Tag Archives: DH Lawrence

Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, But The Wind…’

Posted on by
2

Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, But The Wind…’  William Heinemann, hb, 1935; first published in America in 1934. 276 pp.

This is the second of two books lent to me recently by my friend C. It’s an account by Frieda, née von Richtofen (1879-1956), of her stormy, passionate life with the man who became her second husband: DH Lawrence (1885-1930).

Like the woman herself, it’s a highly unconventional, deeply felt and not entirely reliable account. I could quote the entire four-page Foreword to illustrate its lively, often self-deprecating tone, but here’s a lengthy but I hope revealing sample:

I did not want to write this book. I wanted to give Lawrence my silence. Would he have wanted me to write it? Would he have jeered at me as one of those intellectual females whom he disliked so much? [There’s a lot of insight like this into his not very sympathetic, aggressive criticism of what he perceived as her shortcomings.]…Is it any use, my writing?…Can I hear the real song of our life, the motifs gay, bold, sad, terrible, or can’t I?…I will try to write as honestly as I can…

She then writes the first of many descriptions of the fiery, tempestuous nature of their relationship:

It was a long fight for Lawrence and me to get at some truth between us.; it was a hard life with him, but a wonderful one. Stark and bare, without trimmings and frills…[there was an] unalterable bond between us…

There are several echoes of the language of DHL himself here and throughout this account, and she clearly took on board some of his ideas and beliefs, that are now often seen as misogynistic and excessively authoritarian. She goes on:

We had many battles to fight out, so much to get rid of, so much to surpass. We were both good fighters. There was the ordinary man-and-woman fight between us, to keep the balance, not to trespass, not to topple over. The balance in a human relationship was one of Lawrence’s chief themes.

Then she points out the ‘class war’ between them: they came from ‘different worlds’ – she an aristocrat, he a collier’s son. They had to transcend this gulf, ‘to be reborn into the essence of our individual beings, the essence that is so much deeper than any class distinction.’

There’s that Lawrentian language again.

Then there’s the ‘race’ difference: he was an ‘Englishman, Puritan, stern and uncompromising, so highly conscious and responsible; I, the German, with my vagueness and uncertainty, drifting along. Only the fierce common desire to create a new kind of life, this was all that could make us truly meet.’

Frieda isn’t averse to giving a warts-and-all account. She doesn’t claim to have understood him. ‘I only know that I felt the wonder of him always’:

Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather.

She learned from him what true genius was. But she clearly didn’t always like him very much, as when he cruelly mocked her for showing she didn’t know how to turn on a gas hob. Nevertheless, she concludes, ‘His love wiped out all my shames and inhibitions, the failures and miseries of my past [including her marriage to her first husband, the Nottingham University academic, Ernest Weekley?]…He fought for the liberty of my being, and won.’

Frieda and Lawrence met in 1912, when she was still living with Weekley. She was, she says on p.3, 31 (but she was born in 1879, so I make it 33), and had three children. Lawrence was 26. Within weeks they had eloped to Europe, and she left behind, to her shame and grief, her children; as Weekley filed for divorce on the grounds of her infidelity, she had no legal right to claim custody of them. Lawrence initially consoled her, but then turned characteristically harsh about her sorrow:

…he was furious when I went on [grieving, having received letters from them at home]. “You don’t care a damn about those brats really, and they don’t care about you!” I cried, and we quarrelled.

She adds that he, ‘who had loved his own mother so much, felt, somewhere, it was almost impossible for a mother to leave her children.’ She doesn’t pursue this, but that sounds pretty brutal to me.

She wrote this, whatever this book is, memoir, (auto)biography, poetic reminiscence, at the New Mexico ranch where the couple, who married in 1914, lived on and off for several years in the 1920s, and to which she returned to live most of the rest of her life when Lawrence died in 1930. This book poignantly portrays Lawrence’s always fragile ‘consumptive’ condition: ‘I know now how completely he trusted his life to me, he in whom death was always so near’. This partly explains their constant wanderings in search of more congenial climates for his tubercular lungs.

Her description of that first meeting in 1912 is charming: in the opening sentence of the first chapter she writes:

…it surprises me that Lawrence could have loved me at first sight as he did. I hardly think I could have been a very lovable woman at the time…[But] I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my own proper self.

What follows is a vivid, always engaging account of their wanderings all over the world. There are over 90 of Lawrence’s letters included, to Frieda, her mother and sister. Some of his poems are reproduced, including (I’m pretty sure I’m not misremembering this) ‘Song of a man who has come through’, with its opening line from which Frieda takes her title: ‘Not I, not I but the wind that blows through me.’

There’s only a short section on their time near Zennor in Cornwall, about which I’ve posted here several times before (link HERE). ‘The war seemed to drive Lawrence to utter despair’, she writes; one consequence of this was the beginning of a souring in their always volatile relationship: ‘In those days Lawrence seemed to turn against me, perhaps on account of the bit of German in me.’ It was hardly ‘a bit’! She was a (very distant) cousin of the famous ‘Red Baron’ von Richthofen, the German WWI flying ace.

I enjoyed this as a book to dip into, find weird delights in unexpected places. I can’t recommend it as a full and accurate profile of the married life of the Lawrences (there have been plenty more academic and sober versions published), but it’s a spirited, partial, passionate love letter to a man she clearly adored, and he adored her back – but it was clearly, even from Frieda’s highly subjective perspective, a love-hate thing.

Maxime Raymond Bock, Morel (QC Fiction)

Posted on by
7

Maxime Raymond Bock, Morel. QC Fiction, 2024. Translated from the French by Melissa Bull

Work projects have dominated the last few weeks, hence another period of silence here at T. Days.

