The White Peacock by DH Lawrence

It is said that Maurice Griffenhagen’s, painting, An Idyll, was the inspiration behind DH Lawrence’s novel, The White Peacock. In the painting, a pair of lovers share a passionate embrace, surrounded by a lusciously idealized garden, full of colour, growth and flowers. The pair of lovers, however, seem lost to the beauty that surrounds them, so driven are they by their shared need to fulfil their passion. The painting owes much to Pre-Raphaelitism, but though the colours are vivid, and there is a sense of timelessness about figures, but the outlines are blurred, perhaps impressionistically, indicating, perhaps that the surroundings are vulnerable to change and so too are these lovers within them.

The White Peacock is a novel of Edward England, published in 1910-11. The First World War is not yet even on the horizon, though in the first decade of the twentieth century, Britain’s industrial landscape was long-formed. and its political and social formation were already modern. Yet, throughout the green and pleasant land, rural employment, and country ways still dominated in many places, as Lawrence describes at length in relation to the novel’s setting, Nethermere, a small place in Nottinghamshire.

Cyril Beardsall narrates The White Peacock. He grows up in the English East Midlands. We know this is Nottinghamshire with occasional wanderings as far as Derbyshire, but we never really visit any city throughout the novel. Indeed, we are hardly ever visit the narrator, who regularly observes, describes, but rarely opines, and never pontificates. At times, the narrator almost seems to be living neutrally everyone else’s life in turn.

Like the painting that inspired it, the novel is full of flowers, trees, gardens, and woods. Lawrence’s descriptions of plants and verbiage are themselves vaguely Pre-Raphaelite in their detail and colour. We visit farmers, gamekeepers, several innkeepers and, at times, it seems we have to fight hard to get through the foliage in order to release the trapped rabbit.

And of course, central to the book’s plot are the relations between men and women, childhood friends who grew up together, exploring what the natural world might offer them. Lettie has two admirers, George and Leslie. They are as different as chalk and cheese, and then grow apart, live quite different lives. As they mature, the need to earn a living rears its head above the flowers and compromises have to be made. Marriages are struck. Lettie opts for Laslie, the moneyed option, and George marries Meg, who is at least homely. Children are born and lives diverge, socially, professionally and politically. Only destinations remain similar in their hopelessness.

Lawrence depicts lives where choices have to be made, but where these choices are often constrained by something other than passion. These characters, predominantly the men, seem to have difficulty accepting who they are. They seem to be pre-programmed for failure, and then cannot accept when they feel it. The women seem to be coyer, and, as ever in Lawrence, the suggestion is that they are essentially in control of their relations with men. But these relations, always through marriage, produce new people whose demands on their parents are unpredictable and change all associated lives.

Throughout, the flowers continue to bloom, and nature lives out its apparently inevitable seasonal cycle. But for the people of the small, rural place, the idyll lasts just moments, moments where individuals might forget who they are.

As to the identity or the thoughts of Cyril Beardsall, The White Peacock’s narrator, we know as much by the end as we did the start. We do know, however, that he has moved away from the midlands and now lives a very different kind of life. I wonder who it might be.

Aaron’s Rod by D H Lawrence

Aaron’s Rod by DH Lawrence is a perplexing novel. It seems to represent two quite different aspects of the writer’s creativity. One side has him reflecting on working class life in the English midlands, whilst in the other he is very much the sophisticated traveller and philosopher. These apparently reflect his own origins and reality. The book’s duality is not surprising, when one considers the fact that the early part of the book dates from 1918 and represents an abandoned project. Only three years later did Lawrence return to the work and write the second, more substantial part.

First, the title needs interpretation. Aaron’s Rod, historically, refers to the sacred staff carried by the brother of Moses. It was Aaron who persuaded the flock to worship the golden calf. The rod was used as both symbol of office, and as a means of summoning spiritual power. In the novel, the term is used to refer to the flute which is played competently and professionally by the principal character, Aaron Sisson. Frankly, and in keeping with Lawrence’s preoccupations, it is also a sexual reference to the character’s maleness.

The first part of the book describes Aaron Sisson’s background, upbringing an early life. Thus, rooted in a working-class English midlands mining town at the turn of the twentieth century, Aaron’s aptitude for music makes him stand out, makes him at least seem to have rebelliousness in him. He marries locally. Children come. Love goes. Perhaps desire dies not, however, as this passage illustrates. “…sometimes when she put down her knitting, or took it up again from the bench beside him, her fingers just touched his thigh, and the fine electricity ran over his body, as if he were a cat tingling at a caress.” He leaves his wife and his home area to travel first to London, then to Italy.

It is in London that he meets Lilly. Lilly is the surname of a man, Rowan Lilly. The character features large throughout the rest of the book and might be seen as expressing some of the writers own ideas. He starts by nursing Aaron and back to health after an illness and then departs on his travels. On his invitation, Aaron follows, despite not having much money. On arrival, he finds that his friend Lilly has absented himself.

Life in London had been interesting, both professionally and socially. Aaron pursued his music and even found time and funds to go to the opera. His working-class origins allowed him to make fun of the audience. “Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began…” As a musician, he explores music that such fashionable audiences might shun. There is evidence that Lawrence intended thus to place Aaron on the outside of ‘middle-class society’. When he is asked, later on, about his musical preferences, Aaron expresses his liking for Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, which at time of the book’s writing had received only one London production.

Eventually, Aaron ends up in Florence, where the book really comes to life. Aaron is befriended by an upper-class family, and he meets a countess, who has a suppressed love of music. They make music together, without any really real commitment from either of them, except to their individual needs. Having regained contact with Lilly, Aaron and a group of acquaintances analyse their lives, their estrangement from wives they no longer love, from a past that the Great War has seemed to render irrelevant and estranged.

Eventually, an anarchist’s bomb destroys the front of a café where Aaron is seated, taking out the front windows and destroying the coat rack at the entrance., His flute was in the pocket of the coat and is ruined. Aaron himself survives. But what is he now? He is both penniless and his source of employment is destroyed. Where can a man go when his rod is taken from him?

It is the almost constant reference to the effects of the Great War that is the enduring impression of the novel. Unlike many writers, Lawrence does not appear to take sides. He is probably against war, per se, but he does not slip into a common trap of identifying those who benefited from the conflict and contrasting them with those whose lives were destroyed. For Lawrence, it seems, everyone has suffered. War only destroys, as do all acts of violence, as does the final act of violence, perpetrated for political ends. It achieves only destruction. War also changes social relations, as evidence by the passage “…what should you like to drink? Wine? Chianti? Or white wine? Or beer?” The old-fashioned “sir” was dropped. It’s too old-fashioned now, since the war.”

A reader starting Aaron’s Rod must bear in mind that the book’s opening chapters do not reflect where it will take you. Eventually, it is a thoroughly challenging and complete experience for the reader. Its enduring message that the only things that drive human existence are love and power is itself powerful. It is a complex relationship, however, between the two, because to seek love is often to exert power, and that power can often be controlled, but can also be associated with violence, which is only destructive. It is, say several of the characters, a power exerted primarily by women.

Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness by Lawrence Durrell

Some decades ago I read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and all his travel books. The term addict could easily have been an under-statement of my obsession with the author’s work. I also discovered Tunc and Nunquam and drooled over Dark Labyrinth, Sappho, the Collected Poens and the rest. Soon afterwards, following a break of a couple years from Durrell’s work, I bought a copy of Monsieur and expectantly embarked upon what I anticipated would be a return to the sublime, sometimes intellectual complexities of the sophisticated, often Bohemian travellers that populate his work. I reached page sixty-five, which promptly fell out when I flipped it over in a frustration that had been growing from page one. 

The people in the Avignon books seemed different. They were of the same ilk as those I had previously revered, but somehow these people were fundamentally less engaging than the Alexandria residents with their guarded complexities. In Monsieur, they seemed stuffy, self-obsessed, bound up in the over-complicated minutiae of what I now saw as an isolation, not a liberation, of travel. 

Thirty years on, I gave just finished Monsieur, its time on my bookshelves in the intervening years being merely decorative. It retained a mild disappointment, but this time I was completely engaged.

 Piers has died. His life-long friend, Bruce, is on his way to the rambling but grand old house in the south of France to see to his friend’s affairs. Bruce recalls their friendship, the tripartite relationship they shared with Piers’s sister, the delectable but unstable Sabine. Sutcliffe, the writer, was also a long-term mutual acquaintance. His frustration with his own creativity as never diminished. His notes testify to how hard he tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to sustain his task. And there are others, such as the delicate Pia and a man called Toby, who seems to be exactly what men called Toby ought to be. 

But the central dimension of the book is not the interpersonal relationships between the characters, which form a kind of currency via which the main themes are traded. It is when the Egyptian Gnostic Akkad enters the story that things start to hang together. They went to meet him at Macabru in the desert, where he provided an hallucinogenic stimulus and invited them to a vision, which some of them shared. 

It changed Piers’s life, while others could not get past their scepticism. But in fact the experience changed all of their lives in that it revealed aspects of themselves that each, independently and perhaps collectively, would rather have not admitted until that day. Some of them continued to deny. And laced over the top of all this is a filigree of plot arising from the fact that Piers’s full name was Piers de Nogaret. He was no less than the last earthly survivor of a line that led back to the Grand Master that saw an end to the Knights Templar. The ancestor, the historical figure that became the head of one of the most powerful orders of medieval Christian warriors, was born of parents who were themselves burned as Cathar heretics, so perhaps there was the motive. Perhaps… 

 To cap it all, there’s also sexual confusion. There are homosexual tendencies that seem to be linked to religious cravings. There’s the usual Henry Miller-esque hetero variety that so often suffuses through Durrell’s characters. And here there is more than a suggestion of incest in the dusty rooms of that Avignon chateau. Confused? So was I. And don’t expect much resolution. Perhaps now that I a tad older than when I first read Lawrence Durrell, I am more willing to accept this.

Monsieur, the first of a set of five books, becomes thus a meditation on motive, religiosity, belief and Lord knows what, juxtaposed by a sense of place and history, and all layered with a near scatology of bodily functions. And when it comes to the crunch, why should a corpse need a head anyway? This time I got past page sixty-five, which fell out again, by the way. Monsieur is not the kind of novel that contemporary, plot-hungry readers might crave. It is a page-turner, but you have to go back as often as forward. That’s life, I suppose.