D.H. Lawrence has featured fairly prominently in our current trip. So it felt like time to read a bit more of his work. This is a collection of short stories, first published in its entirety in 1922, although individual items were published in magazines between 1913 and 1921.

Rather in the manner of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, the stories can be interpreted as a fragmentary novel. The characters are different in each narrative, and although World War I is prominent, it is not ubiquitous. But the pieces are linked by a number of thematic threads, such as the impact of the modern world (war and all) on traditional England, and the changes being wrought in the relationship between past and present, tradition and change, men and women.

It's strange material. The stories are simple enough. It's not difficult to grasp what's going on. But they're odd. They linger in your mind. I thought I could write this post quite quickly, but it has taken me absolutely ages, because I've picked each story up again, turning it over in my fingers, as it were, holding it up against the light, and then scampering off onto the internet, eager to see what other people have made of it.

I'm not the first to have this reaction. As an anonymous critic in the New York Times Book Review wrote in 1922: "By far the greater number of these stories have a subtlety, an evasive quality underlying yet penetrating the texture of the exterior plot. Even when they seem simple, they are in truth intensely complex ... They are not tales for those who wish merely to be amused, to read and enjoy without using their own brains, these tales of Mr. Lawrence's. He is one of those writers who demand more than a little co-operation from their readers."

Here, as always, it seems to me, Lawrence is annoying and brilliant in equal measure.



***

The lead story, England, My England, from which the collection takes its name, is perhaps one of the most controversial, with quite wildly different interpretations easily discoverable. (The title is an ironic echo of William Ernest Henley’s patriotic poem, published in 1900, every line of which fills me with horror, none more so than: "Take and break us: we are yours, England, my own!")

It is also one of the best, I felt, poignant and powerful. We meet Egbert and Winifred. Terribly in love at first, but ultimately so different. Egbert has a little private income of his own, but he has no profession, and no actual earnings. He's quite happy to live with his small means, and has no ambition. He has lots of artistic passions -- "Of course in time he would make money in these ways" -- but he's a southerner, an amateur, and "nothing he ever did would hold together for long". Forming a complete contrast is Godfrey, Winifred's father (capable, solid, very comfortably off). The comparison starts to weigh on the relationship particularly when there are also children to deal with. And children bring their own challenge (Egbert is the fun parent, while Winifred is the anxious one).

I've seen relationships like this. Winifred is frustrated: "He simply WOULD not give himself to what Winifred called life, WORK... Money became, alas, a word like a firebrand between them, setting them both aflame with anger." Egbert, according to Winifred, "stood for nothing". If only, she thinks, he had striven for something. She hates his "terrible diffidence".

Egbert, not surprisingly, starts to become bitter. Then one of the little girls, on account of her father's carelessness (at least according to Winifred's account), has an accident, and ends up needing long-term medical care. Egbert is utterly infantilized in this scenario. Godfrey pays, manages, supports Winifred. Egbert, meanwhile, succumbs to a rising sense of frustration and futility.

When the war breaks out, the young man is instinctively against it: "He had not the faintest desire to overcome any foreigners or to help in their death. He had no conception of Imperial England, and Rule Britannia was just a joke to him... He had no desire to defy Germany and to exalt England... He recoiled inevitably from having his feelings dictated to him by the mass feeling."

So he hesitates -- but then he enlists. "In the ugly intimacy of the camp his thoroughbred sensibilities were just degraded. But he had chosen, so he accepted. An ugly little look came on to his face, of a man who has accepted his own degradation."

He's sent to Flanders, suffers a few light injuries, and then... The description of his death, and what he feels as he's dying, is one of the most moving I've ever read: "There had been life. There had been Winifred and his children. But the frail death-agony effort to catch at straws of memory, straws of life from the past, brought on too great a nausea. No, No! No Winifred, no children. No world, no people. Better the agony of dissolution ahead than the nausea of the effort backwards. Better the terrible work should go forward, the dissolving into the black sea of death, in the extremity of dissolution, than that there should be any reaching back towards life. To forget! To forget! Utterly, utterly to forget, in the great forgetting of death. To break the core and the unit of life, and to lapse out on the great darkness... Let the black sea of death itself solve the problem of futurity. Let the will of man break and give up."


