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Fascinating. The Breadalby discussion of translation is indeed a spoof, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not at all a spoof of English translations of Russian literature, but solely of the ‘quite intellectual and artificial’ kind of talk that went on at Garsington etc. — elsewhere described as ‘The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was only emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the elderly sociologist [based on Bertrand Russell], whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient, seemed to be thoroughly happy’. Ursula is therefore not elevated, on the novel’s terms, by her contribution to the discussion; she is just — unusually for her — swept along by it.

There are two particular reasons for thinking this:

a) Lawrence cared very little about translation. He scarcely ever comments on whose translation of anything he reads, and — despite practising translation himself — has remarkably little to say about it. The conversation illustrates his distance from, rather than proximity to, its subject.

b) Lawrence was highly irritated by the Russian Craze, and Women in Love was written during its height. Therefore a discussion of translations of Russian literature was an obvious target for his satire (which is however, by his standards, extremely mild here).

Thanks for the further Hampstead details!

Mike, many many thanks for picking this up! Yes, I think you are right, the so-called quotation in ‘Breadalby’ could be an echo mischievously mangled by Lawrence from the very first page of the novel. There, in your translation, for the benefit of non-Russian readers, the sentence you have quoted reads: ‘The servant, in whom everything, from the turquoise ring in his ear, to the pomaded, dyed hair and deferential body language, marked him out as a member of the newest, most advanced generation, cast a supercilious look along the road and replied: “Nothing at all, sir. Not a sign.”‘ I remember there is a reference to ‘Bazarof’ in Lawrence’s The Trespasser (1912); presumably he had read Fathers and Children in Constance Garnett’s translation of 1895. Does anyone out there have more details about his reading of Turgenev?

I wonder if this is some mangled version of the words which conclude this paragraph on the first page of the novel: I can’t find Bazarov throwing/casting eyes/looks or anything else!
Слуга, в котором все: и бирюзовая сережка в ухе, и напомаженные разноцветные волосы, и учтивые телодвижения, словом, все изобличало человека новейшего, усовершенствованного поколения, посмотрел снисходительно вдоль дороги и ответствовал: «Никак нет-с, не видать».

Thank you Patrick for your intriguing reflections on Calderon and Lawrence as both Edwardians – of a rather different colour. Or stripe. I guess there would be material here for an Imaginary Conversation between the two of them; though this might well become truculent, on both sides. I don’t have the resources to do it, but who knows; someone better informed may pick up on the idea.

Meanwhile, a tiny grammatical point about the conversation you quote from Women in Love, on translations from Turgenev. My wife Madeleine points out (what I, along with the Cambridge editors, hadn’t noticed) that Hermione’s brother Alexander makes a blundering error in his reconstruction of a French intermediary between Russian and English: ‘Bazarov ouvra la porte…’ This should of course be ‘ouvrit la porte’. We may have to wait for the Pléiade Lawrence for the lapse to be properly recorded.

Thank you both for shedding so much light on Lawrence and religion. Damian appositely collocates Blake with Lawrence in his Comment, and this irritates the only question I have remaining about the topic: how do Lawrence’s and Blake’s placings of Jesus differ? As Catherine has said, ‘Christ is a reference point in all of Lawrence’s religious exploration’; indeed after reading her article I almost feel Lawrence was morbidly obsessed with Christ. But if Christ was a/the cynosure for Lawrence, Blake seems thoroughly confused in his placing of him: at the end of ‘The Gates of Paradise’, for instance, we are told that Satan is ‘Worship’d by the names of Jesus and Jehovah’. I have never understood this.

Patrick, and Catherine: I’ve now re-read your Post, Catherine’s Comment (and her Chapter), and your sub-Comment; so am ready to append my own sub-sub-Comment. Especially as it is now Easter Sunday morning, and last night I watched/listened to a complete performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion on French TV (from Versailles). For a moment, this made me feel like the faithful altar-boy I once was.

What kind of religious writer was Lawrence? I have to agree with Patrick that he was a ‘secular’ one in the sense that he was a maverick or freebooter in the field. As a short cut into the subject, I looked up the entries under Religion in my Index to Phoenix, and was impressed by the consistency of Lawrence’s position in these essays. The base-line is always the idea that true religious feeling lies too deep to be appropriated; it cannot be codified (least of all moralized) but only lived. (Didn’t Yeats write somewhere that we can never know the truth, only live it?) Any attempt to construct religion ends up with just scaffolding (I think of Notre Dame!); we are on the way to where ‘Priests in black gowns / Are doing their rounds, / Binding with briars / My joys and desires.’ Just as the ‘wave-tip of life,’ on which Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’ hinges and balances precariously, cannot be arrested — not even by Hokusai! — when the word, which is always moving in Lawrence, pulsating, contributing to and surrendering to a larger rhythm, becomes the Word, to be graven and inscribed; ‘He that takes joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise; / He that would the bird decoy / Doth the winged life destroy.’

Incidentally, it is very dishonest of Eliot to suggest — in the passage Catherine quotes — that Lawrence was seeking to engage with the ‘lowest’ (rather than the ‘deepest’) level of consciousness; with that one treacherous word shovelling on a whole alien value-system. Eliot struggled with Lawrence as Lawrence struggled with Christ — or Satan. At the same time, he was honest enough to be disturbed by, afraid of what Lawrence represented, and so to lash out on occasion in a kind of desperate reflex.

I was happy to be reminded by Catherine that Lawrence saw The Rainbow as ‘a kind of Bible for the English people’. (A very Unauthorized Version!) And Patrick reminds us that The Rainbow is an Old Testament novel, thickly sown with references, just as Women in Love (with Birkin/Christ) has more of a New Testament atmosphere — although one of the titles Lawrence entertained, Dies Irae, also points towards the Apocalypse, and the ‘end-of-the-world feeling’ that Lawrence also attributed to the novel.

But what, meanwhile, of Christ? I understand ‘The Man Who Died’ as a kind of settling of accounts with Christ: the Christ by whom Lawrence was haunted all his life (I profit from Catherine’s many pertinent citations). In the end, Lawrence had to incorporate this Christ, include him in his own imaginative universe. While the other, suffering and sacrificial Christ is (gently but firmly) rejected: as Yeats rejected von Hugel (‘So get you gone, von Hugel, though with blessings on your head’). And as for immortality: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ The true Lawrentian immortality is that conferred and guaranteed by love, as sublimely invoked by Cleopatra: ‘I have immortal longings in me.’

This Comment is long enough, though I would like to have added some reaction to reading Catherine’s chapter, referred to at the end of her Comment, which is indeed rich in reference and wholly relevant to the theme you have introduced. I liked Baldick’s idea of Leavis as St Paul to Lawrence’s Christ; and was much taken with the ‘BD’ Lawrence, armed with sabre and pistol against the modern world. Obviously, a lot has been happening in Lawrence criticism since I gave up on it twenty years ago — though I must admit that the idea of a vegan Lawrence ‘tempts my risibility’. I should be better informed, and chastened.

