squires, all in full blow. Rico had known them in Victoria: they were of good family: and the girls made a great fuss of him.
Outing Rico rides St Mawr over to the Manbys at Corrabach but has the devil of a time starting, getting properly saddled and then horse insists on going sideways onto the village pavements terrifying passersby before he sets off at a blistering almost out-of-control gallop.
Hair Mrs Witt insists on cutting Lewis’s hair.
Maiden name We learn that Mrs Witt’s maiden name is Rachel Fannière.
Men Mrs Will and Lou have a long conversation about the inadequacy of modern men. Mrs Witt admires men with mind but Lou thinks most modern thinking is just the clatter of knitting needles.
MRS WITT: ‘Man is wonderful because he is able to think.’
LOU: ‘But is he?’ cried Lou, with sudden exasperation. ‘Their thinking seems to me all so childish: like stringing the same beads over and over again. Ah, men! They and their thinking are all so paltry. How can you be impressed?’ (p.55)
And:
‘You’ve no idea how men just tire me out: even the very thought of them. You say they are too animal. But they’re not, mother. It’s the animal in them has gone perverse, or cringing, or humble, or domesticated, like dogs. I don’t know one single man who is a proud living animal.’
It’s symptomatic that, when Mrs Witt volunteered to work for the Ambulance Corps during the war she tended many men but never found a real man among them.
Pan The Manbys come over to visit along with a local artist, Cartwright. He looks a bit goatish and this leads into a 3-page discussion of the god Pan, the difference between the goat-satyr figure, the much huger great god Pan, whether he still exists anywhere, in anyone, how you can only see him if you know how to open your third eye.
Excursion The whole gang take to their horses on an excursion to ride to a local landmark, the Devil’s Chair. Once again, Rico has the devil of a time getting St Mawr saddled and then even mounting him, as the horse keeps shying and rearing. En route Mrs Witt is subjected to the conversation of Frederick Edwards, husband of one of the Manby girls, who subjects her to detailed descriptions of his fox hunting exploits, despite the latter’s broad American sarcasm.
The old England such as Lawrence thinks has all but been destroyed.
They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of a hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood flows still in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen. (p.71)
The war
They rode on slowly, up the steep rise of the wood, then down into a glade where ran a little railway built for hauling some mysterious mineral out of the hill in war-time, and now already abandoned. Even on this countryside the dead hand of the war lay like a corpse decomposing.
Feminism Lawrence assigns a little outburst of feminism to one of the silly Manby daughters, Flora. He equates feminism, suffragettism, women’s rights with the shallow, living-on-the-surface point of view, the partying and politics world, ignorant of the great dark depths which Lawrence values.
‘I think this is the best age there ever was for a girl to have a good time in. I read all through H. G. Wells’s History, and I shut it up and thanked my stars I live in nineteen-twenty odd, not in some other beastly date when a woman had to cringe before mouldy, domineering men.’
Lawrence’s mockery of this is just a subset of his contempt for the shiny happy people worldview prevalent in the 1920s, endless parties, endless entertainments, everyone having such fun. (Wells’s ‘Outline of History’ was published in 1919, so Flora is displaying how spiffingly up-to-date she is.)
The accident At the peak of this excursion, soon after they’ve reached the Devil’s Chair and looked out over the amazing view into Wales, St Mawr throws and falls on Rico, and when handsome young Edwards goes to rescue, kicks in the face.
Lou’s vision of evil Amid the general mayhem and panic, the others get the horse off Rico, Mrs Witt becomes practical American, checking his heart and bones, and Lou says she’ll ride back to the nearest farm to fetch some brandy.
On the way she has a massive 4-page-long vision of evil swamping the earth, and the only thing you can do is try to resist it. It’s a bewildering phantasmagoria of the earth swamped by great tides of evil in which Lawrence indicts both bolshevism and fascism but also the endless swarming rise in population and the West’s insistence on having a good time and partying while allowing the evil to spread corruption within. And against all this the individual must fight.
The individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself. Try to hold fast to the living thing, which destroys as it goes, but remains sweet. And in his soul fight, fight, fight to preserve that which is life in him from the ghastly kisses and poison-bites of the myriad evil ones. Retreat to the desert, and fight. But in his soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. The one passionate principle of creative being, which recognises the natural good, and has a sword for the swarms of evil. Fights, fights, fights to protect itself. But with itself, is strong and at peace.
Rico survives. He has some broken ribs and a crushed ankle. He wants St Mawr shot at once.
Servile humans versus animal freedom These feel like sermons, like Lawrence the preacher letting rip.
All the slaves of this world, accumulating their preparations for slavish vengeance, and then, when they have taken it, ready to drop back into servility. Freedom! Most slaves can’t be freed, no matter how you let them loose. Like domestic animals, they are, in the long run, more afraid of freedom than of masters: and freed by some generous master, they will at last crawl back to some mean boss, who will have no scruples about kicking them. Because, for them, far better kicks and servility than the hard, lonely responsibility of real freedom.
The wild animal is at every moment intensely self-disciplined, poised in the tension of self-defence, self-preservation and self-assertion. The moments of relaxation are rare and most carefully chosen. Even sleep is watchful, guarded, unrelaxing, the wild courage pitched one degree higher than the wild fear. Courage, the wild thing’s courage to maintain itself alone and living in the midst of a diverse universe.
Man and animals We are unworthy of the animals we have subdued, enslaved and murdered in their billions.
She felt a great animal sadness come from him. A strange animal atmosphere of sadness, that was vague and disseminated through the air, and made her feel as though she breathed grief. She breathed it into her breast, as if it were a great sigh down the ages, that passed into her breast. And she felt a great woe: the woe of human unworthiness. The race of men judged in the consciousness of the animals they have subdued, and there found unworthy, ignoble. Ignoble men, unworthy of the animals they have subjugated…
Underneath it all was grief, an unconscious, vague, pervading animal grief… The grief of the generous creature which sees all ends turning to the morass of ignoble living.
Eunuchs Lou is horrified when she learns that her husband plans to sell St Mawr to the Manbys who will have it gelded. Lawrences makes it symbolise the sterility of modern civilisation.
The mean cruelty of Mrs. Vyner’s humanitarianism, the barren cruelty of Flora Manby, the eunuch cruelty of Rico. Our whole eunuch civilisation, nasty-minded as eunuchs are, with their kind of sneaking, sterilising cruelty. (p.97)
Lou and her mother are at one in despising modern men. Improbably, they both rejoice that full-blooded animal horse kicked the pathetic Freddy Edwards in the face.
‘The funny thing is, mother, they think all their men with their bare faces or their little quotation-mark moustaches are so tremendously male. That fox-hunting one!’
‘I know it. Like little male motor-cars. Give him a little gas, and start him on the low gear, and away he goes: all his male gear rattling, like a cheap motor-car.’
‘I’m afraid I dislike men altogether, mother.’
‘You may, Louise.’ (p.98)
They go on to enjoy the joke that, instead of giving Miss Manby the horse to geld, they should give her Rico, saying he’s already been emasculated. In other words, Mrs Witt and her daughter bond over the accident, deciding it’s them against the world, against men, against horrible England, and they are going to save St Mawr.
Mrs Witt and Lewis ride to Merriton
So far I have omitted to mention that St Mawr came with a small, dapper, self-contained Welsh groom, Morgan Lewis. He broke St Mawr into riding in the Park and then came with the rest of the party to Shropshire. Here his uncanny self possession and his quietly confident way with the difficult horse intrigues both mother and daughter (Mrs Witt and Lou).
Now, the two women learn that Flora Manby has been to see Rico at the farm where he’s recovering from the riding accident (fascinatingly, he hasn’t been transferred to a hospital but is just under the supervision of the local doctor, no specialist bone consultants etc) and bought St Mawr from him.
When they hear this, the Witt women decide to save St Mawr and Mrs Witt, on impulse, has Lewis saddle up St Mawr and her own horse and the pair set off heading east towards friends of hers in Oxfordshire, at a fictional place called Merriton. (In the days before A roads and the tyranny of the car you could, apparently, ride across country in any direction you wanted.)