Remembering all that, in Burton-on-Trent

It has engendered a lot of commentary, this story. There was a 1915 version, which Lawrence suspected no-one would publish, given the jingoistic climate of the times, but which appeared in The English Review. Founded by Ford Madox Ford, this journal was by that time headed by Austin Harrison, known for his uncompromisingly anti-German stance, and unlikely to be interested in anything remotely "anti-war". George Simmers observes: "My guess is that he liked Lawrence’s attack on a leisured arty, impractical class. Lawrence saw Evelyn/Egbert [the lead figure was called Evelyn in this first version] as a symbol of the amateurism that was wrong with England, and so did Harrison... Whatever the author intended when writing the story, in the context of The English Review it becomes an attack on the Asquith government for lacking the ruthless professionalism necessary to win the War."

According to Keith Cushman, too, "Lawrence’s presentation of the failed marriage of the dilettantish, ineffectual Evelyn and his beautiful wife Winifred dramatizes his belief that the failure of this generation constitutes a cultural death-wish that led to England’s participation in the slaughter on the Western Front... Evelyn’s decision to die on a Flanders battlefield points to the death of England. As Lawrence wrote a few weeks after [publication], 'there is no future for England: only a decline and fall'."

Then, in 1922, came a substantial revision. By now Lawrence was living in Taormina, with both the war and England behind him.


Approaching Lawrence's house in Taormina

Somewhat controversially, though, the characters of Winifred and Egbert were modelled on actual people Lawrence knew, and this became even more apparent in the revised version.

Lawrence was a serial offender in this respect. Many of the characters he creates on the basis of people he actually knew, argues Cushman, "are ALTERNATE versions of Lawrence. He noticed (or imagined) characteristics of someone he knew that reminded him of personal qualities or tendencies that he disliked in himself. These became the basis of a character in which Lawrence could try out and explore the characteristics in question -- and in the process unconsciously validate his own identity as someone who was not like that... Evelyn/Egbert is clearly a Lawrencian anti-self... Egbert loses himself in an idealized past instead of vigorously encountering the future. Furthermore, the effete, ineffectual Egbert is unmistakably unmanly... In the revised story the failure of English manhood greatly contributes to the failure of England. And in emphasizing his anti-self’s lack of manliness, Lawrence is unconsciously asserting his own manhood."

In these stories, the models for Egbert and Winifred were Percy and Madeline Lucas. The former died, in 1916, of wounds suffered during battle. Cushman continues: "Barbara Lucas [their daughter] reports that 'when the story came out' her family didn’t seem 'to have done anything about it openly.' But she was told 'by a friend who is a literary lawyer' that England, My England was 'the most perfect libel case imaginable'... The family shielded Madeline Lucas from the story. She discovered it by chance in 1930 at a friend’s flat in Rome when she was looking for something to read. Barbara Lucas remarks that she doesn’t know whether Percy Lucas ever read the story. The thought that he might have in the months before he was mortally wounded is horrifying."

I was surprised to see the negativity that these interpretations read into the character of Egbert. I liked him, and felt sorry for him (although I guess I wouldn't have wanted to be MARRIED to him...). I find myself, therefore, more drawn to the argument made by Weldon Thornton, who maintains that BOTH the principles illustrated in the story (on the one hand, life as an end in itself, to be enjoyed; and on the other, life as a means to some end, a challenge that needs to be confronted) "are necessary to the fulness of life and should exist in balanced polarity... [and both are] necessary to the wholeness of English culture". Where Egbert goes wrong, according to this interpretation, is in taking on board his wife's and father-in-law's pragmatic evaluation of his lack of worth: "The result is Egbert's decline from joy and insouciance to irresponsibility, to self-denigration, and finally to despair and self-destruction... The fact that the equilibrium on which fulness of life depends is displaced in the way that it is... indicates what Lawrence sees as the drift of our culture toward a pragmatism and a pride in triumphing that are healthful when they are one component of a culture but baneful and life-depleting when the become the norm, the sole respected life-mode, of the society."

