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.
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.
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.
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.
Dear Catherine and Damian, how could I resist such equable, beautifully expressed and authoritative responses to my bad temper about Lawrence’s ‘mystic’ effusions? Thank you both. There is one other question I raised in my introductory post to this series on Women in Love that I would like to focus on. In his post, Damian quotes Lawrence saying of this novel, ‘I should like the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’. I fear this is a different case of Lawrentian sophistry. The ‘time’ cannot ‘remain unfixed’ in the novel, because the action immediately preceding it (The Rainbow) ends around 1905 and the War has manifestly not started by the end of Women in Love as no-one mentions it and if it had begun Gerald et al. could not have travelled to the Tyrol, as Lawrence knew perfectly well. The ‘time’ can therefore only remain fixed. Moreover, I have had quite a bit to do with the War in the last ten years and I have not felt/noticed one shred of ‘the bitterness of the war’ in two close readings of Women in Love in three months. One even reads serious assertions that the novel is a criticism of militarism. I can’t ‘take for granted’ something in the characters just because the author ‘explaining’ his own work tells me to: it is surely a case here of ‘always trust the novel, not the novelist’. The only historical reference to the War in the novel comes in the last two pages, where Birkin ‘cried to himself’ that he ‘didn’t want it to be like this’ and Ursula ‘could but think of the Kaiser’s: “Ich habe es nicht gewollt” [i.e. “I did not want it [the War]”]’. The Kaiser uttered this carefully staged pronouncement in August 1915, long after the end of the novel. For me, at least, it strikes an utterly jarring, gutwrenchingly false and unartistic note. It is a ridiculous anachronism and Lawrence has only introduced it for his private didactic purposes. Conscious that (in Damian’s words) I am ‘quoting Lawrence for contrary purposes’, I can only say that I am reminded of what Lawrence wrote of Tolstoi and Anna Karenina: ‘It is such a bore that nearly all great novelists have a didactic purpose […] directly opposite to their passional inspiration’! However much one admires Lawrence as a writer, one must, I feel, recognise that the wrongheadedness and wishful thinking of what he said about the time remaining ‘unfixed’ and the characters being suffused with the ‘bitterness of the war’ is a typical example of the perversity and contrarianism that repel many people from him.
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!
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.
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.
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.