The Bad Side of Books

by D. H. Lawrence

  The very word cacciatore, which means hunter, stirs one’s bile. Oh, Nimrod, oh, Bahram, put by your arrows:

  And Bahram, the great hunter: the wild ass

  Stamps o’er his bed, and cannot wake his sleep.

  Here, an infinite number of tame asses shoot over my head, if I happen to walk in the wood to look at the arbutus berries, and they never fail to rouse my ire, no matter how fast asleep it may have been.

  Man is a hunter! L’uomo è cacciatore : the Italians are rather fond of saying it. It sounds so virile. One sees Nimrod surging through the underbrush, with his spear, in the wake of a bleeding lion. And if it is a question of a man who has got a girl into trouble: ‘L’uomo è cacciatore’ – ‘man is a hunter’ – what can you expect? It behoves the ‘game’ to look out for itself. Man is a hunter!

  There used to be a vulgar song: ‘If the Missis wants to go for a row, let ’er go.’ Here it should be: ‘If the master wants to run, with a gun, let him run.’ For the pine-wood is full of them, as a dog’s back with fleas in summer. They crouch, they lurk, they stand erect, motionless as virile statues, with gun on the alert. Then bang! they have shot something, with an astonishing amount of noise. And then they run, with fierce and predatory strides, to the spot.

  There is nothing there! Nothing! The game! La caccia! – where is it? If they had been shooting at the ghost of Hamlet’s father, there could not be a blanker and more spooky emptiness. One expects to see a wounded elephant lying on its side, writhing its trunk; at the very least, a wild boar ploughing the earth in his death-agony. But no! There is nothing, just nothing at all. Man, being a hunter, is, fortunately for the rest of creation, a very bad shot.

  Nimrod, in velveteen corduroys, bandolier, cartridges, game-bag over his shoulder and gun in his hand, stands with feet apart virilissimo, on the spot where the wild boar should be, and gazes downwards at some imaginary point in underworld space. So! Man is a hunter. He casts a furtive glance around, under the arbutus bush, and a tail of his eye in my direction, knowing I am looking on in raillery. Then he hitches his game-bag more determinedly over his shoulder, grips his gun, and strides off uphill, large strides, virile as Hector. Perhaps even he is a Hector, Italianized into Ettore. Anyhow, he’s going to be the death of something or somebody, if only he can shoot straight.

  A Tuscan pine-wood is by no means a jungle. The trees are umbrella-pines, with the umbrellas open, and bare handles. They are rather parsimoniously scattered. The undergrowth, moreover, is allowed to grow only for a couple of years or so; then it is most assiduously reaped, gleaned, gathered, cleaned up clean as a lawn, for cooking Nimrod’s macaroni. So that, in a pineta, you have a piny roof over your head, and for the rest a pretty clear run for your money. So where can the game lurk? There is hardly cover for a bumble-bee. Where can the game be that is worth all this powder? The lions and wolves and boars that must prowl perilously round all these Nimrods?

  You will never know. Or not until you are going home, between the olive-trees. The hunters have been burning powder in the open, as well as in the wood: a proper fusillade. Then, on the path between the olives, you may pick up a warm, dead bullfinch, with a bit of blood on it. The little grey bird lies on its side, with its frail feet closed, and its red breast ruffled. Nimrod, having hit for once, has failed to find his quarry.

  So you will know better when the servant comes excitedly and asks: ‘Signore, do you want any game?’ Game! Splendid idea! A couple of partridges? a hare? even a wild rabbit? Why, of course! So she arrives in triumph with a knotted red handkerchief, and the not very bulky game inside it. Untie the knots! Aha! – Alas! There, in a little heap on the table, three robins, two finches, four hedge-sparrows, and two starlings, in a fluffy, coloured, feathery little heap, all the small heads rolling limp. ‘Take them away,’ you say. ‘We don’t eat little birds.’ ‘But these,’ she says, tipping up the starlings roughly, ‘these are big ones.’ ‘Not these, either, do we eat.’ ‘No?’ she exclaims, in a tone which means: ‘More fools you!’ And, disgusted, disappointed at not having sold the goods, she departs with the game.

  You will know best of all if you go to the market, and see whole yard-lengths of robins, like coral and onyx necklaces, and strings of bullfinches, goldfinches, larks, sparrows, nightingales, starlings, temptingly offered along with strings of sausages, these last looking like the strings of pearls in the show. If one bought the birds to wear as ornament, barbaric necklaces, it would be more conceivable. You can get quite a string of different-coloured ones for tenpence. But imagine the small mouthful of little bones each of these tiny carcasses must make!

  But, after all, a partridge and a pheasant are only a bit bigger than a sparrow and a finch. And compared to a flea, a robin is big game. It is all a question of dimensions. Man is a hunter. ‘If the master wants to hunt, don’t you grunt; let him hunt!’

  RETURN TO BESTWOOD (1926)

  I came home to the Midlands for a few days, at the end of September. Not that there is any home, for my parents are dead. But there are my sisters, and the district one calls home; that mining district between Nottingham and Derby.

  It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in Canal Street, New Orleans, or in the Avenue Madero, in Mexico City, or in George Street, Sydney, in Trincomallee Street, Kandy, or in Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, Bestwood, I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion. Partly I want to get back to the place as it was when I was a boy, and I waited so long to be served in the Co-op I remember our Co-op number, 1553A.L., better than the date of my birth – and when I came out hugging a string net of groceries. There was a little hedge across the road from the Co-op then, and I used to pick the green buds which we called bread-and-cheese. And there were no houses in Gabes Lane. And at the corner of Queen Street, Butcher Bob was huge and fat and taciturn.

  Butcher Bob is long dead, and the place is all built up. I am never quite sure where I am, in Nottingham Road. Walker Street is not very much changed, though, because the ash tree was cut down when I was sixteen, when I was ill. The houses are still only on one side the street, the fields on the other. And still one looks across at the amphitheatre of hills which I still find beautiful, though there are new patches of reddish houses, and a darkening of smoke. Crich is still on the sky line to the west, and the woods of Annesley to the north, and Coney Grey Farm still lies in front. And there is still a certain glamour about the country-side. Curiously enough, the more motor-cars and tram-cars and omnibuses there are rampaging down the roads, the more the country retreats into its own isolation, and becomes more mysteriously inaccessible.

  When I was a boy, the whole population lived very much more with the country. Now, they rush and tear along the roads, and have joy-rides and outings, but they never seem to touch the reality of the country-side. There are many more people, for one thing: and all these new contrivances, for another.

  The country seems, somehow, fogged over with people, and yet not really touched. It seems to lie back, away, unreached and asleep. The roads are hard and metalled and worn with everlasting rush. The very field-paths seem wider and more trodden and squalid. Wherever you go, there is the sordid sense of humanity.

  And yet the fields and the woods in between the roads and paths sleep as in a heavy, weary dream, disconnected from the modern world.

  This visit, this September, depresses me peculiarly. The weather is soft and mild, mildly sunny in that hazed, dazed, uncanny sunless sunniness which makes the Midlands peculiarly fearsome to me. I cannot, cannot accept as sunshine this thin luminous vaporousness which passes as a fine day in the place of my birth. Oh Phœbus Apollo! Surely you have turned your face aside!

  But the special depression this time is the great coal strike, still going on. In house after house, the families are
now living on bread and margarine and potatoes. The colliers get up before dawn, and are away into the last recesses of the country-side, scouring the country for blackberries, as if there were a famine. But they will sell the blackberries at fourpence a pound, and so they’ll be fourpence in pocket.

  But when I was a boy, it was utterly infra dig. for a miner to be picking blackberries. He would never have demeaned himself to such an unmanly occupation. And as to walking home with a little basket – he would almost rather have committed murder. The children might do it, or the women, or even the half grown youths. But a married, manly collier!

  But nowadays, their pride is in their pocket, and the pocket has a hole in it.

