She Was Only a Horse-Dealer's Daughter

Girl on horseback by Israeli artist Taly Levi 

tal-stoobik.com

Sullen-looking and bulldog-faced Mabel Pervin, 27, would have been good-looking were it not for the impassive fixity of her features - which is as backhanded a compliment as you could ever wish to hear. Still, it's not a narrator's job to flatter those of whom he speaks, nor to mislead readers, and even her brother, Fred Henry, describes her as "'The sulkiest bitch that ever trod!'" [141] 

He, along with his sister and two brothers, have been evicted from their home. Which isn't very nice. But that's what happens when you allow things to go to the dogs and nothing remains but huge debts and the threat of repossession.

But whereas the Pervin brothers have decided pretty much what they'll do and where they'll go, Mabel refuses to reveal her intentions. Indeed, when asked to disclose her plans, her face merely darkens and she retreats ever-further into silence like an immutable object. This, understandably, exasperates Fred Henry.

Prior to the reversal of fortunes following the death of their father, the Pervin household had been full of servants and the stables full of horses. Mabel had run things efficiently for ten years and no matter how brutal and coarse the circumstances, she always had the financial means to do so and this had given her confidence:   

"The men might be foul-mouthed, the women in the kitchen might have bad reputations, her brothers might have illegitimate children. But so long as there was money, the girl felt herself established, and brutally proud, reserved." [142]

She had no female friends or company after her sister left: but Mabel didn't mind. All was tolerable until her father died. Only then did the shit hit the fan and she had suffered badly during the prolonged period of poverty, attempting in vain to keep the home together for her useless, lazy brothers.

"Now, for Mabel, the end had come. Still she would not cast about her. She would follow her own way just the same. She would always hold the keys of her own situation. Mindless and persistent, she endured from day to day. Why should she think? Why should she answer anybody? [...] She thought of nobody, not even herself. Mindless and persistent, she seemed in a sort of ecstasy to be coming nearer to her fulfilment, her own glorification, approaching her dead mother [...]" [143] and making a festive return to the actual (i.e., the inanimate world of matter).     

In preparaton for this, she goes to the churchyard in order to attend to her mother's grave:

"Carefully she clipped the grass from the grave, and arranged the pink-white, small chrysanthemums in the tin cross. When this was done, she took an empty jar from a neighbouring grave, brought water, and carefully, most scrupulously sponged the marble headstone and the coping-stone.
      It gave her sincere satisfaction to do this. She felt in immediate contact with the world of her mother. She took minute pain, went through the work in a state bordering on pure happiness, as if in performing this task she came into a subtle, intimate connection with her mother. For the life she followed here in the world was far less real than the world of death she inherited from her mother." [143]

I think that's a rather lovely passage; one with a great truth to it. For some people, death is more real than the epiphenomenal dream of life and they really only come into their own (or blossom into being, as Lawence might say) posthumously. To try to dissuade such persons from suicide as a practice of joy, is not only futile, but cruel. Everything should be done to make their passage into death as smooth and as stylish as possible.

I don't know if the young doctor Jack Fergusson understood this, but he did find Mabel's physical intensity and remoteness fascinating: "Some mystical element was touched in him." [144] For Jack, her boat is less canine and more portentous: "It was portentous, her face. It seemed to mesmerise him. There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being [...]" [144] 

Later that afternoon, as dusk was beginning to fall, Jack sees Mabel walking to the pond nearby her house:

"There she stood on the bank for a moment. She never raised her head. Then she waded slowly into the water.
      He stood motionless as the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the centre of the pond, gradually moving deeper into the motionless water, and still moving forward as the water got up to her breast. Then he could see her no more in the dusk of the dead afternoon." [145]

Instinctively, Jack runs to help; that is, to fish her out, not to gently hold Mabel under and thereby assist with the suicide. Rather bravely, considering he couldn't swim and already had a bad cold, he ventures slowly into the pond: "The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen. The lower part of his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element." [145]

In four simple but beautifully written passages, Lawrence describes the rescue of Mabel Pervin:

"He crouched a little, spreading his hands under the water and moving them round, trying to feel for her. The dead cold pond swayed upon his chest. He moved again, a little deeper, and again, with his hands underneath, he felt all around under the water. And he touched her clothing. But it evaded his fingers. He made a desperate effort to grasp it.
      And so doing he lost his balance and went under, horribly, suffocating in the foul earthy water, struggling madly for a few moments. At last, after what seemed an eternity, he got his footing, rose again into the air and looked around. He gasped, and knew he was in the world. Then he looked at the water. She had risen near him. He grasped her clothing, and drawing her nearer, turned to take his way to land again.
      He went very slowly, carefully, absorbed in the slow progress. He rose higher, climbing out of the pond. The water was now only about his legs; he was thankful, full of relief to be out of the clutches of the pond. He lifted her and staggered on to the bank, out of the horror of wet, grey clay.
      He laid her down on the bank. She was quite unconscious and running with water. He made the water come from her mouth, he worked to restore her. He did not have to work very long before he could feel the breathing begin again in her, she was breathing naturally. He worked a little longer. He could feel her live beneath his hands, she was coming back. He wiped her face, wrapped her in his overcoat, looked round into the dim, dark-grey world, then lifted her and staggered down the bank and across the fields." [146]

Jack carries Mabel home and lays her down on the hearthrug, in front of the fire burning in the grate. She was breathing and semi-conscious, but not yet fully in the world. Fetching some blankets from upstairs, Jack warms them before the fire: "Then he removed her saturated, earthy-smelling clothing, rubbed her dry with a towel, and wrapped her naked in the blankets." [146]

Regaining her senses, Mabel asks the young doctor what she did - and if it signifies she has gone out of her mind. He tells her what happened and reassures her it was but a moment of folly and not a sign of incipient insanity. All the time he is a little afraid of her and the strange power she seems to possess (over him).

