In reading Women in Love I am struck by how D.H. Lawrence captures the unconscious sentiments of his characters. While this novel was published 95 years ago, it sounds strangely modern at times, and the following is an imagining of the Lawrencian style for the 21st century.
At Lucky Show, Charles Buckley recognized a girl he knew from his circle, and a friend of hers he did not know. He stared across the low steely table at Morely, a Scot from Glasgow, a man shorter and stouter than himself, with a broad, open face and a cunning sense of pride, almost slovenly, though his attempts to mask it were great and respectable, both manly and direct.
Charles and Morely admired the girls as they walked to a table behind the men and ignored them, Ingrid bristling to see if Charles would approach her. Charles noticed how the two girls were deliberately out of his purview. He forgot about them and asked his friend, “Why is it we don’t have a reason for living?”
“Speak for yourself,” drawled Morely. “You might if you took a painting to market.”
“The painting isn’t the reason, though. If anything, the reason is to see things to paint. But somehow that doesn’t feel good enough. It’s not enough of a purpose, just to live to see.”
Morely shrugged and drank. “I want to write when I wake. But I also want to fall in love. Not with a woman, though, not necessarily.”
“Then with what?”
“With a moment or a thought. You don’t know what I’m talking about, you dirty painter, you can’t paint thoughts.” He laughed at himself to attenuate the hurt he saw in Charles’ face.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t have synesthesia. And thoughts are too boring to see represented in paint. Much better to have them as words.”
“You think writing is a higher art. All artists think their medium is best. Meanwhile, I’m painting consciousness better than you can write it.”
Morely ignored this claim. “Painting is much better for a scene, I think, but for the interior consciousness,” he trailed off as though feigning not to care who won their conversation.
“What about Monet?” pressed Charles. “He painted consciousness.”
“Give me words over Monet,” cried Morely. “Any day.” He threw back the rest of his drink and rose to use the bathroom.
Charles lingered with him as he walked away, but as Morely closed the door behind him, he left Charles seated, bitter and grasping. Charles leaned back in his chair and studied Ingrid and Hannah. Ingrid’s pale arms summoned him, they gave out an aura, an essence, ethereal, waifish, vulnerable. Everything about those arms beckoned Charles and yet because of how Morely had spoken to him, he sat nullified, yearning, yet powerless.
Morely came back and to make amends, offered to buy his friend a drink. Charles was unwilling to let his friend do that: return and buy his friendship back after he had hated him. He refused to let himself be bought over so simply. “It’s my turn,” he said.
He stood and walked to the bar and waited for the bartender and watched as Ingrid turned to Morely’s touch, introduced her friend and pointed to Charles at the bar, who noncommittally raised a hand in acknowledgement. It was a horrid scene unfolding, that Morely should have said hello before he had the chance, especially when he was the one who knew her. He could already feel Ingrid’s smile flash upon his friend as he turned to order the whiskey from the bartender. A mixture of pleasure and hatred fizzled through his fingers as he laid a twenty down and watched the bartender spin, placing back just four dollars, which he left. He wanted to buy Morely a fine drink, though Morely surely expected and felt entitled to it.
Morely smiled at Ingrid and her sister and invited them to sit together. The girls looked at each other first, unsettled by the offer, then Hannah smiled after the look Ingrid gave her and they turned their seats to the men, raised their drinks, and like flamingos walking through a marsh, joined Morely and Charles as he returned, whiskey in hand.
Charles felt weakened and watched as Morely carried the conversation, reclining. He felt Hannah’s reticence despite her warm, fluid nature, far warmer than her sister’s. Ingrid sat with her elbows tucked to her side, head at an angle in her white flue-like dress, as Morely tried to charm her with his Scottish accent. Charles flamed the weak hatred that smoked within him, nursing it, and hoped that Hannah would snuff it out if he asked her a question.
Their conversation dropped, Morely turned to Hannah and Ingrid asked Charles, “What have you been working on?” The flames went away then.
“A painting about that feeling before sleep, when you’re already in bed and you feel sleep coming on and know that it’s coming, but you have an itch, and you scratch yourself and put your arm back where it was so that you can finish going to sleep.”
She pulled back, querulous, unsure if he was mocking her, knowing that he wasn’t. She appreciated his honesty, his calculable integrity in how he had answered, yet she knew that the very question had bristled him and now he sat smugly, smiling. “Sounds like quite a process,” she said.
“Yes, everything is a process.”
Morely and Hannah carried on a conversation of their own, a conversation about Hannah’s people and her boyfriend, that word, ‘boyfriend’ dropped precariously in their talk between a pique of Morely’s interest and a nadir; it was a warning, an goad, to see if he would take responsibility, yet it caused a retreat, wherein Morely smiled and nodded doggedly, sharp, reflexively. What followed was a surface game, something both of them could watch and describe with the phrase, “Isn’t that nice.”
“I think it is. More or less. A process of decay, combustion, growth, flowering.”
“What are you going through now then?”
“Decay.”
“Oh?” She pulled back again, stricken with his importunate surprises that begged her to love him. She was not convinced.
“I can only rise out of ashes again and again. I think of my painting as a perpetual degradation, so that only when I am done with one painting and before I begin another do I grow. And you?” he smiled, “What are you working on?”
She felt embarrassed, as though whatever she might say could not be weird or unique enough to merit conversation with him, and this knowledge comforted her in her submission, so that she unconscionably agreed to it, and said something honest, “I’m taking photographs and freelancing, trying to make it.” She was sorry she’d added that cliche at the end; she could tell that he knew she was antagonizing him and that he was losing patience; he hadn’t wanted a fight, the submission would have been enough. And yet that lasted only a second, because he remembered how she had snuffed his anger, and he wanted her, he wanted to know her and understand how she had come here, to choose photography, and why seeing should make her excited when all they both wanted was to feel, the sensations of touch, through a guise of seeing, and he wondered if he could inculcate her in this way and if they could start a private movement together, one of balance and intricacy, and wet grass and hot sun.
“What are your plans after this?”
Now she put a finger to her mouth to hide her triumph. “We’re going to Bedford.”
It was not an invitation and both knew it. Charles felt the electricity sizzle between them and she wondered if he would press for what he wanted, and how far.
At that moment Hannah turned to Ingrid and asked if she wanted to go. She looked at her drink with little left and said okay. She set it down on the men’s table and said, “It was nice to see you.”
Charles glowered, his face enshadowed, nodding.
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