‘It might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season—I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.’
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
‘I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s—’
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
‘He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.’
(Baby Warren and Dick Diver chatting in ‘Tender Is The Night’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book 2, chapter 21)
‘Your generation,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘is a mess.’
(The Green Hat, chapter 3)
She suspected they might be thinking she was going to more than powder her nose. They were, she was, who cared?
(chapter 4)
She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel.
(chapter 4)
‘The Marches are never let off anything…’
(The sense of doom clinging round twins Iris and Gerald March, a phrase often repeated)
She [Billee Ponthéveque, a cocotte] never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach.
(The blasé attitude to sex and drugs which helped make the book notorious; chapter 7)
‘Why is every one so awful these days!’
(poor Venice Pollen, wailing the eternal wail; chapter 7)
I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.
(One of hundreds of passages where the narrator adulates the protagonist, Iris Storm; chapter 9)
‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was the publishing sensation of 1924, making its author famous overnight, quickly becoming a touchpoint for the culture, going on to be referenced in contemporary newspapers, magazines and other fictions for the next decade and more, as epitomising the spirit of the day and the year.
It more or less invented the concept of the heedlessly hedonistic bright young things of London. More specifically, it crystallised and defined the idea of the new woman about town, smartly dressed, comfortably off, defying conventions (wearing short skirts, bobbing her hair, smoking!). The heroine in question is Iris Storm, wearer of the green hat in question, fast driver of a Hispano-Suiza motor car and breaker of men’s hearts.
Michael Arlen
The most striking thing about the author of this quintessentially English comedy is that he wasn’t English at all, but a Bulgarian of Armenian descent. He was born Dikran Sarkis Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria to an Armenian merchant family. In 1892, his family moved to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after fleeing Turkish persecutions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In Plovdiv, Arlen’s father set up an import-export business and a few years later, he moved his family to England. It was here that young Dikran went to school and was raised speaking posh English, before enrolling at Edinburgh University.
During the Great War Dikran was regarded with suspicion as Bulgaria was allied to Germany and Austria. He gravitated to London and fell in with other conscientious objectors and outsiders. He began writing essays and article for the New Age magazine, and took to signing them Michael Arlen to allay the xenophobia his real name aroused.
During the 1920s Arlen rented rooms opposite ‘The Grapes’ public house in Shepherd Market, then a bohemian Mayfair address. He used Shepherd Market as the setting for the novel. Here’s Shepherd Market on Google Maps. In 1920 he became infatuated with one of the leading socialites of her day, the brilliant and charismatic Nancy Cunard, and she is the inspiration for Iris Storm.
It is, then, as you can see, a strongly autobiographical novel, but with the central character exaggerated for sensational effect.
‘The Green Hat’ made Arlen famous and rich. He enjoyed dressing smartly, driving round London in a yellow Rolls Royce (precursor to John Lennon’s white Rolls Royce forty years later), hobnobbing with other celebrities. He regularly travelled to the United States to work on plays and films. He was understandably nervous about writing a follow-up to his big hit and, indeed, none of his subsequent novels were nearly as successful but he was, until his death in 1956, famous for being famous.
Chapter 1. The Green Hat
Introducing the narrator and Iris Storm
It is the summer of 1922. The story is a first-person narrative told in a breezily facetious style by a well-educated, posh but poor man about town. He lives in a crappy flat above a sordid alleyway in Mayfair’s Shepherd’s market and takes us into his confidence with various arch and self-conscious narrative comments, which hark back to Victorian storytelling.
It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins…
He has just got back to his flat after a party when the front doorbell rings. It is a woman wearing a fashionable small green hat pulled down over her eyes, come to visit her brother, Gerald March, who lives in the flat above the narrator.
As he lets her into the ramshackle house, the narrator is dazzled by her beauty and self possession, by her striking car, a big yellow Hispano-Suiza, by the panache of her green hat, by her small face and dancing auburn hair. He notices she is wearing a large green emerald ring on the third finger of her right hand. He comes to notice that she has tiger-tawny hair and a husky voice. Unfortunately, when they get to the door of Gerald’s flat they see that he is blind drunk.
After the first few pages you realise it is going to overflow with infatuated descriptions of the charismatic Iris. Rhapsodies. A love letter.
She stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfreluches, who know how to stand carelessly.
About her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of many adventures.
The magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.
It seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.
One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.
She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular,
She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.
She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?—as someone who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours.
She wasn’t that ghastly thing called ‘Bohemian’, she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called ‘society’, ‘county’, upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not.
One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.
She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about…
Arlen isn’t afraid to deploy shamelessly poetic prose:
White she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams.
She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world.
Anyway, they look into Gerald’s room long enough to realise he has passed out drunk again. The narrator explains that his binges go on for three days. Iris introduces herself, Iris Storm, Mrs Storm, and explains that she and Gerald are twins, born within the same hour 29 years ago. They come from a posh landed family, the Marches, which has fallen on hard times.
I could somehow ‘cope with’ my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat…
Gerald is ‘absurdly shy’, can’t cope with life hence the alcoholism. She spends most of her time abroad, which she explains why she hasn’t seen her brother for ten years. But he’s drunk and after a bit of chat and explaining these facts, they leave the drunken brother, Iris bitterly commenting that ‘the Marches are never let off anything…’ which becomes a refrain through the book.
On the way back down she suddenly drops into his room asking for a glass of water. The narrator is embarrassed because he is moving out of the place next day and his belongings are scattered all over the floor. She picks up various books, we discover that the narrator is (alas) a writer, and they have some literary chat (she thinks D.H. Lawrence is ‘nice’) which seems terribly dated and irrelevant, for example about the quality of ‘vulgarity’. Then they’re talking about ‘the Jews’ and their love of luxury which leads into a consideration of Chesterton, his Catholicism and blowing on about beer and Britain. Very dated, almost at times incomprehensible.
But the conversation is just filler while he observes and studies the woman he has already become besotted by:
The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are.
She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains.
She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself.
Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair.
More information is revealed, such as Iris has been married two times, both dead. Second husband, Captain Storm, won a Victoria Cross in the Great War but a year later was murdered by Sinn Feiners in Ireland.
There’s a knock at the door and it’s the local policeman on his beat and worried about an unusual car parked in the alley. The narrator reassures him, but when he returns to his flat, discovers Iris has gone into his bedroom and fallen asleep on the bed. He studies her beauty intently, sitting in a chair smoking till dawn. At which point she awakes, puts on some powder and the famous hat, and departs.
Her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself.
Wow! He is hooked.
Chapter 2. The Cavalier Of Low Creatures
Profiling Iris’s twin brother, [the alcoholic] Gerald March
The book very heavily uses the old thriller trick of saying ‘But one was to learn later…’, ‘As I found out later…’, ‘That was to come much later…’ and most ominously of all, ‘But now I’ll never know what she was thinking’, ‘that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know…’ and the like, incredibly obviously signalling that something bad is going to happen, that the astonishingly charismatic Iris Storm is doomed to die!
More generally the narrator spends a lot of time telling us what he’s going to tell us later, constantly promising us stuff later: ‘He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.’ He fusses about what he’s going to say when.
At some point the narrator began to remind me of the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier‘, John Dowell, who comes over as an amateur storyteller, constantly fussing about when to tell us and how to tell us key elements of the plot, continually explaining how he didn’t understand this or that at the time they occurred. ‘It was only later that I realised…’ ‘But one notices those things only later on…’
In this manner the narrator declares that he’s talked the events which make up the narrative he’s going to tell with friends who knew Iris, Hilary Townshend and Guy de Travest, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war (‘I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string’).
This chapter is about Gerald March, twin brother of Iris Storm, six foot two, lean, one time captain in the Grenadier Guards, who’s gone completely to pot after the war. ‘He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it’, ‘the most lovable man I ever met.’,
That was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy
The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine, twisted, defiant mouth…
If I haven’t mentioned it before, Arlen’s prose style is odd, quirky, eccentric, mannered.
It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.
There was by ordinary no grinning froth about Gerald.
I thought I heard Guy mutter something between his teeth.
He has an odd way of saying, not that so and so was an x type of person, but that ‘that was an x type of person’.
That was a most deficient man in every other respect
That was a sad lady, most grave… That was a very quiet lady… That was a gallant lady.
That was a conscientious man, Conrad Masters.
That was a fell lady for whom I bought a green hat that day.
Now that was a loquacious lady.
It seems just not quite standard English usage, although maybe it overlaps with American street slang of the same period or a bit later, Damon Runyon characters saying ‘Now that was some swell broad!’ And he’s addicted to reversing standard word order, often sounding like Yoda from Star Wars.
Thoughtful he was always.
But not I to be provoked!
His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder, for tall was Gerald.
Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it.
Dark it was, the curtains drawn.
A boyish voice, a very boyish voice Venice had.
Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey.
Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern.
Too tall was Guy, in that light.
An amiable man, he looked.
Impatient, Iris’s voice was, I thought.
Soft she was now, soft and white and small.
Or both in one sentence:
The Blues, that man knows.
A man given to muttering, that.
I thought of… Mrs Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that.
Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way.
Why? Maybe he thought it was modish and modern. Throughout the book his style is often just odd;
We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed.
Venice was in high looks that day.
The narrator first met Gerald when he turned up at the magazine where the narrator worked, the New Voice edited by the testy Horton. He gruffly declares he has written a novel. It’s big, titled ‘The Savage Device’, concerns a young idealist named Felix Burton who marries the ghastly Ava Foe. Only later does Iris tell the narrator that Ava is based on her and Burton is based on her first husband, the legendary Boy Fenwick.
Back in the present, when the narrator rings Iris’s London home, the woman she rents the place to, Mrs Oden, tells her Iris left that day for Paris. Some days later he gets a git package from Paris. Iris has sent him a pack of beautiful writing paper with his new address printed on it.
Chapter 3. For Purity!
Portrait of family friend Hilary Townshend
Sometimes his prose is so overwrought and baroque as to be almost incomprehensible.
The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat.
At other times, in fact very frequently, he’s suddenly bright and clever.
Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age.
Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays.
‘Oh, Naps, such a wonder!’ cried Venice on the instant, and I saw what one is so apt to see after an intimate talk with a woman, that one has only been talking to a mood. (chapter 7)
‘Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other people’s expense…’ (chapter 8)
‘Oh, friends and enemies! One relies on what people are in themselves, no matter what circumstances may make them feel.’ (chapter 10)
And funny:
Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest night-clubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. (chapter 4)
The faint, slow lilt of the tango, pleasantest of all dances but one that is so seldom danced in London because nobody in London can dance it… which is a pity. (chapter 9)
She [Iris] drove that menacing bonnet ever more furiously along the road to Maidenhead, so that corners perished like midgets before our head-lights and Hugo and Shirley, who sat behind, murmured against her driving, saying that it would be bad for their reputation as a happily-married couple to be found dead on the road to Maidenhead. ‘A friend of mine,’ yelled Hugo, ‘was asked to resign from Buck’s for being found dead on the Maidenhead road…’ (chapter 9)
‘I do wish,” Hugo said violently, ‘that perfect strangers wouldn’t force themselves on us like this. Any one would think we were at a Royal Garden Party!’ (chapter 10)
And has some dazzling phrases:
Napier stared at her—he was sitting now—and it was as though he had put his hand to his mouth and placed a smile there. (chapter 7)
In the still air of Guy’s great, bare dining room those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat. (chapter 10)
Iris smiled, and those very white teeth bit the moment into two pieces with their smile and dropped the pieces into limbo. (chapter 11)
Well, in the days after Iris Storm’s apparition, the narrator goes for dinner with Hilary and we learn a bit more about all the characters. For example that shy alcoholic Gerald is heir to the earldom of Portairly (would become the 19th Earl of Portairley and Axe). That the second husband, Hector Storm V.C., left Iris everything, which explains why she’s loaded and can jaunt off to the continent all the time.
That her first husband was the legendary Boy Fenwick. That his body was found on the courtyard below their bedroom window on the first night of their honeymoon, Hilary thinks Boy threw himself to his death on a matter of purity. In other words, he discovered the love of his life, Iris March, was not a virgin. Iris could have stuck to the hotel’s suggestion that Boy was drunk on champagne and fell out the window by accident. But she is constitutionally incapable of lying and so said he threw himself out the window while she watched and lit a cigarette. Thus damning her reputation for ever.
The stilted, antagonistic dinner with Hilary is often very funny.
‘Seldom,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.’
Chapter 4. Aphrodite
At the Loyalty nightclub
Not wanting to go home to bed the narrator invites Hilary to a new nightclub on Pall Mall, the Loyalty, overseen by its directeur du restaurant, the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, and packed with social luminaries, an embodification of the roaring twenties.
As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling. She looked bored with boredom.
He had observed that the whole purpose of a “best-seller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban matrons.
The best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends.
There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the Cloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will.
The Loyalty is packed with people they know, and it’s maybe in this scene that Arlen created the sense of ‘Mayfair’ and nightclubs full of cynical bright young things dancing to ‘the Blues’.
There’s a buzz of news, people talking about the evening papers. Then suddenly everyone knows: the news is that Gerald was arrested in Hyde Park for bothering a woman, sitting at the same bench and making indecent proposals to a middle aged women who started screaming and the police appeared.
Iris is at this nightclub and comes up to the narrator and asks him to accompany her to his old house (which we saw him packing to move out of) but where Gerald still lives, because the narrator has a key to get in.
So they drive there and the narrator lets himself in, goes up to Gerald’s flat and it is elliptically done, but we slowly realise he discovered Gerald has blown his brains out. Without pausing he goes back down to Iris who’d waited in the hall and tells Iris he found Gerald in the same posture as the other day, i.e. sprawled drunk and insensible.