It's here that the tale takes a typically queer Lawrentian turn. For when Mabel realises that she is naked beneath the blankets and that he undressed her, she takes this as a sign that he loves her:    

"She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
      'You love me,' she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. 'You love me. I know you love me, I know.'
      And she was passionately kissing his knees, through the wet clothing, passionately and indiscriminately kissing his knees, his legs, as if unaware of everything." [148]

The problem is, Jack isn't sure about this at all:

"He looked down at the tangled wet hair, the wild, bare, animal shoulders. He was amazed, bewildered, and afraid. He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to love her. When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her. Nay, this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honour. It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet - and yet - he had not the power to break away." [148]

In other words, it's all a bit awkward. One begins to think maybe Mabel is a little crazy and one wonders whether some part of him secretly wishes he'd left her to drown ... 

"She looked at him again, with the same supplication of powerful love, and that same transcendent, frightening light of triumph. In view of the delicate flame which seemed to come from her face like a light, he was powerless. And yet he had never intended to love her. He had never intended. And something stubborn in him could not give way." [148-49]

Of course, we all know as readers where this is going and what will happen: that Jack will give way and yield to her love, whatever his intentions and whether this fills him with a certain dread or not.

Almost, one is tempted to imagine that rather than having saved her, she has succeeded in pulling him beneath the water - as Diana Crich succeeded in killing young Dr. Brindell, her arms held choking tight round his neck - and this entire scene is the fantasy of a drowning man: "Her hands were drawing him, drawing him down to her. He was afraid, even a little horrified." [149]

However, as textually there is little reason to think this, let us assume, rather, that Mabel is simply some kind of witch, whose bare arms, small breasts, and soft white feet exert a powerful erotic spell that renders poor Jack as helpless (and as enchanted) as a moth before a candle: "A flame seemed to burn the hand that grasped her soft shoulder [...][149]

Eventually, with an inward groan, he accepts his fate: and her eyes fill with tears of joy (and triumph):

"He could not bear to look at her any more. He dropped on his knees and caught her head with his arm and pressed her face against his throat. She was very still. His heart, which seemed to have broken, was burning with a kind of agony in his breast. And he felt her slow, hot tears wetting his throat." [149]

Paralysed by his own desire, Jack is made to confess his love for her in a soft, low, vibrating voice that didn't seem to belong to him: the terrible intonation of his desire frightening her "almost more than her horror lest he should not want her" [152].  

That, in a nutshell, is the tale of the horse-dealer's daughter and of the young doctor who wanted to save her life. Although he had never intended to love her: "He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind [of his old self and old life] had shrivelled and become void." [150]

So, in a sense, Jack did die after all ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Horse-Dealer's Daughter', England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 137-152. All page references given refer to this edition. The story can also be read online by clicking here, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.  

Note: the other drowning scene to which I refer, involving Diana Crich and a young doctor attempting to save her, is in chapter XIV (Water-Party) of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. 

Musical bonus: Ute Lemper, 'Little Water Song', from the album Punishing Kiss, (Decca Records, 2000), written by Nick Cave and Bruno Pisek. Click here. 

This post is dedicated to meine zwei liebsten deutschen frauen. 

On the Anguished Lyricism of E. M. Cioran

Emil Cioran - crazy hair, crazy guy!

I.

From out of the blue comes a book in the post: a copy of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (1934), kindly sent to me by my friend and sometimes collaborator, the Dublin-based poet Simon Solomon ...

Originally published in his native Romania, this was Cioran's first book in which many of the themes and obsessions of his mature work are already foreshadowed. It might best be described as a series of existential meditations on death, suffering and life's absurdity, in which a young writer openly borrows some of Nietzsche's more theatrical poses and mystical clown's tricks.    

Unfortunately, however, Cioran isn't ever going to be my cup of tea. Even his translator, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, concedes that he's a specialized taste - "too sharp and bitter for many palates and, paradoxically, too lyrical and funny for some others" - though I'm not entirely sure this explains my own aversion. 

After all, I'm perfectly happy with rancorous, darkly comic authors. So perhaps, then, it is the unrestrained lyricism; the fact that there's simply too much blood, sincerity, and fire within the pages for my tastes. If only Cioran had curbed his enthusiasm - and his rhetorical flourishes - I may have found this book easier to read and enjoy.      