I did read the next section of stories in the collected Everyman edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories (those published in the 1930s), but I didn’t find them sufficiently inspiring to write about.

Morel was sent to me (my thanks to them) by QC Fiction, an imprint of Baraka Books based in Québec City (hence the name), specialists in translations into English of Québecois fiction.

It’s a gritty story of a working-class Montreal family – the Morels of the title. Jean-Claude is a hard-working, hard-drinking labourer on the grand modernising construction projects in that city in a period that seems to be the 50s – 90s: motorways, tunnels, buildings.

It’s tough, dangerous work, and Morel suffers physically and mentally as a consequence: labour laws are ineffective, and there’s little consideration by the developers of health and safety. His father lost an arm in a needless accident in the factory where he worked, while his workmates are often maimed, hospitalised or even killed as a result of poor safety conditions. Men like Morel don’t benefit much from the urban renewal projects they expend their health and wellbeing on constructing. They live in squalor.

There are suggestions of corporate corruption, and gross inequality is the norm. Many of these workers are immigrants, paid a pittance, while the speculating property developers and city representatives get rich.

As we see Morel age over the decades he’s racked by aches and pains from old injuries and repetitive stress. He marries, has kids, undergoes various hardships and tragedies, the consequence mostly of his relative poverty, exacerbated by his tendency to drink too much, pay too little heed to the emotional needs of his family (or himself), and his failure to curb his temper.

It’s a fairly difficult, fragmented narrative structure to follow. Flashbacks to Morel’s childhood and adolescence are dropped in the middle of scenes from his adult life. I found myself when I’d finished starting to re-read, and things made much more sense second time round. It’s worth doing this, because I appreciated the author’s skill and technique that way, when after the first reading I was pretty unsure I’d enjoyed the experience.

For instance, it’s important that the story begins and ends with Morel in old age being visited by one of his adult granddaughters. She wants to get to know him – he’s alienated himself, become a recluse, and is estranged from his extended family; she’s anxious to find out why. So there’s a glimmer of hope and possible redemption there to lighten what’s often quite a dark, sombre narrative.

It also enabled me to see beyond Morel’s outwardly grumpy, buttoned up nature – he’s also a bit of a slob. Viewed through the perspective of this second reading I could empathise with him more; he’s been ground down by a system that’s stacked against him. It saps from him the spirit and energy to resist its pernicious effects.

In some ways it’s a novel that reminds me of some of Zola’s representations of working people in similar circumstances, without the weird insistence on inherited traits. It occurs to me that the surname might suggest some influence by another great novel about a man struggling to survive a working-class upbringing: Paul Morel in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.

Tenth blog anniversary

Posted on by
19

When I posted a recent reading roundup yesterday I should have noticed that 10 April marked the tenth anniversary of the first post on this blog. When I started Tredynas Days, I had no clear plan. Books would always feature prominently, but I also wanted to write about anything else that came to my notice and interested me, from online journals (topic of my first post) to medieval hagiography, podcasts, television, music, dogs, birds.

After a few years I clustered some of the more random pieces together under the category ‘Asides’. These often featured places and sights in Cornwall, where I live. DH Lawrence was the subject of a number of related posts with a Cornish theme: he’d lived in Zennor during part of WWI. He and his wife Frieda were famously expelled from the area when she was suspected of signalling to German submarines from the clifftops.

Travels to Spain, where our son and his family live, and Berlin before that, have also been a theme. I like to take a vaguely psychogeographical interest in the locations I find myself in. Indulge in ‘dérives’ through cities and countryside. Walter Benjamin and flânerie – the pleasure derived from aimless but open-minded wandering.

I started the blog at a time when my work life had evolved significantly. I had changed jobs and moved from full-time to part-time lecturing. This gave me more time in which to devote attention to the blog. Just before the pandemic I was made redundant. Even more time available. Then I increased the freelance work I’d done intermittently in the past with my wife, and now find that it takes up quite a lot more of my time and energy – but it’s editorial work that I enjoy. So posting on the blog has declined in recent months.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far I’d like to thank you for visiting. To all those who have over the years taken the trouble to comment and become involved in the online discussions that arise over topics in the posts, I’d like to say thank you. I’ve enjoyed meeting so many people online over these ten years.

As for the future: I don’t know. My focus has tended in recent years to be increasingly on what I’ve been reading, and I’ve enjoyed the discipline of putting into words what I’ve thought about the books I’ve read. But I daresay the ‘asides’ will continue.

DH Lawrence in Zennor – again. Guest post by Helen Boyles

Posted on by
10

Helen recently commented on my posts (from four years ago) about DH Lawrence’s stay in Cornwall during WWI. She gave permission for me to post her poem on the topic. First a short introduction by her about the provenance of the poem:

Introduction

I was inspired to write this poem after a visit to the little ancient Cornish settlement of Zennor which we reached after a long day’s walking along the mist-swathed Cornish Coast path. I had been keen to spend a night here after learning of D.H. Lawrence’s association with the place. I’d studied and long been interested in the writer and his keen emotional response to place in general and this in particular. When in Zennor, we also learnt more about Lawrence from the current publican of the Tinner’s Arms, where Lawrence had stayed for a while when he first came to the place to consider establishing a small writing community of friends there. That it didn’t work out was probably inevitable in a traditional working community during this sensitive period of the first World War with Lawrence’s strong anti-war sentiments and rather flamboyant German wife. I thought it would be fun to try and convey Lawrence’s initial idealism and eventual disappointment in his imagined thoughts and words.

Here’s the poem (WordPress insists on line spaces between lines – hope this doesn’t detract from the effect too much):

Lawrence in Zennor

Yes, this should suit us well, far from the fret and heave of human life,

a space of peace.

