Six short stories by D.H. Lawrence, published in the UK after his death, in 1930.
- Love Among the Haystacks (1930)
- The Lovely Lady (1933)
- Rawdon’s Roof (1928)
- The Rocking-Horse Winner (1926)
- The Man Who Loved Islands (1929)
- The Man Who Died (1929)
1. Love Among the Haystacks (40 pages)
Part 1
It all takes place during one long, hot day harvesting hay and building massive ricks in the Nottinghamshire countryside.
The story of two young brothers who work on the family farm, countrymen who speak in broad dialect, Geoffrey, 22, and Maurice, 21. I think the family name is Wookey. They’ve been raised by their mother, an outsider who speaks proper English and considers herself above the locals, and so consider themselves above the local girls. The result is they are in the prime of their youth, know no women and are deeply frustrated.
There’s an attractive German-speaking governess at the Vicarage and, after they were both involved in a minor accident (with a rake) she agreed to meet Maurice and, the night before the story opens, sat with him and let him kiss her. As the story opens Maurice is reliving the scene in order to taunt his heavier, surly, jealous brother.
It is harvest time, a boiling hot day. The brothers are atop a high haystack and work as a trio with their father tossing hay up from a cart and Geoffrey tossing it onto Maurice. When they’ve finished Maurice goes round testing the corners but their verbal sparring reaches such a peak that the red mist comes down over Geoffrey’s eyes and he forces his brother over the edge of the stack, falling quite a way to the ground.
Their elder brother, Henry, other farm workers and the German woman from the Vicarage who saw it happen, all come running. For a tantalising moment Geoffrey thinks he’s killed Maurice and will at last be free of the poisoned curdling of his soul within itself, the permanent self poisoning which makes him so surly and angry. But then his brother starts coming round and Geoffrey feels trapped again.
On the last pages the governess comes to the fore. We learn she is Polish, named Paula Jablonowsky, just 20 years old, swift and light as a wild cat and, in Lawrence’s characteristic way, the phrase wild cat is repeated again and again.
Now she tends Maurice as he comes round and staggers to his feet, assuring everyone he is fine, especially as he is so publicly receiving the wild Polish girl’s caresses as she ‘gives him lordship over her’.
Squeezed in at the end of this section is the vicar confiding in Maurice’s father that she, the Polish girl, is for the chop. He obviously dislikes her wild impulsive character. She’ll be leaving in three weeks. Immediately the reader sees the problem: Maurice is falling in love with a woman who’ll be gone in weeks.
Part 2
Maurice thinks he loves Paula. He wants to marry her. Following immediately on from the preceding scene, the Wookey men and other labourers lay out a large picnic supplied by their mother. In the middle of the feast Paula walks over the fields from the vicarage with cold chicken for Maurice. The other men josh both Maurice and the girl for being so obviously in love.
Paula tells her more about her life, she hails from Hanover but ran away from home (wild cat!). She tells then she hates the vicarage, no life! She says she’ll move on, maybe go to Paris, maybe get married!
While this is ramifying, a seedy tramp comes up, ‘a mean crawl of a man.’ He asks if there’s any work. The father replies no, they’ve nearly finished. He explains he was a jockey, pulled a race for his manager, was found out and fired. He begs some of the pie, then bread and cheese, then a wedge of tobacco.
While he’s smoking his pipe with the rest of the men, his woman appears through the gap in the hedge and joins them. She’s tough, hard-bitten but only young. She ignores all the others and asks the man if he’s got any work and is angry when he says no. In that queer perceptive way of his, Lawrence points out how there’s a secret sympathy between angry Geoffrey and this embittered young woman, ‘There was a sort of kinship between them. Both were at odds with the world’ (p.25)
Part 3
The men carry on with the haymaking all afternoon but the break in work for Maurice’s accident means they won’t finish today. Somebody needs to sleep the night in the field to protect the tools and Maurice volunteers, because as Henry waspishly points out, he wants to continue his courting of the Polish girl.
Night falls at the end of the long hot day. There’s a brilliant moment:
Maurice wondered what to do. He wandered round the deserted stacks restlessly. Heat came in wafts, in thick strands. The evening was a long time cooling.
That phrase, ‘Heat came in wafts, in thick strands’ suddenly took me back to evenings in the country. Lawrence gives hauntingly beautiful descriptions of the flowers – meadowsweet, ragged robin and bell flowers – while Maurice decides to strip off and wash all over ahead of his rendezvous with Paula at 9.
She is late, it took a while getting the vicar’s baby off to sleep. Now they walk through the grass till she suggests a mad dash through the hay. They hear horses approaching and she asks to ride one. Maurice gentles one of the horses, a mare, and attaches a bridle, then helps the girl onto the horse’s back, swinging up in front of her.
They ride gently to the top of the hill and Lawrence gives a beautiful description of the vista with lights of collieries and the town in the distance. Then she wants excitement and asks him to make the mare gallop down hill, which he does, thrillingly. They dismount breathless and excited and Maurice takes her in his arms and kisses her. They stroll on with arms round each others’ waists.
Maurice feels a spot of rain and tells Paula he needs to cover the stacks with a rain cloth, goes fetches one from the shed, places the ricketty ladder against the stack and clambers up it holding the leading edge of the cloth. She helps.