Two rather different interpretations of Egbert, then. I prefer the second, but I've no idea which has the stronger literary claim to validity.


Lawrence country. This is Shipley Park, once the site of Shipley Hall, which inspired the setting for Lady Chatterley's Lover

***

Several stories deal with the power of touch.

The Blind Man brings together the two men in Isabel Pervin's life: Her husband, Maurice (blinded in the war); and her cousin and oldest friend, Bertie (a lawyer, incapable of physical relations with women, for reasons not specified, and now invited to stay with the Pervins).

At first, Isabel and Maurice dealt well with the terrible new complication that disability creates in their lives. But then it has become more difficult: "A sense of burden overcame Isabel, a weariness, a terrible ennui." And Maurice sometimes succumbs to depression.

On the day of Bertie's arrival, Maurice disappears after supper, and the guest goes looking for him. There follows this strange scenario where Maurice asks Bertie for permission to touch his face, and then asks Bertie to touch him -- touch his eyes, touch the scar from the wound that caused his blindness. It's a fascinating encounter. Maurice emerges exhilarated, Bertie terrified: "[Isabel] knew that he had one desire -- to escape from this intimacy, this friendship, which had been thrust upon him. He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken." Maurice one, Bertie nil. Clever...

There are interesting themes here. Are we witnessing an attempt to recreate the homosocial bonds of the war? Or is this an instance where Lawrence is not so much demonstrating that "the realm of blood-consciousness is intrinsically more important and substantial than the relatively pallid world of mental consciousness" as showing the need for "a social practice that would reconcile these two halves of life"? It's that either/or versus both/and question again.



You Touched Me is a profoundly unsettling story. Here we meet the Rockley family. Ted is the father, and Emmie and Matilda are "old maids" (partly through their own choice, because they feel they're a cut above the colliers or pottery-hands who form the bulk of their environment). The pottery that Ted used to run has closed, and the young women say they like the quiet. Do they? "Certainly their lives were much more grey and dreary now that the grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud and silt its dust over the premises." Ted is dying, too, so it's all rather dismal.

Enter Hadrian, the "charity-boy" their father adopted as a youth, who went off to Canada in his teens to make his fortune, but has now temporarily returned.

There's an incident in which Matilda goes into what is now Hadrian's room, forgetting her father is no longer sleeping there. She touches him lightly, without realizing who it is. This seems a small thing, but Matilda can't forgive him for the mistake, which made her "dislike him deeply". With Hadrian, on the other hand, the touch awakens something. He persuades Ted to faciliate his marriage with Matilda. And Ted duly forces her to go through with it, threatening to disinherit her if she doesn't... "You put your hand on me, though," says the young man, in justification of this coercion. "You shouldn't have done that, and then I should never have thought of it. You shouldn't have touched me." They marry. Wow...

I've not found any interpretations that make this story anything other than horrifying. But I admit I've not really got my head around the "multi-layered design", encompassing elements of biblical narrative, myth, fairy-tale, and socio-realism.


Heanor Memorial Park. These gates originally came from the entrance to Shipley Hall

Last in the "touch" category, and also sharing the unflinching look at the patriarchy apparent in You Touched Me, is The Horse Dealer's Daughter (the very title feels significant, suggesting that women -- who have a label, not a name -- are bought and sold like horses). This time the focus is the Pervin family (same name as the couple in The Blind Man, but there's no connection). In particular, we're interested in Mabel, the only remaining girl in a family that's up against it financially ("all was over..."). Her brothers want Mabel to go and stay with their sister, Lucy, but she won't make any declaration one way or the other: "They had talked at her and round her for so many years, that she hardly heard them at all."