She thanks him and jumps into her powerful roadster and drives off. Turning back to his old house he discovers Guy who took a taxi there, who smokes thoughtfully and says: ‘Had an idea he might blow his brains out.’
Chapter 5. The Dark Letter
Paris 10 months later
All the preceding happened in June 1922. The narrative suddenly cuts to the last week of January of the year 1923 (although he later says it’s 10 months after Gerald’s death?) – and to the Place Vendôme in Paris and a description of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre which, under the lofty title of l’aristocratie internationale; the shops, the tourists, the Americans buying everything.
The narrator is with his sister. He’s spent four months at Cannes where he bumped into her and they drove across France to Paris. The sense of France, and the south of France, as a playground for tourists, reminds me of ‘Tender is The Night’ and perhaps explains why ‘The Green Hat’ is specifically referenced in it: Arlen described this world exactly a decade before Fitzgerald’s (far more profound and moving) account of it was published.
He has several amusing glances at the habitual rudeness of the French, especially French hotel staff, who refuse to help him or his sister, along with a number of comic generalisations (slurs) on the French character.
The French sections evinces a cosmopolitan knowingness epitomised by the dandyish Mr Cherry-Marvel who knows everybody and knows everything about everybody but drones on in endless confidential monologues. In the middle of this endless droning, the narrator drifts off to the present moment, the moment of writing, and tells us how he had, in the 6 months of Iris’s absence, received some long rambling often indecipherable letters from her, and quotes and comments from them at length, hence the title of this chapter.
But somehow, in the middle of his summary of the letters, the narrator describes Guy paying a visit to Iris lying ill in bed, and their conversation (as reported to him later by Guy). This long conversation included stuff about her marriage to Hector which seems to include references to her having gotten pregnant by Hector but Hector being killed before she came to term. This is all very obscure: did Iris have an abortion? Was that so completely illegal and socially stigmatised that Arlen can’t spell it out, even in fiction?
Eventually the narrator manages to interrupt Cherry-Marvel and extract the address of the house where Iris is staying. So he jumps into a taxi, a ‘clever little Citroën taxi’ which takes him on a delirious midnight drive into dark areas of Paris he has never been before, and Arlen gives a wonderfully purple description of the dream Paris of debauchery.
Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced a minuet du cœur with a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours…
The taxi pulls up in front of the address Cherry-Marvel gave him, a huge dark imposing building which he hallucinates is like a fortress or an asylum.
Chapter 6. The Red Lights
The nursing home where Iris is recovering
Continues straight on from the previous scene: When the narrator rings the bell the door is opened by a nun (who turns out to be a lay sister) and who explains that it is a convent-nursing-home. (‘Perhaps of all the nations in the world the French alone are capable of fixing the loudest possible bell to a nursing-home.’) When she explains:
‘Nous avons ici,’ she was pleased to add, ‘la clientèle européenne la plus chic’. [‘We have here the smartest European clientele]
It really made me think of ‘Tender Is The Night’ with its theme of high living inextricably linked with mental collapse. Except that Fitzgerald’s great achievement is to make everything seem wonderful and romantic and somehow innocent. Even when describing squalid scenes Fitzgerald somehow manages to keep his aura of romantic innocence. Not so Arlen:
Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a clientèle européenne la plus chic…. One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America.
When I read the following sentence it struck me that Arlen is attempting in prose the wild coloration and stylisation of modernist painting.
How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards….
Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.
The nun fetches the doctor in charge who turns out to be someone the narrator knows (of course), Dr Conrad Masters, a compulsive bridge player. Masters is a haunted, nervous man and twitchily leaks out to the narrator that Iris has been there for weeks, something to do with ‘septic poisoning’ leading to some kind of nervous collapse, delirium, occasionally waking into lucidity, but not caring. Then Dr Masters goes home in his flash Renault car.
Cut to the narrator that evening taking his (older) sister to the latest Paris nightclub, La Plume de Ma Tante – leaving reader to ask, why didn’t he simply ask to see Iris or force his way to her room? Because the doctor said she needed rest?
Anyway, this Paris nightclub is significantly more debauched than the London one, and reading Arlen’s description of it you realise why the book crystallised an entire era and came to be so widely referenced. Sorry it’s such a long quote but it’s the accumulation that makes its impact.
La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet. Many English people were present. They would be going to the Riviera, then they would be coming back from the Riviera. Colonel Duck was there, with the quality. Colonel Duck was, no doubt, just returned from some notably swift exploits on the Cresta Run. But he never was so talkative about his outdoor activities. Cherry-Marvel was there, with a great big woman and a nice-looking boy with the hands of a housemaid who was a famous boxer. There was the usual group of Argentines, very well dressed indeed. They talked about le polo. All over the room elderly women were dancing with young men of both sexes. Mio Mi Marianne was there, sitting alone, but I might not speak with her because I was with my sister. A demi-mondaine will feel insulted if you speak with her when you are with your sister. Two years before Mio Mi Marianne had one night tied a silk handkerchief round her wrist, and it became the fashion for women to tie silk handkerchiefs round their wrists. Then Mio Mi Marianne tied a silk handkerchief round her throat, and that became the fashion. She thought of these things while smoking opium. She sat alone, staring into a glass of Vichy Water. A young American polo-player called Blister went up to her table, and maybe he asked her to dance, but she just looked at him and he went away again. Her eyes were intent on an opium-dream, and she was very happy in the arms of the infinite. Mio Mi Marianne will be found one day lying on the Aubusson carpet of her drawing-room. There will be a hole in the carpet where her cigarette has died out.
A blackamoor beat a warning roll on his drum, the dancers left the floor, the lights dwindled and awoke again in swaying shadows of blue and carmine. A heavily built young man with the face of a murderer danced a tango with a lovely young girl with short golden curls. Then he threw her on the floor, and picked her up again. Rudolf and Raymonde. He did it beautifully. An American woman called the Duchess of Malvern threw Rudolph a pink carnation. The Baron de Belus said harshly: ‘That is a white carnation really, but it is blushing at the fuss that women make of Dagoes.’
(I comment below on the occasional use of racial terms or slurs in the text which we obviously find unacceptable now, a century later. On the other hand, modish open-mindedness about gender, about ‘dancing with young men of both sexes’ etc.)
Later that night the narrator returns to the nursing home and is surprised to discover young Napier Harpenden there as well, ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods’. He’s passing through Paris on the way to the Riviera with his wife Venice. When we last saw them both, in the nightclub scene at the Loyalty club, they were three days away from getting married. Now it’s ten months later. In Arlen’s characteristic tortured and oblique style, I think we learn from their extended but elliptical conversation, that Napier and Iris had an affair which started on the fateful night that Gerald killed himself. In fact, the narrator realises, he in a way facilitated it because, if he’d told Iris the truth about Gerald she would have reacted, gone home by herself etc, but instead thought everything was normal and so succumbed to the advances of Napier, who had followed her to Gerald’s digs from the club. Complicated.
Also complicated that his wife, Venice, is waiting outside in the car all this time. And Napier has a letter Iris wrote him. Just imagine if Venice saw it! Devastated! End of marriage!
Dr Master emerges and tells them Iris knows they’re there, and asks for Napier. So he takes Napier in to see her, leaving the narrator outside. Is she going to die without ever seeing the narrator again? Is that the drift of all the doom-laded prolepsis in the opening chapter (‘I was never to find out…’).
Back out front of the building Venice is sleeping in the taxi she and Napier came in. The doctor invites the narrator back to his place to join a bridge party. On the way he explains that Iris’s problem is she doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. She bucked up when she saw Napier. And that’s why he – the narrator – must do all he can to prevent Napier travelling on to the South the next morning.
Chapter 7. For Venice!
Venice’s torment that her husband, Napier, doesn’t love her
Next morning the narrator wakes up in his hotel in the Rue de la Paix. When he’s gotten up he phones Venice Harpenden at her hotel and she in that posh darlings loves kind of way compels him to come meet her and buy her lunch.
This lunch is an agonising affair because Venice reveals she is stricken with jealousy by the way Napier (or ‘Naps’, as she calls him) seems obsessed with this Mrs Storm. They had planned to leave Paris this morning and now Naps has changed all their plans. Why? This puts the narrator in the embarrassing position of having to defend Napier and explain away his dogged visits to Iris’s care home as the loyalty of an old friend.
It’s made ten times worse when young innocent Venice confides in the narrator that she cannot have children, and asks him whether that puts a man off a girl, her being infertile; whether it might be enough to drive the man away and into the arms of an old lover (Mrs Storm)?
They’re in the middle of this sticky conversation when Naps himself walks in. The narrator tries to get away but is forced to sit there as the happy-happy conversation of the couple becomes more and more strained until she becomes angry-upset and he momentarily loves his temper. He says Alright then let’s go, let’s go now, let’s go right away to the South. (There’s a detail that Venice had met the narrator’s sister who kindly agreed to loan them her car and its chauffeur to drive them south.)
Only the narrator knows what a sacrifice this is to Naps, not just because he (apparently) loves Iris, but because Dr Masters had specifically said Iris’s recovery rested on Naps visiting her; that only Naps’s presence was giving her any reason to live. And now because of the nagging of his wife, she’s forced him to break his promise and jeopardise Iris’s life (‘a very cruel decision’). Only the narrator realises what this means, as they all get up, shake hands and part with jolly smiles.
And after they’re gone he is left to ponder the infinite capacity of human beings to screw up their loves lives. When he phones Dr Masters to tell him Napier won’t be coming to the nursing home this afternoon, the doctor swears freely. Will I do? asks the narrator. ‘You!’ The doctor says he’ll come and collect him. (If it was lunch he just ate with Venice then this might only be 2 or 3 in the afternoon.)
Chapter 8. Piqure Du Cœur
French for ‘heart sting’, description of very ill Iris in the nursing home
So Dr Masters drives the narrator to the nursing home, they enter a series of courtyards and quadrangles, all appropriately solemn, the narrator led by a gruff unsympathetic nun until he finally comes to the door on a dark corridor. It is opened by a radiantly beautiful nun, Sister Virginie, whose compassion shine forth. She indicates Iris lying in the bed and leaves.
It is dark. All Iris’s curled hair and style has disappeared. She looks small and frail and asleep but the narrator is reassured by her steady breathing. He is turning to go when he realises her great dark eyes are open and staring at him. He is worried she will mistake him for Napier but then sees in her eyes (as people in novels supernaturally can) that she recognised him. She says just one word, ‘Dying’. He goes to the bed to reassure her, takes a comb from the bedside table and gently combs her damp straight hair until she closes her eyes and breathes slowly. Then carefully gets up and leaves and silently closes the door. He is crying.
Sister Virginie accompanies him back to the doctor’s office. Masters tells him off for letting Napier leave. He was doing her some good. The narrator’s visit, not so much. Later, in a phone call Masters tells him not to visit for a while, say ten days.
In the event it’s longer than that, ‘quite a while more.’ Description of his second visit, on 15 February. She talks a lot more this time, telling him off for still being in Paris, so he has an excuse ready, which is that an idea for a story came to him and he wants to stay in Paris to write it. (The idea is about a man who would not dance with his wife. Not a humdinger, is it?)
She’s been told by the doctors to lie perfectly still and not move hear head, not even a finger. She can’t laugh because it hurts. She says nobody wants her, not even a God and makes a joke about having all the paperwork reading, a temperature of 106, getting to the Pearly Gates but being told she is too full of life and rejected by God himself, who tells the archangel Gabriel to escort her back to the world.
She thanks him for bringing Naps to see her, chats some more but then turns querulous and tearful as the really sick do. More clearly than ever it is hinted that her ailment is something to do with pregnancy:
“As for me,” she whispered, “all this effort wasted … no playmate, no nothing. Masters warned me, too…. Dead as dead, the poor darling was….”
So was it a miscarriage? Or did Iris carry the baby to term and it was stillborn? Dr Masters enters and accuses the narrator of making her cry and Iris stands up for him, but it’s time to go.
She tells him she will never return to England.
Chapter 9. Talking Of Hats
London, July 1923: the narrator and Guy see Iris sweep past in a taxi with Napier
Six months later. July that year was swelteringly hot. After dinner at the Café Royal one boiling hot night, the narrator is walking home along Piccadilly with his older friends, Guy de Travest and Hilary. They’re thinking about popping into White’s, the gentlemen’s club, to fetch Napier when they see the very man come bounding down the steps and jump into a tax which roars past them. Both Guy and the narrator see that sitting on the back seat next to him was Iris Storm! Guy invites the narrator back to his house where, incongruously enough, they play squash before bathing and drinking cold drinks.
Guy idly casually says he was thinking of having a dinner party to which he’d invite Venice and Iris so they could finally meet each other. Does the narrator think that would be a good idea?
In fact Iris calls him the next day and insists that he take her shopping and buy her a new green hat. Which he does, and then lunch. She has fully recovered, she looks radiant, she is splendidly imperious.
I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. Strong were the people of that land, stronger than the gold they despised but used, deterred by not qualm nor fear, strong and undefeatable. And just like that was the white mask of this beautiful woman, strong and undefeatable. It knew not truth nor lying, not honour nor dishonour, not loyalty nor treachery, not good nor evil: it was profoundly itself, a mask of the morning of this world when men needed not to confuse their minds with laws with which to confuse their neighbours, a mask of the evening of this world when men shall have at last made passions their servants and can enter into their full inheritance…
Nietzsche wrote about the Superman. Iris Storm is the Superwoman.