Part 4
Geoffrey comes to help with the cloth. He’s cycled up with a bike light on. He can’t see the others and doesn’t call out. Suddenly he hears a slithering against the stack. It’s the ladder the couple climbed up slowly falling over. Geoffrey hears Maurice realise this and explain it to Paula. They’re stuck up there for the time being. Oh well, they can shelter from the rain under the cloth.
During none of this does Geoffrey reveal his presence. Instead he slinks back to the shed where the farm equipment is and feels sorry for himself. He spends a page fantasising about what it would be like to have Paula love him. He is far deeper and darker than Maurice; it would be a deep passionate love. He is entranced by her foreignness (reminding me of how Tom Brangwen is hypnotised by Lydia Lensky’s foreignness in ‘The Rainbow’. Lydia, also, is Polish).
At that moment, almost as if summoned by his unconscious, a figure slips into the shed. Big strong Geoffrey reaches out and grabs it and the helpless female voice reveals it’s the young woman in a sailor hat attached to the tramp who had cadged food off them that afternoon.
She is antagonistic but also soaked through by the rain. He tells her to take her wet things off otherwise she’ll catch her death etc, and gets a big old rug to cover her. She’s also famished so he opens the chest where the remains of the afternoon’s bread and cheese and butter is kept, although she doesn’t eat that much.
He bumps into the chest and knocks the lamp over, spilling its oil. From now on they chat by the light of a few matches until he stops striking them and they talk in the increasingly mystical dark, he shy, she angry and snappish. She confirms she’s been married to the jockey-cum-tramp for four years and hates him. He’s workshy and useless. They had a baby which died at ten months. Often she’s wished she would catch her death and die but it ain’t to be. Instead she is vindictively determined to track him down and dog him.
Long pause then he hears her shivering and offers to warm her feet. Reluctantly she acquiesces. They’re like ice. He kneads them and blows on them. Then he realises she’s crying. She leans forward and strokes his hair. When he moves his head to look at her, her hands stray over his face. He strokes her hair with one hand. Then she clasps him to her breast and cries and cries. Then he takes her into his big strong arms and warms her against his big body. Then he mumbles his lips down over her forehead and she turns hear face up and he experiences his first love kiss.
I thought this was extremely beautiful and touching.
Part 5
Next morning dawns with her still in his arms. She tells him her name is Lydia (Lawrence’s mother’s name, the name he gives the Polish woman in ‘The Rainbow’). But she won’t marry him. So what if they run off to Canada together? She says she has a sister married to a farm hand. She could go and stay with them; he’ll contact her in the spring and they’ll go together to Canada. She agrees with all this but he doesn’t believe her.
When he mentions about the cloth and the rain and his brother she immediately insists he goes and puts the ladder back up, so he leaves her to get fully dressed.
Geoffrey moves the ladder back up against the stack but doesn’t hail his brother, instead collects sticks for a fire. Maurice finds the ladder and is amazed, he was sure it had fallen down. When he tells the Polish girl she is livid, furious, calls him a liar and mean. From this maybe we are meant to deduce that she thinks it was all a ploy to keep her there under the cloth all night and that therefore… something happened! They had sex?
Geoffrey listens to all this with amusement and watches his brother navigate climbing down the dangerous ladder and Paula refusing to follow. Maurice walks round the stack and bumps into Geoffrey who tells him it was he who restored the ladder. if I was Maurice, I’d have run back up the ladder to tell Paula but, oddly, he doesn’t.
Instead he listens while Geoffrey blurts out his news, how he spent the night in the shed cuddling the wife of the tramp. Both brothers are shyly proud and discomfited. Geoffrey takes Maurice to the shed where Lydia is washed and dressed and has let her hair down and looks pretty. He makes a fire while she gets coffee out of the provisions box.
Paula joins them, surprised to see the girl. Geoffrey explains it was him who set the ladder back up against the haystack so she owes Maurice a big apology but when he returns with more kindling for the fire they’re too embarrassed to look at each other.
Coda
In a paragraph, Lawrence tells us that within a week she was engaged to Maurice, and when she was released from the vicarage went to live at the Wookey’s farm. And in a final cryptic sentence:
Geoffrey and Lydia kept faith one with the other. (p.47)
Three things: Pairs, couples, as in ‘Women in Love’. A foreign woman, as in ‘The Rainbow’. And it turning out not at all the soppy Mills and Boon romance you might have expected from the title (cf ‘The Virgin and The Gypsy’, also a completely unexpected narrative).
2. The Lovely Lady (20 pages)
A strange tale, a kind of faux ghost story, set in a strange middle-class household. Pauline Attenborough is the matriarch, 72 but marvellously well preserved. With her fine bone structure, in some lights she could pass for 30. She is strong willed and made her own money. She inherited her father’s fine collection of Oriental curiosities and art, and his expertise, so she was able to expand his collection and his sales activities. The house is full of luxury goods and Pauline takes care to be seen in the best light against fine backdrops.
She was married by one day just left her weak husband to live independently. They had an elder son, Henry, who sickened and died when he was 24. There was a second son, Robert, now 32, a stout barrister, plain and almost speechless, deeply repressed and dominated by his mother. He has a secret hobby which is collecting old Mexican legal documents.
