Vasily Grossman – Life and Fate

Life and Fate is so good I almost can’t write about it. Despite its concentration camps, its scenes in the Gulag and the death camps, the interrogations in Lubyanka and all the deaths coming so early for characters we want to live forever, the tears that came to my eyes while reading were tears of joy – and when I punched the air it was not with rage but as a spontaneous expression of awe at the work’s titanic mastery. In quite important ways, it does more than War and Peace. But Life and Fate is not an epic like that work; rather, it is its negative.

An epic creates myths; Grossman destroys them. Tolstoy’s work created ideas of Napoleon and the War of 1812 which remain sticky to this day even as he tried to destroy the idea of the “Great Man” shaping history. The central ideologies of the mid-20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, also aimed at mythmaking – the Thousand Year Reich, the October Revolution. Life and Fate annihilates these myths while still retaining the hallmarks of the epic form – a vast canvas, a willingness to philosophise, and the detached tone of a writer who sits beside God. It’s probably one of the best books I have read – or ever will.

This idea of Life and Fate as an anti-epic, or perhaps alternatively as an epic of humanism, is one way to approach the book. I wrote about Grossman’s earlier Stalingrad, which I read immediately before Life and Fate (together they must be a little longer than Tolstoy’s book), within the context of truth-telling. But if that book, written under Stalin’s last years, attempted to push truth through the gaps in the censors’ red ink, Life and Fate instead tells it straight out. The reading experience is vastly improved as a result, with characters humanised by their ability to experience such feelings as doubt or a desire for infidelity. But we might also say that if we were dutiful Soviet citizens we needed both works to experience their full impact – Stalingrad to begin weakening our trust in the regime’s narrative, and Life and Fate to replace its totalising narrative with many individual ones.

The two works share a core cast of characters, centring around the Shaposhnikov family. There are limited physical overlaps in this work as it begins with them scattered where in Stalingrad they were initially together, but there are enough connections – even if it is just a character thinking of another – to make us feel as if we are observing a shared world. In a world at war, after all, people cannot be together. In my post on Stalingrad I called that work panoramic, with its vision stretching to miners in the Urals and the full range of Soviet citizens inhabiting the city of Stalingrad itself. Yet immediately upon reading Life and Fate I felt embarrassed at giving it that designation. To say something is panoramic is almost to close the book and say that we don’t need any more voices – it’s a statement that mutes others.

In Life and Fate we hear many of these voices that are lost. There’s Karimov, a Tatar intellectual who cries over the murder of so many of his people’s brightest stars in the early years of the Soviet Union; there’s Kristya, the Ukrainian peasant woman who lost her family during the Holodomor yet saves the Russian soldier Semyonov from starvation; there’s Abarchuk, trapped in the Gulag. Grossman, with a bravery that is hard to appreciate from here, names everything evil that he can. Whether Gulag or death camp (and he was among the first to reach Treblinka), mass deportation (of the Crimean Tatars and others), the arbitrary famines during collectivisation, the mass murders of innocents in 1937, or just the lies of Russian nationalism and the pervasive Soviet anti-Semitism, in Life and Fate we have a kind of record of it. Akhmatova, in her Requiem, regretted that she could not name all the victims of The Terror by name. Grossman, it feels, gets pretty damn close.

In Stalingrad, the Germans were portrayed in a way that left the perceptive reader aware that Grossman’s criticisms against them could easily be reflected back to the Soviets. Here, we are explicit. SS Officer Liss tells the captured old revolutionary Mostovskoy that they are basically one in the same. Later we might find another parallel – Mostovskoy expects to be tortured during questioning, but it is commissar Krymov who is tortured instead – and by his own people in Moscow. Through the story of Viktor Shturm, the novel’s Jewish hero, we see the arbitrariness of state power. At first he is praised for his scientific discoveries, but then the political mood changes and Shturm finds himself cast out of his job. A few weeks later and Stalin decides he doesn’t want to be behind on building a nuclear bomb and Shturm’s fortunes are restored yet again.

