Man belonged to the cosmos and was fulfilled through his natural instincts, of which love was the greatest.
(Burgess’s summary of Lawrence’s credo, page 62)
Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993) was a composer, poet, novelist, essayist, librettist, screenwriter, critic, provocateur and media personality. In the 1980s I watched him appear on TV arts programmes and read his numerous book reviews, essays and novels (notably ‘Earthly Powers’, 1980, and ‘The End of the World News’, 1982). He was great fun, an unashamed entertainer. This book is a classic example of his work: opinionated, interesting, drily amusing, sensible, packed with ideas and insights.
Preface
Part of this is because Burgess, like Lawrence, was an outsider. Most 20th century English authors went to private school and Oxbridge and so, whether they were radicals or conservatives, maintained the same kind of tone and worldview, the same manners, the same limited, privileged experience of life in their works. Burgess, as he explains in his preface, grew up in the pub and shop culture of working class Manchester, with little cultural capital and, like Lawrence, largely had to teach himself about literature. And they both married foreign wives and left England to live abroad, Lawrence in his pilgrimage round the world, Burgess to live in Monte Carlo.
That said, Burgess says there are also big differences. Burgess came of an Irish family and was raised a Catholic. This explains his attraction to James Joyce. But also puts him in a different tradition from Lawrence who came from non-conformist stock, proud of his puritanism, attracted to the old pagan gods, son of a miner.
Burgess admires Lawrence’s intransigence and sympathises with his sufferings on behalf of free expression. Lawrence stands for:
that fighting element in the practice of literature without which books are a mere decor or confirmation of the beliefs and prejudices of the ruling class. (p.x)
‘Literature is essentially subversive’ and Lawrence was a leading practitioner of that subversion.
Chapter 1. Lawrence and Myself When Young
Burgess quotes Lawrence’s biographer and critic Richard Aldington saying Joyce and Lawrence are diametrically opposed: Joyce is about being and Lawrence is about becoming.
Stylistically Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. (p.4)
This strikes me as the single most important aspect of Lawrence’s style as a writer of prose and poetry. His paragraphs feel like they’re being shaped and formed, often reusing the same words and phrases, as you watch. It’s a unique experience of being involved in the writing, as it happens.
His writing does not seem to have emerged, lathed and polished, from the workshop: when we read him we are in that workshop, witnessing a hit-and-miss process of creation in which orthodox faults – prolixity, repetition, apparent absurdity – are idiosyncratic virtues. (p.9)
He is a writer taking chances and trusting that he will be taken seriously.
In the 1910s literature was influenced by the serious scientific predictions of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw with their promotion of Scientific, Rational solutions to society’s ills. Lawrence reacted against all this, despised all politics – maybe all rationality – and spoke for the Natural Man.
The purest exponent of the Natural Man after the Great War was Ernest Hemingway who saw that the complex sentences of Edwardian literature reflected a society and values which had all been exploded. He developed a stripped back, simple and repetitive style which promoted a simplistic code of honour. I like where Burgess says:
It may be that Hemingway’s prose is the biggest stylistic innovation of the century… Hemingway genuinely starts again from scratch. (p.8)
When I was a schoolboy and student, that was my view. From E.M. Forster to Ernest Hemingway was a leap from the 19th into the 20th century and, reading literary books today, they almost all still copy the Hemingway formula: short sentences, simple vocabulary, delete all adjectives and adverbs.
The pre-scientific or irrational in Lawrence made him a genuine primitive man, a pagan. He has a profound feeling for the pagan gods. Even the books set in England contain characters who talk like pagan deities. His people aspire to be naked, and their dialogue is voices from the unconscious, from another realm of experience.
Chapter 2. Beginnings
Lawrence’s father was a miner who worked at Brinsley Colliery, Eastwood, so you might have expected Lawrence’s subject to be squalor, dirt and struggle, for him to have become a proletarian writer. But Eastwood, ten miles north-east of Nottingham, in his day looked out over countryside, and Lawrence chose instead to become a writer of the countryside, flowers and animals.
Lawrence’s parents’ marriage was a warzone. His father was a miner, technically a ‘butty’ or supervisor of a gang of other miners. He was almost illiterate, spelling out the newspaper a word at a time, whereas Lawrence’s mother had been a teacher and clung to the idea that she came of gentle stock. Lawrence was unusually close to his mother – she is the central figure in his first major novel Sons and Lovers, and he was devastated when she died – but, by the same token, he was impressed by his father’s big beefy masculinity and the sodality of the miners.
Lawrence was an amateur painter till he was 20. His surviving paintings are vivid but demonstrate his complete lack of training in perspective or anatomy. Words were different. Poems and prose bent to the force of his imagination with little or no training.
At 17 he went as a pupil-teacher to Ilkeston training centre. At 21 he went to Nottingham University. Aged 23 he went to teach in Croydon. He discovered the ‘English Review’, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, who ‘had the greatest editorial flair of his time, if not of the century’ and sent in some poems (p.20). Hueffer recognised the boy’s genius, invited him up to tea, introduced him to Ezra Pound. Lawrence showed Hueffer his first novel, ‘The White Peacock’.
Burgess makes a characteristically sweeping statement:
One of the uses of fiction is to affirm the values of the bourgeoisie. (p.24)
Lawrence is ‘this most visual of novelists’. Burgess emphasises the brilliant physical details in so many scenes.