Third member of this oppressed and heavy household is her plain, dim niece, Cicely (Ciss), also very dominated. She has a job, 2 hours a morning teaching the grand-daughter of nearby Sir Wilfred Knipe.
Old Mrs Attenborough often doesn’t get up till late. One of her favourite activities, if the sun’s shining, is to take a ‘sun-and-air bath’ (presumably the word ‘sunbathing’ hadn’t been coined yet – according to the Etymological dictionary the first recorded use is from 1935). There’s a square behind the stables which is a nice suntrap and she lies here, in the sun, with a book.
The story proper gets going when timid Ciss decides to have a sun bath, too. She’s always lived in the rooms above the old stables. One of the windows opens onto the stables flat roof, just adjacent to the little suntrap where Mrs Attenborough takes the sun. One afternoon, very quietly, Ciss steals out onto the sunroof, strips off (oh, I say!) and lies down in the lovely warm sun.
After a while, feeling slightly dazed, she has an extraordinary experience: she hears voices. She hears what seem to be disembodied voices talking about Henry, Mrs Attenborough’s dead son, recriminations and blame about his death. Bewildered, for several pages Ciss thinks she’s hearing voices from the beyond, and the surprised reader thinks Lawrence has written a ghost story! (Although I now realise these aren’t are rare in his oeuvre as I thought: witness the four ghost and horror stories in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories.)
But no. After some time she realises that Aunt Pauline, half stunned by the sun, talks in a wandering disconnected way, and her voice comes up the gutter downpipe which runs from Ciss’s flat roof, down the side of the stables, to a drain in the little courtyard, not far from Aunt Pauline’s lying and quietly babbling to herself.
This discovery gives Ciss an idea, two ideas. That evening, after dinner and after Aunt Pauline has retired to bed, she confronts Robert, in a timid sort of way. She steers the conversation round to the idea that they’re both sad, frustrated people whose lives are slipping away. Bold, she asks if he will kiss her, and clasps his hand to her bosom. Robert acquiesces but is useless, has no passion, For several nights Ciss fruitlessly waits for him to come to her bedroom, but he doesn’t.
A day or two later she bumps into him in the garden and takes him to the paddock, the sit on hay, he says he can’t marry her because he hasn’t got any money, she asks if she can touch him, and strokes his hair, but he doesn’t try to kiss her or put his arm round her. Instead he feebly says: ‘I suppose I shall rebel one day.’ What a disappointment.
So a few days later Ciss is lying in the stable roof again, out of sight of Pauline sun bathing below, and she does a funny thing. She puts her mouth to the top of the gutter pipe and talks down it. She puts on a deep bass voice and pretends to be Henry’s ghost.
Aunt Pauline is as bewildered as Ciss was on first hearing a voice, but slowly Ciss coaxes her into believing she is Henry’s ghost. She starts off by accusing Aunt P of murdering him, which she fiercely denies. But her main message is Let Robert go, let him marry, let him be free. Aunt P rouses herself and leaves, Ciss waits before quietly climbing back through her window.
And that evening there is a Great Transformation in the household – Aunt Pauline looks haggard and old. It is as if all the age and exasperation pent up in her for decades has broken through. She looks old and her skin is wizened and wrinkled. The biggest impact is on Robert. Somehow it is liberating for him to realise what a shrivelled old lady his mother is.
Not only her appearance but her behaviour. She yaps her food like a dog, then walks into the living room in a crazy crab-like way, then angrily refuses coffee and says she’s going to bed. Suddenly she has aged 40 years.
But then she suddenly reappears, dressed in a wrap and recklessly announces that Robert and Ciss ought to marry. When Robert says he thought she objected to cousins marrying, Pauline reveals that Robert is not her husband’s son but the result of an affair she had with an Italian Jesuit priest. As she tells it she tries to look flirtatious but only looks grotesque. Her effortless manner has completely broken. It doesn’t return. Ciss thinks this is what she was like all along.
The two young people don’t exactly leap into each other’s arms, they aren’t like that. But the scales have fallen from Robert’s eyes. He pronounces his analysis of the situation, explaining to Ciss that his mother wanted power:
‘Power to feed on other lives,’ he said bitterly. ‘She was beautiful and she fed on life. She has fed on me as she fed on Henry. She put a sucker into one’s soul and sucked up one’s essential life.’ (p.68)
A few days later Pauline dies in her bed of an overdose of veronal. She leaves Robert £1,000, Ciss £100 and the rest of her large fortune to set up the Pauline Attenborough Museum.
That information is the information conveyed in the dry and droll last sentence so that we never find out whether the timid youngsters marry. It’s left to the reader’s imagination to decide whether they’ll overcome a lifetime of inhibitions. Do you think they did?
Thoughts
A fairy story. We seem to have come a long way from Lawrence’s early stories. The setting amid luxury pieces, the talk of fortunes, the terrifying old lady, the hag-ridden younger generation, the country manor, all of it reminded me of Agatha Christie more than early Lawrence.