Chapter 10. The Fall Of The Emerald
The skinny-dipping party at Maidenhead
Way back in the first chapter, Iris had told the narrator about the oversized green emerald ring she wears on the third finger of her right hand. It was given her by her second husband, Hector Storm, who told her he intended it a symbol of her inconstancy, which has driven him to despair: ‘my life is darkness without you, I love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’
Cut back to the present of the story, in which, after that dinner at Guy’s house, they all pile into cars and drive for Maidenhead to go swimming, they being: Guy, the narrator and Iris, Napier and Venice, and another young pair of newlyweds, Hugo and Shirley Cypress.
Iris drives like a demon. The narrator is amazed that everyone seems to be behaving as if nothing is wildly wrong. For he knows that Iris is planning to run away to Rio de Janeiro off Napier in a few days, and he knows Guy invited Iris solely to show her what she is doing is wrong, to show her the happiness of these young couples – Napier and Venice and Hugo and Shirley – to show Iris that she comes from a different world and must not interfere in and wreck their happiness. And yet no-one, not even Guy, acknowledges the elephant in the room. The narrator marvels at their English nonchalance and wonders at what point it becomes hypocrisy.
So when Guy mentions the notion of driving to Maidenhead to go skinny dipping they all jump at the idea, especially Venice and Shirley who think it’s too super! Guy chivalrously says it was the narrator’s idea and they all mockingly refer to him from that point onwards as the ‘he-man’, obviously the latest phrase from America (a phrase mocked by Gertrude Stein in a story told by Scott Fitzgerald).
While Venice and Shirley were gushing, the narrator lit a cigarette for Venice and his hand momentarily touched hers and he discovered it was cold as ice, and in a flash he realised the toll knowing her husband is in love with Iris has taken, how it has undermined that marriage, how desperate she is.
Anyway – the party drive in two cars from West London to Maidenhead, late at night, going at 70mph, taking bends at crazy speeds, Iris driving like a mad thing. They pull into the courtyard of hotel which is closed and bribe the grumpy owner to lend them towels, then stumble in the intense dark down to the river. The narrator finds Iris leaning on him in the darkness and goes purple:
She leaned on my arm, completely. “Foot hurts.” I wished she wouldn’t. I almost said, “don’t.” Her touch confounded, confused. She was tangible, until she touched you. She was finite, until she touched you. She was a woman, until she touched you. Then she became woman, and you water. She became a breath of womanhood clothed in the soft, delicious mystery of the flesh. Touching her, you touched all desire. She was impersonal and infinite, like all desire. She was indifferent to all but her desire, like all desire. She was a breath carved in flesh, like all desire. She was the flower of the plant of all desire. Desire is the name of the plant that Lilith sowed, and every now and then it puts out the flower that in the choir of flowers is the paramour of the mandrake.
She is also, as we have realised by this stage, poison.
They discover boats moored to a jetty and fuss around a motorboat. Several locals, apparently the hotel owner and a local constable, tell them they can’t, but they make all kinds of witty replies and go ahead anyway. Posh privilege.
I think they strip off – as with the situation around Iris’s pregnancy, Arlen’s style or his entire mentality, is so roundabout that it’s hard to be sure – and swim in the water, all except Iris who lounges among the cushions in the motorboat.
Guy warns of dangerous currents and I felt the hot breath of tragedy on my shoulder – would one of them drown like the young couple in Women in Love? No.
But there is a bad moment when the bantering men realise Iris’s dress is in the boat but no Iris! She must have decided to go in after all. Lots of shouting and they realise they can’t see or hear Iris, or Venice. There’s a mad couple of minutes while they splash and yell and swim off in different directions before they find them and bring them back to the jetty.
In fact Venice insists that she’d gotten into a bit of trouble, called out, and that’s why Iris dived in: to save her. She tells everyone crowded round her in the bottom of the motorboat the Iris saved her life! Which triggers tense and varied responses from the menfolk, who are all aware of the tangled web between Napier, his wife Venice, and his lover Iris.
Iris is cold. The menfolk fuss, Guy and Napier worry, after her illness. She gets dressed but is still cold. They make their way back to the cars and Iris snuggles up next to the narrator. He discovers she’s lost the famous emerald ring. Yes, at the bottom of the Thames, she explains. So after all the heavy symbolism attributed to it, associated with infidelity by husband Hector, it was in saving a rival woman’s life that she lost it, an unambiguously moral act.
Then again, as she falls asleep on the narrator’s arm, she whispers that she thinks Venice got into trouble, half consciously, on purpose. Why? To make her (Iris) like her (Venice). Like her enough to back off from stealing her husband. ‘Will it?’ asks the narrator. ‘No,’ replies Iris.
The Last Chapter: St George For England!
Arlen has his narrator introduce us to his Last Chapter with a heavy sense of impending doom, commenting on his own practice with the airy self-consciousness theorising of an eighteenth century novelist, of a Henry Fielding, or maybe Robert Louis Stevenson at his most chatty.
NOW as I come to that last night of all, a night that was as though set on a stage by a cunning but reckless craftsman of the drama, and as I look every way I may at the happenings that were staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my hand to, but a faithful chronicle of events. For it would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest man and loves his craft, must work always under a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell of life truthfully; since, as the old, old saying is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life. He may, to be sure, be as dingy as life, according to the mode of the day, or he may even achieve the impossible and be more dingy than life, also according to the mode of the day, but to be as improbable as life will be as far beyond the honest novelist’s courage as it must be against the temper of his craft; for should his characters have to “break out,” should the novelist be so far gallant as to concede something to the profligate melodrama of life, his people may only “break out” along lines which the art of their creator has laid out and made inevitable for them; whereas you and I know that living men will do queer things which are desperately alien from what we had thought their possibilities—nay, impossibilities—to be, living men will defy the whole art of characterisation in the twinkling of an eye and destroy every canon of art in a throb of a desire: so that we may make no count or chart of the queer, dark sides of our fellows, nor put any limit, of art, psychology, romance or decency, to the impossibilities which are, within the trembling of a leaf, possible to men and women.
It’s a big chunk of text but not particularly clever. Truth is stranger than fiction, so what. It’s this kind of rambling banter which makes the book approachable and easy company, but by the same token also prevents it being literature. It’s not deep or pioneering or particularly thought-provoking. Indeed at some moments it’s almost gibberish, like the long exchange between the narrator and Iris about why she’s inviting him to come for a drive into the country.
‘We are driving into the country, let me tell you, to meet my fear. And when we meet it I shall not mock, nor tremble, nor quail, but I shall be a very Saint George for steadfastness. That is the programme, so far. And you, will you be my esquire?’
‘You speak of darkness, of sun-dials, of fear, of Sir Maurice Harpenden, whom I do not know, of Saint George of Cappadocia, whom, alas, one sees only too little of these days. I think that you, too, must have dined alone. And you have gone mad. Else why must we drive into the country?’
‘But we go to keep high company to-night, that’s why! Are you afraid of that? The captains and the kings of the countryside are our adversaries. Sweet, you and I shall stand arrayed against the warriors of conduct.’
‘Not I, Iris! I am for conduct.’
There’s piles more like this but, despite the deep purple passages – or maybe because of them – it was wildly popular.
So what happened ‘on that night’ of dark repute? Well, Iris invites the narrator to accompany her as she drives west out of London towards a place called Sutton Marle and the house of Sir Maurice Harpenden, father of Napier, being irritatingly vague and obscure to begin with, and then spouting a lot of stuff to justify running off with Napier and ruining poor Venice’s life. She laments that Venice couldn’t have a child; then everything would be different.
Then in the middle of the countryside, she pulls up by a field with the headlights shining on a tree in a field and delivers a massive burst of backstory. She was brought up alongside her twin brother Gerald, Boy Fenwick and Napier, son of Sir Maurice. Her mother died and her father declined. Sometimes an aunt took her and Napier up to London, for tea at Harrods, which they loved as children because they got gleefully lost in it. And so they nicknamed the tree they played around ‘Harrods’.
Napier and she became very close but his father wanted him to marry rich, not the daughter of a bankrupt family and so forced Napier, when he got old enough to go to university, never to see Iris again.
She reveals that when they met for one last time by the tree they played in as children, she told him she loved him and would never love another man. And she kept her vow. She gave herself to Boy and then to Hector in marriage, but they both realised she didn’t love them. Hector volunteered to go off to Ireland where he was killed, because one night he heard Iris whisper Napier’s name in her sleep.
Now she has come back to beard Sir Maurice and tell him that his ban on their love consigned her to twelve years of hell, to the deaths of two husbands, and to the future misery of Venice Pollard.
She starts the car again and sweeps up the drive to Sir Maurice’s house and comes to a halt in front of the grand steps. Out comes the ancient butler, Truble, to greet them. He starts wittering about how he’s known Iris all his life, held her in his arms when she was a baby, and she declares he is her oldest friend, then he is crying and she tries to comfort him.
The narrator and Iris go round the back of the house and spy through the long windows three men inside playing bridge: Guy de Travest, Hilary Townshend and Sir Maurice. Iris forces the narrator to give a quick moral profile of all three. God this is dragging on. What’s going to happen?
They knock and the men get up from their game and greet them. Iris is, as he first saw her, wearing a green hat. Turns out Sir Maurice invited Iris down. The three men have known and loved Iris since she was a girl which is why they want to confront her about her plan to run away with Napier. There’s a lot of talk but it develops into a confrontation between Iris and Maurice who hate and fear each other. He says:
‘This isn’t badness. Damn it, girl, this is evil! There aren’t any words in English to describe what we think of a woman who comes wantonly between a man and his wife, a man and his career.’
It turns into a long, melodramatic, overwritten confrontation, in which Iris, Maurice, Hilary and Guy all have extended speeches considering every aspect of the issue at inordinate length. I wasn’t very interested in all the fol-de-rol about love and the gods and destiny and whatnot, what interested me was the way Arlen makes it at least in part a clash of the generations. The old men realise that their generation screwed it up; with all their fine talk of honour and decency, they’re the generation which gave the world the Great War, which in fact destroyed all those values. Hilary states it clearly:
‘Maurice, years ago, didn’t realise that in our time we are not our children’s masters. Their ideas are not ours, their ambitions are not ours. And there’s no reason why they should be, since ours have sent all Europe to the devil.’
A point echoed by Guy:
‘I fancy Hilary’s right about this father and child business… after all, our cubs can’t make more of a mess of everything than we and our fathers have done.’
When Maurice states, or implies, that Iris is going to ruin Napier’s career in the Foreign Office, Iris makes the kind of set-piece statement that is quoted in history books about the 1920s generation rebelling against their parents’ bankrupt values:
‘You talk to me of your England. I despise your England, I despise the ‘us’ that is ‘us’. We are shams with patrician faces and peasant minds. We are built of lies, Maurice, and we toil for the rewards of worms.
‘You would have Napier toil for a worm’s reward, you are sorry I have broken Napier’s career in the Foreign Office. Maurice, I am glad. To you, it seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty arena of national strifes and international jealousies.
‘To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory. Maurice, there are better things, nobler things, cleaner things, than can be found in any career that will glorify a man’s name or nationality.
‘You thought to bully me with our traditions. You are right, they are mine as well as yours. May God forgive you the sins committed in their name! And may He forgive me for ever having believed in them…’
This all feels immensely theatrical, like the last act in a play by George Bernard Shaw, what with its strong independent female protagonist and stirring speeches against the dead hand of the older (male) generation.
It obviously represents a clash of moralities, as well: the older generation condemn people like iris for their selfishness, promiscuity or adultery; whereas people like Iris see themselves as being true to Life unlike the small-minded, parochial and stifling lives of the older generation which – unanswerable argument – led up to the greatest cataclysm in human history.
At the height of the confrontation there suddenly comes a voice from the French windows (it’s always the French windows) and it’s Napier himself! He’s come all this way to rescue Iris. And Venice has come with him, standing behind him. Napier steps forward and it is his father he steps towards. He says he wants to clear Iris’s name, Iris begs him not to confront his father, Maurice says they must part, Hilary says the young people must go now, it’s a very fraught busy scene.
Napier now makes his grand speech, accusing his father of sacrificing his life on the altar of stupid outworn values and traditions:
‘You sacrificed Iris for what you call my future, my career. Weigh Iris on one side and on the other my future, my career, now that I am thirty! You sacrificed my happiness to the ghastly vanity of making our name something in this world. You call that ‘working for my future,’ sir. And I call it the cruel sort of humbug which has dragged God knows how many decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness. Here I am at thirty, a nothing without even the excuse of being a happy nothing, a nothing liked by other nothings and successful among other nothings, a nothing wrapped round by the putrefying little rules of the gentlemanly tradition. And, my God, they are putrefying, and I bless the England that has at last found us out.’
Then becomes clear one of the most striking things in this madly extended and over-the-top finale, which is that Venice has come round to Iris’s point of view. She is ready to give her husband to her because she has come to appreciate how truly and deeply Iris loves him.
Napier’s anger has been intensified because when he happened to walk in Sir Maurice was yet again throwing the fact of Boy Fenwick’s suicide in her face, and this goads Napier beyond endurance. After a lot more ranting and raging he finally spits out why this is so unfair. Iris deliberately let people believe it was something in her that triggered Fenwick’s suicide, allegedly ‘for purity’. Now Napier reveals that Fenwick had syphilis when he married Iris, and killed himself when he realised he had given it to her.
!!!!
Iris is mortified and whispers, very powerfully, that Napier has taken from her the only gracious thing she ever did in her life. And with that they leave, Iris and Napier, through the open French windows.
