‘All feelings belong to the body, and are only recognized by the mind.’ This statement by Lawrence can be taken as a categorical refutation of another manner of presenting human beings in fiction, one which was touched on by Patrick Miles in his post about two late novels by Henry James last week (‘the presence of the living and breathing human body [in these novels] is negligible’). Lawrence’s statement explodes a landmine under Edwardian consciousness and convention. True, it comes late on in Lawrence, in his essay on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1929; but this fundamental belief informs all Lawrence’s writing, from the very beginning. It certainly motivates a very early story, written in 1909 when he was only 24, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. First published in The English Review in 1911, the final version of the story appeared in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in 1914; quotation here is made from the text edited by Brian Finney for Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1982, pp. 88-105). It should be noted at the outset that during this process Lawrence made significant alterations.
The subject of this story is an incident which would have been not uncommon within the author’s experience: the death of a miner in a pit accident. What makes the story slightly different is that the man here, Walter Bates, is killed while working alone down the mine, after his colleagues have ended their shift. But what makes it entirely different from such a story conceived merely as a material event, is the fact that Lawrence’s real subject is Walter Bates’s wife Elizabeth, and the flux of her feelings as she waits that evening for her husband. First she waits angrily, supposing that he has gone drinking before coming home; then fearfully, as she conceives of other possibilities for his non-appearance; and ultimately with the full realization of what his death means to her. In these concluding pages the young writer announces his full ambition, and proves he is equal to it, sounding the depth of the woman’s feeling and laying out for the reader, as on an extraordinary scroll, the lucid and bewildering awareness which she is brought to.
The opening paragraph itself has been justly praised, as Lawrence provides the physical context of the colliery and atmosphere with startling concreteness and economy. The engine providing the ‘slow inevitable movement’ of the black coal trucks is contrasted with the energy of a startled colt, that ‘outdistanced it at a canter’; but the natural world here is far from energetic. ‘The fields were dreary and forsaken […] oak leaves dropped noiselessly’. We then focus on a ‘low cottage,’ whose brickyard boasts ‘some ‘dishevelled pink chrysanthemums’, which serve to introduce Elizabeth Bates, the miner’s wife, ‘her mouth […] closed with disillusionment’. We meet her five-year-old son, whom she reproves for tearing at the chrysanthemums (a sprig of which she puts in her apron), and her father, who drives the engine. She is clearly unhappy that her widowed father is remarrying.
Lawrence praised George Eliot for showing later novelists the way ‘by putting all the action inside’. This is exactly what he himself proceeds to do, but in a more modern idiom, in line with his own developing theory of how feelings operate, how they may be understood and described. It is when the woman goes inside the house, superficially engaged in attending to her children (there is also a daughter), that Lawrence goes inside her, and explores what is happening beyond her own volition or control – while time advances (as it does throughout the story) mechanically, like the coal trucks…half past four, quarter to five, and so on. We also learn that not the least of what goes on inside her is that she is pregnant.
Meanwhile, the daughter Annie notices the chrysanthemums, and enthuses about them; which only prompts a derisive summary from the mother:
It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.
But immediately after this, the pointed symbolism of the chrysanthemums is shouldered aside by the dramatic irony of the wife’s angry exclamation: ‘He needn’t come rolling in here in his pit-dirt, for I won’t wash him. He can lie on the floor.’ And this feeling then assumes a physical reality, via an extraordinary animal metaphor: ‘Her anger wearied itself, lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes even her anger quailed and shrank.’ As the evening wears on, and the children fret, ‘her anger was tinged with fear’.
This fear is soon justified as she perceives her neighbours’ concern: ‘At this, suddenly all the blood in her body seemed to switch away from her heart.’ Undercutting convention, the body and the blood insist on speaking their own language. When Elizabeth Bates hears ‘the rapid chuff of the winding-engine at the pit […] Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood’. When her husband’s mother appears, ominously in her black shawl, the wife begins to admit to herself the worst possibility: ‘“Is he dead?” she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently’; and her emotions are again rendered with surprising precision, as ‘The tears offered to come to her eyes’. The old woman laments, self-pityingly (her emotions by contrast are quite conventional); and eventually, ‘at half past ten’ a group of miners bring the body. ‘“They’re bringin’ ‘im, Missis,” he said. Elizabeth’s heart halted a moment. Then it surged on again, almost suffocating her.’ Her husband, we are told, has been suffocated — ‘smothered’ — by a fall of rock; Lawrence uses this parallel, once again, to establish the literal link, the balancing of physical realities. As they leave, stepping over the body, one of the men knocks over a vase of chrysanthemums (the symbolism is not forgotten).
