On Screen

...On Screen LAWRENCE IN PRINT AND ON FILM BY JOHN SIMON D Lawrence used to remind me of a collier who, refusing to leave the hated mine by the elevator, insists on burrowing his way singlehanded to the antipodes No wonder he got shafted But that view was less than fair For one thing, most real writers prefer to dig for China, for another, Lawrence's England was still a hot (or cold) bed of doddering but tenacious Victonamsm So Lawrence's fight was a brave and good one But when I look more closely at Lawrence's novels after Sons and Loieis, even at the masterpiece Women in Love is alleged to be, my discemfiture reasserts itself There is something faintly repulsive about this novel in its language, with its tumblings and repetitions, in its ideas, with their contradictions, in its obsessiveness, without our quite knowing by what it is obsessed "A beautitul enigmatic book," Yeats called it, but Yeats was equally aware that "Lawrence romanticises his material, with such words as 'essential fire, 'darkness,' etc ' and felt that ' happiness is not where he seems to place it" And Thomas Mann wrote to Karl Kerenyi "I prefer [Aldous Huxley] to D H Lawrence, who is undoubtedly a significant manifestation and characteristic of his time, but whose hectic sensuality has little appeal for me " He went on to stigmatize the anti-mtellectualism of the literature of the day And it was only 19 34' Yet on the subject of the intellect, as on so much else, Lawrence was less outright hostile than hopelessly self-contradictory This, no less than his febnhty, may have spurred on the always loosely reined malice ot Dame Edith Sitwell "Lecturing at Liverpool, [I] said that Lawrence was the head of the Jaeger school ot literature, since he was hot, soft, and woolly Messrs Jaeger protested mildly 'We ate soft,' they wrote to me, 'and we are woolly But we are nevei hot, owing to our system of slow conductivity' I replied, begging them to invent a system of slow conductivity for Lawrence, adding that I regretted having made the comparison, since their works are unshrinkable by Time, whereas the works ot Mr Lawrence, in my opinion, are not" But E M Fors-ter saw in Lawrence "the only prophetic novelist writing today [1927] the only living novehst in whom the song predominates I could go on forever adducing contradictory judgments on Lawrence, but for my purpose, which is to show why a film version of Women in Love must fail, it is more relevant to point out where friendly criticisms agree, or at least converge Thus Elizabeth Bowen noted that m Women m Love "individual characters may seem to split apart under a too great pressure", and Lady Ottolme Morrell (whom Lawrence was unkindly to turn into the Hermione Roddice of the novel) wrote in her memoirs "His insight was indeed very intense, but sometimes so bnght that it distorted those it focused " What these basically sympathetic demurrers mean can best be understood when collocated with some critical raves Thus F R Leavis commends "Lawrence's preoccupation with relating the overt expressions of personal lite to the impersonal depths his power of presenting in the individual psyche the large movement of civilization " That Lawrence was attempting something of this sort is beyond dispute, that he succeeded is open to question For it is very hard to reach such new goals by the older methods ot storytelling he generally adhered to Katka, Proust, Joyce even Mann to some extent, had to resort to new novelistic structures They also were more at ease with language than the often laboriously groping Lawrence One more "loins" or "darkness" or "electricity" we say, and we've had it, and it comes, frequently in some clattering compound, screaming out against its hyphenation As J I M Stewart puts it for the defense, "Lawrence's representative people live at the end of abnormally open channels of communication with infrapersonal worlds, and through these channels their conscious minds are constantly inundated by potent and mysterious floods So far, so good But Professor Stewart continues "Of this violence of Lawrence's language is the necessary and effective instrument " If as I believe, that second "of" was accidentally dropped in by the compositor (Eight Modern Writers, p 518), Stewart seems to me dead wrong, if, however, this is not a typo, it is a useless truism I would say that in his stories and novellas, where Lawrence could not let himself go on at inundating length, either in linguistic cataracts or narrative meanders, he is a master indeed There Professor Stewart's channels of communication have been subjected to Dame Edith's (or Messrs Jaeger's) system of slow conductivity, and we can get both the Lawrentian depth perception and the Lawrentian ineffable mystery without being flooded or burnt to a cnsp When a character in Women in Love is not only steeped in prophecy and song (to use Forster's terms), when he is also a burstingly open conduit to layers of depth psychology, prerndividuahty and prehistory, when he becomes both a sketch from life and a larger-than-hfesrze principle m action, when he must give voice to dark electric forces engendered in the loins and best left voiceless—then Lady Ottohne's distortions and Miss Bowen's splitting apart are almost inevitable The novelist faces pitfalls, his film adapters, one large unfordable morass Unfortunately, neither pruning nor complete omission is a satisfactory solution for the filmmaker What would Joyce be without his puns, or Quasimodo without his hump9 A great writer or a great literary creation depends on his characteristics, whether they be eccentricities, foibles, downright flaws, or indeed troublesome strokes of genius As Graham Hough observes about Lawrence, "because his darker and more vatic utterances contain statements that are literally nonsense, it has often been found easy to reject the whole as nonsense The whole may very well be untrue, but it certainly makes a kind of sense Although it is often rather hard to separate the "kind of sense" from the nonsense, presented with the entire novel, the reader himself can judge which is which, according to his own lights It is unsatisfactory to have to take someone else's blue pencil or scissors for the sword of absolute justice Ever since Richard Aldington, critics have tended to boggle at the rabbit episode, and this is—probably just as well—omitted from the film Almost equally unanimously, even enthusiastic pro-Lawrence critics tend to be unhappy about some of the sexual descriptions—not because they offend as sex, but because they fail as description Yet most of these scenes are in the new film version, in rather dubious equivalents All critics, though, admire the episode where Ursula watches Brrkm shatter the reflection of the moon in the water by throwing pebbles at it ?a scene that always stays in the memory," Forster called it—but this too is missing from the film What is definitely and consistently decimated is the artistic-cultural-histonc philosophizing which, however hard to swallow it may be, is the essential Lawrence Take for example, Birkm's (the Lawrence alter ego's) reply to Hermione about why he is copying an ancient Chinese drawing of geese "I know what centres they live from—what they perceive and feel—the hot, stinging centrahty of a goose in the flux of cold water and mud—the curious bitter stinging heat of a goose's blood, entering their own blood like an inoculation of corruptive fire—fire of the cold-burning mud—the lotus mystery " It may be farrago, but it is what makes Lawrence Lawrence T m he film version of Women in Love—produced and written by Larry Kramer, a young American, and directed by Ken Russell, a young Briton—is for all its superficial fidelity to the novel a profound betrayal of it It is also an uneasy compromise between art and entertainment (as if the two were contradictory) and a resultant failure as both To be sure, Kramer and Russell have been quite faithful to Lawrence in their fashion, moreover, greater faithfulness would not necessarily have been an improvement, very possibly the opposite The only safe and wise thing with a novel like Women in Love is not to make a film of it at all Even the faithfulnesses then, are questionable here For instance, the naked wrestling bout between Gerald and Birkin, which m the novel recedes into the fabric of the whole—an important strand, yes, but nothing particularly sensational —here, what with male genitalia dangled across the screen, takes on the kind of homosexual coloration that Lawrence (whatever might have been latent in his psyche) would certainly have abhorred Again, Lawrence's enthusiastic nature descriptions are evoked cme-matically by making a forest scene as gieen as roach poison, and the following wheatfield sequence more golden than the bowels of Fort Knox A love scene presents vertical images in horizontal position, so that a naked Ursula rises in slow motion toward a nude Birkin floating down upon her, the parr of them surrounded by enough pink and gold flora to make it all look like two stripped dress-shop dummies accidentally dumped in the middle of a florist's window This is presumably meant to convey Lawrence's purple prose of physical fulfillment, and, in the most horrible way conceivable, it does just that But theie are times when small liberties are being taken and prove quite sufficient to oversimplify, distort and cheapen a scene Thus the entire figure of Loerke is completely vulgarized and wrong In Lawrence he is, like Gudrun, an incomplete artist whom the girl gravitates to as Gerald s opposite, but who is no more the solution for her than Gerald was The movie turns htm into a homosexual and precursor of the fascists who behaves like a pig He puts on his socks and boots on the dining table and shakes his cigar ashes into Ursula's dessert Far slimier than in the book, he makes real Nazi sculptures A delicate, pubescent girl on horseback, as Lawrence describes her, is shown as a ponderous monument to the heavy-limbed Hitler Youth maiden Again the semianonymous couple whose wedding starts the book off become minor characters in the film and then turn into drowned young lovers, m the book, it is a shadowy, half-grown Cnch sister and a nameless would-be rescuer who drown All this so that the director can cross-cut from Ursula and Birkm in their first sexual aftermath to these drowned newlyweds at the bottom ot the drained lake and reveal—the two couples intertwined in exactly the same way' Now this is sinister nonsense First, because Lawrence avoids such obvious symbolism Secondly, because it is misleading Lawrence would never have intended a parallel between the embrace of love and the clasp of death, or between a drowning girl dragging her rescuer down with her and Ursula dragging Birkm into—what"7 Marriage7 Domesticity7 She does no such thing Thirdly and most importantly, by intruding a third couple of some importance but uncertain significance the script obfuscates Lawrence's basic design two clearly antithetical couples working out their exemplary destinies Another typically facile symbol is the image ot Gerald and his father being driven home in their snow-white Rolls-Royce while pit-blackened colliers trudge wearily homeward all around them Again, the improvised pseudo-Russian ballet is performed in the novel foi Her-mione in the film, it is danced chiefly by herself and turned into a crude travesty geared at easy laughs Indeed, Lawrence's already rather cruel portrait of Lady Otto-lme is reduced to caricature by Russell's direction and Eleanor Bron's cabaret-style performance Kramer and Russell use a number of little cinematic tricks, intended to liven up things, but actually deadening them with the withering breath of artiness Particularly damaged are the love scenes, two of which I have already described But there is also that series of self-conscious quick dissolves that verge on being jump cuts during Gerald's declaration of love after he has seen Gudrun dancing before the cattle, or the pulsation effect (little zoomings in and out) when Gerald makes brutal love to the provoking Gudrun for the last time Worse yet is the cross-cutting during Gerald and Gudrun's first mating in her room, when we keep cutting from the thrashing lovers to Gerald's mother insanely laughing at her husband's funeral Not only is the device obvious, but the laughter at the funeral does not exist in the novel Kramer may have gotten the idea from Lawrence's beautiful story "Smile," where a somewhat similar incident is treated with infinite finesse And in that Alpine sex scene between Gerald and Gudrun we get the same kind of cross-cutting—this time to Gudrun's happy or mocking laughter under the Matterhorn a laughtei that similarly infuriates Gerald Yet if a parallel between Mrs Cnch and Gudrun is intended, it is not developed T M t might be argued that these flaws are at least partly offset by some of the film's virtues The camera work of Billy Williams is, in its less obstreperous moments, by no means ummpressive, the set and costume design and general period atmosphere are accurate and suggestive, and some of the scenes convey certain Lawrentian points with economy and efficiency But against this I must set the overriding flaw of a largely social novel being so pared down that there is hardly any social fabric left in the film Gone are all sorts of minor characters and social milieus that explain how the mam characters live and why, ambiances into which they fit or against which they rebel As it is, the Brangwen gnls and Rupert Birkin float mysteriously and arbitrarily through the movie, and the uninitiated fumgoer can hardly figure out their class or their occupations, if any What philosophizing the script still allows them, seems, therefore, idle and gratuitous The castmg, too, leaves much to be desired I have already mentioned the simphstically conceived and executed Hermione Loerke and Mrs Cnch But the leads are also problematic Alan Bates is a breezy iconoclast of a Birkm, without the character's disturbing ambiguities Jennie Linden's Ursula is a typical soubrette with little of the New Woman about her And Oliver Reed is miscast as Gerald The icy, blond, open Nordic god becomes a black-haired, pear-faced, sinister mustachioed skulker Reed, moreover, likes to pad out his dialogue with a breathing scenario, so that many speeches are prefaced by a stertorously melodramatic intake of breath As Gudrun, Glenda Jackson gives the most interesting performance of the film, but is, alas, almost fnght-eningly plain Her features are heavy and somehow malevolent in their irregularity, her body is like a block of uncarved stone except for her much-revealed breasts, shaped like collapsing gourds, and her thick arms and legs might as well be those of the West African fetish that figures so prominently in the novel but is cut from the film Even her line reading is rather too slow and mannered, but at least it is intelligent and arresting...