Venice faints, the older chaps kindly bring her round and are just tending her when… Napier appears back in the French windows and there’s the deafening roar of Iris’s car, starting up, revving up, then roaring off into the night! What!?
Napier walks across the room, looking defeated, and tells Venice that he can’t leave her like that, he is not such a cad. Venice asks what he’s talking about? Napier says Iris tried to conceal it, said she’s promised not to tell, but then tells him that Venice is pregnant, with his child! So that’s why he came back. He’s not a perfect cad. He’ll stand by her.
Except it’s a lie! Venice screams that it’s a lie! She is not pregnant. Iris lied to him to send him back! Chaos, pendemonium, all manner of recriminations and explanations!
But above it all Sir Maurice confronts the narrator about the unnatural loudness of Iris’s car. Suddenly panic grips everyone. Is she going to do something stupid? And so they jump into Sir Maurice’s car and go hurtling off down the drive, then out into the country lanes, chasing Iris’s headlights which they can see in the night.
As the chase reaches its climax, they watch Iris’s car leave the road and race towards the talismanic tree named ‘Harrods’, the place she was happy as a child, race towards it and crash into it with a huge crash and flare of flame.
The others slow their car and park and run towards the wreck. The narrator’s foot touches something soft and he picks up her green hat, the green hat.
Thoughts
Goodness me, what a ridiculously over-extended and over-excited farrago it turned into at the end!
I’ve read so much about ‘The Green Hat’ that it’s a great relief to finally read it. I can see why it was such a hit, crystallising the frenetic partying of the era which everyone, at the same time, felt was so ill-omened and fated. It certainly portrays its little set of high society hedonists with imaginative force and humour, and combines a gossip column view of Paris and London, with tear-jerking scenes in the nursing home, naughty high jinks in Maidenhead, and then a Bernard Shaw moral confrontation followed by a fireball climax. No wonder it was immediately made into a play and soon afterwards into a movie.
At numerous points it has subtlety, acute observations and sharp writing. But a lot of it is obscure, oblique, written in an elliptical style which makes such a fetish of avoiding the point, as to make plenty of passages puzzling and some bits of it almost incomprehensible.
And the final chapter with its torrent of revelations feels as if it has been hammered onto the rest of the narrative with six inch nails. All the revelations of her happy childhood, the tragic blocking of her love for Napier imposed by Sir Maurice, 12 years of hell, all this makes you fall right out of love with the book and then left reeling by the melodramatic ending.
I can see why it is on no-one’s academic reading list and is not even currently in print. Shame. A properly edited edition by, say, the Oxford University Press, would be worth reading for the historical footnotes and explanations alone.
Arlen was soon to be outdone. All around were other gifted writers describing the same sort of thing, but with much more restraint, balance, style and depth. Pure posh dimwit comedy was done better by P.G. Wodehouse; more thoughtful satire was being done by Aldous Huxley; far more stylish bright young comedy was to be done by Evelyn Waugh a few years later; Catholic guilt (if that’s what partly drives Iris) was to be patented by Graham Greene a few years later; while the psychological costs of all this frivolity was brilliantly captured by Noel Coward and, a bit later, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even D.H. Lawrence wrote some stories depicting the fast cars and partying of the younger generation (The Virgin and the Gypsy) – to name just a few.
On each of those individual terrains, Arlen compares badly but, at that moment, in 1924, Arlen combined them all to create a smash hit and he lived off its reputation for the rest of his life. Kudos.
Cast
London
Unnamed narrator
Gerald March
Iris March / Fenwick / Storm
Boy Fenwick – apostle of purity, killed himself on his wedding night to Iris when he learned she wasn’t a virgin (?)
Hector Storm – Iris’s second husband, hero in the war, came to realise she was incurably promiscuous, ironically gave her emerald ring, shot dead by nationalists in Ireland
Hilary Townshend – older friend of the narrator and friend of the March family, knew Iris as a girl – amusingly says ‘hm’ every other sentence
Guy de Travest – older friend of the narrator
The London nightclub
- The Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, directeur du restaurant of the Loyalty Club
- Mr Trehawke Tush, the popular novelist, who knows all the tricks of success
- Hugo Cypress
- Colonel Duck
- Mrs Angela Ammon
- Lady Cornelia Pynte
Paris
Venice Pollen, fragrant daughter of Nathaniel Pollen who owns half the newspapers in England, engaged then married to…
Napier Harpenden – ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods who never once relied on the favouritism of gods or men’ – says what at the end of every other sentence
- Mr Cherry-Marvel – master of gossip
- Dr Conrad Masters – treats Iris
- Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon who owns the nursing home where Iris is treated
Donna Anna Estella Guelãra who Martel-Bonnard nearly killed with his treatment
Names of background characters in hotels and bars to create a sense of being in the swim of cosmopolitan fast set:
- Lady Tekkleham
- The Baron de Belus
- Fay Avalon
The climax
Sir Maurice Napier – handsome, cunning old soldier, Iris’s sworn enemy for 12 years
Mr Truble – Sir Maurice’s fat old butler and Iris’s ‘only friend’
The roaring 20s
Direct description
By halfway through I realised the novel’s success, almost regardless of the ‘plot’, was at least in part because of its vivid picture of the world of the rich cosmopolitan fast set of London and Paris. This rises to a peak in the two nightclub scenes, the one at the Loyalty Club in London (chapter 4), one in La Plume de Ma Tante (chapter 6). They have the same kind of appeal as celebrity gossip columns do to this day, although with the added value of literary references or artfulness. (Compare the nightclub scenes in chapters 15 and 16 of Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay.)
The narrator’s worldliness
The image of bright young things is supposedly embodied in Iris Storm but really it resides in the tone of voice and tremendous worldliness evinced by the narrator. He knows everyone but, deeper than that, he has had experiences, many experiences. In every situation he remembers other times when… and lots of dark and troubled experiences are attributed to him. Oooh. Conveyed in almost every sentence, sometimes rising to a Noel Coward level of blasé worldly cynicism:
‘There is a new dance place open. I heard about it from a friend of mine, Mr Cherry-Marvel. You will meet him, he is charming. This new place is called La Plume de Ma Tante. It has only been open three nights, so it will be very modish for another two.’
Casual racism
Part of the breezy cynical dismissal of everything and everyone associated with these posh affluent characters, is a breezy cynical use of what we, a hundred years later, consider racist slurs and stereotypes, in particular of Jews and people of colour.
When the narrator is describing the new Paris nightclub La Plume de Ma Tante to his sister, and mentions it has a caged nightingale to sing, he goes on:
‘There is probably baser music to supplement this nightingale. There are, in fact, five lovely niggers.’
This is the only use of the n word, so it is not a major or even minor theme, just a throwaway remark, although soon afterwards:
La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet…
Any slur on people of colour is clearly just a detail in the general mockery of the whole scene and the entire milieu of international debauchery, but still…
Slightly less throwaway is the unpleasant references to ‘the wrong sort of Jewess’. In the nightclub scene, chapter 4, the narrator is emphasising how the Loyalty club is full of all sorts of colourful people, and:
There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr Trehawke Tush, the novelist: ‘The only decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar…’
He goes on to be just as rude about Mr Trehawke Tush, and then Venice Pollen, and pretty much all the other characters at the nightclub, in fact both remarks come amid a welter of descriptions of other aspects of nightclub life which the narrator clearly finds risible. The point is it is a satire on all these posh pretentious people and frenetic 1920s nightclub culture. But still…
Sex
How much literature is about the incredible difficulties human beings have finding and keeping a mate? Half of all world literature? More?
I sat there in that deep armchair, subdued by the thought of the awful helplessness of men and women to understand one another, and of the terrible thing it would be for some of them if ever they did understand one another, and how many opportunities the devil is always being given of making plunder out of decent people.
Such a simple task. So completely beyond the powers of people in most novels or plays, operas and poems.
P.S.
Mrs Forrest, a fabulously fashionable young woman in Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1927 novel ‘Unnatural Death’, proclaims that she ‘adores Michael Arlen’ and asks Lord Peter Wimsey whether he’s read his latest novel, ‘Young Men in Love’ yet.
Credit
‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was published in 1924 by William Collins. I read it online.
Related link
Related reviews
- 1920s reviews
‘Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel?’ (the narrator about Gerald March, chapter 2)
Books & Boots 
The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence (1928)
A Penguin paperback edition of 12 short stories by D.H. Lawrence.
The 1981 Penguin edition has a 4-page introduction written by Lawrence’s friend and critic, Richard Aldington. He gives dates of composition for the stories so I’ve rearranged them according to his chronology. Aldington’s introduction concludes with the point that:
Lawrence was quite aware that as a writer of short stories he was completely out of touch with the popular and high-paying magazines of the 1920s. Instead of trying to conform, he preferred to write newspaper articles for bread and butter, and to write his stories in his own way.
In Aldington’s view the stories fall into several groups. 1) The first two are pre-Great War, Edwardian. ‘Strike Pay’ is one of the belongs to the group of studies of West Midlands coal miners. 2) ‘A Modern Lover’ is the first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to in later stories, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man. 3) There are four gruesome and uncanny stores:
Aldington relates the uncanny stories to Lawrence being persuaded by his wife to return from their ranch in New Mexico to England in late 1923. He rediscovered his hatred for England and its superannuated class system but, during the trip, went to stay with an artist versed in the occult, Frederick Carter. Maybe this influenced these four supernatural stories, which are a strange eruption in Lawrence’s oeuvre.
A Modern Lover (1910?)
The first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man.
Young Cyril Mersham returns to the Midlands countryside where he grew up after two years away in the big city to the south. Some of the nature description is lovely but, even for Lawrence, it’s generally overwritten, overdone.
Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of life to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither, enough to satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could laugh the crystalline laughter of the star, and bathe in the retreating flood of twilight like a naked boy in the surf, clasping the waves and beating them and answering their wild clawings with laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain.
Cyril arrives at the farm where he used to be such a frequent visitor three years ago, and is greeted by the farm wife, the father, the two sons who’ve just come back from a day at the coal mines and strip and wash, and the daughter of the house, Muriel. He is invited to stay for dinner but nowadays he talks in the received pronunciation of the South, careful and ironic statements, and the more he talks the more he alienates the entire family from him. He is not the local man he was. After eating he is out of the way in the busy kitchen with men walking backwards and forwards with hot water and whatnot, so Muriel tells him to go and wait in the parlour.
In the parlour Cyril sits in the old chair, observes the watercolour paintings of his on the wall and photos of him on the mantlepiece. In among them he notices a photo of a stranger he doesn’t know. He remembers all the books he and Muriel read and discussed, but it is all over-egged.
There, by that hearth, they had threshed the harvest of their youth’s experience, gradually burning the chaff of sentimentality and false romance that covered the real grain of life.
Cyril priggishly pontificates at her, who is all hesitancy. Their manner of speaking is quite hard to follow but what comes over is how supercilious and patronising he is. Then there’s the sound of a bicycle bell and a different male voice outside. She looks at Cyril and he instantly divines it is her new boyfriend. Muriel tells him that he told her to find someone else and, well… she has.
Sound of the interloper’s voice in the kitchen, talking easily to the brothers. Obviously he’s quite at home. Then a brother tells him Muriel’s in the parlour and he walks in to confront Cyril, the former lover.
He is Tom Vickers. He’s some kind of electrical engineer at the mine. He crushes Cyril’s hand in his handshake. But Cyril is unquenchably superior. Fencing and sizing each other up. In his internal monologue, Cyril cites literary authors to make himself feel superior and affects a lazy drawl. But he has lost.
Lawrence’s weakest area is sometimes his dialogue: it feels like he’s trying to be witty and sharp but this isn’t his metier so that this would-be witty dialogue feels weak and contrived; in trying to portray Cyril as witty and dazzling, it mostly comes over as clumsy and pretentious. I take the point that that is precisely the character of Cyril that he’s trying to portray. As with a lot of dialogue in old books, I wonder if this is actually how people spoke 100 years ago…
Lawrence is better at describing the curdling atmosphere of the scene and describing Mersham’s stealthy method of bringing up old songs and subjects with Muriel and so slowly stealing her sympathies back from the interloper.
They both leave at ten and walk the cobbled track to the barn where Vickers has parked his bike. In a way, the most memorable thing about the entire story is learning that in those days, a bicycle lamp wasn’t electrical but was an actual flame, in a lamp, with a wick, which had to be carefully lit and the glass clicked shut.
Cyril admires the other man’s confident movements, as when he leans down to pump up his tyres. He fools himself that this is the kind of man a wife gets bored of after a while, but has to admit he’s attractive. Cyril waves goodbye as Vickers cycles off.
He goes back into the parlour and asks Muriel if she’d like to walk him part of the way back to his path home. Her father looks disapproval but that doesn’t affect to young couple. Outside it is the dark night and, because he is more restrained, Lawrence is more effective.
There was a strangeness everywhere, as if all things had ventured out alive to play in the night, as they do in fairy-tales; the trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters below uniting in some magnificent game. They emerged from the wood on to the bare hillside. She came down from the wood-fence into his arms, and he kissed her, and they laughed low together. Then they went on across the wild meadows where there was no path.
They have reignited their old flame. He even says they could get married, although he has no money. He seems to suggest that she will ‘come to him again’, suggesting sex. As if they’d made love before. But doesn’t want to seem to be coaxing of forcing. but she points out how it (sex) is different for girls. Very unreasonably, he gets angry at her reluctance. He claims to have given her ‘books’ – presumably about contraceptive techniques?
