Backlisted - The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

In our first podcast of 2019 we tackle D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, a novel that has divided opinion since it was first published (and banned) in 1915 - and sure enough opinion was divided between John and Andy on this one. To discuss the book they are joined by writer and critic Catherine Taylor and Unbound editor-at-large Rachael Kerr. Also on this episode Backlisted listeners' favourite 'old' books of 2018.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)19'23 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. It's 2019. It's 2019.

It's 2019. Which is it? I think we said 2019. It's 2019. It's 2019. Which is it? I think we say 2019. It sounds cooler. We had a couple of bits of good news over the break, did we not? We had the news that we're all our podcasts now on Spotify, which is the second biggest after iTunes place now where people get there. It's where the young people get their podcasts.

I'm reliably informed. When the younger people are looking for something about Anthony Pohl, it's to Spotify. It's to Spotify, they turn up. OK, good. The second bit of good news is that the Anthony Pohl episode has been the most successful one we've done, and we think that that might be connected to Spotify.

We don't know, but I'm absolutely delighted. I really enjoyed it on the night, that episode, but also the thought that it's going out there around the world and it's being streamed on the same platform as Kanye West and Taylor Swift. Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran. It's very pleasing. So did you get any nice books for Christmas?

No, I didn't. I got some nice books for Christmas. I got all my Elizabeth Taylors and I got Proust. And have you read any Elizabeth Taylor? Love it, of course. It's like a sharp kind of glass of vodka after the foaming ale of Lawrence, I have to say. Whoa.

And you started reading In Search of Lost Time. Which translation have you read? I mean, I've only read a little bit, but I was expecting it to start with somebody dunking a biscuit, and it doesn't. A rich tea in a cup. That's what Lawrence would do. Did it... Which translation have you got?

Scott Moncrief, Kilmartin. It's the one that Vintage do. I've already put the screw on John by saying to him, if you get through it, then that's our Christmas episode for 2019. What a thought! An hour of light-hearted chat about In Search of Lost Time. But it would be great to do it.

Maybe we should get Alain de Botton. Certainly ambitious. Catherine, did you get any nice books for Christmas? I actually don't tend to receive books for Christmas. I think perhaps my family and friends think I already have too many books. Of course, you can never have too many books, but I did receive one book. Henry Green's last novel, Doting, published in 1952.

Have you done Henry Green on Backlisted? We've tried. You've tried, I see. We have an empty chair like tiny tims doting is probably not his best name i think his best known is the books that are packaged together as a trilogy living loving and party going but doting interestingly he died about 20 years after it was published and he never he never wrote another novel it's about a middle-aged woman and a younger woman

who sort of run rings around this civil servant who's married to the old woman. I haven't started it yet, but I do love his experimental writing. I think he wrote once about writing that it was... The act of writing was a direct intimacy between the writer and the stranger, and I think that's quite a lovely phrase. It was a very nice addition. It was a great intimacy between the writer and a stranger and I think that's quite a lovely phrase. It was a very nice addition. It was a great nature of the poll as well. And even more. So they're all part of that Eton, Oxford cabal.

Rachel did you get any nice books for Christmas? I got bought a copy of Melmoth by Sarah Perry which I've been dying to read and which I have not yet started because I've been busy with re-reading Lawrence. I read a book at Christmas which I absolutely loved, which is Watling Street by John Higgs. It's a book I've been meaning to read. I've read that book and I've interviewed John about it. Tell us about it. Watling Street is the road that runs from Dover to Anglesey,

one of the five ancient pathways of prehistoric Britain. And he does what could be a run-of-the-mill psychogeographic journey, but it's much more interesting that. It's a sort of reflection on Brexit, on Britain, on divided Britain, on the future, on the nature of what he calls, Teilhard de Chardin's brilliant term, the noosphere, which is the kind of symbolic... I mean, you know, there's the biosphere

where animals and plants live, and then there's the noosphere, which is the place of ideas, which is where human culture lives. And he talks about the noosphere of Albion, the old name for the islands of Britain. There's a fantastic bit, and I was telling the boys last night, where he goes to interview Alan Moore in his house in Northampton,

and there's a picture of Alan Moore with his kind of snakeshead stick pointing at an empty bit of ground next to the superior car garage. It's like, this is the absolute centre of it. It's a really good book. I devoured it. I have to say, I haven't read a book of that kind that I've enjoyed so much for a long time I got three books which I I think map the territory of my psyche and personality absolutely perfectly they are paintings in Proust by Eric Carpley's which goes through in search of lost time in the order in which these paintings appear

talks about each painting or painter that's mentioned by proust and reproduces the painting right and so you can either dip into it's quite interesting to dip into but if you read through it after you've read in search of lost time from cover to cover it's like a sort of brilliant whistle stop tour through this 3,000 page book I really loved reading it was the perfect way to see out the end of that year of reading it right so I'm saying to you John you know don't buy it this year because maybe I'll get a few for Christmas excellent this year at the end of the year the second of my three books was the Beastie Boys book, which is fantastic. As a pop book, hip hop book, I'm sure they put it together. Whoever helped them do it has really got the feel of Grand Royal Magazine in the 90s, which is the magazine that they published.

It is really funny. It's full of loads of good photos. It's great. And also it's got an incredibly moving ending they've done a thing for their deceased colleague which is just beautiful and really brings a tear to the eye so that's really great and then my third book was the folio edition of robert burton's anatomy melancholy So actually I was the publisher of that particular edition. Oh my God. I now have to confess. Very fantastic.

And that is a coincidence, that's a total coincidence. Funny enough that is on my TBR list for this year because I have a feeling that we might be able to squeeze an actual episode. Well you could probably ask Philip Pullman to come in because I commissioned the introduction from him. That was one of my cunning plans. So it's mentioned, it's a big part of the Dance of the Music of Time. Yeah.