Joyce, by contrast, was an urban man and knew nothing of flowers. Lawrence is the great novelist of flowers.
Snobbishness Lawrence’s mother felt she married down when she married his father. She aspired for her boys, wanted them to climb the social ladder. This is reflected from as early as ‘The Peacock’, with characters saying ‘awfully’ and ‘frightfully’, words never used in the Lawrence household. He was aping his social superiors, he was pitching the narrative at a higher social level.
Chapter 3. The Denial of Life
Lawrence’s second novel, ‘The Trespasser’, was published in 1912. It’s set on the Isle of Wight which was as far abroad as he’d managed to get by that point. The lead character Siegmund, hangs himself. The is the only suicide in Lawrence’s oeuvre.
In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Richtofen, the wife of his French tutor at Nottingham University, philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley. She describes how they fell in love in her memoir, Not I, but the Wind…, how she was forced to abandon her three children when they eloped abroad, ending up in a rented house on Lake Garda in north Italy.
Mr Noon: Lawrence drafted the first part of this novel before the war. It was published as a fragment in 1934. Only 50 years later, in 1984, was the second part, which existed in papers belonging to a friend of Lawrence’s, published. The two halves or parts were first published together in 1984. The second half is quite different from the first. It appears to be a factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations. Burgess makes the point that:
It was common practice for Lawrence to write half a novel, abandon it, and then pick it up again with no great concern for plausible continuity; when in doubt, change your main character’s character, though retaining the name, and make him or her start a new life somewhere, preferably in Italy. (p.33)
This happens in ‘Mr Noon’, ‘The Lost Girl’ and ‘Aaron’s Rod’.
Marriage It is amusing that Lawrence was very fierce for marital fidelity, had a pagan reverence for the union of one man and one woman and yet the partner of his life was secured by wrecking her marriage to Professor Weekley. Also ironic that Frieda was (allegedly) unfaithful to him.
Anywhere Lawrence was one of those rare writers who could write anywhere, even amid noise and distractions. He never had a permanent home and so no book-lined study, was able to be interrupted mid-sentence to meet people or go and do some chore, come back hours later and pick up where he left off. In the relationship with Frieda, he did all the household chores while she lay in bed smoking. He reflected this aspect of himself in the character of Rawdon Lilly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’:
He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid. (Aaron’s Rod, p.121)
England, My England Soon after eloping, Burgess quotes letters in which Lawrence lambasted the English and England in extreme terms. And yet he remained an Englishman through and through. Richard Aldington amusingly said Lawrence was as English as a wet Sunday in Hull.
Son and Lovers Another joke: given the theme of this novel is a young man’s struggle to break free from the smothering influence of his mother, Frieda playfully suggested it should be titled ‘Sons and Lovers: Or, His Mother’s Darling’. Lawrence was not amused.
Chapter 4. Son and Lover
David Herbert Lawrence was called Bert in the family home. He disliked his first name. After he eloped and became more cosmopolitan he liked his female admirers, starting with Frieda, to call him Lorenzo.
‘Sons and Lovers’ was published in May 1913. Giving its protagonist the French surname Morel is symptomatic of Lawrence’s aspiring cosmopolitanism. Burgess describes it as a ‘florescent, leafy, pullulent’ book (p.50).
Lawrence’s modernism lies not in the formal technique of his novels: they display none of the agonising over technique obvious in Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James or Joyce. The modernism is in the content for two reasons to do with the characters.
1) His characters’ identities are extraordinarily labile: they change all the time. Not just that, but sometimes they disappear altogether, subsumed into the weather, the moonlight or other settings or environments.
2) All Lawrence’s characters point away from the conventions of normal social life towards primeval depths. They repeatedly sink to, or strip back layers to reveal, the elemental layer of human existence. This is deeper than anything in the history of the novel, deeper even than the Greeks in their tragedies.
Symptomatic that, ‘no strong believer in the solidity of human identities’ Lawrence had a lifelong fondness for charades (p.54). This spilled over into the best poems where he mimics or inhabits a bird, beast or flower to an extraordinary degree.
Masculinity All his life Lawrence kept a reverence for beautiful men, for the beauty of the male body, linking back to the strong nudity of his coal-miner father (stripped to the waist and washing in a tin bath every evening) and the community of tough men he managed.
Chapter 5. Coming Through
Lawrence was ‘arrogant, dogmatic, messianic, inconsistent’ but also loveable. He wasn’t troubled by his own faults or the impression they gave in society because society was a spume, a phantom: reality lay much, much deeper, and chasing, revealing and describing the depths of human experience was his challenge.
Reason Lawrence never understood rational argument, which was a kind of giving-in to the surface, the superficial, instead of seeking the core.
Friendship pattern The success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ introduced him to the upper echelons of English culture and society and inaugurated the rhythm he enacted with almost everyone he met: 1) ingratiating charm; 2) lecturing about eternal depths which they barely understood; 3) bitter rejection and immortalisation as satirised characters in whichever novel he was working on; 4) with the frequent threat of libel action (p.55).
‘Love Poems and Others’ published February 1913. In the summer Lawrence and Frieda returned from Germany to England principally because Frieda wanted to see her three children by Weekley.
