by Rick Gekoski
It was a pretty enticing thought, this menstrual-blood-quaffing Valkyrie seducing my Barbara. I could see the headline already: ‘Lecturer Watches As Aussie Vampire Eats Wife!’ A few weeks later we found an adequate flat in Leamington, and invited Germaine back to supper. I don’t think we ever found a date that suited all of us – her calendar, unlike ours, was always full. Anyway, she’d helped us through a crisis, and after that rather kept her distance. I didn’t mind: it had been exceedingly kind of her to intervene, and she had plenty to be getting on with. Within a year she had resigned from Warwick, gone abroad, and moved into a more exciting world. No more English Department, no more white tiles, no more unhappy colleagues. It must have been a considerable relief. It was to take me thirteen more years before I had the nerve to do the same.
Barbara had ironically ended up in a maximally uncomfortable milieu: marooned amongst self-satisfied academics, only five miles from her old home in Kenilworth. She had none of Germaine’s swagger, yet The Female Eunuch had an effect on her, on both of us, which neither of us would have fully registered at the time. There are books that produce epiphanies – as Hume had done for me, at eighteen – but The Female Eunuch worked on us imperceptibly, in combination with a number of cognate influences. The mature woman that Barbara came to be was, indeed, tougher, sassier, more socially confident, more inclined to seek responsibility on her own terms. She became a good painter, trained as a homeopath and, echoing in her soul somewhere, I expect she would acknowledge the voice of Germaine Greer.
It didn’t work that way for me, of course, it couldn’t have. But from the time of the publication of The Female Eunuch it became a more complex, more embattled, and certainly a more interesting thing to be not a mere male, a penis-toting animal, but a man. The Female Eunuch set an unprecedented problem for men of the time: if you disagreed with and opposed it, you found yourself in the company of stodgy, generally right-wing, anti-feminists; if you were generally well disposed, you acceded to a description of yourself which was unbearable.
Germaine knew this was a likely response, of course, and it was part of her rhetorical strategy, as the sentences with which the book ends make clear: ‘Privileged women will pluck at your sleeve and seek to enlist you in the “fight” for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive. The old process must be broken, not made new. Bitter women will call you to rebellion, but you have too much to do. What will you do?’
The sentence may have been directed primarily towards women readers, but it felt as if it was aimed directly and threateningly at me. Considered thus, The Female Eunuch was like a terrorist attack: it was designed to distress, to cause outrage and to provoke just that response which would heighten the tension that it described and bring it to boiling point. I could see this of course – you couldn’t miss it – but the book left you with no room to negotiate. I admired the spirit and voice without sharing the analysis or conclusions. I carped, I argued, I quoted selected passages with disdain. It made me defensive, sulky, slightly desperate. I suspect that Germaine would have said that, under the pressure she had imposed, I revealed myself for what I was. It wasn’t a comfortable process, and even now I am not sure I would thank her for it.
11
HIGHLY ORCHESTRATED
You’ve got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear – even in the self.
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
If you want to understand the difference between sense and sensibility, the following instance, abstracted from one of my Oxford DPhil tutorials, may be instructive. John Bayley and I were talking about Lawrence’s Women in Love. I don’t remember why: might it have had something to do with endings? Or perhaps with the nature of love (his The Characters of Love is a remarkable book). I’d inherited John for a year while my thesis supervisor J.I.M. Stewart was on leave, presumably to write another of his Inspector Appleby books. (‘Not thrillers, dear boy, I think of them as parodies of thrillers.’)
Bayley was more fun than Stewart, who had confined our very occasional tutorials to correcting the spelling of my latest chapter, and describing to me the Regius Professor of Greek’s erotica collection.
‘Can you take me to see it?’
‘Certainly not.’
Bayley, though, actually engaged with the words on the page, and I learned a lot from him, if only obliquely. Everything about John was oblique, and one could never predict what he might say next. He was illuminatingly insightful, whimsical and puckish, his premises opaque, his procedures impenetrable. There was a cultivated femininity in his sensitivities. He had a face and demeanour right out of the benign children’s books of Edwardian literature, a Bunterish affability which concealed a mind like a velvet trap. It is inconceivable that he might have had followers, as Leavis did. You couldn’t become a Bayleian.
His stuttering was not the usual Oxford affectation – they don’t do it in Cambridge – but a desperate groping for the next syllable, leaving his listener praying that he would either make it – soon! – or give up trying. You had to be patient, for after a time, as you settled in to the tutorial, he would calm a little, and his performance improve. I remember listening to him lecture at the University of Warwick, some years later, while sitting next to his wife, Iris Murdoch, who was clenched with apprehension as John began, stutteringly.
‘He’s always much better after the first few minutes,’ she said to me, anxiously clutching my hand, and he was, but those moments seemed interminable. In tutorials he had learned to let his students start the talking, and I think it was I who had broached the topic of Women in Love.
‘I love the ending,’ I said. ‘You know, when they are talking about love and relations between the sexes? And it ends with a disagreement, when Birkin says he needs two kinds of love, and Ursula disagrees, and he just says “I don’t believe that . . .” And that’s it, that’s the final line. It’s a wonderful ending, so shadowy and inconclusive.’