3. Rawdon’s Roof (10 pages)
A first-person narrator which allows the tone of voice to be more informal and chatty with many a ‘by Jove!’ and ‘Bless me!’, creating the voice of a bluff Edwardian chap. To my limited mind the narrator suggested the bluff obtuseness of Dr Watson, a similarity which grows as the story unfolds and the narrator spots ‘clues’ which the main protagonist doesn’t see.
The narrator is called Joe Bradley. He knows this fellow Rawdon who’s always boasting that ‘No woman shall sleep again under my roof!’ This is despite the fact that he has a wife (who he communicates with by letter and occasional half hour interview) and a mistress. But none of them are allowed to sleep ‘under his roof’.
The mistress is Janet who lives five minutes away and whose husband is in the diplomatic service. The narrator sees him paying visits to this Janet almost daily, but always during the day, never at night. Lonely woman.
The narrator finds it a great mystery and puzzle that neither Rawdon nor Janet ever come out and confess anything. He guesses the husband, Alec Drummond, knows about the affair, all of which makes Rawdon’s stupid boast that no woman will sleep under his roof sound all the sillier.
As to the wife, neither of them want a divorce, and she is practical and witty about the situation:
She said: ‘I don’t mind in the least if he loves Janet Drummond, poor thing. It would be a change for him, from loving himself. And a change for her, if somebody loved her –’
All of this is background to the actual story which kicks off one evening in November after he’s been to dinner at Rawdon’s and has stayed on while Rawdon talked interminably about one of his favourite subjects, 14th century music, for Rawdon is a fine amateur musician, even giving music lessons to Janet Drummond’s three children.
We learn that it’s set after the war for Rawdon fought in it as a major and brought back a man, Hawken, to be his butler or servant. Now this servant enters to announce that Mrs Drummond has called by. Rawdon is astonished and asks her to be shown into his room where he and the narrator are having brandy and cigars etc. When the narrator offers to go he begs him to stay.
Long story short, Janet confesses that Drummond’s just come home, more broke and chaotic than usual and insists on making love to her. She doesn’t like him and now confesses, in front of the narrator, that she loves Rawdon and wants to be with him. Rawdon agrees but says he’ll sleep at a hotel, given his famous vow. He’ll leave her in the capable hands of his man, Hawken.
Now let’s just pause and consider this man Hawken. He showed Janet in and then retired. When Rawdon mentioned him a few times, each time Janet made sarcastic remarks about him ‘busy man, that Hawken’. When Rawdon says she can stay here the night under Hawken’s care, she says not likely. When he suggests Hawken drive her home, she says no. This is enough to create a strong mystery around the servant.
But when they go to seek him out in the servants quarters, he is not there, all there is is an empty bottle of beer and two glasses on the table. Suddenly he appears down the stairs with his arms full of bed linen. He claims he’s been airing it in the drawing room which had a fire in it. But he looks flustered and this adds to the air of mystery. I began to wonder whether Hawken and Janet were having some kind of secret affair?
In the event, Hawken and Rawdon set off with a flashlight to accompany Janet across the fields back to her house and the narrator goes up to the spare room because Rawdon has asked him to stay the night. To his surprise the bed in the spare room has been freshly slept in, the pillow crushed and the sheets still warm. He hears a soft voice call ‘Joe’ and steps across the hall and through the padded door into the servants’ quarters and to what he assumes is Hawken’s bedroom. And here the whole mystery is solved because he sees ‘a pretty white leg and a pretty feminine posterior very thinly dimmed in a rather short night-dress’ quickly disappearing under the bedsheets. He beats a hasty retreat back to the spare bedroom and goes to bed.
Next morning Hawken comes to attend on him and the narrator tells him his secret is out. At which Hawken comes clean with surprising candour, telling the narrator that this bed, the spare bed, is the most comfortable in the house, as if he’s tried them all.
This explains the sarcastic remarks Janet made about Hawken. Quite clearly she knows all about his shenanigans. And this makes a mockery of Rawdon’s bombastic boast that no woman would ever sleep under his roof again. Seems that at least one and quite possibly more than one have been sleeping under his roof for years, without him ever knowing.
Thoughts
Did Lawrence write this for money, as a pastiche of a bluff 1920s story for chaps? The most notable element for me, once again, is the poshness of the characters: Rawdon isn’t some bloke down the pub, he owns a house with a drive down to metal gates which can be locked, and with paths off over the fields. And his mistress is the wife of a chap in the Diplomatic Corps. Why did this son of a miner write so often about the posh upper middle-classes?
4. The Rocking-Horse Winner (16 pages)
A sort of ghost story. A boy is brought up, along with two younger sisters, in a posh Edwardian household which is struggling for money. Although the father is an Old Etonian he never manages to succeed at anything and the family gets deeper into debt. The bitter, hard mother can’t conceal her disappointment from her children, especially the sensitive son, Paul.
She has a fateful conversation with him on the issue of luck, pointing out that she and her husband have little of it. It’s better to be born lucky than born rich. You can lose wealth but, with luck, can be confident of regaining it.
The children think they hear ghostly whispers in the house, the house talking, saying ‘there must be more money, there must be more money’. The boy becomes obsessed with riding his rocking horse, thrashing it with the whip his uncle Oscar gave him and obsessively chanting ‘Now take me to where there is luck! Now take me!’. The childrens’ nurse, the two sisters and his mother all demand he stop riding it in such a frenzy.
