These were sentiments Lawrence held—with alternating scorn and compassion—throughout his life, sentiments he feared applied to himself as well as to the people among whom he grew. Thus, for his own purposes, as a writer, he loved, hated, and exploited the Miriams but could neither give nor deny them their due. Instead, he lets Paul Morel drive himself crazy over this dilemma. Hence in one paragraph: “There was … the most intense pleasure in talking about his work to Miriam. All his passion, all his wild blood, went into this intercourse with her, when he talked and conceived his work. She brought forth to him his imaginations.” But then, Miriam’s “intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated [him] into a frenzy … ‘Why can’t you laugh?’ he said. ‘You never laugh laughter. You only laugh when something is odd or incongruous, and then it almost seems to hurt you … When you laugh I could always cry; it seems as if it shows up your suffering. Oh, you make me knit the brows of my very soul … I’m so damned spiritual with you always!… and I don’t want to be spiritual.’” Then, stricken by his own evil behavior, he sees her with “her soul … naked in her great dark eyes, and there was the same yearning appeal upon her.”
This habit of Lawrence’s, of making the character suffer two and even three reversals of judgment in the space of a single paragraph, is a vivid presence in Sons and Lovers. It not only signifies the routine instability of one’s actual moods, it nails the torment at the heart of any decision rooted in mixed emotions, and the second—no, not the second, the third—time I read the book it hit me hard. I was now old enough to have experienced many times over the alarming bewilderment of my own erratic behavior—the morning of my first wedding day I was nearly hit by a truck because, as I crossed the street, I was still saying yes, no, yes, no to myself, and failed to stop walking when the light turned red—and I could feel viscerally the shock of Lawrence’s acuity in tracing the staccato nature of emotional confusion.
When at last Paul persuades Miriam to lie down with him it is, of course, a disaster. They fuck for a week—for that is what they do, fuck not make love—but after every episode each is left feeling alone, alone and in despair. We don’t know what Miriam is going through, but Paul: “He had always, almost wilfully, to … act from the brute strength of his own feelings. And he could not do it often, and there remained afterwards always the sense of failure and of death. If he were really with her he had to put aside himself and his desire. If he would have her, he had to put her aside.”
I was nearly thirty the second time I read the book and it was only now that I realized that never for a moment do we see Miriam as she might have seen herself. From start to finish, Miriam remains “other,” a creature ever and only instrumental in Paul’s battle with his own frustrations. He doesn’t know what he wants from her, but whatever it is, he’s not getting it and that’s all he can concentrate on. “You don’t want to love,” he raves at her, “your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved … You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.” Exactly what his mother thinks of Miriam, for her own reasons: “She’s not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him … she will suck him up.” And exactly what I thought the first time I read the book, as I did with all the women in all the books I was then reading—their sole reason for living was to thwart the male protagonist, the one with whom I identified. The possibility that Miriam is laboring under the same blindsided narrowness that hinders Paul and Mrs. Morel—that idea was beyond all of us.
Enter Clara, a working-class feminist of the 1880s who has had enough education and experience so that she, too, feels herself to be “different.” Unlike Miriam, Clara is possessed of a haughty reserve that makes her seem mysterious and exciting—even though she’s a mass of enervating contradiction: hungry for life yet fearful and suspicious of all who approach her. Nonetheless, she falls for Paul, and she sleeps with him. With Clara he finally knows the rapture of sex; with Clara, he and his partner are drowning together. It is here in bed with Clara that his separation from adolescence—he’s twenty-three!—is completed, and the alarming complexity of life, with all its shimmering instability, begins to take hold of him.
When at last Paul and Clara lie down together, the love they make is not only rapturous, the earth moves: “And after such an evening they both were very still, having known the immensity of passion … childish and wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their innocence and realized the magnificence of the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and the great day of humanity … to know the tremendous living flood which carried them always, gave them rest within themselves. If so great a magnificent power could overwhelm them, identify them altogether with itself, so that they knew they were only grains in the tremendous heave that lifted every grass blade its little height, and every tree, and living thing, then why fret about themselves? They could let themselves be carried by life … There was a verification which they had had together. Nothing could nullify it. Nothing could take it away.”
Oh no?
A mere few months and ten pages later: “Clara knew this held him to her, so she trusted altogether to the passion. It, however,” had begun to fail her. “They did not often reach again the height” of the times when they experienced the oceanic. “Gradually, some mechanical effort spoilt their loving, or … often he seemed merely to be running on alone; often they realized it had been a failure, not what they had wanted.” One night, “he left her, knowing that evening had only made a little split between them. Their loving grew more mechanical, without the marvelous glamor.” Within the year they had parted.
It is passages like these two that mark the modernity of the book. Modernity was pushing all writers to put on the page the entire truth of whatever it was the writer found festering in the human psyche: not only sorrow and disorder, but sadism, alienation, and the brevity of passion. I now think that Lawrence saw this last by the time Sons and Lovers was published—he was then twenty-seven—but the insight alone could not stack up against the pressure of that other thing that he also saw, and that was to be his life’s obsession: that to be deprived of experience of the senses, as bourgeois society demanded we be, was truly a sin against life.