So we follow Mabel as she goes quietly off to tidy her mother's grave, and then attempts to commit suicide by walking into the pond... Jack, the local doctor, rescues her. He takes her back to her home, unconscious, and takes care of her. She comes round. And she asks him if he loves her...: "You love me. I know you love me, I know." He doesn't have the power to break away. "And yet he had never intended to love her... With an inward groan he gave way, and let his heart yield towards her... He never intended to love her. But now it was over. He crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind had shrivelled and become void." He tells her he loves her. Says they'll be married, tomorrow if she wants.

But this is not exactly a happy ending. Mabel feels a distinct ambivalence:

"She only sobbed terribly, and cried:
"'I feel awful. I feel awful. I feel I'm horrible to you.'
"'No, I want you, I want you,' was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should NOT want her."

***

Tickets, Please was fascinating both thematically and geographically. It begins like this:

"There is in the Midlands a single-line tramway system which boldly leaves the county town and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dale, through the long ugly villages of workmen’s houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through stark, grimy cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where the collieries are, then up again, past a little rural church, under the ash trees, on in a rush to the terminus, the last little ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond. There the green and creamy coloured tram-car seems to pause and purr with curious satisfaction. But in a few minutes -- the clock on the turret of the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s Shops gives the time -- away it starts once more on the adventure. Again there are the reckless swoops downhill, bouncing the loops: again the chilly wait in the hill-top market-place: again the breathless slithering round the precipitous drop under the church: again the patient halts at the loops, waiting for the outcoming car: so on and on, for two long hours, till at last the city looms beyond the fat gas-works, the narrow factories draw near, we are in the sordid streets of the great town, once more we sidle to a standstill at our terminus, abashed by the great crimson and cream-coloured city cars, but still perky, jaunty, somewhat dare-devil, green as a jaunty sprig of parsley out of a black colliery garden."

The tram service described in this story is the Ripley Rattler. According to this site (details vary a bit from source to source), the service operated from 1913 to 1933, and connected Ripley and Nottingham, via Eastwood, Heanor, and Codnor. It was a single-track route, with 316 passing loops, and definitely had the switchback quality that Lawrence described, gaining, as he says, a reputation for being "the most dangerous tram-service in England".

The drivers Lawrence describes are men who have been deemed unfit for soldiering: "So they have the spirit of the devil in them. The ride becomes a steeple-chase... From village to village the miners travel, for a change of cinema, of girl, of pub. The trams are desperately packed."

What is more, the service is entirely conducted by "girls": "[They] are fearless young hussies... With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring hymns downstairs and a sort of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease. They pounce on the youths who try to evade their ticket-machine. They push off the men at the end of their distance. They are not going to be done in the eye -- not they. They fear nobody -- and everybody fears them."


One of the trams


The arrival of the tram, on 15 August 1913 -- therefore before the regular service, which started on 1 January 1914

The women conductors represent the economic opportunities for women that World War I has brought in its wake. But, as the story shows, the changes don't reach far beneath the surface. Working as inspector on the tram service is one John Thomas Raynor. Aka Coddy. And he's an entirely unreconstructed male. He flirts with the women; he seduces them. And we're told: "Of course, the girls quit the service frequently," so we surmise there are more serious things afoot.

Annie resists his charms for a long time, but then she meets him at the Fair. She "walks out" with him. She likes him -- and he leaves her.

So Annie leads the other women to take their revenge. "Outside was the darkness and lawlessness of war-time;" inside, they goad him, challenging him to take one of them as his wife. They attack him, at first boisterously, but in fun, and then increasingly seriously: "At that moment they were rather horrifying to him, as they stood in their short uniforms. He was distinctly afraid."

It's all overtly sexual: "'You ought to be KILLED, that's what you ought,' said Annie, tensely. 'You ought to be KILLED.' And there was a terrifying lust in her voice." Eventually, John Thomas chooses Annie. But she drops him like a hot potato. "He rose slowly, a strange, ragged, dazed creature..." They claim no-one wants him. "Yet each one of them waited for him to look at her, hoped he would look at her. All except Annie, and something was broken in her."

He slinks off. Annie is distressed; and the other women are uncomfortable, eager to be off: "They were tidying themselves hurriedly, with mute, stupefied faces."

