Outside of a Dog (20 page)

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 symptom 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:

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:

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 closeness 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:

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 in
The Rainbow
.

We discussed this, gingerly, in seminars, prompting a hearty woman mature student to expostulate, ‘Can’t they just be satisfied with a jolly good shag?’ Not everyone is. When
the course ended an attractive young woman student invited me out for dinner, ostensibly to say thank you for ‘teaching her such a lot’. She chose a local bistro, made sure I drank too
much, and put her hand on my thigh.

‘The problem with you,’ she said caressively, ‘is that you never do anything you disapprove of. It would be so good for you, it would free you from all that rectitude and
conscientiousness. You’re so
stiff
.’

By now
that
was certainly true, and the overt appeal to my inner Allen Ginsberg was intuitively perfect. I wanted to be free, less rule-bound, licentious. When I drove her home she kissed
me passionately, and begged to be taken back to my flat, promising anything I liked by way of the unspeakable. I demurred: she was my student, she was married, she was that little bit unstable. I
might have settled for any two out of three, but together they hardened my resolve. I’ve always regretted it. She was right.

I carried on, not with her, but with a book on Lawrence, which had been commissioned by Methuen two years before. I wasn’t much good at that either. I had begun a chronological novel-by
novel account, but there was something dead about the whole enterprise. I started again, informing Methuen that the book would now be entirely about
Women in Love
. Curiously, they seemed
happy enough about this, probably because they had despaired of ever seeing a final script from me.

A year later I wrote again to tell them that I was now writing a novel about a university lecturer, unhappy in life and love, who is writing a critical book about D.H. Lawrence. This novel would
correlate Lawrentian experiences and ideas with events in the lecturer’s life. After some time, this book was published, not once but twice. The first version, by Bernard Malamud, was
entitled
Dubin’s Lives
, which came out in 1979, when mine should have been published, and wasn’t. The second, in 1997, was Geoff Dyer’s
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with
D.H. Lawrence
, a great title, and a good book. So mine was a viable idea after all, only I was the wrong person to have it. I never wrote a single word.

Rereading
Women in Love
after some thirty years, it is hard to escape the question: how is it that I was so taken in by all of this overheated nonsense? How pleasurable it now is to quote
Lawrence’s excesses, and to conclude: now I know better, how callow is youth, how easily fooled. How agreeable it is to age, and to mature, and to come finally to sound judgement.

This is fine, as far as it goes, but it leaves something out. There is a memory trace running through
Women in Love
not of the passages and sentences that I remember from last reading it
thirty years ago, but of me – could I call him a literary ‘little Rick’ – who was struck by those passages so deeply as to remember them almost verbatim on rereading: of the
drowning of Diana Crich, the smashing of the lapis lazuli paperweight on to Birkin’s head, the wrestling scene, those obscure moments of ‘Excurse’, multiple individual lines and
sentiments, all come back virtually intact. And what returns, too, is a ghostly version of my former reading self, captured by the lines, reading them attentively and with respect, aware that, if
the rhetoric is sometimes strained, the repetitions insistent, nevertheless there is a powerful presence in the words, a project worth taking seriously, and personally. Rereading Lawrence I
re-encounter my previous self, and recover for a moment something fresh and young, eager to believe, open-minded and open-hearted in ways that I had almost forgotten were possible.