And because I finished the Dance of the Music of Time, because I finished Insertion of the Lost Time, I wanted a substantial reading project for the year. Anatomy of Melancholy is a big old piece. It's a big unit. It's three volumes. And it is out of print. So sourcing it proved challenging for the person concerned but they did it I'm really pleased you got it

maybe next I could suggest Hobbes' Leviathan if you want a big project to read in 2021 if you haven't got anything else coming up so I suppose we ought to get on with the actual this is just the warm up Nick this is just the warm up shall we start?

Oh, sorry, Nicky. Thank you. I've got seven books. I asked for books. You have to guess. I've got probably the book that I think most people got this Christmas. Normal people.

Apart from that. She's already read Normal People. Michelle Obama. Yes. Was that the best-selling book? I think it was. I've read it. It's very enlightening, actually.

Was it? Yeah, very good. So thumbs up for that. Thumbs up for Michelle Obama. Also thumbs up for the Lily Allen. Now, I hear that's really great, the Lily Allen book. It's no shame. Yeah, it's good.

And it's also interesting because it's about, she's positioning herself as a narcissist, but interestingly enough, as a pop star who does things that male pop stars are acceptable, but for females it's considered not acceptable. So that's why I say interesting. She's very interesting. Very interesting.

Do you think your year of producing Backlisted has resulted in an upswing in the quantity of books that you've got. I mean, by about 600%. One person at a time, Andy. Shall we start? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you join us as we stand on a hill looking down on the rich, marshy grasslands of the Midlands, a church

tower illuminated by moonlight the wind at our backs the dome of stars shining down on us the call of a lone owl quickening our blood god almighty i'm john mitchinson the publisher of unbound the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read i'm andy miller author of the year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are two returning guests, Rachel Kerr, publisher and editor, former publicity director of Jonathan Cape, marketing director of Picador,

and Harville, now editor-at-large for Unbound, who joined us for the Charles Sprawson episode on Haunts of the Black Masseur. And full disclosure alert, she is married to the man, John Mitchinson. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. Okay, good, good. Okay. And we're also joined by Catherine Taylor.

Oh, hello. Hello, Catherine Taylor. Catherine Taylor is a writer and critic who contributes regularly to the FT, The Guardian, The Economist, the TLS, The New Statesman and The Irish Times, and is a judge for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize and commercial director for the brilliant Brixton Review of Books. And Catherine is a returning guest. She last joined us to talk eloquently about Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift, which was for some time our most popular episode and is still one of our most popular episodes. which was for some time our most popular episode and is still one of our most popular episodes. The book that Rachel and Catherine are here to talk about

is The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, first published by Methuen in 1915, which with its sequel, Women in Love, is widely considered to be Lawrence's crowning achievement as a writer. I'm just going to say, John and I had a very nice, appropriately enough, Mexican meal before Christmas where we talked about what books we might do in the year ahead

and guests that we might ask. And John has wanted to do Lawrence and I think The Rainbow ever since we started doing Backlisted. So I was very up for that and I was thinking, you know what, this will be great fun, great, great. You know, I come to Lawrence as a relative newcomer, but it'll be good, it'll be good. It's a challenge by my prejudices and then we had a lovely lovely meal and we're walking back to the tube and John went in a bid to sell it to me he said the thing about the rainbow Andy is it's the

one of DH Lawrence's books where he's channeling Thomas Hardy and at which point I knew I was in trouble a novelist I'm not sure about channels a novelist I really struggle with. But we'll come on to that soon. We will come on to it. I mean, it's also one of the reasons for doing it. It's not an obvious choice, obviously. There are many more obscure books than The Rainbow. It's one of the classic English novels.

But it was a book that I'd read a long time ago and hadn't reread, and it had been one of my favourites. And I just felt that Andy and I had glanced around it there are so many over so many so many previous podcasts that it would be a good moment to dust off the old copy and see whether it stood up to scrutiny which we will find out with the help of our guests in a moment. Before we get on to that we asked people earlier in the week to tell us about the best the best old book or batlist book that they read in 2018 and we got like dozens and dozens of responses to this i wish i could read it we can't return all your paintings sadly but we can read out a few of these

tweets so i'm going to read out a few of these and see what the panel be kind everybody makes these suggestions of books but also if you're listening at home and you have a pen and a piece of paper to hand it's probably worth jotting some of these down I certainly want to read some of these based on the enthusiasm with which they've been recommended by listeners so here we go John the first one that I've highlighted here is Matthew Adams hello Matthew Matthew suggested we read The Journal of a Disappointed Man by WNP Barbellion. I mean, it's your pinned tweet, isn't it?

A quote from that book. It has been for some time, yes. And in fact, I think it was mentioned on the very first episode of Batlist. I think it was mentioned in the jail. In addition to Matthew, if you're out there and you have a deep abiding love of The Journal of a Disappointed Man,

contact me. Contact me. I'm saying you might get lucky this year right so here we go linda recommends living alone by stella benson written in 1917 the war as magic realism completely delightful and melancholy wow i've just never heard of that it's amazing you know one of the things i found about these when people sent them in is how few of them I had heard of. And that's brilliant. I mean, I totally agree. It was a real revelation, actually, the list. I mean, I've jotted loads down.

You've got one there. I have got one here. It wasn't exactly from that tweet, but I was struck by Neil Mudd's trope. Hello, Neil. Disastrous lifestyle choices, check. Gifted but obscure writer, check. Dead, check. Annika Vann sounds like a prime candidate for the Batista pod treatment.