Thank you indeed for sharing this extract with us, Catherine, and I do appreciate why you ask your question. I had never seen this writing of Eliot’s before. It is interesting, but strangely depressing, as Eliot in ‘clerical cut’ usually is.

I agree with you that he seems to call Lawrence ‘secular’ because Lawrence is not Christian in Eliot’s sense of the term. But I feel he also applies the adjective because of what he sees as Lawrence’s interest in observing religions quasi-anthropologically.

I myself used ‘secular’ in a far more basic sense, I’m afraid. I remember that I first wrote ‘Lawrence as a religious writer’, but then feared readers would take that to mean ‘writing from within a religion’, especially an established one. I agree with you that Lawrence was a religious writer tout court — he wrote about the human need for religion as such — but I still think there is a case for stressing that he was writing about Christianity (the particular focus of my post) from outside any established form. Thus, for instance, Pavel Florensky (a Russian Orthodox priest), or John Robinson (an Anglican bishop) are what one might call ‘religious religious’ writers, but Bakhtin or Kierkegaard are ‘secular’ religious writers as neither of them regarded himself as a member of his national church. I’d go so far as to say a ‘secular’ religious writer explores other people’s belief whereas the ‘religious religious’ writer has a ‘religion’.

I will say this for Eliot’s essay: it sent me back to Mornings in Mexico after sixty years, and the chapter ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ really is as fine Eliot says. But the answers on this subject, as far as I can see, are all embedded in your magnificent article, which I strongly recommend Calderonians to read by following the link at the bottom of Catherine’s Comment.

An extremely beautiful post Patrick; thank you.

Just one quibble: your description of Lawrence as a ‘(secular) religious writer’. What is the first adjective doing here?

T.S. Eliot, near the end of the 1937 essay extracted below, also describes him as a ‘secular’ religious writer (asterisks around important bits my additions):

‘before making my concluding observations, I shall consider one man who cannot be omitted, an Englishman who cannot be duplicated or replaced by a specimen from any other country, whose position is unique, and whose peculiar attitude towards Christianity does not seem to me to have been quite correctly estimated. That is D. H. Lawrence.

… With these two odd handicaps — the will against Christianity that was a residue of childhood and adolescence, and the temperament of uneducation — Lawrence started out on a lifelong search for a religion.

Whatever his disadvantages, a man of the ability of Lawrence, and with such an addiction, can be of very great value indeed; and *it is as an investigator of the religious life — as a kind of contemplative rather than a theologian — that he seems to me to take a high place with most right*. People have deplored the spoiling of the remarkable novelist of Sons and Lovers for the making of a medicine man; but much as I admire that rather sickly and morally unintelligible book, I find the medicine man much more important than the novelist. …

I think of Lawrence neither as an artist, nor as a man who failed to be an artist; I think of him, as I have suggested, as *a researcher into religious emotion*. And unless we see him as this, we are apt to attach too much importance to his views on sex and on society, to his psychological extravaganzas, and to personal peculiarities which may account for his aberrations.

… Lawrence had a really extraordinary capacity for being exacerbated by the modern world of enlightenment and progress, whether in a Midland mining village or in metropolitan intellectual society. This world was his nightmare; he wanted a world in which religion would be real, not a world of church congresses and religious newspapers, not even a world in which a religion could be believed, but *a world in which religion would be something deeper than belief, in which life would be a kind of religious behaviourism*. Hence the prancing Indians, who, in Mornings in Mexico, inspired some of his finest and most brilliant writing. He wished to go as low as possible in the scale of human consciousness, in order to find something that he could assure himself was real.

…The attempt is fundamentally chimerical. We do not feel that Lawrence really got inside the skin of his Hopis, nor would we wish him to do so, because he was a civilized and sensitively conscious man, and his Indians, one feels, are pretty stupid. He merely gave a marvellous record of how the Indians affected Lawrence. Yet his mistaken attempt was the result of an awareness of something very important. He was aware that religion is not, and can never survive as, simply a code of morals. It has not even much meaning to say that religion is ‘good’. Other things are good or bad in relation to one’s religion. If (I think he would have said) you find you can only accept an ‘evil’ religion, then for God’s sake do, for that is far nearer the truth than not having any. For what the evil religion has in common with the good is more important than the differences; and it is more important really to feel terror than to sing comminatory psalms. So he set himself, by an immense effort of will — the same effort that the Christian has to make towards a different end — to believe in nature spirits, and to try to worship stocks and stones. And with the same perseverance he set himself to an attitude of scepticism towards science, for he saw that science only provides a relative truth, and as we cannot know the relations, we do better — the contemporary mind being what it is — to deny it altogether than to accept it as an absolute which it is not.

The religion of Lawrence can be a useful criterion for us in testing the reality of our own faith: it can serve as a constant reminder that Christianity is frightening, frightful and scandalous to that secular mind which we are all compelled to some extent to share. But *for itself, it remains on the level of secularism, because it remains a religion of power and magic*. Or rather, the religion which Lawrence would have liked to achieve is a religion of power and magic, of control rather than propitiation. What he, being a civilized man, actually arrived at, was, of course, only a religion of autotherapy. It was like the restless search of the hypochondriac for a climate in which he can be cured, or in which at least he can bear his ailments more easily. Perhaps there is this motive in all of us, but if so, at least we can hope that our being aware of it helps to keep it in its place. We can cry, Thou son of David, have mercy on me, but we can be healed only if our faith is stronger even than our desire to be healed.’

For Eliot, Lawrence is ‘secular’ because he is not Christian in Eliot’s sense of the term. But Christ is a reference point in all of Lawrence’s religious explorations. And for these explorations the adjective ‘secular’, to me, jars. Nothing was secular to Lawrence.

Finally, here’s a little more on Lawrence and Christ, in case of interest to anyone: https://catherinebrown.org/d-h-lawrence-icon/

Utopia did, I believe, have children who were adorned with jewels relinquished upon maturity. Thanks as ever for stirring my mind.
x Jill

Dear Damian, thank you so much for taking all this trouble to attend to my entirely speculative passing point about Lawrence and children. Your Comment brilliantly addresses it. Of course, I am never happy attributing something in one historical period to a cause in a later historical period (‘having children in the war years’). But I can well imagine that Lawrence enjoyed the company of children. It occurs to me also that his TB might have affected his fertility. I agree with you, the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Anna as a child is ‘on another plane’. I would never deny it: Lawrence is a great writer. Thanks again for all your Comments, Patrick

Patrick: a point about Lawrence and children. It’s true that Birkin inveighs (somewhere in the novel: I haven’t looked for it) against people having children; but this is part of his general pessimism, and especially in the war years — having children is simply deathly. This is part of the ‘bitterness…to be understood’, I think.

Lawrence himself, in his own life, was unambiguous. He wrote to Frieda on 15 May 1912: ‘I want you to have children to me’, and explicitly rejected the idea of ‘interfering there’ (Marie Stopes style) when people were in love — and preferably married? There never were children between them; but Lawrence grew to have a good (if tempestuous) relationship with Frieda’s children, and by all accounts was very good value with children generally.