Anyway, this ride takes several days and, with wild improbability, tough old Mrs Witt (51) is described as falling in love with small dapper Lewis. In the middle of the ride they see a shooting star and this triggers a 2-page hymn by the usually taciturn Lewis to the pagan rural beliefs of his boyhood. And this in turn makes Mrs Witt see in him something different from all the other useless posh English fops she’s met in this country. So in a mad scene, as they trot along on their horses, she proposes to him. Obviously he is non-plussed, then thinks she is teasing him, then, when forced, explains that his body is a kind of temple and he won’t allow any woman near it, specially any woman who has treated him and thinks of him as a servant. Mrs Witt is irritated then angered by his presumption and they both forget it ever happened.
The reader doesn’t, though. It has the strange illogical logic of Lawrence’s dreamworld, maybe. Aldington, in his introduction, says the incident is introduced solely to humiliate Mrs Witt, who Lawrence created in order to mock, but it doesn’t read like that at all. As the book continues Mrs Witt and Lou emerge as the strong satirical ones, superior to the empty headedness of 1920s culture and English chaps and chapesses.
For a moment the ghost hangs over the whole narrative, of the possibility that Mrs Witt will inappropriately pair off with Lewis and Lou will marry strong silent Phoenix. It’s as if these are the conventional, semi Mills and Boon romantic clichés which Lawrence gestures towards, before soundly rejecting.
Flora, Rico and Lou
Meanwhile, back in Shropshire, it becomes ever clearer that Flora Manby loves Rico who is falling in love with her, too. We saw how Lou and Rico were alienated, how she thought him shallow. When the accident occurred it was Flora who shrieked and ran over to the man trapped under the horse rather than Lou. As he’s been recovering at the farm (Flints Farm) Flora has visited him every day, brought lovely flowers and books to read. She manages his transfer to a car and transport to the Manby family home where she’s decorated a room on the ground floor for him.
Lou watches all this with sardonic amusement, and writes her mother about it. In their correspondence the two American women finalise their plans. Lou and Phoenix, and Mrs Witt, Lewis and St Mawr, are to make their separate ways to London. Here they arrive in August 1923. Lou is dismayed to realise how small and dingy the apartment she lived in all that time feels tom her. Like a back number. There’s just time for the visit of a caricature bright young thing, The Honourable Laura Ridley, for Lawrence to mock.
2. America
Mrs Witt arranges for them to be taken across the Atlantic not on a liner (simply too ghastly!), instead as passengers on a merchant vessel bound for Galveston Texas. The party are Mrs Witt and Lou, Phoenix and Lewis and St Mawr.
Past the Isle of Wight, into the Channel, across the grey Atlantic and into the dazzling blue harbour of Havana, Cuba. After a few days on to Texas and a train to the ranch they own and whose profits fund their travels round Europe. But Lou finds it unreal, the cowboys and ranchers like figures from a Zane Grey novel or, worse, a silent movie. St Mawr fits in though visibly different from the long-legged Texan horses. Phoenix loves being back among Spanish and Indians to gossip with. We hear little of Lewis, marooned among the big Texans.
So Lou and Mrs Witt motor to San Antonio, catch a train to Santa Fe and hole up in a hotel where Mrs Witt announces she has made her last decisions and takes to her bed.
Lou and Phoenix ride out into the desert to check out a ranch a Mexican wants to sell. Phoenix drives. On the journey Lawrence tells us that Phoenix is blossoming in his territory and fantasises about taking a white woman lover to enjoy her money and for daytime respectability, but to have many Indian and Mexican mistresses in the night time. And he thinks Lou fancies him. This is a big mistake as Lou is absolutely fed up with men, and the world, and just wants to be left alone.
She understood now the meaning of the Vestal Virgins, the Virgins of the holy fire in the old temples. They were symbolic of herself, of woman weary of the embrace of incompetent men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment. Not these little, incompetent, childish self-opinionated men! Not these to touch her. (p.146)
Anyway, they arrive at the dusty, waterless primitive ranch, thousands of feet up a hill from the desert floor and Lou falls in love with it. Lawrence gives a massive 14-page description which mixes the stunning views and natural beauty with the story of the New England immigrants who built the place and struggled against the odds, and lack of water in summer and deep snowdrifts in winter, to raise a flock of goats, for their wool and goat’s cheese, and struggle and fail to make a go of it.