Yet if this work were only negative, only critical, it would be miserable. Dismissing that world – the world of the Soviet Union in the years of the war against Hitler – too readily is itself an evil. A lot of people died to defeat Hitler, far more than perhaps needed to, but in many cases those people volunteered quite readily to defend their homelands against invasion. During the war they displayed great strength and fortitude. There were heroes among them, even if their state was not always playing the role of hero. Grossman’s love for the defenders of Stalingrad is real. The defence of the city itself was, at least in part, truly epic. But where Stalingrad ends with a celebration of that very heroism, Life and Fate as usual goes further. One of the most chilling parts of the book is the growing menace we perceive as the Soviet authorities realise they have the Germans on the back foot. It is at that point that the state decides it is time to exact its revenge, and all those fates which had seemed so positive are turned to ashes under the Stalinist, KGB gaze.

In such a nuanced view of the war, Grossman differs significantly from Tolstoy, who is both mentor and rival in Grossman’s two novels. One thing I noticed rereading it at the beginning of last year was how naïve, how sentimental War and Peace seems, how disgusting even the light nationalism of its later parts is. The Russian soul is not the hero of Life and Fate, unless that soul means the desire for a people to defend its homes. In War and Peace, ultimately, we have some delightful aristocrats who are trying to work out how to live, with the war just providing some novel opportunities for engaging with a problem which is ultimately mainly a concern for a man or woman of money, leisure, and time for reflection.

Life and Fate is concerned with a much more pressing matter, one that comes long before we can start thinking about how to live in the Tolstoyan sense. That concern is how to survive, how to live under totalitarianism pressure, how to protect the self from a state and society that are attempting at every stage to enchain or annihilate it. This is not a concern that is any less relevant now, even if many of us are less at risk of getting shot. Simply put, it is about human dignity and its preservation.

This is something we like to say, or used to like to say, about the great writers of Russia’s nineteenth century. Tolstoy celebrates the peasant, but ended up in later years having vitriol for the aristocrat or bourgeois. The Ukrainian Gogol celebrated the little man, but only so long as he was Russian. Against Dostoevsky we can let Karimov speak, who says “I’m a Tartar who was born in Russia and I cannot pardon a Russian writer his hatred of Poles and Yids.” Dostoevsky might tell us interesting things about people, but dignity is not part of it. Who then do we have?

The answer, for Grossman, is Chekhov, whose understated style we also see in Life and Fate with its short chapters and almost entirely dislocated impressionistic stories. Here is why, according to another one of the characters:

“Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness – with people of every estate, every class, every age… More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people – a Russian democrat. He said – and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings!” People were themselves before they were their identities, regardless of these identities – ethnic, religious, material. Of all the Russian writers Chekhov is the one whose project to care and depict was not led off course by ideas about how the world should be. Or, as he famously said himself “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

The spirit of Chekhov infuses this book, and it is because of this spirit that Life and Fate feels impossibly modern in the same way that Chekhov himself does. We judge the characters – Grossman doesn’t do that, he just depicts them. Grossman instead judges the powers and ideas that put characters into the positions they are in, where they show their best and worst sides. Because the book is dedicated to social justice in the most serious sense of that phrase, and because the world it shows is so manifestly unjust, we can’t help but agree with him about what’s going wrong, while still standing in awe at all of the people and faces he somehow manages to fit in.

In a time of war, in the very same places as described in Life and Fate, and with the same peoples in the trenches but now on different sides, this book is more important than ever. Written in Russian by a Jewish writer from Ukraine, with its central hero a Jewish man from Ukraine, this is a great novel of tolerance, of pluralism, of dignity. In the war we have now, where nationalist tempers are high on both sides, nuance denied, and memory readily distorted for political aims, Grossman’s book, more than any other I have read, shows the kind of spirit we all need to have to build a lasting peace, for all the people who live in these lands.   

But first, I suppose, there’s more killing.

Correcting our Idea of Genius – Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

I am something of a Thomas Bernhard fanatic. After Woodcutters, the other Bernhard on this blog, I had a break until late 2023, when I read, in quick succession, Concrete, The Loser, Extinction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard is a writer who is addictive in a quite unique way. His books are propelled by the bile and bitterness of his narrators and are inescapable thanks to their flowing, paragraphless prose, which offers no exit for someone looking to put them down and take a break. Entering Bernhard’s world means a total surrender to his aims and approach.

