虹

A tongue-tied English farmer catches his first sight of a Polish widow in black at church, and before the service is even over he has walked her home to his place on the marsh. He later drowns in a flood that rises over his own fields, and his foreign wife, who never quite understood her husband's speech, murmurs a few words on her own deathbed, words her old Polish love once taught her. Lawrence's The Rainbow starts here: a marriage made by instinct rather than language, and a death that ends it the same way.

The author, D.H. Lawrence, was born in the late nineteenth century into an English mining family and died in 1930, not yet forty-five. The Rainbow came out in 1915, an ambitious book he wrote in his late twenties: he pulled the lens away from the pits his father knew and turned it toward the farming country of Nottinghamshire his mother's side had worked for generations, tracing three generations of women in the Brangwen family as they struggle inside their marriages and try to find themselves against the grinding gears of industry. The book was prosecuted for obscenity in Britain, and the printed stock was publicly burned. What actually provoked people was never the sex. It was the book's daring claim that civilization's price is pulling people, inch by inch, out of their own bodies and off the ground under their feet.

When the story opens, the world is still the Brangwen family on the Nottinghamshire marshland: Tom Brangwen, a farmer, tongue-tied but sharply instinctive, marries Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow who has drifted here with her small daughter Anna after the death of her first husband, a doctor in a foreign country. Anna grows up and marries Will Brangwen, the nephew Tom brought home from an orphanage, an inward young man fixated on church woodcarving and drafting. Their marriage is a daily fight of passion and friction, Will sunk in his own faith and unwilling to surface, Anna's whole will bent on nailing the house down and then planing it back to her own measure. The next generation is Anna's daughter Ursula, the real center of the book's second half: unwilling to be only a woman of the household, she falls in turn for a Polish-descended English army officer and a schoolmistress of the New Woman persuasion, goes off to study and to teach, and hunts for a place to stand in a world still framed by men.

Behind this world sits a backdrop that never holds still: canal picks ring out across the marsh, colliery headstocks go up one after another, and a mechanized town (the book calls it Wiggiston) spreads like black rust, slowly eating the fields. Old Tom's own son, young Tom, leaves farming for the pits and rises to colliery manager. He later marries Ursula's New Woman schoolmistress, a match that quietly hands the old generation's instinct, the maternal land, over to the new order.

Tom and Lydia's marriage is written very quietly, and very clumsily. Two people who cannot even fully share a language sit at the table on the marsh, and neither speaks. Lawrence doesn't write dialogue; he writes the instant their elbows touch while washing dishes, the film across Lydia's face as she reads her first husband's old letters in translation, the moment Tom finally presses his face close to hers under the covers, what stands between them isn't nationality, it's a layer of nature inside each of them that no one can translate. Reading this section, you feel Lawrence working with his bare hands to describe two souls building their first, clumsy bridge to each other.

When their stepdaughter Anna marries Will, the bridge collapses. Anna is fire: she wants to be seen, to be acknowledged, and she wants the whole world remade to her own measure. Will is a nail, buried in his church woodcarving and refusing to come out. Their marriage is like two trees whose roots have locked together, neither able to swallow the other; Lawrence writes every kiss between them as if it were an exchange of blows, every night in bed as a small war. What decides this war is Anna's body: in the act of bearing child after child, she wins the world back for herself.

The first time I read the lines about Anna's triumph, I stopped short: Lawrence calls it a victory, flatly, with no hedging at all. But look back over the first half of Anna's life, and the door that was never fully opened to her only swings open in motherhood, and putting that on the page unsettles a reader far more than any account of whether she loved Will.

What starts to break this apart is the view out of Anna's own window. The canal cuts through to the far end of the field, headstocks rise one after another, and Wiggiston's chimneys turn the sky gray. Lawrence writes this encroachment in the language of the body, not of scenery: the children's breath starts carrying a trace of sulfur, and coal dust settles layer after layer over the wood Will has carved. At the same time, old Tom's own son (Anna's own brother) takes a job at the pit and eventually rises to colliery manager. This branch of the family slides, quietly, from the side of the land to the side of the machine.

Old Tom's death is the sound of that old life being snapped off in a single blow. He drowns in a flood that comes too fast; Lawrence doesn't write what's on his mind as he dies, only that he never makes it home, that the rising water closes over his head. Set beside the decades of industry that follow, it reads like fate settling the whole account at once: the generation rooted in the land, living by instinct, is taken by the water in a single summer night, along with the way of life that went with it.

With Anna's daughter Ursula, the whole register shifts. Her story is no longer about fields and family but about forcing herself out through a world built for men. As a young woman she has two loves that mark her: one with the young officer Anton Skrebensky, all charm and the particular polish of the British Empire, but underneath, a man who wants to tame rather than stand as an equal; the other with her schoolmistress, Winifred Inger, a strong, mannish woman who preaches the New Woman. Lawrence gives both loves equal weight: Ursula throws herself into each one, and in each one finds, eventually, that the two of them don't meet at the bottom.

What lands hardest, half comic and half bitter, is who Winifred ends up marrying: Ursula's own uncle, that same colliery manager, young Tom Brangwen. The stroke is cold and exact: a woman who has the New Woman on her lips ends up fitting herself, by her own hand, into a marriage inside the new industrial order.

Ursula doesn't stop there. She goes off to study, goes off to teach, clawing her days back into her own hands inch by inch. Meanwhile Skrebensky returns from the Boer War and proposes; she accepts, briefly, then takes it back, having finally seen that what he wants isn't to stand beside her but to have her surrender herself. He marries someone else almost immediately, and it's only then that Ursula realizes she is carrying his child.

Lawrence writes the miscarriage almost like an ambush: out walking in the countryside, she runs into a herd of spooked horses, their hooves graze her, and the illness comes down on her, taking the pregnancy with it. She lies sick for a long time, close to not knowing whether she'll stand up again. On the day she recovers, she walks out of the house alone and looks toward the dark colliery town in the distance, and on the horizon, a rainbow hangs.

The book stops there. The rainbow isn't a reconciliation with anyone, and it isn't a new life arriving; Lawrence is cruel enough not to leave her even the child. It's an arch standing between the old ruins and an unknown new world. That's why it can carry across generations of repetition: from the first clumsy bridge built between two people in Tom and Lydia's marriage, to the light that finally falls over Ursula's head alone, the same image, moved from one end of history to the other, its meaning shifting with it.

This Lawrence book is famous for two things. One is the body and desire written so plainly, so bluntly, that the British authorities at the time prosecuted and destroyed it as obscene. The other is the sheer weight of the rainbow as an image, one of the most powerful extensible symbols in English literature, able to stitch the fates of three generations of one family, and two eras of an old and a new England, into a single picture. But what actually keeps the book alive is something plainer: it's the story of a woman prying herself out of her own cradle in a world that had no place made for her yet. Reread it today and his account of how mechanization pulls people out of their bodies and off the land reads almost like a prophecy written for our own time.

A companion piece can give you a map, but you still have to walk the land yourself. The most important things in The Rainbow are not on the surface of the plot. They live in how Lawrence writes the almost nameless tremor inside two bodies, together or apart; in what happens on the nights that give you not one line of dialogue; in the string inside Anna that rings the instant Will's chisel touches the wood. Reading a summary is like listening to someone describe a dish — whether it's good, you still have to taste it yourself.