In the autumn of 1913 he wrote a good deal of The Rainbow, provisionally titled ‘The Sisters’. In July 1914 Frieda’s divorce came through and the couple came to London to sign the papers, then get married. A few weeks later the Great War erupted and they were trapped in England for four long bitter years.
Chapter 6. Dementia
The Lawrences didn’t have money to pay the lawyers’ fees for the divorce so he was declared bankrupt. In December The Prussian Officer and Other Stories was published. In 1915 the odd story England, My England‘. Lawrence is always unsettling because he says the uncomfortable, inconvenient thing.
In 1915 Lawrence worked on ‘The Sisters’ and decided to divide it in two. He developed the notion of setting up a commune of like-minded artistic people in Cornwall. He tried to recruit Lady Ottoline Morrell for this. He wrote long letters raving about the collapse of British society to poor Bertrand Russell, with whom he was initially very taken before they had a huge falling out. Russell accused him (after his death) of being a proto-fascist.
Lawrence said he rewrote ‘The Rainbow’ about seven times. It was published on 30 September 1915. Just a week later, a negative review in the Daily News triggered outcry at the book’s supposed obscenity. The book was taken to court for breaching obscenity laws. Many witnesses for the prosecution and none for the defence. Lawrence wasn’t called. His publisher, Methuen, meekly apologised, withdrew the book, pulped the remaining copies and paid a fine of ten guineas. Britain’s writers did nothing. The Society of Authors did nothing. That maligned figure, Arnold Bennett, was the sole author to publicly protest (he had already sent the impoverished author a gift of £40).
The impact was to ruin Lawrence’s reputation, livelihood and career. It delayed publication of the second half of the novel, Women In Love, by five years, giving the misleading impression that it is a book of the 1920s, which it very much isn’t.
Burgess, of course, defends ‘The Rainbow’ but even he, in his summary, zeroes in and quotes some of the passages describing sex (in extremely vague and gaseous way). He himself doesn’t convey how much of the novel isn’t about sex at all, but about the tempestuous and primeval emotions of the characters, described in an amazingly impassioned prose.
In my review of The Rainbow I point out that with the arrival of Ursula to young womanhood the novel drastically changes tone, moving out of its kind of primitive pagan rural background and arriving in the modern world of schools and trams. Burgess makes the nice point that this is the ‘Wellsian mode’, the tone of Ann Veronica and Wells’s Edwardian social novels.
Chapter 7. Westward
Lawrence fantasised about setting up a colony of like-minded artists in America, maybe Florida, until the authorities made it clear he couldn’t leave the country. So he settled on Cornwall where he founded an artistic community. Two leading figures were the gifted editor John Middleton Murry and the brilliant New Zealand short story writer, Katherine Mansfield.
Lawrence was at one point so close to Murry that he suggested becoming blood brothers. The quartet shared a cottage for a while but inevitably fell out. Nearly 20 years later Murray was cruelly satirised as the slimy seducer Denis Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Point Counter Point’.
In Cornwall Lawrence revised part two of The Sisters, which came to be titled Women in Love. He finished in November 1916 but could find no publisher. July 1916, his travel book about his time in Italy, Twilight in Italy, was published.
During this period he was summoned to several Army medicals in Bodmin. He was always rejected but found the poking and prodding of his body deeply humiliating. His horrible wartime experiences are dramatised in the long, brilliantly vivid ‘Nightmare’ chapter in ‘Kangaroo’.
Lawrence spoke openly against the madness of the war. His wife was German. On 12 October 1917 local police raided his home and ransacked it for evidence they were spies, signalling to German U-boats with their washing or their late-night lights. No evidence was found but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall.
Lawrence and Frieda went to stay with H.D. in London. He started writing Aaron’s Rod. In November 1917 the poetry collection ‘Look! We Have Come Through’ was published. In 1918 they went to live in Derbyshire. In October ‘New Poems’ came out. As soon as the war finished (November 1918) they set about leaving England but it took a year, until October 1919, before they could get passports.
During this period Lawrence did the reading for his book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature, which was eventually published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. It contains essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. It contributed to establishing Herman Melville as a seminal figure in American literature.
Some critics criticise it for being a rushed, superficial and highly impressionistic study; Burgess calls it ‘a series of jolts and lunges… meant to jolt Americans’ into reading their great authors. He claims it is one of the few books which created an entire new discipline, as it apparently helped jolt Americans into creating course of America literature at their universities.
Chapter 8. Nakedness
Burgess devotes an entire chapter to ‘Women in Love‘ which Burgess considers one of the ten great novels of the century. The central point of the novel is the way the characters are stripped down to their essentials, stripped to their primitive emotional cores which are depicted as bubbling over with extreme emotions, continually changing.
They are not human beings as we expect to meet them either in real life or in fiction. They are close to animals in the discontinuousness of their emotions, with unpredictable shifts of feeling which are always intense… they are capable of great emotional and even physical violence; they seem to have a skin missing. This is the peculiar quality of Women in Love which could as well be called Women in Hate. (p.89)
He outlines the main characters, identifies some of their real-life bases (Rupert Birkin is Lawrence, Hermione Roddice was partly based on Ottoline Morrell, Gudrun bears many of the traits of Katherine Mansfield).