Such a fine, wild landscape – the finest I have seen in all my travellings.

A kind of paradise – I could be happy here.

The mind can breathe – we can settle to our work,

with like minds forge a new way.

Six rough stone-walled fields from my window

is the sea, I feel I hear its breathing out there

through the day, its hush and rush. It takes us out, away.

I feel the words and lines come crowding in, worlds

building from the passions of our lives and loves.

 

Yes, so I thought, thought I could escape smallness here

with these grand shapes, the jutting profile

of the Head, the stony tumble of the fields.

And surely there was space

for all of us, Katherine, Murray, Frieda, me,

to be – and grow, but no; the littleness, the fear

came creeping in to shrink and darken us.

Banal complaints: the place too large, too small,

the damp, the inconvenience,

the awkward shape and pace of things,

the surly silence of the working neighbourhood.

How they diminish us, betray our better selves.

 

And what we do to each other – the stupidity of that –

the grief. How we feed the innocent the lies of honour, duty,

serve them the myth of nationhood. What does that mean?

I see the stoic faces quietly accept this myth

of honour, duty, nationhood, turn from the land

to follow that hollow call.

I want to shout at them: Don’t listen to those lies!

But they regard me warily.

Old Celtic stock, the folk are quiet and plain with us,

are rooted in their own truth, in myth memory

that tunnels underneath the bright turf

where they delve within the roar of waves.

Some may be lost in that roar, the blindness it brings.

Well, they may see a light and read it as the enemy

or a signal to such, I’m told.

 

And Frieda moves to the sea’s pulse; sometimes calm and lazy,

sometimes dancing, sometimes turbulent.

We move to each others’ moods, the flux and turn

of moon drawn tides.

I have loved her boldness, reckless energy,

but here it spills to carelessness –Volklieder

in the lanes does not sit well with this community, not now,

she should see that. So now we’re trapped in gossip,

warped in the mirror of suspicious minds.

 

A brave community this could have been,

and this place carved from granite and the light,

it could have been a paradise.

In its sounding of the ancient ways it brought new possibility:

it brought a hope and we have wasted it.

I thank Helen for this fine response to DHL and his experience of West Penwith. There follow some links to my original posts here about his initial euphoria on moving to Zennor, and the ensuing disillusionment and exile. Helen captures very well in her poem this movement in DHL’s spirit from elation and hope to despondency:

  1. The Promised Land
  2. I feel fundamentally happy and free
  3. The magic fades
  4. Now I am glad and free
  5. ‘The sensuous Celtic type: DHL’s short story ‘Samson & Delilah’
  6. (Two years ago I posted THIS PIECE on the sale of the idyllic cottage in which he and Frieda had lived, and where he’d hoped to establish the utopian community ‘Rananim’ with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; they disappointed him by moving to Mylor, near Falmouth, in what he called the ‘softer’ part of the county, to escape the cottage they considered too basic and uncomfortable.)

 

Bernard Walke, Twenty Years at St Hilary

Posted on by
8

Bernard Walke, Twenty Years at St Hilary. Truran, Mount Hawke, Cornwall, paperback, 2002. First published 1935

The friends with the beautiful Siamese cats, who’ve featured in a couple of recent posts, are active participants in the life of the city’s cathedral, and the charity that runs Epiphany House, which featured in one of my ‘local walks during lockdown’ posts (link HERE). In discussing some related topics, the life of Fr Bernard Walke came up. I hadn’t heard of him, so a copy of his book about his time as vicar of St Hilary, near Penzance, was duly reserved at the local library, now open for a click and collect service.

I’m not a religious person (my friends clearly are), but Fr Walke’s genial and charming humanity shine through every page of his memoir. His Anglo-Catholic faith is apparent, and he has that rare ability to make it seem natural and attractive.

Bernard Walke, Twenty Years at St Hilary coverHe’d been a curate at two other Cornish churches before St Hilary: first at St Ives, where he initiated his popular practice of taking mass outdoors onto the harbourside, and endeared himself to the ordinary townsfolk by joining the fishermen when they put to sea; then at Polruan, opposite Fowey, where he enjoyed occasionally accompanying the freighters carrying china clay to Europe and beyond.

Each chapter is packed with incident and experience. In the opening chapter he relates a typically endearing anecdote of the stray cat that adopted him and would trot after him to church when he celebrated mass. One day she was taken with the sparkling sequins decorating the mantle of a grande dame of the village in the front pew. She sprang from her usual spot on the pulpit lectern into the old lady’s lap. Next day Walke received an irate letter from his Vicar, enumerating his many ‘extravagances’ (code for ‘high church practices’) concluding with the cat’s ‘monstrous behaviour’ the previous night. One phrase stood out for him:

‘Your performing cat has made religion stink in the nostrils of the best people in Polruan.’

In his defensive reply Fr Walke adduced the example of St Philip Neri, whose cat always accompanied him ‘at his devotions’, but to no avail; the poor little cat was barred from the church.

Fr Walke arrived at St Hilary in 1913. His first impression of the village, just outside Penzance in rural west Cornwall, was not favourable. The church had been unsympathetically rebuilt in Victorian times, the landscape was rather bleak, and the village was blighted by what he thought rather ugly villas.

In his twenty years as vicar there, however, he became much loved by his parishioners and locals. There was hostility throughout that time from some to his catholic rites and adornments to the church, culminating in a violent incursion by Protestant activists near the end of his time there – an attack that almost broke his spirit and his already faltering health.

He began the memoir while being treated for TB in a sanatorium at Tehidy, then later in Gran Canaria when his health again deteriorated.

