Topics for discussion

1. Analyse the strong positions of the text.

2. Comment on the function of analogy in the passage.

3. Reported speech as the method of characterization.

4. The portrayal of Irene.

5. Speak about the main features of Galsworthy’s style.

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE (1885 - 1930)

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE (b. Sept. 11, 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, Eng.-d. March 2, 1930, Vence, France), English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. His novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in I-ove (1920) made him one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century.

Lawrence was first recognized as a working-class novelist showing the reality of Lnglish provincial family life. and - in the first days of psychoanalysis - as the aulhor-subject of a classic case-history ot the Oedipus complex. In subsequent works, Lawrence's frank handling of sexuality cast him as a pioneer of a "liberation" he would not himself have approved. From the beginning readers have been won over by the poetic vividness of Ills writing and his efforts to describe subjective states of emotion, sensation, and intuition. I his spontaneity and immediacy of feeling coexists with a continual, slightly modified repetition of themes, characters, and symbols that express Lawrence's own evolving artistic vision and thought. His great novels remain difficult because their realism is underlain by obsessive personal metaphors, by elements of mythology, and above all by his attempt to express in words what is normally wordless because it exists below consciousness. Lawrence tried to go beyond the "old, stable ego" of the characters familiar to readers of more conventional fiction. His characters are continually experiencing transformations driven by unconscious processes rather than by conscious intent, thought, or ideas.

Lawrence was ultimately a religious writer who did not so much reject Christianity as try to create a new religious and moral basis for modern life by continual resurrections and transformations of the self. These changes are never limited to the social self, nor are they ever fully under the eye of consciousness. Lawrence called for a new openness to what he called the "dark gods" of nature, feeling, instinct, and sexuality; a renewed contact with these forces was, for him, the beginning of wisdom.

The search for a fulfilling sexual love and for a form of marriage that will satisfy a modern consciousness is the goal of Lawrence's early novels and yet becomes increasingly problematic. None of his novels ends happily: at best, they conclude with an open question.

Sons and Lovers carries his early experience to the point of quasi-autobiography. The central character, Paul Morel, is naturally identified as Lawrence; the miner-father who drinks and the powerful mother who resists him are clearly modeled on his parents; and the painful devotion of Miriam Leivers resembles that of Jessie Chambers. An older brother, William, who dies young, parallels Lawrence's brother Ernest, who met an early death. In the novel, ihe mother turns to her elder son William for emotional fulfillment in place of his father, and when William dies, his younger brother Paul becomes the mother's mission and, ultimately, her victim. Paul's adolescent love for Miriam is undermined by his mother's dominance; though fatally attracted to Miriam, Paul cannot be sexually involved with anyone so like his mother, and the sexual relationship he forces on her proves a disaster. He then, in reaction, has a passionate affair with a married woman. But Paul can manage sexual passion only when it is split off from commitment; their affair ends after Paul and Dawes have a murderous fight, and Clara returns to her husband. Paul, for all Ills intelligence, cannot fully grasp his own unconscious motivations, but Lawrence silently conveys them in the pattern of the plot. Paul can only be released by his mother's death, and at the end of the book, he is at last free to take up his own life, though it remains uncertain whether he can finally overcome her influence. The whole narrative turns Lawrence's own life history into a powerful psychoanalytic study of a young man's Oedipal attraction toward his mother and its consequences on his relations with other women.

On the Easter Monday the same party took an excursion to Wingfield Manor. It was great excitement to Miriam to catch a train at Sethley Bridge, amid all the bustle of the Bank Holiday crowd. They left the train at Alfreton. Paul was interested in the street and in the colliers with their dogs. Here was a new race of miners. Miriam did not live till they came to the church. They were all rather timid of entering, with their bags of food, for fear of being turned out. Leonard, a comic, thin fellow, went first; Paul, who would have died rather than be sent back, went last. The place was decorated for Easter. In the front hundreds of white narcissi seemed to be growing. The air was dim and coloured from the windows and thrilled with a subtle scent of lilies and narcissi. In that atmosphere Miriam's soul came into a glow. Paul was afraid of the things he mustn't do; and he was sensitive to the feel of the place. Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together. He would not go beyond the Communion-rail. She loved him for that. Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her.

Miriam very rarely talked to the other lads. They at once became awkward in conversation with her. So usually she was silent.

It was past midday when they climbed the steep path to the manor. All things shone softly in the sun, which was wonderfully warm and enlivening. Celindines and violets were out. Everybody was tip-top full with happiness. The glitter of the ivy, the soft, atmospheric grey of the castle walls, the gentleness of everything near the ruin, was perfect.