When she points out how they’d have to creep about in corners, suddenly all the magic and glamour of it disappears, and he just feels tired, and a gap opens between them which she, of course senses, and begs him not to feel cross with her. Robbed of the possibility of sex, he finds himself deflated and empty. He hasn’t the energy to kiss her goodbye or say anything fancy. She turns and walks away without saying a word, her white face disappearing into the gloom.
How many billions of men must have felt this rebuff, the woman they’re wooing’s definitive refusal of sex, which bursts their balloon, evaporating all their energy or interest – and how many billions of women must have spoken sensibly and wisely and then been heart-broken when their man abruptly went cold and walked away. The story gets better as it progresses and the further it gets from Lawrence’s cack-handed dialogue. In one sense it’s a trite scenario, but the final walk through the night woods creates a mood which makes the ending genuinely moving.
Strike Pay (1913)
One of his studies of the West Midlands miners he grew up among. A lot of information is packed into just six pages. The miners are on strike. The Union agent hands out strike pay to a roomful of miners who are in a boisterous bantering mood, joking about how much they each get paid. They go into town and join the other colliers loitering around. then four of them decide to walk to Nottingham, nine miles away, to watch the Nottingham versus Aston Villa football match.
On the way they stop at each village pub for a round. They come to a field where some of the pit ponies they work with have been liberated from toiling underground (for the duration of the strike). The more adventurous of the miners round them up and mount and ride them, larking about, falling off, getting on again. Eventually they resume their trek to Nottingham. But at the next pub Ephraim Wharmby, a shy young lad, realises he’s lost his half-sovereign (a sovereign = one pound sterling, so half a sovereign was ten shillings or modern 50p). They all rifle through his clothes and boots and go back to the pony field but can’t find it. Being good chaps they all pitch in and give him two shillings each of their pay (10p) and he doesn’t have to buy the next round.
The match is good and the lads go on to more pubs, along with thousands of other colliers, but Ephraim is miserable and opts to go home. When he arrives home there is a scene with his domineering mother, Mrs Marriott, who asks where the devil he’s been, while they’ve made lunch, and tea and dinner for him, all to wait and then be cleared away. Sheepishly Ephraim hands over all he has (4 shillings sixpence, after ha paid for his football ticket) which makes Mrs Marriott angrily ask if he thinks that’s enough room and board to support him and his wife, Maud. Under the haranguing, Ephraim turns from meek and apologetic to furious, and demands his tea. Mrs Marriott order her daughter (Maud) to refuse and flounces out, but she quietly gets her man his tea, he is her man, after all.
The Border-Line (1924)
Katherine Farquhar is another avatar of Frieda Lawrence, a handsome full-bodied woman of forty, twice married with two grown-up children.
Daughter of a German Baron she was, and remained, in her own mind and body, although England had become her life-home. And surely she looked German, with her fresh complexion and her strong, full figure.
Full of confidence, she is in Paris boarding the train to take her to visit relatives in Baden-Baden and to see her second husband, Philip, a journalist currently working in Germany. She remembers her first husband, father of her two grown-up children, Alan Anstruther, son of a Scottish baronet, and captain in a Highland regiment. They fought. Alan was obstinate. After ten years they ceased to live together.
Alan had a good friend, Philip Farquar, trained for the bar, went into journalism, small and dark with an air of knowing all the secrets, attractive to women. Philip is in awe of Alan’s solidity. ‘He is the only real man, what I call a real man, that I have ever met.’
Then the Great War broke out and Alan marched bluffly off to war. In spring of 1915 he was reported missing and never reappeared. Katherine didn’t mourn. Philip stayed in England working as a journalist and was a source of consolation and strength. In 1921, aged 38, she married him.
It was lovely at first but then a sense of loss and degradation afflicted her. Philip is clever and reassures her but she feels trapped. Sometimes the face of Alan, ‘the bony, hard, masterful, but honest face of Alan would come back’ to her. She sensed him with her on the cross-Channel ferry and his memory made her happy in Paris, where the story opens.
So she takes the train East, heading into Germany, and:
As she looked unseeing out of the carriage window, suddenly, with a jolt, the wintry landscape realized itself in her consciousness. The flat, grey, wintry landscape, ploughed fields of greyish earth that looked as if they were compound of the clay of dead men. Pallid, stark, thin trees stood like wire beside straight, abstract roads. A ruined farm between a few more wire trees. And a dismal village filed past, with smashed houses like rotten teeth between the straight rows of the village street. With sudden horror she realized that she must be in the Marne country, the ghastly Marne country, century after century digging the corpses of frustrated men into its soil. The border country, where the Latin races and the Germanic neutralize one another into horrid ash. (p.94)
She is travelling across the borderline. The train arrives at Nancy. She has to change here and catch a different train on in the morning. A German porter escorts her to her hotel, where she has dinner. Then she fancies seeing the cathedral. She gets lost and has to ask a French policeman the way, for Alsace is now occupied by the French. She used to love seeing it but now she experiences the cathedral as a huge looming mass, and is terrified by the sense that behind it ‘lurks the great blood-creature waiting, implacable and eternal.’
As she turns to leave the square she sees a man waiting by the post office and realises it is her first husband, Alan. As she goes to pass, he puts his hand on her arm. He says nothing, doesn’t look at her.
She knew that she was walking with his spirit. But that even did not trouble her. It seemed natural. And there came over her again the feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless pleasure of a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom she belongs.
She realises nothing comes close to the fulfilment of being with your man:
As she walked at his side through the conquered city, she realized that it was the one enduring thing a woman can have, the intangible soft flood of contentment that carries her along at the side of the man she is married to. It is her perfection and her highest attainment… No matter what the man does or is, as a person, if a woman can move at his side in this dim, full flood of contentment, she has the highest of him, and her scratching efforts at getting more than this, are her ignominious efforts at self-nullity. (p.97)
She knows he is a spirit returned from hell but all the fear and dread you might imagine someone having when encountering a ghost are absent. Instead Lawrence envisions the whole thing solely in terms of fulfilling a woman’s primal need.
Now that she was walking with a man who came from the halls of death, to her, for her relief. The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even now, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from her body. She went at his side still and released, like one newly unbound, walking in the dimness of her own contentment.
And the word ‘contentment’ is repeated throughout the passage.
At the bridge-head he came to a standstill, and drew his hand from her arm. She knew he was going to leave her. But he looked at her from under his peaked cap, darkly but kindly, and he waved his hand with a slight, kindly gesture of farewell and of promise, as if in the farewell he promised never to leave her, never to let the kindliness go out in his heart, to let it stay hers always.
She goes back to her hotel and undresses for bed, trying not to break the spell of completion.
If a man could come back out of death to save her from this, she would not ask questions of him, but be humble, and beyond tears grateful.
Next morning she goes out into the defeated and occupied town but it is hard and cold. So she catches the connecting train on into Germany proper. She crosses the Rhine, huge, sluggish and weary of race struggle. It is a profound geographical borderline between the Celtic and Germanic races. At the actual border, at Kehl, she feels that ‘the two races neutralized one another, and no polarity was felt, no life–no principle dominated.’ Lawrence gives brilliant descriptions of the watery, frozen landscape. After another long delay:
At last they set off, northwards, free for the moment, in Germany. It was the land beyond the Rhine, Germany of the pine forests. The very earth seemed strong and unsubdued, bristling with a few reeds and bushes, like savage hair. There was the same silence, and waiting, and the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned north, under the waning civilization. The audible overtone of our civilization seemed to be wearing thin, the old, low, pine-forest hum and roar of the ancient north seemed to be sounding through. At least, in Katherine’s inner ear. (p.101)
At last the train arrives at Oos and her husband, Philip, is there to meet her. He is obviously ill and complains of being cold. And she, after her transformative experience at Nancy, the deep sense of completion she felt with the ghost of her first husband, finds Philip trivial.
As she looked at him she felt for the first time, with curious clarity, that it was humiliating to be married to him, even in name. She was humiliated even by the fact that her name was Katherine Farquhar. Yet she used to think it a nice name! ‘
Just think of me married to that little man!’ she thought to herself. ‘Think of my having his name!’
It didn’t fit. She thought of her own name: Katherine von Todtnau; or of her married name: Katherine Anstruther. The first seemed most fitting. But the second was her second nature. The third, Katherine Farquhar, wasn’t her at all. (p.101)
Also waiting there is her sister, Marianne, and they immediately gang up on Philip, denigrating him in German and bursting into giggle.
Both sisters stood still and laughed in the middle of the street. ‘The little one’ was Philip.
‘The other was more a man,’ said Marianne. ‘But I’m sure this one is easier. The little one! Yes, he should be easier,’ and she laughed in her mocking way.
‘The stand-up-mannikin!’ said Katherine, referring to those little toy men weighted at the base with lead, that always stand up again.
‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Marianne. ‘I’m sure he always comes up again! Prumm!’ She made a gesture of knocking him over. ‘And there he rises once more!’ She slowly raised her hand, as if the mannikin were elevating himself.
The two sisters stood in the street laughing consumedly. (p.102)
Which I’m sure Philip, feeling cold and ill, thoroughly appreciated. So they settle in, tea, dinner, chats. Marianne is five years older than Katherine. Her husband also was killed in the war but she has reached a place of equanimity and detachment.
She had now ceased to struggle for anything at all. She was a woman who had lived her life. So at last, life seemed endlessly quaint and amusing to her. She accepted everything, wondering over the powerful primitiveness of it all, at the root-pulse. ‘I don’t care any more at all what people do or don’t do,’ she said. ‘Life is a great big tree, and the dead leaves fall. But very wonderful is the pulse in the roots! So strong, and so pitiless.’
It was as if she found a final relief in the radical pitilessness of the Tree of Life.
This comes close to my view, or is the standpoint I would like to arrive at. Philip plays up to being weak and ill. To some extent it had always been his schtick, his brand. From his point of view, he saw the strong, manly, defiant types be exterminated by the million in the war while he kept his head down, and so he survived and won Katherine’s hand. ‘When the lion is shot, the dog gets the spoil.’
From Katherine’s point of view his weakness and dependency made a welcome change after Alan’s manly expectation of being obeyed and worshipped. But here, in defeated abject Germany, Philip comes over as abject and defeated and she realises she despises him, ‘the whimpering little beast’.
Katherine sees the abject poverty of the townspeople. In the evening they queue to get water from a hot spring since so many of them can’t afford coal or wood to warm their homes and she despises Philip for his self-pitying shivering. Let him shiver!
She goes for big bracing walks in the wild woods, deep in snow and feels the presence of her manly first husband, she wants to hug the big firm pine trees. But Philip staggers along beside her, short and sick and whining. God, how she despises him! Over there, in the reddish rocks, she is sure Alan is waiting for her but… She has to turn and take the panting Philip back to his sick bed.
Philip becomes so ill he is bed-ridden but Katherine continues her long walks in the woods. One day Alan simply walks out from among the rocks, striding proudly in his kilt, and puts his arm round her, and leads her to a secluded place, and makes love to her.
She yielded in a complete yielding she had never known before. And among the rocks he made love to her, and took her in the silent passion of a husband, took a complete possession of her. (p.104)
Obviously the word ‘possession’ has a double meaning, in the contexts of ghosts and spirits. I suppose it raises the question of whether Alan’s appearances to Katherine are ‘real’ or her hallucinations.
On her return she finds Philip really ill. She doesn’t care but out of duty stays with him and tends him. Next day she can feel Alan waiting among the rocks but Philip becomes hysterical at the thought of him leaving her and so she stays, sullen and resentful. As evening approaches it grows colder and colder and:
A very powerful flow seemed to envelop her in another reality. (p.105)
Alan is calling her, Alan has hold of her soul which a force which grows by the hour. She stays with Philip who goes downhill fast, at midnight rolling his eyes, and he begs her to hold him in his arms ‘in pure terror of death’.
And as she reluctantly works her arm down around his shoulders, on the bed, the door opens and Alan walks silently in. He walks to the bed and loosens the sick man’s arms from around Katherine’s neck and places his (Philip’s) hands on his chest. And Philip has last convulsions and dies.
But Alan ignores all that and draws her over to the other bed, where he makes love to her again:
But Alan drew her away, drew her to the other bed, in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey. (p.105)
Commentary
Obviously a story like this drives a coach and horses through our modern notions of feminism and gender. Lawrence’s obsession with the notion of Man and Woman, and Husband and Wife, and the primeval power they exercise over each other, seem like they’re from the stone age. Certainly the story’s notion that a woman must submit to a strong manly husband would make any feminist throw up.
In my opinion, the best thing to do with this, as with most old literature, is to suspend judgement and give yourself to the experience, submit to the text’s descriptions, ‘ideas’, obsessions and opinions, no matter how contrary to modern belief.
There’s something to outrage a feminist or progressive reader on every page, yet it would be odd to balk at these ancient attitudes but swallow whole the bigger issue here, the idea that there are ghosts, there are spirits, that ghosts of the dead come back to visit us.
In fact this itself is contested within the story. an see that this is contested. The fundamental question is, Is the ghost of Alan real or Katherine’s (very powerful) hallucination and my opinion is, It doesn’t matter. The text is what it is.
If, for the duration of the story, you buy into the (obviously nonsensical) idea that the spirits of the dead come back to haunt us, why not buy into all the story’s other nonsensical or objectionable aspects and opinions?
Reading any literature is, in an obvious sense, submitting to someone else’s worldview for a while. What’s the point of doing it if that worldview isn’t different from ours, uncanny, alien, other, enlightening, illuminating and takes us to strange places, showing us actions and opinions we wouldn’t countenance for a second in our real lives? And so judging it by the value of our real lives is a problematic, arguably a blinkered and self-censoring, approach.