John considered this for a moment.
‘I’ve always th-th-thought it r-rather h-h-highly orch-orchorchestrated.’
The insight gains from having been stuttered, as if the perception were hard won. But it had the ring of some delicately perceived truth that had been unavailable to me. My reading of the ending was not wrong, it was sensible enough, but it was unremarkable. It took what was given, without grasping the tonality, the latent content, the authorial control.
To think like that, it seemed, you had to have real sensibility, and to be English. I was American: apparently we were bright enough, but earnest, too new world – almost as bad as Australians really – lacking in subtlety of mind, our feelings deep, perhaps, but all in a flow, without rivulets, eddies, or tributaries.
In those days people still took Lawrence seriously, and he had a central place in the canon and syllabus of twentieth-century fiction in a way that, I gather, he no longer does. I suspect he is now seen as dated and more than faintly ridiculous, embarrassing almost. But in the sixties and seventies, he was celebrated as one of the key figures of what Leavis had called The Great Tradition.
Lawrence is usually taught alongside Joyce in courses on modernism – Women in Love was published only a year before Ulysses– but if you were a serious reader of serious literature, Leavis required that you chose between Lawrence and Joyce. Joyce may have been technically precocious, but was reprehensibly self-referring, unhealthy, and ultimately solipsistic:
. . . there is no organic principle determining, informing and controlling into a vital whole, the elaborate analogical structure, the extraordinary variety of technical devices, the attempts at an exhaustive rendering of consciousness, for which Ulysses is remarkable . . . It is rather, I think, a dead end, or at least a pointer to disintegration . . .
The terminology explicitly echoes Lawrence: ‘vital’ lack of the ‘organic’ is undesirable, ‘disintegration’ is the process of breaking down into corruption, ‘cosmopolitan’ is used pejoratively, ‘exhaustive . . . consciousness’ is a s
ymptom of sickness of being. We might as well be listening to Rupert Birkin, the lead voice of Women in Love.
When I announced, in my first year teaching at Warwick, that I intended to offer an ‘option’ on Lawrence, it was regarded by my colleagues as a worthy choice (if a bit old hat), and a tempting one by the students. So many signed up that the chairman warned me that I wouldn’t be given credit for teaching more than two seminar groups. I did three anyway, to accommodate the thirty takers, delighted that so many had chosen Lawrence (and me). We read the major novels, the short stories, essays and travel books, and the Collected Letters, went on a visit to Eastwood and Lawrence country, even went down a mine. (I was too frightened and stayed above in the pub, having a pint.)
We agreed with Leavis that, in some fashion worth investigating, Lawrence could be good for you: he had, according to his disciple, ‘a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’. These very qualities, that now make me recoil with a sceptical fastidiousness that does me no credit, then seemed to me highly desirable, and worth teasing out from the multiple challenges and difficulties of the major Lawrence works. And of these works there seemed little question that Women in Love was the key text.
Though published in 1921, the novel is a companion piece to The Rainbow (1915) and was originally part of the same project, which was to be titled The Sisters. Women in Love is written during the First War, and is apparently set just before it, though the tone of the novel, and its major themes, seem clearly to reflect the chaos and disintegration of that period. How else is one to explain the novel’s barrage of reference to dissolution, corruption, disintegration and chaos: ‘It’s the lie that kills. If we want hate, let us have it – death, murder, torture, violent destruction – let us have it: but not in the name of love . . . I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away . . . it would be better.’
If it were just Rupert Birkin who felt so, we would presume some individual pathology, but it is a feeling shared variously by his girlfriend Ursula, her sister Gudrun and her lover Gerald Crich, the son of the local colliery owner, and must be assumed to have some general significance. Birkin believes that mankind has reached the end of a stage of being, which is now ‘obsolete’. We need to find a way to enter into some new and more satisfactory mode of being, or what he calls ‘form of life’. It is by no means clear what any of this means. Birkin says it one way, then another. Tries a formulation, abandons it in disgust, reformulates, re-abandons. He knows something is critically wrong, but can neither describe nor overcome it: indeed the two processes are knotted in such a way that unless he finds the right language he cannot locate the right form of life, and vice versa. So two projects are intertwined for him: to find a new language, and a new way of being. If the one fails, so will the other, and yet neither is possible without the other having been accomplished. We are thus ‘imprisoned’, Birkin insists, within a ‘limited, false set of concepts’. It is the archetypal Wittgensteinian conundrum, before Wittgenstein first formulated it.
Women in Love is about the yearning for freedom, the struggle and dissatisfaction of sensing the possibility of something wider, larger and more satisfying – something new – and failing either to describe or to find it. It is a chronicle of frustration, and frequently Birkin’s attempts to articulate his perceptions are embarrassingly inadequate. Take, for instance, this ludicrous conversation between Birkin and Gerald:
Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of productivity.
‘Gerald,’ he said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald. ‘Why do you?’
Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.
‘I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,’ he said at last. ‘Do you ever consciously detest me – hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.’
Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say.
One can only sympathize, which is, of course, part of the point. Birkin is working on a metaphor about ‘star equilibrium’, which he wishes to put in the place of the dead concept ‘love’, but neither Gerald nor Ursula – nor the reader – trusts him when he attempts ‘to drag in the stars’.
He does it anyway. He wants love, surely enough, he yearns for it, but he hates both the idea and the known reality. His desire for a new way of understanding is erotic in its intensity, and it is no surprise that what draws him to Ursula is a recognition that they are using ‘the same language’. But it is a frustrating effort, for both the lovers and the readers.
Birkin’s effort ‘at serious living’ is at the centre of the novel, and that effort is a philosophical one. Not merely does he seek a new set of concepts, the progress of the narrative itself attempts, however implicitly, to supply them. Women in Love is by design that rarest of things, a genuine novel of ideas, and those ideas are embedded in the very method of telling the story. The effort is, in Lawrence’s terms, if not A.J. Ayer’s, philosophical. In the essay ‘Surgery for the Novel: Or a Bomb?’ Lawrence raises this very issue:
Plato’s Dialogues . . . are queer little novels. It seems to me the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple . . . So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again, in the novel.
The philosophical effort here, properly understood, is epistemological. Yes, there is a lot of stuff about love, and new concepts, and sociology, and leaders and followers – much of it garnered from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – which if philosophical at all is only so in a cracker-barrel sense.
The central effort is this: if you have come to believe that knowledge of the self, the world and others is inhibited and distorted when filtered through consciousness, that the ‘mind’ is an inadequate receptor for knowledge of the world, then what is to take its place? Women in Love suggests instead a theory of knowledge based on intuition, quickness of apprehension through ‘the blood’. It is surprising, when you leaf through the text, how many paragraphs begin: ‘Suddenly he/she realized . . .’ Apperception becomes the mode of perception: we know the world through the immediacy of its impact on us, not ours on it.
This is only partially achieved and unsatisfying. What intrigued me more, reading it at the time, was whether the novel’s analyses of personal and cultural disintegration might speak directly to my own situation. What could be learned from Women in Love? It addressed the questions of men and women, the nature of love and sexual connection, questions of how to be in the world. I wasn’t doing very well on any of those fronts. Barbara and I separated for the second time (in only three years of marriage) in 1972, and this time it felt more serious. Her fragility meant we could never capitalize on the early excitement of coming together: have new experiences, travel, make something new and contemplate a spacious future uniquely our own. Our differences in tastes and passions were at first animating, but were beginning to prove, in the language of the law courts, irreconcilable. The discovery and exploration of such differences is a universal experience of new lovers, but after a time the novelty palled, and Barbara began to find me a constant source of pressure, while I came sadly to regard her as retracted and self-absorbed.
We were wedded not to each other, but to ambivelance about each other: unable to unite or permanently to separate. It was a pattern that was to drag on for many years. She moved back to Oxford, and I took a flat in a Victorian house in Leamington Spa. We’d been trapped in exactly that crimped form of marriage that Birkin so detested: ‘each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy . . .’ I had criticized her along Birkinian lines: recoiled from her ‘will’, accused her of bullying, demanded a simultaneous close
ness and separateness. Lawrence made me yearn for a life of passionate intensity, I felt myself coiling within, in readiness and in anticipation.
Yet I experienced Women in Love, in spite of its promises, as a source of negative energy: its restlessness and overwrought critical dicta were what affected me, not (as Leavis would have had it) with some purported spiritual intensity, moral seriousness and belief in the deepest sources of being. Lawrence helped me to recognize and to describe how and why things had gone wrong in my life, and made them worse. (Raymond Williams described the novel as ‘a masterpiece of loss’.) If Women in Love pointed towards richer forms of life, I couldn’t avail myself of them, not at all. Reading it made me unbalanced, more dissatisfied, as unrealistically demanding as Rupert Birkin, and, I suspect, just as crazy.
My students, though, responded more generously, curiously and unexpectedly. We discussed the love-making scene between Birkin and Ursula in ‘Excurse’, which led Rebecca West to complain that Lawrence was incapable of saying exactly what his lovers were doing in bed:
It was a perfect passing away for both of them, and at the same time the most intolerable accession into being, the marvellous fullness of immediate gratification, overwhelming out-flooding from the source of the deepest life force, the darkest, deepest, strangest life-source of the human body, at the back and base of the loins.
You don’t need an A.J. Ayer to tell you this is nonsense, but it isn’t indecipherable. Lawrence was knowledgeable about tantric sex and Kundalini Buddhism, and there is some opaque reference to such practices here. This becomes (almost) explicit in the chapter ‘Continental’, when after a night of love-making Ursula reflects to herself: ‘Why not be bestial and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experienced.’ John Sparrow was later to be the first to remark that the ‘Night of Shame’ chapter of Lady Chatterley’s Lover involves a scene of anal penetration, and there are similarly described moments both here and between Ursula’s parents inThe Rainbow.