The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
D. H. Lawrence · a novel in thirty-one chapters · written 1916 to 1917, published 1920 · scored on Lawrence’s English in the Cambridge text (1987), read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of two couples in a double plot; novel of ideas, industrial novel and satire of bohemia in one work
Mythos
The will that freezes: the white races’ northern way of ice, snow and abstraction; Cain, who killed his brother; Cybele and the moon; the sons of God and the daughters of men
Phase
From one morning in the sisters’ window bay at Beldover to a death in the Tyrolean snow and a disagreement between the two who are left
Presentation
Fiction; thirty-one titled chapters, each a single scene of crisis, joined by recurrence rather than sequence; two couples told against each other
Register
From the sisters’ quick exchanges and Ursula’s mockery to Birkin’s argued doctrine and the incantation of the unconscious
Scale
Two sisters and two men; a coal town, a country house, a London set and a hotel in the snow
Governing Proposition
Two sisters in a Midlands mining town meet two men: Ursula, who teaches, comes to marriage with Rupert Birkin, who is seeking a new kind of love, and Gudrun, who carves, to a contest with the mine owner’s son Gerald Crich that ends with his death in the Alpine snow. The wager of the novel is that the will which masters matter in industry is the same will that turns love into conquest, that a civilisation which lives by it dies of it, and that the other love it needs can be sought and argued for but is not yet reached.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.” The first sentence is domestic and exact, and the talk it opens turns at once to marriage: Gudrun asks her sister whether she really wants to marry. Neither can say. The question is posed as small talk on a morning in a Midlands mining town, and the novel takes thirty-one chapters to answer it twice, in two ways that cannot both be right. Ursula teaches; Gudrun carves small animals. Around the house lie the pits and the miners, and the Crich house at Shortlands, whose family owns the mines.
The two men are Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, the mine owner’s son. Ursula and Birkin come to marriage; Gudrun and Gerald come to destruction. The two couples are an argument made by contrast, and the book moves them through places that make an order of society: the coal town, Hermione Roddice’s country house at Breadalby, a London bohemia, and at the last a hotel in the Tyrol, snowed in. The chapters are titled, from “Sisters” to “Exeunt”, and each is a single scene of crisis, often under the name of an emblem: “Rabbit”, “Moony”, “A Chair”. What joins them is recurrence rather than sequence. A horse forced to stand returns as a rabbit that will not be held; a lake at night returns as a slope of snow.
The book had been half of another. Lawrence’s single project, “The Sisters”, was divided in 1915, and its first half became The Rainbow, which was prosecuted that year and destroyed under a court order. The second half was drafted in Cornwall in 1916 and revised into 1917, and found no publisher until 1920, when Thomas Seltzer printed it for subscribers in New York. Lawrence had warned Edward Garnett in June 1914 not to look in his new work for “the old stable ego of the character”, and in his Foreword of 1919 he defended the book’s repetitions as natural to its crises of feeling, a “pulsing, frictional to-and-fro”. The war that ran through every year of the writing is never named in it.
Movement II
Gerald Crich is fair, northern in look, and heir to the mines. As a boy he killed his brother by accident, and the book lets the mark of Cain stand over him without pressing it. His mother lives in an estranged isolation; his father is dying, slowly, through much of the book, and the dying is drawn at length. Gerald has the energy the others lack, and the will to put it to use. What he does with it is the first half of the book’s argument.
In “Coal-Dust” the sisters are at a level crossing when Gerald rides up on a mare and a line of trucks comes through. The mare is terrified. Gerald holds her and forces her to stand while the trucks pass. Ursula cries out against him; Gudrun watches, transfixed. The scene must stand where it stands, because it is Gerald’s whole relation to life shown once, in a horse, before it is applied to a woman, and because the woman who will receive it is watching.
“The Industrial Magnate” shows the same will at work on matter. Gerald remakes the mines on the principle of the instrument, the men and the machines alike made means to an end. The chapter is the book’s essay on industry, and it earns its place because it is the mare again, at the scale of a town. In “Rabbit” a rabbit called Bismarck, struggling, tears Gudrun’s arm, with Gerald beside her. The mare, the mines, the rabbit and the woman are one relation, and the novel makes of it a love story.
Movement III
At the Criches’ water party the second couple’s contest is opened. Gudrun, among Gerald’s Highland cattle, strikes him, and he knows what the blow is: “You have struck the first blow,” he says, and she answers, “And I shall strike the last.” The exchange is the whole of their love told in advance, and the novel holds them to it to the end.
At dusk the lanterns are lit on the lake. Then the cry goes up: Diana Crich, Gerald’s sister, is in the water, and with her a young doctor. At dawn the two bodies are found, she with her arms about his neck. It is one of the book’s heights, and it is dreadful: a festival on the water ends in a drowning, the light of the lanterns gives way to the grey of morning, and what is brought out of the lake is a pair locked together.
The drowned pair are love holding on into death, and the book answers them at its end with the opposite, a man who dies alone in the snow. Between the two images the story of Gerald and Gudrun runs as the blow foretold it. After his father’s long dying ends, in “Death and Love”, Gerald goes to Gudrun, and the love that follows is a contest: the will turned from the mine to a woman, and met there by a will as strong as his own.
Movement IV
Birkin carries the book’s other question, and its doctrine. At Breadalby the comedy of manners ends when Hermione brings a ball of lapis lazuli down on his head. Birkin wants neither her love nor the old marriage: he seeks a love of two separate beings in balance, a “star-equilibrium”, and beside it a bond with a man. He argues it to Hermione, to Gerald and to Ursula, and then argues it again. Ursula mocks him, and she is often right. The lecture is a character’s, and the book places it and judges it more often than it speaks through it.
In “Moony” Birkin goes at night to Willey Water and throws stones at the moon’s reflection, cursing Cybele: “The accursed Syria Dea!” The light breaks into fragments and gathers again; he throws again, and again it gathers. Ursula is there and sees it. It is the strangest of the book’s heights and one of its most exact images: a man trying to break an image he cannot bear, and the image re-forming each time on the dark water.
In the same chapter Birkin thinks on the African carving he first saw in Halliday’s flat, in “Totem”, and sets two ends for a dying race: the long African way of purely sensual knowledge, and the way of the white races, a northern mystery of ice and snow and destructive abstraction. The meditation is the book’s myth stated outright, and its racial schema is crude where it is most explicit. But the myth bears weight, because the novel then enacts its second way: Gerald, fair and northern, will go into the Alps and freeze. In the next chapter, “Gladiatorial”, Birkin and Gerald wrestle naked in the library, two men in a contest that is, for once, a bond.
Movement V
Birkin offers Gerald a Blutbrüderschaft, a sworn bond between men, and Gerald declines. Birkin and Ursula come together in “Excurse”, a night in Sherwood that the book wraps in the sons of God and the daughters of men, and they marry. In “A Chair” they buy a chair at the market and give it away. Then the two couples go to the Tyrol, to a hotel in the snow.
There the double plot half gives way. A sculptor, Loerke, who has made a frieze for a factory, argues a theory of art, and Gudrun turns toward him. The contest with Gerald, begun among the cattle, goes on in the snow, and the will that mastered the mare and the mines can master nothing here. The book admits Loerke late, as a third story, and its law is stated in him more than it is shown.
Gerald walks up the snow slope alone and dies there, frozen: the northern way of “Moony” is his end. In the last chapter, “Exeunt”, Birkin is by the body, grieving for the bond Gerald would not take. Ursula gives her verdict, that he cannot have two kinds of love. The book ends on his answer, “I don’t believe that,” and with it the question of the first chapter, whether marriage is enough, stays open. The new love has been needed, argued and sought; it has not been reached.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. The two couples are an argument made by contrast, and neither can be cut: Gerald and Gudrun are the will carried into love and so to death, Birkin and Ursula the attempt at another way. The set pieces bear weight: the mare at the crossing is Gerald’s whole relation to life, shown before it is turned on Gudrun, and “The Industrial Magnate” shows the same will remaking the mines. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the subtractive test removes: Birkin’s doctrine restated to Hermione, to Gerald and to Ursula with diminishing return; the satire of Breadalby and the London bohemia, which runs on after its point is made; and the same adjectives, “dark”, “mindless”, “potent”, pressed past use.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the will that masters matter in industry is the same will that turns love into conquest, and a civilisation that lives by it dies of it. Gerald forcing the mare to stand at the crossing, Gerald remaking the mines on the principle of the instrument, and Gerald and Gudrun’s love as a contest are one fact shown three times; Gudrun knows its terms when she strikes him among his cattle. Against it Birkin seeks a love of two separate beings in balance, a “star-equilibrium”, and a bond with a man as well. The book discloses that the new love is needed and that it is not reached. Held off the top because the doctrine is often asserted rather than disclosed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height is reached often, more often in a dreadful key than a warm one. The ceiling: the lanterns on the lake and the drowned found at dawn, Diana Crich with her arms about the young doctor’s neck; Birkin stoning the moon’s reflection on Willey Water until the broken light gathers again; Gerald walking alone up the snow slope to his death. The violent heights: the mare at the crossing, the rabbit tearing Gudrun’s arm, the naked wrestling of “Gladiatorial”. The warm: “Excurse”, the night in Sherwood. Held below the summit because the heights are bought at a price in shrillness: where the prose strains for transport, in “Excurse” above all, it falls into incantation, and the elevation thins in the satiric chapters.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, not only evoked. In “Moony” Birkin thinks on the African carving first seen in Halliday’s flat and sets two ends for a dying race: the long African way of purely sensual knowledge, and the way of the white races, a northern mystery of ice and snow and destructive abstraction. The novel then enacts the second: Gerald, fair and northern, goes to the Alps and dies frozen in the snow. The myth supplies the plot’s end. Around it stand Cybele and the moon, Gerald as Cain, and the sons of God and the daughters of men, while the people stay particular. Held a step down because the mythic vocabulary is sometimes Birkin’s lecture rather than the book’s structure, and the racial schema is crude where it is most explicit.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the English novel of marriage and society, from Austen to George Eliot, the provincial novel of Hardy, and Lawrence’s own Sons and Lovers. The turn: character given as states of a deeper being, not as “the old stable ego of the character”, which Lawrence told Garnett not to look for; a plot of scenes, each a crisis of the unconscious, joined by recurrence rather than sequence; marriage taken as the story’s problem, not its end; love between men set beside love between man and woman as an equal question. The stake was paid: The Rainbow had been destroyed under a court order in 1915, and this book waited four years for a publisher. Held below the top because The Rainbow made the first break, and this book carries it further rather than making it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The double plot is the argument: told singly, Gerald and Gudrun’s story is a tragedy of will and Birkin and Ursula’s a romance with a lecture in it; paired, each is the other’s measure, and both answer one question. The episodic form is the instrument: each chapter is a single crisis under an emblematic title, “Rabbit”, “Moony”, “A Chair”, and meaning passes between them by recurrence, the mare to the rabbit to Gudrun, the water to the snow. The repetition is form where it builds a crisis by approach and return. Held below the top where argued dialogue makes the form a container, and because the Tyrol, with Loerke, half leaves the double plot for a third story.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century of reading has not exhausted the book, which stood at the centre of Leavis’s canon of the English novel and has been contested since Kate Millett. The text holds its questions open: whether Birkin’s doctrine is the book’s or the book’s satire of it, since Ursula mocks him and is often right; whether Gerald’s death is fate, choice or the book’s verdict; whether Gudrun is destroyed or the one survivor; whether the last exchange concedes or refuses. The formal yield holds on return, in the recurrences that join the chapters. Held a step down because some of its open questions are only the doctrine’s obscurity, and because the yield of the ideas has faded faster than the yield of the scenes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the novel in English of the first decades of the twentieth century. The force: with Joyce and Woolf, this is one of the books in which the English novel turned inward, and the one that turned it toward the body, the unconscious and sexual relation rather than toward consciousness and its stream; it reorganised what the novel of love could hold, and set industrial modernity and erotic life on one axis. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Leavis’s canon placed Lawrence at the head of the English novel at mid-century and this book at his peak; its frankness about sex and about love between men was taken up by the fiction and criticism that followed; and it became a set text across the universities. Held below the top because its manner has had fewer heirs than Joyce’s or Woolf’s, and Lawrence’s standing fell from the 1970s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One hundred and six years of survival shown. The text is whole: the changes made for the London edition of 1921 were small, and the Cambridge edition of 1987 restored the text from Lawrence’s typescripts. Presence is continuous: in print throughout, taught as a central modernist novel, and filmed by Ken Russell in 1969, a film that won Glenda Jackson an Academy Award and brought the wrestling scene into the culture. Its surface has dated in places: the Edwardian bohemia, the racial vocabulary of “Moony” and the Tyrol, the doctrine in Birkin’s mouth. Its matter, industrial mastery and the will in love, has outlived its conditions. Charged on presence: contested since Millett, the book is held now more in the academy than among general readers, which keeps it at the foot of its span’s usual figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Lawrence’s English, with no translation between. The command is great and uneven. The scene: the sisters in the window bay of the first sentence; Hermione bringing a ball of lapis lazuli down on Birkin’s head; the chair bought at the market and given away; the long dying of Gerald’s father. The dialogue is quick, with a sharpness the narration often lacks, above all in the sisters’ exchanges and in Ursula’s mockery of Birkin. Water, moonlight and snow are drawn as few English novelists draw them. Charged: repetition that becomes insistence; the vocabulary of the unconscious, “mindless”, “dark”, “potent”, “sensual”, used until it ceases to signify; chapters, “Excurse” among them, where the prose loses control of its incantation; and the satiric portraits of Halliday’s set, drawn with a heavier hand than the rest.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Pussum’s bohemian chatter in the café in “Crème de Menthe” and Gerald dead in the snow; or Ursula’s lesson on catkins in “Class-room” and Loerke’s factory frieze in the Tyrol. One law governs them: the will that would master life, in a woman, a horse, a mine or a work of art, against the spontaneous being that will not be mastered, and what each does to the other. The satire, the industrial chapter, the love story and the alpine end obey it, across a range that holds a comedy of manners, a drowning, a cat and a wrestling bout. Charged: Birkin is both the book’s searcher and its mouthpiece, and its judgement on him wavers; and Loerke, admitted late, carries the law stated more than shown.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders, joined by one question. Consciousness, in four lives seen from within. The family: the Brangwens and the Criches, a dying father, an estranged mother, a drowned sister. Labour and industry: the pits, the miners, Gerald’s reform of the firm, a town built on coal. Class: the mine owner’s son and the schoolteachers, Hermione’s country house. Art: Gudrun’s carving, Loerke’s frieze, the African figure. Sexuality and love in every form the book can name, between men included. The natural order: water, moon, snow, animals. The sacred, as an idea sought rather than a faith held. History and the state are thin by choice: the war that ran through the years of writing is never named, and that absence holds the axis below the great social novels.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.9. A text whole and in print for a century, its matter outliving its surface; one disclosure, the will in industry and in love, shown three times and held; and a turn from the stable self of the English novel that was paid for in a suppressed book and four years without a publisher.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: Birkin’s doctrine restated with diminishing return, the satire of Breadalby and the London bohemia run on past its point, and three adjectives pressed past use. Next above it, The Made at 8.4: a command of scene, dialogue and the natural world, uneven where the vocabulary of the unconscious ceases to signify and the prose loses control of its incantation.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5, by four tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, scored as the novel as published, in thirty-one chapters, in the text of the Cambridge edition (1987), edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen and established from Lawrence’s typescripts and the first edition. The first edition was printed for subscribers by Thomas Seltzer in New York in November 1920; Martin Secker’s London edition followed in 1921, with changes to the Halliday and Pussum chapters made under a threat of libel from Philip Heseltine. Those changes are small and touch no axis. The opening chapter Lawrence discarded, the “Prologue”, published only after his death, is context and not the work. The novel is in Lawrence’s English, so no translation enters. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain; events are paraphrased. Lawrence’s letter to Edward Garnett of June 1914 and his Foreword of 1919 are quoted as his own statements, not as the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the novel in words, how the threat of libel was settled, the year the Prologue was first published, the extent of the novel’s translation, the dates and titles of the criticism it has drawn, and what the Foreword says of the war, are not given. Citations are by chapter title.