On this view, the more a text breaches modern morality, or vividly depicts old opinions, different worldviews, the better, as this exercises the muscles of the imagination and helps keep our minds open, open to the millions of things human beings have believed and valued.
Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)
Jimmy plunged out into the gulfing blackness of the Northern night, feeling how horrible it was, but pressing his hat on his brow in a sense of strong adventure. He was going through with it.
A satire on the type of the squirming Oxford intellectual, a type Lawrence detested.
Jimmy Frith is 35. He’s just been divorced by his ‘very charming and clever wife’ of ten years, Clarissa. Jimmy is the editor of a high-class, rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, the Commentator, and his candid editorials bring him shoals of admiring acquaintances. Plus he’s handsome. The result? He meets loads of clever, sophisticated women when what he wants is to meet the ‘real’ people, the simple, genuine, direct spontaneous, unspoilt souls. In the opinion of his men friends, he was a grinning faun or Pan-person. In his own opinion, he was a martyred Saint Sebastian with the mind of Plato. He sought some unspoilt, unsophisticated, wild-blooded woman, to whom he would be a sort of Solomon of wisdom, beauty and wealth. She would need to be in reduced circumstances to appreciate his wealth, which amounted to the noble sum of three thousand pounds and a little week-ending cottage in Hampshire.
Then his magazine is sent a short vivid poem and accompanying letter from a woman in the North. He asks for another and a correspondence ensues. To his enquiries she explains that she is married to a coal miner who has a mistress, so is alone and misunderstood. She used to be a teacher. Now she writes poetry to relieve her heart. She is Mrs Emilia Pinnegar, 31, with a child of 8.
All these facts are by way of setting the scene for the meat of the story. This is that, after some correspondence, Jimmy decides to go and visit this woman. So he takes a train to Yorkshire, then undertakes a harrowing walk through a coal-mining town as dusk falls, eventually arriving at her poor cottage where she answers to his knock.
Mrs Pinnegar is not a pretty woman. She is tall, with a long face and a haggard defiant expression. Life has been hard to her. In his semi-realistic, semi-visionary style, Lawrence depicts Jimmy overcoming all the drawbacks, in his own internal thoughts, and then rashly inviting her to run away, to come and live with him in his house in St John’s Wood. Lawrence depicts the strange and visionary in the everyday.
He lifted his face, his eyes still cast in that inturned, blind look. He looked now like a Mephistopheles who has gone blind. With his black brows cocked up, Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles blind and begging in the street.
She is astonished by this mad invitation but he insists and she begins to accept it. She suggests he waits around to meet the man of the house, which he reluctantly accepts. The husband is on the afternoon shift at the mine and arrives home soon after 9pm, dirty and reeking of underground
Maybe that’s what all the fol-de-rol of the plot was for: to arrive at this confrontation between the bookish Oxford intellectual and the dirty but proud coalminer. He strips to the waist and washes himself, then his wife washes his back, then towels him dry. They both perform this daily ritual completely ignoring Jimmy who sits in a corner, noting the husband’s thin muscular physique.
Then the wife brings his dinner and Pinnegar sits and eats, at a right angle to Jimmy. He asks why Jimmy’s here and so begins a long, tense dialogue, which includes the blunt admission:
‘She’s told you I’ve got another woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’ll tell you for why. If I give in to the coal face, and go down the mine every day to eight hours’ slavery, more or less, somebody’s got to give in to me.’ (p.122)
The husband and wife argue over his other woman, but when she says she wants to go with Jimmy, he visibly strips himself of all emotion, and agrees. It’s late. Jimmy leaves to take up the reluctant offer of the local pub, to sleep on their sofa.
Next morning, he returns to the cottage. In the daylight he sees how bad the woman’s skin is and bluntly thinks, ‘however am I going to sleep with that woman?’ but determines that he will. The husband is there, in a corner, reading the paper. He asks her to come with him now, but she refuses, saying she has things to sort out, she’ll come on Monday. Now she goes out with the child, leaving Jimmy alone with the surly husband.
They talk frankly, about the new government (‘something has to change’) and then the woman. The miner says something had to change and he regards Jimmy as the instrument of that change. Jimmy knows the cold, hard miner is dominating him and hates it.
On the train home, Jimmy at first feels exultant, like he’s had a great adventure. Back in London he goes to see his friend, Severn, who thinks he’s been an idiot. This prompts Jimmy to write a last-minute letter on Sunday night asking Emily to reconsider: does she really want to come (which, of course, signals his own reluctance)?
But the only reply is confirmation she’ll be taking the train next morning. Next morning Jimmy goes to Marylebone station taut with nerves. In the cab to his house he can more than sense the presence of the other man on her, he can feel him. It will be a battle. So the story ends:
As he sat in the taxi, a perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall–the woman, or the man, her husband? (p.130)
On a rational level, it is wildly improbable and doesn’t make any sense. But on the irrational, unconscious level Lawrence operates on, it is magnificent.
Two Blue Birds (1926)
This is a very high-spirited, amused, ironic story. A man and woman, in their thirties, are married and love each other but for the past four years or so can’t bear to be in each other’s company. So they live apart, he in London, she in the south of France with her latest lover. He has a secretary, Miss Wrexall, who adores him, would do anything for him. The wife thinks the arrangement is fine, she suggested she go to France, she’s the one having the ‘gallant little affairs’ but the thought of his dutiful and common little secretary is like grit in her eye.
Then he has his secretary’s mother and sister move in. They’re of the servant class: the mother is an excellent cook and the sister functions as a maid and valet de chambre. When the wife comes back from France she is horrified at how well the new household functions, and himself cock of the walk.
He had that air of easy aplomb and good humour which is so becoming to a man, and which he only acquires when he is cock of his own little walk, made much of by his own hens.
The servants are all flattery and submission and what would you like for dinner, Mrs Gee, but she hates them.
Spring visit
So on her next visit she needles him. Maybe being so well provided for might be bad for his work (for he is a workaholic)? But the narrative hovers at a generalised level, about their feelings, especially her conflicted feelings: loving him but not wanting to be with him; having affairs but not caring about the other men; hating the happy little domestic situation he’s arranged for himself.
She is Mrs Gee, ‘a broad, strong woman’ just turned 40. She schemes. Her hardness is brilliantly conveyed.
The garden was full of flowers: he loved them for their theatrical display. Lilac and snowball bushes, and laburnum and red may, tulips and anemones and coloured daisies. Lots of flowers! Borders of forget-me-nots! Bachelor’s buttons! What absurd names flowers had! She would have called them blue dots and yellow blobs and white frills. Not so much sentiment after all! There is a certain nonsense, something showy and stagey about spring, with its pushing leaves and chorus-girl flowers, unless you have something corresponding inside you. Which she hadn’t. (p.19)
This is the funniest Lawrence text I’ve read. Laugh-out-loud funny. The wife comes across him dictating an article to the secretary in the garden and is infuriated: is there nowhere to escape their happy little domesticity?
He was dictating a magazine article about the modern novel. ‘What the modern novel lacks is architecture.’ Good God! Architecture! He might just as well say: What the modern novel lacks is whalebone, or a teaspoon, or a tooth stopped. (p.19)
It is an article on ‘The Future of The Novel’, precisely the kind of thing Virginia Woolf wrote by the dozen but here, taken as the epitome of fatuousness.
The wife spies on the man complacently dictating to the compliant secretary when she notices two blue tits fighting at his feet. He notices, too, and waves them away, then the wife steps forward and there’s a tense scene, with the wife making ironic catty remarks to the secretary. Then stalks off, in her rather wolfish way.
Tea time arrives and the wife reappears as the sister serves the tea things. She asks the secretary (who was about to leave) to stay, and tell her sister (the maid) to bring another cup. Miss Wrexall runs off to change (for tea) into a chicory blue dress of the same shade as Mrs Gee’s except the latter’s is very expensive and fine. Two birds in blue fighting over their man. Like the two blue tits. And the two birds of the title. Humans becoming, and behaving like, animals, as in the novella The Fox.
Mrs Gee taunts them both, suggesting Miss Wrexall is not just the most perfect secretary but that maybe she writes the husband’s novels for him? Mrs Gee taunts the secretary for being so competent and proficient at shorthand and so on. The husband bridles. Miss Wrexall becomes agitated.
Sticking the knife in, Mrs Gee tells Cameron (the first time we’ve heard his name) that maybe he takes too much from Miss Wrexall. Her aim is to stain and sully their simple working relationship. Miss Wrexall bridles and says there is nothing inappropriate between them. Trying to reconcile, Miss Wrexall says there’s no need for Mrs Gee to feel left out.
‘Thank you, my dear, for your offer,’ said the wife, rising, ‘but I’m afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet, tearing out their little feathers!’ (p.26)
And with that parting shot she gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s an absolutely brilliant depiction of its subject matter, of the very complicated currents involved in marriage, separation, relationships, all tied up with the simple metaphor of the two birds.
The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)
The unnamed young American woman who’s the protagonist, a Californian girl from Berkeley, at 23 marries a little, wiry, twisted fellow from Holland, who’s made his fortune setting up and running silver mines in northern Mexico, in Chihuahua state.
It’s a bleak isolated location. Ten years pass. She bears him two children. The Great War knocks the bottom out of the silver market and the mines are abandoned while the Dutchman tries to switch to agriculture. They have occasional white guests (i.e. non Spanish or Mexican). One of these asks what lies beyond the hills that surround the ranch and the Dutchman explains about the neighbouring Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the Navajo, who were still wandering free, and the Yaquis of Sonora, and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua State.
This conversation lights a flame in the woman’s soul. Her husband goes away for a few days to Torreon so the woman gets her servants to saddle up a horse, packs some food and – rejecting offers to help or accompany her – sets off for the hills.
To cut a longish story short, after a while she bumps into three Indians. When she tells them she has rejected the white man’s God and wants to find out more about their gods, they nod to each other: this was prophesied; the white man has triumphed over the Indian because the sun and the moon are out of balance, but the wise men predict that when a white woman offers herself as a sacrifice, then the sun and the moon will be realigned.
So she agrees to travel back to their village where she is put up in a house without windows and, over the course of weeks and maybe months, we see her being subjected to various rituals, stripped and anointed, redressed in native costume, allowed to watch native dances and ceremonies, and above all, plied with a sweet drink which gives her hallucinations, makes her forget herself and instead see phantasmagorias and become acutely sensitive to sights and sounds.
Lawrence prepares us for the ending by having her think, repeatedly, ‘I have died, my old self is dead, I have died to my old life etc’. So she is perfectly prepared when the shortest day of midwinter arrives, and the Indians ritually strip, wash, anoint, redress her and lead her up to a sacred cave behind an imposing sheet of ice and there, as the sun moves slowly round to shine through the ice and illuminate the cave, they sacrifice her to their gods.
The actual act isn’t described. The story stops just at the moment before she is sacrificed, with a great sense of suspense.
They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce. Their ferocity wanted something, and they were waiting the moment. And their ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph. But still they were anxious.
Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionlessness he watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power.
The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race. (p.81)
In Lawrence’s later novels I noticed his frequent use of words he’s coined and ‘exultance’ is one of them. Standard English isn’t deep or vivid enough to convey the depth he wants to express.
The Last Laugh (1925)
E.M. Forster wrote stories about Pan, the mischievous Greek god of nature, associated with spring, fertility, merriment and sex but they were set in sunny Greece or a summer’s day in the English countryside. Lawrence has the bright idea of relocating all this to Hampstead, in north London, in the depths of winter.
So it’s a cold winter’s night when a slight man with a red beard says goodbye to two friends, a man and a woman, who are visiting, shuts his door and they go down into the street. When the woman calls goodbye Lorenzo’, we know this is a brief, sly self-portrait of Lawrence himself.
On into the snowy street go the man in his bowler hat and the young woman. She is Miss James (referred to simply as ‘James’) and is deaf. We learn this when the man says he can hear someone laughing. This prompts James to get out her listening machine, an elaborate device which needs to be switched on, and puts on her headphones. She can’t hear any laughter but then thinks she sees something in a little park with big black holly trees and old, ribbed, silent English elms, ‘a dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes.’
They’re loud talking brings over a tall, clean-shaven young policeman. None of them can hear the laughter but they all feel… rejuvenated, enlivened. The girl finds herself attracted to the fit young policeman and starts to feel frisky:
She seemed to stretch herself, to stretch her limbs free. And the inert look had left her full soft cheeks. Her cheeks were alive with the glimmer of pride and a new dangerous surety… The second of ancient fear was followed at once in her by a blithe, unaccustomed sense of power.
This is something new for the girl:
Having held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact, and never having let any man touch her, she now, with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness, allowed the large hand of the young policeman to support her
Meanwhile the man in the bowler hat:
His voice, with curious delight, broke into a laugh again, as he stood and stamped his feet on the snow, and danced to his own laughter, ducking his head.
He thinks he sees something moving and sets off at a run down the hill. He comes to a halt in front of a house just as the front door opens and a woman comes down the path. She asks if he just knocked at her door and he says no. Mysteriously, magically, seductively, she says she’s always listening for that knock at the front door because you always hope… you always hope something wonderful will happen. She makes eyes at him and invites him in and he needs no second invitation. For some reason Lawrence makes her a Jewess. Maybe that is to emphasise her exotic, slightly unenglish sexiness. Into her house disappears the man with the bowler hat.
James and the policeman watch then turn away and walk towards the tube station. She feels a tremendous sense of exultation and power, so much so that she feels she could kill the policeman.