Well, the truth is we've nearly done Anna Kavan at least a couple of times. There's a new anthology in the offing. Claudia Watkins recommends Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel by William Trevor, which she says is beautifully written and intriguing, atmospheric, sad and funny and amazing. Jill Hopper at Jill Hopper One says The Contiki Expedition by Tor Heyerdahl, an adventure that made my hair stand on end. Sharks and Ships. Nicky's read it. And? Yeah, it's good. Very, yeah, very, very adventurous. What I remember about that book is that book was on my parents' bookshelves and the bookshelves

of all my parents' friends when I was growing up. And my parents' bookshelves and the bookshelves of all my parents friends when I was growing up do you remember it I went to see the there was a film of the yeah I remember taking my brother to the cinema to see the film of that David Millington who is at Green Corrie suggested a book I love which I'd forgotten about Mythago Wood by Robert Holstock I've never heard of it a couple of people unfamiliar with my work have suggested books by Somerset Maugham. And I just have to break it to you, it's never going to happen. Start your own podcast to do Somerset Maugham

because it ain't happening on Backlisted. Here's a good one. Gone With The Wind says, Jackie, read this lying by the pool in coss but being transported to the deep south during the american civil war probably the biggest read of my life at 998 pages but an ideal holiday read and a great page turner i have read it and you know i think it's interesting it's one of those books that so many people probably haven't read because they just associate it with the film and it's a brilliant book okay book. Okay. Here's P. Lowe, which is P-Lowe, who recommends a book which I do love,

Narrowboat by LTC Rolt. He says, recommended for shepherd fanciers like John. It's very much in the tone of whichever book he recommended that mentions selling goldfinches in the paper bags in a good way. Wonderful recommendation. That's the best. We've got Joel Pinkney here. He recommends

The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwartz-Bart, originally published in 1972 and reissued by NYRB Classics. An astonishingly well-told story of several generations of women on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Much about the legacies of slavery.

Gorgeous, heart-rending book. That sounds great. That sounds good. There's so many of these. The novelist Claire Fuller, she got in touch. She Said the Wall by Marlon Haushofer. Yeah. Translated from the German by our friend Sean Whiteside,

our listener Sean Whiteside. First published in 1968, a woman finds herselfuck in the Alps Behind an Invisible Wall, brilliant book and made into a fine film too. Jonathan Gibbs, our former guest, the novelist Jonathan Gibbs says The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch is my favourite old book of the year

old, well it's a year younger than me so go figure, it brilliantly showcases her ability to mix high and low, serious and ludicrous in the same book and Catherine Taylor, at Catchy Taylor, replied to Jonathan saying, hooray. That's because I wrote an essay on The Black Prince for the second issue of the Brixton Review of Books last year.

Did you? Oh, we can get you back in again. No, just don't. Tony Cross at Lockster 71, Bid Me to Live by H.D., the story of Wilbur Marks. Oh, can we do that, please? I love that book. And her. She'll make a good double bill with Richard Aldington's

Death of a Hero, which, rather, you know, Aldington was a great mate of D.H. Lawrence. James Durser, at James Durser, Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell, 1959. Something that might conceivably be grouped with that run of books you've had with sharply observed female protagonists using what agency they have in suffocating patriarchy, sweet

and tragic, with a crafty structure. Anna Maria Tuckett says, I read two novels by Dorothy Whipple, The Priory and They Were Sisters, and enjoyed them very much. I was rather crushed to hear Carmen Khalil's low opinion of Whipple on the Elizabeth Jenkins episode. I'm afraid I share Carmen Khalil's low opinion of Whipple on the Elizabeth Jenkins episode. I'm afraid I share

Carmen Khalil's low opinion. I'm doing two more and then we'll move on to the main event. Professor Laura Vaughan, I'd nominate The L-Shaped Room. Thank you, Professor Laura Vaughan. I absolutely would love to do that book on here by Lynn Reid

Banks, which I reread last year for the umpteenth time. Its depiction of unmarried pregnancy at a time well within living memory is astonishing, as is the characterful description of bedsit land in Fulham. You're singing my song, Professor Laura Vaughan. It's terrific, and it's the first of a trilogy. And finally, Caroline Raphael, our friend Caroline Raphael, says, the humbler creation.

I'm seeing if anybody knows who that's by Pamela Hansford Johnson taught crisp and agonising story of a marriage against late 1950s London backdrop these look terrific as well Pamela Hansford Johnson's novels aren't they being reissued

at the moment I believe they might be I think they might be yes I believe that's right. Anyway, listen, thanks very much everybody. What we might try and do is put that full list up on our Facebook page and website. We will excavate it and put it up as a document on the website.

So thank you so much for all your recommendations and also, apart from the two people who nominated Somerset Maugham, thank you for your... Thank you for your nominations. Nicky's got her head in her hands now. Don't be mean to the listeners, Andy. I just, I don't like Somerset Maugham,

which happens to dovetail with the author we've gathered here to talk about. Indeed, and we're here to talk about Lawrence. Hey, it can't all be book chat. Smoke Chesterfields. I wonder if it would be, I mean, people who haven't read The Rainbow, a little bit of context. It was published in 1915. It was very rapidly impounded.

It was withdrawn from sale as obscene, and it wasn't available again for another 10 years. We had a little chat before we started today, and nobody wants to hear me bang on for an hour about my prejudices against dh lawrence some of which were overturned by reading the book i have to say yeah what i think is interesting is that lawrence is an author who has always polarized readers for 100 years basically and continues to do so now and for different reasons it's such a strong

flavor such a strong personality coming through the writing and so our panel here is made up of sort of all points of the compass I think of how people have felt about Lawrence at various points or feel about Lawrence now. Rachel can you remember the first time you read Lawrence or The Rainbow? I first read The Rainbow when I was an undergraduate. And I loved it so much and I loved his work so much that when I went on to do postgraduate study, I had to write a dissertation, a 10,000 word dissertation. And so you had to choose a subject for that. And I was desperate to do D. do DH Lawrence because I wanted to read everything

I wanted to read all the supporting you know all his letters and everything I wanted to know more about him and I went to my tutor the very estimable and wonderful Judith Chernick at Queen Mary College Mile End and the sense of palpable distress when I suggested that I was going to do Lawrence the sort of dismal sort of oh oh, God, do you have to? I said, yeah, I'm really sorry, but I really, really do want to do. And she said, oh, come on, you better focus on a novel. Which novel are you going to focus on? And I went, I'm really sorry, but it's going to be Lady Chatterley's Lover,

at which point she looked even more distressed. And over the course of the next two years, I probably caused her more upset than anything else. But we came to an agreement that in the end, you know, that I had helped her enjoy it more and she had helped me temper my rather passionate feelings about D.H. Lawrence into something a little more critically cool. And it was a fantastic experience for me.

