Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (7 page)

Gudrun, too, has undergone a transformation between the two works, though one far less radical than Ursula’s. This is in part because her character was less well developed in
The Rainbow,
and one had the sense that she is more easygoing than her sister. In
Women in Love,
Gudrun, as we have seen, is far more unfeeling than any of the other characters, except Loerke, who is on a par with her in emotional insensitivity and even cruelty. But then Gudrun, like Gerald, is bound by symbolism as she is not in
The Rainbow.
This gives her character a certain determinism, like that of a character in a Greek drama. Lawrence had courage, and it not only took courage for him to depart from the models that he himself created in
The Rainbow,
but it is a sign of his artistic curiosity to see how Ursula might turn out if she had a new mindset—a determination to reinvent love—that might encourage her to take another direction. We now know how she and Gudrun turn out in
Women in Love.
They become totally different people than they are in
The Rainbow.
The approach Lawrence uses in these two works is much like Picasso used when he would take a particular pictorial idea to a certain point and develop that same idea but in new directions, variations on a similar theme.

 

Critics have charged that
Women in Love
lacks a precise style or the brilliant technique of Joyce. The passage by Burgess quoted above makes that claim. Lawrence’s enemies made a similar point at the time the novel was released. Even friends, such as John Middleton Murry, were critical of him. Flaubert, whom Lawrence certainly read, and by whom he was clearly influenced in the area of acute observation of reality, both in nature and human relationships, used character to elucidate our understanding of society. However, Flaubert contrived situations, plausible and realistic though they were. For Flaubert, the novel was complex, not unlike a poem, in which precisely the right word must be chosen, the
mot juste,
and combined with a precise and beautiful rhythm to which the novel itself was subject. There were two poets, both contemporaries of Flaubert’s, who first succeeded in freeing literature from the tight constraints to which Flaubert subjected it. One was a Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire, who is the apostle of modernism. In his poems, but especially in his essays on painting and literature, Baudelaire almost single-handedly dragged romantic literature into the modern era. In defining and liberating the modern, Baudelaire invented the prose poem, a genre Rimbaud would perfect at only twenty years old. The prose poem freed literature of the artificial. It was style that renounced formal style in favor of a far more imperceptible one that employs the rhythms of everyday life. The other poet was the American Walt Whitman, who demonstrated that literary form could be annihilated and poetry would not only still exist, it could even be intensified. From Whitman came the Americans—Pound, the greatest craftsman of the new writers, Eliot, Hemingway, and Stein, all of whom in their way were, as Henry Miller would say about Rimbaud, assassins of the old literature.

In
Women in Love,
Lawrence took almost equally from these two traditions. From Flaubert and the Symbolists, he took symbolism to give his characters an expanded, if more precisely defined meaning, while in the tradition of the Americans, he let them appear to run free. Though Pound said of Lawrence that he had mastered the modern form before Pound had, it is not true. Pound in his imagist manifesto had decided that the poem should be composed not of feet, as in classical poetry, but of breath phrases, the way that we speak in modulated breaths. This is the technique Lawrence chose for
Women in Love;
the subject matter and the dialogue as spoken in real life would determine the flow and structure of the novel. This is why to some it appears
Women in Love
has no structure at all. Great literature, Lawrence came to realize, is the seemingly artless creation of everyday life, with its rhythms, its immediacy, its truthfulness, and its life-and-death struggle with the problems of existence, with just enough art to give it definition and to make us think it is directly drawn from reality, even when we know we are being manipulated. “If it does not seem a moment’s thought,” writes Yeats, “our stitching and unstitching have been naught.” For this one needs a very great writer, and this is what Lawrence was when he created
Women in Love.

 

Norman Loftis
is a poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher, and film-maker. His works include
Exiles
and
Voyages
(poetry, 1969),
Black Anima
(poetry, 1973),
Life Force
(novel, 1982),
From Barbarism to
Decadence (1984), and
Condition Zero
(1993). His feature films include
Schaman
(1984), the award-winning
Small Time
(1989), and
Messenger
(1995). He is currently Chair of the Department of Literature at the Brooklyn Campus of the College of New Rochelle and is on the faculty at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, where he has taught since 1970.

