A flame kindled round him, making his experience passionate and glowing, burningly real.
(description of Will Brangwen falling in love, although it could be almost any Lawrence character, male or female)

What did the self, the form of life matter? Only the living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further complication.
(Ursula’s credo right at the end of the book, p.484)

This strikes me as a work of utter genius. Lawrence had an astounding gift for creating men and women who are more like pagan gods of the landscape, who live what seem primeval lives of extraordinary depth and intensity.

Other novelists build their narrative out of key scenes, scenes which move the story along or reveal people’s personalities, create way stations to the plot or highlight characters’ development. Many novelists work through extensive dialogue, designed to disclose people’s (clashing) personalities, sometimes to announce shocking revelations, as in a stage play or, alternatively, to be witty and amusing. Lawrence is extremely unlike all of that. This novel amounts almost to a repudiation of that entire tradition.

Instead, with relatively few well-defined scenes and tens of pages passing with no dialogue at all, Lawrence describes the inner lives of his characters at great length, to intense and penetrating depth, in rhapsodic poetic prose. At one point he gives a sense of what he’s about, in the perception of the newly-married Tom Brangwen:

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away… leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent bedrock… (p.150)

He does so not in a rational, analytical way. Instead there are page after page describing the complex, many-sided and continually changing quality of his characters. Their moods, emotions, feelings and qualities are described with incandescent vividness and they are always changing, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, sometimes sentence to sentence, in a dizzying, bewildering shimmer. Is this how people’s perceptions, moods and feelings change? It feels rather delirious and yet wonderful at the same time. Here are young Anna and Will falling in love.

A spell was cast over her. And how uneasy her parents were, as she went about the house unnoticing, not noticing them, moving in a spell as if she were invisible to them. She was invisible to them. It made them angry. Yet they had to submit. She went about absorbed, obscured for a while. Over him too the darkness of obscurity settled. He seemed to be hidden in a tense, electric darkness, in which his soul, his life was intensely active, but without his aid or attention. His mind was obscured.

(Note the repetition. I’ll come to that in a moment.) Or Ursula wanting to be back in love with Anton.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be able to love him.

Hundreds and hundreds of pages of characters keyed up to the most intense and exquisite emotional peaks and extremities.

Passion

‘The Rainbow’ follows three successive generations of the Brangwen family who inhabit and inherit the family farm, Marsh Farm, in rural Nottinghamshire, from the 1840s to the Edwardian era. But there is little or nothing about business dealings, the practical details of raising crops or cattle and so on.

Instead the book focuses in huge detail on two types of subject: first the childhood and adolescence of the key figure in each generation; but then, most particularly, on the love lives of these figures, described with astonishing, monomaniacal intensity. Here is just one among many, many such passages, in this case describing Ann and Will falling in love, in this scene embracing and kissing.

They would stand sometimes folded together in the barn, in silence. Then to her, as she felt his young, tense figure with her hands, the bliss was intolerable, intolerable the sense that she possessed him. For his body was so keen and wonderful, it was the only reality in her world. In her world, there was this one tense, vivid body of a man, and then many other shadowy men, all unreal. In him, she touched the centre of reality. And they were together, he and she, at the heart of the secret. How she clutched him to her, his body the central body of all life. Out of the rock of his form the very fountain of life flowed. But to him, she was a flame that consumed him. The flame flowed up his limbs, flowed through him, till he was consumed, till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.

Lawrence’s characters are continually being swept out into the spaces between the stars, bursting into flames, swooping cruel as a hawk, and generally being transported by stark, primeval, unstoppable passions. At numerous points the impassioned couples imagine themselves transported far from ‘civilisation’, like beings on a desert island, like Adam and Eve. At one point Lawrence makes this more than usually clear.

And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen felt that the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of the world of to-day, cities and industries and civilization, leave only the bare earth with plants growing and waters running, and he would not mind, so long as he were whole, had Anna and the child and the new, strange certainty in his soul. Then, if he were naked, he would find clothing somewhere, he would make a shelter and bring food to his wife. (p.193)7

Male and female created He them

He asserted himself before her, he felt himself infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted herself before him, she knew herself infinitely desirable, and hence infinitely strong. And after all, what could either of them get from such a passion but a sense of his or of her own maximum self, in contradistinction to all the rest of life? (p.302)

Above all, this enormous 500-page hymn to the life of the passions and emotions focuses on what, in Lawrence’s hands, is the primal dyad, duality and dichotomy between a man and a woman in love. Thousands of other writers have handled this worn-out subject but Lawrence does it unlike anyone else. Other novelists structure their stories through scenes, which generally include dialogue in which characters reveal their feelings, and the scenes are carefully calibrated to depict men and women going through the fairly well-recognised stages of acquaintance, friendship, admiration, affection, first feelings of love and so on. Think Jane Austen. Above all they have a social aspect and their characters conform to social norms.

Not so Lawrence. Lawrence works through page after page of prose poetry describing the characters’ feelings in the most primal, extreme, almost abstract way, sometimes with the simple profundity of the Old Testament.

She liked Anthony… All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses. (p.417)

His characters are like protagonists in a kind of Wagnerian drama of souls, endlessly battling for fulfilment.

She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself forth in its proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form, which seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud. It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order. All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality? (p.444)

Very often the drama rotates around ideas of completion. Male and female both feel a lack and want to be made complete and, once married, finally achieve this wonderful sense of completion, and yet all kinds of things can knock it sideways, create barriers, can make them hate each other, and brood and be distant, but then something snaps, one or the other begs forgiveness, there is joyful reunion and completeness again.

It was begun now, this passion, and must go on, the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined against him. She could limit and define herself against him, the male, she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one moment in exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme contradistinction to the male.

Something Lawrence does again and again is give each gender successive paragraphs – a paragraph to how the man is feeling, a paragraph to the woman. It’s one of the many ways he creates this sense of a primal male-female opposition or dyad.

He was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.

But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her conception, and because she was with child by him.

Sex

As that passage implies, there is a very strong sexual undertone to all this. For most of the book Lawrence nowhere explicitly describes sex, even when the couple are alone in their house, even alone in their bedroom, the language is never specific about undressing, boobs and willies and so on, it always remains at this level of abstract nouns, of ‘need’ and ‘completion’ and ‘union’ and suchlike.

But sex, heterosexual sex, the loss of self in the union of bodies making love, obviously underpins a great deal of the book’s psychology and, maybe, it’s aesthetic, its constant search for a kind of primitive intensity and physical communion between male and female.