When Uncle Oscar calls by one day he asks the boys the horse’s name and Paul gives the name of a recent winner at the Ascot races. When Oscar asks Paul how he knows the name, sister Joan snitches that he’s always talking to Bassett the gardener about horse races. (Bassett has his current post with Paul’s family because he was Uncle Oscar’s batman during the war, in which he was wounded.)
When questioned, Bassett reveals that he and Paul have been betting on horseraces. To be precise, Paul gets the names of winners and Bassett places the bets. Paul makes his uncle swear ‘honour bright’ that he won’t tell anyone, least of all his mother.
Long story short: Uncle Oscar thinks this is childish fantasy but decides to take the boy to Lincoln races. Here Paul successfully predicts the winner, a rank outsider, so that he, Bassett and Oscar all make money. Slowly Oscar gets sucked in and comes to believe in Paul’s powers. Both Bassett and Paul tell him it was his gift of ten shillings which set off Paul’s winning spree. Slowly Oscar comes to realise that Paul really has made the astonishing sum of 1,500.
Oscar joins the syndicate and so realises it’s true when Paul’s bet at the Leger wins £10,000. All the time Paul is explaining that he is obsessive about winning in order to stop the whispering, stop the house whispering, stop the incessant whispering ‘There must be more money, there must be more money’ and help his mother who endlessly complains about their poverty.
Uncle Oscar has promised secrecy but once he realises the boy’s motivation, he comes up with a plan. He’ll take £5,000 of Paul’s money, give it to the family solicitor, give a false story about some distant relative dying and wanting a thousand a year handed over to Paul’s mum every year on her birthday (in November).
The only problem is that as soon as the mother hears the plan, she wants all the money at once. The household is deeply in debt and needs the full £5,00 just to pay off the debts. To Paul’s dismay, the voices he hears, the house’s voices, simply intensify.
Summer comes and Paul makes some losses. He only wins when he’s certain’, when he’s unsure, the syndicate generally loses. Having realised the depth of debt and the need for money, Paul becomes more and more desperate. ‘I’ve got to know for the Derby! I’ve got to know for the Derby!’ the child reiterated, his big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness.
His mother notices how overwrought he is and tells him he must go away, have a holiday, go to the seaside, but the boy feverishly insists he can’t go till after the Derby. He is equally as insistent that, although he’s now outgrown it, the old rocking horse is moved up to his room.
The climax of the story comes when the husband and wife are at a big party in town when she has a rush of anxiety about the boy. She knows she must be at home. She telephones home and the nanny says everything is OK but still she insists they leave the party early and drive home.
She creeps up to his room, hears a strange noise as she stands at the door, goes in and turns on the light – to find her son riding riding riding the rocking horse with demented energy, crying out manically ‘Malabar! Malabar! Tell Bassett! Tell Bassett!’
She takes him off the horse and puts him to bed, later asking her brother Oscar what ‘Malabar’ means. It’s a horse running in the Derby. Oscar puts a thousand pounds on it at 14 to 1. The boy continues feverish, unwell and bed-ridden for days. On the third day Bassett asks the mother if he can see the boy, gains admission to the bedroom, tells the feverish boy that Malabar won, netting him over £70,000 so he now has over £80,000 in his fund.
The mother hears all this as the boy feverishly and disconnectedly explains about the luck and the gambling and the horses, and tells her he’s lucky, he’s lucky. And that night, with the fatality of a fairy story or folk tale, he dies, and the reader is shaken by the secret, subterranean power of this intense, strange and compelling story.
5. The Man Who Loved Islands (28 pages)
The First Island
The narrative starts off sounding like a children’s story, addressing the reader straight out.
An island, if it is big enough, is no better than a continent. It has to be really quite small, before it feels like an island; and this story will show how tiny it has to be, before you can presume to fill it with your own personality.
And:
It seems that even islands like to keep each other company.
But then it becomes strange. The text is divided into three parts as the mysterious protagonist lives on three successive islands, each successively smaller and more isolated. The first one is quite large with a farm and three cottages each with inhabitants who contribute to the island economy. The owner, in this section, is called ‘the Master’. While they labour, the Master spends his time in a library compiling a reference book of flowers mentioned in Greek and Latin literature. But he is losing money badly. Long discussions with the bailiff and more bank loans to help the second year.
Bad luck: cows fall off cliffs, a man breaks a leg, the pigs get a disease, a storm drives his fancy yacht onto the rocks. At the end of the second year staff start leaving. In the third year he makes cut backs and sacks staff. He starts to feel it is doomed. The second half of the fourth year he spends on the mainland, eventually selling it at a loss to a company who want to build a hotel and golf course.
The Second Island
He moves to island number two, much smaller but still in sight of the first one. He still has people with him, though far fewer: the faithful old carpenter and his wife, a widow and daughter and a young orphan. He moves into the much smaller house, the other live in two joined cottages. They no longer call him ‘the Master’ but by his name, Mr Cathcart.
The place is dominated by the numerous different sounds of the sea. The place is a kind of refuge for all of them. Occasionally he goes to the mainland, to the city, but with a faraway look. He has dropped out of the rat race. Slowly he gives up on the big reference book he was going to read. He falls in love with the widow’s daughter, Flora but he doesn’t want sex. With Lawrentian mysticism, he wants to move beyond sex to a place of desirelessness.