Burgess singles out three big scenes: 1) how the violence of the big half-wild rabbit scene, in which it scratches and draws blood from both Gudrun and Gerald, anticipates the violence of their relationship and his final attempt to murder her.
2) When Ursula comes across Rupert throwing stones at the reflection of the moon in the millpond to try and abolish the power of the feminine moon over him.
3) The naked wrestling scene between Birkin and the mine owner Gerald Crich, which is deeper than homoerotic, far more primal, and its sad incompletion, the way Gerald can’t rise to Birkin’s wishes.
If we are startled by this scene we are merely experiencing the shock that it was Lawrence’s lifelong mission to impart – the shock of meeting [elemental] truths which logic and science… have tried to drive out. (p.96)
Burgess thinks it is a great novel because it is completely new: the novel, as a form, is mostly concerned with people in a social context, it is the quintessentially bourgeois art form, hedged round by manners and etiquette. From Samuel Richardson through Jane Austen to Henry James and E.M. Forster, the most earnest novels had always been about social convention and good manners. Lawrence tears the face off all this and shows his characters as madly irrational complexes of blood and nerves; primal, pagan wild animals: they have a social face (they have jobs and responsibilities) but their private lives are thronged with out-of-control primeval forces, ‘naked primitives’.
He makes the further point that the novel, up to that point, existed to convey a plot, a story. In their different ways Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford showed that you could achieve new literary heights by jettisoning the straitjacket of a logical plot and instead showing human reality in a heightened form.
Chapter 9. A Snake and Sardinia
Burgess is dismissive of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the novel Lawrence began in 1918, set aside, then completed in the spring of 1921. ‘It is a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’ (p.101).
More interesting is The Lost Girl, which he had also abandoned, and now took up and completed. It is a hokey tale in the popular style of Arnold Bennett with lots of authorial buttonholing – ‘Now fancy our two young heroes walking up the steps to the hotel…’ and, being absolutely unthreatening, won a literary prize and £100.
Lawrence and Frieda visited Florence, which he liked. He fancied it a place of manliness and virile statues, now gone to seed and packed with a large expatriate British community of ‘aesthetes’. Some of these are portrayed pretty blatantly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’ leading to accusations of bad manners and caddishness.
They moved on to Sardinia, then to Sicily where they found a cottage where they lived, off and on, for two years. The stay in Sardinia inspired Sea and Sardinia the most charming book Lawrence ever wrote and, in Burgess’s opinion, the best single introduction to his oeuvre.
Chapter 10. The Prophecy is in the Poetry
This chapter covers:
- Lawrence’s best book of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- his two works triggered by Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
- his final, posthumous work, Apocalypse
Chapter 11. Eastward
1921, year of The Captain’s Doll, in which the captain and his German paramour turn into Lawrence and Frieda, endlessly bickering, with their famously arduous trek up a glacier during which they bickered and argued every inch of the way there and back.
In October 1921 ‘Sea and Sardinia’ was serialised in The Dial magazine and was read by the American socialite Mrs Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was starting an artists’ community in Taos, New Mexico, with the aim of preserving the arts and crafts of the local Indians. She fancied having a writer-in-residence to record the way of life and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ convinced her that D.H. was the man. She wrote offering him free board and lodging and Lawrence bit.
He and Frieda decided to visit America not by crossing the Atlantic but by heading East. They took ship from Naples in February 1922, passed through the Suez Canal arriving at Ceylon in March. He discovered he really hated tropical jungles.
They sailed on to Australia, arriving at Perth at the start of May 1922 and stayed with friends for a fortnight. Staying in a town outside Perth they met Maria Louisa Skinner, a minor writer who was emboldened to show Lawrence her manuscript of a novel. For reasons that puzzle Lawrence scholars to this day, he was inspired to take it up as a collaboration and rewrite it the Lawrence way. It was eventually published as The Boy in the Bush with Skinner credited as co-author. Burgess thinks Lawrence collaborated because Australia made a big impact on him but he simply wasn’t there long enough to pick up the local lore. This manuscript was packed with local lore and just needed the psychological depth which he tried to add.
After just two weeks, they took ship to Sydney. He only stayed here two days (too expensive) before heading to a house 50 kilometres south.
Chapter 12. A Comical-Looking Bloke
Here Lawrence wrote Kangaroo which Burgess calls ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It was an improvisation i.e. he set off without having a plot or characters but the book’s slapdash unevenness of tone 1) allows for all kinds of elements, including extended lyrical descriptions of the Australian landscape and 2) creates an overall sense of spontaneity and immediacy which is very appealing.
Kangaroo’s main characters are transparently based on Lawrence and Frieda, being Richard Lovat Somers, an English writer, and his wife Harriet, who has a foreign look. They arrive in Sydney, find a house to rent. The neighbours are a childless couple and the husband, Jack Callcott, explains he’s a member of a secretive authoritarian political movement, the Diggers, who are seeking to overthrow democracy. He introduces Lovat to their leader, a charismatic Jewish lawyer named Ben Cooley and codenamed ‘Kangaroo’.