Of course, I've no doubt that the self-professed barbarian and passionate young fascist who authored On the Heights of Despair would brand my unlyrical (and perhaps at times even anti-lyrical) call for the exercising of caution cowardly - a sign of my own sclerosis and hollow intellectualism.  

II. 

The vital importance of lyricism to Cioran in the above work is clear from the opening section, in which he roots it in what he terms inner fluidity or spiritual effervescence - the chaotic, unconscious turmoil of the deepest self. Lyricism is thus an outward expression of profound interiority:

"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."

I don't know what that sentence means and it's not one I could ever imagine writing; not even in the throes of death or some other decisively critical experience, "when the turmoil of [my] inner being reaches paroxysm". In fact, such language and such thinking is antithetical to my substantial centre of subjectivity.

Thus, I'll just have to remain a stranger to myself and to reality; a loveless being, trapped in an impersonal bubble of objectivity and "living contentedly at the periphery of things", never knowing the lyrical virtues of suffering and sickness, but vegetating in scandalous insensitivity and sanity.  

For according to Cioran, just as there's no authentic lyricism without illness, nor is there absolute lyricism "without a grain of interior madness". Indeed, the value of the lyrical mode resides precisely in its delirious and savage quality; it knows nothing of aesthetics or cultural refinement and is utterly barbarian in its expression. 

Sounding more like Bataille than Bataille, Cioran concludes his vision of excess with the following:

"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."

As a thanatologist, I agree with this last statement. Only consciousness of death and of the fact that all being is a being toward death, isn't something that I find particularly troubling. In other words, whilst I might share Cioran's nihilism, I don't experience his intense anguish and black drunkenness.

I prefer a practice of joy before death, not a practice of misery (no matter how lyrical) ...

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Michel Foucault's Simplest of Pleasures

 

Portrait by Rinaldo Hopf (2004)

Michel Foucault was always deeply attracted to the idea of suicide as one he could darkly caress and think of primarily as an aesthetic question, rather than as a moral problem. He encouraged everyone to carefully choose and prepare their own death: to arrange the details and shape it into a work of art.

Of course, he appreciated the fact that suicide doesn't always result in a beautiful corpse and there are often discouraging traces left behind. It's obviously not very nice to have to hang yourself in the kitchen and leave a blue tongue sticking out of your mouth; or to jump from your eighth floor apartment and leave tiny bits of brain on the pavement for the local dogs to sniff at. Having said that, much of this unpleasantness could be avoided if we revalued suicide and made it easier and acceptable to kill oneself. 

In an interview entitled The Simplest of Pleasures, Foucault envisions a time and a people to come who have accorded suicide the highest status. Such people will hold suicide festivals and suicide orgies and establish places where those planning on suicide can seek out potential partners.

Indeed, Foucault says if he were to win a fortune in the lottery, he would personally open a suicide hotel where people who wanted to die could go and spend a weekend, enjoying themselves as far as possible before happily checking-out, liberated of every identity.

To think of suicide in this manner - as a question of style and as something not only admirable, but chic and playful - dissolves the depressing interiority that those who would make of life and death a tedious psychodrama insist upon. Death should not be another opportunity to pass judgement; nor should it be turned into a banal biological fact with which to smother the imagination. 

And suicide should not be left to a minority of unhappy souls who frequently make a mess of it and thereby bring the entire concept into disrepute. Each one of us needs to address the issue of how best to make an exit from this life - not waste time asking why it has to happen, or praying there's an afterlife.

Dying Game

We regret to announce the death of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet, which occurred 83 years ago today in Vence, in the South of France.  

  

Mr. Lawrence was a writer who exercised a more potent influence over my youthful imagination than any other and I have continued to find inspiration and interest in his work to this day, even if I tend to use him as a leaving point, rather than as a figure of ultimate authority.

For I realise now that his was not the final word and that one best expresses loyalty to his memory via acts of infidelity and deconstructive criticism. Lawrence challenges his readers in precisely the same manner as Zarathustra challenges his listeners: to lose him, so that they might find themselves. But losing a teacher does not mean forgetting all that they have taught and I will never forget above all the courage that Lawrence showed in the face of suffering and death: 

"One wishes things were different. But there's no help for it. One can only do one's best, and then stay brave. Don't weaken or fret. While we live, we must be game. And when comes the time to die, we'll die game too."   

- Letters, V. 3951

Suicide Note

Photo: Adam Rowney, Suicide Rainbow, 2009

I have always been attracted to the idea of suicide. Not because I feel particularly world-weary, or prone to morbid thoughts, but because the act of suicide seems to me to be one that shows tremendous courage and which, paradoxically, takes away life out of a love of life. That is to say, in choosing to die freely and in a manner of their own devising, the suicidal subject offers a form of vital affirmation.  

I would happily kill myself tomorrow were it not for the fact that a very great deal of time and effort is required to produce an originally stylish suicide and I am, alas, fundamentally lazy. Thus whenever I begin to imagine the meticulous preparation that is required - arranging all the details, finding all the right ingredients, shaping the entire enterprise into a true practice of joy - then too do I think: 'Well, maybe the day after tomorrow ...'

And I remember also the following verse by Dorothy Parker:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.