Burning man, p.13
Burning Man, page 13
Only in free verse can we feel that ‘Now, now, the bird is on the wing in the winds.’ In Lawrence’s own poetry his birds are flashing feathered things with comic bodies, nimble feet and a taste for worms. His hummingbird ‘races down the avenues’ and goes ‘whizzing through the slow, vast succulent stems’, his Blue Jay ‘runs in the snow like a bit of blue metal’, his turkey cock has ‘wattles the colour of steel which has been red hot and is going cold, / Cooling to a powdery pale-oxidized sky-blue’. But while his birds are marvellously ‘of life’, Lawrence could equally, like Shelley, transcend life. The final page of The Rainbow is a case in point: what, after all, is a rainbow if not bodiless beauty? Lawrence’s problem with Shelley was not only that the poet was all spirit and thus one-sided (only two opposites can make a whole) but that he contradicts himself. ‘Shelley wishes to say, the skylark is a pure, untrammelled spirit, a pure motion. But the very “Bird thou never wert” admits that the skylark is in very fact a bird, a concrete, momentary thing.’ So it was not only Frieda who Lawrence was wrestling on the night of Saturday 6 May 1916, but also Shelley.
The next month, when the foxgloves stood against the walls of Higher Tregerthen like, Mansfield thought, an ‘encampment of Indian braves’, the Murrys left Wuthering Heights for their equivalent of Thrushcross Grange, ‘a soft valley’, as Lawrence snidely called it, ‘with leaves and the ringdove cooing’.145 Claire Tomalin suggests that Mansfield took with her a memento of Zennor in the form of the consumption that Lawrence had passed on like a vampire’s kiss; having wanted to kill Murry and Frieda, it is a fitting enough irony that he killed Mansfield instead. Two years later she was describing her own fits of tubercular temper as ‘really terrifying’ and like ‘Lawrence and Frieda over again. I am sure I am more like L than anybody. We are unthinkably alike, in fact.’146
Lawrence, who never understood why the Murrys (or anyone else) would not want to live with him, now moved into Katherine’s tower to finish Women in Love. The usual plan for a novel, he believed, was to take two couples and develop their relationships.147 His two couples were Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, and Ursula’s artistic sister Gudrun (based on Mansfield) and Birkin’s friend Gerald Crich. But Birkin and Gerald are also a couple and in the chapter called ‘Gladiatorial’, Lawrence pitched them against one another, like Whitman and Shelley, when they take off their clothes for a wrestling match.
So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense. He seemed to penetrate into Gerald’s more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection, always seizing with some rapid necromantic foreknowledge every motion of the other flesh, converting and counteracting it, playing upon the limbs and trunk of Gerald like some hard wind.148
The interfused bodies are lifted from Leaves of Grass, but the image of Birkin playing ‘like some hard wind’ upon Gerald’s tree-like trunk is from ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘Make me thy lyre,’ wrote Shelley, ‘even as the forest is.’ A self-playing instrument, the lyre (whence ‘lyric’) is the quintessential metaphor for Romantic inspiration, and ‘for the poet to yield himself to and be borrowed by the wind is’, as the critic Merle Rubin puts it, ‘almost the Shelleyan stance’.149 Lawrence had used the trope of a tree as a lyre in Sons and Lovers, where Paul Morel lies in bed listening to his father banging his fist on the table below while the wind comes ‘through the tree fiercer and fiercer’ and ‘all the cords of the great harp hummed, whistled, and shrieked’.150 Shelley expands on the image in A Defence of Poetry:
Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.151
By depicting Gerald as both a wrestler and a tree bending to Birkin’s inspiration, Lawrence’s contraries found their balance.
Women in Love is as different from her sister novel as Frieda from Else Jaffe. The Rainbow looked back to the organic past but Women in Love, whose subject is movement, runs into the future. ‘Let’s wander off,’ says Birkin to Ursula. ‘My God,’ thinks Ursula at the book’s exhausting close, ‘how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons.’152 Will Brangwen was a man of the land with no language for desire, but his granddaughters are nomads in brightly coloured stockings who articulate complex sexual needs. The Rainbow had been about family and roots but Women in Love is about breaking free. ‘What had she to do with parents and antecedents?’ Ursula thinks as she sheds her connections. ‘She knew herself new and unbegotten.’153 Birkin, too, is uninterested in what came before him; unlike Paul Morel, the new Lawrentian hero has no class, no history, no parents to contend with; he comes from nowhere.