Burgess points out that the novel is about types of power:
- there is an entire chapter devoted to the dynamic of Frieda and Lawrence’s marriage, and Lawrence’s preposterous efforts to convince her that she should submit to him as lord and master, which she robustly ridicules
- the political plot, sort of, about the Diggers and Cooley, although his so-called ideology is disappointingly wishy-washy, all about love of your fellow men, and Colley asks Somers (in several embarrassingly bad scenes) to love him
The plot, such as it is, leads up to a riot at a meeting of the Australian Socialist Party, which is attacked by a phalanx of pseudo-fascist Diggers, complete with gunshots, a bomb being thrown, and Kangaroo being mortally wounded. Burgess points out how all this is prefaced by an extended passage about the nature of the ‘mob’, reminiscent of Freud’s work ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ which had just come out (in 1921), which Burgess says ‘shows an acuteness worthy of Adolf Hitler’ (p.142). I found it, like most of Lawrence’s attempts to tackle serious political or sociological issues, so wordy, so convoluted, and so embroiled with his personal mythology around the sexes and the deep gods, as to be almost unreadable.
Burgess briskly summarises that Lovat cannot give his allegiance to Kangaroo because the latter’s philosophy of brotherly love is shallow piffle beside Lovat’s deep feeling for the dark gods lying behind everything, deeper than humanity.
In a side note, Burgess picks out one of the final scenes of Lovat walking by moonlight by the seashore as being as magical and symbolic as Burkin throwing stones in the millpond to break the image of the moon in ‘Women in Love’. Lawrence’s novels overflow with wonderful, wonderful nature descriptions.
Chapter 12. Quetzalcoatl
After their Australian sojourn Lawrence and Frieda continued their odyssey east, arrived in San Francisco and took train to the artists’ community at the pueblo town of Taos, New Mexico, in the south-west USA. They had, as you recall, been invited by its owner Mabel Dodge Luhan, the American socialite, who had read Lawrence’s poetry and thought he’d be a perfect fit.
They were found a ranch fifteen or so miles from the town and endured a tough and demanding winter in its very primitive conditions, helped by a couple of Danish artists they sub-let some outhouses to.
By spring 1923 they needed a break and Lawrence took Frieda to Mexico. After some weeks in Mexico City, they headed south west and settled in a house on Lake Chapala. Over the next few years they made three trips in all. Out of them came a long novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), an epic 462 pages in the Penguin edition, and the travel book, Mornings in Mexico (1927).
Burgess gives a workmanlike summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ but doesn’t do this vast, complex, brilliant and ridiculous book justice. He calls it ‘the least liked of Lawrence’s novels and one can see why’. It is humourless, and pontificates, at length, on a subject of little interest to most English readers (a couple of Mexicans leading the rise of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl ).
One key point I nearly forgot by the time I’d staggered to the end of it, is that it, also, was very obviously written at two different times. The opening chapters are written in a surprisingly pared-back prose, lacking the usual Lawrentian guff, repetition and rhetoric. Almost as if he’d been reading Hemingway (who, however, hadn’t published much yet). Whereas the second half, describing the proponents of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is an orgy of half-baked mysticism, pseudo-psychology and tedious ‘hymns’.
Burgess suggests the difference in style is explained by facts on the ground. After 6 months Frieda was fed up of Mexico’s searing heat and (probably) Lawrence’s insistence on her submission to his religious fantasies. So she booked a berth on a ship from New York back to Britain (as the novel’s protagonist Kate Leslie, also does). On the New York quayside they had such an intense argument that they for a while thought the marriage was over.
He travelled west across America, stopping in the young Hollywood, before making it back to Mexico City. Here he completed the novel unrestrained by Frieda’s presence and influence. So you could argue that the first, very restrained and unLawrentian half, with its sensible characters doing believable things, was written under Frieda’s influence; and that the wildly self-indulgent second half, a fantasia of the new religion, accompanied by long poem-hymns he attributes to the new religionists, is Lawrence unleashed.
In real life Lawrence for a while felt he had lost Frieda and that, in her insistence on being free, independent and going her own way (home), she had ‘won’ their endless battle; whereas in the novel, Lawrence has the very strong character Kate Leslie in the end bow and submit to the male principle of her dark native husband. I.e. in the novel Lawrence faked that he’d won. In reality he swallowed his pride, and also took ship to Britain, ending in London where he realised just how much he disliked the English.
In his brisk summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ Burgess doesn’t mention the book’s countless breath-takingly beautiful prose descriptions of the Mexican landscape and mood. Equivalents to the wonderful evocation of the Australian landscape in ‘Kangaroo’. In both these novels, for my money, the ‘plot’ is dubious but the sense of place is astonishing.
Burgess thinks ‘there is no less convincing ending in the Lawrence oeuvre’ (p.157) but I found the ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ appropriately ambiguous and uncertain. It just stops in mid-conversation as the protagonist, Kate Leslie, rather hopelessly asks the Mexican general she’s married and who wants her to join their religious movement, Cipriano Viedma, to make her stay with him – despite the fact that we’ve seen her pining for Britain and booking a berth on a ship home. It ends on a note of irresolution and ambiguity which, I thought, accurately sums up the Lawrentian protagonist, endlessly conflicted and contradictory and changeable.
Chapter 13. A Spot of Red
In London Frieda and Lawrence became close to the artist (the Right Honourable) Dorothy Brett, and she accompanied them when they sailed back across the Atlantic in March 1924. They travelled from New York to Chicago and then back to Taos. Here Mable Luhan gave the Lawrences 170 acres of land and Lawrence, always surprisingly practical, threw himself (alongside native labourers) into rebuilding the adobe shacks, clearing the irrigation ditches, planting a flower garden.