At one point Will, a Christian, takes his wife Anna, a sceptic, to visit Lincoln cathedral. As he enters the soaring building he undergoes a great soaring of the soul but, as you can see, the whole thing is described in very thinly veiled sexual terms.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated… Every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch. (p.202)

More straightforwardly, Will returns from an evening in Nottingham after arguing with Anna, and they approach each other as strangers, which they find more arousing.

She watched him undress as if he were a stranger. Indeed he was a stranger to her. And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he touched her… They abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.

Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in, infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one man’s capacity. (p.235)

Still described in general or euphemistic or categorical terms. Whereas, 25 or so years later, here are Ursula and Anton.

She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her fingers on the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his back, when he made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles developed very strong through riding; and she had a great thrill of excitement and passion, because of the unimpressible hardness of his body, that was so soft and smooth under her fingers, that came to her with such absolute service. (p.460)

‘With such absolute service,’ what a thrilling phrase. Once they have slept together once, the descriptions of Anton and Ursula become more, not explicit exactly, more frank. More honest, maybe, though still couched in poetic rather than naturalistic details.

He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast against him.

As you can see, it’s not really the sex, it’s the complete picture of closeness or otherwise between people, which Lawrence is after.

Married love

Tens of thousands of novels, from Jane Austen to Bridget Jones, depict the process of finding a mate, of falling in love, as leading up to the great plot climax of marriage and ending there.

Lawrence is notable for carrying right on into the state of married love, in fact he only really blossoms once a couple are married and the real struggle begins, the struggle for complete physical and spiritual union, which is so overwhelming when achieved and experienced, which obliterates the outside world in its intensity, and yet is so fragile, so easily punctured by the slightest whims of jealousy or irritation or misunderstanding on the part of either spouse. And then the days and nights of alienation and coldness and apartness, sometimes rising to active hatred of the other, before some route is found back to apologise and forgive.

A large amount of the first half of the text is made up by this endless battle of the two sexes, conceived in a kind of elemental abstraction.

Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne. (p.189)

Joy

If there are black moments of hatred and scorn, Lawrence’s work is also, and mostly, coloured by an extraordinary primeval joy. Here’s the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen, left alone during the day while her husband, Will, goes to work in Nottingham.

She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations. As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit was somewhere far off.

She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no one to exult with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced before the Unknown.

Suddenly she realized that this was what she wanted to do. Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had chosen her, to Whom she belonged.

She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.

It’s not joy, is it, it’s exultation, and this note of fantastic joy and psycho-physical excitement recurs again and again, the fantastic excitement of being alive!

To Ursula it was wonderful. She felt she was a new being. The darkness seemed to breathe like the sides of some great beast, the haystacks loomed half-revealed, a crowd of them, a dark, fecund lair just behind. Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. She wanted to let go. She wanted to reach and be amongst the flashing stars, she wanted to race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this earth. She was mad to be gone. It was as if a hound were straining on the leash, ready to hurl itself after a nameless quarry into the dark. And she was the quarry, and she was also the hound. (p.317)

Aspects of Lawrence’s style

Plain prose

Lawrence doesn’t achieve his effects through fancy vocabulary. It’s striking how ordinary most of his vocabulary is. It’s really the power of his perceptions which startle you. Lydia gets a job caring for an old vicar who keeps a parish by the sea.

Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.

Repetition within paragraphs

Who knows how conscious it was but Lawrence employs a very definite strategy of repeating two or three key words within each paragraph. Each paragraph has one or two key words which are repeated two or three times. The effect is to make each paragraph feel… feel like it has an identity of its own, stands distinct from its neighbours. Each one seems to be ringing its own bell. Look at the repetition of ‘very’ in the paragraph above. There are thousands of similar and often more striking examples.

It’s as if Lawrence has struck out a phrase encapsulating a perception and then wants to examine it from various sides, repeats the phrase, repeats it with slight variations, to see what happens as he walks round it, to observe the changing light giving it different perspectives.

To pick a paragraph more or less at random: young Anna Brangwen has gone to church accompanied by her cousin, Will Brangwen. They are both sitting in a pew as the service begins. First read it for the sense:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew. (p.110)

And then pick out the repetitions:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew.

It’s not the consciously poetic prose of an Oscar Wilde because it avoids Wilde’s gossamer vocabulary, all silver and emeralds, and instead deliberately uses very plain ordinary language (except, I suppose for luminous, maybe). But the key words are the opposite of recherché – on the, hands, knees, strange. You could hardly get commoner words. Yet this kind of sounding repetition is without doubt poetic in technique and it’s absolutely everywhere, in every single paragraph.

Direct repetition

Generally, the repeated words or short phrases are scattered throughout a paragraph, separated by other phrases. But sometimes he wants to be so emphatic that he just repeats a phrase side by side.

She felt his power persisting on her, till she became aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was forcing her, he was forcing her. (p.181)

Why could he not leave her? Why could he not throw himself into the hidden water to live or die, as might be? He could not, he could not. (p.187)

Hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. (p.322)

Ursula was beside herself. She could not endure till the Saturday came, her thoughts burned up like a fire. If only it were Saturday, if only it were Saturday. (p.339)

On a macro level, certain words or images become associated with certain characters through repetition: foreign and foreignness with Lydia; Tom Brangwen’s blue eyes; flame with Anna; Will the hawk.

Dialect and surprise words

He does, occasionally, deploy dialect, or unusual words, or (colloquial?) phrases, mostly in direct speech.

Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.

‘Sit you down,’ said Tom Brangwen, ‘an’ take a bit off your length.’

What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young family that needed fettling for? (p.275)

‘Isn’t it a nasty morning,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not much of weather.’ (p.370)

‘Pens don’t melt into the air: pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What has become of them then?’

The main motor of the text is his staggering imagining of people’s primeval lives and feelings; but the proximate cause is his extraordinary sentences. On page 30 or 40 I realised that nearly every sentence comes with an unexpected phrasing which knocks the wind out of you, extraordinary unexpected vividnesses in sentence after sentence, smacking your imagination like a sheet of rain across a lake.

He held her in his arms, and his bones melted. (p.119)

The days went by, they ran on dark-padded feet in silence. (p.120)

The air was all hoary silver. She looked around her. Trees stood vaguely at their distance, as if waiting like heralds, for the signal to approach. In this space of vague crystal her heart seemed like a bell ringing.

Tom Brangwen wanted to make a speech. For the first time in his life, he must spread himself wordily. (p.137)

Lawrence is an astonishing spendthrift of beautiful lines, throwing away hundreds of casually brilliant and inspiring lines.