The memoir is dominated by his deep reverence for and love of nature: birds, trees, plants and animals are frequently befriended or described. He was particularly fond of donkeys, and would ride around the county in a ‘shay’, tolerating the wayward animals’ tendency to wander off the road. One had a habit when off duty of taking to the fields and causing mayhem, such as leading local horses into bad habits.

Fr Walke’s wife Annie was a noted member of the Newlyn community of artists. Many of this famous group populate the pages, and several of them contributed artworks to decorate the church: Harold and Laura Knight, Dod and Ernest Procter. Roger Fry did a reredos. Other well-known figures appear briefly, from AJ Munnings to GB Shaw.

This amiable country vicar’s warm heartedness wasn’t confined to love of nature: he was a great campaigner on behalf of the ordinary working people of his community. In St Hilary this was largely the pre-mechanised agricultural workers. Like all the greatest Christians, he practised what he preached, and strove to bring light and purpose into the lives of St Hilary’s people.

He is perhaps best known for the Christmas plays that he wrote and had performed in the church by the parishioners. A BBC friend persuaded him to have some of these broadcast on radio – the first ever outside broadcasts in the mid-1920s, continuing into the thirties.

He set up a local children’s home, and opened his own house up to a small group of Austrian refugees after WWI. The chapters set during that terrible war are particularly poignant. Fr Walke was a committed pacifist, and the already simmering hostility to his catholic tendencies was heated even further by his anti-war stance. There’s no mention of DH and Frieda Lawrence’s similar activity in nearby Zennor at this time (see my posts on DHL in Cornwall HERE).

His campaigning was also extended to an attempt to establish a new mining enterprise in the area; most of the mines had by this time closed, and many former miners who hadn’t joined the Cornish diaspora were unemployed.

I approached this memoir with some trepidation, since I don’t share the author’s faith. But I enjoyed it immensely; the author has a delightfully self-deprecating style, and his love of humanity is uplifting.

 

 

Only women grow up: Kay Boyle, My Next Bride

Posted on by
6

Kay Boyle, My Next Bride. Virago Modern Classics, 1986. First published in America, 1934

If ever I see the faces of Brancusi, or Duchamp, or Gertrude Stein, I shall look the other way because of the history of courage they made for you. “If you can’t live hard, die holy like a piece of cheese, Victoria.”

Kay Boyle My Next Bride cover

The cover of this handsome VMC paperback shows ‘Mrs Douglas Illingworth’ by Meredith Frampton

This cryptic thought and strange aphorism appears in parentheses early in Kay Boyle’s künstlerroman My Next Bride. It thus contrasts bracingly with the Modernist narrative account of the early scene in which nineteen-year-old, virginal Victoria John unpacks her few treasures in a decrepit, crumbling boarding house at which she’s just arrived in Neuilly, Paris.

It’s the early thirties, and Paris is the city of that Lost Generation of American expats like Victoria (and Kay Boyle). She’s an aspiring artist (who favours, significantly, portraits from the lives of the saints) whose much-loved woman friend, an older Australian vaudeville singer called Lacey, with whom she’d hoboed across the States and Canada, had recently committed suicide. Lacey had challenged and inspired her, ‘a stricken thin madonna’ who’d said to the ingénue Victoria, in addition to the startling words quoted above, that ‘life was an obligation in arrogance, talk an experiment in insult.’

What I’ve quoted so far indicates that Boyle’s narrative voice is typical of its period and her coterie: experimental, unconventional, fragmented and poetic. Perspectives shift abruptly, mid-paragraph, even mid-sentence: the Modernist verbal equivalent of the artistic developments favoured by the avant-garde of Montparnasse in which she moved. Dos Passos, Pound and Hemingway had been there – some of the few names Boyle doesn’t let drop. Archibald MacLeish is name-checked, DH Lawrence, Picasso. No wonder Victoria gravitated there to develop as an artist, to find herself as an artist and person.

It’s a thinly veiled autobiographical novel. Victoria, like Boyle, joins a commune run by a shady American proto-hippy named Sorrel. He’s clearly based on Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond. A charlatan scoundrel, who preys upon lost souls like Victoria and lures them into his squalid community to exploit. She’s put to work as a salesgirl in his shop in fashionable central Paris; the stock is the hand-crafted tat churned out by his doting disciples. He meanwhile swans around in classical Greek robes and sandals, striking poses and extolling the virtues of the simple life, dance, art, vegetarianism, and free love. Entering this group, where washing up is rarely done and the food is vile, is like ‘taking the veil’, another member breathlessly tells Victoria, unaware of the hypocrisy of her despicable phoney guru, who pockets a wealthy American patroness’s cash at the end and takes off for the Riviera with his mistress. “They don’t know what they want,” he confides to wide-eyed Victoria at one point, gleefully.

Victoria is attracted to the charismatic Anthony Lister, who seems to be based on a combination of Harry Crosby, the wealthy, sexually promiscuous playboy who with his wife Caresse was part of the bohemian expat artistic scene in Paris, and Laurence Vail, modernist sculptor and writer who was became Boyle’s second husband in 1932. He’d previously been married to Peggy Guggenheim, the heiress, who appears in the novel as Fontana (also resembling Caresse C.), destined to become Victoria’s most true friend – if not her next bride.

He quickly singles out Victoria as his next bride, chatting her up with the most bizarre line in garbled stream-of-consciousness monologues, that read like an Imagist poet on opium (pretty much like Crosby, then). Here’s a sample from their first meeting:

“It’s the first time I’ve walked up this side of the street. I always take the other. I believe in embassies, and always in the emissary of the soul. The patterns on these walls take the sight right out of the eye like an operation. My name’s Anthony,” he said, his eyes escaping. “I believe in bone.”