And the only reason I could do that was that at the time there were there were three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover in print with Penguin I don't know if they are still in print in the same but though because the way well we can talk about this later but the way Lawrence wrote was that he would write a whole manuscript and then he would go I hate that and start again not to go back and edit in any way so it was obviously very good training for me as a future editor of books myself. I was looking at his

writing methods as much as anything else, which of course ends up with you comparing and contrasting three different versions of Connie's orgasm and the terrible dark secret moments. I don't want to do that. Catherine, when did you first read The Rainbow? I think I was about just before I went to

university. so I must have been 16 or 17. My mother was a huge Lawrence fan and I hate to mention Thomas Hardy sorry Andy also a huge fan of Thomas Hardy and I do see this book as you know he's aping Hardy to some extent as part of that English rural tradition writing and I did love The Rainbow I'd really not got on with Lawrence. I hated Sons and Lovers. I think I might have been forced to read it at school. I don't like Sons and Lovers either. And I found it extraordinarily turgid

and with all those sexist tropes that have been levelled at Lawrence. But I think what's interesting about The Rainbow, which I revisited last year because I wrote an essay on it for a book called Literary Landscapes, was that I'd forgotten that it was set so near to where I grew up. So it's in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire border, the Earwash Valley. It's a book that runs from about the 1840s to 1905. So it's sort of pre-industrialisation, but it also, it really focuses on Lawrence's attitude towards mass industrialisation. And also he puts aspects of himself in the book.

I would say that the last part of the book, which focuses on Ursula Brangwen, who is the third generation of the Brangwen family, the farming family that are being focused on in this book. And I think one of the reasons it was banned, because obviously there's frank sex, there's sex between women, etc., there's unmarried sex.

It was Anna dancing naked in front of the mirror that was seen when it was up in the Bow Street Magistrates' Court. That was one of the pieces that was read out. Pregnant and dancing. Pregnant and dancing, how dare she? In her own bedroom, by herself. I think it's a book about Lawrence's own coming of age in a way that Sons and Lovers is,

but he puts himself, I think, into the character of Ursula and perhaps couldn't write about some of the things that she experienced as a man writing about some of his own inclinations, perhaps. So when I revisited it, I found it was marvellous. I just thought some of the episodes he's writing about the natural world, about the passion and tenderness between, particularly between Anna and her husband, their wedding, the few days that they are closeted together. And also about the battle between, in this case, men and women in relationships was something that I didn't actually find sexist. I just find it very honest. And yeah, he does go off into these.

The purple prose of his, let's just say, sort of shamanistic beliefs. I would like to ask John, actually. I don't actually get to ask John this, but because it's this book, where were you when you first read The Rainbow? Okay, so I was in Auckland in New Zealand, and I'd read Women in Love, and I'd not gone on with it. I'd just finished school, you know, precocious, read Ulysses at school, thought I wanted to be, you know,

a writer like Joyce because he was brilliant. Very embarrassing. And then read Lawrence and I thought, this is terrible. This bloke can't write, he's maundering on endlessly. And then something happened. The penny dropped at some point. I watched the Ken Russell film, which is mad, of Women in Love. I mean, it's iconic, but mad. We'll come on to it. Keep going.

I just, then I discovered some of these short stories, England by England, and then I discovered the poetry. And then I had a kind of revelation about Lawrence. I felt it's like taking George Eliot and Hardy and Dickens and putting all the kind of, particularly those novels, even a bit of Jane Austen, and then suddenly just letting it explode. I felt a release. So I read The Rainbow and I completely fell in love with it. And the thing that we all don't like about Lawrence is the hectoring, being shouted at loudly and poked repeatedly in the chest by a man who's got kind of very, very strong ideas about sexuality,

about religion. He may have issues, yes. And basically I think all his novels are this, aren't they? They're kind of what he calls the metaphysic, the ideas that animate them. The key one in The Rainbow in Women in Love is the idea of, you know, man, woman, there needs to be a trinity, a mechanical modern world as opposed to the natural world.

a mechanical modern world as opposed to the natural world the novel is some kind of way of combining ideas about the world with character when he says that philosophy religion and science are all of them busy nailing things down to get a stable equilibrium religion with its nailed down one god who says thou shalt thou shalt and hammers home every time philosophy with its fixed ideas science with its laws they all of them all the time want to nail us onto some tree or other but the novel no the novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has yet discovered everything is true in its own time place circumstance and untrue out of its own place time circumstance if you try to nail anything down in the novel it either kills the novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail which is

and that's also that's great lawrence is a i think he's a brilliant critic what you get in the sense of the rainbow it's like the marriages go wrong before they go right relentless endless sort of pattern of things going wrong and people not understanding one another. At one moment, everything seems to be going well, and then suddenly, you know... Was it your favourite novel, though? It was for a long time.

Well, I used to say it was in the way that I used to say that Shake Some Action was my favourite song. Flaming Groovies? Yeah. I mean, it's still a great song. I still think The Rainbow is a great novel. So what we're going to do now is we're going to raise a glass to D.H. Lawrence. I feel like we're welcoming him in, right?

And we've got a clip here. We've got someone who's going to lead the toast for us. There's a prize if you can tell me who this is. Here's the first of the day, fellas. To old D.H. Lawrence. Gah! Nick, Nick, Nick. D.H. Lawrence. Indians. Name it.

Name that film. Name that film. It's Jack Nicholson. It is Jack Nicholson. Five of his easy pieces? Oh, he's so close, but he's not right. It's in Easy Rider. Ah, Easy Rider, of course it is, of course it is.

