by Adrian D’Ambra
When I first read The Rainbow and Women in Love as part of a modern literature unit at university in the mid-1970s – in the striking, white-bordered Penguin paperbacks with the attractive front cover photographs by Harri Peccinotti – I crammed the inside cover pages with notes cribbed from Julian Moynahan, Graham Hough and F.R. Leavis. Moynahan places Women in Love in the context of the death throes of pre-World War One Europe, a Europe in which Gerald’s industry – Lawrence’s despised age of the machine – has created the machinery of death for the majority of people. He draws particular attention to the ritual scenes of The Rainbow: 1) Lydia Lensky as ‘a flower unsheathed in the sun’, flowing into organic nature; the flower flourishes in daylight and returns to the organic centre of creation at night. 2) Will and Anna Brangwen’s sheave gathering represents their pursuit of and return from one another. 3) Ursula and the horses. The inner turbulence of Ursula in her pregnancy to Anton Skrebensky is the insistent desire to maintain the search for self – embodied in the horses which represent the life of instinct, the upper layers of self. Their power is the revelation of natural energy. According to Moynahan, the first generation (Lydia Lensky and Tom Brangwen) submit and are saved, the second generation (Anna and William Brangwen) progress but fall short, while in the third generation (Ursula Brangwen and Anton Skrebensky), after exhausting experience, Ursula is prepared for her final transfiguration, readying herself for the man who ‘would come out of Eternity to which she herself belonged.’ Retracing the three generations, Leavis draws attention to Tom’s many needs which represent the need to go beyond the instinctual. Anna and Will’s failure to create is parodied by their aimless procreation, while their daughter Ursula sees no unknown in Anton.
In The Rainbow, Leavis emphasises the theme of the struggle for higher possibilities… ‘blood intimacy’ is a thing to be overcome. He describes the novel as a study in contemporary civilisation in which the central idea is the supremacy of the individual and individual fulfilment which is only achieved through relation with others. Love and sex are not absolute but need to be transcended also. Lovers are doors into the unknown and fulfilment can come through marriage which can open individuals to the ultimate – not belonging to one’s self and becoming eternal. The conclusion – Ursula, Skrebensky and the moon in the sand dunes, followed by Ursula’s near-trampling by the horses, her subsequent miscarriage and vision of the ‘great architecture of light and colour’ of the rainbow – is, apparently, not real but indicative of Lawrence striving for an ideal. Moynahan concurs, figuring the rainbow as a symbol of a prophetic hope rather than an absolute truth whilst Hough interprets it as an exploration towards an embryonic philosophy of life which is non-moral and anti-intellectual, going from the known and comprehensible to the incomprehensible: the search for truth. He finds fault in the failure of Ursula and Skrebensky which implies that sexual satisfaction is ultimate and that it relies on mental compatibility. This further implies that love is either perfect or non-existent.
Some lecture notes at the end of The Rainbow suggest that the conclusion is not as unprepared as it appears. Anna’s much earlier moment of awareness in creation is characterised by the rainbow. The religious experience of mankind is open even to Will in the rainbow. Lydia and Tom pass ‘through the doorway into the further space’, making the threshold of their encompassing relationship akin to the rainbow.
In Women in Love, Hough determines marriage as the major theme and the examination of modern society as a minor theme. Birkin is saved from white death which kills sensuality and soul by his realisation that he must be free. Freedom of ‘pure, single being’, a profound bond between man and woman which leaves them as individuals. But, according to Hough, Ursula and Birkin’s fulfilment seems too non-human. Because Gudrun and Gerald fail in this polarity, they fail in everything but Hough also finds this not quite convincing. Gerald is divorced from his being whilst Gudrun is unable to find self-forgetfulness. The novel’s conclusion asserts the strength of the forces dealt with; the hard struggle for success. Gerald’s death is the result for those who cannot accept the responsibility of a real relationship. His final conversation gives prominence to the theme of relations between men. Therefore, life as a man-woman relationship is impossible. According to Moynahan, Birkin escapes from the doomed, known world in which all ideas – even love – have their social origin and condition, abandoning them for the solid core of self.
Leavis locates the decisive launching of the novel in the conversation between the two sisters. He interprets the diagnosis of Gerald’s individual psyche as the diagnosis of a civilisation. His ‘go’ leads to self-destruction. His solution is found in anti-human drive; a refusal of responsibility towards life. His supreme end is the great social productive machine. For Lawrence, the mind is the dead end of life. With the will it can automatise life. Disquality: Lawrence’s essential insistence on the spiritual differences in which neither equality nor inequality count.
All of this, the reading and the notetaking was, what, four decades ago, so long ago that I have completely forgotten the plot and characters of these novels, let alone the struggles between ideas and ideals, men and women, individuals and their selves or society. Beyond theme and interpretation, audience, purpose and meaning, the thing I find myself most interested in now is simply how he does it: how Lawrence writes; literally, how he deploys the words upon the page in the order and relationship to each other that he intends us to read them in.
The most consistent feature of Lawrence’s writing in terms of the way in which it is composed is repetition, the repetition of words and phrases within sentences and paragraphs and sometimes across pages. One early reader and admirer, for example, was critical of Lawrence’s insistent reuse of the word ‘fecundity’ in relation to Ursula’s sexual coming of age and pregnancy in The Rainbow and any number of critics from T.S. Eliot on have lamented Lawrence’s hammering out of ideas in his prose as though the novelist were stubbing a finger on the reader’s chest to make and remake a point.
The repetition I am observing, though, is not limited to Lawrence’s reactionary social ideas or his libertarian sexual ideology. Whether he is describing a setting, a character’s physical or facial characteristics or an emotional or intellectual state of being, repetition is simply part of the manner in which Lawrence places and replaces the words upon the page. My question, as I’ve been rereading Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow over the last month is simply why, why would you choose to tell a story in this way? The conclusion I have come to is hardly earth-shattering, it’s neither a revelation nor, necessarily, particularly original, but I do find it satisfying. I think that Lawrence uses his pen and does his writing in the same way that an artist uses a brush and paint. To me as a reader he goes about the work of writing in a painterly manner.
I am thinking about the actual physical action of writing rather than the theoretical or critical aspects of the written product. Looking at the words, reading them syntactically and continuously, what I see is the writer’s pen being applied to the paper in the same way that an artist’s brush is applied and reapplied to a canvas. No matter how realist or abstract the approach, a painter attempting some form of visual representation of an observed reality in a portrait or a landscape or a still life will apply and reapply the brush. This might be done for any number of reasons by any number of different artists; sometimes to layer up the paint, sometimes to thin it out with water or medium, sometimes to blend colours and sometimes to single one out, and sometimes it will simply be the signature stylistic brush stroke of that painter that determines how and why it is done. For whatever reason and no matter how central or peripheral to the subject of the painting, a patch of canvas or board is almost never touched just once by the artist’s brush. It is touched and retouched, dabbed and stroked and flicked and picked, depending on the method and the tools, until – eventually – it is left alone and – eventually – the image is complete.
So too with Lawrence’s writing. He is constantly deploying and redeploying words and phrases, in his case, layering up the image, building up his visual representation until it is fixed and done, and then moving on. Put simply, he writes like a painter paints. As I noted earlier, certainly in these early novels, this is a more or less continuous practice but there are also moments when it is highly concentrated. For example, when I was reading the cherry picking scene in Sons and Lovers I felt that I was looking at a landscape by Cezanne rather than reading a chapter in a novel.
There was a great crop of cherries at the farm. The trees at the back of the house, very large and tall, hung thick with scarlet and crimson drops, under the dark leaves. Paul and Edgar were gathering the fruit one evening. It had been a hot day, and now the clouds were rolling in the sky, dark and warm. Paul climbed high in the tree, above the scarlet roofs of the buildings. The wind, moaning steadily, made the whole tree rock with a subtle, thrilling motion that stirred the blood. The young man, perched insecurely in the slender branches, rocked till he felt slightly drunk, reached down the boughs, where the scarlet beady cherries hung thick underneath, and tore off handful after handful of the sleek, cool-fleshed fruit. Cherries touched his ears and his neck as he stretched forward, their chill finger-tips sending a flash down his blood. All shades of red, from a golden vermilion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a darkness of leaves.
The sun, going down, suddenly caught the broken clouds. Immense piles of gold flared out in the south-east, heaped in soft, glowing yellow right up the sky. The world, till now, dusk and grey, reflected the gold glow, astonished. Everywhere the trees, and the grass, and the far-off water, seemed roused from the twilight and shining.
Notice how the ‘dark leaves’ become ‘a darkness of leaves’ beneath the ‘dark and warm’ clouds of early evening; how the trees are ‘hung thick’ with cherries and how the cherries ‘hung thick’ beneath the boughs. Notice how the wind makes the tree ‘rock’ so that Paul is ‘rocked’ high up in the tree and how suggestive this is of the pulse being ‘stirred in the blood’. Notice how Paul reaches ‘down the boughs’, how the colour and coolness of the fruit send a ‘flash down his blood’, and how the sun ‘going down’ ignites the clouds. Notice – of course! – the repetition of the colour words ‘scarlet’ and ‘crimson’, and how the cherries ‘glowed’ in one paragraph and the clouds are ‘glowing’ in the next. Notice how we move from the ‘golden vermilion’ of some of the cherries to the ‘gold’ flare and the ‘gold glow’ of the sunlight reflected by the clouds as the sun sets. Notice how, I would suggest, in another method at least as painterly as it is authorial, how the cherries themselves are figured first as ‘drops’, then beads and then ‘finger-tips’ as they are being picked by Paul’s fingers. But the triumph, the moment I thought that I was looking at a Cezanne rather than reading a page in a novel, was the synaesthetic moment when the scarlet colour word of the cherries is used to name the colour of the ‘roofs of the buildings’. The moment is suffused with light from the setting sun which is disseminating the colour of the organic living cherries over everything, even the inert unliving buildings of Willey Farm as though the visions of humanity and nature are being suffused with the same being.
english literature teacher 