Right. Not sure what escaping eyes look like, but this is impressive hokum.

After numerous late-night debauches with him Victoria comes to see his darker, troubled side. When she’d told him of the problematic issue of the poor (herself included), he replied:

Rich or poor, every one was stabbing every one else with hate, stabbing in envy and in terror. “It isn’t a great deal to ask, only that every one put down their weapons…I ask that people give up their brides. The whole universe on a honeymoon of horror, wedded to their daggers, stabbing their way from one betrayal to the next…”

Poor Anthony. He knows there’s more to life than partying, being ‘the eternal bridegroom’, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise.

Some of the best scenes in this uneven novel (brilliant at its best, which is most of the time; dire in places) involve the two starving, genteel Russian sisters living in the grim Neuilly boarding house. Aristocrats from before the Revolution, they’re reduced to applying to an agency for domestic staff where, in a scene of comic genius, they’re mistaken as employers in search of maids, when in fact they’re looking for work themselves, but can’t quite articulate this evidence of how low they’ve sunk.

Fontana’s dog is excellent, too:

The Russian dog came after them into the car and slouched down beside them, incredibly bored, incredibly clean, with his hair curled smooth as a caracal and his loose, tapering limbs bent under his pointed breast.

In later life Boyle became a fervent social activist, fingered by the McCarthyists for her left-wing tendencies. In this novel there are signs of this tendency, as in a stirring speech towards the end from Victoria to privileged but angst-ridden Anthony. She’s begun to grow up, to see through fakes like Sorrel, and to discern the self-indulgence of Anthony’s atrophied poeticisms:

Only women grow up, Victoria was thinking; men go on remembering the time when their families stood on guard about them, or the books on the table, or the silver, and there was no need for explanation. Haven’t you learned that once cut out of the family’s life you are a single thing given to yourself and other people, carved out separate to stand alone or not to stand at all?

Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado is a weaker, more frivolous version of My Next Bride‘s more ambitious, satisfying account of a young American woman’s painful growth into selfhood and discovery of love’s unexpected springs.

 

Sennen, Geevor, a tin miner and DH Lawrence

Posted on by
8

A week ago I drove with Mrs TD down to my favourite part of Cornwall, west Penwith, for one of our regular visits to these remote and beautiful moors and coasts. There’s a point on the A30 when the road crests a rise and a couple of miles below you see the magnificent sweep of Mount’s Bay, with the dark turrets of St Michael’s Mount in front, and the graceful crescent of the bay curving round to Penzance and beyond (I’ve posted about this, and St Mary of Egypt, here.)

Sennen Cove harbour

We headed further on this road, past Penzance, to Sennen Cove. We wanted to see again another lovely Cornish bay – not as spectacular as Mount’s Bay, but still lovely. It’s a popular destination for summer holidaymakers, and on a lovely August day the beach was busy with surfers, swimmers and watchful lifeguards (but not, sadly, the famous Newfoundland surf lifesaver dog, whose name I forget; there’s a book about him.)

The cliffs loom above the cream-coloured sand of the beach, giving the bay a sense of being protected by a tremendous elemental force: furrowed and fissured black granite.

We wandered through the village, heading for the art gallery: the Capstan and Round House. It’s a wonderful old building, with an ancient capstan wheel in the basement; there’s just room to walk around its perimeter and admire the artworks on the walls and surfaces.

Geevor entrance flags

Entrance to the Geevor Mine site

The owner was charming: Colin Caffell (his partner runs the gallery upstairs). He told us about his commission a few years ago to make a memorial statue to Cornish miners. He started with the clay model, then handed it on to the people who specialise in casting. He also told us about the garden in which the statue stands, at the entrance to Geevor Mine, a few miles along the coast road just outside Pendeen, which of course we had to drive on and visit (it’s only been there since 2015, and we’ve somehow never been in before).

This north Cornish coastline is spectacularly beautiful: more rugged and forbidding than the south, just a few miles across the moors of this narrowest part of the peninsula. I’ve posted before about Cape Cornwall, nearby, with its dangerous offshore rocks and iconic community of red-legged, red-billed choughs. Also nearby is the surprisingly large town of St Just, home of the gallery of one of my favourite artists: Kurt Jackson.

 On his website the sculptor Colin explains his intentions: he wanted to position the seven-foot bronze resin statue in a garden containing grasses and plants from all of the continents to which the intrepid Cornish hard rock miners took their skills: the Americas, Australasia, Africa and Asia. The colour scheme he was aiming for, the blues, oranges and reds, were intended to evoke the sunset over the Atlantic. He wanted this garden to become a ‘place for quiet reflection.’ It is.

Of course the plants had to be hardy enough to survive the salty winds blowing off the ocean. He goes on to say that the plants do better than one might expect; the artist Patrick Heron managed to create his own exotic garden where he lived not far along the coast.

The plaque beneath the statue reads:

Hard rock breeds hard men

Who slip between earth’s cracks for a living,

The dark chasm which closes around you,

Tight like a fist, draws you down

Into the mine’s gullet, the belly of the beast

Hewn out of granite, the ledger of tin,

The ingot of tradition, a labyrinth of strong voices

That still chisel the dark, the rich seam,

A stream that runs through each generation,

A lode that anchors a man’s life

From ‘The Wheal of Hope’ by James Crowden.

