Sun

I am not really sure why I have avoided D. H. Lawrence all my life: somehow I managed to associate him with images of dreary working class neighborhoods of unplastered brick in fog and drizzle. But his prose is poetic and this story, at least, is lyrical and imbued with great and sensitive beauty. The subject is a woman recovering from something — perhaps post partum depression — by sunbathing, just as I have recovered from mine. The notion of conscious life being somehow separate and somehow altogether besides the heat of the sun coursing through the dark passages of our body struck me as strangely apt; as did the description of the early morning sun shaking itself off from the wetness of the night. And the observation how recovery from depression, perceived as a kind of warming, awakes sexual desire. As perhaps sunbathing itself does. (God knows, I have been at the receiving end of this: does this explain crowded summertime beaches?)

David Herbert was a very sexual man — the story illustrates this, and as does his fiery relationship with his wife. I am guessing he was one of those who think, as I did until recently, that sex and our sexual nature is the most central, the most fundamental element of our being; and that once we lose it, there is no more point to life. But he was empathically — rather than voyeuristically — interested in female sexuality, and he wrote about it both openly and beautifully. Here he portrays the slow gradual rise of desire of a convalescent, under Sicilian sun. It’s very touching. It made me get up and go out into the sun.

And then there is the story’s denuement: the heroine belongs to that common class of people who simply cannot take initiative and responsibility. The women who need a man to achieve anything, to dare it, even; the men who spend their lives doing as told, first by their mothers, then their wives.

The story features a couple like this. She will bear him another child because that is the only sex she dares to have, even though it is pale and worm-like; and he will agree to support her life abroad and even take off his immaculate clothing and sunbathe, if she orders him to. They are both bound to the vast wheel of circumstance, as so many others.