Lawrence didn’t know any more than Thomas Hardy on this score, or H. G. Wells or George Meredith, for that matter: grown-up writers all. It was simply the urgency with which he insisted on outing what they all knew but could not address directly that set him apart. He was like an abolitionist among antislavery liberals who say yes, slavery is terrible, but in time it will die out, be patient, while the abolitionist says fuck that, now or never, and goes to war.
And it was true: to feel badly but calmly about what is spiritually deforming is the mediocre norm; to rage against it is to become an instrument of revolutionary change. In literature one does that by naming the crime against nature without pity or caution or euphemism; renouncing in no uncertain terms, as W. H. Auden had it, “the laziness or fear which makes people prefer second-hand experience to the shock of looking and listening for themselves.”
The third time I read Sons and Lovers—it was now the early 1970s—I was in the midst of divorcing my second husband. All around me, friends, relatives, even neighbors felt free to cry at me, “Why are you doing this? What is it you want?” The answers, in my own ears, sounded lame. Why had I left him? After all, I wasn’t married to a man I didn’t love, I wasn’t being forced to choose between work and marriage, our sex life was fine. But the times were encouraging me to look with new, more unafraid eyes at what I was now feeling driven to do and, somehow, involving myself once again in the harrowing life of the Morels felt intimately related to the task at hand.
I had married—twice!—because when I was young, a woman alone was a woman stigmatized as unnatural, undesirable, un-everything. Yet each time around I discovered that I
shrank from being seen as one half of a couple—I actually flinched when addressed as “Mrs.”—and while I liked my in-laws well enough, I was intensely bored by family life. Worst of all, there were times when, during a cozy evening at home, alone with my husband, I felt buried alive. The simple heart of the matter was: I didn’t want to be married. I turned the pages of Lawrence’s great novel as though reading Braille, hoping to gain for myself the freedom from emotional blindness the book was urging on its readers.
Within the seven years following the publication of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence wrote his two acknowledged masterpieces, The Rainbow and Women in Love. He said when he started them that he would not again write the way he did of the Morels: graphically and with transparency. No, now he would make what he felt dense with meaning; wild and large and mythic. And so he did. In these books he certainly has got down brilliantly the crime of suppressed feeling—this is where his genius succeeds without parallel. But the part in him that wants to believe in the everlasting good of erotic freedom, there anyone can now feel him plunged in chaos, the writing in these novels in a fever because he suspects that what he insists is true may not, in fact, be true.
Lawrence was writing at the beginning of the Freudian century, the time when Western culture was on the verge of validating his own inner torment. His metaphor—the repression of the erotic—was, in fact, to become the wedge that modernism used to pry open the uncharted territory of human consciousness. If Lawrence were alive today, this metaphor would not be available to him because today all have had long experience of the sexual freedom once denied, and have discovered firsthand that the making of a self from the inside out is not to be achieved through the senses alone. Not only does sexual ecstasy not deliver us to ourselves, one must have a self already in place to know what to do with it, should it come.
That insight, however, was fifty years down the road for all of us. Meanwhile, the longing to forge a life from the experience of a Great Passion—whatever the outcome, whatever the cost—haunted the imagination of those of my generation who pined to live life on a grand scale; and no one pined more for it than high-minded literary young women like myself for whom the ideal carried special weight.
TWO
In my mid-twenties—still a novice insofar as erotic experience went—I, along with many of my schoolmates, became besotted with Colette, and for many years we read her with the absorption of awestruck students in the presence of a master teacher. That is, we read her to learn better who we were, and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live. The condition, of course, was that we were women and, all other things being equal, Love (as we had been told since infancy) was the territory upon which our particular battle with Life was to be pitched. Not another living writer, it seemed to us, understood our situation as well as Colette. No one came even close. In her work we could see ourselves not as we were, but as we were likely to become. It was the potential for self-recognition that made Colette’s novels so compelling, sounded depths of understanding that were like nothing we had ever encountered. She seemed to know everything that actually went on inside a woman “in the grip.” Her wisdom riveted your eyes to the page, gathered up your scattered, racing inattention, made of A Woman in Love as serious a concern for the modern novel as War and Peace or The Search for God. As you read on in Colette in the 1950s, the noise within died down; at the center, a great stillness began to gather; a point of entry into the human condition was about to be broached.
It was, of course, a given among us that Chéri and The Last of Chéri—the sequential story of an aging courtesan and her empty-hearted young lover—was Colette’s twin masterpiece, but the two books that became imprinted on me were The Vagabond and The Shackle. Here, Colette dramatized the “condition” in the voice (nakedly autobiographical) of a thirty-three-year-old woman—divorced, sexually experienced, on her own (this identity alone made her thrilling)—for the moment a stage performer on the road with a theatrical troupe, but within herself profoundly at loose ends. Why? Because the question of whether she is to be an independent working woman or a woman given over to Love torments her. In this voice we found a glamorous loneliness, the kind we fantasized as emblematic of the contemporary woman who could throw off the despair of an unhappy marriage, but would then find that along with freedom from the conventions came the potential for another kind of despair, the despair that in Colette’s hands became intensely romantic.
For years I had by heart the following passage from The Vagabond:
Behold me then, just as I am! This evening I shall not be able to escape the meeting in the long mirror, the soliloquy which I have a hundred times avoided, accepted, fled from, taken up again and broken off. I feel in advance, alas, the uselessness of trying to change the subject. This evening I shall not feel sleepy, and the spell of a book … even that spell will not be able to distract me from myself.
Behold me then, just as I am! Alone, alone, and for the rest of my life, no doubt.
Alone! Really one might think I was pitying myself for it!
If you live alone, says a friend, it’s because you really want to, isn’t it?
Certainly, I “really” want to, and in fact I want to, quite simply. Only, well … there are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a poison which makes you beat your head against the wall.
How I resonated at twenty-three to the drama—the sheer poetry!—of this scenario. Renée Néré, the astonishingly forthright narrator of The Vagabond and The Shackle, is a woman whose fractured identity is central to her existence. She has written books, divorced a despotic husband, gone on the stage, but her hold on her newfound independence is transparently shaky. Take, for instance, the curious business of her relation to her own writing. Although she has published two books, writing is a fugitive activity for Renée. Why? The impulse, quite simply, is not strong enough:
From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe … The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar. It takes up too much time to write. And the trouble is, I am no Balzac! The fragile story I am constructing crumbles away when the tradesman rings, or the shoemaker sends in his bill, when the solicitor, or one’s counsel, telephones, or when the theatrical agent summons me to his office.
Again, a situation my friends and I knew all too well … and one I was to go on “knowing” for years to come.
Much as she wishes to be “free,” and much as she associates freedom with work, Renée’s resolve is repeatedly undermined by her conflicted desire for love. Struggle as she may, Colette is saying, a woman is always torn between the longing for independence and the even greater longing for passion. This is the dilemma that commands Renée’s real attention. Love has come, and love has gone: she knows its pleasures and its pains inside out. Should it come again, she muses repeatedly, will she give in to the siren song or will she resist it? She thinks about the emotional slavery that accompanies desire: the longings, the anxieties, the potential for humiliation. Still, the lure is powerful. The war within provides the excitement of transgression.
This internal argument about whether or not to resist love is the remarkably sustained subject of the two novels that Renée Néré narrates. In The Vagabond she will renounce it, in The Shackle she will knuckle under to it. The first gratified us, the second shocked us, but, either way, we were in thrall. What carried the day was the significance, in Colette’s hands, of erotic obsession—which of course we were all calling love. In these books Love with a capital L is the glory and the despair equally of a woman’s life; to experience both at once (what were we thinking!) was to achieve transcendence. “What torments you’ve thrust me into all over again,” Renée cries to the friend who introduces her to a new lover. “Torments,” she adds reverently, “that I wouldn’t exchange for all the greatest joys.” Love is the divine stigma upon which Colette’s unique powers of observation were ever tra
ined.
When I came to read these books again for the first time in a half century, I found the experience unsettling. The wholly unexpected occurred: I came away with the bad taste of revised feelings in my mouth. This time around I found myself thinking, How brilliantly Colette evokes Renée—the pathologic insecurity, the endless fantasizing, the morbid preoccupation with aging—but how shallow her situation seems now. Repeatedly, Renée’s reflections lead back only and ever to a self that remains unknowing—and clearly are the thoughts of a writer who knows no more than her characters know.
Most striking, for me—the single greatest change, in fact, in my feeling about these novels—was the sense I now had that everything was taking place in a vacuum. When I had read Colette before, the entire world seemed to collect around what I took to be the narrator’s wisdom. Now that wisdom seemed narrow and confined. Vanity alone gives her whatever insight into an affair she may gain. While she cannot see that she makes instrumental use of her lovers, she can easily see that she herself has no reality for them and, in her thoughts, she is quick to condemn them for an emotional shallowness she cannot spot in herself:
“How is it that he, who is in love with me,” she thinks of Max, her lover in The Vagabond,
is not in the least disturbed that he knows me so little? He clearly never gives that a thought … [never] does he show any eagerness to find out what I am like, to question me or read my character, and I notice that he pays more attention to the play of light on my hair than to what I am saying … How strange all that is! There he sits close to me … [but] he is not there, he is a thousand leagues away! I keep wanting to get up and say to him: “Why are you here? Go away!” And I do nothing of the kind. Does he think? Does he read? Does he work? I believe he belongs to that large rather commonplace class of persons who are interested in everything and do absolutely nothing. Not a trace of wit, a certain quickness of comprehension, a very adequate vocabulary enhanced by a beautiful rich voice, that readiness to laugh with a childish gaiety that one sees in many men—such is my admirer.
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