The memorial was ‘raised and funded by the community of the St Just Mining District in honour of the courageous men who worked the narrow lodes in hazardous conditions far below the land and sea in the mines of this district; and the women and children who toiled on the surface crushing and dressing ore. As pioneers, many of these Cornish families took this skill and expertise to the far corners of the world as new mining opportunities emerged.’ [from the same plaque]

That last point is perhaps a little romanticised. The diaspora of Cornish miners – the hard rock specialists who’d learned to extract every kind of valuable mineral from the granite under the moors of west Penwith and the rest of the county (or duchy) – had to emigrate when the mines became less competitive than their counterparts in other ‘far corners of the world.’ They had little choice, in other words.

In 2016 I wrote some posts on the Man Engine (here, and here) the massive mechanical puppet that toured the county and beyond, commemorating these hardy miners – many of whom died or suffered terrible injuries, working in dangerous, unpleasant conditions. The Levant disaster was just one such terrible event.

View from the moors above Zennor

View from the moors above Zennor

We drove on for lunch at the Tinners Arms, Zennor. I usually aim to have a pint of Tinners Ale here, the inn where DH Lawrence stayed briefly while searching for a place to rent in what he optimistically considered his ‘promised land’. He eventually found the small, basic cottage complex at Higher Tregerthen just outside the village. I’ve posted several times before about his stay in west Cornwall, trying to create a utopian community, Rananim, starting with John Middleton Murry and his wife Katherine Mansfield – but they disappointed him by moving to the ‘softer’ part of the county, to less basic accommodation.

A comment on a related post last August, about the sale of this remote cottage by a local estate agent, elicited a comment today from Julie Warries (thanks, Julie), who said she’s particularly interested in Lawrence’s time in Cornwall and the letters he wrote there. She added a charming aside: when she visited the Tinners Arms she asked a barman for directions to Higher Tregerthen. He didn’t know, but added that she wasn’t the first person to ask that!

Mrs TD thinks I should start a ‘DH Lawrence tours in Cornwall’ agency…Who knows.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge

Posted on by
9

Dürrenmatt post 2: The Pledge – Requiem for the Crime Novel. 

This is the last of the five novellas in my paperback Picador edition.

There’s a link to Grant’s post on it at his 1st Reading blog in my previous post. He summarises the plot and comments perceptively on the significance of the frame narrative as a crucial element of the novel. This enables the world-weary, experienced detective (the main narrator) to challenge the crime writer’s methods and explain why he disdains his moribund genre of novel writing – hence the subtitle.

He concedes that it may be ‘morally necessary’ for the puzzle or contest to be resolved by the detective in these stories so that goodness and justice prevail over evil and crime. But the ‘rules of the game’, as in chess, don’t apply or even exist in the real world he operates in. Life is more random.

Dürrenmatt Novels coverThe story he tells to justify his argument is a fascinating example of metafiction serving to highlight the weaknesses in the genre he (and FD) criticises. He’s able to highlight, through this story of the investigation of a serial child sex-murderer, the way a chance accident, a random, unpredictable event can foil the most brilliant detective like Matthaï in this story.

Unlike the two Inspector Barlach novellas discussed in my previous post, this story doesn’t simply favour the detective’s intuitive, spontaneous approach over the conventional scientific-rational police methods of his colleagues. The neatly symmetrical generic plot with its satisfyingly neat conclusion is exposed and debunked. The black-and-white morality of the conventional murder mystery is nevertheless as blurred as it is in the Barlach stories. Justice is again ultimately shown to be an illusion.

Like the classic tragic hero in drama, Inspector Matthäi’s hubris in this story causes his downfall. His arrogant ‘pledge’ to the parents that he’ll catch the killer of their daughter arises from his arrogant confidence in his detection skills (plus he panics and is desperate to escape their despair so blurts out what pops into his head). In fact his logical methods and his motivation become increasingly irrational, obsessive and as deranged as the killer’s.

By refusing to abide by the ‘rules’ of the genre, Dürrenmatt ingeniously subverts the genre he is simultaneously rewriting. As Grant says in his post, he thus explores and problematizes the moral dilemmas and philosophical questions that are raised by this cunningly framed plot. There’s even a grim humour in his exposure of the flaws in the famous crime writer’s (the frame narrator’s) predictable fictional conventions. It’s this self-referential destruction job that makes the novella so intriguing and rewarding.

One of my less impressed initial reactions was that the rash promise (or Pledge) to catch the criminal made to the murder victim’s family was a cliché. I’ve seen this trope countless times in recent TV crime dramas. In most cases the detective making the promise is inexperienced, and allows their emotional response to the grieving family, or their over-confidence in systematic, scientific detection methods, to cloud their judgement.

But then I reflected that FD was doing this in 1958. I’ve little knowledge of the history of the crime genre, but I’d have thought this was pretty innovative at that time.

The subversive ingenuity of this novella was made even more apparent for me when I read at the Univ. of Chicago Press site (link in previous post) that this prose fiction work is a reworking of an original TV play by FD. He was dissatisfied with the conventionally neat ending of that drama, in which the murderer is caught as a consequence of the brilliant Inspector’s relentless and systematic detection methods. It seems he thought this trivialised the story. He deliberately reworked the ending so that the chance accident that Matthaï didn’t or couldn’t anticipate thwarted his success and plunged him into his own moral and mental dissolution. The solving of the case is less important than the sad fate of Matthäi in this subversion of the generic convention.

FD’s achievement here puts me in mind of DH Lawrence’s famous statement in his essay ‘Morality and the Novel’, in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (1914):

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

FD enacts this dictum in The Pledge at Matthäi’s (and the conventional crime novel’s) expense.

Isn’t he guilty, in doing so, however, of putting his own thumb in the scale to pull down the moral balance the way he prefers it? Or is this in fact just a realistic acceptance of the amorality of the world?