The firelight glowed against the darkness in the room.

He had worked for many years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were utterances of himself. (p.355)

He seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. (p.443)

And the mood in the build-up to Christmas.

Everywhere was a sense of mystery and rousedness. Everybody was preparing for something.

Nature poetry

The period just before the First World War saw an efflorescence of nature writing, a gaggle of so-so poets jostling to describe what was coming to feel like the disappearing landscapes of rural England. Edward Thomas was probably to emerge as the best of these but he only started writing his magical poetry once the Great War commenced. Anyway, Lawrence describes nature with the same bright vivid intensity he depicts his humans. They’re relatively rare, his straight nature descriptions, but when they occur, they are like the brightest nature photography.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud…

And yet a deep characteristic of Lawrence is that he doesn’t describe nature as an outsider, as a bourgeois tourist, but always relates it to the hard, muddy lives of the farmers he’s depicting. Sparkling nature is embedded in the world of human labour.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud. Then the turnips were pitted and work was slack.

For me, reading the first version of this paragraph without the final sentence lacks something. When you add in those final nine words, the whole rhythm of the paragraph seems complete. Here’s a selection of his nature writing.

Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. (p.121)

The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow. She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight. (p.178)

How lovely was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent on the meadows.

The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the corn-harvest. To Ursula, it was as if the world had opened its softest purest flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant, almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red button-chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a drunken dance. (p.308)

There was a place where she went trespassing to find the snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed. Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of night. And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight of the ground.

The plot = four generations of the Brangwen family

The Marsh farm in the valley of the river Erewash, not far from the village of Cossethay in one direction and the town of Ilkeston further away. In the 1840s a canal was built across their land and then a railway on a viaduct.

At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that occasionally a man’s figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse traversed the sky.

First generation – Alfred Brangwen

Alfred Brangwen of this period married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the ‘Black Horse’. They had four sons and two daughters. The eldest boy ran away to sea and did not come back.

The second boy, Alfred, became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in Nottingham, stifling his native creativity. He married the daughter of a chemist, became something of a snob, in later life took to womanising.

The third son, Frank, became a butcher, at eighteen married a little factory girl, who bore him numerous children. In later life he became a drunk and a bore.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger, remained at home.

Second generation – Tom Brangwen marries Lydia

The story follows the youngest son, Tom Brangwen, from boyhood to manhood. He struggles at school. When he was 17 his father fell and broke his neck, leaving just him, his mother and Effie in the farm. When he was 23 his mother died leaving him and Effie. They quarrel a lot. He takes a corner at the local pub to keep out of the way. Then Effie got married and moved out, leaving Tom with Tilly, the cross-eyed servant girl.

The story describes him having pre-marital sex several times, first time with a prostitute, next time with a girl he meets from a group at the pub, the glory and bewilderment of it. One day he sees a small woman dressed in black shepherding a child, walking the other way up the hill. One thing leads to another and he starts to woo her.

She is Lydia Lensky, of German descent, who married a Polish doctor who got caught up in the Polish Rebellion (spring 1863), was forced to flee, arriving in London (recapped pages 256 to 258). The doctor died and she threw herself upon charities who found her work caring for old single vicars, first one in Yorkshire, now one in Derbyshire.

Tom woos her over months, then one evening carries a bunch of daffodils he’s picked to the vicarage to propose to here. They are married. Account of his winning over Lydia’s feisty young daughter by her deceased doctor husband, Anna Lensky. Lydia bears him a son but Tom always stays closer to Anna.

She [Anna] was, however, only eighteen when a letter came from Mrs Alfred Brangwen, in Nottingham, saying that her son William was coming to Ilkeston to take a place as junior draughtsman, scarcely more than apprentice, in a lace factory. He was twenty years old, and would the Marsh Brangwens be friendly with him.

Will Brangwen, comes to visit and the narrative describes their slowly falling in love, till they are regularly meeting for illicit hugs and kisses in the cowshed. One time father Tom spies them, doesn’t interfere but is upset at the thought of losing his beloved daughter.

Third generation – Anna marries Will Brangwen

Will and Anna marry. It is a very stormy relationship, Anna being independent and headstrong but Will subject to black rages. Tom leases them a cottage of their own, Ivy Cottage.

Tom Brangwen had taken them a cottage at Cossethay, on a twenty-one years’ lease. Will Brangwen’s eyes lit up as he saw it. It was the cottage next the church, with dark yew-trees, very black old trees, along the side of the house and the grassy front garden; a red, squarish cottage with a low slate roof, and low windows. It had a long dairy-scullery, a big flagged kitchen, and a low parlour, that went up one step from the kitchen. There were whitewashed beams across the ceilings, and odd corners with cupboards. Looking out through the windows, there was the grassy garden, the procession of black yew trees down one side, and along the other sides, a red wall with ivy separating the place from the high-road and the churchyard. The old, little church, with its small spire on a square tower, seemed to be looking back at the cottage windows.

Will retains a lifelong interest in Christianity and church architecture, he feels liberated into eternity by it, whereas Anna sees only the finite stone building which feels man-made and cramped next to the wide universe.

Fourth generation – Ursula and Gudrun

Anna bears several children. The first is a daughter, Ursula. Will is still just 22 (p.214) and falls helplessly for this first daughter. Barely a year later another girl, Theresa. Two years later, Gudrun (p.219). Then Catherine. By the time he’s 26, Will has four children. By the time he’s 30, five (p.238).

Anna becomes totally self sufficient in being a mother which drives him to seek fulfilment elsewhere. But after failed attempts to chat up girls in Nottingham, he returns home more ironic and alienated and, paradoxically, this makes him more attractive to Anna, and they embark on a renewed sex life.

(Anna’s father, Ursula’s grandfather, Tom, dies in a flood, when torrential rain bursts the canal bank and floods the Marsh, he being drunk and riding back from a day in town. His son, Tom, works away and so the second son, Alfie, inherits the Marsh.)

Ursula is 8 when her father, Will, sets up woodwork classes in the local church for village boys (p.239). Ursula is conscious of a difference from the poor families in the village and gets into fights. Her parents send her to Nottingham Grammar School where she is thirsty for knowledge but not systematic. As she hits adolescence she undergoes intense religious experiences, though contradictory, rebelling against the literal interpretation of Jesus, wanting a more sensual religious rapture or ecstasy.

She feels hampered by being the eldest in a house full of children, by ‘the perpetual tyranny of young children’.