There is surely nothing more movingly depicted than the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Lydia’s child Anna in The Rainbow. And it’s important to remember that at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie is pregnant by Mellors. This is Lawrence’s last fictional word on the subject!

Laurence Brockliss’s latest post has certainly addressed the two questions about marriage that I asked in my introductory one to this series on Women in Love. It’s addressed them so effectively that I now find those questions rather half-baked!

Taking the second one first — ‘Were there no happy Edwardian marriages?’ — I appreciate Brockliss’s explanation that there just isn’t the intimate documentation to quantify happiness in Victorian/Edwardian marriages. I should have thought of this, since it is broadly confirmed by my own experience of personal archives from the Edwardian period. Moreover, no-one did then what could presumably be done today, namely commission a mass poll with the question ‘Do you consider your marriage happy?’.

On the other hand, Brockliss concludes from his data-crunching that ‘most couples chose sensibly’ and ‘mésalliances were uncommon’. I assume, from his next sentence and his stance as a social historian, that by mésalliances he means ‘socially and financially unsuitable combinations’, although he will be well aware that to most people the word will mean ‘unhappy or temperamentally unworkable combinations’. Even given the fact that ‘divorce was a possibility only for the rich’, Brockliss’s conclusion about mésalliances would suggest that a majority of Victorian/Edwardian marriages were happy, or at least successful in terms of duration and children.

This in turn suggests that the institution of marriage itself was successful, which casts a searching light on my first question, which was ‘Is there any substance to Birkin’s critique of contemporary marriage, or is it guff?’.

The searching light quickly led me to realise that Birkin doesn’t criticise the institution of marriage itself at all. On the contrary, he seems sufficiently impressed by it to make ‘sex-marriage’ — a sexually complete partnership with one woman for life — his ideal. Neither he nor Ursula can wait to get married ‘by law’ as well. His belief in marriage, I gather, is something that feminists hold against Lawrence.

Nevertheless, I find the view of other people’s marriages presented in Women in Love both warped and bleak. I agree, of course, with Damian Grant in his last Comment that The Rainbow actually celebrates two ‘conventional’ marriages. But in Women in Love the marriages of Will and Anna Brangwen and Thomas and Christiana Crich are seen through their children’s eyes as having petered out in procreation, the nine to five, material wealth and falling asleep by the fire. It is this, and not the institution of marriage, that Birkin inveighs against at the beginning of chapter 16: ‘The thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were’ (etcetera).

And whereas Laurence Brockliss showed in his previous guest post that some Late Victorians and Edwardians were consciously choosing not to have children, procreation is a strong thread and gauge of happiness/success in his present one. The Rainbow is full of children, but I think I am right in saying that no-one of Ursula’s generation in Women in Love aspires to having any. Lawrence may, I assume, have meant to suggest that after her terrible miscarriage in The Rainbow Ursula could not conceive again. But there is no indication that Birkin wants children. I do not know the real reasons that Lawrence and Frieda remained childless (a fact that worried Leavis), but I don’t think one can deny that both Birkin and Lawrence were utopians. There is no place in a utopia for children. Utopia is by definition perfect; children want to change things. As Sylvia Plath wrote, ‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children’.

Like Patrick, I must thank Professor Brockliss for his very meaty post. One could make many a good meal out of it, but I will confine myself to a few salient points.

How did Tolstoy know (he asks), about happy and unhappy families? He knew by intuition, which is another kind of knowledge to that which historians and social scientists represent — and naturally defend, as somehow of superior validity. But remember Blake’s relevant observation: ‘What is now proved was once imagined.’ Who is to say that intuition is inferior to demonstration? Not I, anyway, for what it’s worth. As Freud remarked, Sophocles and Shakespeare ‘intuited’ the Oedipus complex long before his own case studies. And Freud held the poetic imagination in great respect.

Brockliss himself remarks, giving the unusual details of the Symonds household, that ‘what [Symonds’ wife] thought of their relationship remains a closed book’. Precisely; and what the novelist tries to do is to write that closed book for us. (As does Pat Barker, in her rewriting of Homer in The Silence of the Girls.)

Our author also claims to have ‘a deeper understanding of our 5,000 marriages’ thanks to the social situations which have been studied. This depends on what is being understood. (Personally, I would trust Tolstoy.) A diet of data may simply not be nourishing; as Mr Gradgrind’s educational programme based only on ‘facts’ risks constipation in the children.

A second point I would take up is where Professor Brockliss says that the novel deals typically with courtship rather than marriage. Typically, yes; but there are enough marriages studied in fiction to question this as a generality. (As early as Henry Fielding’s Amelia, for example.) And surely no-one can accuse Lawrence himself of neglecting the subject, when The Rainbow studies two marriages closely; those of Tom and Lydia, and Will and Anna. Of Tom Brangwen this is Lawrence’s summary (I quote from memory): ‘This was what his life amounted to: the long marital embrace with his wife.’ And we get snapshots from later on in the marriage of Will and Anna, in Women in Love itself, especially the conflict between the two grown daughters and their parents. The very intimate study of marriage-in-action that we find in Lawrence’s plays is another matter; but should be allowed to feed back into the argument.

If the social scientist finds more sustenance in Bennett, Gissing, and Galsworthy than in what Lawrence offers, then that is hard luck on the social scientist (and on social science). The Old Wives’ Tale, as I remember, ends with a dog’s dinner; and that’s about as much sustenance as it provides.

Unusually, I am going to make two separate Comments on this erudite and entertaining post; this is the first.

As with Professor Brockliss’s previous guest posts, he has radically revised a conventional wisdom about our Victorian/Edwardian ancestors, and he has done it using objective, statistical data. How many times have I heard people say that our forebears had very limited opportunities to meet members of the other sex, and therefore predominantly married the girl next door, the lad in the next field, or a cousin? It makes a huge difference to learn that ‘in fact these provincial worlds were remarkably open’, and to read about examples, even if their matrimonial life is still inscrutable.

Brockliss’s revision certainly applies to my own maternal and paternal ancestors, who were not professionals but lower down the ladder. The Victorian patriarchs in my family were policemen in Kent or farm labourers in Hampshire, and their families had been there since the late eighteenth century if not earlier. But at least half of their children married and settled hundreds of miles away (particularly in London), whilst the other half stayed put.

Again as Laurence Brockliss says, how my Victorian patriarchs’ children who moved and married far away met their spouses, we don’t usually know. However, my private theory is that it was a function of the different nature of travel in those days. A neighbour rang me yesterday evening after spending a day on business in Leeds; he had driven there from Cambridge and back in a day. People in the nineteenth century — it always comes as a surprise — travelled equally long distances on business, or in search of work, but of course they did not return the same day. I have the impression they often stayed just long enough to fall in love… That was certainly the case with a great-grandfather of mine who was an ‘excavator’ born in Cornwall and wed in Lambeth.

