This month features Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, Penguin Modern Classics, £5.99 |
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With D.H.Lawrence the questions have always been How can something this good be this bad? And, more perplexingly still, How can something this bad be this good? But I think it¹s too easy to start dividing his work into the domestic and the messianic, and loving the former and hating the latter.
His prose does come astonishingly to life whenever describing living things: a rabbit, a house, a bunch of flowers. And throughout his work there runs the passionate and conscious attempt to make every single thing come alive. Nothing, in Women in Love, is more animated, more agitated, than Lawrence¹s chapter on Gerald's decision to become a man-machine.
Lawrence's theory - if it can be called that - is meant to be tested on one's pulses.
Despite the perpetual livingness, however, one feels, at times, when reading Women in Love, as if one were examining a diagram: a perfect square with Ursula and Birkin (the ur/ir-sound couple) at the top two corners and Gudrun and Gerald (the capital-G couple) at the bottom. There are thin diagonal lines from Ursula to Gerald and Gudrun to Birkin, and the verticals are fainter than the horizontals.
But across this rigid grid come Lawrence's characteristic pulses - comings-together, fleeings-away; infatuation, disgust; the respiration that puts the breathlife into his depicted relationships.
The point with Lawrence is never to be afraid of going too far, is always to push, push, push. In the pushing-process, Lawrence writes one of the most truly and throughly poetic novels in English. It is part of his achievement that one becomes embarrassed only once a chapter, say.
Women in Love comprehends the pithiest summaries and the windiest repetitions. The high points seem obvious, but the rest of what Lawrence writes is not merely dull valleys in-between. He is attempting, in an entirely uncontemporary supermarket sense, to be organic about everything.
During his lifetime, he convinced many that his was the one true path; he even, towards the end, acquired disciples. And Lawrence, unless one surrenders to him, is almost unreadable.
His descendants, it seems to me, are Angela Carter and more recently still Jeanette Winterson. All three complete loons, of course - and Lawrence the only truly great writer among them.
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