Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ she is talking about. Sex, lovemaking, is ‘tomfoolery’. Men’s tomfoolery.

      But March is drawn to the young soldier, and Banford, who will be left out if March marries, weeps and complains, and the boy hears the weeping and the commotion and learns how much he is seen as an interloper, a thief. He goes off into the dark and shoots the fox.

      March dreams again. Her Banford dies and there is nothing to bury her in but the fox’s skin. She lays the dead girl’s head on the brush of the fox, and the skin makes a fiery coverlet. Awake she stands by the dead fox that is hanging up waiting to be skinned, and she strokes and caresses the beautiful flowing tail. The soldier watches and waits.

      So, one thieving fox is dead, but the human fox is alive and determined to have March. He began by coveting the little farm, but now it is the woman he wants. He is in a contest with Banford, and for a while this battle dominates the tale, and March, the contested one, is almost an onlooker. The young man detests Banford. This is a power struggle, naked and cold, like the one between the human world and the fox, ending in its death. There has to be a victim. Banford is a frail thing, dependent on March, and it is clear she will do badly without her.

      The tale progresses through scenes where every detail has significance, reminding us of how much we miss in life, how much we don’t see. March has been wearing farm clothes, breeches and boots, looking ‘almost like some graceful loose-balanced young man’. Now she puts on a dress and for the first time the young man sees her as dangerously feminine, and beautiful. Bludgeoned and shouted at as we are by fashion, and often by nakedness, I cannot imagine a scene in a modern novel where the putting on of a dress, the revelation of the power of a woman’s body, could have such an impact. And March, in a dress, is undermined and made defenceless.

      Against all Banford’s entreaties and guiles, he draws March out into the night ‘to say what we have to say’, and makes her put her hand on his heart. She feels the heavy, powerful stroke of the heart, ‘terrible, like something beyond’. As for him, now he is seeing her in a dress, he is afraid to make love to her, for ‘it is a kind of darkness he knew he would enter finally’.

      Perhaps what annoys some feminists about Lawrence is that he insists lovemaking, sex, is serious, a life-and-death thing. Well, it used to be that children resulted from the terrible gamble of the genes, and often enough, death, and disease, as we now have Aids. And death ends the conflict in this tale: the rejected woman, Banford, is killed by a falling tree; the young man, the soldier, engineers this death.

      And so now there is nothing to prevent the banns and the wedding bells and happiness, but this is Lawrence. March is not happy. We are at once in the old Lawrentian situation. The man wants the woman to be passive: like the seaweed she peers down on from a boat, she must be utterly sensitive and receptive. He wants her to submit to him, ‘blindly passing away from her strenuous consciousness’. He wants to take away that consciousness so that she becomes, simply, his woman.

      Well, yes, it is easy to laugh. But women do not seem to be particularly happy having their own way – as Lawrence and the Wife of Bath would put it.

      And men are certainly not happy.

      I wonder what his prescription would be now?

      ‘The awful mistake of happiness,’ mourns Lawrence, claiming that things go wrong, if you insist on talking about happiness.

      But what do we care about his pronouncements on the sex war? What stays in my mind is the entranced woman, wandering about her little farm in the darkness watching for her enemy the fox, for the white tip on his fiery brush, the ruddy shadow of him in the deep grass, then the struggle to the death between the two women and the young soldier, in the long cold evenings of that winter after the war where they watch each other in the firelight. ‘A subtle and profound battle of wills taking place in the invisible,’ he says.

      In his later life unpleasant tales were told about Lawrence in New Mexico; his treatment of animals could be cruel. Yet he often writes about them as if he was one. Probably he was punishing himself. He was very ill then. I have read theses and tracts, and analyses about Lawrence, which never mention the consumption that was eating him up. Young, it was surely this illness that gave him his supernormal sensitivity, his quickness, his fine instincts. He was fiery and flamy and lambent, he was flickering and white-hot and glowing – all words he liked to use. Consumption is a disease that oversensitises, unbalances, heightens sexuality, then makes impotent; it brings death and the fear of death close. ‘The defects of his qualities’, yes, but what qualities.

       Carlyle’s House: Newly discovered pieces by Virginia Woolf

      These pieces are like five-finger exercises for future excellence. Not that they are negligible, being lively, and with the direct and sometimes brutal observation, the discrimination, the fastidious judgement one expects from her… but wait: that word judgement, it will not do. Virginia Woolf cared very much about refinement of taste, her own and her subjects’. ‘I imagine that her taste and insight are not fine; when she described people she ran into stock phrases and took rather a cheap view’ (‘Miss Reeves’). This note is struck often throughout her work, and because of her insistence one has to remember that this woman, aged 28, took part in a silly jape, pretending to be one of the Emperor of Ethiopia’s party on a visit to a British battleship; that she and her friends went in for the naughty words you would expect from schoolchildren who have just discovered smut; that she was sometimes anti-Semitic, capable of referring to her admirable and loving husband as ‘the Jew’. This was rather more than the anti-Semitism of her time and class. The sketch here, ‘Jews and Divorce Courts’, is an unpleasant piece of writing. But then you have to remember a similarly noisy and colourful Jewess in Between the Acts, described affectionately: Woolf likes her. So, this writing here is often unregenerate Woolf, early work pieces, and some people might argue they would have been better left undiscovered. Not I: it is always instructive to see what early crudities a writer has refined into balance – into maturity.

      None of that lot, the Bloomsbury artists, can be understood without remembering that they were the very heart and essence of Bohemia, whose attitudes have been so generally absorbed it is hard to see how sharply Bohemia stood out against its time. They are sensitive and art-loving, unlike their enemies and opposites, the crude business class. E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf’s good friend, wrote Howards End, where the battle between Art and the Wilcoxes is set out. On the one hand the upholders of civilisation, on the other, Philistines, ‘the Wilcoxes’. To be sensitive and fine was to fight for the survival of real and good values, against mockery, misunderstanding and, often, real persecution. Many a genuine or aspiring Bohemian was cut off by outraged parents.

      But it was not only ‘the Wilcoxes’, crass middle-class vulgarians, but the working people, who were enemies. The snobbery of Woolf and her friends now seems not merely laughable, but damaging, a narrowing ignorance. In Forster’s Howards End two upper-class young women, seeing a working person suffer, remark that ‘they don’t feel it as we do’. As I used to hear white people, when they did notice the misery of the blacks, say, ‘They aren’t like us, they have thick skins.’

      With Woolf we are up against a knot, a tangle, of unlikeable prejudices, some of her time, some personal, and this must lead us to look again at her literary criticism, which was often as fine as anything written before or since, and yet she was capable of thumping prejudice, like the fanatic who can see only his own truth. Delicacy and sensitivity in writing was everything and that meant Arnold Bennett and writers like him were not merely old hat, the despised older generation, but deserved obloquy and oblivion. Virginia Woolf was not one for half measures. The idea that one may like Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf, Woolf and James Joyce was СКАЧАТЬ