In this period Lawrence wrote St Mawr. Like so many of Lawrence’s fictions it splits into two distinct parts (England and America), maybe three (London, Shropshire, Texas). The first, longer part portrays the posh, upper-middle-class world Lawrence was now moving in (the miner’s son had come a long, long way in a little over 10 years), set in London mews cottages and posh grand houses.
St Mawr is the name of a horse, a stallion, bought by Mrs Witt, a redoubtable American widow of independent means, for her son-in-law Henry Carrington, so he can join her and her daughter, Louise (Lou), as they go riding in Rotten Row (in Hyde Park) and mingle with London’s elite. Here the nervy, uncontrollable horse causes a scene and is banned as a danger to the public.
The scene then shifts to the West Midlands on the Welsh border, where a posse of posh people go for an extended break and where St Mawr is startled by a snake in the heather and rears backwards, kicking one of the men in the party in the face then rolling onto Henry and crushing his foot.
In part two, the leading figure, Mrs Witt, takes daughter, son-in-law and difficult horse by ship back to America, to the ranch where she grew up and whose profits pay for her pampered lifestyle travelling round Europe (and which explains why she and her daughter like horses).
But they don’t stop here. Lou looks for somewhere isolated where she can be herself and discovers a half-abandoned old ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and buys it, and persuades her mother to join her and the family retainer, a native American named Phoenix, in rebuilding and furbishing it.
Burgess makes the obvious point that the entire narrative arc of the story follows Lawrence’s recent life, from posh nobs in London, via an excursion into the English countryside, then back to the States, to the dusty desert reminiscent of Taos, and then the final 20 pages are a pretty literal description of the ranch which Mabel Luhan, with great generosity, gave to Lawrence.
Burgess goes on to make the fairly obvious point which I’d completely missed that St Mawr is Lawrence: wounded, angry, liable to lash out. When the horse kicks a nice posh chap in the face up in the Shropshire hills it is Lawrence spitting in the face of the posh people he met in London and claimed to love his work and who he loathed. In fact St Mawr overflows with hatred of just about everyone, as I itemise in my review of it.
According to Burgess, right at the end of 1924 Lawrence travelled with Frieda and Brett back to Mexico. The British vice-consul found them a cottage in Oaxaca and it was here that he completed ‘The Plumed Serpent’, in all its madness.
He also completed the odd book of travel sketches combined with anthropological reportage, ‘Mornings in Mexico’. The book starts out as restrained and observant sketches of his hacienda, his servant, a long walk to a remote village and a description of a market day; but then the second half and the last three or four chapters become more anthropological, describing trips to observe traditional Indian music and dances, and taking it on himself to explain the Indians’ entire animistic worldview. Several of these chapters do not take place in Mexico at all, but in the United States, so the title of the book is pretty misleading.
Here in Oaxaca, in early 1925, Lawrence fell very ill. He went down with malaria but also food poisoning causing diarrhoea. To compound his misery, the region was hit by an earthquake. He was moved to the one decent hotel in Oaxaca. He was left weak and ill. All the old fight went out of him. For years he had written fantasies of subjecting Frieda to his imperious male will. Now he could barely walk and realised how utterly dependent on her he had become.
A doctor in Mexico City diagnosed tuberculosis and told Frieda that Lawrence only had a year or two left to live. When they tried to return to Taos the US immigration officials prevented him, until overridden by a kindly official in the embassy in Mexico City. But only with a 6-month visa.
In the event Lawrence recovered back on the ranch and was fit enough to get involved in all manner of outdoor chores and work. Burgess dwells on his finding a porcupine with cactus needles in its nose and carefully extracting them, which led to one of his many essays about man’s place in nature.
In September 1925 his US visa expired, he travelled to Washington with Frieda, then they caught a liner back across the Atlantic. He kidded himself he’d come back but, of course, he never did. His ranch is now a museum dedicated to him, the D.H. Lawrence ranch.
Lawrence disapproved of the Atlantic – ‘a dismal kind of ocean; it always affects me as the grave of Atlantis’ – although not as much as he disapproved of England.
Chapter 14. Life in Death
Lawrence passed through England en route for the continent. Burgess thinks Italy was Lawrence’s true home and the Mediterranean his proper sea. By the autumn of 1925 they had settled at a place called Spotorno, on the coast just over the border from France. Here he turned 40.
Burgess summarises Lawrence’s life to date: he had travelled right around the world looking for a race unspoiled by western materialism but hadn’t found it. He had hated the tropics (Ceylon), ignored the native people of Australia, seen the corruption and lassitude of the Mexicans, hated America’s Fordist culture, loathed England’s imperial snobbery.
Etruscan Places Now, back in Italy, he persuaded himself he’d found it in the long-extinct and legendary race of the Etruscans. Hence his book Etruscan Places. The Etruscans created a civilisation in west and north-west Italy which reached its height around 500 BC. To Lawrence’s mind they were an example of a primitive people in touch with their sensual pagan selves who were crushed out of existence by the cerebral, law-obsessed, imperialistic Romans.
This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the historical facts since 1) if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars), 2) the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they also practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have had sympathy for.
But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans into his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’. This is why the book opens with an attack on all historians of the ancient world who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures.