Extraordinary, Catherine. Reading your Comment made me feel like someone being taken over the terrain of Lawrence’s novel by someone with a metal detector — by which I mean a detector of details which one needs and should have noticed. It is only by such close mapping of the ground that criticism earns its authority, and I’m very grateful for it. Grateful for example to be reminded of the very persuasive link between the ballistic fantasies of Gudrun and Loerke and the famous explosion of the mines laid under Messines ridge in June 1917 (thanks to John Worthen for this also). And yes indeed, the first sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an attempt to sweep the whole thing under a hastily-erected tombstone — not those regimented War Graves Commission things, set later in rows like dentures — in order to get on with life, as best we may. I should go back and re-read the ‘Nightmare’ chapter in Kangaroo, where some of the details you mention are set out (the conscription humiliations). I’ve just noticed that in a letter to Koteliansky in 1916, Lawrence says that he can’t bear to go to London: ‘It is like walking into some horrible gas, which tears one’s lungs.’ For someone with Lawrence’s lungs, the technology of the war as well as the bitterness of the war was there in every breath.

Actually I think that Patrick did it cheekily to provoke; I cannot buy him as a sergeant-major…

Ursula is 26 at the beginning of Women in Love. The incident with the horses in The Rainbow is in 1905 when Ursula, as Damian says, is at least 20 (I’d say probably more, and the novel doesn’t say how long she’s ill for). So Women in Love starts, let’s say, at earliest in 1911 (one of the drafts has a discussion of Dreadnought ships at the start, which makes it pre-war).

The time that elapses between the chapters is unfixed: the chapters take place respectively on a morning, that lunchtime, the end of a schoolday, a Saturday, a day, an evening, a morning to third evening following (that’s ch. 7 ‘Fetish’), Saturday morning, after Friday afternoon, a morning, a morning, an afternoon, an afternoon, a morning, Sunday morning to evening (that’s ch. 15 ‘Sunday Evening’), an illness, history of Gerald up to the present, a day, a night and the next several days, an evening, several days, an afternoon, an afternoon to following morning, several days, a few minutes, a few hours, an evening and the next few days, a day to next morning, several days, several days, next morning and the following week or two. There is some mention of seasons, and taking that into account I don’t think that more than two years have passed – so in that sense, indeed, we haven’t reached 1914 by the end of the novel.

But I agree completely with Damian that this doesn’t matter. It’s part of the change of mode from The Rainbow, which is historical, to WL, which is geographical, that these things don’t matter any more (no more than realism of character is any longer a relevant criterion). Unlike Patrick I see the novel as completely suffused by ‘the bitterness of the war’ – though more in the whole stuff of the novel than as represented exclusively or particularly by the characters. After The Rainbow, which was Lawrence’s ‘Bible’, Women in Love was his ‘Apocalypse’; Frieda wanted the title ‘Dies Irae’. It is a final reckoning. Half the central characters are in one way or another destroyed, and what’s going to happen to the survivors, back in England, ending the novel on an argument, is not clear: it forecasts the opening of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’

The War emerges from the novel’s deep subconscious to closer to the surface – though does not reach it, except in the moving Kaiser comment – at certain moments . Consider the sensitive mare at the crossing, who is held there by the superior will of an English officer, despite the terror: ‘The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise struck through her till she was rocking with terror … the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other’.

Or at Breadalby, an English idyll that represents the very opposite of the fronts of France: ‘The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery’.

The ‘perfect explosive’ that Loerke and Gudrun speculate might blow the earth in two would have had particular relevance after the explosion of the Messines Ridge mines on 7 June 1917 (one of the largest non-nuclear explosions of all time; John Worthen observes this detail).

Lawrence had a gift of prophecy. Perhaps it was that that made him send his protagonists to – of all places – Südtyrol, which was soon to be taken by Italy from Austria as a result of the War.

The War’s implicit status in the novel fits with its place in Lawrence’s life. He wasn’t there. He saw none of its horrors, save those that were shipped home ‘more or less in bits’ (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). But even had he not been called up three times, or expelled from Cornwall as a suspected German spy, he would still have been obsessed by it – always thinking about it, always horrified by it; and its bitterness to be ‘taken for granted’ in most of his writings from then on.

My dear Damian: as a victim and diagnostician of ‘chronotopia’, and a biographer who certainly ‘mixed the times’ in my life of George, I do of course accept Samuel Johnson’s argument. I’m not suggesting, though, that Ursula is 35 at the beginning of Women in Love, only that by having her quote the Kaiser in 1915 Lawrence is making that absurd suggestion at the end of the novel. I would have thought most people imagine the novel as opening more or less where The Rainbow left off and covering at most three years? I don’t at all dispute that the ‘bitterness of the war’ flowed down Lawrence’s arm whilst he was writing Women in Love, but I just don’t see any of that bitterness in the characters; it’s a figment of Lawrence’s post facto imagination and those who bizarrely wish at all costs to see the novel as a criticism of militarism.

My dear Patrick: you are I think a bit severe on our mutually-admired Lawrence in your last Comment. Since we’re in the wars, a bit sergeant-majorish in fact: ‘Private Lawrence: What sort of a time do you call this? Ten days confined to barracks!’ No doubt because of the discipline you had to accept for your Calderon blog, aren’t you being a bit literal on the time front in fiction? (‘Ridiculous anachronism’, ‘gutwrenchingly unartistic,’ etc). I always remember Johnson’s compelling argument, in liberating Shakespeare from the unities: ‘Time is, of all modes of being, the most obsequious to the imagination.’ We remember the liberties Shakespeare takes in the history plays. Why can’t Lawrence do the same? The bitterness of the war (if one can distinguish that from Lawrence’s habitual bitterness) can have flowed down his arm during the writing of the novel, 1914-18 and after, though the events must be assumed historically to precede the war. (If The Rainbow, as you say, ends round 1905, when Ursula must be at least 20, we are not to suppose her a ripe old 35 at the beginning of Women in Love!).

So, my (for once) inflexible friend, I don’t agree at all that ‘time can only remain fixed.’ Let us be more obsequious!

Picking up from both Patrick and Catherine Brown. Patrick quotes Lawrence writing that Blake ‘was one of those ghastly obscene knowers’. Now Patrick knows as well as I do that one can quote Lawrence (like scripture) for contrary purposes; and there are many positive endorsements of Blake to offset this one. The fact is, Blake was one of those visionaries as ‘crucified’ by contraries as was Lawrence; as is the emblematic tortoise in Lawrence’s wonderful series of tortoise poems (the tortoise which actually has the cross printed on its underside).

It takes one to know one. And just as Carlyle (observed Lawrence) wrote volumes on the value of silence, so Lawrence flexed the membrane of knowing/unknowing all his life. And it is in the sexual experience, not surprisingly, that the membrane is most exercised. A reference point for me is the summary at the end of the ‘Excurse’ chapter in Women in Love, when Ursula and Birkin have ‘known’ each other (in the significant biblical phrase): ‘they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge’ (p.320). There are some things that cannot and should not be hauled up into consciousness. That can only be (as Keats wrote) ‘felt upon the pulses’. But we have to be able to express this very fact, somehow; and this is one of the sites of the struggle with language.

