Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Lawrence always reminded the novel of its promise to offer something new. In his essays, where he insists that the novel ‘has got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the rut’ (Phoenix, ed. Edward D. McDonald, London, Heinemann, 1936, p. 520). In his letters, as we shall see below. And of course — proof of the pudding — in the novels themselves. The last paragraph of The Rainbow tries its best to persuade us that people will ‘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’. This was Lawrence’s optimistic new testament — delivered before the world disintegrated into war.
It is in Women in Love nevertheless that he really delivers his promise, despite the catastrophe of the war, which he saw as a kind of death-wish of western civilisation. Here we can observe, almost scientifically, how this ‘wonderful and terrible novel’ (letter to E.M. Forster, November 1916) emerges iridescent (a favourite adjective) from the carapace of the established fictional form. Jane Austen had proposed that a novel should ideally present two contrasting couples in a country town, and Lawrence does not disdain this structure; and it was George Eliot (he remarked approvingly) who first ‘put the action all inside’, a procedure he is happy to follow. But here the superficial similarities end. The experiences of Rupert Birkin with Ursula Brangwen, and of Gerald Crich with her sister Gudrun — not to mention the relationship between Rupert and Gerald themselves — are as far removed from those between Elizabeth Bennet with Mr Darcy and her sister Jane with Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice as could be inferred from the century that separates the two novels. And George Eliot would not have recognized what goes on inside Lawrence’s characters: the strange fields of force — electric and magnetic — that govern their thoughts, moods, and actions. (Perhaps Mary Shelley might have understood better?)
It is not just that Lawrence takes us deep into the earth (with the coal mine and the lake) and into the thin, upper air of the mountains; not just that there is love and death in equal measure. It is what happens underneath what happens that counts; the patterning of forces that work on the characters and lead them, through a precarious social life perceived likewise with unusual intensity, to their inevitable destiny. As Lawrence wrote in the (unpublished) Foreword, ‘I should like the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’ (Women in Love, eds David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, Cambridge, CUP, 1987, p. 485; all subsequent page references are to this edition). This bitterness is just one of the ‘forces’ involved. Lawrence had provided the prescription for his novel in the famous letter to Edward Garnett in June 1914, as he was setting to work on The Sisters (which would develop into The Rainbow and Women in Love). He tells Garnett that ‘that which is physic — non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element’, and elaborates this in a remarkable image which functions as a divining rod to lead us through what is to come in Lawrence’s fiction:
You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the ego is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element.
Here, then, is where the newness of Lawrence’s project declares itself; which will guide him in the ‘period of crisis’ he was living through. And where, it is safe to say, readers tend to divide into those who have confidence in the author, and are prepared to ‘exercise [that] deeper sense’ to follow him, and those who become impatient, hankering still for the well-trodden ways of fiction, where things go on happening all the time but where we are not invited to explore the patterning that gives coherence and meaning to these things.
Lawrence’s potent symbol of the phoenix in its CUP incarnation
The ground rule of Women in Love is that the ground itself is continually shifting; there are no rules, except for this one. Everything in the universe is always in flux, in motion. Lawrence wrote in a poem (‘Fidelity’) of ‘the wonderful slow flowing of the sapphire’, and this creative flow, this permanent deliquescence and renewal, acts on his characters too and their relationships. Both couples function on a polarized axis between attraction and repulsion, love and hate; terms which are set up immediately, in each case. Development takes the form of alternation rather than alteration, as the ‘two poles of one force, like two angels or two demons’ (p. 199) wrestle with each other. Under the magnifying glass of Lawrence’s vision, the tremulations of ordinary, socialized life are recorded as storms, tempests. Again, this is a feature that critics of Lawrence fail to register, or to understand: that what he ‘sees’, and presents to us, is a heightened and enhanced account –the reverse of slow motion, though with the same intensifying effect — of what is at once truthful and (as he had warned us) unrecognisable: human emotion as we have never experienced it in fiction before — though we are used to it in poetry. (I am thinking in particular of the poetry of William Blake, whose prophetic books surge from the same depths to a similar clash of opposing energies.)
We may well ask ourselves the pertinent question: with all this radical instability, these tremors and convulsions, how do we make sense of the characters and keep up with their relationships at all; in a word, how do we read the novel? My answer would be that Lawrence creates coherence in Women in Love as Shakespeare does in his plays, by the structural use of imagery. It is through consistent, contrasted images that he maintains the difference between Birkin and Ursula on the one hand and Gerald and Gudrun on the other. Each couple has an imagistic signature, which remains indelible throughout the upheavals of the text.