In a funny kind of way, the difficulty in Lawrence is sort of the point. I think anyone who is interested in fiction, there is stuff to be gained from the rainbow. But if you're a pointer least, if you like beautiful, accurate, delicate, psychologically kind of turn sense, then this is not the book for you and it never will be are you looking at me while you say that yes andy come on i think you need to say something all right i'll start very quickly no i'm gonna

what i'm gonna say is i don't want to say why i don't like dh drugs because i think when i was working on my last book it really changed how I read and one of the things that really changed for me is I'm reluctant to get hung up on whether I enjoy a book or not right because I think we can't enjoy everything and actually enjoyment is an overrated element it's not to be discounted it's important but when it comes down to it there are just some writers whose prose you can't work with because of your particular makeup right and I had not read Lawrence properly until last year I read Sons and Lovers and I thought okay this is okay but I'm having to kind of muscle past the gag reflex in order to get this down, right?

This is not my taste. And going into the rainbow, it was sort of horrible for me because I was thinking, I'm just not enjoying this. This is too earnest and too purple. So however I might appreciate it in principle, with my knowledge of the history of the English novel, with my reading of Jeff Dyer to help me identify what's good and what isn't so good when it comes down to it and this is a sophisticated i'm gonna get i just don't like it i can educate myself to try and appreciate it and that's what i should do that's what i should do i don't have any time i don't think there's

any shit about it to be honest but you can't otherwise you get trapped don't think there's any should about it, to be honest, Andy. But you can't... Otherwise you get trapped, don't you? You get trapped in a kind of thinking, oh, I like this, I don't like that. That's fine, but... But you've given it a good go, Andy. I have tried. You've given it a good go. I've watched Women in Love.

We can talk about Women in Love as well, which I went into, Catherine, thinking, I like Ken Russell. Ken Russell's film about Debussy with Oliver Reed is one of my favourite things. And yet it seemed like the absolute hellish coming together of... I just thought, oh! The problem with Women in Love is that it sort of becomes a parody of the book.

And I would argue that book, I think, John, you had a reaction to Women in Love when you read it, you read it before The Rainbow, as I did. It sort of spoils it. And I think so many people don't tend to read Lawrence so they don't read the books they see a film like that I think that's very true because I I think I I think I'd already seen the film of Women in Love when I when I first read the rainbow and I read the rainbow first and I was really that's part of why I loved it so much because

it was nothing like that film who can forget Glenda Jackson as Gudrun? I know. I mean, you know, beautiful to look at, but sort of horrible in every way. You know, I hadn't really enjoyed Sons and Lovers either. I'd found that really tricky. I would call that earnestness. Yeah. But somehow just the sheer kind of beauty, if you just let the language kind of wash over you. And the structure. And the structure and everything. It's all very beautiful. And what I love most about The Rainbow, what really got me at the time, and still actually, you know, 30-odd years later,

I'm reading it again, and what really makes it sort of sing for me is the attempt, sometimes successful and sometimes not so, to give inarticulate people voice and understanding of their own feelings, which I think is a wonderful thing to be trying to do. And I love the men are warm and attached to the soil and the blood in the teats of the cows.

It's the women who are looking... For those who can't see it, Rachel is actually milking something here. But I love all that. I love the fact that the women are outward looking and that is not yet. I mean, he gets later in his writing career, the opposition between men and women gets much more. Women are sharp and outward looking and difficult and men are sort of destroyed by it.

Whereas at this point, they're in a balance. I think what I took from rereading it was that it seemed to me as radical as it must have seemed when it was published and then, you know, almost immediately revoked, as it were, in 1915. And to sort of put it in context, that same year Virginia Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, and around that time, Dorothy Richardson was publishing her extraordinary sequence of novels, which became Pilgrimage.

And also it was published in the middle, well, the beginning, sorry, of the First World War. He was a conscientious objector. Harried out of the country. Harried out of the country. And also you mentioned, obviously, Jeff Dyer's book, Out of Sheer Rage, about Lawrence. He's had such an influence on so many different kinds of writers.

Helen Dunmore's novel Zen or in Darkness, which is about D.H. Lawrence and his German wife, who was also a divorcee. They're living in Cornwall during the First World War and how they were targeted as spies by the establishment. Her cousin was the Red Baron. Yeah. Richthofen. Richthofen. I'm just going to read the blurb on the back of your edition, Catherine, Her cousin was the Red Baron. Yeah. Did you know that? Rick Toven.

Rick Toven? I'm just going to read the blurb on the back of your edition, Catherine, of this. This is how Penguin sold you the rainbow. In about the 70s, I think. Yeah. This is my family edition. Yeah, yeah. His classic story of a family of Midland farmers.

It's terrific, isn't it? It's like the comic strip presents the ream. Yeah, and the tides of passion and conflict within them. A vigorous and strong-willed breed, the Brangwens have been established for generations as a yeoman family on the borders of Nottinghamshire, among the coal mines. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow,

he discovers that love must struggle to come to terms with the other forces that go to make up a human personality. To which you think, eh? That's not really adequate. Sorry, whoever wrote that then. But, you know, so I was looking around for positives to accentuate in my experience. And so I found a couple that I wanted to share with you. The first is that I found this brilliant documentary about Lawrence that was made in the mid-'80s, a South Bank show that was made. They commissioned Anthony Burgess to make a film about Lawrence.

Oh, my Lord, did they? And we've got a clip from that here. There's a thing in here where I found I thought I could really... This Lawrence I could really get with. When he published his first books, the Bloomsbury intellectuals like E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell and Lady

Ossoline Morell patronised him. He responded by satirising them in his books. Lady Ossoline Morell especially, an aristocratic lady, passionate, possessive, with no talent at all except for self-exhibition. Lawrence was a provincial man, a man of the working classes.

In a sense, he's the patron saint of all writers who never had an Oxford or Cambridge education, who are somewhat despised by those who have. Now I can support that. Andy, that is actually a huge part of my love for him, is exactly that. The fact that he was so patronised, the fact that he's pretty much been a figure of fun to so many people

because he was patronised right from the start. He's like the full Monty version of literature. I mean, even John's mother, who's a very wonderful reader, she just refers to him as Dirty Harry. Oh, I can't get on with him, Pet, so there's Dirty Harry. He didn't care. He just made up the rules. I mean, he wrote 36 books. He died at 44. He was unbelievably productive.