It is at this point, where the ‘plot’ ends — and where many a short story would also terminate — that Lawrence begins his burrowing into the woman’s deeper and unacknowledged self, to reveal the awareness that will assert itself at moments like this from her traumatized body: arrested as it is beside the dead body of her husband. Elizabeth Bates is looking at death still from the outside. Her social self, with its irritations and anxieties, is here ‘countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him’. But she must wash the body. ‘She was afraid, with a bottomless fear, so she ministered to him.’ The mother and the wife work together at this task:
They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.
Lawrence now explores and illustrates this extreme of isolation, channelling through the woman his own highly-charged and powerfully imaged perceptions: ‘Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. […] Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living?’ She feels it is the ‘false’ intimacy of marriage, and the marriage bed, which has obscured this the most:
There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now.
This chilling idea is followed up with an image which would recur, curiously, in another context, in writing about intimate combat (in and under the trenches) in the First World War : ‘They had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought.’ As her anger, earlier, was animal, now her fear becomes concrete, mineral: ‘In her womb was ice of fear […] The child was like ice in her womb.’ And the pregnancy provides part of her realization:
He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother — but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife.
She can even project herself into the dead man’s consciousness, in sympathy: ‘He, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. […] He had been her husband. But how little!’ This imaginative dilation complicates the action: ‘She was almost ashamed to handle him; what right had she or anyone to lay hands on him; but her touch was humble on his body.’ The body exacts its due, to the end.
We know that it was partly the experience of Lawrence’s aunt Polly, who had lost her husband in a mining accident, that provided the frame for this story; but the depth of perception here derives more from his highly sensitive reaction to his parents’ marriage, to be presented more fully and with more complexity in Sons and Lovers. And in addition I would like to quote the point made (in a personal email) by my learned Lawrentian friend Michael Bell, concerning the significance of the changes made through successive versions of the story, which have not been my main focus here:
The point about ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is that in the first version the wife remains hostile to the husband even in death, but by the final version she undergoes a reversal of attitude and sees herself as having failed to accept and love him: she adopts the critique of herself that Lawrence makes of Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers to some degree and more distinctly in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, which is a dramatic version of the ‘Odour’ story.
Penetrating and unsparing as is Elizabeth Bates’s perception, this fundamentally post-Edwardian story is not, of course, the author’s last word on the possibilities of human relationship. As much of Lawrence’s writing, early and late, makes plain, it is relationships formed in the context of modern industrialism that typically lead to such a bleak conclusion. In other, saner, contexts, the marriage of true minds — and bodies — is still possible. Tom and Lydia Brangwen plumb other, richer depths in their life together on Marsh Farm in The Rainbow: Tom’s view is that his whole life had ‘amounted to the long marital embrace with his wife’. Their grand-daughter Ursula finds her fulfilment likewise with Birkin in Women in Love, their coming together being described by Lawrence as ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’.
© Damian Grant, 2022
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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.
Birkin’s and Ursula’s coming together was ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’… No Jamesian loquaciousness-ness there, then! And yet are the last two pages of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ overwritten? Is all the ‘free indirect speech’ a bit wobbly and unbelievable? Does Lawrence ‘know’ too much here and ‘tell’ too much himself? (‘The children had come, for some mysterious reason’…) I cannot help feeling the story isn’t totally successful despite his rewrites?
Patrick: it’s not like you (connoisseur of the contingent) to expect to find anything ‘totally successful’ in human endeavour. The figure in the carpet — to steal an image from James! — is the fault that the oriental weaver makes, deliberately, to avoid such hubris. And: ‘fail better’, remember?