From the beginning, Ursula is associated with light and flowers, organic growth and integration: ‘underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass’ in her (p. 9). She represents (for Birkin) ‘the perfect candour of creation’ (p. 368). Whereas her sister Gudrun is and feels shut out from this system, an ironic and resentful onlooker. Significantly, she is always the more visualised of the two, in her startling outfits of bright, even strident colours. Gudrun is ‘the more beautiful and attractive […] Ursula […] more physical, more womanly’ (p. 83). The adjectives come from different orders, different worlds, and imply the different trajectories of the two different young women. These trajectories are made possible by the partners Lawrence assigns to each — partners who are created to live out their own complementary fates.
Ursula is drawn to Rupert Birkin via an instinctive antagonism (and readers may well understand her initial reaction to this awkward and opinionated schoolmaster). It is Birkin whose reflections and arguments lead us into the novel’s exploratory centre; he whose awkwardness derives from an impatience with conventions and received ideas. He resists ‘the old way of love […] as a bondage, a conscription’ (we note the latter term; p. 199); he insists on seeing humanity as a stage in the evolutionary process. Ursula’s antagonism transforms gradually into a recognition and a need; a need which is reciprocated by Birkin himself, and beautifully expressed in what is effectively a proposal: ‘There is a golden light in you, which I wish you would give me’ (p. 249). Birkin has reflected, earlier, that he ‘can’t get right at the really growing part of me’ (p. 125); it is the rooted Ursula who enables him in this respect, as the two are progressively grafted together.
‘Pity’, colour print by William Blake, c. 1795, illustrating ‘pity like a naked newborn babe,/Striding the blast’ from Macbeth, Act I, scene 7. © Tate Gallery. Cf. Birkin to Ursula in chapter 14: ‘I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world’. The image of the ‘naked infant’ is used three times in less than a page.
Gudrun’s disposition by contrast attracts the interlocking attention of Gerald Crich, son of the local mine-owner. Gerald has the mark of Cain, having killed his brother in an accident with a gun in childhood, and being responsible for the death of his sister by drowning at his party. He tries to compensate by applying his dominant will to the efficient running of the mine, and (as the novel opens) by forming a relationship with Gudrun to fill the vacancy of which he is afraid in himself.
The key chapters for these two counterpointed relationships are 23, ‘Excurse’, and 24, ‘Death and Love’. Occurring two-thirds of the way through the novel, they are as it were the tipping point from which there is no possibility for either couple of reversal, return. In the first of these, Birkin and Ursula spend a day out together, negotiating a fearful quarrel in which Ursula denounces Birkin for all his faults, and walks away, throwing at him the rings he has given her; before returning some moments later with a flower as a peace offering. The day turns on this hinge. ‘Everything had become simple again, quite simple, the complexity gone into nowhere’ (p. 310); and after an idyllic high tea en amoureux, the lovers find consummation under the trees in Sherwood Forest (p. 320).
But in the contrastive chapter that immediately follows, the logic of the images closes in fatefully on Gerald and Gudrun. Fearful of the void after his father’s death, Gerald bears down on Gudrun encumbered with mineral images of iron and stone. (At one point, he is even described as ‘radio-active’ (p. 332).) The scene where he comes uninvited into her bedroom, and is momentarily calmed by her complicit response — which leaves her, who has previously sought this knowledge of him, ‘destroyed into perfect consciousness’ (p. 345) — is an anticipation of the final scene in the alien cold of the mountains. Here, as Gudrun peels away from him under Loerke’s influence, he panics, and finally lapses out of life after a violent expression of his own inadequacy. Gudrun then simply disappears; which also fulfils the logic of the novel, since her tale is told; leaving Ursula and Birkin to conclude with yet another loving argument.
‘The Ghost of a Flea’ c.1819-20 William Blake © Tate Gallery.
Cf. ‘There passed through Gudrun’s mind Blake’s representation of the soul of a flea. She wanted to fit it to Loerke’ (chapter 30).
Conscious of the stylistic peculiarity of his novel, Lawrence defended in his Foreword ‘the continual, slightly modified repetition […] this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination’ (p. 486). But this authorial witness doesn’t quite prepare the reader for a recurrent and revealing feature — enacting the ‘to-and-fro’ — that composes sentences in a certain way, and then structures these sentences into paragraphs and larger units. So ingrained is Lawrence’s determination to see things in terms of polarity, dynamic and creative opposites, that sentences come ready seeded with qualifications and adversitives (such as ‘but’, ‘yet’, ‘still’, ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘at the same time’), which create an atmosphere of such uncertainty, possibility, that the reader is kept continually on their toes. It is unnecessary to offer examples, since they appear on almost every page; but the thirty pages of chapter 8, ‘Breadalby’, provide a switch-back ride through all points of the emotional and intellectual compass. (It is curious, almost amusing, that towards the end of the novel Gerald replies to Birkin’s question is he all right? with an attempt to short-circuit the system, saying ‘All right and all wrong, don’t they become synonymous, somewhere?’ (p. 439).)