"In Tickets, Please," says Bernard-Jean Ramadier, "Lawrence clings to the cultural primitivism that informs his works, showing through the story of Annie and John Thomas Raynor the authentic sadness he deeply felt as he witnessed the disfigurement of his country -- England my England -- and the perverted relationships between people as a consequence of misused progress... Tickets, Please reads like an illustration of the criticism in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious [another of Lawrence's books], in which the novelist sharply judges the outcome of progress: 'the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own fault.'"

Whether you're on Lawrence's "side" in this or not, it's still a powerful -- quite terrifying -- illustration of what it feels like when social change and social stagnation confront each other.


Heanor. One of the stops on the Ripley Rattler

Also featuring changed roles for women, and the inability of men to adapt to them, is Monkey Nuts. In this story, Albert's the corporal, ie the boss, but Joe (much younger, and "slightly better class") likes him, and the two get on. They work at the station; they're billeted near the station. "After Flanders, it was heaven itself."

And in comes Miss Stokes, the land-girl, bringing the hay. "Miss Stokes watched the two men from under her broad felt hat. She had seen hundreds of Alberts, khaki soldiers standing in loose attitudes, absorbed in watching nothing in particular." Joe, however, is more interesting. She likes him. Where Joe is shy, Miss Stokes is confident. "Forward" would have been the word used then. As Miss Stokes's interest grows, Joe and Albert no longer get on so well.

Ultimately, Joe doesn't want "Monkey Nuts", as the young woman is nicknamed. But he continues to see her -- held, as it were, in thrall. One day, however, he lets Albert go to meet her in his place. She's not interested in Albert. She makes one last effort with Joe, turning up with the hay, and trying to force a conversation. Joe defies her. She stops bringing the hay, and the men are back on their own: "As far as they were concerned, she had vanished into oblivion. And Joe felt more relieved even than he had felt when he heard the firing cease, after the news had come that the armistice was signed."

I think Joshua Bartee puts a nice gloss on this terribly sad story: "The young man’s life, by the intrusion of the young woman, is thrown into disarray by the pressures of having to relate to others in the postwar world, not as fellow soldiers but as a lover, as Joe the man. Joe and Albert’s close, easy-going relationship is indicative of the comfort derived by soldiers from the company of men who experienced the same perils they did, and their mutual difficulty in reintegrating into society." At the end, the men's friendship is restored: "Their relationship is platonic, non-sexual; however, it is like an old marriage, a relationship built on common peril and survival, one of mutual trust with one partner being dominant (Albert, due to the hierarchy of military rank), and the other submissive (as in Joe and his half-averted face and feminine features)... The men have succeeded in preserving their postwar relationship, the routine they need to stay alive, one ingrained in the trenches."

Keith Cushman, quoted here, comments: "Though the aggressive woman is humiliated, the net result is that the deathly relationship between the unformed, malleable Joe and the emotionally sterile Albert will continue. This is another story in which the battle leads to no victory."

The difficulties of social change depicted in Monkey Nuts and Tickets, Please are incontrovertible. I just wish Lawrence had showed a bit more sympathy for the female side of the equation.



***

Next, a raft of stories featuring adversarial and/or exploitative relations between men and women.

The narrator of Wintry Peacock is asked by a young woman, Maggie, to translate a letter from a woman in Belgium that has come for her absent husband, Alfred. Immediately, the narrator's negativity is apparent: The woman is "wearing a white apron that was longer than her preposterously short skirt"; she "smiled, with that odd, immediate intimacy, something witch-like and impossible... I was being cajoled."

Maggie expects her husband back that night. He has been wounded. They've been married six years, and he joined up on the first day of the war. He'd already been through the South African War. The letter announces the birth of a baby credited to Alfred ("notre cher petit bebe"). But the narrator -- in what we assume is a fit of male loyalty -- changes its import, telling Maggie that the baby referred to in the letter has been born to the "household" -- to her mother, in fact. Maggie doesn't really believe him.

Maggie is very fond of a peacock called Joey, whom the narrator rescues from the snow the next day. When he brings the bird back, Maggie says it was Alfred's return that scared him off. Later, after a rather tense tea, Alfred catches up with the narrator, and asks about the letter. Maggie has burnt it, he says. The narrator tells Alfred what was in the letter, and tells him what he told HER. Alfred is not sure the child in the letter is his, but "it might be". What is clear, however, is his wish that the narrator had done away with Joey...

The ending is enigmatic:

"Again he looked into my eyes. And then once more he went into a loud burst of laughter that made the still, snow-deserted valley clap again.
"'God, it’s a knockout!' he said, thoroughly amused. Then he stood at ease, one foot out, his hands in his breeches pockets, in front of him, his head thrown back, a handsome figure of a man.
"'But I’ll do that blasted Joey in—' he mused.
"I ran down the hill, shouting with laughter."

Apart from feeling annoyed that the narrator had sided with this shifty young man in preference to smart Maggie, I found the story a little baffling. Judith Saunders, however, says the story is about "mate-guarding", and references the Jupiter-Juno-Io love triangle of Graeco-Roman mythology (which includes Argus, the many-eyed creature who served Juno). "Once readers recollect the Jupiter-Juno-Io love triangle," says Saunders, "the significance of Maggie Goyte's pet peacock becomes clear. An Argus-like character [with many "eyes"], Joey devotes himself to Maggie; he embodies a loyal vigilance enlisted on her behalf... The husband's urge to kill his wife's peacock communicates, indirectly, his determination to free himself from her relentless observation... Other details in Lawrence's tale subtly strengthen the links between a rural Englishwoman and the queen of the gods -- who, as patroness of marriage looks out for women's interest in matrimony... Repeatedly the narrator characterizes Maggie as 'witch-like' (six iterations in the space of a very few pages)... Her eerie qualities are particularly evident when she interacts with the faithful peacock -- who plays the part of her 'familiar'... Lawrence deliberately associates the betrayed wife with supernatural female forces, hinting that Maggie's ability to thwart her husband is more than mortal -- or may appear so to masculine sensibilities, at any rate."

Again, this is a situation that cannot end well: "It is a fierce and bitter contest, ending, like that between Jupiter and Juno, in a draw: she curbs but cannot quell his womanizing; he resists but cannot defeat her vigilant intervention... Throughout the body of his work... Lawrence typically frames male-female antagonism in terms of universal, cosmic opposition." The narrator, meanwhile, according to Saunders, helps preserve the balance of power between the two, thereby prolonging the competition, and enjoying "the role of a Puck-like mischief-maker".

OK, that is clearer now, though no less bleak.



There's more cosmic opposition at work in Samson and Delilah, another frankly disconcerting story.

A man arrives at a bar in Cornwall, and claims the landlady, Mrs Nankervis, is his wife. She doesn't acknowledge him. But he insists, and says he's Willie Nankervis.

If he is, he left when their daughter was a baby, and went to America to work in the mines. After the first six months of absence, there was no communication, and no money. The woman appeals to him: "Be a man, and not worse than a brute of a German." She asks her paying guests to help evict him. But he sneaks back in. Actually, "sneaks" is not necessarily accurate. Did she deliberately leave that other door open? How much does she actually want him back? These things are left opaque.

Here's an example of her ambivalence: "Her anger stirred again in her violently. But she subdued it, because of the danger there was in him, and more, perhaps, because of the beauty of his head and his level drawn brows, which she could not bear to forfeit." He flatters her, starts to seduce her. But it's threat that's paramount: "'And don’t you think I’ve come back here a-begging,' he said. 'I’ve more than one thousand pounds to my name, I have. And a bit of a fight for a how-de-do pleases me, that it do. But that doesn’t mean as you’re going to deny as you’re my Missis...'"

Personally, I want to hit him over the head with a large mallet, but I often feel like that about Lawrence's characters.