Sean Penn directed a film version in 2001, also called The Pledge, starring Jack Nicholson. If you’ve seen it I’d be interested in hearing your opinion: is it as good as the novel?

 

 

 

Angela Thirkell: High Rising

Posted on by
11

Angela Thirkell, High Rising. VMC 2013; first published 1933

Thirkell H Rising cover

The VMC cover demonstrates the retro charm of this frothy confection of a novel

Angela Thirkell was quite someone: a granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Burne-Jones and goddaughter of JM Barrie, her father was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and she was related to Kipling and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Like her enterprising protagonist Laura in her second novel High Rising, she took to writing potboiler-middlebrow ‘rather good bad books’ about which she has ‘no illusions’ as to their literary merit, to make a living when left alone in the world:

She had considered the question carefully, and decided that, next to racing and murder, and sport, the great reading public of England (female section) likes to read about clothes.

There’s a character in this novel who reluctantly shows Laura’s publisher her novel; Laura is relieved to find she’s one of those ‘rotten’ writers who knew they couldn’t write’ – a typically self-deprecating reference that surely applies to Thirkell herself.

So Laura churns out, as often as Thirkell did, frothy romances set in the world of fashion, ‘opium’ as a friend and fan of Laura’s describes the experience of reading them. Laura is slightly embarrassed to add to the pile of what would now be derisively known as chick-lit, but happy to cash the royalties cheques. She’s level-headed, a realist who’s learned to exploit her own limited talent and the even more limited tastes of her target market. (Elizabeth Taylor does a much more witty, interesting and sophisticated job on this in Angel.)

Unlike Laura, whose husband had died (though she says he was an expensive nuisance when alive), Thirkell left her second husband; her first she divorced on the grounds of adultery. Men tend refreshingly to be portrayed as the weaker sex in this novel, and it’s the spirited, sensible women like Laura who win through – ‘excellent’ women, to borrow Barbara Pym’s phrase – a writer to whom Thirkell is often compared, but who is a far sharper, more accomplished artist.

I won’t summarise the rather predictable but amusing plot – links to other bloggers’ posts at the end supply outlines. I’ll just single out the few points that amused me in this undemanding, often saccharine entertainment. It’s ideal for a rainy day or sickbed – a guilty escapist pleasure that was a bit too much for Karen of BookerTalk, who likened it to an indigestible ‘meringue’. She craved something edgier and saltier. I know what she means, but I (mostly) enjoyed this novel. I didn’t care for the casual anti-Semitism; it’s not sufficient to put it down to the opinions of the period. Look what was going on in Germany in 1933.

Thirkell set these comedies in Trollope’s Barsetshire – a feature that appealed to me, as my recent Barsetshire posts indicate. She’s not in his league, of course, but wouldn’t claim to be.

Laura’s young son Tony divides critical opinion: to some he’s a charming, precocious chatterbox; I’m with those who found him irritating, with his obsession with trains and the patrician manners his private school encourages. But he reminded me of my grandson when he was that age. Now he’s scared of trains. Existential pre-teen angst has replaced innocent pleasure. Tony will probably become Transport Minister in a Tory government and close unprofitable country lines like the one passing through High Rising.

I preferred Laura’s cheerful maternal doting on him mixed with prevalent hatred. On several occasions she could happily kill him, our narrator tells us. She contemplates writing a book: ‘Why I Hate My Children’. Reminds me of the recent bestseller ‘Why Mummy Drinks’.

There’s a weird section in Ch. 9 just like passages in Cold Comfort Farm (published the year before, in 1932): Laura sees a handsome, swarthy rider in Hyde Park:

Rather DH Lawrence-ish, thought Laura vaguely. The sort of person who would turn into a half-caste Indian, full of black, primal secret something-or-other, and subjugate his mate.

Her reverie is ended when this hunky vision speaks in an accent so ‘healthily Cockney that the lure of the he-man vanished.’ The pastiche is almost as good as Stella Gibbons’.

There’s a well done car crash (no one is hurt) when Laura’s publisher gets drunk at a New Year party (as publishers do) and drives her home. The aftermath is a good example of Thirkell making an entertaining meal of unlikely material. The car ends on its roof, with Adrian jammed under the steering wheel, and Laura on top of him. She’s livid.

‘[The door]’s stuck, of course,’ she said coldly. ‘Do we spend the night here? It may be respectable, in view of the limited opportunities, but it’s not my idea of comfort.

Adrian manages to get out:

‘Come on, Laura,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

‘How can I get out of a small window above my head, you soft gobbin,’ said Laura angrily. ‘I’ll never take you to a party again.’

The dressing-down she gives him when they get to her house is classic.

Farcical-theatrical set pieces like this just about redeem a lively but uneven, limited comic novel. They could easily feature in those screwball-women films of the period starring actors like Claudette Colbert.

See Jacqui’s post

Ali’s at HeavenAli

Jane’s blogging as FleurInHerWorld (now Beyond Eden Rock)

Karen’s at Booker Talk

DH Lawrence’s idyllic cottage in Cornwall

Posted on by
39
Estate agent's advert for DHL cottage

The ‘tower house’ at Higher Tregerthen, nr Zennor, where the Lawrences lived in 1916-17; advertised for sale by a local estate agent last week

An advert in the property pages of last week’s local Cornish newspaper, The West Briton, provided the inspiration for today’s post. Two years ago I posted a series of pieces on DH Lawrence’s letters written during his stay here in 1916-17. I shall dip into these posts here, with some added material from the letters of that time (he was a prodigious, brilliant correspondent).