And, as Burgess points out, when Lawrence was anathematising an empire which crushed scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ he was also obviously referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.
The Man Who Died Burgess devotes 4 pages to a summary of this vivid short story depicting Jesus waking from the dead in his tomb. In the story Jesus stumbles out and takes shelter with a peasant before the several encounters with disciples described in the New Testament.
These encounters are given according to the Biblical sources but we see that the resurrected man who lived them is radically different from the Jesus of the Bible account. For he has thrown off his mission to convert the world to love. He now sees all that as a form of narcissism. Now he will live for the instinctive life within him i.e. become Lawrentian man.
And so in the second half of the story (and, as Burgess points out, so many of Lawrence’s stories and novels fall into two distinct halves) he travels south along the coast. Here he comes to a small domestic temple to the goddess Isis and falls under the spell of its priestess, culminating in their having sex at the pagan altar.
Burgess doesn’t quite bring out how brilliantly vivid and imaginative this story is, with scores of moments of insight, starting with the searing description of what it feels like to rise from the dead – but he correctly points out the other striking thing about it which is – why wasn’t it banned? Why wasn’t Lawrence prosecuted for blasphemy? What kind of story could possibly be more blasphemous? Instead, as we know, the Establishment reserved its fury for his next novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s always sex with the philistine, guttersnipe British, who are too thick to notice transgressive ideas.
Chapter 15. A Woman’s Love
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a book about fidelity. Lady Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors must be true to each other and what they awaken in each other – a true awakening of their bodies’ sensual and sexual identities – despite the full panoply of opposition society can throw at them: gossip and rumour, social disapproval, censure from her father and sister, the howling anger of his shrewish wife, the cold anger of her husband, and the minefields of the law.
He began it at Scandicci in Italy in October 1926 and over the next two years wrote three versions. Many critics think the shorter first version is best, but it was the longest version which he chose to have privately printed in 1928.
Burgess correctly points out that for a book which supposedly champions free and ecstatic sex, ‘Chatterley’ is embarrassingly limited and ignorant. Lawrence is embarrassingly fixated on the penis, the phallus, on Mellors’s erect penis, and the sex is entirely orientated around his quick phallic penetration of Lady C. There is little or no foreplay and no attention whatsoever is given to Connie’s pleasure or orgasm. She is condemned to find all her pleasure in response to his quick thrusting cock.
As Burgess says, not just any modern westerner with an interest in the subject, but any literate member of the world’s other cultures, readers of Japanese, Chinese or India erotica, would know vastly more than Lawrence describes. Lawrence’s supposed sex set-pieces make us look like an embarrassment on the world stage. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ only counts as a ‘sexy’ book when set against the narrow, blinkered, strangled, philistine background of early 20th century Anglo-Saxon culture. Compared with the erotic writings of virtually any other tradition, it is pitifully inadequate.
Burgess is critical of it. He thinks Connie isn’t as interesting a female figure as Ursula, Gudrun (who is?) or Kate Leslie, while her desertion of a crippled husband subverts her moral standing. Mellors is less attractive than the gamekeeper in The White Peacock. In my reading, I didn’t like Mellors. He is unnecessarily chippy and shirty with Clifford and, especially with the painter Duncan Forbes who offers to help them out and Mellors rudely dismisses. By the end I didn’t like either of the lovers. My sympathy went out to Mrs Bolton, a battling single mum from the village who comes to be Clifford’s housekeeper and manages to stay sympathetic to all three parties in the love triangle.
Both Lawrence’s US and British publishers refused to publish it. Lawrence had a full version privately printed in Italy and distributed 2,000 copies. Wikipedia describes the fate of various expurgated and pirated editions. Burgess summarises Lawrence’s own account of printing a private edition, as given in ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.
The famous 1960 trial came about because Penguin decided to use the text as a test of the recent Obscene Publications Act 1959.
When the jury found against the prosecution i.e. that paperback publication could go ahead, Burgess and other critics like him were relieved because now they were free to discuss the book on its merits and admit the fact that it’s a flawed novel.
Official persecution continued. When he sent the manuscript of his poetry collection ‘Pansies’ to his London publisher, it was intercepted, opened, and alleged ‘obscenities’ cut.
In 1919 the Warren Gallery held an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings. A surprising 12,000 people paid to see them. They yellow press got wind of the nudity and egged on the police to raid the gallery and confiscate 14 of the pictures. The authorities proposed to destroy the paintings and the book of the exhibition though the gallery owners rounded up some contemporary artists to defend him.
Burgess doesn’t think much of the paintings, says the paintings ascribed to Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, are better.
Chapter 17. Death in Vence
Burgess dwells on the friendship between Aldous Huxley and Lawrence and he quotes a nice section from an interview given late in life where Huxley says that Lawrence was, above all, happy. Burgess thinks Huxley absorbed enough of the scientific worldview ‘to bring a new intellectual rigour to the novel’. Having just read a load of Huxley’s novels I think this is rubbish. There’s nothing intellectually rigorous about them, my abiding impression is of the endless vapouring gaseous trip about Love and Art gassed by preposterous pseudo-intellectual rentiers. And his later writings about drugs and religion dress up in scientific terminology but are basically spiritualist nonsense.
