I.
The dead don't die, wrote D. H. Lawrence [a], and it's a line that has long haunted my imagination.
Sometimes they look on and help (the kindly ghost); sometimes they prevent us from living (the malevolent spirit); and sometimes they engage in non-consensual sexual activity, ranging from the nocturnal masturbation of sleepers to violent spectral rape (the pervy poltergeist).
It really depends, I suppose, on how the dead adjust to their posthumous status - some find peace easier than others - and the nature also of the relationship established by the living with those who inhabit the other side; is it respectful and loving, for example, or is there an element of secret resentment for those who have passed and a refusal to let them go?
Lawrence addresses these and other questions in a (longer-than-average) short story written in 1925, entitled 'Glad Ghosts', and published (in two parts) in The Dial the following summer [b].
II.
According to one commentator, 'Glad Ghosts' is often misread or simply dismissed as a confused and confusing work [c]. For those of us with a passion for spectrophilia, however, it holds significant interest and makes for an amusing halloween study ...
Having said that, it's not really a supernatural sex story; it is rather the tale of kinky but perfectly mundane goings on between a group of unhappy and unfulfilled - some might say repressed or hysterical - poshos happy to indulge in extramarital shenanigans so as to feel better about themselves (and in the case of both women involved, conceive a child).
In other words, this is a perversely material tale about the flesh, disguised by Lawrence as a ghost story. Readers are invited to play along with the idea that there might possibly be strange things going bump in the night (and not merely those caught up in a polyamorous love pentangle), but we know that's not really the case.
Anyhoo, let's take a look at the tale a bit more closely ...
III.
Mark Morier is the (Lawrentian) narrator. He's indifferent to his own poverty, but vitally concerned with his own passionate vision which, he felt, "lay embedded in the half-dead body of this life" [174].
Mark is friendly - but never flirtatious - with a fellow former art student called Carlotta Fell. She's a beautiful young woman with an aristocratic background and a penchant for painting still lifes.
Mark feels that, despite their differences, he and Carlotta "had a curious understanding in common: an inkling, perhaps, of the unborn body of life hidden within the body of this half-death which we call life [...] a curious abstract intimacy, that went very deep, yet showed no obvious contact" [175].
In other words, he wants to fuck her but feels she's out of his league. His suspicion is Carlotta wants to "marry into her own surroundings" [175] rather than take a chance with him. She hates her own class, but is pot-bound within it like a house plant. Perhaps that's what makes her sad: an unconventional soul forced to lead a conventional life.
At twenty-one, Carlotta marries Lord Lathkill (or Luke to his friends): a handsome army officer with dark hair and dark eyes. This is usually a good sign in Lawrence's work, but I'm not sure about that in this case. Later he is described as being "like a tortoise in a glittering, polished tortoiseshell that mirrors eternity" [176]; not conceited, but secure in his knowledge of things.
Having said that, however, there was a sort of fear in his dark eyes and an emptiness: "He was so sure of circumstances, and not by any means sure of the man in the middle of the circumstances. Himself! Himself! That was already a ghost." [177]
The problem is he thinks himself and his family unlucky - almost cursed. And sure enough, all three children born to him and his wife die; their twin boys are killed in a car accident and their baby girl perishes from a fatal illness. Following this, they retreat into a life of seclusion, with his elderly mother at the family home in Derbyshire. It's here - at this haunted mansion - that Morier reluctantly goes to visit them ...
When he arrives, there's already another couple present; bald-headed, ruddy-faced Colonel Hale and his swarthy young wife, who had "the hint of a black moustache" [183] and hairy limbs. Later, at dinner, Morier will admire her slim, swarthy arms which had "an indiscernible down on them" [185].
When Morier is introduced to the dowager Lady Lathkill and this rather odd couple it makes for an awkward encounter. He feels as if he "interrupted them at a séance" [183], which, given the old woman's "leanings towards the uncanny - spiritualism, and that kind of thing" [181] is perfectly possible.
Morier is shown to his room - the so-called ghost room. Apparently the lovely female ghost isn't ghoulish or ghastly in the least and brings good luck. Morier is put in the room to tempt her into appearing, so that the family fortune might be restored. Our narrator doesn't seem to take the idea of a ghost very seriously. In fact, he's thinking more about Carlotta than the latter:
"Poor Carlotta! She looked worn now. [...] It was as if some bitterness had soaked all the life out of her, and she was [...] drained of her feelings. It grieved me, and the thought passed through my mind that a man should take her in his arms and cherish her body, and start her flame again. [...] Her courage was fallen, in her body; only her spirit fought on. She would have to restore the body of her life, and only a living body could do it." [183-184]
I think, as readers, we all know what this means and what's going to happen ...