  It is another world. There are policemen everywhere, great big strange policemen with faces like a leg of mutton. Where they come from, heaven only knows: Ireland or Scotland, presumably, for they are no Englishmen. And they exist, along the country-side, in thousands. The people call them ‘blue-bottles,’ and ‘meat-flies.’ And you can hear a woman call across the street to another: ‘Seen any blow-flies about?’ – Then they turn to look at the alien policemen, and laugh shrilly.

  And this in my native place! Truly, one no longer knows the palm of his own hand. When I was a boy, we had our own police sergeant, and two young constables. And the women would as leave have thought of calling Sergeant Mellor a ‘blue-bottle’ as calling Queen Victoria one. The Sergeant was a quiet, patient man, who spent his life trying to keep people out of trouble. He was another sort of shepherd, and the miners and their children were a flock to him. The women had the utmost respect for him.

  But the women seem to have changed most in this, that they have no respect for anything. There was a scene in the market-place yesterday, a Mrs Hufton and a Mrs Rowley being taken off to court to be tried for insulting and obstructing the police. The police had been escorting the black-legs from the mines, after a so-called day’s work, and the women had made the usual row. They were two women from decent homes. In the past they would have died of shame, at having to go to court. But now, not at all.

  They had a little gang of women with them in the market-place, waving red flags and laughing loudly and using occasional bad language. There was one, the decent wife of the post-man. I had known her and played with her as a girl. But she was waving her red flag, and cheering as the motor-bus rolled up.

  The two culprits got up, hilariously, into the bus.

  ‘Good luck, old girl! Let ’em have it! Give it the blue-bottles in the neck! Tell ’em what for! Three cheers for Bestwood! Strike while the iron’s hot, girls!’

  ‘So long! So long, girls! See you soon! Merry home coming, what, eh?’

  ‘Have a good time, now! Have a good time! Stick a pin in their fat backsides, if you can’t move ’em any other road. We s’ll be thinking of you!’

  ‘So long! So long! See you soon! Who says Walker!’

  ‘E-eh! E-eh!’

  The bus rolled heavily off, with the shouting women, amid the strange hoarse cheering of the women in the little market-place. The draughty little market-place where my mother shopped on Friday evenings, in her rusty little black bonnet, and where now a group of decent women waved little red flags and hoarsely cheered two women going to court!

  O mamma mia! – as the Italians say. My dear mother, your little black bonnet would fly off your head in horrified astonishment, if you saw it now. You were so keen on progress: a decent working man, and a good wage! You paid my father’s union pay for him, for so many years! You believed so firmly in the Co-op! You were at your Women’s Guild when they brought you word your father, the old tyrannus, was dead! At the same time, you believed so absolutely in the ultimate benevolence of all the masters, of all the upper classes. One had to be grateful to them, after all!

  Grateful! You can have your cake and eat it, while the cake lasts. When the cake comes to an end, you can hand on your indigestion. Oh my dear and virtuous mother, who believed in a Utopia of goodness, so that your own people were never quite good enough for you – not even the spoiled delicate boy, myself! – oh my dear and virtuous mother, behold the indigestion we have inherited, from the cake of perfect goodness you baked too often! Nothing was good enough! We must all rise into the upper classes! Upper! Upper! Upper!

  Till at last the boots are all uppers, the sole is worn out, and we yell as we walk on stones.

  My dear, dear mother, you were so tragic, because you had nothing to be tragic about! We, on the other side, having a moral and social indigestion that would raise the wind for a thousand explosive tragedies, let off a mild crepitus ventris and shout: Have a good time, old girl! Enjoy yourself, old lass!

  Nevertheless, we have all of us ‘got on.’ The reward of goodness, in my mother’s far-off days, less than twenty years ago, was that you should ‘get on.’ Be good, and you’ll get on in life.

  Myself, a snotty-nosed little collier’s lad, I call myself at home when I sit in a heavy old Cinquecento Italian villa, of which I rent only half, even then – surely I can be considered to have ‘got on.’ When I wrote my first book, and it was going to be published – sixteen years ago – and my mother was dying, a fairly well-known editor wrote to my mother and said, of me: ‘By the time he is forty, he will be riding in his carriage.’