Jeff Dyer says a brilliant thing. It's a very good book out of sheer rage. One of the things that he does brilliantly is he says, you know what, I don't even really like D.S. Lawrence's novels very much. The essence of Lawrence is in the poetry and the journals and the person. It's this immense aliveness, isn't it?

I mean, his book studies in classic American literature. Everybody who's ever written it, I mean, it's a brilliant book of criticism, but it's also got to be the funniest book of criticism. And people think he had no sense of humour. Lawrence had a brilliant sense of criticism, but it's also got to be the funniest book of criticism. And people think he had no sense of humour. Lawrence had a brilliant sense of humour. He wasn't able to laugh at himself, which is a problem.

I feel a lot of novelists have that problem. He could laugh at other people really, really well. This is about Walt Whitman. I am he that aches with amorous love. Well, what do you make of that? I am he that aches. First general love. Well, what do you make of that? I am he that aches. First generalisation. First uncomfortable generalisation.

With amorous love, oh, God, better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ache of amorous love, think of having that under your skin. All that. I am he that aches with amorous love. Walter, leave off. You are, you are, this is written in, you know, the 20s. You are not he, you are just a limited Walter, and your ache doesn't include all amorous love by any means.

If you ache, you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more stays outside the cover of your ache that you might be a bit milder about it. I am he that aches with amorous love. Chuff, chuff, chuff. Choo, choo, choo, choo, chuff. Reminds one of a steam engine, a locomotive. They're the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love.

All that steam inside them. 40 million foot pounds pressure. The ache of amorous love. Steam pressure. Chuff. You know what? I'll tell you what I find fascinating about Lawrence. Based on my reading of The Rainbow and the things that you were reading there,

my favourite chapter in The Rainbow is the teaching chapter. Oh, it's brilliant, yeah. Just as a bit of observation. First of all, that's as a standalone piece of observation, that really works. But then actually I really respect him as a writer for almost saying to the reader, I could do it like this. I could do it in this social realist way, but I don't want to. I want to do something different. He totally didn't want to do that.

And that's what I love so much about it. One of the things I was looking at my old notes, one of the things that I love that he once said in a letter to J.B. Pinker, he said, tell Arnold Bennett in a letter to J.B. Pinker, he said, tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels, which are copies of other novels. A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction. And that's exactly what he does. It's what he does with this in a way that I think this is sort of the best expression of exactly that ideal to actually try and do that,

to construct a book entirely from people's inner thoughts and feelings, which are not even available to the people themselves. It's an extraordinary act of authorial bravura and ambition and confidence to be able to express the thoughts of somebody who can't articulate those thoughts even to themselves. Can we talk slightly a bit as well? It's an anecdote, but it's quite an interesting anecdote to me. When I was a publisher at the Velio Society, we published a centenary edition of Sons and Lovers in 1913, and Colm Toybeam wrote the introduction. Colm then went on to give one

of those masterclasses that they have at Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sons and Lovers. What was fascinating was that there were quite a few elderly people in the audience who had known the Lawrence family and were complaining about you know the people that he put in the book

and this a hundred years on. What's the name of the rich family in the rainbow? He didn't even change the name. And they are to this day reputedly will not discuss Lawrence. So Colm, who obviously himself writes about where he grew up in a school in Wexford in Rubberig, Ireland, had to completely stress this was fiction.

But for them, it wasn't. And I think, again, that's lawrence the rebel it's interesting him as a novel of a rural life he writes brilliantly about animals there's a wonderful scene where tom brangwen the older takes anna his uh his stepdaughter um out when she's her mother the mother's having uh childbirth quoted in the session and he goes out into the cow shed and it's the sort of breathing of the cows and the rhythm of the feeding of the cows and routine which calms

the child's crying down. But it's all amped up to such a level. I mean Andy's saying about whether you can get on with the prose or not. Having really finished it you feel like you've been in a tumble dryerdryer.

You think, he must have been the most exhausting man to live with. But, of course, he had TB and he died young, and I think that sort of accounts for the prolific nature of... So this is a clip of Aldous Huxley talking about D.H. Lawrence. Huxley knew Lawrence very well in the last... I mean, he knew him for much of his life, but he knew him very well in the last five years of his life. And this is a reminiscence of what Lawrence was like,

you know, the force of energy that Lawrence represented. I mean, he was very charming, generally. I mean, he would sometimes sort of get cross, but he could be very amusing and entertaining. And he was happy. I mean, he was happy sort of sitting on a stone. I mean, very like, remember that poem of Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply,

sitting on an old grey stone, as he says. And, of course, a lot of his life was spent in this way. And then he would get an urge to write and then write for 18 hours a day. I mean it was very extraordinary to see him at work. It was a sort of possession. He would rush on with his hand moving at tremendous rate and never correct anything because if he was dissatisfied he would start again from the beginning. His capacity for perception is, I mean, it was a great pleasure and instruction, really, to go for a walk with Lawrence.

I mean, the sort of way he perceived the world was so intense and exciting. I don't think Aldous Huxley... Wow, too many mind-expanding jokes there, Aldous. I don't think Aldous Huxley got the Beastie Boys book for Christmas, did he? Let's be honest. Can I just read a great bit of the Jeff Dyer book? Because this leads straight on from that.

He says, what is surprising to find that the parts of the correspondence of a great writer I most like are those which would be edited out if any kind of selection were made, i.e. those having nothing to do with his genius and everything to do with his ordinariness and the ordinariness he claimed to loathe.

The fact that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover means next to nothing to me. What matters is that he paid his way, settled his debts, made nice jam and marmalade and put up shelves. My God, he's Jeremy Corbyn. But I don't want to talk in stereotypes here, but it's also the mark of an autodidact, surely, the fact that he consumed so much

and that he had this extraordinarily work ethic he just hadn't followed the work ethic of generations before him he poured it all into being a writer so true and creative he was so i mean he i mean i don't often say this but he was so brave really he just didn't care and he he you know he lived in penury for most of his life he he wrote his way He wrote his way out of it. He was vituperative, but in a very funny... I mean, you know, some of the letters, when he's taking the piss out of people, I mean, he's brilliant.