She was surprised herself at the strong, bright, throbbing sensation beneath her breasts, a sensation of triumph and rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame. (p.139)
And then, making it absolutely plain that this is about the god:
Voices were calling. In spite of her deafness she could hear someone, several voices, calling and whistling, as if many people were hallooing through the air: ‘He’s come back! Aha! He’s come back!’ (p.139)
There’s a flash of lightning and she sees the face right in front of her. She and the policeman walk on towards her house, which is a little one in side street near a church but as they approach the church she sees the front door is open. From inside come more voices crying ‘He is back’, then piece of paper are whirled past them on the wind and then the big white sheet of the altar cloth. In case the reader hasn’t got it yet, Lawrence writes:
There came a bit of gay, trilling music. The wind was running over the organ-pipes like pan-pipes, quickly up and down. Snatches of wild, gay, trilling music, and bursts of the naked low laughter. (p.141)
The policeman is so scared by all this that he asks if he can come into her house to warm himself up. She says OK and he can make a fire in the grate but he mustn’t come upstairs, which is where she goes.
Cut to the next morning, and James in her studio looking at her paintings. She finds them ludicrous. The servant comes to ask if she wants breakfast and is surprised when James says there’s no need to shout i.e. she can hear. In fact everything feels different the morning after.
The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven. (p.142)
The serving woman reminds her that there’s a man downstairs, the policeman. James is surprised that he didn’t let himself out the night before.
Now she thinks of Marchbanks. This is a young man she’s been jolly good friends with for two years. Not lovers, mind; none of that dirty stuff. Now, in her new world eyes, she thinks how ridiculous it is, all this man-woman nonsense and, to her surprise, she hears the low laughter, as if agreeing with her.
Only now is it made explicit that this Marchbanks is the man in the bowler hat she was with last night. Now she sees him coming down the side street to the house then entering. It’s their habit for him to come to breakfast. He asks him about staying his night with the Jewess. He left at dawn. She tells him not to shout when he speaks and he thinks she’s joking, doesn’t realise she can hear. She is, in fact, cured.
James now has the confidence to mock Marchbanks who doesn’t like it. She tells him she saw the face again, closer up, last night, and heard the laughter, but can’t tell him any more.
They go down to see the policeman and the story for the first time topples over into being a ghost story. The policeman hasn’t left because he has gone lame. James asks him to take his socks off and they discover that his foot has become deformed, curled itself up like the paws of an animal. Of course. He has started turning into a satyr. In her ear James hears the creepy laughter and then Marchbanks reels back as if he’s been shots.
She started round again as Marchbanks gave a strange, yelping cry, like a shot animal. His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly wild recognition. He was staring with fixed eyes at something. And in the rolling agony of his eyes was the horrible grin of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself.
‘Why,’ he yelped in a high voice, ‘I knew it was he!’ And with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor. Then he lay still, in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening. (p.146)
And the story ends abruptly with ‘faint smell of almond blossom in the air.’
This is a horror story, isn’t it? not a genre you associate with Lawrence.
Aldington suggests that Lawrence’s placing of himself at the start of the story somehow implies that he is a wizard capable of deploying the occult powers that follow. This includes deforming ‘his natural enemy’, the policeman (to understand this you need to know about the terrible persecution Lawrence suffered from the authorities and the police during the First World War; see the novel Kangaroo) and striking dead a personal enemy.
Smile (1926)
A very short story, 5 pages. The third-person narrator describes a man on a train south. He’s had a telegram announcing that a woman he is attached to somehow, Ophelia, is critically ill. She is in a hospice run by the Blue Sisters, in Italy. Unable to stay up all night at her bedside, he sits up all night on the sleeper train from France into Italy, as penance. He has a Christian frame of mind, in fact:
His dark, handsome, clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on the Cross, with the thick black eyebrows tilted in the dazed agony.
But by the time he gets to the hospice, the following evening, the Mother Superior tells him Ophelia is dead. She leans towards him sympathetically, but he recoils. When she places a hand on his arm he notices how shapely it is. When she stands he sees how full-bodied she is. She calls for a young nun to come and accompany him to see the body and he notices how shapely her hand is, too. So he’s taken to see the body. In the room is another nun. When she stands he notices her fine white hand against her bosom. Obviously he is super-aware of their femininity.
When Matthew (only now are we told his name) sees the body (we are only now told it is his wife), gives a grunt and then smiles. The three women (Mother Superior, a senior nun, the junior nun) are scandalised but smiles are infectious and one by one, they smile too.
The smile fades and he looks back over his marriage. Ten years during which she became restive and left him numerous times, only to crawl back. There are no children. The whole thing was a disaster. he’s filled with bottomless sadness.
Inexplicably he feels the dead woman digging him in the ribs, tempting him to laugh. To quell it he turns to the Mother Superior and snarks ‘Mea culpa’. The nuns step back from this strange angry man. But even as he makes for the door he has to hold back the smile and, as he passes her, is smitten by voluptuous feelings for the mature nun.
When he’s left the three sisters move closer, bend over the body and notice, they think, the ghost of a smile on the dead woman’s face. Did she see him? Did she catch the smile that infected them all?
Glad Ghosts (1926)
Long, 40 pages. It was the first fictional work he began after what proved to be his final trip to Europe, in the autumn 1925.
It’s a surprisingly accessible, chatty first-person narrator tells this long ghost story. It’s all about his friendship with the Honourable Carlotta Fell. They met when they were both at school together. She was attracted to him because he had a real feel for the thing, for It, but they were never lovers, never anything like. She affected to hate her own class but like all posh young people, got over it and married into it, to a Lord Lathkill, very handsome, officer in a Guards regiment. He sees them soon after they’re engaged when Lathkill jokes about ‘the Lathkill bad luck’.
They see each other now and then but then the war comes. Afterwards, he sees them again, learns that Lathkill was wounded in the throat, now his voice is husky. They have twins. The narrator visits and sees them asleep in their cots. How sweet. Then a little girl.
He travels. Then he hears about the disasters. The twins were killed in a car crash along with their aunt. A few months later the little girl dies of an illness. He’s abroad when he gets the news and toys with writing, but what could he say? Some time later he returns to England and sends a letter. Carlotta replies inviting him to their place in Derbyshire. He counter-replies asking to see her in London. Here he sees for himself the lines of suffering in her face, and how the stuffing’s been knocked out of her.
She really presses him to visit them in Derbyshire so he acquiesces. Lathkill meets him at the station and drives him to their dark, lifeless mansion. Here things kick up a notch. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name, Mark Morier (distantly echoing the Paul Morel of Sons and Lovers).
More to the point, we learn two key facts: this house has a ghost, a woman ghost, who is meant to bring good luck (unlike the bad luck which has so far blighted the couple) but this ghost is rarely if ever seen. And 2) that Lathkill’s elderly mother holds seances and that in one of these the medium unambiguously stated that the Lathkill ghost would return as and when a friend of theirs with two Ms returned. Lathkill and Carlotta both think ‘Mark Morier’.
That evening he attends an awesomely frigid and stony dinner: Carlotta and Lathkill, along with his witchy mother, and two other guests: a yellow liverish colonel, and his terrified silent wife, Mrs Hale. The stoniness of the dinner is magnificently conveyed.
Then the women retired and the men go to the drawing room to smoke and drink spirits. Here the terrified Colonel tells his story. He married young, a woman named Lucy who was 28 to his 20. She bore him three children who grew up and married, but then she died. And then she reappeared to him after death. She badgered him to remarry and even suggested the bride, one of their daughters’ friends, 28, the same age Lucy was. And yet after the second marriage, she has haunted him angrily denouncing him for betraying her, terrifying him away from sleeping with the new Mrs Hale. Hence the extraordinary frigidity of the couple at dinner time, the fear and sterility in Mrs Hale.
Then they go up to join the women for coffee and more stilted conversation. In the midst of it, the man suggest putting some records on and dancing, so they clear the furniture out of the way and there’s an extended description of the dance, of the narrator’s feelings of dancing with old Carlotta, and then with terrified Mrs Hale.
In the midst of the dancing they feel the room become very cold. Presumably it is the ghost. The Colonel had gone to bed but now he reappears in his pyjamas, saying the ghost of Lucy has reappeared to admonish him. This triggers a diatribe from Lathkill. He explains that he realises he has been living bloodlessly, like a ghost, he and Carlotta are both ghosts, the house is dead and sterile. But this evening he has realised they have to live while they are still alive.
He sits next to Mrs Hale and presses her hand to his breast. And he tells the Colonel that the only way to appease the spirit of Lucy is to take her to his heart and warm her. Did they have much sex when they were married? No, the Colonel admits; he didn’t think she wanted it and so had affairs with other women but left her alone. Now Lathkill, in his raised visionary state, tells him to open his chest to her, and the Colonel indeed undoes his dressing gown, unbuttons his pyjamas and exposes his chest. He delivers an astonishing paean to his mother, thanking her for creating him, a man of flesh and blood.
If this was a ghost story, a genre story, we’d meet the ghost. But it isn’t, it’s Lawrence delivering a sermon. The sermon is, unsurprisingly, about the importance of physical love i.e. sex but delivered by Lathkill, who’s gone into visionary overdrive:
We’ve almost become two ghosts to one another, wrestling. Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can’t give it to you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We’ve suffered so much the other way. And the children, it is as well they are dead. They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. (p.192)
The women react to these speeches in the same bizarre spirit, Carlotta bursting into tears, Mrs Hale sticking by Lathkill.
Eventually this bizarre and surreal scene comes to an end and Lathkill walks the narrator to his guest room. Here he strips and imagines stiff unhappy Carlotta stripping down the hall and fantasises about worshipping her with his body. Instead he remains chaste. Then he goes to sleep and has a visionary dream, a long fantasia which involves meeting the ghost in the heart of oblivion. Here’s what he dreams.
Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep. I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face. I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. (p.201)
There is no embarrassing next morning, he just gets up and leaves, Lathklill shaking his hand, Carlotta saying ‘At last it was perfect!’
What this means is made clear in the last page of the story, which consists of a letter Lathkill writes some time later to the narrator who is once again abroad. In the letter Lathkill announces that Carlotta has had a baby, with yellow hair, while just a few days later, Mrs Hale had a baby with black hair.
So what I think ‘happened’ is that the evening ended with Lathkill impregnating Mrs Hale and the narrator impregnating Carlotta. The three alienated and sterile people (Lathkill, Carlotta, Mrs H) were all rejuvenated and brought back to life, in real flesh-and-blood bodies. Colonel Hale was exorcised of his guilt and has gone off to farm pigs. Even spooky Lady Lathkill has, apparently, abandoned the other side and committed to ‘this side’, to life in the here and now. With the result that the dead house where the narrator noticed everyone spoke in hushed whispers, has been restored to life. And Lathkill loves his life and his home again.
Sex is the cure.
According to notes, Lawrence really struggled with this story, starting and finishing others while he wrestled with it and you can see why. Like so many of his works it falls into two halves: the opening is amazingly fresh and realistic, sounding like a normal writer, and even up to the frigid dinner party it makes sense. It’s when the Colonel confesses how he is haunted by the ghost of his first wife that the story crosses over to the other side of fantasy. The sudden cooling of the room as if a spirit had entered, the increasingly frenetic dancing, the men swapping their dancing partners as they are to swap sexual partners, and Lathkill’s visionary speeches to the Colonel, Carlotta and his mother, before plunging into the strange ending where the narrator appears to have sex in a dream. Or is he just repressing the reality of sleeping with another man’s wife? I prefer the dream opinion because that’s what Lawrence presents in his text, that’s what’s on the page, and that is what is such a weird and giddy escape from the banal world of adultery.
Social history note: Here as in other stories from the period, Lawrence talks about them putting some jazz on the gramophone. Imagine how evocative it would be if he only told us the precise track.
In Love (1927)
12 pages. A light comedy.
Two sisters: Henrietta and Hester. Hester, the eldest, 25, is due to get married in just a month’s time. Henrietta, the younger, is just 21. Hester looks worried about going to spend a weekend with her fiancé, Joe, on his farm in Wiltshire but she goes anyway.
Here she spends the day helping with the chores, helping the cook serve dinner etc, then the servants wash up an leave. Six months earlier Hester would have been comfortable with Joe, they’ve been friends for donkey’s years. But now there’s a constraint between themselves because he’s made the mistake of falling in love with her. He wants to cuddle and ‘pet’ and all that stuff, which she finds repellent. Wishes it had never happened, now. For some reason I’ve found more humour in this selection of Lawrence stories than in all his novels put together.
He was extremely competent at motor-cars and farming and all that sort of thing. And surely she, Hester, was as complicated as a motorcar! Surely she had as many subtle little valves and magnetos and accelerators and all the rest of it, to her make-up! If only he would try to handle her as carefully as he handled his car! She needed starting, as badly as ever any automobile did. Even if a car had a self-starter, the man had to give it the right twist. Hester felt she would need a lot of cranking up, if ever she was to start off on the matrimonial road with Joe. And he, the fool, just sat in a motionless car and pretended he was making heaven knows how many miles an hour. (p.151)
After enduring some ‘cuddling’ on the sofa, Hester asks Joe to play the piano for her and while he plays she slips out of the bungalow. She feels an immense relief to be out in the cool night under the moon but then the playing stops and she, on impulse, shimmies up into the weeping willow which hangs over the stream. Joe comes calling for her, but quietly and pathetically, making her despise him even more. More comedy:
She began to cry, and fumbling in her sleeve for her hanky, she nearly fell out of the tree. Which brought her to her senses.