Those characters guided by mind rather than blood exist in a state of frenzy: the sculptor Loerke speaks in a ‘satirical demoniac frenzy’ and his factory frieze contains a ‘frenzy of chaotic motion’; Gerald, whose father dies in a ‘frenzy of inhuman struggling’, then half-strangles the continually frenzied Gudrun in a ‘frenzy of delight’. Women in Love was a novel of revenge whose subject was not love but hate, or rather the ways in which love and murderous hate form two halves of the same emotion. ‘Murder,’ Lawrence believed, ‘is a lust utterly to possess the soul of the murdered’, and the desire to kill the loved object is as basic as any other instinct.154 As a child, Gerald Crich accidentally kills his brother when they are playing a game, and Ursula and Gudrun wonder whether it was an accident at all. ‘Perhaps there was an unconscious will behind it,’ says Ursula. ‘This playing at killing has some primitive desire for killing in it, don’t you think?’155 When Gerald’s sister Diana then drowns at the water party, she is found with her arms ‘tight round the neck’ of her fiancé. ‘She killed him,’ says Gerald.156 Before he meets Ursula, Birkin is involved with Hermione Roddice, a society hostess with a country estate and a ‘long, grave, downward-looking face’ which had in it ‘something of the stupidity and unenlightened self-esteem of a horse’.157 A woman of iron will who controls her guests like marionettes, Hermione tries to kill Birkin with a paperweight of lapis lazuli. He is quietly reading Thucydides when, on the other side of the room, Hermione puts down her pen.
She could not go on with her writing. Her whole mind was a chaos, darkness breaking in upon it, and herself struggling to gain control with her will, as a swimmer struggles with the swirling water. But in spite of her efforts she was borne down, darkness seemed to break over her, she felt as if her heart was bursting. The terrible tension grew stronger and stronger, it was most fearful agony, like being walled up.
A ‘voluptuous thrill’ like ‘shocks of electricity’ runs down her arms as she picks up the weight and brings it down on Birkin’s head. The sensation is ‘pure bliss’ but the act is incomplete, and so Hermione takes up the stone again. ‘She lifted her arm high to aim once more, straight down on the head that lay dazed on the table. She must smash it, it must be smashed before her ecstasy was consummated, fulfilled for ever.’ Birkin, quick as a flash, shields himself beneath the volume of Thucydides and the blow comes down on the book instead, ‘almost breaking his neck’. Rising, he confronts his killer. ‘No you don’t, Hermione … I don’t let you … It isn’t I who will die. You hear?’158
The scene is emblematic of the rage felt by generations of Lawrence’s women readers, and it is curious that Hermione Roddice did not become iconic in the days when Lawrence was being bashed over the head by exasperated English Departments the world over. When the novel appeared, however, Ottoline noted that she had given Lawrence a present of a similar lump of lapis lazuli, Frieda recalled that she had recently broken an earthenware plate over his head when he was peacefully doing the washing-up, and Murry himself will have seen that the entire passage mirrored the murder of the father in The Brothers Karamazov. ‘I snatched up that iron paperweight from his table,’ says Smerdyakov, ‘do you remember, weighing about three pounds? I swung it and hit him on the top of the skull with the corner of it. He didn’t even cry out. He only sank down suddenly, and I hit him again and a third time. And the third time I knew I’d broken his skull.’159
Birkin and Ursula begin their infernal journey in Beldover, a mining town of ‘powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness’,160 and when they leave for the Alps – taking the same Dover-to-Ostend passage as Lawrence and Frieda in May 1912 – they descend further into the darkness. In the chapter called ‘Continental’, ‘darkness’ is used a dozen times in two pages: the ‘darkness’ on the boat is ‘palpable’, the boat’s crew are ‘dark as the darkness’, Ursula and Birkin ‘fall away into the profound darkness … dark fathomless space … surpassing darkness … profound darkness … honey of darkness’; Birkin finds himself ‘falling through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across the chasm between the worlds’. Disembarking from the ship is like ‘disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld’; around them ‘spectral people’ are ‘hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness through the grey air’. They journey by train ‘out of the darkness’, through further ‘wet flat dreary darkness’ and into ‘level darkness’.161 In the mountains beyond Zurich they find themselves in deep snow, and at a hotel in Innsbruck they rendezvous with Gudrun and Gerald. Their downward journey now becomes a more spatially complex one, best described as upward descent, when the party move to a mountain hostel. Ursula understands that she has arrived at her destination, ‘the navel of the world’,162 a great cul-de-sac where the valley is shut in beneath the roof of the sky and the perpendicular walls of snow and black rock. The higher they climb, the lower they sink and Ursula and Birkin flee this upside-down topography in horror.