Correction, which I have now read for the second time, is to my mind the best Bernhard, and one of my favourite books altogether. It has a unique structure for the author, with two narrators, (even though one filters the other,) who take equal sides of the novel for themselves and who have slightly different voices. It also has the most interesting readerly experience, in that the novel’s journey is primarily one where we change our opinion about its central character, the genius scientist Roithamer, rather than one where something happens. All happening takes place before the book begins.

As with all Bernhard, the story itself is simple. Roithamer, a genius of sorts who works at Cambridge, upon the death of his parents inherits a lot of money and decides to use this money to build a Cone in the centre of the Kobernausser Forest in Austria for his sister to live in. Once the Cone is finished his sister dies, probably not of joy, and Roithamer then hangs himself. Our narrator, a friend of Roithamer’s, arrives at the house of a mutual friend, Hoeller, where Roithamer did much of his work on the Cone, to start putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order. The first part of Correction is an almost hagiographic portrayal of Roithamer by this friend; the second is Roithamer’s own literary remains, partly filtered. Chief among them is a manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone”.

In the first part of the book Roithamer is presented as a classical genius – what Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein is entirely appropriate here: “he was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Roithamer is totally focused in a way that few of us ever are: “a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end”. The ultimate end, it turns out, is suicide, but before we get to suicide, this thinking is inspirational. Roithamer builds a Cone for habitation, something nobody has done before, and does so totally professionally, as the result of massive research and effort, and all this in the face of all manner of criticisms and accusations of madness.

He is also totally himself, totally dedicated. Quite frankly, I would rather be like this – more pedantic, more unbearable, more focused, than any of the human qualities those who know me would wish I had in greater quantities to balance out my already well-developed inhuman ones. Almost all I could think as I read these sections was how much I agreed with everything, how much I myself wanted to build my own Cone, or rather in my case a Cube, a white glass cube but also in the centre of a forest or failing that atop a cliff and far away from everything and everybody, my own “thought-chamber” where I would be able to work totally undisturbed and think better, cleaner, wiser thoughts than anywhere else. A place where I would experience the same joy as I had recently in the crypt at the cathedral in Münster, where I was alone beside silent stone.

We see Roithamer’s genius reflected in Bernhard’s prose. It flows, in long sentences, with a focus on choosing the right words. One of the things I love, you’ll have noticed, is Bernhard’s italics. He uses italics to make us read words and phrases we might otherwise pass over. Strangely, simple though it is, it works. But there are also the neologisms, obviously more brilliant in the original German where they can remain a single word, things like the “thought-chamber” above. This sentence-by-sentence genius can also be drawn out to the wider book, where we are constantly becoming more precise, more accurate, more truthful in our various assertions.

Here is an example. On page 1 we learn that Roithamer has killed himself. On page 53 we learn the location, on page 61 we learn the method, on page 81 we learn who found him. The whole book is structured like a spiral, as we constantly correct our initial view to be closer to the reality that once was. Spirals can mean madness, of course, the sense of one being trapped. But they can also be like drill bits, precisely what is needed to make a hole through something – some challenge or problem – otherwise impenetrable. That is the great test of genius and obsession – to fixate upon the right thing, not the wrong. I have a friend whose longtime obsession is Pokémon Pearl. I, fortunately, am more obsessed by books and terrible questions.

Our narrator’s obsession is Roithamer himself. This is, he notes, not exactly healthy. He describes being unable to think his own thoughts, because he is incarcerated “within Roithamer’s thought-prison – or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon.” This, naturally, makes the depiction of Roithamer we receive in the first part of the book slightly suspect. It also provides one of the novel’s mysteries. For the second part is a collection of Roithamer’s thoughts, as filtered through the narrator, yet the narrator is nowhere to be found. Even though he claims they were friends who went to school together, Roithamer doesn’t mention him once. In fact, Roithamer provides information that directly contradicts the narrator’s testimony. (The narrator claims Roithamer visited Stocket to see him, whereas Roithamer claims he visited Stocket to see an uncle).

The result of the narrator’s obsession is that he essentially goes mad, helped by working in quite literally the same room as Roithamer when he worked on the Cone. He is almost subsumed into Roithamer. Arguably, the second part of the book, where Roithamer’s voice is even more dominant, is just an extension of this – the narrator is totally crushed as a human being with any more existence than merely that of a bridge between the dead man’s words and our ears. Yet interestingly, his admiration for Roithamer, his Roithamer-obsession, is quite similar to what I felt.