In fact he becomes so disillusioned with the merely mechanical acts of sex and loving that he leaves the island altogether and wanders the continent looking for freedom. Flora writes to say she is pregnant with his child. He takes her to the mainland and they’re married and return to the second island and he hates it. It’s become suburban, being a nice happily married young couple. ‘They might have been a young couple in Golders Green.’
He scours newspapers for islands coming up for sale and finds a tiny one off the north coast. The baby is born to Flora’s delight but Cathcart feels depressed and trapped. he gives Flora money and a cheque book and departs.
The third island
On the tiny island he has men build him a hut with a corrugate irons roof, a simple room with a bed, table and chairs. Coal, paraffin, book. He’s forgotten about the book. He spends his time sitting and watching the sea. He becomes obsessed by the seabirds, which Lawrence describes in loving detail. But one day they all depart.
When the boat arrives to bring provisions, he can barely stand the two humans who accompany it. The days shorten and the world grows eerie. He is clearly declining. He has the sheep removed because they are too much company. He doesn’t bother reading the letters the provision boat brings. He loses track of time. He becomes unhinged, tearing the labels off the stove and other bits of equipment because he doesn’t want to see letters any more.
He prowls the island in an oilskin coat in all weathers. He falls ill. In his fever day and night merge into Time. It gets colder and colder and one night it snows and again the next day. Vaguely he feels he has to get away and spends hours trying to unmoor his boat. There is a storm and more snow, deep drifts. The island disappears under snow. When he makes it through the drifts to the boat it is swamped with snow. With the classic symptoms of the cold and snowbound, he just wants to lie down and go to sleep.
In fact he doesn’t actually die, the ending is more mysterious than that. I give this extended quote to give you a sense of the gently lulling rhythms of the prose which convey the way the man has been worn down to mute acceptance.
The wind dropped. Was it night again? In the silence, it seemed he could hear the panther-like dropping of infinite snow. Thunder rumbled nearer, crackled quick after the bleared reddened lightning. He lay in bed in a kind of stupor. The elements! The elements! His mind repeated the word dumbly. You can’t win against the elements.
How long it went on, he never knew. Once, like a wraith, he got out, and climbed to the top of a white hill on his unrecognizable island. The sun was hot. ‘It is summer’, he said to himself, ‘and the time of leaves.’ He looked stupidly over the whiteness of his foreign island, over the waste of the lifeless sea. He pretended to imagine he saw the wink of a sail. Because he knew too well there would never again be a sail on that stark sea.
As he looked, the sky mysteriously darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him. (p.124)
6. The Man Who Died (48 pages)
To be back! To be back again, after all that! (p.128)
An extraordinarily brilliant imagining of being Jesus, waking suddenly, with a start, in the tomb, coming back to life with infinite pain and resentment. As you might expect from Lawrence, there is no God. No God speaks to Jesus. Jesus has no sense of his divinity. He is just a man who’s been tortured to death, thought he had done with the whole squalid thing, and now finds himself dragged back into the wretched world.
Chapter 1
A poor peasant near Jerusalem buys a cock which grows into a fine vaunting specimen. One morning it leaps to the top of the wall of its compound and leaps free. At the same time the unnamed man is awaking in his tomb, slowly coming back to life, feeling again all the pain from his wounds. He stumbles out into the daylight and finds a man chasing a runaway chicken towards him. He spreads his linen shroud enough to startle the runaway cock and the peasant catches it. Then, awed at the sight of the resurrected man, invites him to come and hide out at his humble cottage made of clay.
Lawrence was fascinated by death as a realm of knowledge or completion beyond the world. See Birkin’s meditations on death and dying throughout ‘Women in Love’. The figure of Jesus gives him a spectacular opportunity to imagine how it must have felt to die.
Desire was dead in him, even for food and drink. He had risen without desire, without even the desire to live, empty save for the all-overwhelming disillusion that lay like nausea where his life had been.
He likes to lie in the morning sun feeling the surge of new life. He is amused by the jaunty cockerel, now tied by string in the peasant’s yard, who still struts and vaunts and, when a hen comes within reach, jumps and mounts her. The man thinks it is life which cannot be quenched.
And the man who had died watched the unsteady, rocking vibration of the bent bird, and it was not the bird he saw, but one wave-tip of life overlapping for a minute another, in the tide of the swaying ocean of life. And the destiny of life seemed more fierce and compulsive to him even than the destiny of death. The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life.
‘The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life.’ Incidentally, many of the paragraphs start with ‘And’ or ‘For’, copying the style of the Bible, and the man is never named, nor the peasant, giving them the primal simplicity of Bible or fable, deliberately.
After a few days he goes back to the tomb and finds Mary Magdelene there, weeping, only here she is called Madeleine. He presents himself to her but here the story really starts diverging from the Bible account. For this resurrected man has finished with preaching and teaching. His death marked the end of that entire mode.
‘What is finished is finished, and for me the end is past,’ he said. ‘The stream will run till no more rains fill it, then it will dry up. For me, that life is over… I have outlived my mission and know no more of it… The teacher and the saviour are dead in me; now I can go about my business, into my own single life.
