'The Woman who Rode Away' by D.H. Lawrence

 Lawrence is indulging himself with a little portentous anthropology channeling James Frasier with a soupcon of Rider Haggard and Montezuma  but mainly achieving a tour of his own unconscious.  It is an unwieldy mixture of realism and the symbolic.  The woman who rode away was a big blond with blue eyes and a commanding way with her.  Frieda Lawrence was such a Von.  Why was no one ever sent after her?  We are told several times that her husband guarded her carefully.  The land of the mysterious tribe of Indians was well known to the folk who lived in the foothills.  Can it be a wish that Frieda Lawrence would head for the hills?  The vigour of the dark Indians that attracts her is in sharp contrast to the ill author who can hardly have been a sun to her moon.  

Febrile ravings.  

D.H. Lawrence on 'The State of Funk' (essay written 1928/9)

 Here D.H. Lawrence is deploring funk and encouraging the English to allow the future to take its natural form.  Don’t press it into a shape or an off the peg solution.  It is a conservative vision of hope and gradual change into a form that has a national truth.

“It is the business of men, of course, to take the same attitude towards the birth of new conditions, new ideas, new emotions.  And sorry to say, most modern men don’t.  They fall into a state of funk.  We all of us know that ahead of us lies a great social change, a great social adjustment.  A few men look it in the face and try to realise what will be best.  We none of us know what will be best.  There is no ready-made solution.  Ready-made solutions are almost the greatest danger of all.  A change is a slow flux, which must happen bit by bit.  And it must happen.You can’t drive it like a steam engine.  But all the time you can be alert and intelligent about it, and watch for the next step, and watch for the direction of the main trend.  Patience, alertness, intelligence, and a human good will and fearlessness, that is what you want in a time of change.  Not funk.”

The Fox (1922) by D.H. Lawrence

I read The Fox by D.H. Lawrence last night for the first time and it confirmed my opinion that when constrained by the short form he was at his best. Give him prating room and he will take it. That mars the end of the novella which up to that was compressed and moved with the internal energy of the story. Then out comes the soap-box. ‘Can you hear me back there, I’ll capitalise so’s you won’t miss the important bits’.

Is the symbolism neon with directional arrows indicating an entrance into a magical playground where the dark forces of illness, repression and dismal Sapphism are defeated by manly health? Of course and no doubt for his red hair and beard D.H. might himself have been nicknamed ‘Foxy’.

We are introduced :"The two girls were usually known by their surnames, Bamford and March.” They are both nearly 30 and it is presumed they will never marry. The year is 1918. Bamford is the sickly one and the principal investor in their small holding. March is robust and practical:

March did most of the outdoor work. When she was out and about, in her puttees and breeches, her belted coat and her loose cap, she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man, for her shoulders were straight, and her movements easy and confident, even tinged with a little indifference or irony. 

Into this menage comes a trois in the form of a fox that is taking their chickens. Somehow he evades their gun:

The fox really exasperated them both. As soon as they had let the fowls out, in the early summer mornings, they had to take their guns and keep guard: and then again as soon as evening began to mellow, they must go once more. And he was so sly. He slid along in the deep grass; he was difficult as a serpent to see. And he seemed to circumvent the girls deliberately. Once or twice March had caught sight of the white tip of his brush, or the ruddy shadow of him in the deep grass, and she had let fire at him. But he made no account of this.

In one of her dreamlike rapt moments the fox appears to March like a spirit animal:

She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. Her chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound — she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted.

Later she goes out to look for the fox:

She took her gun again and went to look for the fox. For he had lifted his eyes upon her, and his knowing look seemed to have entered her brain. She did not so much think of him: she was possessed by him. She saw his dark, shrewd, unabashed eye looking into her, knowing her. She felt him invisibly master her spirit.

Then a young man turns up, a soldier on leave. The fox is in the hen house toorallou. March has a dream:

That night March dreamed vividly. She dreamed she heard a singing outside which she could not understand, a singing that roamed round the house, in the fields, and in the darkness. It moved her so that she felt she must weep. She went out, and suddenly she knew it was the fox singing. He was very yellow and bright, like corn. She went nearer to him, but he ran away and ceased singing. He seemed near, and she wanted to touch him. She stretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.

This is a great short read. I forgive him the ending and maybe I’m wrong about it. ‘tinged with a little indifference or irony’. Very fine.

Twas on the Isle of Capri that I met him. (Lawrence and Mackenzie)

To balance and really ‘fair and balanced’ is a worthy goal, we must completely ignore the daft elements in the, well, not thought but visceral responses, or ‘gut reactions’ of David Herbert Lawrence. Compton Mackenzie in his novel The West Wind of Love (publ.1941) introduces us to the prating of one Daniel Rayner who requires no key to be seen as D.H.L. Only the names have been changed to protect the boring. This was literary revenge for the inclusion of the Mackenzies in two stories from the Collection The Woman who Rode Away. They were Two Blue Birds and The Man Who Loved Islands.

They met on the Isle of Capri IRL and the meeting in the novel is on Citrano somewhere in the South of Italy just after the end of the Kaiser War. Mackenzie best known now for Whisky Galore and Monarch of the Glen describes ‘our Davey’. Was he called that. I’m making it up. Why not? The sketch in ‘West’ is I think fair and represents the impression he might have had on a lot of people. Ford Madox Ford, who first published him, wasn’t much taken either.

In the first place he had sprung from the people, preserving the Midland accent of his upbringing among the ribbon-and-lace makers of Warwickshire and his education at a council school. Neither should have been a handicap at the University of Birmingham, but that English respect even for the synthetic gentility that is painfully manufactured by third –rate public-schools pretending to the authentic tradition of the historical factories of the English gentleman implanted in him early a resentment against the reminders, sometimes real but often imaginary, of his humble origin. The natural result was that conscious of his own genius he became aggressive and self-assertive.

(John Ogilvie’s, the protagonist of ‘West’, view of Rayner)

They discuss industrialisation:

”Man went off the track long before machinery was developed” Rayner replied contemptuously. “Man went off the track when he started to think here,” he tapped his forehead, “instead of here,” he pointed to the generative centre. “I want to find people who think here,” he declared passionately, and somewhat to the surprise of passing country-folk stood still in the middle of the alley with his long white index finger directed like a signpost towards the fly of his trousers.

On a personal note this is precisely the opposite of the advise given to me by the Clareman on the building job long handled shovel
“Use your head and not your lad”.

With a note of despair we are told:

Day and night for nearly a month John and Rayner talked, and then early on a June morning Rayner came to the tower when John was still in bed and announced that he and Hildegarde were leaving Citrano that morning.
“I’m choked here,” he announced. “These small bright people get on my nerves. It’s like watching a butterfly on the inside of a greenhouse fluttering up and down with the glass between him and the sun.”

A week later John received a postcard from Monte Cassino. This place is rotten with the past. A year later a postcard from Rarotonga: If you are thinking of coming here, don’t. These soft brown people are dissapointing.