He had a lot to put up with. But there is that sort of sense that... I don't think you can have lawrence without the fiction really but at the same time it doesn't it doesn't really matter if you you know if you want to i think you can appreciate lawrence without having to but by the whole of uh the the grand metaphysical scheme i was i was saying was i was looking for things about lawrence that i could relate to what could i find relatable in the modern medium? And, of course, I got a copy en route, but it didn't arrive in time.

I was hoping to read an extract from a book called D.H. Lawrence, The Croydon Years. Well, I was going to bring that up. You discovered Nietzsche. By Helen Cork. Exactly. It's like TSL in a market, isn't it? He discovered Nietzsche. He, the great British acoly He discovered Nietzsche in Croydon Public Library. He discovered Nietzsche. He, the great British acolyte of Nietzsche,

discovered it in the Croydon Public Library in December 1908 because he was working as a teacher in the Davidson Road School in Croydon from October 1908 to December 1911. That's it. And he also, the long-term listeners will know of my evangelical Croydon streak, that he also mentions the Swan and Sugarloaf pub in a story called The Witch a la Mode.

The Swan and Sugarloaf pub is now a Tesco Express. Oh, no. But back in the 80s, it's where my friend Mark Webb had his 18th birthday party. And the DJ refused to play 25 O'Clock by the Dukes of Stratosphere at his own birthday party. I think

that's one of the reasons why I like that section of the Rainbow so much. Actually, the teacher, if he wanted to, and he didn't want to, which I respect. And as you suggest, Rachel, his sheer insolence, actually, of saying, I am going to animate this woman called Ursula.

I am going to flow through this character. The beauty of the story. But had he wanted to, it's like all the great painters. Had they wanted to paint a formal portrait, they could have done that, but they didn't want to. Yeah. They wanted to do something different. It's one of the things, when I was doing my Lady Chatterley research

and all that, there was a point at which he wrote a letter saying, I just want to write this book and fling it in the face of the public. Those were the exact words, I'm going to fling it in the face of the public. And you sort of think at that point, in know, in the mid to late 20s, you know, how he had that much energy left, I don't know. You know, but he did. And he rewrote that book three or four times so that he could get to the point where he felt it was flingable

and explosive enough that it would make a difference. Were the books widely read in his lifetime? No. No, because, well, obviously, quite a few of them were banned. And I actually think it would be interesting to talk about why he has fallen out of fashion now. When I studied English Literature at university, he was absolutely on the syllabus.

We had to read Lawrence. I wrote one of my dissertation essays on a short story, on a novella called The Ladybird, The Fox and the Captain's Doll. And now he's not taught. And he isn't part of, as far as I'm aware, part of the curriculum. I think almost every one of us here would have had to read him at school and I don't think that's the case. I think it's very interesting in the way that we are appreciating

working class writers much more, that Lawrence should be dusted down and brought back to life. He was a pioneer. I asked a friend of mine who works in the department that is responsible for the books that get onto the curriculum about why Lawrence had been so pop yes my friend Michael Gove uh why Lawrence had been so popular when we were young as uh to be taught right and had then fallen out of favor and he said a really interesting thing he said it's because his a really interesting thing. He said it's because, this is his opinion, not fact, he said, I think it's because in the 60s and 70s,

as you suggest, Catherine, Lawrence was seen as the ancestor of working class writers like Alan Silito and David Storey, who were considered important enough that we needed to go back and see where they had come from. Whereas, in fact, once we get into the 80s and that generation recedes, Lawrence is seen as being an anachronism.

And so he has no relevance to the literary scene of today. Not only in style, but all things like that. Two other things. Really important is that F.R. Leavis, the most influential critic of his generation, Raymond Williams, perhaps the second most, are both massive Lawrence fans. So in terms of canon building,

Lawrence is put, in the middle years of the century, Lawrence is put by Leavis because he sees him as a kind of English Freud, you know, thinks he's the great sort of, you know, the novel, the bright book of life. He's the final flowering of the great tradition of the English novel. Raymond Williams, because he saw him as a working class writer, he was engaging with, you know, a kind of trailblazer. But then everything, Sexual Politics byate millis is published in 1970 and i mean you begin to see then that the wheels start to fall off the lawrence bus because he is you know he is very susceptible particularly if you take all his work i mean i

think the novel's less so but he says some pretty terrible things that you know on one route you know the whatever that law is that you end up talking about Hitler, that his ideas, movements in world history, European history, not a great book. I mean, he opens himself up to the worst kind of, on one level, you know, blood and boden kind of fascism and on the other level, feminism. Feminism sees him as a misogynist.

He pops up in The Intellectuals and the Masses, particularly by John Kerry. This is a thing that he wrote to Blanche Jennings in a letter in 1908. A bit mean of me to read this out, but blame Professor Kerry. If I have my way, I will build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly and a cinematograph working brightly.

Then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the helped and the maimed. I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus. On that note, I watched the David Koresh Wacko documentary the other night, which is not entirely dissimilar. But to be fair to Lawrence, he's not being singled out

by Carey in that book. It's to make the point that the intellectual trend in the early years of the 20th century was to exterminating the mass of suburbia, the mass of lower middle class, Forster, HG Wells, etc. Guess who this is? This might surprise you.

I don't know about women in marriage. One thing I do think, if we'd known as many women as we've read books by D.H. Lawrence, we should have a clearer idea of the situation. To get down to the facts of women for oneself, I think it must be necessary to know many women. There is such a jumble of fancies and ideas about them in one's head that to fly to the first one you encounter and only experience that, how can you test what's true and what's most valuable? I do think DHL went deeply into all this. I don't think he ever drew any conclusions,

but they're really dependable. I mean, he never resolved the quarrel between the necessity and beauty of being united with a woman one loves and the necessity of not being entangled or bullied or victimised or patronised or many of the other concomitants of love and marriage. If that's not Philip Larkin, I'll leave my hat. The thing about Larkin, Larkin really interesting with Lawrence. Larkin loved Lawrence's poetry. Larkin thought Lawrence's poetry was some of the greatest poetry of the century.