Another anchor point is right at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Mellors writes to Connie: ‘so many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arm round you, the ink could stay in the bottle’. I guess as much ink has been spilt as sperm ejaculated since we invented writing. (I recall here Patrick’s phrase, ‘linguistic premature ejaculation’.) It is an effect of his instinct, his metabolism, his genius, and his courage, that Lawrence comes closer than most to the ‘mystic’ combination of the two.

Thanks both to Damian for his excellent post, and to Patrick for his excellent response. To Damian’s points I’d add the way in which Lawrence’s ‘passionate struggle into conscious being’ (one has, for example, to become conscious of how and when to be unconscious) involves pulling words — ‘ideal’, ‘human’, ‘inhuman’, ‘electricity’, ‘degeneration’ — in opposite directions, not at the same time, but between successive usages in a work. That is a major contributor to the flux, and difficulty posed to the reader, that both Damian and Patrick rightly describe. In response to Patrick — I don’t know that Lawrence did always know. It was a ‘passionate struggle’. That doesn’t mean he always got there; one admires the struggle. That’s true of so many aspects of Lawrence.

Damian Grant’s superb post is unusual, I think, in concentrating on the ‘new psychology’, ‘imagistic signatures’, and ‘stylistic polarities’ of Women in Love, rather than its ‘realistic’ narrative spine, historical context (established by the Rainbow) and what, with John Pym, I take to be its core theme, namely ‘how are the sexes to live together?’. I am extremely grateful to Damian for redressing the balance of these forces in my mind. At the same time, I remain unconvinced by what Lawrence repeatedly refers to as ‘mystic’ perceptions in the novel — the novel’s ‘mystic pretensions’, so to speak.

Has Lawrence any equal in vivid, sensuous artistic realisation of the material world, or alive, authentic, dramatic dialogue? For instance, what other novelist has even noticed an Orange Tip butterfly before, let alone described two flying round each other as having ‘a halo round them’, and made us believe that it is Ursula who perceives ‘they were orange-tips, and it was the orange that made the halo’ (chapter 10)? The simple one-sentence paragraph ‘And she recognised half-burnt covers of Vogue — half-burnt representations of women in gowns — lying under the grate’ (chapter 27) conveys Ursula and Gudrun’s past in their parents’ home with astonishingly Chekhovian economy and finality. Frankly, not even Chekhov could have realised the scene of non-communication between Birkin and Ursula’s father (chapter 19) as brilliantly — as concretely in real time — as Lawrence has.

But then, at climactic points in the novel, we are presented with a kind of linguistic premature ejaculation. ‘This was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are in the beginning’, or ‘He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being’, or ‘[He] found her, found the pure, lambent reality of her for ever invisible flesh’ (all from chapter 23), or ‘Gudrun lay destroyed into perfect consciousness’ (chapter 24): one has a rough, impressionistic idea of what they mean, but they do not bear closer semantic, or sometimes syntactic, scrutiny. It is impossible to say precisely what they mean. And Lawrence does not want us to know exactly what these splurges of language mean, because their meaning is ‘mystic’.

The comparison with Blake’s prophetic books is very apt. A mystic (I would prefer ‘mystical’) perception cannot be adequately conveyed in language to a third person (e.g. reader) because a mystical perception is a revelation given by a second subject to a first subject and it can only be communicated (‘revealed’) to a third subject by the second subject, not the first (the object of the revelation, in this case Lawrence). I have read all of Blake’s prophetic books, but I do not understand much in them because only Blake had the revelation and knows what the words he uses mean. Similarly, only Lawrence knows what the passages I have quoted, and the many like them, including the one about ‘another ego’, mean. He knows, and that for him is enough (unfortunately for us). According to Leavis (Nor Shall My Sword, 1972, p. 11), Lawrence said ‘Blake was one of those ghastly obscene knowers’. On the evidence of passages in Women in Love Lawrence was one of those ‘knowers’, too.

Great though I believe the novel Women in Love to be (thank you, Damian, for reinforcing that!), I am left with the same difficulty as I have in reading those other believers in didactic literature (‘preaching’) Blake and Bunyan: their passages of mystic incoherence are difficult to stomach and certainly seem to detract from their genius.

Dear Mr. Miles,
Russian sources mention that George Calderon translated Russian songs from the early 17th century. The songs were from the recordings of Richard James. Can You say a few words about Calderon’s translation? Is this text in the public domain?
George Calderon. Beauties of Russian Literature // Proceedings of the Anglo-Russian Literary Society, 1905, N 13. (??p. 78- )
Best regards, Arno S.

Thank you John (yes, we may!). I doubt whether Lawrence ever got that $5,000; if the deal fell through, he would have had to pay it – or some of it – back anyway. I don’t have his ledger! Nor I suspect did he.

As for Leavis, even when he is right he is intolerably so. I do agree with the last sentence you quote; but especially in his latter years Leavis wrote so much like a pressure cooker about to explode that one just wants to keep one’s distance. I remember when he came to give a talk at Manchester University in the late 60s, about Olivier’s Othello. (Film again in the dock.) He was trembling with rage at the lectern; could hardly contain himself as he fulminated against the vulgarity of Olivier’s performance. One was shouted out of any possible sympathy with this point of view.

The eternal questions revolving round the relation between the verbal and the visual require more sober and patient consideration. I suggest it has to do with the contrast between image and imagery. The visual image is a defined and delimited thing, which — whatever its symbolic associations — remains thus: iconic. Whereas imagery, on the verbal plane, sets up a network, multilayered and tentacular; it is inexhaustible. Blake’s ‘Pity’ is an extraordinary image, but it doesn’t have the intense and at the same time diffused, unfocussed emotional appeal of Shakespeare’s lines: ‘Pity like a naked new-born babe / Striding the blast.’

Interesting that Lawrence took to painting in his last years; but said he couldn’t work from a model. The model ‘got in the way of’ the vision.

Damian (if I may) and Patrick, many thanks for your perceptive points. I had not known of Lawrence’s regrettable antipathy to the Seventh Art – he had perhaps not seen the fluid genius of, say, Buster Keaton. One wonders what the Hollywood studio that paid Lawrence $5,000 in 1924 for the rights to Women in Love would have made of the book. It would, of course, have been a silent film, but it would have been made in that golden period before the Hays Code wrapped any suggestion of screen sex in a cloak of decency.

As for the general perils of screen adaptations of classic novels, here is the first paragraph of Ian Leslie Christie’s review of Women in Love (Sight and Sound, Winter 1969/70): “Ken Russell’s [film] has already received the dubious distinction of provoking a scathing protest from that redoubtable Lawrence champion F. R. Leavis. But although Leavis’ main contention – that ‘it’s an obscene undertaking to “write again” for the screen’ – seems merely vituperative, the rest of his case does, in effect, point to the crux of the matter. ‘No one,’ he asserts, ‘who had an inkling of the kind of thing the novel is, or how the “significance” of a great work of literature is conveyed, or what kind of thing significance is, could lend himself to such an outrage.’”