What comes over from Lawrence’s last months spent dying from tuberculosis was his own foolish denialism, and the complete wretched inadequacy of contemporary medicine. Only antibiotics can treat TB and they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet.
Testimony from various sources suggest that Frieda was worse than useless at looking after Lawrence. She couldn’t cook, turned the kitchen of the villa where he spent his last weeks into a slum. Everything had to be cleaned and tidied by Aldous and especially Maria Huxley who worshipped Lawrence like a god.
We have it on the testimony of Aldous Huxley that, a day or two before he died, Lawrence said of his wife: ‘Frieda, you have killed me.’ The best source for his final days is from the English poet Robert Nichol. He wrote:
Aldous would not repeat such a terrible saying unless he felt it to be true. And he said, ‘I like Frieda in many ways but she is incurably and incredibly stupid – the most maddening woman I think I ever came across. Nevertheless she was the only sort of woman with whom D.H.L. could live. (quoted p.196)
Burgess makes the point that if Lawrence had married little Maria Huxley, she would have been a faithful, efficient, kind wife, creating order and tidiness everywhere, as she did for Huxley – but Lawrence needed chaos. He thrived on the battle of wills, the clash between his domesticity and Frieda’s slovenliness, between his working class background and her aristocratic hauteur, between his English puritanism and her continental sensuality, on her willingness to fight back.
Mind you, these comments shed light on Frieda’s own memoirs, one of the most salient parts of which, for me, was the way she doesn’t actually comment on any of the numerous books he wrote during their 18-year marriage. I thought it was tact. Maybe she was just too stupid, and didn’t try.
He died peacefully in his sleep and was buried at Vence. A year later he was exhumed and shipped over to Taos where Fried built a shrine for him at the ranch.
Burgess calls him ‘the most English of our writers’, is that true? More English than Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens? He’s nearer the mark when he says:
The British expect comfort from their writers, and Lawrence offers very little. (p.197)
The tenor of the text and endings of most of his stories offer very little comfort, from the bleak endings of ‘Women in Love’ and ‘The Fox’, to the uncertain ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ or the hanging ending of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ – you go through these great emotional rollercoaster rides reading his stories but then, at the end… what?
Chapter 18. On The Side of Life
Burgess has a half-hearted go at speculating what might have happened if Lawrence had lived longer. Would he have come over to Huxley’s way of seeing i.e. combining all the blood and dark gods stuff with a more rational point of view? Unlikely.
Like most critics, Burgess thinks Lawrence had, in fact, done his best work. Some people think Sons and Lovers is his masterpiece; Burgess thinks it’s Women In Love. But after that it was all slowly downhill, there is a steady diminution in force, he is never so wildly radical again.
Then Burgess adds his own interpretation which is that Lawrence was a professional writer. He could sit down anywhere and bang out letters, stories, essays, poems or continue with a novel. More than most we have to take his oeuvre, across its many genres, as one thing.
Was he a prophet? Burgess acknowledges Lawrence’s writings about power, his dislike of Italian fascism, but his own flirting with power and submission in ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’. But he doesn’t mention what I think is stronger, which is the sense of doom which dogs Mellors in ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mellor’s conviction that a great crash was coming and the future was going to be very dark proved to be right.
Lawrence would have been dismayed to learn his name is associated in the common culture with sex, with the scandal surrounding Lady Chatterley, with the soft porn movie versions, as a prophet of soft-porn sensuality. There’s nothing soft porn about Lawrence: his writings are hard and rebarbative, they are not relaxing or lulling.
This is Burgess at his weakest. He wanders off into a lengthy consideration of Henry James and his criticism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as he tries to define what ‘life’ means in the context of a novel. But he’s over-thinking it. Think back to reading ‘The Rainbow’: it is the most fantastic depiction of the complexity of human existence, of being a person plonked down amid families, in settlements and cultures, in the natural and man-made worlds, and the endless fizzing popping confusing experience of being alive to all these endless inputs and experiences. Comparisons with Henry James or James Joyce or any other writers are beside the point. Lawrence was the poet laureate of the teeming richness of Life and delves so deep, drilling beneath all conventional notions of identity, taking his characters to primeval, archetypal depths. And his novels inhabit the animals they describe and bring to life the myriads of flowers quite as fully as his human characters, maybe more so.
It seems overblown when Lawrence writes about the ‘cosmos’ but surely Lawrence, more than any other writer, had the right to do so, because he deliberately moved out of all his comfort zones, left England behind, and wrote dazzling evocations of the landscapes, flora and fauna of the Mediterranean, Australia, and the American and Mexican desert. Who cares what Henry James wrote about ‘form’ or why James Joyce deployed such complex symbolical structures – you only have to read any of Lawrence’s descriptions of the Australian outback, of the silver fish in the cold Pacific, of the thunderhead clouds massing over the distant mountains in Mexico, and you realise you are in the presence of a great, great writer, who owned and described more of the world than most of his contemporaries even saw.
Burgessian vocabulary
- allumeuse = French for ‘tease’
- hypergamy = the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological or educational background (as working class men do with upper class women, as Lawrence men do in a number of his stories: Virgin and Gypsy, Lady Chatterley)
- prevernal = relating to the early stages of spring, or the end of winter
Credit
Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess was published by William Heinemann in 1985. Page references are to the 1986 Abacus paperback version.
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.
Related reviews
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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/