Daniel Sutton, in The Primrose Path, is another such. Once a migrant, he is temporarily back in England, but determined to return to the better lands overseas (a bit like Hadrian, then). He had a difficult relationship with his first wife, Maud, and left her for a younger woman, who accompanied him to Australia. This one tried to poison him, he tells his nephew, Daniel Berry. Now Sutton is with another young woman (she's just 21), whom -- of course -- he bullies.

Berry is the (sometimes malevolent) observer in all this. We learn very little about this reticent character, who concludes, at the end of the story, that Sutton's latest woman will leave him, too: "'She'll hate him like poison. And serve him right. Then she'll go off with somebody else.' And she did."

According to Weldon Thornton, "In this tale of two temperaments, we are not simply to condemn Sutton and agree with Berry. Here as elsewhere in his works, the evaluation that Lawrence evokes... turns not so much on a character's overt success or failure as on whether he is trying, however imperfectly, to live rather than to protect himself from life... There is more of life in the uncle than in the nephew because the older man, for all his vulnerability, engages life, while the younger simply observes and critiques it."

Hmmm. I don't know we need too many livers-of-life like Sutton...



And finally, my favourite. Fanny and Annie. Again we have an adversarial man/woman relationship; again we have systemic patriarchy. But we also have two brilliantly feisty women. And the grandest of openings:

"Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fire. And the nostalgia, the doom of homecoming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sky, lighting the desultory, industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out."

"She" is Fanny, and the person she's regarding is Harry: "Her soul groaned within her, as he clambered into the carriage after her bags. Up shot the fire in the twilight sky, from the great furnace behind the station. She felt the red flame go across her face. She had come back, she had come back for good. And her spirit groaned dismally. She doubted if she could bear it... The twin black cones of the iron foundry blasted their sky-high fires into the night. The whole scene was lurid... From the foundry came the horrible, slow clang, clang, clang of iron, a great noise, with an interval just long enough to make it unendurable... And thus they arrived in the streets of shops of the little ugly town on top of the hill."

Fanny has been a lady's maid in Gloucester, and this is all a terrible come-down. So why does she come back? That's left open. She has kept Harry Goodall dangling for a dozen years. She doesn't love him. She had loved someone else, her cousin, Luther, who jilted her, and then died. But now she's back: "She knew her life would be unhappy. She knew that what she was doing was fatal. Yet it was her doom. She had to come back to him... Ah, she despised him!" But, of course, it's never straightforward with Lawrence. The head might be despising, but she recognizes "a certain physical winsomeness" in him, and "the thorn of desire rankled bitterly in her heart".

Turning the whole thing into soap-opera is Mrs Nixon. She's determined to "shame" Harry, calling to him in the street, and even interrupting the church service where he has been singing. She's "a devil of a woman, who beat her pathetic, drunken, red-nosed second husband, Bob, and her two lanky daughters, grown-up as they were". It's the pregnancy of one of these daughters, Annie, that Mrs Nixon lays at Harry's door. "It's no more mine than it is some other chap's," protests Harry, echoing Alfred the Peacock-Hater. Harry elaborates on this stance later, saying to his father: "It's no more mine than it is Bill Bower's, or Ted Slaney's, or six or seven on 'em." Poor Annie. What a life.

Then there's Sunday tea -- "with sardines and tinned salmon and tinned peaches, besides tarts and cakes" -- and the Goodalls are a bit concerned that the scandal might scare Fanny off. On the contrary, the changed equation somehow gives Fanny more power. She throws in her lot with the family quite unequivocally, as though this element of choice exorcises that sense of doom she was labouring under.

Weldon Thornton suggests -- and I think the suggestion makes absolute sense -- that Fanny has returned because she is pregnant. It is never specified. But it would make sense of certain ambiguous snatches of conversation between Fanny and her aunt, and it would explain why, after all these years, the young woman has felt forced to come back. It would also explain her calmness with regard to Harry's misdemeanours. Society would never say so, but she might well feel they're now on the same footing.

***

This is vintage Lawrence, then. Whether intriguing, bewildering, off-putting, moving, disturbing, or all the above, each story is like a slow-moving train wreck: You're horrified, but you can't look away.