The first post was on Aug 11 2016:

When we came over the shoulder of the wild hill, above the sea, to Zennor, I felt we were coming into the Promised Land. I know there will be a new heaven and a new earth take place now: we have triumphed. I feel like a Columbus who can see a shadowy America before him: only this isn’t merely territory, it is a new continent of the soul. Letter of 25 Feb. 1916 to Lady Ottoline Morrell, from The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore (Heinemann, London: 1962, repr. 1970; all quotations here are from this text), vol. 1, p. 437

The copy at the bottom of the estate agent’s ad gives the Lawrence quotation(s)

The quotation in the estate agent’s copy (I’ve gone for a full-size image in the hope it can be read) conflates and slightly misquotes two different letters from Lawrence. The first part I quoted in that first post of mine. It should read

At Zennor one sees infinite Atlantic, all peacock-mingled colours, and the gorse is sunshine itself, already. But this cold wind is deadly. [24 Feb. 1916, from Porthcothan, to JM Murry and K. Mansfield]

Not surprisingly the agent omits that second sentence. Their second sentence cites part of this, which I quoted in my second post:

 [5 March 1916, from the Tinner’s Arms inn, Zennor, to John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield] We have been here nearly a week now. It is a most beautiful place: a tiny granite village nestling under high, shaggy moor-hills, and a big sweep of lovely sea beyond, such a lovely sea, lovelier even than the Mediterranean… To Penzance one goes over the moors, high, then down into Mount’s Bay, looking at St Michael’s Mount, like a dark little jewel. It is all gorse now, flickering with flower…

The rooms and fabric of the house have clearly been modishly updated since the Lawrences lived there in relative squalor

In the same letter he goes on to describe the house, in good estate-agentese:

What we have found is a two-roomed cottage, one room up, one down, with a long scullery. But the rooms are big and light, and the rent won’t be more than 4/- [4 old shillings, 20 pence in new currency, if I remember rightly: a pittance even then; it’s rather more expensive to buy now!] The place is rather splendid. It is just under the moors, on the edge of the few rough stony fields that go to the sea. It is quite alone, as a little colony.

DHL planMy picture left from the text captures the whole of the rest of this excited letter, with Lawrence’s sketches of the site plan. I see I’ve underlined his likening the place to ‘a little monastery’. As my posts of two years ago indicate, he was hoping to set up a ‘Rananim’, a sort of Utopian commune of like-minded higher spirits (with his own and Frieda’s at or near the top of the heap, he assumes, with characteristically disarming lack of modesty). If you can read the text in my picture you’ll see that he enthusiastically allocates living space to his chosen companions; the Mansfields were unable to put up with the primitive, ‘rugged’ living conditions and escaped to the ‘soft’ part of the county. ‘The walls of their cottage are rather damp,’ he admits in a later letter to Barbara Low (?30 May).

Lawrence had a sturdier spirit, and preferred this ‘queer outlandish Celtic country [where] I feel happy and free’ [16 April 1916, Higher Tregerthen, to Catherine Carswell].

The estate agents might feel the need for some judicious editing of some of his other descriptions, as here in that same letter to Barbara Low cited above:

The place is perfectly lovely. The cottage is tiny…The stairs go up at the side, nice and white, the low square window looks out at a rocky wall, a bit of field, and the moor overhead. The fireplace is very nice, the room has a real beauty. Upstairs is a good bedroom with a great window looking down at the sea – which is six fields away. There is also a window, as in the living room, at the back, looking over the road on to the hill which is all rocks and boulders and a ruined cottage. It is very lovely, and dear to my heart.

Third post, Aug. 13, 2016

By this time the euphoria Lawrence had felt on entering this ‘promised land’ in the far west (‘there is something uralt and clean about it’, he said in that letter about the house) had faded, transformed into something bitter and disillusioned. This was partly because he felt betrayed by his ‘truly blood kin’ – principally the Middleton Murrys, who failed to share his enthusiasm for Higher Tregerthen and the ‘rough primeval’ scenery around – ‘too rocky and bleak for them’, he wrote disparagingly to Ottoline Morrell on 16 April; and partly because of his and his German wife’s experiences with the locals, who suspected them of signalling to the enemy (this is at the height of WWI), a feeling reinforced by their tendency to hold forth heatedly on the stupidity of the war and the bigots (as they saw them) who blindly supported it (‘one hates one’s King and Country’ he wrote to Ottoline Morrell on 18 April). The dream ended when Lawrence was exempted from conscription on the grounds of his ‘consumption’ – which relieved him (‘I should die in a week, if they kept me’, he wrote to Catherine Carswell, 9 July) and saddened him, for he felt a deep sympathy for the Cornish conscripts, ‘most unwarlike, soft, peacable, ancient’ – yet ‘they accepted it all…with wonderful purity of spirit’ and sense of ‘duty to their fellow man’. This was an attitude he pityingly admired, for he despised what he saw as wrong-headed patriotism (and a nationalist sentiment unfortunately being encouraged in some political quarters again today):

All this war, this talk of nationality, to me is false. I feel no nationality, not fundamentally. I feel no passion for my own land, nor my own house, nor my own furniture, nor my own money. Therefore I won’t pretend any…the truth of my spirit is all that matters to me.

Post 4, Aug 14 2016

In October 1917 the police raided the house at Higher Tregerthen and the Lawrences were ignominiously evicted from the county, still half-suspected of being spies in the pay of the enemy. Lawrence in these last Cornish letters had given up on this Celtic paradise – ‘here one is outside England’ he had written ecstatically to JB Pinker from Porthcothan, nr Padstow, on 1 January 2016, on first arriving in Cornwall, before moving to Zennor – and was now talking of going instead to the actual, not his fantasy Celtic America/new found land, which despite its shortcomings was ‘nearer to freedom’.