The White Peacock

D.H. Lawrence The White Peacock (1911)
This was his first novel, rewritten three times prior to publication but never quite shaking off that first novel quality of meandering whilst simultaneously trying just a bit too hard. Prior to this effort, he mainly wrote poetry which shows in so far as that the opening chapters read very much like an accumulation of poetic material - florid descriptions of the natural world, landscape and so on - in which an indeterminate number of characters are embedded like raisins in a currant bun. These characters are naive, vaguely middle-class, and slightly unworldly - possibly for the sake of contrast with the violence of their environment, which itself is rooted in nature red in tooth and claw with the occasional brusque intrusion of earthier, seemingly more substantial working class persons whom, it might be argued, serve as extensions of the environment. Not a page seems to go by without either a rabbit strangling, mention of a sheep killing dog, or some other reminder that the refinement of our civilised lives is an anomaly in the great scheme of things, at least not until we come to the awful, sugar coated sub-Dickensian Christmas celebrations at the close of the first of the three parts into which the novel is divided; and even the festivity is itself briefly punctuated by:

There was a great fall of snow, multiplying the cold morning light, startling the slow-footed twilight. The lake was black like the open eyes of a corpse; the woods were black like the beard on the face of a corpse.

...then right back into the Quality Street choccy box for another couple of dozen pages.

My first guess would be that Lawrence didn't want to take too many chances with his first novel, and maybe thought the swearing coal miners of his own upbringing would alienate potential readers, so he gave us Dickens-lite and so much so that I found myself waiting for some comic misunderstanding based on a pair of gloves having been left on the drawing room table rather than in the parlour as would ordinarily have been the case. The problem is that it's difficult to care about these characters one way or the other, and the first person narrative only serves to muddy their definition - I only realised his name was Cyril after a hundred or so pages. Cyril and his friends seem slight in their wispy thoughts and passions although, as I say, it seems to be on purpose, as this exchange perhaps suggests.

I laughed to see her so enthusiastic in her admiration of my sister. Marie is such a gentle, serious little soul. She went to the window. I kissed her, and pulled two berries off the mistletoe. I made her a nest in the heavy curtains, and she sat there looking out at the snow.

'It is lovely,' she said reflectively. 'People must be ill when they write like Maxim Gorky.'

'They live in town,' said I.

'Yes — but then look at Hardy — life seems so terrible — it isn't, is it?'

'If you don't feel it, it isn't — if you don't see it. I don't see it for myself.'

'It's lovely enough for heaven.'

The point eventually becomes clear, this being the tragedy of the disparity between the dreams and aspirations of these four young people, and how the world actually works; but the absence of forward thrust results in a narrative which more closely resembles music, and probably ambient music at that, so it's only once we reach the last hundred or so pages that anything really begins to feel as though it's saying something, and the way in which all has been kept isolated from the intrusion of the twentieth century at last makes sense.

One of our boys settles into respectable nineteenth century conservatism where the other embraces modernity and the rights of the working man, with Lawrence himself more concerned with what drives their impulses than where those impulses lead.

Of course, I am in sympathy with the socialists, but I cannot narrow my eyes till I see one thing only.

So, I suppose you might say it's a nineteenth century novel waking up to the harsh industrialised daylight of the twentieth century, this being its subject as much as it might be considered a description. Most of Lawrence's major themes are already there, not least the casual homoeroticism and the pagan undercurrent, here most visibly expressed as the death of Annable, the gamekeeper and a sort of Green Man holding out against the encroachment of Christianity; but The Trespasser does at least some of this in half the page count, and without suggesting that the writer has gone into a room looking for something but is now unable to remember what it was.

There was a gap between to-day and tomorrow, a dreary gap, where one sat and looked at the dreary comedy of yesterdays, and the grey tragedies of dawning tomorrows, vacantly, missing the poignancy of an actual to-day.

See, that probably boils the whole thing down to a single sentence, or at least as I understood it; so it's a mostly decent novel, and particularly so for a debut, but mainly in the context of Lawrence's back catalogue.