But he struggled with the novels. Again, this is this fascinating thing. Like Hardy, who I would argue is as great a poet as he is a novelist. I think that, and again, that sort of Florence, I would say exactly the same. You know, you're not exactly reading two different writers there but I think the poetry has stood up in some respects where some of the novels have fallen down.

I'm not thinking about Kangaroo specifically, and that is a testament to his extraordinary productivity and his genius, it seems like. I think you're right about the poetry. I mean, I don't think the novels after Women in Love really stand up to much. I mean, there's always good things in all of them. It strikes me that Lawrence is...

Apart from Chatterley. We don't want to get diverted onto Chatterley, but I would defend that book even. I mean, it's got some absolutely dreadful bits in it, but in terms of being an absolute thing that he wanted to say and do, it is exactly what he wanted to say and do. It's a piece of work that he made with a purpose and he did subject it to this rewriting and making it fresh.

And that's the thing about when you just mentioned Kangaroo and those shorter novels that he sort of bashed out quite quickly and never did that rewriting, rewriting, rewriting on, whereas The Rainbow is something that took him a long time and was, you know, in women in love. It was very important to him that those... It was very important that they became alive in his hands. That was what he was trying to do,

to make the writing come alive. You know what it really reminds me of? This is self-parody, me saying this, but it's true. It really reminds me of that brilliant Neil Young thing where Neil Young's response to people saying, well, I like this record, I didn't like that record, is to go, well, it's all one song. Yeah.

And the thing with Lawrence is, in a sense, you're missing the point. I would be missing the point if I was going, well, I didn't like this novel. It doesn't matter. It's the essence of the thing. It's the flow of ideas. It's the flow of energy. That's absolutely right, Andy. That's a very good way of putting it. Do you think he will come back? I don't know. If nothing else, I just hope that people read the letters. No, I do hope that people read the poetry.

And if you can cope with the prose, as Andy said, then there is so much that's good in the novels. The 500 pages of The Rainbow, there are some unbelievably, I see now, turgid passages. But some of the scenes, like when the father goes and gets the brothers and they do an impromptu kind of carols under the married couple's window on the back lawn and the mad speech he gives at the wedding.

There are some wonderful bits. I just love that you can have this in a 1915 novel. It's a letter that Ursula sends to Skrebensky after he's... At the end of the book, she's basically... It's all about Will, Anna and Skrebensky a bit married. And without giving too much away, it doesn't... Because nothing is ever... Like I say, nothing's ever stable in a Lawrence novel.

There are no... But the letter she sends is lovely. I keep living over again the lovely times we have had but i don't think you liked me quite so much towards the end did you you did not like me when we left paris why didn't you i love you very much i love your body it is so clear and fine and i'm glad you do not go naked or all the women would fall in love with you i am very jealous of it i love it so much it's taken the english novel quite a long time to get anybody who can write about sex that openly and clearly i think that's why it didn't

seem anachronistic to me to reread this book because you you know you said you found yourself caught up in a maelstrom of emotions and you've been through the ringer when you finish reading it but actually how true to life and many relationships that is well i think you've lived you've basically by the end of this you've lived through three three marriages affairs kind of it's and you are exhausted it's sort of he nods he nods soulfully hey quickly before we finish i just want to go around the table and ask, do you have a favourite word that D.H. Lawrence uses repeatedly? I do, yes. Okay, so I do. I wonder if it's the same one.

Okay, no, Catherine, you go first. What's yours? Loins. I'm not saying it's a favourite, but it's the one that springs to mind immediately when I think of D.H. Lawrence. Suave loins of darkness. Inchoate. Oh, yes, he likes Inchoate. Yes, that's true. Yes, all right.

I love his... There's two, right? So, first of all, fecund. Yeah, he loves fecund. He's an embarrassingly fecund writer, that's for sure. Yeah, that's right. And maximum.

He's got this weird thing with maximum. When he uses it as the maximum amount, he'll say, like like Sunday was the maximum day. I think he was schooled in Latin. You know, but what I also like about him, again, all these things I like in principle.

No, no, no, I like in principle, I love the idea that he has particular words that just do it for him. That he's writing and he's and it's basically pouring out of him and he doesn't want to revise he doesn't want to go back he's like and he just he has to get it out right yeah it's like a sort of there's a there's a wonderful description in the rainbow of um somebody describes somebody else as a running stream

and the person who's listening goes, oh, that's what my wife is like. She's like a running stream. And it's a sort of little moments of understanding that burst all over the place, which is sort of so touching and so kind of... Like fireworks. Yeah. And when he wants to do character,

Kan Gudrun says she would have no truck with tame cats, nice or not, because she believed that they were all only untamed cats with a nasty, untrustworthy habit of tameness. That's very good, very lovely. Well, look, I think we have covered the ground. We didn't read too much from the book. It's there, the whole quivering edifice of Lawrence's work, his poetry. Quivering comes up a lot.

Quivering, yeah. I think you're right, Catherine, I think worth looking at, particularly with the increased attention this year on working-class writing and people from working-class backgrounds. He was a trailblazer, a remarkable trailblazer, and as I say, still gets people proper riled up. Anyway, that's all we have time for. Huge thanks to Rachel and Catherine, to our producer, Nicky Birch,

and to our sponsors, Unbound. You can download hundreds of other shows, plus follow links, clips, and suggestions for further reading on our website, backlisted.fm. And of course, you can still contact us on Twitter, Facebook, and Boundless. If you've enjoyed this,

ponder the pros and cons of leaving a review with stars optional on iTunes or Spotify or wherever else you obtain your podcast-shaped inspiration. Look, we have come through. See you in a fortnight. I would let my wife and servants read D.H. Lawrence. Very. Magnanimous of you.

Well done. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call lock listed which is andy me and nicky talking about the books music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight