“He took off his clothes and sat down naked among the primroses ... but they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft-sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, softer and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thighs against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying.”
And this is the man who Mr. Lawrence would have us believe was Inspector of Schools in England in the beginning of the Twentieth Century! The idea that he wants a woman is now absurd. This is his idea of bliss. He knows where to plant himself, his seed: along with the trees in the folds of the delicious fresh-growing leaves. This is his place, his marriage place.
It may interest Mr. Lawrence to know that this procreative idea of Birkin's is not original with him. Many years ago I encountered a man in the Kings Park State Hospital who was of the same belief and addicted to the same practice.
It would not be convincing if only æsthetes, intelligentsia, artists, and the like had revolutionary ideas. Gerald, a man of business, an executive, a coal baron, aggressive, capable, also had them, inherited from his mother, acquired from Birkin and “made in Germany” where he had been sent to school. He makes love to Ursula by expounding his theories of life:
“If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like the ichthyosauri. If only we were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days; things straight out of the fire.”
He wants her without contract, understood or stated:
“There is a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I should want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures. I should want to approach you and you me.—And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, take that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”
In other words, sheer savagery, and the worst African variety at that!
One of Mr. Lawrence's obsessions is that he can distinguish between the sexual writhings of his characters, depending upon the environment in which they writhe and the immediate exciting cause. This justifies him in describing the same writhe over and over with a different setting. Of the five hundred pages, at least one hundred are devoted to descriptions of the sensations that precede and accompany ecstasy provoked and induced by some form of unhealthy sexual awareness.
It is impossible to give even a brief synopsis of “Women in Love.” One chapter, however, must be mentioned, for in a way it is the crux of the book. For some time Birkin has been trying to state his case to Ursula and stave off her clamour for consummation. He wants sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as fulfilment. He wants her to give him her spirit.