  To which my mother is supposed to have said, sighing, ‘Ay, if he lives to be forty!’

  Well, I am forty-one, so there’s one in the eye for that sighing remark. I was always weak in health, but my life was strong. Why had they all made up their minds that I was to die? Perhaps they thought I was too good to live. Well, in that case they were had!

  And when I was forty, I was not even in my own motor-car. But I did drive my own two horses in a light buggy (my own) on a little ranch (also my own, or my wife’s, through me) away on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. And sitting in my corduroy trousers and blue shirt, calling: ‘Get up Aaron! Ambrose!’ then I thought of Justin Harrison’s prophecy. Oh Oracle of Delphos! Oracle of Dodona! ‘Get up, Ambrose!’ Bump! went the buggy over a rock, and the pine-needles slashed my face! See him driving in his carriage, at forty! – driving it pretty badly too! Put the brake on!

  So I suppose I’ve got on, snotty-nosed little collier’s lad, of whom most of the women said: ‘He’s a nice little lad!’ They don’t say it now: if ever they say anything, which is doubtful. They’ve forgotten me entirely.

  But my sister’s ‘getting on’ is much more concrete than mine. She is almost on the spot. Within six miles of that end dwelling in The Breach, which is the house I first remember – an end house of hideous rows of miners’ dwellings, though I loved it, too – stands my sister’s new house, ‘a lovely house!’ – and her garden: ‘I wish mother could see my garden in June!’

  And if my mother did see it, what then? It is wonderful the flowers that bloom in these Midlands, in June. A northern Persephone seems to steal out from the Plutonic, coal-mining depths and give a real hoot of blossoms. But if my mother did return from the dead, and see that garden in full bloom, and the glass doors open from the hall of the new house, what then? Would she then say: It is reached! Consummatum est!

  When Jesus gave up the ghost, he cried: It is finished. Consummatum est! But was it? And if so, what? What was it that was consummate?

  Likewise, before the war, in Germany I used to see advertised in the newspapers a moustache-lifter, which you tied on at night and it would make your moustache stay turned up, like the immortal moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose moustache alone is immortal. This moustache-lifter was called: Es ist erreicht! In other words: It is reached! Consummatum est!

  Was it? Was it reached? With the moustache-lifter?

  So the ghost of my mother, in my sister’s garden. I see it each time I am there, bending over the violas, or looking up at the almond tree. Actually an almond tree! And I always ask, of the grey-haired, good little ghost: ‘Well what of it, my dear? What is the verdict?’

  But she never answers, though I press h
er:

  ‘Do look at the house, my dear! Do look at the tiled hall, and the rug from Mexico, and the brass from Venice, seen through the open doors, beyond the lilies and the carnations of the lawn beds! Do look! And do look at me, and see if I’m not a gentleman! Do say that I’m almost upper class!’

  But the dear little ghost says never a word.

  ‘Do say we’ve got on! Do say we’ve arrived. Do say it is reached, es ist erreicht, consummatum est!’

  But the little ghost turns aside, she knows I am teasing her. She gives me one look, which is a look I know, and which says: ‘I shan’t tell you, so you can’t laugh at me. You must find out for yourself.’ And she steals away, to her place, wherever it may be. – ‘In my father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.’

  The black-slate roofs beyond the wind-worn young trees at the end of the garden are the same thick layers of black roofs of blackened brick houses, as ever. There is the same smell of sulphur from the burning pit bank. Smuts fly on the white violas. There is a harsh sound of machinery. Persephone couldn’t quite get out of hell, so she let Spring fall from her lap along the upper workings.

  But no! There are no smuts, there is even no smell of the burning pit bank. They cut the bank, and the pits are not working. The strike has been going on for months. It is September, but there are lots of roses on the lawn beds.

  ‘Where shall we go this afternoon? Shall we go to Hardwick?’

  Let us go to Hardwick. I have not been for twenty years. Let us go to Hardwick: