by Rachel Cusk
Anyone encountering Lawrence’s prose for the first time will feel the immediate force of its revelations, the density of its character and the totality of its originality. The opening pages of The Rainbow, with their evocation of the cyclical harmony of man and beast and land, are among the most memorable in English literature:
They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seeds to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it.
This is provocative writing, sure enough, but provocation is far from Lawrence’s aim. Rather, he is serving his own vision of an original world free of shame, out of which arises the discord of gender:
The women were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.
In this Eden, too, the woman’s curiosity is the driving force that rouses creation from the stasis of repetition. What is the moral status of this curiosity? Is woman wrong to want ‘another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy’? It is culture, civilisation, she is drawn to: ‘she strained her eyes to see what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered himself in this conquest, her deepest desire hung on the battle that she heard, far off, being waged on the edge of the unknown.’
Lawrence considers these questions through the medium of English rural life, beginning his story in the small Midlands village of Cossethay just as a canal has been built through it to connect the new collieries, bringing the first signs of the ‘commotion’ – the violation, in Lawrence’s sexual-topographical vision – of industrialisation to the slumberous valley. The Brangwens have farmed there for so long their origins are lost in the mists of time; the men and women of this family, riding the changes of the late nineteenth century and the new dawn of the twentieth, experience its transformations through their very bodies and minds, live out its recalibrations of domestic power, material wealth, urban migration, social ambition, sexual possibility. They become aware of the world beyond the village and beyond England, discover the concepts of freedom and choice; like waves that advance and draw back but are always encroaching they move generationally towards education, culture, self-fulfilment. Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the fruit of this long clamber out of stasis and ‘blood-intimacy’, are deposited by the novel’s end on the shores of the twentieth century: frustrated and desirous in equal measure, vibrating to life at its highest pitch, giving voice to themselves out of the long silence of femininity, they are Lawrence’s incarnation of modern womanhood. How will they live? How will they find satisfaction? Not in the manner of their mother or their mother’s mother, not by means of domestic power: they will no longer serve as the medium through which life begets itself. The ‘wave which cannot halt’ is to be halted: Ursula and Gudrun realise that to liberate themselves from the cycle of repetition they will require financial independence from men; they will have to educate themselves; they will have to work. And having liberated themselves from men, what relationship with them can they expect to have? Without the context of hearth and home, childbearing, male protection inextricable from female servitude, what will love between a man and a woman be?
These are the questions with which the novel so fascinatingly concludes, questions Lawrence goes on to address in Women in Love. But the achievement of The Rainbow in creating the conditions for such questions to be asked is momentous. The Old Testament world of Cossethay, with its ceaseless begetting and harvesting, with the rainbow that stands over it as the sign of God’s pleasure in the order of his creation, has finally elapsed. The new world is a world of fundamental disorder, carved into the old like the collieries and roads and railway lines are being carved into the novel’s Midlands landscape. It is a world predicated on the potency of the individual, a world that has moved out of the shelter of God’s creation and is creating itself. Lawrence’s grasp of what kind of future this implies for men and women, for society, for the earth itself, is extraordinarily complex and prescient. And the ‘re-adjustment of the old relation’ between the sexes is an evolution in which we remain embroiled, with all the pleasures and pitfalls Lawrence perceived.
The Rainbow is a novel that retains its transfigurative power of explanation, its capacity to demystify us to ourselves. Not least physically: to read Lawrence is to read with the body as well as the mind. For this he will always be treated with suspicion, with caution, as long as the formation of the human personality is based around the denial or misrepresentation of the sanctity of the body’s wants. But Lawrence possessed the bitter knowledge born of his own experience; that originality and truth will always and ever meet with rejection by the common mind. It was to the individual that he addressed himself, for it is as individuals that we read. This is why Lawrence was a writer; and why reading him remains a subversive, transformative, life-altering act.
On Françoise Sagan
It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can sometimes become fate. The fiction lays a fetter on the life. To the reader, as often as not, it will all seem to be part of the same story. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in The Great Gatsby. Albert Camus, more eerily, foretold precisely the manner of his death in La Chute. Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters: the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. It is as though they, with their mortal grasp on the faculty of imagination, have crushed our illusions about human destiny. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it. They have failed to provide us with a happy ending.
The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death in 2004 were full of the sense of this failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic, pitiable figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, published when she was just eighteen. In that book, Bonjour Tristesse, she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of post-war Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and the amorality of her life that interested the obituary writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine, Céline, Françoise Sagan never escaped. Bonjour Tristesse concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving invariably forms part of the legend of her life, received severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny is palpable.
If there is hedonism, if there is amorality in Bonjour Tristesse, then it is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense Sagan is far more of a classicist than her existentialist brethren Sart
re and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioural norms, but in Bonjour Tristesse those norms are as much psychical as societal. Céline, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her values and personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Céline’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that it is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it necessary? Is it intrinsic to human nature? Is it possible to lack a moral sense, and if so does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this brief and disturbing novel.
Céline and her father, Raymond, have decided to rent a summer villa on the Côte d’Azur for two months. Raymond is bringing his girlfriend, Elsa, along for the holiday, though Céline is anxious that the reader should not disapprove: ‘I must explain this situation at once, or it might give a false impression. My father was forty, and had been a widower for fifteen years.’ Notice that it is Raymond who has been bereaved, not Céline herself: she tells us only that she had been at boarding school until two years earlier. Later, she remembers her father’s embarrassment at her ugly uniform and plaited hair when he came to collect her from the station. It is as though they had not seen each other in the intervening years; as though Céline, between the ages of two and fifteen, was an orphan. ‘And then in the car his sudden triumphant joy because I had his eyes, his mouth, and I was going to be for him the dearest, most marvellous of toys.’
At the villa the trio are contentedly idle. They swim and sunbathe; they are untroubled by the sense of duty or compunction. Raymond does beach exercises to diminish his belly. The beautiful, vapid, red-haired Elsa badly burns her skin. Céline, who has recently failed her exams at the Sorbonne, lies on the beach running sand through her fingers: ‘I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer.’ One day, a young man capsizes his sailing boat in their creek – this is Cyril, an ardent, good-looking, conventional university student who offers to teach Céline how to sail, and is the ideal prospect for a summer romance.
Chance, impulse, happenstance: this is how life unfolds in the unexamined world of Raymond and Céline. They do not concern themselves with order and structure, the imposition of the will, the resistance to certain desires and the aspiration towards certain goals. Even Elsa merely submits to the sun’s power to burn her. Is this the correct way to live? The question does not arise; there is no one to ask it. Until, that is, Raymond announces one evening that he has invited a woman named Anne Larsen to stay. The first thing we learn about Anne is that she was a friend of Céline’s dead mother. With the mother, the whole lost world of order, nurture and morality is powerfully invoked. Anne, it is clear, is the emissary of that world: ‘I knew that once she had come it would be impossible for any of us to relax completely,’ says Céline. ‘Anne gave a shape to things and a meaning to words that my father and I prefer to ignore. She set a standard of good taste and fastidiousness which one could not help noticing in her sudden withdrawals, her expressions, and her pained silences.’ Anne is beautiful, sophisticated, successful; and unlike Céline, Raymond and Elsa, she is an adult, with an adult’s power of censure and moral judgement.
Cyril, too, is an adult – he is shocked by Raymond and Elsa’s ménage, and apologises to Céline for kissing her. ‘You have no protection against me … I might be the most awful cad for all you know,’ he says, in a most uncad-like way. When Anne arrives, it is clear that she means to take Raymond and Céline in hand. It is clear, too, that she is in love with Raymond, and that Raymond has reached for her in a bid to escape the pleasurable anomie of his circumstances and the childlike emotional world that he inhabits with Céline. Elsa is dispatched; the mature, glacial, controlling Anne is installed. Soon she and Raymond announce their plans to marry; immediately, Anne begins to impose her will on Céline. She orders her to eat more, to study in her room instead of going to the beach, to cease outright her relations with Cyril. Is this love or is it hatred? Is it nurture or is it control? Is it common sense, or the jealousy of a constricted older woman for her uninhibited stepdaughter? Is it what Céline has missed out on by not having a mother of her own, or what her motherlessness has exposed her to?
Sagan records clearly the effect the change in regime has on Céline: ‘It was for this I reproached Anne: she prevented me from liking myself. I … had been forced by her into a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience … For the first time in my life I was divided against myself.’ In one sense, then, morality is a form of self-hatred; it is a wound one assuages by wounding others in precisely the same way. But Anne has done something else – she has stolen Céline’s father, her one source of unconditional love. Raymond is now ‘estranged’ from his daughter; he has ‘disarmed and abandoned’ her. Céline the divided girl is forced into immorality: she wishes to get rid of Anne and regain Raymond. Her actual powerlessness gives rise to fantasies of power, and these thoughts cause her to oscillate between hatred and terrible guilt. Here, then, is another indictment of morality, as it is lived by Anne. Anne has fomented violence in Céline’s pacific nature. By controlling and censuring her, and by interfering with her source of love, she has given her the capacity to do wrong.
This is a masterly portrait of primal human bonds and needs that cannot but be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychical consequences of different forms of upbringing. One day, Anne locks Céline in her room, after an argument about schoolwork. At first Céline panics, and flings herself at the door like a wild animal. ‘It was my first experience of cruelty.’ Then her heart is hardened, her duplicity sealed: ‘I sat on my bed and began to plan my revenge.’ The form this revenge takes occupies the final section of the book, and is almost theatrical in its psychological grandeur. Céline chooses as her tools her father’s childishness, Anne’s intransigence, Elsa’s vanity, Cyril’s responsible nature, and with them she forges a plot in which each of the four is utterly at her mercy. As a dramatist she experiences, for the first time, complete power over others. Her plot is tragic and bitter, but it plays uninterrupted to its end. Neither right nor wrong, neither conformity nor permissiveness, neither love nor hatred winds up the victor of this moral battle: it is insight, the writer’s greatest gift, that wins.
Sagan’s second novel, A Certain Smile, is in many ways a sequel to Bonjour Tristesse. Several of the familiar themes are there: the search for and betrayal of the lost mother; the double nature of father/lover and lover/brother; the defence of boredom or nothingness as a moral position more truthful than conventionality. Dominique, a law student at the Sorbonne, meets Luc, the married uncle of her boyfriend, Bertrand. Luc and his gentle, kindly wife, Françoise, take Dominique under their wing, for she is uncared-for and alone, the daughter of distant provincial parents rendered more remote by their unassuageable grief over the death some years earlier of ‘a son’, as Dominique expresses it. Like Céline, Dominique struggles to maintain the dignity of her own reality, to assert its truth, however abnormal other people might claim to find it. ‘I was contented enough, but there was always a part of myself, warm and alive, that longed for tears, solitude, and excitement.’
Luc quickly begins to make advances towards Dominique, even as Françoise is enveloping her in mother-love. Dominique profits from their attention, but can find no moral path through it, for the two forms of affection – sexual and parental – are confused. Luc proposes that Dominique come away with him and have a brief affair, at the end of which he will return to Françoise. Once again, the father-figure is identified with an aberrant morality that results in the girl’s betrayal of the mother-figure. More importantly,
he denies her emotional reality: according to Luc, his affair with Dominique can proceed only on the basis that she does not love him. The nature of love is the novel’s central preoccupation. The uncanny maturity that made Sagan’s name as a novelist is most strongly in evidence in her fearless and astute portrayal of love as a psychical event that has its roots in family life and the early formation of personality. To the modern reader, Luc’s conduct towards Dominique has strong undercurrents of abuse: her violent emotional trauma in the aftermath of the affair, and the novel’s exquisitely ambivalent ending in which the subjective death and rebirth of Dominique is described, go far beyond poignancy or even frankness. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!’ Dominique finds herself repeating, without knowing why. Sagan’s sense of emotional tragedy is indeed that of the great dramatists.
‘Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters,’ Sagan said in an interview, shortly before the publication of A Certain Smile. In Bonjour Tristesse, this structural tenet is illustrated almost sculpturally by Céline’s description of the three adults standing on the stairs the night Raymond transfers his affections from Elsa to Anne: ‘I remember the scene perfectly. First of all, in front of me, Anne’s golden neck and perfect shoulders, a little lower down my father’s fascinated face and extended hand, and, already in the distance, Elsa’s silhouette.’ These two novels, so spare and rigorous, so artistically correct, so thorough in their psychological realism, are the highest expression of the triangular purity of their author’s strange and beautiful esthétique.