But within the scale of relative success, which we inhabit, I do feel that Lawrence does miraculously well in his unfolding here of the widowed woman’s feelings. As to how he does this; whose feelings these really are; whether we call the method ‘free indirect speech’, or telling rather than showing, I can’t do better than recall Ulysses’ description of the overseeing power of state intelligence (in Troilus and Cressida), which ‘can thoughts unveil / In their dumb cradles’. Sinister enough in this context; but if we apply it to the creative process, it identifies that truly miraculous reaching beyond (yes: into things ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’) which a supreme artist can persuade that ‘dumb cradle’ to speak…its primal, preternatural words.
As Lawrence said elsewhere: ‘My task as a novelist is to know the feelings inside a man, and to make new feelings conscious.’ This he achieves, I think, as far as is artistically possible, in the story which we both admire.
I struggle in vain to free myself from such a consummate rhetorical net thrown over me, Damian! I can but mutter that because Lawrence is still experimenting in this early masterpiece with his own language to describe feelings, perhaps we don’t always believe that it is Mrs Bates’s internalised language..?
There is a slightly similar problem with the chrysanths. ‘Odour’ is clearly a word of a different register from that of the characters in the story, and even of the narrator, who only use ‘smell’. In fact ‘odour’ is literary, and the idea that chrysanthemums are associated with death and decay is purely literary and musical: the working class growers of the early twentieth century loved them for their vibrant yet subtle colours and their beauty, it was only certain poems and Puccini’s famous funereal quartet of 1890, Crisantemi, that linked them to death. In the East, chrysanthemums are synonymous with life, health, happiness, longevity. And in any case, in Italy it is only the white chrysanthemum that is associated with funerals. This layer of the story, then, could be said to be Lawrence’s literary man’s imposition; it is noticeable that the girl Annie finds the flowers ‘smell beautiful’… When Lawrence tells us later that ‘there was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room’, I am slightly loath to believe that this is Mrs Bates’s perception.
On the other hand, as a member of a chrysanthemum society for twenty years and an afficionado of Twigs Way’s magisterial Chrysanthemum (Reaktion Books, 2020), I can confirm that the miner Walter Bates’s obsession with growing the flower is historically completely accurate and I have known at least one marriage break up over chrysanthemums. Elizabeth Bates cannot, until the very end perhaps, come to terms with Walter Bates’s ‘otherness’, of which his chrysanthemum growing is a prime example. She is, in fact, jealous of chrysanthemums.
Patrick: you talk of being entangled in rhetorical nets! But in this latest comment you have buried me in compost, offloaded a whole Kew Gardens-worth of chrysanthemum lore and logic (not to mention music) which leaves me leafless, stripped bare of argument.
But grasping at straws, I can at least agree with you about the falsity, the artificiality of the word ‘odour’ in the title of the story. Yes; this is perhaps Lawrence going for an ‘upgrade’, getting a bit above himself — which he would normally scorn to do. The word ‘odour’ is as you say from a different register; we would rather expect to (and do) find it in Eliot’s The Waste Land, recycling Enobarbus’s very upmarket Cleopatra: on whose barge ‘strange synthetic perfumes…drowned the sense in odours’ (lines 87-9). It is significant, I think, that in the famous passage in Sons and Lovers where Mrs Morel is startled by the lilies ‘reeling in the moonlight’, Lawrence does not use the word ‘odour’; ‘scent’ and ‘perfume’ are enough for him.
And for her. But how much of Mrs Morel’s interior life — like that of Mrs Bates — is hers, and how much the intrusive author’s, is surely one of those will-o’-the wisp questions which might enable us to do critical somersaults to exercise ourselves but which must remain unresolvable — like the mathematicians’ pi. As Gustave Flaubert said: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Was this a boast, or an inculpation?
Nice to read this – if it’s the same Damian Grant, I remember some very enjoyable tutorials from my time as an undergraduate at Manchester University in the late 1980s.
Dear Rob Langham: very kind of you to comment. And to remember those tutorials; because yes, it is the very same DG (well, snowed on by the years), as plied his trade in Manchester all those years ago. Now retired, of course, and migrated to France; taken French nationality, in fact (dual), in protest at Brexit lies and littleness. But Patrick’s Calderonia–glad to meet you here–keeps me firmly rooted in the UK–as well as family ties, friends, football, cricket, and poetry magazines. Thought I was at a safe distance from the coronation; but no–there was six hours of it on French TV (much to the irritation of true republicans). Warm wishes to you.