Gerald, losing his mind over Gudrun’s affair with the ‘insect’ artist Loerke, tries to strangle her. The desire comes over him as suddenly as Hermione’s desire to kill Birkin: both sensations are ‘voluptuous’ and both executions are ‘bliss’. Gudrun’s throat was ‘beautifully, so beautifully soft, save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last!’ He then, like Captain Oates and Dr Frankenstein, heads off into the snow, struggling through ‘a wind that almost overpowered him with sleep-heavy iciness’. He is found frozen in ‘a pit’ among the rocks and precipices. To retrieve his body the mountain guides drive stakes into the wall and attach a rope to ‘haul themselves up the massive snow-front, out on to the jagged summit of the pass, naked to heaven’.163
* * *
The lowest circle of hell, referred to as ‘Caina’ by Francesca di Rimini because it is where brother-killers like her husband are destined to go, is at the frozen centre of the world. Dante departed from the traditional image of the burning pit when he turned the base of his Inferno into a deep-freeze whose temperature is controlled by Lucifer’s vast bat-wings fanning their glacial winds of hate. The damned are submerged in the solid ice of Cocytus, in the middle of which is Lucifer himself, a three-faced colossus, his three mouths gnawing on the three betrayers: Judas, Brutus and Cassius.
Dante and Virgil are lifted down to this ice-bound impasse on the back of the giant Antaeus whom Dante mistakes, from the distance, for a tower, and they escape by climbing up Lucifer’s legs, using his hairs as a ladder. What happens on Lucifer’s legs is of immense spatial complexity. When they reach thigh-level, Virgil turns himself and Dante around so they appear to be descending again; he explains that Lucifer’s thigh is the globe’s circle of gravity, and so what had been upside-down is now the right way up. Lucifer is in fact standing on his head with the stars above his feet – the position in which he landed when he was thrown from Paradise.
* * *
There are wonderful things in Women in Love, but it is not the flawless masterpiece that Lawrence believed he had written. It is an experiment in the art of fiction produced at a time of unendurable stress. The ambition to replace character with ‘rhythms’ is laudable, but we only have to compare the result with Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to see that Lawrence has failed. Women in Love lacks the immersive environment of Sons and Lovers, the atmospheric grandeur of The Rainbow and the hypnotic pull of The Trespasser. The book’s tension comes not from whether or not the characters will destroy one another but from the pressure that Lawrence exerts on his reader. Are we prepared, like Ursula, to follow Birkin come what may, or will we remain in our towers and observe his proceedings from a distance? Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does the novel become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers.
But while Lawrence allows Birkin appalling indulgences, such as driving his motorcar like ‘an Egyptian Pharaoh’, he also sees how maddening his spokesman can be and therefore gives us Ursula, whose role it is to save the tale from the teller. When Birkin tells Ursula that he wants their relationship to be ‘a pure balance of two single beings; – as the stars balance each other’, she reflects that while she likes him very much, ‘why drag in the stars?’164 When Birkin tells her that he wants ‘a woman I don’t see’, Ursula asks, ‘What did you ask me to tea for, then?’165 When Birkin describes his vision ‘of a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass and a hare sitting up’, Ursula asks if this is all he believes in, ‘the end of the world, and grass?’166 But the blithe spirit is soon knocked out of her. When Birkin explains, at the end of the novel, that she is not enough for him and he also needs intimacy with a man, Ursula does not come back with a quip. She simply accepts that some things are past all understanding.