This stylistic reflex it is, also, which doesn’t allow one point of view to dominate. As Lawrence maintained in an essay: ‘If you nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail’ (Phoenix, p. 528). Women in Love is written with such openness and ambiguity, such tentativeness in reaching forward, that it does indeed walk away with the nail.
© Damian Grant, 2021
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’
This nineteenth-century engraving of Florizel and Perdita does indeed make them look — to use Lady Chatterley/Connie’s dismissive phrase about the Elizabethans — somewhat ‘upholstered’.
In all the excitement — which has never quite subsided — about the sexual explicitness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it has often been overlooked that it is a very literary novel: a product deeply implicated in the high culture it makes a point of traducing. (And the fact that the narrative visits Berlin, London, Paris and Venice makes it almost as cosmopolitan as Eliot’s The Waste Land, published six years previously.) One aspect of this literariness is not even paradoxical, when we realize that Lawrence systematically uses modern culture — especially in its literary aspect — as a sounding-board against which to play out the (re)discovery of sexual reality and fulfilment by Connie and Mellors in the wood. Sir Clifford himself writes commercially successful short stories; Connie’s first lover at Wragby, Michaelis, is a well-received playwright; and conversation among the guests is inevitably intellectual. Lawrence’s narrator even uses other novelists as a kind of shorthand: Mrs Bolton’s conversation is described at one point as being ‘more than gossip. It was Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more, that these women left out’ (third version of the novel, edited by Michael Squires, Penguin Classics, 1994, p. 100).
It is the first sign of her liberation from this world that Connie starts to react against what she sees as the deadness of this culture, which has atrophied language: words themselves.
Part of this logic makes gamekeeper Mellors, though perfectly able to speak in the educated language of the time, prefer to use dialect with her; especially in their most intimate moments. And so the symbolic scheme seems to be simple: Wragby = writing, high culture = degeneracy, death; the woodland = nature, spontaneity, in the service of life itself.
But closer reading proves that the system as it works in the novel is not simple at all. The cultural alignment turns out to be far more interesting, far more complex and contradictory. What we have to conclude is that Lawrence the practised writer and passionate apologist manages to have his cake and eat it. It is thanks to Shakespeare, and especially The Winter’s Tale, that the woodland — backdrop to sexual fulfilment — enjoys a win-win situation, as the best of culture comes to the aid of the best of nature, in a convenient realignment.
In chapter 8 of the novel the wood first comes alive for Lady Chatterley, or she herself becomes alive: ‘Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in her cheeks and burned blue in her eyes’ (86). Interestingly, she first has to evade — as it were, to sidestep — two literary quotations, negative contradicting impressions from both Milton and Swinburne (85). But then more positive Biblical references take over (‘Ye must be born again — I believe in the resurrection of the body!’) before Lawrence offers this reassuring summary: ‘In the wind of March, endless phrases swept through her consciousness’ (85). Words are already playing a double game, some shutting out and others leading on. Connie is entranced by the ‘first violets’ in the wood and the daffodils, ‘so bright and alive […] So strong in their frailty’, and she enthuses to Clifford about these on her return to the house, ‘to Wragby and its walls’ (86); walls also made of words, as we have previously seen.
She goes to the wood again next day, and it is on this occasion that she follows the narrow track leading to the clearing and the gamekeeper’s hut, where she meets and talks briefly to a surprised and slightly resentful Mellors (87-90). Another conversation with Clifford ensues, in which as she is putting the violets she has gathered into a vase he exclaims: ‘Sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes.’
Connie reacts negatively to this: ‘I don’t see a bit of connection, with the actual violets’ (91), also showing that she knows her Shakespeare: ‘The Elizabethans are rather upholstered’ (91). Next day, when Clifford himself ventures with her into the wood in his bath-chair, there is another negative reaction to verbal culture when as she gives him some wood-anemones she has picked, he quotes Keats (from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’), ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’.
The following day, on her third visit to the wood, she sits at the hut and inwardly rejects the word ‘ravished’ and all the ideas it stands for. ‘Ravished! How ravished one could be without being touched! Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions’ (94). This before an edgy conversation with Mellors, who comes upon her there, which sends her home at the end of the chapter ‘in a confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt’ (96).
Here one must pause to point out that of course Lawrence knew his Shakespeare too, and had remembered Perdita’s celebrated speech to Florizel in Act IV, scene iv of The Winter’s Tale; remembered it at the roots of him, rather like the poems that are ‘woven into a man’s consciousness,’ and ‘which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life’ (‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’, Phoenix II edited by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, London, Heinemann, 1968, p. 597). If we turn back to this speech ourselves, we will recognize that something interesting has been happening in this eighth chapter of Lawrence’s own pastoral romance. Perdita addresses Florizel and the young girls:
Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’th’spring that might
Become your time of day; and yours and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, (dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath); pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength […] (lines 112-24).
Proserpina (as Persephone), the winds of March, the daffodils, the violets, the pale primroses, the breath of Cytherea (Aphrodite): all of these are reproduced within one page at the start of this chapter, where Lawrence is working to establish Connie’s intimacy with the wood and all it represents. What we can observe here, then, is the intriguing example of Lawrence rejecting the cultural with one hand — Clifford’s ill-judged quotation from Shakespeare — and embracing it with the other, in the author’s probably unconscious use of the very same passage to convey Connie’s palpably physical experience of the wood. The ‘endless phrases’ that ‘sweep through her consciousness’ in ‘the winds of March’ are as much a part of that experience as the sense impressions themselves — and the only way that Lawrence can convey these to us. In effect, Perdita’s speech acts as a kind of spell, an incantation, to allow Connie’s entry to the wood.
One could even argue that this passage permeates the novel more extensively. The first paragraph of chapter 12 (165) repeats the incantation, when Connie goes to the wood hoping to meet Mellors. ‘It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white’; hazel catkins and crowds of yellow celandines greet her, with ‘the triumphant powerful yellow of early summer’. Then we have this sentence: ‘And primroses were broad and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy.’ Lawrence’s idea here can only be understood as in dialogue with Perdita’s ‘pale primroses, / That die unmarried’, to emphasize by contrast Connie’s own imminent ecstatic coupling with ‘Bright Phoebus in his strength’. This spell-like, motif-laden paragraph also contains the image ‘The lush dark green of hyacinths [bluebell leaves] was a sea’, which anticipates the powerful sea imagery used a few pages later to describe Connie’s full orgasmic experience (‘it seemed she was like a sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving’ (174)), and it is impossible not to relate this motif, again, to the same passage in the play, when Florizel replies to Perdita ‘when you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’th’sea’ (ll. 140-1). The sea returns a third time — like the tide — in the sentence that ends the chapter: ‘As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive’ (178).
We may conclude that the passage from The Winter’s Tale is used by Lawrence in contradictory ways, like a Janus face. At one level in direct quotation, to let Connie make a negative statement about language and culture; but at another more pervasive level it filters back to the water-table of Lawrence’s verbal imagination to inform and generate his own profoundly felt formulations. We can identify two contrary currents, poetic invocation running under rhetorical positioning.
More generally, one needs hardly to be reminded of the extended passage in chapter 15 where Connie and Mellors decorate each other’s pubic hair with flowers (pp. 220-229) to realize that flower imagery is central to the novel: with the creative fragility of the flower, like sexual life itself, perceived in contrast to the death-dealing mechanization all around. Here, the ground-note is sounded by the moving image from Shakespeare’s sonnet 65: ‘How with this rage shall beauty find a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’ And is it too fanciful to suggest that the concluding couplet (‘O none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright’) could have prompted the image that concludes the novel, when Mellors writes to Connie that if he ‘could sleep with my arm round you, the ink could stay in the bottle’ (301)? Though admittedly the ink has a different function in each case.
Top row, left to right: wood forget-me-not, columbine. Bottom row, left to right: red campion, creeping jenny. The lovers wind them and other wild flowers onto each other’s bodies.
What we have in this novel is the most substantial and developed instance of a paradox we find underlying much of Lawrence’s work, which reacts against mental activity on behalf of the body — but in a medium which is inevitably the finest product of the mind. Consider the poem ‘Snake’, where Lawrence repents in one line for his action in throwing a log at the snake — ‘I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education’ — and makes the gesture as of a deference to nature in the next: ‘I thought of the albatross’ (Poems, edited by Keith Sagar, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, p. 137). But of course the albatross is Coleridge’s albatross, is Baudelaire’s albatross; is a cultivated bird no less than Keats’s nightingale, one of Audubon’s famous prints, or even Yeats’s bird of changeless metal from ‘Byzantium’.
I am not suggesting that the wood in Lady Chatterley’s Lover isn’t a wood, any more than the Forest of Arden isn’t a forest. It is (they are), with all the reality that may be conferred by verbal representation. But we have to acknowledge that it is a magic wood; and part of the magic is, that it also provides a roof-top protest on the prison-house of language.
© Damian Grant, 2021
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.