It turns out that Carlotta isn't the only one dead in life; her husband and the Colonel too are zombiefied. The latter, for example, is not quite sixty yet has blank staring eyes with "deathly yellow stains underneath" [189] and he seemed to smell.
For some reason, he decides to confide in Morier and tells him of his marriage to his first wife, Lucy, who has haunted him ever since her death, and now prevents him from loving his new young bride; wed for almost a year, they have yet to consummate their relationship. Apparently, she doesn't mind, believing as she does that pleasing the dead is a higher form of duty than pleasuring the living.
Morier - and, indeed, Lord Lathkill - is shocked and disturbed by this. Both think it wrong and the former says he'd simply tell the ghost-wife to go to Blazes! For why love a ghost when you can love a black she-fox - as he thinks the Colonel's wife.
Later, over coffee, Morier is aroused by the thought of dark hairs growing on the inside of her "strong-skinned, dusky thighs" [193]; he admires the mysterious fire he detects beneath her resistant passivity. However, it's not just the narrator of our tale who is attracted to Mrs Hale - Lord Lathkill is also keen to dance with her ...
Not that Morier is unhappy having to dance with Carlotta:
"She was very still, and remote, and she hardly looked at me. Yet the touch of her was wonderful, like a flower that yields itself to the morning. Her warm, silken shoulder was soft and grateful under my hand [...]
She [...] let the strain and the tension of all her life depart [...] leaving her nakedly still, within my arm. And I only wanted to be with her, to have her in my touch." [194]
Having said that, it doesn't stop him from enjoying the next dance with Mrs Hale:
"I looked down at her dusky, dirt-looking neck - she wisely avoided powder. The duskiness of her mesmerised body made me see the faint dark sheen of her thighs, with intermittant black hairs. It was as if they shone through the silk of her mauve dress, like the limbs of a half-wild animal [...] [194]
Unfortunately for Morier, Mrs Hale only has eyes for Lord Lathkill ... and he's keen to try his luck with the dark young woman. But then the temperature suddenly drops and the spirit of the Colonel's first wife puts in an invisible appearance. Only Lord Lathkill is determined she won't spoil their fun - and he puts on the gramophone, insisting they keep dancing so as to resist the "cold weight of an unliving spirit [that] was slowly crushing all warmth and vitality out of everything" [197].
It's the triumph of warm flesh and blood over death - something which comes as a moment of revelation for Lord Lathkill:
"'I've only realised how very extraordinary it is to be a man of flesh and blood, alive. It seems so ordinary, in comparison, to be dead, and merely a spirit. That seems so commonplace. But fancy having a living face, and arms, and thighs. Oh my God, I'm glad I've realised in time!'" [200]
Pressing the arm of Mrs Hale against his chest, he addresses his wife, who is silently weeping by this stage:
"'Don't cry, Carlotta! [...] We haven't killed one another. We're too decent after all. We've almost become two spirits side by side. We've almost become two ghosts to one another [...] Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can't give it you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We've suffered too much the other way.'" [201]
With this, whilst still holding hands with the Colonel's dark young wife, he hands Carlotta over to Morier, who agrees to help her (again, we all know what this means). But before Morier can fuck Carlotta and Lord Lathkill can bang Mrs Hale who sat in silent remote mystery throughout the above speech, they must first help the Colonel, who reappears in his dressing gown desperate for assistance.
Lord Lathkill - like a man with "one foot in life and one in death" [202] knew just what to say: the Colonel should open up his heart and provide a home for poor dead Lucy. He accuses the Colonel of never having worshipped the body of his wife with his body - no matter how awfully good he may have been to her.
In an amusing passage, Lawrence writes:
"The queerest of all accusing angels did Lord Lathkill make, as he sat there with the hand of the other man's wife clasped against his thigh. His face was fresh and naïve, and the dark eyes were bright with a clairvoyant candour, that was like madness, and was, perhaps, supreme sanity." [203]
Lord Lathkill - or shall we call him Luke, a strange, uncanny figure was, in truth, like a man reborn - tells the Colonel that Lucy haunts him and wails in the afterlife because he despised her living body and the only way to end her torment (and his) is to "'take her to your warm heart, even now, and comfort her [...] be kind to her poor ghost, bodily'" [204].
And this he does - to miraculous effect! "The passionate, compassionate soul stirred in him and was pure [...] [205].
Luke and Dorothy - for that, it turns out, is the living Mrs Hale's name - retire for a night of passion. And Morier goes to his room in the hope and expectation of a visitor in the night ... And it's at this point that the story becomes a little unclear as to what actually happens: is it the ghost of silence, or is it Carlotta who comes under cover of darkness ...?