‘I don’t know what I shall do,’ he said. ‘When I am healed, I shall know better. But my mission is over, and my teaching is finished, and death has saved me from my own salvation. Oh, Madeleine, I want to take my single way in life, which is my portion. My public life is over, the life of my self-importance. Now I can wait on life, and say nothing, and have no one betray me…’
He sees that she still wants to give. She has exchanged the life where she took (money, as a prostitute) for the opposite extreme, where she is now addicted to giving and sacrifice. Both nauseate the man. And when she looks at him:
She looked at him again, and she saw that it was not the Messiah. The Messiah had not risen. The enthusiasm and the burning purity were gone, and the rapt youth. His youth was dead. This man was middle-aged and disillusioned, with a certain terrible indifference, and a resoluteness which love would never conquer. This was not the Master she had so adored, the young, flamy, unphysical exalter of her soul. This was nearer to the lovers she had known of old, but with a greater indifference to the personal issue, and a lesser susceptibility.
I find this magnificent, completely, totally believable, and conveying a strange and obscure but important meaning about life, the nature of experience.
So intense is Madeleine’s need for a saviour, that she twists what he said into his opposite, convinces herself that the preacher and saviour has returned, which is exactly what he doesn’t want.
He takes some money from Madeleine and returns to the peasant’s cottage, giving it to the woman. He is aware of the woman’s young body serving him simple food and becomes aware of his virginity and his body’s limitations. Virginity is a kind of selfishness. The body is designed to give and take. But he doesn’t want narrow sex, certainly not with the peasant’s wife, with her small greedy soul.
He admires the cock for its natural life. On the third day he returns to the tomb and sees Madeleine, his mother and a third woman. He refuses to go over to his mother but speaks to Madeleine, telling her he must go to his Father. He knows this is the kind of language she wants to hear.
Back at the peasant’s house his wounds heal and his soul heals. He realises he was addicted to giving (advice and compassion). Now that is finished. He is detached. He decides to become a physician, cuts his hair and beard, and buys the right clothes and shoes with the money Madeleine gave him. And asks the peasant for the lively cock. With him in his arm he goes into the town. Behold the seething life. He will leave the lusty cock in some yard full of hens to fornicate. Will any woman tempt him out of his loneliness into physical union.
On the road he meets two men who realises were his disciples but he conceals his identity. He asks about himself and they tell him with shining eyes that their saviour is risen from the dead and will soon return to his father in heaven in glory. Then he reveals himself to them and they are amazed, and while they’re still stunned he runs off under the walls of the town.
He lets his cock get into a fight with the rooster of an inn. His cock wins and he gives it to the innkeeper. As he wanders through the chaotic world, he is revolted by his former self and his efforts to compel men to love and forgiveness. After death, he has risen without any desire or intention of any kind. He now sees his attempts at compulsion as like everybody else’s need to compel their neighbour to their beliefs, everyone imposing on everyone else in a vast net of egos. From all this, he wishes to escape.
Chapter 2
Part two shifts scene completely to a little promontory sticking out into the warm sea under the Mediterranean sun in January. Two young servants are preparing pigeons for sacrifice. The girl slips and lets a pigeon escape at which the boy beats her, then turns her over and quickly rapes her. Guiltily he looks up and sees he is watched by two figures. Down by the sea is a man, dressed in a simple cloak with a hat and dark beard. Further up the hill, towards the temple of Isis, is the slaves’ owner, 27, a virgin, the priestess of Isis.
She’s the daughter of a powerful man who knew Mark Antony, in fact Antony spent many a half hour talking to the beautiful virginal girl. She was propositioned by other men, often, who wanted to open her bud, but she consulted a philosopher who told her she should ‘wait for the reborn’. Well, the male figure she saw down by the shore, obviously that was the man who died. The reader has a strong suspicion of what is going to happen.
Her father died, Antony was overthrown, and her mother brought her to an estate in Judaea near the coast. And here she herself paid for and supervised the erection of this small temple to Isis Bereaved, Isis in Search of her beloved brother Osiris.
Then he is in front of her asking for shelter. She orders her slave to take the man to a cave in a nearby gully. Here he beds down for the night. Next morning the slave comes tells the priestess the man is a criminal. He takes her to the cave where she sees for herself the marks of the cross on his feet and hands. But she dismisses it, and the slave. Watching the thin, haggard man sleeping, for the first time she is touched by desire, more precisely, by ‘the flame-tip of life’.
The sun rises. The day begins. The slave fetches the man. At the temple she asks him about his marks. He simply asks to be allowed to go on his way. She invites him into the temple, into the inner sanctum where he bows to the statue of the goddess. And suddenly the priestess realises that he is Osiris reborn, sister of the goddess. Out in the daylight she asks him to stay, and he feels his loins twitching. Why.
He goes down to the promontory and wonders whether he should give himself to the touch of the priestess:
Like the first pale crocus of the spring. How could I have been blind to the healing and the bliss in the crocus-like body of a tender woman! Ah, tenderness! More terrible and lovely than the death I died. (p.158)
While she sits in the dark of the temple all day, staring at the statue of the goddess, wondering whether she should give herself to the wanderer-brother. At the end of the day she begs him to stay another night.
