A Penguin paperback edition of 12 short stories by D.H. Lawrence.

• A Modern Lover (1910?)
• Strike Pay (1913)
• The Border-Line (1924)
• Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)
• The Last Laugh (1924)
• Smile (1924)
• The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)
• Two Blue Birds (1926)
• Glad Ghosts (1926)
• In Love (1927)
• None of That
• Sun (1928)

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:

• ‘Smile’ – Matthew travels to the death bed of his wife, Ophelia
• ‘The Border Line’ – the ghost of a woman’s first husband, killed in the Great War, takes her from her second husband
• ‘The Last Laugh’ – the demonic appearance of the god Pan in mid-winter London
• ‘Glad Ghosts’ – the ghost of a spurned wife haunts the inhabitants of a country mansion

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.

• The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories online
• Collected Stories online

Related reviews

• D.H. Lawrence reviews