I should like to take up John Pym’s description of Larry Kramer’s script as ‘over-literal’. When I first saw the film in 1970, I could not know whether it was ‘faithful’ to the novel to the point of ‘literalness’, as I had not read the book. However, I think I assumed the film was ‘faithful’, as it certainly seemed focussed on what John Pym calls ‘Lawrence’s principal theme’ and Birkin calls ‘sex marriage’. Watching the film again in 2020, I was so struck by the dialogue that I looked in my copy of the novel, e.g. at the last two pages, and this confirmed that the lines were ‘literally’ what Lawrence had written.

However, having now read the novel twice, I feel that Kramer/Russell’s treatment of the sex scenes, which John Pym rightly focusses on, was doomed to dissatisfy everyone. A ‘literal’ treatment of the scene in Gudrun’s bedroom would not have shown her even removing her nightdress. In the text, Gerald wants maternal comfort: he buries his head between her clothed breasts, he cleaves ‘intensely’ to her ‘like a child at the breast’, he is ‘infinitely grateful’ to her ‘as an infant is at its mother’s breast’. How do you externalise these deep unspoken feelings in a film? Kramer/Russell may have sincerely hoped they could make the point by having Gudrun instantly offer her breasts, but the effect is inevitably misconstrued by the spectator — although Oliver Reed’s face does at first convey extreme pain and relief rather than lust. The ‘literal’ approach to this scene would surely have fallen flat, and Kramer/Russell’s ‘creative’ approach fails too, because it simply seems like gratuitous striptease.

Similarly, the film scene in which Birkin struggles to take his and Ursula’s clothes off in order to have ‘compulsive’ sex on the ground is literal in the sense that historically, yes, it would have taken ages to get those clothes off, and it is literal in so far as Kramer/Russell’s version makes it clear that Birkin really wants something ‘beyond’ passion; but this version leaves Ursula in tears and the impression that their first sexual contact was a disaster, whereas in the text Birkin, at least, went home ‘satisfied, fulfilled’, feeling he had had ‘this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion’. Here, then, the film version is hardly even ‘faithful’ to the text.

As Damian Grant has explained in his Comment, the actual consummation of what Birkin wants from a ‘sex marriage’ relationship occurs in a pitch-black forest, and is therefore largely tactile. Obviously, the film does not attempt to show this. Yet here, for me at least, not having had John Pym’s professional exposure to the soft pornography of the 1960s, Kramer/Russell’s sunlit dream sequence amongst the pink (!) rosebay willow herb succeeds in conveying much of the intended ‘paradisal’ meaning of the text…

Finally, I think that the film version of the sex scene between Gudrun and Gerald in their ski chalet room fails entirely to be ‘literal’ to the text: it comes across as a pornographic rough romp, when in the novel it is presented as a revenge rape.

As Damian Grant says, Lawrence’s ‘sex scenes’ are all about what is happening to his characters inwardly. These scenes fail in Russell’s film since, as John Pym rightly suggests, they come across merely as soft porn. Thank you, gentlemen, for two endlessly engaging and challenging analyses!

I respond with some hesitation to John Pym’s post, since it is many years since I saw Ken Russell’s film of Women in Love – though I did then return to it, with enjoyment, two or three times. What I do remember was the incongruity of blond, snow-doomed Gerald being played by swarthy Oliver Reed; and the slight, even weedy Birkin filled out by Alan Bates, who was surely more at home as strapping Gabriel Oak in Far From the Madding Crowd. Ursula and Gudrun were better cast.

But one can’t enter this discussion without recalling Lawrence’s own dislike of photography (‘Kodak vision’) and film, which he saw – accurately enough, for the time – as composed of ‘jerking’ stills rather than fluid movement. The medium for him was all part of our false vision of ourselves, a distracting visual objectification and externalisation: as if we were all arrested at the mirror stage. (It is no contradiction, surely, that when he was offered $5,000 dollars in 1924 for the film rights of Women in Love, Lawrence promptly accepted; one had to live. And anyway, the project came to nothing; which is perhaps just as well, given the time.)

Lawrence’s view is particularly relevant, I feel, to consideration of the sex scenes, on which John Pym chooses to focus. Not only does Ken Russell misrepresent – how could he not? – the scene where Gerald comes uninvited to Gudrun’s bedroom in her parents’ house, where the exact nature of the significant physical encounter is left obscure (nothing ‘eye-popping’), but in the balancing scene where Birkin and Ursula do remove their clothes and have full, joyous and fulfilling intercourse, this happens (significantly) in the darkness in the middle of Sherwood Forest. Lawrence is careful to distance us not only from visual but even from too much verbal voyeurism:

‘They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh…his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence…never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.’ Pace certain unsympathetic commentators (and I would rather not line up John Pym with these), this is not nonsense. It is a way of writing about sex which reminds us that sex is not essentially a visual experience, but one of tenderness, touch, and transcendence; a cinematic representation of which – however well-intentioned – will always be some kind of betrayal.

This Comment is already too long (sorry Patrick), but I would like to add that I do recognize that Lawrence develops (rather than changes) his technique of sexual description in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – many episodes happening outside and in broad daylight. And I have seen one or two film versions which manage to engage with the sexual activity maintaining an appropriate respect for the ‘tenderness’ involved (this being one of Lawrence’s provisional titles). Whether Lawrence would have approved – even for $5,000 dollars – I’m not sure. Because even here, the real drive of his description is inward, to what is inscribed by actions on the sensitive emotional centre.

I am no expert on Jarintzoff, but the date, 1928, strikes me as interesting. She is said to have died c.1930 in the USA, but there seems to be scant information on this. Can this picture be in any way linked to the US, either through you or through its subject matter? I know of no other pictures by her.

I am interested in Nadine Jarintzoff because I own a very interesting work of art signed and dated 1928 by her entitled ‘ Alone ‘ . It is in very soft pencil and depicts a fir tree in darkness on the edge of a cliff. The tree takes up the whole left hand side of the large and narrow drawing, while on the right hand side a bright star is shown piercing the gloom. The piece seems to have been influenced by Symbolism and I wondered if you knew of other works by Nadine in public collections or private hands. Also, I wonder if the drawing reflects the artist’s state of mind in 1928.

Providing images for this story was one of the more challenging tasks I’ve done in my role as Sam2, but – as usual – it was incredibly satisfying and fun 🙂

I am not close to being a professional illustrator so the hand-drawn pictures had a particularly worrying risk of looking…well…“shite” and thus dragging down the entry. I had to be very careful!