She worries that she must be abnormal. All the other girls love this love stuff. Suddenly there’s the sound of a car which pulls up at the gate to Joe’s place. Hesta scrambles down out of the tree and runs over. It’s none other than sister Henrietta, and the car is driven by Joe’s brother, Donald, and in the back is Teddy, a second cousin.
They all swear they don’t want to interrupt the love birds, they’ve come to stay on an adjoining farm, but Hester insists they come in. When Henrietta and Hester enter Joe is, of course, furious, which the innocent younger sister doesn’t understand. Hester wants them all to stay but Henrietta can see they’re not wanted and, after warming her hands at the fire.
In front of her Hester and Joe have a flaring row. Joe wants to know why Hester just walked out like that and Hester claims she has a very good reason so… What is it, asks naive Henrietta. The impatient boys out in the car toot their horn. Henrietta yells out the door for them to wait half a minute and turns back to the couple who are at daggers drawn. Finally Hester spits it out:
Her face flew into sudden strange fury. ‘Well, if you want to know, I absolutely can’t stand your making love to me, if that’s what you call the business… I couldn’t possibly marry him if he kept on being in love with me.’ She spoke the two words with almost snarling emphasis… ‘Nothing can be so perfectly humiliating as a man making love to you,’ said Hester. ‘I loathe it.’ (p.159)
Joe goes red with fury then pale with shock. The girls comment on horrible men:
‘I don’t believe I could stand that sort of thing, with any man. Henrietta, do you know what it is, being stroked and cuddled? It’s too perfectly awful and ridiculous.’
‘Yes!’ said Henrietta, musing sadly. ‘As if one were a perfectly priceless meat-pie, and the dog licked it tenderly before he gobbled it up. It is rather sickening, I agree.’
‘And what’s so awful, a perfectly decent man will go and get that way. Nothing is so awful as a man who has fallen in love,’ said Hester.
‘I know what you mean, Hester. So doggy!’ said Henrietta sadly. (p.159).
To be precise, the sisters agree that men are awful. But then in a comic twist Joe announces that he never lover her either. He only proposed and did all the lovey-dovey stuff because it was expected of him. All of which he says with a sneer. Is he sincere, or just recovering from being rejected. Hester is surprised but Henrietta is appalled.
And he realises what a pig he’s been and repents, And Hester for the first time sees:
the honest, patient love for her in his eyes, and the queer, quiet central desire. It was the first time she had seen it, that quiet, patient, central desire of a young man who has suffered during his youth, and seeks now almost with the slowness of age. A hot flush went over her heart. She felt herself responding to him. (p.161)
So she decides to stay and Henrietta slips out to let the love birds alone. Moral: love is a complicated thing.
None of That
22 pages. First-person narrative. The unnamed narrator meets Luis Colmenares in Venice. He’s a Mexican painter in exile. Surprisingly their conversation is all about a world-famous bullfighter from Mexico, Cuestra, who retired when an American woman, Ethel Cane, left him half a million dollars, and who Colmenares saw the other day swimming in the Lido.
Colmenares says he knew Ethel Cane in Paris before the war, when she knew ‘everybody’, was married to a painter (who wasn’t darling?) and had a mania for collecting antique furniture. Then she came to Mexico, attracted by the violence of the revolution, and hooked up with Colmenares, as someone she’d know in Paris. She came in search of a special man but her can-do energy and independence put off Mexican men, who were used to respect and obedience. They danced with her and expected her to become their mistress but she had a catchphrase: ‘I’m having none of that!’
So she became bored and insulted Mexico, saying it was nothing but little boys with guns.
She had an imaginary picture of herself as an extraordinary and potent woman who would make a stupendous change in the history of man. Like Catherine of Russia, only cosmopolitan, not merely Russian. And it is true, she was an extraordinary woman, with tremendous power of will, and truly amazing energy, even for an American woman. She was like a locomotive-engine stoked up inside and bursting with steam, which it has to let off by rolling a lot of trucks about. But I did not see how this was to cause a change in the tide of mortal affairs. It was only a part of the hubbub of traffic. She sent the trucks bouncing against one another with a clash of buffers, and sometimes she derailed some unfortunate item of the rolling-stock. (p.210)
(Cf the comic comparison of Hester with a car in ‘In Love’.) Colmenares was in thrall to her and flattered by her attention but she never had any intention of becoming an item. She used him for his information about Mexican history and society etc. Colmenares explains that he sometimes thought she wanted to be made love to, but realised that was only with her external self. Deep inside she despised men (‘she was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She only wanted passive maleness’), and only used them to try and ‘start something’, to be at the centre of something, to make something happen. He knew if he gave in to becoming her lover he would be chewed up and spat out and then the subject of humiliating stories told to others. So he felt a physical repulsion from her.
Anyway, the narrator prompts Colmenares to move things along and the painter comes to the bit where Ethel Cane meets the world-famous bullfighter, Cuesta. Well Colmenares took her to a bullfight. At first she was disgusted by the blood and killing but then Cuesta came on and performed like a god. When he kills a particularly demanding bull, Ethel goes mad and joins the rest of his intoxicated admirers. She cheers and he catches her eye and it visibly affects him, he is so distracted Colmenares worries he might make a mistake and be injured.
But he isn’t. Instead, later, Ethel asks whether Colmenares knows Cuesta (yes) and asks for an introduction. So Colmenares arranges for him to call round, dressed in his best, wearing a ponytail. He doesn’t speak any other language; Ethel speaks in French, which Colmenares translates. It’s a brief call but Cuesta takes to calling round regularly. He just sits there talking to the translator he brings, staring at Ethel all the time. He’s a pig, he’s an animal, when alone with Colmenares, he refers to Ethel in the crudest physical terms. He has no brains, no imagination, nothing fires him. Colmenares he’s not really even human.
Nevertheless Ethel is infatuated and asks Colmenares endlessly for his opinion. Suddenly she starts talking about killing herself. Mad with infatuation she doesn’t want her body to triumph over her imagination.
‘If my body is stronger than my imagination, I shall kill myself,’ she said… If my body was under the control of my imagination, I could take Cuesta for my lover, and it would be an imaginative act. But if my body acted without my imagination, I–I’d kill myself… If I can’t get my body on its feet again, and either forget him or else get him to make it an imaginative act with me–I–I shall kill myself.’ (p.220)
Colmenares tries to persuade both these people to walk away, Ethel to get on a train to New York and forget, Cuesta to stop tormenting her. But she is infatuated and Cuesta 1) thinks of her as a dish he wants to eat and 2) learns that she is rich, really rich, very, very rich. But neither of them want to be physical. Ethel takes herself too seriously to be so vulgar and Cuesta actually finds her pale whiteness repulsive.
Cuesta always goes to her house early in the evening, and for half an hour at most, claiming to be busy in the evening. But on his last visit, when Ethel asks why can’t he visit her for a full evening, he tells her she is welcome to come to her house at 11, when his evening business is finished. She is embarrassed and acts surprised that he is available so late. ‘If it’s a special occasion,’ he replies.
‘Come, then, at night–come at eleven, when I am free,’ he said, with supreme animal impudence, looking into her eyes.
A few days later Colmenares hears Ethel is ill. A day or two later it is announced she is dead. It was all hushed up but Colmenares knows she poisoned herself. In her will, she had left half her fortune to Cuesta. The will had been made some ten days before her death but it was allowed to stand and so he took the money.
The narrator complacently concludes that ‘Her body had got the better of her imagination, after all’ but Colmenares says it was worse than that. When Ethel and Cuesta retired to Cuesta’s bedroom, he handed over to a gang of his cronies who gang-raped her, telling them to be careful not to leave bruises or marks. The doctors at the inquest still found puzzling bruises but then another revolution broke out and the whole affair was overshadowed by larger violence. Mexico.
Sun (1928)
18 pages. Maurice and Juliet are Americans. They live in New York (East Forty-Seventh Street) where Maurice runs his own unspectacular but efficient business. He wears dark grey suits and parts his hair neatly. Since they had a little boy, Juliet has changed, becoming increasingly upset at her stifling life. The doctors recommend a break, in the sun, so she and her little boy take ship across the grey Atlantic and on to Italy.
Here she settles into a villa with a few servants. After a few weeks of lying dressed in the sunshine, she makes the decision to sunbathe naked and, after a little scouting round, finds a sheltered rocky place among cacti where she won’t be overseen. Lawrence describes her first occasion bathing quite naked and the wonderful feeling of coming back to life it awakens in her.
She slid off all her clothes, and lay naked in the sun, and as she lay she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the Sun! He faced down to her with blue body of fire, and enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet.
Back at the villa she tells her little boy to strip and, reluctant and scared at first, he quickly gets used to scampering round in the nude.
‘He shall not grow up like his father,’ she said to herself. ‘Like a worm that the sun has never seen.’
A month or more passes (January through February) with Juliet sunbathing every day. She turns golden brown. She takes her boy with him to the secret place. There are a few minor incidents, like the time she realises he is standing before a snake and has to very carefully make him back away, while the snake disappears.
Then one day, walking naked among the bushes she comes across the peasant from the next-door podere tying wood to his donkey. He straightens and sees her and they make eye contact.
Then his eyes met hers, and she felt the blue fire running through her limbs to her womb, which was spreading in the helpless ecstasy. Still they looked into each other’s eyes, and the fire flowed between them, like the blue, streaming fire from the heart of the sun. And she saw the phallus rise under his clothing, and knew he would come towards her.
‘Mummy, a man! Mummy!’ The child had put a hand against her thigh. ‘Mummy, a man!’
She heard the note of fear and swung round.
‘It’s all right, boy!’ she said, and taking him by the hand, she led him back round the rock again, while the peasant watched her naked, retreating buttocks lift and fall.
She slips her grey shift on and goes back to the villa, lies on her bed and fantasises about him. Next day she is down at the secret rocky place when the villa’s ancient housemaid, Marinina, shouts down to her. Her husband is here, all the way from New York. Then she shows Maurice down the secret path to the sheltered sun terrace.
He looks immaculate in a dark grey suit and she realises what a totally indoor man he is. He for his part is shocked to see her standing completely naked and averts his eyes as he walks forward. They don’t embrace or touch, but discuss practicalities. The little boy sees his Dad and isn’t that moved. When Maurice takes him in his arms, the boy demands that he removes his jacket.
Juliet announces she’s never going back to New York, she couldn’t bear it. He hesitantly acquiesces then, for politeness’ sake, she asks if he can come out here. To her disappointment he says yes, he can probably manage a month.
She ended on an open note. But the voice of the abrupt, personal American woman had died out, and he heard the voice of the woman of flesh, the sun-ripe body. He glanced at her again and again, with growing desire and lessening fear.
They have lunch. Now Juliet had noticed that the peasant had lunch at the same time every day, at the house over on the next podere or terrace. He has it now, with his wife dressed in black. Juliet arranges their lunch so that Maurice sits with his back to the view while Juliet can see across to the peasant and his heavy wife. Juliet fantasies about sex with him, to be taken and drenched in sunlight with such an elemental force, and then part without all that tedious talking and engagement, just being uplifted and transported. Whereas, her husband! She looks at him over the lunch table.
There was a gleam in his eyes, a desperate kind of courage of desire to taste this new fruit, this woman with rosy, sun-ripening breasts tilting within her wrapper. And she thought of him with his blanched, etiolated little city figure, walking in the sun in the desperation of a husband’s rights.
God. Suddenly she realises white worm-like Maurice will make love to her and she will get pregnant again with his child and bear it and be trapped in the same sunless place. When all she longed for was to be transformed by wonderful sun-drenched sex with the solid, silent man of the earth.
And the story ends with this bitter note of her being trapped.
Note: the phallus
Interestingly, there seem to be two significantly different versions of this story. The online version includes several mentions of the peasant’s ‘phallus’, namely when she stumbles across him silently working in a little gully and he turns round and sees her naked and she sees his intense eyes but then notices his ‘phallus’ growing erect in his trousers. And ends with Juliet comparing the peasant’s big penis favourably with her husband’s ‘little, frantic penis’. Whereas the words phallus and penis don’t appear in the Penguin paperback version. There’s no mention of this in Aldington’s introduction and no notes, so I’m guessing that even in 1981, Penguin had to be careful and chose to print a bowdlerised version of the story, maybe that Lawrence himself toned down to secure publication. But that the Planet Gutenberg online version, created in 2004, felt free to use the uncensored version.
In the Penguin version it’s only at the very end that we learn of Juliet’s sun-filled infatuation with the peasant, or the idea of the peasant, and it felt to me like it came out of the blue, though was quite a powerful bombshell to end on. In the online version the incident in the gully with the phallus occurs earlier and so establishes the theme of sex-with-the-peasant much earlier, which is then reprised at the end. We are more prepared for Juliet’s sense of lust lost at the end.
Both ‘work’ but to produce different flavours. If I was forced to choose, I’d prefer the censored Penguin version. This is because the effects of the sun on Juliet’s body and consciousness are reasonably subtle, as is the interplay of her with her little boy and how he gets used to playing naked. But when you read of a phallus engorging, let alone the comparison of two men’s penises, it doesn’t exactly move things into the realm of pornography, but it does undermine the subtlety of the other perceptions and descriptions. I think the censored version is slightly crippled in shape by having the sexual impact of the gully episode played down; but the benefit is that you pay more attention to Juliet’s changing feelings.
Credit
‘The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1928 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1981 Penguin Classics paperback edition, though most of the stories are available online.
Related links
The Planet Gutenberg version of this collection has slightly different stories, in a different order.
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Posted by Simon on March 7, 2025
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/07/the-woman-who-rode-away-and-other-stories-d-h-lawrence/