The manor is of hard, pale grey stone, and the other walls are blank and calm. The young folk were in raptures. They went in trepidation, almost afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them. In the first courtyard, within the high broken walls, were farm-carts, with their shafts lying idle on the ground, the tyres of the wheels brilliant with gold-red rust. It was very still.

All eagerly paid their sixpence, and went timidly through the fine clean arch of the inner courtyard. They were shy. Here on the pavement, where the hall had been, an old thorn-tree was budding. All kinds of strange openings and broken rooms were in the shadow around them.

After lunch they set off once more to explore the ruin. This time the girls went with the boys, who could act as guides and expositors. There was one tall tower in a corner, rather tottering, where they say Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned.

“Think of the Queen going up here.” said Miriam in a low voice, as she climbed the hollow stairs.

“If she could get up” , said Paul, “for she had rheumatism like anything. I reckon they treated her rottenly”.

“You don't think she deserved it?” asked Miriam.

“No, I don't. She was only lively”.

They continued to mount the winding staircase. A high wind, blowing through the loopholes went rushing up the shaft, and filled the girl's skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until he took the hem of her dress and held it down for her. He did it perfectly simply, as he would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always.

Round the broken top of the tower the ivy bushed out, old and handsome. Also, there were a few chill gillivers, in pale cold bud. Miriam wanted to lean over for some ivy, but he would not let her. Instead, she had to wait behind him, and take from him each spray as he gathered it and held it to her, each one separately, in the purest manner of chivalry. The tower seemed to rock in the wind. They looked over miles and miles of wooded country, and country with gleams of pasture.

The crypt underneath the manor was beautiful, and in perfect preservation. Paul made a drawing: Miriam stayed with him. She was thinking of Mary Queen of Scots looking with her strained, hopeless eyes, that could not understand misery, over the hills whence no help came, or sitting in this crypt, being told of a God as cold as the place she sat in.

They set off again gaily, looking round on their beloved manor that stood so clean and big on its hill.

“Supposing you could have that farm”, said Paul to Miriam.

“Yes!”

“Wouldn't it be lovely to come and see you!”

They were now in the bare country of stone walls, which he loved, and which, though only ten miles from home, seemed so foreign to Miriam. The party was straggling. As they were crossing a large meadow that sloped away from the sun, along a path embedded with innumerable tiny glittering ponds, Paul, walking alongside, laced his fingers in the strings of the bag Miri­am was carrying, and instantly she felt Annie behind, watchful and jealous. But the meadow was bathed in a glory of sunshine, and the path was jewelled, and it was seldom that he gave her any sign. She held her fingers very still among the strings of the bag, his fingers touching; and the place was golden as a vision.

Notes

Anne is Paul's elder sister, Leonard is her friend.

Food for thought

1. Divide the text into parts; state the connections between the parts.

2. Analyse the opening paragraph, state its function. What is the mood presented in the first paragraph? Comment on the feelings of Paul and Miriam; define the stylistic devices the author used.

3. Pick out the words and word-combinations belonging to the thematic field of ecstasy and intense feelings. Do you find any similarity in the description of the church and the ruin? Account for it.

4. Speak on Paul and Miriam’s feelings in the church and the way they are presented.

5. What is the stylistic function of mentioning Mary Queen of Scots? How does the mood change in the following description? State Paul’s attitude to the queen. Does it differ from Miriam’s? Prove that Miriam is a romantic girl.

6. Comment on the closure of the text; find the key words that create the atmosphere.

Topics for oral discussion

1. Analyse the implications suggested by the title of the book.

2. Comment on the opening and closing paragraphs.

3. Speak on the difference in presentation of religious places and on the role of religion for Miriam.

4. Dwell upon similarities and difference between Miriam and Paul.

5. Build as many thematic sets of the text as possible; account for their place in the text.

6. How is Lawrence’s aesthetic creed expressed in the given passage?

RICHARD ALDINGTON (1892 - 1961)

RICHARD ALDINGTON, original name Edward Goderee Aldington, (b. July 8, 1892, Hampshire, Eng.—d. July 27, 1962, Sury-en-Vaiis, Fr.), poet, novelist, critic, and biographer. Educated at Dover College and London University, he early attracted attention through his volumes of imagist verse. He wrote searingly and sometimes irascibly of what lie considered to be hypocrisy in modern industrialized civilization.

His first and most important novel, Death of a Hero (1929), a semimiautobiographical novel of prewar bohemian London and the trenches reflected the disillusionment of a generation that had fought through World War I and is dedicated to the so-called "lost generation". Containing a passionate protest both against war and against the rotten order of things in his own country, it displays a vast canvas of English intellectual and social life before and during World War I. The core of Aldington's outlook is a deep-rooted disillusionment in a world seized by suicidal and homicidal madness. Yet there is no contempt for man, but a genuine fellow-feeling and sympathy for humanity cheated into suffering and frustration.

The novelist calls his book a threnody, a song of lamentation for the dead of the generation that went through the horrors of war: "a memorial in its ineffective way, to a generation which hoped much, strove honestly, and suffered deeply."

The form and method of the book are extremely .variegated: crudely naturalistic scenes, cynical discussions of sexual topics alternate with pages of biting social satire and passages of expressive word-painting. The expression "a jazz-band novel" that Aldington has coined for his work, seems highly appropriate. Aldington treats his subject-matter as seen and experienced by the sensitive nature of an artist, which makes the whole intensely humane and vividly passionate.

DEATH OF A HERO

Part I. 4

But more than words about things were things themselves. You looked and looked at them, and then you wanted to put down what they looked like, rearrange them in patterns. In the drawing-class they made you look at a dirty whitish cube, cylinder, and cone, and you drew and re-drew hard outlines which weren't there. But for yourself you wanted to get the colours of things and how they faded into each other and how they formed themselves – or did you form them? – into exciting patterns. It was so much more fun to paint things than ever to read what Keats and Shakespeare thought about them. George spent all his pocket-money on paints and drawing-pencils and sketch-books and oil-sketching paper and water-colour blocks. For a long time he hadn't much to look at, even in reproductions. He had Cruikshank and Quiz illustrations which he didn't much care for; and a reproduction of a Bouguereau which he hated; and two Rossetti pictures which he rather liked; and a catalogue of the Tate Collection which gave him photographs of a great many horrible Watts and Frank Dicksees. Best of all, he liked an album of coloured reproductions of Turner's water-colours. Then, one spring, George Augustus took him to Paris for a few days. They did an “educative” visit to Louvre, and George simply leaped at the Italians and became very Pre-Raphae­lite and adored the Primitives. He was quite feverish for weeks after he got back unable to talk of anything else. Isabel was worried about him: it was so unboyish, so well, really, quite unhealthy, all this silly craze for pictures, and spending hours and hours crouching over paint-blocks, instead of being in the fresh air. So much nicer for the boy to be manly. Wasn't he old enough to have a gun licence and learn to kill things?

So George had a gun licence, and went out shooting every morning in the autumn. He killed several plovers and a wood-pigeon. Then one frosty November morning he fired into a flock of plovers, killed one, and wounded another, which fell down on the crisp grass with such a wail of despair. “If you wing a bird, pick it up and wring its neck”, he had been told. He picked up the struggling, heaving little mass of feathers, and with infinite repugnance and shut eyes tried to wring its neck. The bird struggled and squawked. George wrung harder and convulsively – and the whole head came off in his hand. The shock was unspeakable. He left the wretched body, and hurried home shuddering. Never again, never, never again would he kill things. He oiled his gun dutifully, as he had been told to do, put it away, and never touched it again. At nights he was haunted by the plover's wail and by the ghastly sight of the headless, bleeding bird's body. In the daytime he thought of them. He could forget them when he went out and sketches the calm trees and fields, or tried to design in his tranquil room. He plunged more deeply into painting than ever and thus ended one of the many attempts to “make a man” of George Winterbourne.

The business of “making a man” of him was pursued at School, but with little more success, even with the aid of compulsion.

“The type of boy we aim at turning out”, the Head used to say to impressed parents, “is a thoroughly manly fellow. We prepare for the Universities, of course, but our pride is in our excellent Sports Record.

There is an O.T.C., organised by Sergeant-Major Brown (who served throughout the South African war) and officered by the masters who have been trained in the Militia. Every boy must undergo six months' training, and is then competent to take up arms for his Country in an emergency”.

The parents murmured polite approval, though rather tender mothers hoped the discipline was not too strict and “the guns not too heavy for young arms”. The Head was contemptuously and urbanely reassuring. On such occasions he invariably quoted these stirring and indeed immortal lines of Rudyard Kipling which end up, “You'll be a man, my son”. It is so important to know how to kill. Indeed, unless you know how to kill you cannot possibly be a Man, still less a Gentleman.

Notes