I think we got there in the end with the combination of some live action (you do not want to SEE what my “cartoon” hedgehog looked like) and a little tweaking, such as “fixing” Larrion’s initially out of proportion ear, and reddening Bunching’s face (though I am aware that on some monitors that shade of pink may render a little neon). Here you can see the “evolution” of Bunching:

Early on I had thought that for “consistency” it might be appropriate to hand draw everything, including those that we already had images for (King’s College Chapel and Kittie). Calderonia readers may be interested in this early draft of “Kittie”, that didn’t end up making it any further:

Очень глубокая статья! Анализ поведения творца в период пандемии. И великолепное стихотворение, в котором произошло стяжение времени. Не только двенадцати лет, но гораздо более долго отрезка времени. Поздравляю поэта и мыслителя!

[Translation: A very deep post! It analyses how creative people behave in a pandemic. And they are splendid stanzas, in which time is gathered together — not just the twelve years of the poem’s writing, but a much longer period of time. I congratulate the poet and thinker! — Sergei Bychkov]

Benjamin proposed
the Angel of History,
wings spread, heraldic.
Patrick Miles confronts Time with
a miserable maggot.

The maggot has been
busy, though; in evidence,
three coping stones to
Making Icons, chiselled, set
to top off the monument.

Patrick and John:
Contemplating the adventure of 90 from the relative security of mere 80, one feels a mixture of admiration and trepidation. Admiration for the personal journey, trepidation at the unexpected accidents that will impinge upon it. ‘If man could look into the book of fate…,’ etc. Just as well we can’t.

But talking of books, I was struck by what John says – or does not say – about his reading (once the office is done). Novels: Jane Austen and Dickens. Writers, one has to say, whose spiritual side is at best recessed; unadventurous in that dimension, unexploratory. Is this to take a break from more speculative matters, to keep one’s feet on the fictional ground? One can understand such an impulse.

But: no poetry? We have heard from many sources during the current predicament that people have derived immense comfort from reading (and writing) poetry. One of the reasons for this may be that poetry can fight free of narrative obligation (what Virginia Woolf complained of, almost comically: ‘the intolerable business…of getting from breakfast to lunch, and from lunch to dinner’) and settle instead into reflection, reassessment, looking for the facets of meaning in events rather than jostling the events themselves. The Covid virus is an event, imposes an unfolding narrative in human affairs. Powerless (almost) in the face of this, we need to make what sense we can, and derive what consolation we can, of and from the circumstances. And perhaps the free rein of poetic discourse is more suited to this than the patient prose of the novel, on its daily rounds.

Very interesting entry! I particularly like the use of accurate statistics throughout – many of which surprised me (e.g. “The mean number of children born to professional fathers who were married before 1861 was 6.4; the mean number of children born to those married in the years 1881-91 was 3.5”).

Fascinating read to understand the challenges you have faced but persevered to produce this book. Very well done Andrew!

I have ordered my copy and look forward to reading it. The Group Photograph was a very moving and well put together book so it was an easy decision to order this next book you have created.

I hope you are very successful for the determination you have shown!

When John Pym sent me the image of Gerty Simon’s portrait for inclusion at the end of his guest post, I was rendered speechless by its quality. The angle she has set Gough at is extremely subtle, the way she has discreetly focussed attention on his huge, bony hands, is very clever, and everything has pin-sharp definition, of course. I thought immediately: this photograph is a work of art. The total radiance of the image (that jacket, that moustache, those eyes!), the sense that character is completely conveyed by it, remind one of Rembrandt’s portraits…

Can, or do, works of art of this calibre lie? To me, at least, Gough comes over in Simon’s portrait as intelligent, vivacious and humorous, highly sensitive, perhaps artistic, and certainly charming. Anyone who reads the section ‘Assessments: Modern historians’ in the very long Wikipedia entry for Hubert Gough will see that evaluating him as a general and man is a complex matter. I do feel, though, that whatever contemporaries and historians may have said of him, the brilliant person who comes across in Gerty Simon’s portrait must have been there, for her to have found him and brought him out.

Dear Harvey (if I may), I was touched and gratified by your comment – and the name Lena Connell (previously unknown to me) will now be one I shall look out for. Your observation on Hubert’s words on my ‘medals’ is acute and quite possibly true. As he felt my lapel, Hubert may also, perhaps, have been prompted by a sudden connective remembrance of his younger brother, after whom I was named, who had died in France in 1915 at the age of forty-three. JNP

What an enjoyable read! I read it twice to absorb all the detail. Gough’s remark to his great-nephew, ‘What a lot of medals you have!’, is very poignant. Was this an emotional moment for the old man — reflecting that all the medals he’d received in his lifetime had failed to protect his reputation — and did the young boy unconsciously pick up the emotion and take such a vivid mental photograph?

Gerty Simon’s portrait of Gough is most impressive. It reminded me of the work of another woman photographer of a slightly earlier generation: Lena Connell (1875-1949). There was a family connection and I had long been familiar with her sympathetic portraits of my father and his generation, but I didn’t realise until recently that she’d been such a pioneer, said to have been the first woman photographer to take a photograph of a male politician (Ramsay MacDonald in 1911) and perhaps best known now for her portraits of the leading figures in the suffrage movement. She closed her shop in London in 1922, so she and Gerty were never in competition, but Gerty may have benefited from a trail that Lena had already blazed.

Dear Damian, Excellent and thank you! Are you suggesting that Calderonia is a little island of Culture ‘off Europe’? Please archive for me two bottles of Ventoux, then, and bring them over to Calderonia later this year! Affectueusement, Patrice

Patrick: cycling (electric) in the Vaucluse, I am delighted to get this distant sniff of Culture. Lots of past here, but the archiving is done on foot rather than by hand. Courage! (A nous deux)

Patrick: I much appreciate your pugnacious post from yesterday. It exposes the mismanagement of our archives (which you know better than I do) with relentless argument; devastating evidence; and destructive conclusions. I am relieved that your head is still in good shape after beating it against this wall. What do these custodians think they are there for? Nothing but flag-waving and window-dressing seems to get you anywhere today. Researchers need a slogan: Dead Lives Matter!

To conclude:

At thirty-two grand for her mails
Wendy Cope hits the jackpot. One fails
To grasp how it is
That limericks like this
Should make archivists go off the rails!

Damian Grant

Awesome post, thanks for sharing!

With regard to the scales and the weights of your hero and heroine, it is possible that (given the manners of the times) they would have been well kitted out, even for breakfast, and so you might need to make allowance for Edwardian shoes, bustles, smoking jacket etc.

At such a time as this, the photograph of the weighing machine brings memories. 1965, Old Addenbrookes Hospital Cambridge, weekly weighing took place of all patients on just this type of equipment. Much safer than standing while the nurse adjusts the scale, a moment which held pronouncements influential on the forthcoming week’s meal times as well as medical interventions. An entry on the graph quite as powerful as returned school homeworks—and the patient attending just as apprehensively.

Biographer: his work is never done.
He thinks ‘I’ve finished, moi.’
But then a recent auction sale (what fun!)
Throws in avoirdupois.