One of the ways that Correction provides a journey for the reader is that it takes that attitude and forces us to amend it. Once we hear Roithamer’s voice, unvarnished, the genius becomes rather more petty than godly. “That extraordinary talent for life” which the narrator so praises becomes in practice rather pathetic. Roithamer absolutely hated his upbringing on the estate of Altensam. He spends page after page criticising his brothers, his father, his mother in particular. He describes endless squabbles and confrontations in which he himself is the instigator. For example, it was enough for him to return home from abroad and find that a barn had been painted to send him off on a rampage.

Given that, like a lot of people on the spectrum or whatever, Roithamer has a real dislike of hypocrisy, the sheer amount that we find in him soon comes to undermine him. Nobody understands him, yes, but he claims to have been observing his sister for years and years to create the ultimate habitation for her in the form of a Cone. Yet the result of this observation is a home so comically unsuited that she dies pretty much immediately. The repetitions of these problems, Roithamer’s total lack of growth, and indeed the way that his entire personality seems to have come from his upbringing even though he claims to despise it, all makes him look rather ridiculous. He cries about people who “never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves,” but it is he who is the first person who should consider this.

Bernhard is a hugely funny writer, which I have failed to indicate here thus far, but humour is another way that our thought-image of Roithamer becomes covered in cracks. As Roithamer’s own suicide approaches, he reels off a whole host of family members who have committed suicide, in a way that is too over-the-top to be upsetting. “…They shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle. … And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems.” When we learn that one of these people literally threw themselves down the air shaft of a cheese factory our sympathy struggles to break through the snort of laughter at these words.

In fact, it is humour that keeps Roithamer alive. At one point he visits the cliff off from which one of his relatives threw himself and finds himself considering following suit, “but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there.” We laugh, perhaps, but three of Wittgenstein’s own brothers died to suicide, so these numbers are not the mad inflations they might seem. And Austria did, for a long time, have among the highest suicide rates in the world.

By the time Roithamer reaches the idea of suicide, the final “correction” for “our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature”, we are already no longer with him, but watching him, rather sadly, as the madman that others did claim he was. One of the key elements of cone-building, as we learn, is “statics”, basically how to keep things from falling over. In the case of Roithamer, this provides a beautiful metaphor. He tips and tips as far as he can into his thoughts, and done well he can make huge advances (as he does by building the Cone) without getting to a point where he loses his balance and falls over. But in the book, he does go too far, and hence falls. We, watching, do not.

Another key idea, understandably, is the idea of correction itself. Roithamer writes his manuscript about his childhood and then corrects it, making it much smaller and completely different, then does so again, then finally kills himself. Correction, when I reflected on it, really has two meanings or uses. It can mean to take something false and replace it with what is true, as in the case of an incorrect mathematical summation, or it can mean to take what is largely true and make it more precise. Correction abounds in the latter, but believes it is a tale of the former. One of the mesmerising beauties of Bernhard’s prose is its precision-fanaticism. Whether it’s denying one word in favour of another, “master builder” instead of “architect”, or its deployment of a huge number of words and phrases to create a more accurate picture than one or two alone could do, Correction aims at precision in a way that others might be willing to stop and say this is “good enough.”

Precision-fanaticism is another phrase for perfectionism. Nowadays, self-help gurus are all about the need to be less of a perfectionist, and Correction provides a dramatization of why we should heed them. Roithamer, finding error and inaccuracy everywhere, ultimately gives up on his connection to the source of all error – existence itself. For us, it need not be so. We can stop at a given sentence, just as I can give up on a given blog post, and say that this is good enough. Could be better, but won’t be. Thus we live to fight another day.

As much as this book ultimately becomes a criticism of Roithamer, indeed even a correction to our idea of genius, it remains mysterious to me because I am unable to shake my love of the ideas it represents and the way it represents them. Much as once upon a time I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov or Levin, I would want to be Roithamer if I could. At least the Roithamer that is represented in the novel’s first half. The Roithamer of the second, with his pettiness and pointless arguments with his family members, I fear I already am.

Where Bernhard is normally so negative and cruel that we normally come out of his books looking for things that might actually be affirmed in life, in Correction I actually heard something truly beautiful and admirable – the sheer, single-minded dedication to an arbitrarily chosen idea that we are willing to stake our entire soul upon. Yes, it’s mad, but I want to build my Cone. Better that than not wanting anything at all, and sinking into the grim mediocrity that Bernhard hates so much.

Uneasy Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is a frustrating book. I have a suspicion that it was probably supposed to be. Following the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire in the 19th century, it is primarily the story of their struggles to assert themselves and their identities. While the older generations have only limited success, Ursula, the granddaughter of our original Brangwen hero Tom, is able to achieve something closer to what she wants for her (emotional) life.

That she does so is a little ironic. The Brangwens may be progressing financially and socially in the story, but it is clear that for Lawrence the world around them in late 19th and early 20th century England is not. Rather, it’s becoming increasingly more awful as continues to industrialize and modernise. What complicates this situation is that it is precisely the progress Lawrence dislikes – economic, educational, and social – which allows Ursula the chance to be herself in the way she thinks she ought. Otherwise, I think this might have been quite a one-dimensional book.

The Rainbow was my first full-length Lawrence, after a few of his poems and his well-known short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”. The best compliment I can give him, not that I think he’d necessarily care for my feedback even if he weren’t dead almost a hundred years, is that he certainly has his own distinctive approach. The characters of The Rainbow only ever experience strong feelings. The best way to describe them for one who hasn’t read him is that they are like jugs of emotions just sloshing about more than real people. Regularly, the feelings pour over the brim and make a mess on the carpet.

Central to these emotions are love and hate, and the frustration that leads to their regular alternations. Anna Brangwen, the adopted daughter of Tom Brangwen, imagines her premarital life as like a torture cell where she could “neither stand nor lie stretched out, never.” She escapes her home by marrying Will Brangwen, son of one of Tom’s brothers. At first, things are good: “Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.”

Then, just as quickly, things are bad. First, she’s crying, and then he is. They are unable to talk to each other, and Will takes up drinking – the men in The Rainbow are always going up to the village to get drunk alone, and Will quickly joins their number. When they visit a cathedral – Will likes them as a kind of hobby – Anna decides to ruin his faith through mockery and doubt and largely succeeds, leaving him miserable. They then make up just as suddenly, and it almost seems as if Lawrence approves of this destruction because he suggests it leads to better sex. At another point, Will tries to seduce a stranger and when he returns home the result is the same – better sex. Both he and Anna no longer feel obliged to be good or obey or social norms, and their passion for one another reaches a new height. (I lost track of how many babies she has throughout the novel, or how many fallings-out.)

The only child who matters within this book, however, is Ursula, the eldest daughter. On the first page of The Rainbow we learn that the Brangwens are all born with a look of “expectancy” on their faces, and it is with Ursula that we get closest to fulfilment. In the background of the book’s several hundred pages, modernity has crept into the story. By the time of Ursula’s section, we have the occasional motor car and the Boer War to help us date things, while the suffragettes are trying to get women the right to vote. The Brangwen family has also grown. At first, they were reasonably well-off farmers, but the growth of towns nearby thanks to coal mining makes them more money and allows them to climb a little socially.

Most directly for Ursula, this helps her to become a teacher and try to live an independent life. She also then goes to college to actually train to be a teacher, which perhaps she should have done before doing the teaching. In between all this she has her experience of first love with the son of a friend of her mother’s, an extremely homoerotic experience with a female friend, and through her other acquaintances she also comes across such ideas as the cause of the suffragettes.

In general, however, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Lawrence seems very hostile towards the modern world. The corporal punishment Ursula has to mete out to her children at the freshly-built new school seems as demeaning to her as it is to them, while the teaching itself is unstructured and primarily rote-learning. The suffragettes are criticised for thinking about ideas rather than actual human fulfilment, and as for the growth of towns and urban spaces Lawrence memorably describes them as “a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease”. People everywhere seem to be turning into machines, and Lawrence is no fan.

His own ideas are much more timeless, or at least timeless-seeming. There’s an emphasis on personal freedom and self-assertion, but mainly through passionate sex rather than upending society. In fact, there’s no real sense of society at all – Lawrence’s characters are all monstrous egotists only brushing against each other when their blood is pumping. The greatest moments are moments of nakedness – Anna dancing in her bedroom nude, or Ursula running on the beach naked. That’s the fulfilment everyone wants here and not the vote. But we might also notice, unsurprisingly, that even if a partner is present, these are moments of self-fulfilment rather than of joint, let alone of collective fulfilment. The men observing feel left out, alienated. (I am not sure Lawrence liked men who were not himself.)

Lawrence uses religious language and symbols to give his work a kind of mythic edge and his ideas the stamp of Truth. Early moments of love are described as “the light of the transfiguration”; at one point Ursula is compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; and cathedrals play a reasonably prominent role. The clear delineation between and essentialising of men and women, a sense of cyclicity (Brangwens on their first illicit strolls with lovers always seem to find the same paths to tread), and biblical images like a flood and the rainbow of the novel’s title, all make Lawrence’s narrator seem like someone presenting some timeless discovery, as if he has gone back to the root of things to find their real essence.

It is not so, of course. Lawrence may attempt to cloak himself in the Bible, but his main influences seem to be the classic German thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we read that “she felt his will fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and obscure,” we think of Schopenhauer’s idea of a fallen humanity controlled by clashing wills. When we consider Lawrence’s rejection of modernity (“I hate democracy”, Ursula cries embarrassingly) and his love of the body, there’s more than a touch of Nietzsche and his successors in the Lebensphilosophie movement, while Freud is also here in much of the more detailed psychological assessments of the effects of modern society on the individual soul.

One is allowed to be influenced by others, of course, and Lawrence not being a real prophet does not devalue his ideas necessarily and certainly not his book as a whole. In fact, The Rainbow was banned in the UK for some years after its initial publication, which is generally a sign that it did reflect a certain truth. A truth about sex in particular – this is, undoubtedly, the sexiest book I’ve read which does not mention the male member once. Like de Sade, there’s a sense that even if Lawrence has a limited view of female empowerment, it’s one that still undermines the view that women exist only to be caregivers and dolls.

Overall, the ideas are actually reasonable enough; the problem is that, wishing to convince us of their Truth, Lawrence takes the easy option of disallowing debate or counterargument to exist. Characters are either sellouts to modernity who become like machines and are dropped by Ursula, or they are having great sex. I suspect there may be more to the matter than that. Anna has fifty babies, while Ursula gets engaged, goes on a mad one, and then breaks the whole thing off. The life of the body is good and fun, but I dislike the way Lawrence completely devalues the mind. I suppose once we accept he is right about everything we are supposed to stop thinking, if we were supposed to think at all.

One figure I thought of regularly while reading The Rainbow was Dostoevsky. Both he and Lawrence can only write characters whose emotional states are strained so taut you can hear the thrumming as soon as they leap onto the page; both he and Dostoevsky could have done with a better editor; both he and Lawrence have their own visions of how things are. But of the two, only Dostoevsky actually places his ideas against those of his enemies in such a way that even today, many readers can be quite convinced that he wasn’t really a toady old reactionary Christian nationalist. With Lawrence, you’d need to be an idiot to miss what he’s on about. Which altogether just makes him seem naïve and a bit silly, even before we start thinking about the ideas themselves.

Yet this is not a bad book by any stretch. One reason why this is so is the tension I noted at the start on the subject of modernity. Ursula goes to a better school than her parents, she is able to get a job where her mother gets none, and I might even suggest that her willingness to have sex while ultimately backing out of marriage indicates that she was not entirely deaf to some of the more radical ideas her suffragette friends may have been mentioning. In other words, her choices do not come out of nowhere – the world may be getting worse, but it is also opening up new opportunities for achieving the kind of self-realisation that Lawrence definitely loves.

There’s an irony in all that which he may have noticed himself. Such an irony, and the question of how much self-fulfilment Ursula will actually get within that world, makes her part of the novel by far the most interesting. Indeed, it even sustains itself into a sequel, Women in Love, which I will probably read at some point. This, and the occasional richness of the sloshing-about of these characters’ sensual emotions, makes The Rainbow quite the sensual experience. Just one that I will not rush to return to until I have gone outside and first touched the grass.