Even the narrator seems uncertain. But see what you think, dear reader, on the basis of the following passages:
"And softly, in silence, I took off my things. I was thinking of Carlotta: and a litte sadly, perhaps [...] I could have worshipped her with my body, and she, perhaps, was stripped in the body to be worshipped. But it was not for me [...] to fight against circumstances.
[...] Desire is a sacred thing, and should not be violated.
'Hush!' I said to myself. 'I will sleep, and the ghost of my silence can go forth, in the subtle body of desire, to meet that which is coming to meet it. Let my ghost go forth, and let me not interfere. There are many intangible meetings, and unknown fulfilments of desire.'
So I went softly to sleep, as I wished to, without interfering with the warm, crocus-like ghost of my body.
And I must have gone far, far down the intricate galleries of sleep, to the very heart of the world. For I know I passed on beyond the strata of images and words, beyond the iron veins of memory, and even the jewels of rest, to sink in the final dark like a fish, dumb, soundless, and imageless, yet alive and swimming.
And at the very middle of the deep night, the ghost came to me, at the heart of the ocean of oblivion, which is also the heart of life. Beyond hearing, or even knowledge of contact, I met her and knew her. How I know it I don't know. Yet I know it with eyeless, wingless knowledge.
For man in the body is formed through countless ages, and at the centre is the speck, or spark, upon which all his formation has taken place. It is even not himself, deep beyond his many depths. Deep from him calls to deep. And according as deep answers deep, man glistens and surpasses himself.
Beyond all the pearly mufflings of consciousness, of age upon age of consciousness, deep calls yet to deep, and sometimes is answered. It is calling and answering, new-wakened God calling within the deep of a man, and new God calling answer from the other deep. And sometimes the other deep is a woman, as it was with me, when my ghost came.
Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep.
I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face, I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. Yet I know it was so.
I awoke towards dawn, from far, far away. I was vaguely conscious of drawing nearer and nearer, as the sun must have been drawing towards the horizon, from the complete beyond. Till at last the faint pallor of mental consciousness coloured my waking.
And then I was aware of a pervading scent, as of plum-blossom, and a sense of extraordinary silkiness - though where, and in what contact, I could not say. It was as the first blemish of dawn.
And even with so slight a conscious registering, it seemed to disappear. Like a whale that has sounded to the bottomless seas. That knowledge of it, which was the marriage of the ghost and me, disappeared from me, in its rich weight of certainty, as the scent of the plum-blossom moved down the lanes of my consciousness, and my limbs stirred in a silkiness for which I have no comparison.
As I became aware, I also became uncertain. I wanted to be certain of it, to have definite evidence. And as I sought for evidence, it disappeared, my perfect knowledge was gone. I no longer knew in full.
Now, as the daylight slowly amassed, in the windows from which I had put back the shutters, I sought in myself for evidence, and in the room.
But I shall never know. I shall never know if it was a ghost, some sweet spirit from the innermost of the ever-deepening cosmos; or a woman, a very woman, as the silkiness of my limbs seems to attest; or a dream, a hallucination! I shall never know." [208-209]
Only, I think we can know: because when Morier leaves that morning Carlotta says goodbye and whispers: "'At last it was perfect!'" [209] - and I don't think she's referring to their efforts on the dance floor.
The tale finishes with (the miraculous) news revealed in a slightly nudge-nudge, wink-wink manner from Lord Lathkill that Carlotta has given birth to a blonde-haired son (Gabriel); and that Dorothy Hale is also a new mother, to a "'black lamb of a daughter, called Gabrielle'" [210].
As for the Colonel, he became a pig farmer - as well as a father to another man's child. Not that the latter fact seems to bother him, Lord Lathkill assuring Morier that the former is a good sport (i.e., a cheerful cuckold) and that whenever they meet they look one another in the eye with understanding.
Notes
[a] D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry (2 Feb 1923), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 375.
The deceased in question was Katherine Mansfield, Murry's wife, who had died on 9 January 1923, aged 34.
[b] The Dial, vol. lxxxvi (July-August 1926), pp. 1-21 and 123-141. Here, I am referring to the story as published in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 174-210.
[c] See Ben Stoltzfus, 'Lacan's Knot, Freud's Narrative, and the Tangle of "Glad Ghosts"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 32/33 (2003-2004), pp. 102-114. To read on JSTOR, please click here.
For Stoltzfus, the ghosts are "metaphorical knots of dysfunction", not actual presences from beyond the grave, and the tale is best understood in psychoanalytic terms. Lawrence uses poetic language, he argues, to "unveil unconscious states of mind" [105].
For an earlier post on the theme of spectrophilia - written with reference to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - click here.
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