The intertwining of the old settlers’ doomed attempts to make a go of it, how they eventually gave up and sold out to a Mexican who has, in turn, failed to turn a profit, are skillfully blended with Lawrence’s astonishing powers of observation and description. He was a phenomenal travel writer, observing and turning into bombshells of beauty all his observations.
These last 20 pages of descriptions of the dusty desert, its cacti and pine trees and native flowers, make the starkest possible contrast with the story’s Shropshire section, particularly the horse excursion through the heather and ling and bilberries of the hillside towards Wales. Stepping right back from any characters and narrative, it’s a dazzling tale of two utterly different terrains.
So it is that Lou buys the ranch for $1,200 and persuades Mrs Witt to leave the hotel in Santa Fé and submit to being driven by Phoenix all the way out to this dusty outpost. The thing is, they won’t have to make a business of it, since they live on income from the ranch described earlier. it will simply be a retreat and Lou wants to retreat, to escape the world.
‘As far as people go, my heart is quite broken. And far as people go, I don’t want any more. I can’t stand any more. What heart I ever had for it – for life with people – is quite broken. I want to be alone, mother: with you here, and Phoenix perhaps to look after horses and drive a car. But I want to be by myself, really.’ (p.162)
The novella ends with a great speech by Lou explaining why she wants to escape men and their civilisation. The thought of going off in a taxi for cheap sex nauseates her. If she does have anything to do with a man again it will because of spiritual affinity. Meanwhile, she will live in the desert, pure and alone.
‘There’s something else even that loves me and wants me. I can’t tell you what it is. It’s a spirit. And it’s here, on this ranch. It’s here, in this landscape. It’s something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don’t know what it is, definitely. It’s something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it’s something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It’s something to do with wild America. And it’s something to do with me. It’s a mission, if you like. I am imbecile enough for that! – But it’s my mission to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I’ve come! Now I’m here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. – And that’s how it is. And neither Rico nor Phoenix nor anybody else really matters to me. They are in the world’s back-yard. And I am here, right deep in America, where there’s a wild spirit wants me, a wild spirit more than men. And it doesn’t want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am, with a deep nature aware deep down of my sex. It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.’
And that’s how this strange, visionary novella ends. The two obvious points are that 1) right at the end this strong independent woman can only define herself against men, again and again, rather than in her own right. 2) Where’s St Mawr? I thought he was a symbol of life and freedom and the dark reality underlying the shallow tinsel of civilisation and yet, as soon as the team reach America, he disappears, and the last twenty pages of the book are this Hymn to the Desert.
Themes
Hatred of the modern world – ‘A great complicated tangle of nonentities ravelled in nothingness.’
Hatred of modern England, so cramped and nailed down.
The two American women stood high at the window, overlooking the wet, close, hedged-and-fenced English landscape. Everything enclosed, enclosed, to stifling. The very apples on the trees looked so shut in, it was impossible to imagine any speck of ‘Knowledge’ lurking inside them. Good to eat, good to cook, good even for show. But the wild sap of untameable and inexhaustible knowledge–no! Bred out of them. Geldings, even the apples.
High in the sky a star seemed to be walking. It was an aeroplane with a light. Its buzz rattled above. Not a space, not a speck of this country that wasn’t humanised, occupied by the human claim. Not even the sky. (p.109)
Hatred of the 1920s party mindset.
I felt I couldn’t sit there at luncheon with that bright, youthful company, and hear about their tennis and their polo and their hunting and have their flirtatiousness making me sick.
People, all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard let’s-be-happy world. Their wills were fixed like machines on happiness, or fun, or the-best-ever. This ghastly cheery-o! touch, that made all her blood go numb.
I feel in the minority. It’s an awful thought, to think that most all the young people in the world are like this: so bright and cheerful, and sporting, and so brimming with libido. How awful! (p.121)
Hatred of what civilisation has done i.e. emasculate men and destroy the natural world.
Mrs. Witt thought she could detect the scent of furnace smoke, or factory smoke. But then she always said that of the English air: it was never quite free of the smell of smoke, coal smoke.
