The 100 best novels
written in English
No 43
The Rainbow
by DH Lawrence (1915)
The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence's finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was
Covers / DH Lawrence / The Rainbow
The Short, Controversial Life of D. H. Lawrence
The Short, Controversial Life of D. H. Lawrence
Robert McCrum
Sunday 14 July 2014
W
hich Lawrence to choose? Lady Chatterley's Lover is arguably the most influential, and certainly the most famous, or notorious. But much of it now seems embarrassing. Sons and Lovers, his unforgettable third novel, is many readers' favourite, but I've chosen The Rainbow, the more perfect twin of the diptych that also contains Women in Love.
DH Lawrence |
No question: Lawrence is uneven, and troubling. In the last century he was fiercely attacked, and wildly overpraised, not least by the critic FR Leavis who clobbered generations of students with his verdict that Lawrence was "the great genius of our time". At the same time, my generation ingested Lawrence – his novels, poems, and stories – like junkies. Here, at last, was a writer who was unequivocally all about the human soul, and who loved nothing better than to explore every nuance of family and marital, and sexual, relations.
For readers who had grown up with JM Barrie, CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E Nesbit and all the repressed masters of post-Victorian children's literature, Lawrence seemed to offer the most exhilarating liberation. We, by contrast, would feel the blood thunder in our veins, become spontaneous and vital and instinctual. We would, as Lawrence put it, "break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to form our utterance". We would celebrate Dionysus, and we would be free. Adolescents had worn khaki in the 1940s, and flannel in the 50s, but we would dress like clowns.
It's an undifferentiated blur now, but if I stop to focus on my DH Lawrence, the Lawrence of the 60s, I can begin to discern the fuzzy but recognisable outline of a literary aesthetic that was both persuasive and, for Lawrence at least, coherent. Anyway, don't we expect our greatest writers to be a little bit mad? As compelling as the fantasy of the creative crucible, we had the puritanical cold steel of FR Leavis to remind us, in The Great Tradition, about Lawrence's artistic integrity and moral grandeur, his profound artistic seriousness. As he once wrote to Aldous Huxley: "I always say, my motto is 'Art for my sake'." This Lawrence was also the magnificent standard-bearer for English modernism. By the 60s, we didn't need to box him into a pigeonhole: he was protean, inspiring, and with the kind of grandeur that is unknown today. As the novelist and critic Howard Jacobson has written, "Women in Love is the nearest any English novel has so far approximated to the fearful grandeur of Medea or the Oresteia."
In addition to the attractions of his literary genius, there was the thrill of Lawrence's personal philosophy. This had begun in heterodox meditations on Christianity, and had then swerved towards mysticism, Buddhism and – most arousing of all – earthy, pagan theologies. Seductively, for English adolescents in, say, 1967, Lawrence seemed to celebrate the liberation of the individual in the mass, through the celebration of primal instincts.The DH Lawence with whom we fell in love with was a protean figure, for sure. The barest sketch of his biography – the humble origins in mining Nottinghamshire; the escape to metropolitan London; his elopement with Frieda, a married woman; the long exile; his "savage pilgrimage" to self-knowledge; and finally his early death from tuberculosis in 1930, aged just 44 – put him effortlessly in the company of the great Romantics, Byron and Keats.
But he was more than a Romantic, apparently in a deep colloquy with some darker forces. He was also intimately in touch with nature, which plays a vital role in all Lawrence's best work. Thomas Hardy had written about rural Dorset with a poet's eye, but Hardy was a Victorian who treated the landscape as an attractive backdrop to the human drama. Lawrence is a 20th-century writer and his vision is fresh, dynamic and modern – as if nature is there to galvanise the human soul, not merely to decorate his or her environment.
Listen to Lawrence describe the scene beyond the grime of the colliery in Women in Love: "Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms… currant bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over stone walls."And then, beyond the confines of The Great Tradition, there was that notorious novel with those forbidden words, and those ectstatic descriptions of sexual intercourse. Lady Chatterley was an essential handbook to the 60s. Lawrence's fascination with sex made a wonderful contrast with the terribly grey dullness of the postwar world.
Similarly, in The Rainbow and Women in Love, the sexuality of his characters throbs through the narrative like a feverish pulse. No one writes better than Lawrence about the complexity of desire, especially homosexual desire. "I should like to know," he wrote in one letter, "why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not."
Looking back, Lady Chatterley's Lover was both the making of DH Lawrence in the postwar English imagination, and ultimately, the ruining of his reputation. Most damaging of all – from one book that's a long way below his best – DH Lawrence became fatally attached to the zeitgeist, and fatally identified with just one novel. In time, inevitably, there was a reaction against the bells and the beards, the drugs, the pan pipes and the liberation. So Lawrence got thrown out with the flared trousers, the Beatles and, in America, with the Vietnam war. By the dawn of the 80s there was no place for clowns, and four-letter words were two a penny.
And so, from the occasionally ridiculous to the sublime. Lawrence first attracted the attention of literary London with a short story entitled Odour of Chrysanthemums, and it's as the master of the short story that I began to read him. Where to start? There are many options, including The Rocking-Horse Winner, but one of his finest collections is The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published in 1914. This places it after his acclaimed third novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), but before The Rainbow (1915), the novel that secures his claim on posterity.The Rainbow, for me, is as close to perfection as any of his mature fiction. The novel opens with Marsh Farm, the home of the Brangwen family whose men and women, Lawrentian archetypes, inhabit the landscape that Lawrence loved. One of the many joys of The Rainbow is his evocation of the natural world, physical, timeless and symbolic. The novel is also conceived on a majestic scale, spanning a period from the 1840s to 1905, and showing how the Brangwen farming family is changed by Britain's industrial revolution, evolving from pastoral idyll to the chaos of modernity.
Once Tom Brangwen has married his "Polish lady" (chapter 1) and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, the narrative kicks into a high gear, the close-knit exploration of feelings. Anna meets Tom's nephew, Will. They marry; she becomes pregnant with Ursula; and the novel slowly builds to its celebrated concluding section: Ursula's quest for fulfilment in a heartless, repressive society. After her doomed passion for Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry, Ursula is left with a more personal epiphany, one doubtless shared by its author, a vision of a rainbow: "She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of truth, fitting to the overarching heaven." With this spiritual regeneration, the novel ends, to be taken up again with Women in Love, the story of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the sisters of Lawrence's first draft.
The more we look at DH Lawrence, the harder it is to understand why – apart from a shift in the cultural mood – he should have become so neglected. Certainly, he held some perverse, and often baffling, views on sexual politics, especially feminism; also on democracy and organised labour; and on modernity. Like all radicals, he made some ridiculous utterances from time to time. He is a writer that adolescents devour omnivorously, but then cannot return to. Perhaps if we read him in a less compulsive way, we could learn to benefit from the nurture of the diet he offers, and stay with him at all ages, young and old.
A note on the text
Lawrence began to write a novel entitled "The Sisters" in the spring of 1913, while staying in Italy. "It is a queer novel," he wrote to his editor Edward Garnett, "which seems to have come by itself." After many drafts and revisions, this ur-text would become the source of his two great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Meanwhile, another version, written in the spring of 1914, entitled "The Wedding Ring", was accepted for publication by Methuen & Co but then returned to Lawrence on the outbreak of war in August 1914. The publishers blamed the hostilities, but a deeper reason was probably their anxiety about obscenity, a fear that would soon be fulfilled.
After this troubled start, Lawrence rewrote the book completely in the winter of 1914-15, removing material he would later use for Women in Love, and completed the novel now known as The Rainbow on 2 March 1915. "I know it is quite a lovely novel, really," he wrote to a friend in February 1914. "The perfect statue is in the marble, the kernel of it. But the thing is the getting it out clean." Methuen, meanwhile, continued to worry about the novel's sexual content, urging Lawrence to make additional changes, while also making unauthorised changes to the proofs themselves.
The Rainbow was finally published in Britain on 30 September 1915, whereupon Methuen were almost immediately prosecuted, in November, for Lawrence's frank treatment of sexual love. After the trial, all copies of the novel were seized and burnt, and The Rainbow remained banned in Britain for 11 years under the Obscene Publications Act 1857. However, it escaped repression in America where BW Huebsch published the first US edition in November 1915. After many vicissitudes, the text that is now canonical is the Cambridge University Press edition (1989) edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes.
Three more from DH Lawrence
Sons and Lovers (1913); Women in Love (1920); Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928, private printing; 1960)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
No comments:
Post a Comment