"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922)

Read story by D.H. Lawrence online.

It's possible I was in the wrong mood for D.H. Lawrence, this story, or both, but its tedium was thick. The horse dealer's daughter—Mabel, by name—is an only daughter of 27, with two older brothers and one younger. Their mother died long ago, their father more recently. After his death the siblings ran his horse dealing business into the ground. The story takes place on the eve of their giving up the estate, having lost it. Now it's a matter of moving out. Mabel refuses to answer any of her brothers' questions about what she plans to do next. The second-oldest son, Fred Henry, is close friends with the village doctor, Jack Fergusson, who comes by to say goodbye. Fred Henry's and Fergusson's goodbye is so tender I caught myself wondering if they were gay, which is doubtful. I don't think it's consciously intended that way. Mabel is bereft by all these turns of event, starting even many years before with the death of her mother. She visits the cemetery and lovingly tends her mother's grave. All this takes place on the same day. Fergusson sees her at the cemetery, and she notices him too. Later, Mabel tries to drown herself in a pond. Fergusson sees what she's doing and comes to her rescue, nearly drowning himself in the process, as he can't swim. She is unconscious when he gets her out of the water. He takes her to her place, undresses and dries and treats her, with his clothes still full of the muck and stink of the pond water. She awakes. They have a conversation. Suddenly they are consumed by passions for one another, declare their love, and plan to be married in a day or two. It's the kind of fictional passage that really has to be carried by the language, or at least set up better. To me, last night, Lawrence failed on both. I think his language is rarely up to his scenarios, certainly not here, with stultifying descriptive details and too many murky points about their intense emotional states. Obviously it's about passion, to practically a demented degree, but it also seemed evasive about the sources. It could have been the overwhelming circumstances of an extraordinary day for either or both. It could have been Fergusson getting a good look at Mabel's body while he was caring for it. It could have been feelings Fergusson had for Fred Henry jumping siblings to Mabel. It could have been anything. Now they're getting married. It goes from screamingly dull to weirdly repulsive just like that. I'm sure it's not intended any such way. But it hasn't aged well, at least not for me.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Women in Love (1920)

I read Women in Love voluntarily, on my own, prompted by a couple of people who separately, in a month's time, remarked how much they liked it. Whether it was the expectations thus engendered or whatever, I wasn't much impressed. D.H. Lawrence seems to me to be a writer who leans very hard into expressing the inexpressible by expressing over and over again how inexpressible it is. The profound and inviolate earth, etc. William Faulkner is another writer who indulges this, though I think he is a bit more successful with it. (For that matter, I'm pretty sure I do it too and so have little to complain about as I am hardly in the same league as either.) At its best, as with Faulkner, it can be positively hypnotic, describing the indescribable by describing so vividly everything around it, like the technique of defining and drawing negative space in sketching. I will give Lawrence this: it's a pretty big book and I was never tempted (well, never too tempted) to abandon it. But I had a hard time relating to any of the characters because I had a hard time relating to their experience of sexuality, which in many ways is all that it's about. Certainly I can see how it might be taken as daring and provocative, certainly for its times. But in these times I can't help finding it all a little outdated, even antiquated. I really don't mean to be complacent, but it seems to me that women, at least in much of the West, are more enabled now to resist the effects of the kinds of sexual repression in Lawrence's story—to never have to suffer them in the first place in some cases. Sexual activity is usually a given for adult women. I know it's likely that I'm missing some basic point about D.H. Lawrence in this novel. But a rural British village in the early 20th century doesn't offer me many ways in. In some ways it reminds me of the folks I've known from Western North Dakota. When it's you and the land and your family and your community, it's different from being surrounded by thousands and millions of people. And when you're the aristocracy—well, then. In fact, for me that was the most interesting part of the book, all the sideline various ins and outs of the labor relations and struggles.

In case it's not at the library.