It is not only Ursula who does not understand Birkin; the reader is also confused. This is not because Birkin is passing through, as Lawrence explained to Garnett, ‘allotropic states’, but because Women in Love is incomplete. In its original conception the novel began not with the chapter called ‘Sisters’ where Ursula and Gudrun, at home in Beldover, discuss their views of marriage, but in the snowy upperworld of the Tyrol, where Birkin and Gerald – brothers – are on a climbing holiday in the mountains: ‘The acquaintance between the two men was slight and insignificant. Yet there was a subtle bond that connected them.’ The original opening, now known as the ‘Prologue’ and published among Lawrence’s miscellanea, makes sense of Women in Love by providing a context for Birkin’s antagonism to Hermione and his belief that he can never be completed by Ursula. Birkin, although intimate with women, does not desire them. Instead he feels a ‘passion of desire’ for Gerald Crich, and for the type of Cornish man who has ‘the eyes of a rat’, ‘dark, fine, rather stiff hair and full, heavy, softly-strong limbs’. He is also ‘roused’ by the ‘manly, vigorous movement’ of those men he sees in the streets.167 This was an astonishingly brave piece of writing which would, had Lawrence not discarded it – through fear of censorship, no doubt – have led to a different novel entirely. Removing the opening was like taking a nose from a face, but Lawrence also destroyed his novel’s most dazzling effect: Women in Love began and ended with Birkin and Gerald in the same Alpine landscape; he framed the novel inside a great wall of rock and snow from which no one can escape.
It took Lawrence seven months and three separate drafts to complete Women in Love, which was delivered to Pinker, his British agent, in November 1916. In his haste, an error slipped in. After Ursula and Birkin flee the mountain, Gudrun and Loerke discuss their pleasure in ‘the achieved perfections of the past. Particularly they liked the late eighteenth century, the period of Goethe and of Shelley, and Mozart.’168 The point Lawrence wants to make is that Gudrun and Loerke have a taste for the artificial and overwrought, and he clearly means Schiller not Shelley; he knows very well that Shelley’s period was not the late eighteenth but the nineteenth century. This is the only mention of Shelley in Women in Love, and each time he rewrote the novel Lawrence repeated the mistake, thus digging the Romantic deeper and deeper into the perfections of the past while Whitman, as Lawrence put it in his essay on the great American poet, went ‘forward in life knowledge’.169
In a statement intended to accompany the American edition of the novel, Lawrence explained that Women in Love – whose gestation was coterminous with the Battle of the Somme, the beginning of modern, mass-industrial warfare – was produced during ‘a great hail storm’ of ‘abuse and persecution’ (his own). Although the book ‘did not concern the war itself’, Lawrence wrote, the ‘bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’.170 What the reader hears in its pages, however, is an echo of Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’, written at another apocalyptic moment, on a black day in July 1816 when ‘the fowls went to roost at noon’.
The first year of Byron’s exile was known as ‘the year without a summer’. In Indonesia, Mount Tambora erupted, hurling twenty-five miles of gas and ash into the stratosphere, burying villages beneath boiling lava and extinguishing the sun. Ten thousand people died instantly, their cultures and language wiped out. Two years of climatic chaos followed: a 300-mile-wide mushroom cloud circled the earth, floods in China washed away harvests, summer crops in Massachusetts froze at the roots, brown snow fell in Hungary, red snow fell in Italy, harvests failed across Europe, thousands starved and, to replace the horses that died of hunger, the bicycle was invented. ‘The world was void,’ wrote Byron in ‘Darkness’; ‘Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless’. Byron wrote ‘Darkness’ by the shores of Lake Geneva where he was idling with Shelley, and Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley began at the same time, was born from the same climatic disaster. The intensity of the atmosphere was exacerbated because Byron, being famous, was spied on by tourists with telescopes on the opposite side of the lake, who elaborated on their findings in gossipy letters home. ‘There was no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost,’ he complained. ‘I believed they looked on me as a man-monster.’171 He was also spied on by his doctor, Polidori, who was being paid by Byron’s publisher to report back on the poet’s activities.
