The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
Sometimes a story just clicks with you because it’s the right story at the right time, because it somehow reflects the things you’re going through in your own life. That’s the power of stories, of narratives, when they transcend entertainments and distractions and become an affecting mirror of your own experiences.
For me, The Rainbow is the right story right now. It’s beautiful and it’s honest, with less of the literary self-awareness of other novels of the time I like, such as those of Joyce or Woolf. Admittedly, I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, but unless it has a really bad final third, it’s shaping up to be one of my favourite books in a long while. Which surprises me, actually, because I didn’t previously rate D. H. Lawrence that highly, even if he is probably the most famous writer to have come from my home city.
I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover a few years ago, and I admired him for the frankness with which he described physical love-making (you’ll probably notice his influence in some of my more explicit work), but I found his writing style to often be quite blunt, almost crude, a little thrown-together. He has a tendency to repeat himself quite a lot as well, like he might use a word or a phrase and then you’ll see that word or phrase again half a page later, as if he can’t quite let go of it and wants to make sure you’ve noticed how good it is. He does that in The Rainbow too, sometimes to greater effect, sometimes to lesser.
He was a talented writer though, not as ambitious as my other early twentieth-century literary heroes perhaps, but talented nonetheless. The Rainbow, I feel, has both the broad strokes and the subtlety of a Turner painting, and when he starts describing the weather, and the way the characters experience it, like the sky pregnant with rain about to break as Tom Brangwen goes to visit Lydia Lensky to ask her to marry him, it is of a Turner painting that I am given a distinct impression.
I think, however, that if I had read it at another time, while I was at university perhaps, I would not have been so captivated by it. I would probably have read the first hundred-and-fifty or so pages, and then become bored with its apparent repetition as it moves down the successive generations of the Brangwen family and how each falls in love and marries. But I can appreciate it more now, now that, for the first time, I am living with my girlfriend, and living through the new and unfamiliar joys and challenges that brings, because, while in some ways The Rainbow is a love story, it is much more than that.
It’s not just a fall-in-love-and-live-happily-ever-after story, it’s about the way love grows up and brings a new awareness of oneself, how it makes your blood run hotter and brings you to a new life, how you relate to another person and how you mature with them as you live together and begin to know one another. It’s about how love and your regard for another person can be constantly shifting and altering, moving through subtle shades, and sometimes contradictory. Lawrence’s character, at least when they are young, are not living a static, easy life of marital bliss, they are constantly trying to understand each other, to re-evaluate themselves, struggling with their passions and their angers and their desires.
The effect of the characters’ experiences is all the greater because the reader watches the characters grown and mature, Tom from a young country farmer to an old land owner in the first generation, and Anna from a little girl to a mother of five in the second generation. I liked the way Tom was shaken by his first drunken sexual experience with a Nottingham prostitute, and the way it sobered and matured him, made him wiser and less happy-go-lucky, so that he was nervous and awkward when he first encountered the young widow Lydia Lensky. I liked the way, when they were first married, he would run away to the pub because he was almost frightened of how he could not understand his wife and her past life in Poland, though he loved her and they made love, and then how they gradually come to understand one another and their connection becomes deep and unbreakable.
I liked too how, when Will and Anna are first married and moved in together, though they passionately love each other, they also hurt each other without meaning to. How she would become so absorbed in sewing or some other work that she would forget to make the dinner for when Will returned, and then he would become angry, and then she would become angry and want to hurt him, and they would argue and then they would come together and be passionate again. I’m putting it bluntly, but Mr. Lawrence does it much more subtly. It seems honest and realistic the way he captures the shifting moods within a relationship, the way two people have to adjust to each other and can affect each other.
I actually found it disappointing, almost upsetting, to read when Will tried to cheat on Anna with a girl he sat next to at the theatre, because I empathised with the characters and wanted them to succeed. What actually happens though is that the girl rejects his advances and Will goes home to Anna and she asks him about where he’s been and he says he went to the theatre on his own and met nobody, and she can tell that he is keeping something from her, but then she decides that she doesn’t care, and when he realises that she is indifferent, it reignites his passion for her, and their marriage becomes stronger and more secure after that, even though it had started to sour.
And the book is not just about the love between men and women, but also parental love. It’s touching the way the love grows between Tom Brangwen and his wife’s daughter, the young Anna. At first Anna rejects him because he is not her real father, but he is patient with her, and they grow to love each other, and Tom almost takes solace in his love for Anna when he feels unable to connect with his wife. Then, much later on, Anna and Tom have a disagreement, and Anna accuses him of not being her real father, but immediately regrets it because she loves him and because it makes her feel less secure in the world and it feels like she has broken something between them.
The Rainbow is a love story then, but it’s about the changing shades of love as one grows older, as a person moves from a child, to a lover, to a parent. It’s about the people relate to the people around them, and how this can be both difficult and life-affirming. The thing is, all lovers argue sometimes, and all lovers, in their everyday lives, sometimes hurt or frustrate each other, people are as inconstant as the weather, sometimes we can happy or sad or lonely or irritable, sometimes several of these at once, and that can make living with someone you love difficult. But you stay together, and grow together.
I’m not complaining, and I’m not trying to make The Rainbow sound in anyway negative, because it’s a very positive novel, at least so far. Obviously, I’ll have to wait to see how it ends before I can say what my ultimate lasting impression of it will be. I’m very happy living with my girlfriend, of course, but it’s a new experience, a different way of living to when you’re living with friends or your family. Sometimes you can argue without really knowing why, or one of you could be sad for some reason completely unrelated to the other person, and that can directly affect the other person. You can both have your doubts and hopes and fears and joys, and they all get mixed in together. I don’t think this is abnormal nor necessarily bad, it’s just part of being in a relationship and living together, but The Rainbow acknowledges this in ways I haven’t really seen before, perhaps, to an extent, in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time, but not in a way that speaks to me like this work by a writer from my home city. Right story, right time.
Tags: D H Lawrence, In Search of Lost Time, James Joyce, Lady Chatterly's Lover, love, Marcel Proust, Marriage, Relationships, The Rainbow, To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf
