Very far off was her old experience—Skrebensky, her parting with him—very far off. Some things were real: those first glamorous weeks. Before, these had seemed like hallucination. Now they seemed like common reality. The rest was unreal. She knew that Skrebensky had never become finally real. In the weeks of passionate ecstasy he had been with her in her desire, she had created him for the time being. But in the end he had failed and broken down.
Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him now, as she liked a memory, some bygone self. He was something of the past, finite. He was that which is known. She felt a poignant affection for him, as for that which is past. But, when she looked with her face forward, he was not. Nay, when she looked ahead, into the undiscovered land before her, what was there she could recognise but a fresh glow of light and inscrutable trees going up from the earth like smoke. It was the unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose shore she had landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which washed the New World and the Old.
There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child, it would have made little difference, however. She would have kept the child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky. Anton belonged to the past.
There came the cablegram from Skrebensky: “I am married.” An old pain and anger and contempt stirred in her. Did he belong so utterly to the cast-off past? She repudiated him. He was as he was. It was good that he was as he was. Who was she to have a man according to her own desire? It was not for her to create, but to recognise a man created by God. The man should come from the Infinite and she should hail him. She was glad she could not create her man. She was glad she had nothing to do with his creation. She was glad that this lay within the scope of that vaster power in which she rested at last. The man would come out of Eternity to which she herself belonged.
As she grew better, she sat to watch a new creation. As she sat at her window, she saw the people go by in the street below, colliers, women, children, walking each in the husk of an old fruition, but visible through the husk, the swelling and the heaving contour of the new germination. In the still, silenced forms of the colliers she saw a sort of suspense, a waiting in pain for the new liberation; she saw the same in the false hard confidence of the women. The confidence of the women was brittle. It would break quickly to reveal the strength and patient effort of the new germination.
In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only know the old horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind. They were all in prison, they were all going mad.
She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph, the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard-edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.
And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.
Selected Bibliography
Works by D. H. Lawrence
Novels
The White Peacock, 1911
Sons and Lovers, 1913
The Rainbow, 1915
Women in Love, 1920
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928
Shorter Fiction
The Ladybird; The Fox; The Captain’s Doll, 1923 (novellas)
St. Mawr, 1925 (novella)
The Escaped Cock, 1929 (novella; published as The Man Who Died, 1931)
The Virgin and the Gipsy, 1930 (novella)
The Complete Short Stories, 3 volumes, 1961 (collects Lawrence’s shorter fiction)
Poetry and Plays
The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, eds. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, 2 volumes, 1964 (reissued in one volume, 1971)
The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence, 1965 (collects Lawrence’s ten plays)
Essays, Travel Books, and Letters
Twilight in Italy, 1916 (travel book)
Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923 (literary criticism)
Etruscan Places, 1931 (travel book)
Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald, 1936 (collects many of Lawrence’s essays on various topics)
Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, 1968 (collects numerous essays, reviews, introductions, and sketches, and a few previously uncollected stories written by Lawrence)
The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton, 1997 (based on the texts of Cambridge University Press’s seven-volume edition of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, published 1979–93)
Selected Criticism
Delany, Paul. D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
DeSalvo, Louise. Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge in the Lives and Works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. New York: Dutton, 1994.
Dyer, Geoff. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. New York: North Point Press, 1999.
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. New York: Verso, 1998.
Feinstein, Elaine. Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Lawrence, D. H. “Fantasia of the Unconscious” and “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.” London: Penguin, 1977.
———. Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume II, June 1913–October 1916, ed. by George J. Zytaruk, James T. Boulton, and Andrew Robertson; Volume III, October 1916–June 1921, ed. by James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson; Volume IV, June 1921–March 1924, ed. by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton, and Elizabeth Mansfield; Volume V, March 1924–March 1927, ed. by James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1989.
Lawrence, Frieda. “Not I, But the Wind . . .” New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.
Maddox, Brenda. D. H. Lawrence: The Study o
f a Marriage. New York: Norton, 1995.
Squires, Michael, and Lynn K. Talbot. Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. New York: Counterpoint, 2007.
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