She’s just short of 16 (‘a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent… sensitive in the extreme, always tortured, always affecting a callous indifference’) when young Anton Skrebensky, son of the friend of the Brangwen family’s, turns up, aged 21 and in the army and wonderfully confident and self possessed.

History, breasts, the rest of England

History With the arrival of Ursula something happens: the narrative seems to emerge from a kind of unspecified timelessness, from ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, and into something more like the modern, historical, recorded world. This is signalled by specific historical references: at first the vague one to ‘the Mahdi’, which could derive from a long period, but then the extremely specific one marking the exact start of the (second) Boer War (October 1899) and intermittently chronicles the progress of the war via letters from Anton Skrebensky who serves in it.

Breasts I’ve added ‘breasts’ to this heading for a specific reason. When Lawrence described the previous generations of womenfolk – the woman from Heanor, Lydia Lensky, Anna Brangwen – there was a great deal of Lawrence’s characteristically ripe and florid prose about their love affairs but it was all described in general terms, about completion and fulfilment, even when she clasped his firm body or he pulled her towards him, it’s in a generalised kind of way, very rarely is there a reference to physical particularities (apart from height, body shape, facial features).

My point is that when Ursula arrives, she does so accompanied for the first time by 1) specific historical references and 2) by the word ‘breasts’. We learn that women have, not a vague ‘bosom’ which heaves with passion, but two breasts which are revealed when they strip naked. Ursula strips for her lesbian lover and they both have breasts. Thus the women cease being almost abstract principles of femininity (although they retain all those aspects) but now become real, physical women. You have for the first time real nudity.

The rest of England And the rest of England starts to appear. Up till now, a little over half-way through, the narrative took place in an almost abstract rural background with very limited horizons. The nearby village of Cossethay, the town of Ilkeston on its hill which can be seen from Marsh Farm, those are the borders of the narrative’s world, that is all the country the characters know or need to know.

But with the arrival of Ursula, suddenly we are turfed out of the primal dream of the first half and dumped into contemporary England, the England of economics and coal mines and imperial wars, of politicians in London. It is a shock when Skrebensky’s barracks at Salisbury is mentioned, or the fact that Fred Brangwen’s bride, Laura, attended Salisbury Training College. Naming mundane places in England seems like a crashing come-down after the primal semi-abstract setting of the first half. Even more so when Ursula applies for teaching jobs at Gillingham in Kent or Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey. I’d spent so long in Lawrence World that I’d forgotten such boring and mundane places existed. As with the history and the breasts of naked women, it feels like the narrative emerges from a kind of ahistorical dreamtime into the modern world of real people with physical bodies scrabbling for jobs.

Ursula’s story

Anton goes to war Ursula has a romantic involvement with the dashing son of friends of the family, Anton Skrebensky, but comes to see he is too conventional. By the time he is called on duty to serve in the Boer War (started October 1899) Ursula is over him. He writes a few letters which she loses.

Lesbian Miss Inger She has a schoolgirl crush on her grammar school teacher Miss Winifred Inger, which develops into a lesbian affair. Miss Inger invites her to stay with her at a bungalow with a lake where they go swimming, kiss and appear to have sex. But after a while Ursula comes to find her too ‘hippy’ and ‘clayey’ and stops feeling so intensely. In fact, she manages to marry Winifred off to her Uncle Tom. There’s a vivid portrait of an extended visit to Uncle Tom Brangwen, who is the manager of a horrible modern filthy colliery in the brand new red-brick town of Wiggleston. He explains how the coalminers are like faceless units who have adapted themselves to their horrible work and their horrible homes, They stay for weeks. Uncle Tom is experienced and cynical, he just wants someone to breed with (p.352). One night Miss Inger slips into Ursula’s bed to ask her whether she should accept Tom’s proposal. Coldly, Ursula say yes. Miss Inger goes back to her own bed to cry.

Applying to become a teacher When school ends Ursula is dumped back in the cottage (Yew Cottage) overflowing with kids and babies and hates it. She writes to her headmistress who advises her to become a teacher. She should earn in the region of fifty pounds a year. (Interestingly, her father estimates that, from his work and a private income of Anna’s, he earns about £400 a year. Compare with Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who each have annual unearned income of £600 pa i.e. £1,200 combined.)

Ursula applies through a central agency and receives interested replies from schools in Gillingham, Kingston and Swanwick (p.362). But her father (Will Brangwen), now well entrenched in restoring the church next door, playing the organ and supervising the choir, refuses to let her go as far away as London. Instead he finds a school in the slum quarter of Ilkeston, St. Philip’s Church School in Brinsley Street (p.367).

(Incidentally, 2 years earlier her grandmother, Lydia, had died; seeing as old Tom died in the flood years earlier, Marsh Farm passes to their second son, Uncle Fred and his wife whose marriage Ursula attended with Skrebensky, where she wanted to expose her breasts to the huge moon, p.368.)

Teaching The headmaster, Mr Harby, ‘a short, thick-set, rather common man’ with complete control of the school and its hundreds of boisterous children. She is a hopeless failure at keeping discipline and standards with her 55 (!) small children. The head master comes to loathe her. She is still only 17 (p.393).

She hates teaching. The pupils are wildly disobedient and violent, kicking her, throwing stones at her. In a major learning she loses her temper and thrashes a boy to a whimpering wreck. Then does it again to another. Now the children are scared of her, but she has hardened her heart.

Suffragettism and feminism

She and Maggie, in their dinner-hours and their occasional teas at the little restaurant, discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in the vote. To Ursula the vote was never a reality. She had within her the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far transcending the limits of the automatic system that contained the vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman meant something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something, she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.

That deeply-felt sense of injustice, that you’re put down and held back merely by virtue of being a woman, explains feminism’s deep and abiding and universal hold over billions of women, but also why it is so incoherent, contradictory and impractical as anything like a set of beliefs or demands. Because it’s a deep gut conviction which can express itself in a myriad different ways.

Maggie Schofield She becomes friends with another young teacher, Maggie Schofield. They eat packed lunches together in the nearby churchyard. Ursula goes to stay at Maggie’s home, in the grounds of a fine house where her brothers are caretakers and gardeners. She is set a-flutter by Maggie’s older brother, Anthony, with his eyes like a goat, and walks and talks with him, but when he proposes she gently says no. She knows she is a wandering spirit.

She buys a bicycle I’ve repeatedly read that bicycles were the great liberating invention of the 1890s. There was a widespread bicycle craze and countless cycling clubs were set up. The device was especially important for women because it allowed women, for the first time in history, to travel widely and freely beyond their homes and without male chaperones. A paragraph indicates that Ursula and Maggie fully participate in this new freedom.

She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy, finding, discovering.

(Compare the bicycle as agent for freedom in H.G. Wells’s novel, Ann Veronica, and the brief mention and photo of lady bicyclists in my review of Oscar Wilde’s London.)

Outgrowing Cossethay The Brangwen clan have always felt themselves superior to the villagers. In fact it’s one of the earliest themes, sounded in the book’s opening pages. When her parents decide to move away from Cossethay Ursula is delighted. She, too, needs to leave. The locals:

They quoted this and that about her. And she was ashamed because she did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet — and yet — one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it. So Cossethay hampered her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to her own height. (p.419)

Will Brangwen gains a position After decades of plugging away at his wood carving, Will Brangwen is invited to apply for the job of Art and Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. His salary will be £200 a year (p.429). To do this he will have to be located more centrally and so he, Anna and the remaining children leave Yew Cottage and move to a big red-brick villa at a place named Willey Green, on the edge of the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover. Will Brangwen, like the novel as a whole, since Ursula arrived, ‘must become modern’ (p.421). Ursula, as the eldest, helps with the move to the new house (we are told the astonishing fact that the Brangwen family now numbers ten! – no wonder Ursula complained about the tyranny of children, toddlers and babies everywhere).

Ursula starts college She completes her two years at St Phillips school and enrols to do an art degree at University College Nottingham (a constituent college of the University of London which didn’t become the University of Nottingham until 1948).

She studies for three years. At first the college seems a magical place of learning, linking back to the medieval origins of education. But by the second year she’s come to realise the lecturers are not priests of higher wisdom but retailers of second hands goods. All the subjects come to bore her. Cynically, she realises they are just being trained to add to their commercial value.

In her third year she is 22. She gets a letter from Skrebensky. It is six years since their last meeting, so, since he went off to the war in October 1899, it must be 1905.

Ursula finds the meaning of life Pages 441 to 442. In science classes, Ursula is given a lecturer, Dr Frankstone, who puts forward the extreme rationalist argument that, from a scientific point of view, there is nothing special about life which, after all, follows the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. But Ursula rebels against this scientific materialism, in these terms:

Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity. (p.441)

Ursula loses her virginity Anton Skrebensky writes to say he’s in England, does she want to meet? They meet in Nottingham and go for many walks. She is transfigured by his presence and he declares he still loves her. He tells her stories of his years in Africa and weaves a spell, a mystique around the darkness of the African night, ‘massive and fluid with terror’, and this becomes the motif of their meetings, ‘darkness’ and the ‘fecundity’ of the night become the key words of these passages. They appear to fall in love all over again and kiss in kisses described with great sensual beauty by Lawrence.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness. It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction. They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.

See what I mean about the poetry of Lawrence’s primal, elemental view of human existence, transformed and transported into a mystical realm. One walk leads them to a shade of an old oak tree and it is here that they finally go beyond kisses and Ursula appears to lose her virginity.

He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark, and again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses, and there was the silence between them…

They walk on to an old oak tree, swaying in the wind, and lie down under it, and this, I think, is Lawrence’s description of Ursula losing her virginity:

Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted. She was caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man, what was he? — a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality. (p.451)

1) Note how ungraphic this is, how hedged around and muted and euphemised. I take it the sentence describing the act is ‘The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted’ which is the opposite of explicit. Lawrence characteristically turns it into an elemental moment, fraught with Biblical overtones (the ‘agony’ of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane) which would have infuriated Christian traditionalists. 2) But barely is the sentence over before we are swept away on a great wind of gassy abstractions, off into paradise.

(When E.M. Forster does this, moves from the concrete moment up into one of his pagan or classical references, it is objectionable because it feels so limp and polite. By contrast I find Lawrence’s deployment of a similar trajectory, from the concrete to the abstract, convincing because he is so sincere. He really means it.)

Contemporary Edwardian readers would have been scandalised that Ursula feels absolutely no shame or regret about having pre-marital sex: ‘She was not ashamed — why should she be?’ But it’s worse than that because Lawrence portrays sex as the main way to become fully human, to complete yourself. And in so doing, achieve that annihilation of the external world which all his characters seek.

When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong… She had taken him, they had been together… But it was as if she had received another nature. She belonged to the eternal, changeless place into which they had leapt together… Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of artificial light. As they went up the steps of the foot-bridge over the railway, and met the train-passengers, she felt herself belonging to another world, she walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing her from them… This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and pride of night, never forsook her. She had never been more herself. (p.452)

Instead of being a dirty, shameful act which requires ages of guilt and atonement, Lawrence depicts unmarried sex as a complete liberation of her, a fortification, a making of her character, a giving of strength and inner certainty which will never leave her.

She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong — she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense: — she existed supremely. (p.452)

This is a powerfully non-conformist point of view, in our own times as much as Lawrence’s. Sex has completed her and now they both stand outside all conventional values, free and utterly independent.

They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence was like a possession upon them. They were possessed. Perfectly and supremely free they felt, proud beyond all question, and surpassing mortal conditions.

Holiday in London Anton proposes marriage (the decent thing) but Ursula, strong-headed as always, refuses. Instead they go for an extended holiday to London, where they live under false pretences as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky in a hotel in Piccadilly. Living in sin, as the Establishment would call it until the 1970s or ’80s, maybe still in some Christian or religious communities.

To France On a whim Ursula demands they go to France. They catch the train to Paris, which isn’t described at all, then she wants to go to Rouen, and the one-sentence description of the great cathedral for a moment revives the reader’s memory of Will and Anna in Lincoln cathedral. As their short break draws to an end she beings to draw apart from him.

Back in England she goes back to Nottingham and Anton is left bereft in London. He drinks at his club. He pesters her to get engaged. He has six months before his posting to India and wants to take her as a bride. He writes to her father, gets his permission, they are formally engaged, she gives him a ring.

Her final exams These have to be taken in London so she goes to stay in a pension near the British Museum. Anton sleeps with her. They go out west to a restaurant on the river near Richmond which is a disaster because Anton asks when she wants to be married and she says she doesn’t, and he starts crying, gets up and walks away crying, till she runs after him to dry his eyes and calm him down before they get a memorable cab back into London, getting out to walk through Hyde Park.

Failure and decision Ursula fails her third year exam. She does not get her BA. Anton is leaving for India in September. Ursula faces a decision: marry him and go to India to live the life of an army officer’s wife; or remain unmarried and become a spinster teacher. She consults Dorothy, pointing out she doesn’t believe in love, love isn’t the be-all and end-all, why shouldn’t she love many men? Dorothy points out how promiscuity ends badly. So, out of fear, she acquiesces and agrees to marry Anton.

The house party In August Anton invites her to a house party on the Lincolnshire coast being given by his great aunt, golf, tennis etc (p.476). Ursula is intimidated by all these worldly people, described with characteristic Lawrentian hyperbole.

She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. (p.476)

She and Anton go for walks beside the sea and have sex among the sand dunes. These scenes, right at the end of this huge novel, feel like the most shameless and permissive. We are repeatedly told how Anton sneaks out of the room he’s sharing with another man, sneaks down the big house’s corridors and into Ursula’s room ‘when it’s safe’.

She let him take her, and he seemed mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. (p.477)

But the point of these fornications is they slowly drive the pair apart until Ursula is utterly detached from them while Anton revels in his savage triumphs. When the time comes for her to catch a cab to the station they part as strangers. All this is interesting – the way you can have mad sex with someone and yet, on an emotional level, become more and more alienated. It’s a strange, uncanny thing which I think I’ve experienced myself and couldn’t be described by an author who politely omitted the entire sexual side of life.]

Anton marries Left bereft and empty, tortured by nights without the mad passion of Ursula, Anton acts decisively. He writes to the grown-up daughter of the colonel of his regiment, and proposes. Initially surprised, she replies, they correspond, she accepts, they are married in a fortnight, and Anton sails off to India a respectable married man. All this has a peculiar psych-sexual logic. It makes no rational sense but perfect emotional sense.

Ursula realises she’s pregnant Back at the (relatively new) family home in Beldover, Ursula repents her hardness to Anton. She realises she is pregnant with his child which transforms here view. She has an epiphany about the deep truth of motherhood, how it brings stability and identity. For the first time she realises the achievement of her mother, Anna, with her endless babies. She writes to Anton apologising, saying she will become his wife and come out to India, then waits for a reply. And waits…

The walk in the rain and the horses This extraordinary novel ends with an extraordinarily, hallucinatorily powerful scene. One windy rainy day Ursula goes for a walk across fields in the rain and has a terrifying encounter with a pack of horses, depicted as vast elemental, mythical forces. She becomes terrified and has to climb up a tree, through its branches and drop the other side of a hedge to escape them. After lying in a stupor against a tree in the rain, she finally makes it home and takes to her bed where she develops a fever that lasts for weeks.

Freedom In her delirium, she yearns for freedom from everything, society, the world, her lover, her parents, even from her own body.

If she could but extricate herself, if she could but disengage herself from feeling, from her body, from all the vast encumbrances of the world that was in contact with her, from her father, and her mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance. Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: ‘I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.’

The fundamental Lawrence position: denial of the entire world in order to achieve complete freedom.

The rainbow In her recovery she realises she is not pregnant. She gets a brisk cablegram from Anton telling her he’s married. She doesn’t care, he is part of the old life. She sits in the windowseat watching the world go by, the shabby colliers and constrained women and watches the new housing estates being built across the hillsides, ‘a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land’, and is sickened by the world, she dreams of a new life, of a new germination, of new seed waiting to burst into life. And suddenly she sees a rainbow forming in the rainy skies, a symbol of hope for a new life.

And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

God, what a magnificent, hallucinatory, overwhelming work of genius!

Memorable scenes

The description of Frank watching farm hands carrying fresh sides of beef from the slaughterhouse.

Tom taking a bouquet of daffodils to woo Lydia Lensky.

Married Tom Brangwen taking toddler Anna to the market with him, how she outbraves the other farmers.

Tom Brangwen takes toddler Anna out to the cowshed to stop her crying.

Young toddler Ursula running across the fields to meet her daddy, Will, from work.

Her father, Tom, drowning in the great flood.

Married Will, after an argument with Anna, picks up a young woman at the theatre and takes her to a dark park where they kiss and he is dazed with lust but she says no and breaks away.

Anton Skrebensky takes Ursula to a funfair in Derby. Weeks later, on his last day, they go to town then he brings her home in a crazy car ride.

Ursula thrashing the rat-like schoolboy Williams.

The walk through the snowy park when Maggie Schofield’s brother, Anthony, proposes to her. The snow and birds in the snow are beautifully done.

Anton and Ursula in Lincolnshire, she dancing in the waves, he caressing her body through her long Edwardian dress, sex in the sand dunes.

Lawrence and imperialism

Skrebensky is in the British Army, the Royal Engineers or Sappers, to be precise (p.474). When Ursula asks whether he enjoys the army Anton explains the need for an army and references the triumph of the Mahdi in Sudan. The Mahdi’s forces took Khartoum after a year-long siege and killed the British barrack, including General Gordon, on 26 January 1885. The British public clamoured for revenge but it was a long time coming and the extensive Mahdist state wasn’t overthrown by British forces until 1899. Ursula and Anton’s conversation takes place sometime during this long interval, 1885 to 1899.

I’ll quote Ursula and Anton’s dialogue in its entirety because it demonstrates Lawrence’s relentless focus on the personal. There may be wars and fighting and such, but they mean nothing next to his characters’ quest to find themselves and be themselves. Ursula is talking and Anton replies:

‘It seems just as much a game.’
‘If you call war a game.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s about the most serious business there is, fighting.’
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
‘Why is fighting more serious than anything else?’ she asked.
‘You either kill or get killed — and I suppose it is serious enough, killing.’
‘But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,’ she said.
He was silenced for a moment.
‘But the result matters,’ he said. ‘It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not.’
‘Not to you — nor me — we don’t care about Khartoum.’
‘You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.’
‘But I don’t want to live in the desert of Sahara — do you?’ she replied, laughing with antagonism.
‘I don’t — but we’ve got to back up those who do.’
‘Why have we?’
‘Where is the nation if we don’t?’
‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’
‘They might say they weren’t either.’
‘Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should still be myself,’ she asserted brilliantly.
‘You wouldn’t be yourself if there were no nation.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d just be a prey to everybody and anybody.’
‘How a prey?’
‘They’d come and take everything you’d got.’
‘Well, they couldn’t take much even then. I don’t care what they take. I’d rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire who gave me everything you can buy.’
‘That’s because you are a romanticist.’
‘Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go away, and people just living in the houses. It’s all so stiff and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really?’
‘I would fight for the nation.’
‘For all that, you aren’t the nation. What would you do for yourself?’
‘I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.’
‘But when it didn’t need your services in particular—when there is no fighting? What would you do then?
He was irritated.
‘I would do what everybody else does.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.’
The answer came in exasperation.
‘It seems to me,’ she answered, ‘as if you weren’t anybody — as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.’