How slim (or not) was George? And was his Kitty
‘Beginning to be fat’?
It would be tragic, more than just a pity,
To say: it’s come to that.

Meanwhile your Guthrie guy (who wrote for Punch)
Could throw his weight around:
He was the lightest of this Foxwold bunch,
A mere 9 stone 12 pound!

I’ve always thought that Middlemarch is the greatest novel in the English language just for its sheer humanity. Every character is brought to life and every character elicits our sympathy, even when we are given a clear steer as to their moral worth. Eliot can be rather hard on her wayward female characters but she is never preachy and generally can detach herself from Dorothea and let us see she is not the perfect woman. Personally, I prefer Mary Garth and find her romance with Fred Vincy the most affecting in the book. Lydgate is difficult to understand fully unless you know a lot about the Paris School of Medicine in the early 19th century and what most English doctors thought about it, especially the ideas of Lydgate’s teacher, Broussais. There is still a lot of debate as to whether Casaubon is Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln College Oxford. There is a very good recent biography by H.S. Jones which I can recommend.

As for other Eliots to read. The only other large novels I warm to are The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede. Felix Holt is worthy but gets rather boring and Daniel Deronda suffers from Eliot’s refusal to grant her erring female characters much mercy and from, I think, Daniel’s improbable (at the time) spiritual journey. Eliot of course is just as harsh on Hetty in Adam Bede but at least Hetty is not executed and has a chance of a new life. I would also recommend Eliot’s Tales of Clerical Life, which nobody seems to read but are exquisite long short stories which really bring the trials and tribulations of being a rural incumbent on next to no stipend to life: she’s much better here than Trollope who takes pity from a lofty distance and never makes us live the hardship. But that’s one of Eliot’s great strengths: she has the ability to create real people from all social backgrounds; along with Wordsworth, she is one of the few 19th century writers who give working people dignity and intelligence and doesn’t sentimentalise them.

Now, surely, is the time for a blossoming of dialogue on Calderonia between self-isolated followers all across Britain, nay the World!

I have received many responses by email to my ‘discovery’ of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Calderonia poet laureate Damian Grant writes: ‘Amazing you’re reading it for the first time! I almost envy you. I have my favourite bits too, but feel too lazy to dig them out right now.’ A lady who has definitely read all of Eliot usefully warns that Daniel Deronda would be ‘too sentimental for you’, but strongly recommends Adam Bede, as does another person. My favourite response, though, is: ‘I understand your love of Middlemarch. I have such a vivid memory of reading it – in a small Anglican mission in a Zairean forest, by kerosene lamp, lying on a small cot with a ferocious headache (they were treating me for malaria, but what I had was an infection on my scalp from a dirty motorcycle helmet). It was a wonderful book, and a magical escape from that place.’

John Pym, our living and liveliest link with George and Kittie, writes: ‘Let me modestly suggest Scenes from Clerical Life – laugh out loud at points!’ Well…it so happens that that is the other volume of Blackwood’s Eliot that I recently had repaired, so I shall start there. Does anyone feel strongly enough about George Eliot to tell us why in a Comment?

A Happy New Year to you Patrick, and to all Calderonia followers.

Your quotations from the Morning Star about the lack of employment rights at Amazon struck a loud and horrible chord with me because, as it happens, I am currently reading James Bloodworth’s Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. The first section, ‘Rugeley’, describes the author’s experiences working as a ‘picker’ in one of Britain’s numerous Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’. I would recommend this book to anyone who uses Amazon – but please prepare yourselves for a deeply disturbing read. Without following Bloodworth’s example and taking a job in one of these chillingly 1984-esque warehouses, I cannot of course verify the accuracy of his account for myself, but, like you, I find the accusations credible, and I was appalled to read of the cynicism and sheer inhumanity with which Amazon exploits its staff. As a member of a multi-generational household which can take delivery of a dozen or more Amazon parcels every week, I am sickened by my new-found knowledge.

Something else to give up then, as well as single-use plastic? Or something else for our politicians to address?

Dear Mr Miles,
It seems I am one of those drop-in viewers you describe so well, but I will endeavour to opinionate gently if I may.
I am an admirer of the bindings of Sybil Pye, and stumbled across your very interesting website. According to Pye’s Notebooks, transcribed by Marianne Tidcombe in ‘Women Bookbinders 1880-1920’, she bound four copies of Calderon’s ‘The Fountain; The Little Stone House’, described thus: “Four copies, two brown goatskin, one black goatskin, one blue pigskin, blind- and gold tooling. Bound 1918-1919. Mrs Calderon”. Bloomsbury Book Auctions in November 1996 listed a copy bound by Pye in purple morocco, and describes the circles and wheat motif as its design. In a letter to Thomas Sturge Moore in 1925, Pye wrote that she had “only finished 9 out of the 13 little books I promised Mrs Calderon! However the end of that is in sight now, & I have learnt a good deal from it”. I have unfortunately not been able to track down these volumes.
Additionally, Pye first used the circles and wheat motif on a binding in 1913, for a copy of Michael Field’s ‘World at Auction’ – it is currently held at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas, and was reproduced in Apollo Magazine in 1925. It is used three times as part of a larger design, and is identical to the one featured on the Calderon bindings published by Grant Richards, except for each of the initials – in their place is a larger dot. The wheat tool was originally designed & used by Charles Ricketts, and later given to Pye.
Apologies if any of this is already known to you. If you have any additional information on Sybil Pye, especially details of her leather bindings for Mrs Calderon (none of which I have seen), I would be most interested.
Very kind regards,
Paul

Dear Jules,

Very many thanks for these pointers and your appreciation.

A near-Edwardian polar expedition and a parish magazine editorial — what could be more authoritative than those?

I’ve also received a number of emails on the subject. The consensus is indeed that the meths were/was used as a brandy substitute. I had always assumed this would leave a nasty taste in the pudding and char it, but I am reliably informed otherwise: it’s the meths that’s burning, not the pudding.

One of Calderonia’s great ‘reticence of professors’ sums up snappily: ‘I would read this as a 100%-ish grain alcohol. Good for inflaming puddings as a brandy substitute but lethal otherwise!’ Another suggests that these Victorians were ‘meths drinkers’. Two commenters suggest that it was not really methylated spirits, but samogonka, i.e. Russian moonshine, straight alcohol, but that George hadn’t been in Russia long enough to know the stuff. Whichever, I think I will stay with the brandy.

You mention off-licence, I mention professors, and I am reminded of a Cambridge one of my acquaintance who did not go to the off-licence at Christmas, what he termed ‘the dray’ came to him.

A very ‘merry’ one, indeed, to you and yours!

Patrick

Patrick, a quick Google threw up the following – one from Antarctica and the other from Bedfordshire. You may draw your own conclusions.

http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2018/on-the-christmas-menu-in-antarctica

Click to access Shepherds_Return.pdf

And thanks to this timely reminder, I realise that yet another trip to the off-licence is required!

A very “merry” Christmas to you all and thank you for your most entertaining Calderonia this year.

Jules