Outside in the evening, Lawrence devotes a page to describing the day to day life of the peasants on the estate. I haven’t made it clear that the temple sits in the (dry, rocky) grounds of a villa, which belongs to the priestess’s mother. For this mother work a number of slaves and the man who died sits watching them work, an old man scraping scales off fish by the shore, some other guys carrying nets, two maidens, and the steward of the estate who dresses like a Roman.
So the man and the priestess don’t exist in an empty allegory, but are embedded in broader society. Although you and I might refer to this as the ‘wider’ world, the man thinks of it as the narrow world. The wider world is the world of his reborn soul.
And he senses the mother’s opposition to him. Very slowly the sun sets and the day dies and the man goes to the cave and discovers it has been swept and cleaned and a nice bed made for him at the priestess’s command.
When night falls he goes to the temple, she takes him inside and locks the door. She tells him to strip naked and starts to oil his wounds. This brings back the terrible pain of his killing and he is afraid. But he has a revelation that all his teaching was around death and led up to death and all he had to offer his followers was his corpse. Whereas here, now, beside this beautiful woman, he feels the amazing power of life.
Suddenly it dawned on him: I asked them all to serve me with the corpse of their love. And in the end I offered them only the corpse of my love. This is my body – take and eat – my corpse – A vivid shame went through him. ‘I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death. Perhaps he loved me in the flesh, and I willed that he should love me bodilessly, with the corpse of love – ‘
There dawned on him the reality of the soft, warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight. ‘And I told them, blessed are they that mourn,’ he said to himself. ‘Alas, if I mourned even this woman here, now I am in death, I should have to remain dead, and I want so much to live. Life has brought me to this woman with warm hands. And her touch is more to me now than all my words. For I want to live –’
She oils him and he feels himself healing. She embraces him and he feels the sun rising in him, becoming something new. Then she turns to worship her goddess and he stands beside her and feels himself rising.
He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent. ‘I am risen!’
And he loosens her tunic which falls, leaving her naked, and touches her breasts, and feels that electric shock of desire at the touch of a naked woman.
He untied the string on the linen tunic and slipped the garment down, till he saw the white glow of her white-gold breasts. And he touched them, and he felt his life go molten. ‘Father!’ he said, ‘why did you hide this from me?’ And he touched her with the poignancy of wonder, and the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire. ‘Lo!’ he said, ‘this is beyond prayer.’ It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose! My mansion is the intricate warm rose, my joy is this blossom!
You can see why orthodox Christians would have gone nuts. Now, 100 years later, though it’s easy to mock, I still find Lawrence’s descriptions of sex wonderful and life affirming.
They are one. Afterwards, towards dawn, she returns to her mother’s villa, full of the god Osiris while he looks at the sky full of stars and feels one with the great rose of space. It starts to rain and he spends the day in his cave looking out at the rainy world and one narcissus bent over. At the end of the day she comes to the cave and they are one, again. And so days and nights pass as they perfect their touch.
When she meets him on a hot day when he can smell the pine needles, he sees a change in her and knows she is pregnant. It is time to move on. He confirms that her mother is not happy. The small world of property and jealousy is reasserting itself. To be safe he moves to a cave closer to the sea. They meet and she begs him to stay but he says he must leave very soon.
One night he hears voices and knows the slaves have arrived at the tip of the promontory in a boat. They disembark and he hears the steward give orders for his capture. Never again. never again will he be caught and handed over to Roman justice.
I was worried that Lawrence would have him caught and killed again. Using death to end stories is such a bore. But fortunately Lawrence has other plans. The man dodges the little crew coming for him and casts his voice out of the rocks to terrify the one slave left in the boat, who leaps out and flees.
And the man who died carefully steps into the boat, takes the oars and rows out to where the current will take him far, far down the coast. Good.
The man who had died rowed slowly on, with the current, and laughed to himself: ‘I have sowed the seed of my life and my resurrection, and put my touch forever upon the choice woman of this day, and I carry her perfume in my flesh like essence of roses. She is dear to me in the middle of my being. But the gold and flowing serpent is coiling up again, to sleep at the root of my tree.
‘So let the boat carry me. Tomorrow is another day.’ (p.173)
Excellent. The triumph of life.
Three thoughts
1. So the pagan worship of this life, of the body, the flesh and its pleasures and its innocence, triumph over the stale, dead teachings of the Christ which the man himself has rejected.
2. Is it any surprise so much of Lawrence’s work was banned by the Christian authorities?
3. The character of Rupert Birkin in ‘Women in Love’ is widely thought to be a self portrait by Lawrence. The other characters routinely comment on his love of preaching and, on at least one occasion, compare him to Jesus in his self righteousness. Well, in this story, all those criticisms of Lawrence, in fiction and in life, come to a kind of climax. You can imagine the same friends and critics falling round laughing, saying ‘He’s finally done it! He’s finally turned himself into Jesus!’ Yes, from one point of view it is ludicrously conceited and self-important to dare to describe the thoughts and desires and then the sexual activity of Jesus Christ! Maybe it should, under the blasphemy laws, have been banned. But what a stunningly vivid narrative, what uncanny but convincing descriptions!
Credit
‘Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in 1930. References are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.
Books & Boots 