The darkness was never dark. It shook with the concussion of many invisible lights, lights of towns, villages, mines, factories, furnaces, squatting in the valleys and behind all the hills.
Great porpoises rolled and leaped, running in front of the ship in the clear water, diving, travelling in perfect motion, straight, with the tip of the ship touching the tip of their tails, then rolling over, corkscrewing, and showing their bellies as they went. Marvellous! The marvellous beauty and fascination of natural wild things! The horror of man’s unnatural life, his heaped-up civilisation! (p.135)
Hatred of modern men or men in general.
‘At the bottom of all men is the same,’ she said to herself: ‘an empty, male conceit of themselves.’
‘Isn’t it extraordinary,’ Laura continued, ‘that you never get a really perfectly satisfactory animal! There’s always something wrong. And in men too. Isn’t it curious? there’s always something – something wrong – or something missing.’ (p.131)
‘I can’t take those men seriously. I can’t fool round with them, or fool myself about them. I can’t and I won’t fool myself any more, mother, especially about men. They don’t count.’ (p.163)
‘I don’t hate men because they’re men, as nuns do. I dislike them because they’re not men enough: babies, and playboys, and poor things showing off all the time, even to themselves. I don’t say I’m any better. I only wish, with all my soul, that some men were bigger and stronger and deeper than I am…’ (p.164)
Hatred of the continent.
Soon, the ship steering for Santander, there was the coast of France, the rocks twinkling like some magic world. The magic world! And back of it, that post-war Paris, which Lou knew only too well, and which depressed her so thoroughly. Or that post-war Monte Carlo, the Riviera still more depressing even than Paris. No, no one must land, even on magic coasts. Else you found yourself in a railway station and a centre of civilisation in five minutes. (p.133)
Lawrence on film
Notable how Lawrence invokes analogies to film and cinema when describing the Texas ranch where our gang arrive and Lou’s sense of how empty and rootless it is.
It was all so queer: so crude, so rough, so easy, so artificially civilised, and so meaningless. Lou could not get over the feeling that it all meant nothing. There were no roots of reality at all. No consciousness below the surface, no meaning in anything save the obvious, the blatantly obvious. It was like life enacted in a mirror. Visually, it was wildly vital. But there was nothing behind it. Or like a cinematograph: flat shapes, exactly like men, but without any substance of reality, rapidly rattling away with talk, emotions, activity, all in the flat, nothing behind it. No deeper consciousness at all. So it seemed to her.
One moved from dream to dream, from phantasm to phantasm.
But at least, this Texan life, if it had no bowels, no vitals, at least it could not prey on one’s own vitals. It was this much better than Europe.
Lewis was silent, and rather piqued. St. Mawr had already made advances to the boss’s long-legged, arched-necked glossy-maned Texan mare. And the boss was pleased.
What a world!
Mrs. Witt eyed it all shrewdly. But she failed to participate. Lou was a bit scared at the emptiness of it all, and the queer, phantasmal self-consciousness. Cowboys just as self-conscious as Rico, far more sentimental, inwardly vague and unreal. Cowboys that went after their cows in black Ford motorcars: and who self-consciously saw Lady Carrington falling to them, as elegant young ladies from the East fall to the noble cowboy of the films, or in Zane Grey. It was all film-psychology.
At the same time, these boys led a hard, hard life, often dangerous and gruesome. Nevertheless, inwardly they were self-conscious film heroes.
(p.137)
Women protagonists
I’m struck by the way that story after story is about women, takes a woman or women for its leading protagonists, takes the women’s point of view. I’m struck by how these authors write at vast length about women, women’s emotions and feelings and perspectives, make women the leading figures, the deepest and most sympathetic characters.
- The Rainbow – Anna, Ursula
- The Ladybird – Lady Daphne
- The Fox – Ellen March
- St Mawr – Rachel and Louise Witt
- The Plumed Serpent – Kate Leslie
All these female protagonists and yet you don’t have to read far to come across Lawrence’s fundamentally sexist, male point of view.
Credit
‘St Mawr’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in 1925. Page references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition, where it is packaged with ‘The Virgin and The Gipsy’.
Books & Boots 