You can see why they both become irritated with each other. There is no breaking down Ursula’s focus on the personal and her light mockery of Anton’s earnestness, which is mockery of his entire profession and commitment. You can pick different bits to make different points, but for me the key statement is Ursula saying: ‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’ It is a manifesto for complete irresponsibility. Whatever it is, other people will do it while we concentrate on living our best lives, discovering ourselves, expressing ourselves.

I thought that this dialogue happened any time during that 14 year period of Mahdist rule, as indicated above, until page 326 when, the narrative tells us, war is declared against the Boers i.e. 11 October 1899. This triggers a couple of pages repeating Anton’s belief that individual needs and feelings must be subordinated to the needs of the whole, the state, the community.

Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all.

Which is, of course, the precise opposite of Lawrence’s position. For Lawrence, the community or ‘civilisation’ is an abstract term which is derived from individuals but individuals are concrete entities while civilisation is a word. Later on, we are told Uncle Tom Brangwen’s similarly cavalier attitude.

About all the rest, he was oblivious, and entirely indifferent — even about the war. The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great adherent.

From what I know this was Lawrence’s essentially unpatriotic attitude to the Great War (when this book was published) and contributed to his bad reputation and unpopularity.

(Note: interesting that both classics, ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, contain fragments of imperialism. In ‘Howards End’ Mr Wilcox’s company made its fortune in West Africa – when Margaret visits his London office there’s a big map of West Africa on the wall – and the youngest son, Paul Wilcox, goes out to Nigeria as an imperial officer. Here in ‘The Rainbow’, Skrebensky is in the British Army and serves in the Boer War, remains in Africa for three more years, before being posted to India.)

Why Lawrence’s attitudes to sex, morality and Christianity got him into trouble

1. Lawrence’s sexual worldview

There’s not a lot of graphic sexual description – a quick check shows the word ‘breasts’, for example, only appears seven times in this huge text – but, as you’ve seen, Lawrence’s entire conception of human personality is based on this hyperbolic, super-exaggerated depiction of extremes of emotional and psychological and spiritual delirium and a crucial, central component of this is the vision of couples achieving an extraordinary physical and emotional communion. Sex sets them free.

The fact of their own consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they were free. (p.452)

This is described again and again, with Tom and Lydia, Will and Anna, Ursula and Anton, in rhapsodies of bodies meeting and achieving consummation, which are modelled on and continually hint at sexual intercourse.

Although sex nowhere appears explicitly, a hyper-sexualised frame of mind, page after page of rhapsodic descriptions of psycho-physical unions, underpins the entire book.

This explains why, just a few months after its publication, ‘The Rainbow’ was prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result, the book was banned and 1,011 copies were seized and burned. It became unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the United States.

2. Lawrence’s characters’ complete indifference to social morality

Arguably, though, just as important in the Establishment’s widespread criticism of the book as its sexualised worldview, is the complete indifference of all his characters to conventional morality, and often their active rejection of it. They are barely aware of it, it never hampers or controls their behaviour. Of Anna, he writes:

She adhered as little as he to the moral world. (p.235)

And she stands for all the main characters: frankly, none of them give a damn what society thinks. Here are Ursula and Anton:

She gave the complete lie to all conventional life, he and she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living lie to the dead whole which contained them.

Lawrence goes out of his way to explain how each successive couple lives life on their own terms, heedless of any outside comments or values. When young Tom Brangwen loses his virginity to a prostitute at a pub, and then has sex with a woman he’s picked up in a pub out in the woods, he shows no remorse or Christian guilt. Lawrence just explores the impact on his emotions.

After Ursula loses her virginity, Lawrence goes out of his way to say she was not ashamed or embarrassed, just as she had the lesbian affair without any thought of outside values or strictures. When Will Brangwen tries to have his way with a girl he’s picked up at the theatre, in a dark public park, all this is described frankly and openly with none of the Christian or moralising commentary the Edwardian world demanded.

And after Ursula and Anton become lovers, they go on holiday to London and live in sin, unmarried but masquerading as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky, which was not only scandalous but probably against the law. They don’t care, they revel in their blithe rejection of all society’s values.

If I was an Edwardian moralist, preaching the stern requirements of Empire and Duty and Christian morality, the uniform indifference of all the main characters to social norms and values would upset me just as much as the impassioned sexualised descriptions.

(A side note on this: Uncle Tom Brangwen the colliery manager’s open cynicism about ‘morality’ when Ursula and Winifred go to stay with him i.e. the working classes can’t afford morality and don’t care. They leave that sort of thing to their betters who can afford ‘morality’, p.349.)

3. Lawrence and Christianity

This is too big a subject for me. It would take a book to describe and disentangle because all the main characters have complex responses to Christian teachings which change and develop over time. Lawrence is not unsympathetic to Christianity’s message and cultural significance. He was raised on it and it shows. It’s important that Will Brangwen is made very sympathetic to Christian belief, maintains the church next door to Yew Cottage, repairs the organ, leads the choir and so on. But it is all done in the Lawrentian style i.e. in terms of rhapsodies and ecstasies, depicting a kind of utterly amoral, sensual and rhapsodic type of Christianity which must have horrified contemporary churchmen.

For example, take the extraordinary scene set in Lincoln Cathedral where Will experiences a deeply religious experience and yet it is couched in unmistakably sexualised terms, with the soaring arches coming together in great climaxes of fulfilment. Not only that, but at the climax of that chapter, in an extraordinary narrative manoeuvre, the narrator himself becomes Jesus for the last few pages (281 to 282).

Lawrence has a lot of time for the historical, cultural and spiritual importance of the church and its traditions but it is a profoundly Lawrentified Christianity. He is clearly soaked in the Biblical tradition and from time to time makes Biblical comparisons, mentioning Pisgah or David or Samuel. But these have a different flavour to his citations from Jesus, which are weighed and assessed by characters.

In particular, an entire book could be written about the changing, evolving attitude of Ursula to Christianity. In her, Lawrence describes in some detail the changing beliefs of a sensitive young girl, from girlhood, through adolescence and into young adulthood. At one point there’s a passage of several pages where Ursula considers one by one the main teachings of Jesus and relates them to her own life.

‘Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.’
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys?

This seems a fair thing for a novelist to do, to describe how their characters respond to Christian teaching and how that response changes as they grow and mature; something similar must have occurred in thousands of other coming-of-age novels. What most of them probably didn’t have so much is the earlier passages where the adolescent Ursula responds to Christian belief in purely sensual terms.

‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous yearning to respond to Christ. If she could go to him really, and lay her head on his breast, to have comfort, to be made much of, caressed like a child!

Recap

So I’d have thought it was not just 1) the deeply sexualised worldview which underpins the entire book and is present in so many passages, which offended contemporary readers, but also 2) the characters’ complete indifference to convention values and social morality, and 3) Lawrence’s having an ostensibly serious, earnest feel for Christian teachings but again and again converting these into his hyper-sensualised worldview. I’d have thought it was all three aspects of this deeply unconventional and aggressively non-conformist writer which offended the powers that be, triggered scathing reviews and landing him in court.

Can a male author write women characters?

In quick succession I’ve read ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, both long novels written by men with strong women as the central figures, extended depictions of the deepest thoughts, feelings, sensations of strong characterful women, written by men.

More than once, as I read Forster and Lawrence’s descriptions of the deepest thoughts and feelings of their women characters, I’ve wondered, ‘Is any of this true? Or likely?’ As a heterosexual man living with a wife and daughter my experience is of being continually bewildered by the lack of communication or understanding between man and woman. And yet many women readers, for over a century, have loved the characters of Margaret Schlegel and Ursula Brangwen.

This is too big a question for me to work through or settle, I’m just pointing out the oddity of reading such extended depictions of the most private, intimate thoughts and feelings of women, written by men.

Criticisms

Unrealistic

The obvious criticism is that this is ludicrously unlike how people in the real world think, behave or speak. The defence is, How do you know? How do any of us know how other people are feeling, especially at the deep, emotional level Lawrence is obsessed with depicting?

Boring

Another obvious criticism is that it’s boring – 500 pages of characters all living on a kind of high wire of emotional intensity, described in page after page of rhapsodic prose-poetry, get pretty exhausting. You’d have thought so – all I can say is I found it exhilarating right up to the end.

You can’t ignore the world

A stronger criticism is to do with the tension between the characters and the real world. In a nutshell, Lawrence characters try to ignore and keep the real world at bay. Again and again his couples create a private world, often centred in the intimacy of their bedrooms, extending at most to other rooms in their household, and completely ignore the outside world. This works perfectly for Tom Brangwen whose farm is a sort of microcosm. For a long time it works for Will and Anna who make Yew Cottage and the nearby church into their entire world. But it breaks down in the figure of Ursula who, as I’ve described, brings real physicality, along with history, and then the harsh contemporary world of work into the novel, in the blunt form of the horrible school she teaches at, then Nottingham College.

Lawrence kept reminding me of the Jacobean poet John Donne, whose love poems are devoted to making ‘one little room an everywhere’. His characters are so intensely solipsistic that even when they’re out and about, going about their business, even when Tom Brangwen goes into Ilkeston on market day or Will Brangwen commutes to his office in Nottingham or Ursula takes the train to Nottingham Grammar School, still, somehow, they take their ‘one little room’, their imaginative universe, with them.

The criticism is that this is not a sustainable attitude. The world is the world, demands that we take it seriously, if only to earn a living, at which point we have to interact with all manner of other people, and, generally, lots of them. All of that Lawrence tries to keep at bay.

Seen from this perspective, the novel reflects a kind of primal conflict between the one little room of the characters’ intensive loves and the wider world of jobs and people. Viewed thus it falls into two halves. In the first half, the book succeeds in inhabiting a kind of timeless country idyll, almost untouched by the outside world, in which Marsh Farm is a kind of universe of its own, scene of Tom’s single and then married life, just as Yew Cottage represents the world created by Will and Anna, and all their children.

In the second half the novel emerges, with Ursula, into the light of day, engaging far more fully with the real world in all its complexity, father Will getting his inspectorate, the girls commuting to grammar school, Ursula getting her ill-fated teaching job, the children, the other teachers and so on.

But it isn’t a complete transformation. Ursula still battles hard against the influence of the outside world. She loathes the redbrick town where Uncle Tom has gone to live and is appalled by the empty shadow lives lived by its broken coalminers, just as she is appalled by the lives of the poor children she teaches, and the hard hearts of the other school teachers.

In the first half the characters live in an ahistorical world which is like a timeless dream, which is why I liked it so much. In the second half, the Ursula half, the mix is more half and half, Ursula’s many moods and rhapsodic emotions are more kettled by the real world, which all the time she tries to hold at bay.

I imagine critics have discovered all kinds of dichotomies in the text. The obvious one is between men and women. Then another obvious one, between town and country. But I suggest yet another dichotomy which dominates the text, echoing the town and country one in places, but lying deeper: this is the dichotomy between the ‘little room world’ each of the characters creates and treasures, and their rejection of and resistance against the Outside World. Again and again the characters seek to ridicule, belittle and abolish the outside world. Here’s Ursula walking through Nottingham, with its bright street lights and busy trams and panting trains, rejecting the lot:

‘The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it? — nothing, just nothing.’

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or sat were only dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper ships in their motion. (pages 447 to 448)

And here’s Anton, from the same passage, rejecting the city and all its people:

He despised it all — it was all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good political speakers, their good, earnest women — all the time he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance! (p.449)

Lawrence characters don’t just criticise the external world, they seek to annihilate the outside world in order to let their inner worlds triumph, become the universe.

They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed. The world was a world of servants whom one civilly ignored. Wherever they went, they were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride of the senses.

They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest lived on a lower sphere.

She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent, at one’s ease. Vaguely, in a sort of silver light, she wandered at large and at ease. The bonds of the world were broken. This world of England had vanished away. (p.472)

But England hasn’t vanished, London hasn’t disappeared, the world of work and trains and trams resumes day after day, without respite.

Lawrence characters continually focus on their inner lives, feelings and emotions, scorning and rejecting almost everything about the outside world, and yet are still subject to its presence and pressure, which sometimes overwhelms them, but at other points they successfully obliterate. This, I think, is the fundamental dynamic driving this book.

The sequel

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which he considered titling ‘The Sisters’ and ‘The Wedding Ring’. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works (both about 500 pages long). In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the legal banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel.

Credit

‘The Rainbow’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1915 by Methuen and Co. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

• The Rainbow online

Related reviews

• D.H. Lawrence reviews