 

 

 

This novel was written in its first form in the Tyrol, in 1913. It was altogether re-written and finished in Cornwall in 1917. So that it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself: I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.

The book has been offered to various London publishers. Their almost inevitable reply has been: “We should like very much to publish, but feel we cannot risk a prosecution.” They remember the fate of
The Rainbow,
and are cautious. This book is a potential sequel to
The Rainbow.

In England, I would never try to justify myself against any accusation. But to the Americans, perhaps I may speak for myself. I am accused, in England, of uncleanness and pornography. I deny the charge, and take no further notice.

In America the chief accusation seems to be one of “Eroticism.” This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty “amours,” or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?

Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being.

The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfil. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.

This novel pretends only to be a record of the writer’s own desires, aspirations, struggles; in a word, a record of the profoundest experiences in the self Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad. So there is no apology to tender, unless to the soul itself, if it should have been belied.

Man struggles with his unborn needs and fulfilment. New un-foldings struggle up in torment in him, as buds struggle forth from the midst of a plant. Any man of real individuality tries to know and to understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes along. This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art. It is a very great part of life. It is not superimposition of a theory. It is the passionate struggle into conscious being.

We are now in a period of crisis. Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure. Those others, that fix themselves in the old idea, will perish with the new life strangled unborn within them. Men must speak out to one another.

In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author ; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination.

 

Hermitage
12 September, 1919

URSULA AND GUDRUN BRANGWEN sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house
¹
in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.

“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you
really want
to get married?” Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It depends how you mean.”

Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.

“Well,” she said, ironically, “it usually means one thing! But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be—” she darkened slightly—“in a better position than you are in now?”

A shadow came over Ursula’s face.

“I might,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”

Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.

“You don’t think one needs the
experience
of having been married?” she asked.

“Do you think it need be an experience?” replied Ursula.

“Bound to be, in some way or other,” said Gudrun, coolly. “Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.”

“Not really,” said Ursula. “More likely to be the end of experience.”

Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.

“Of course,” she said, “there’s
that
to consider.” This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly.

“You wouldn’t consider a good offer?” asked Gudrun.

“I think I’ve rejected several,” said Ursula.

“Really!”
Gudrun flushed dark—“But anything really worth while? Have you
really?”

“A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked him awfully,” said Ursula.

“Really! But weren’t you fearfully tempted?”

“In the abstract but not in the concrete,” said Ursula. “When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted—oh, if I were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. I’m only tempted
not
to.” The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.

“Isn’t it an amazing thing,” cried Gudrun, “how strong the temptation is, not to!” They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.

There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women. Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe.
²
Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula’s sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun’s perfect sangfroid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: “She is a smart woman.” She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life.

“I was hoping now for a man to come along,” Gudrun said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid.

“So you have come home, expecting him here?”
³
she laughed.

“Oh my dear,” cried Gudrun, strident, “I wouldn’t go out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient means—well—” she tailed off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. “Don’t you find yourself getting bored?” she asked of her sister. “Don’t you find, that things fail to materialize?
Nothing materializes!
Everything withers in the bud.”

“What withers in the bud?” asked Ursula.

“Oh, everything—oneself—things in general.” There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.

“It does frighten one,” said Ursula, and again there was a pause. “But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?”

“It seems to be the inevitable next step,” said Gudrun. Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.

“I know,” she said, “it seems like that when one thinks in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening, and saying ‘Hello,’ and giving one a kiss—”

There was a blank pause.

“Yes,” said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. “It’s just impossible. The man makes it impossible.”

“Of course there’s children—” said Ursula doubtfully.

Gudrun’s face hardened.

“Do you
really
want children, Ursula?” she asked coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula’s face.

“One feels it is still beyond one,” she said.

“Do you feel like that?” asked Gudrun. “I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.”

Gudrun looked at Ursula with a mask-like, expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.

“Perhaps it isn’t genuine,” she faltered. “Perhaps one doesn’t really want them, in one’s soul—only superficially” A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She did not want to be too definite.