Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence

He had come to this new country, the youngest country on the globe, to start a new life and flutter with a new hope.  And he started with a rabid desire not to see anything and not to speak one single word to any single body--except Harriet, whom he snapped at hard enough.  To be sure, the mornings sometimes won him over.  They were so blue and pure: the blue harbour like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark-brown cliffs, and among the dark-looking tree-covered shores, and up the bright red suburbs.  But htel nad, the ever-dark brush that was allowed to come to the shores of the harbour!

Richard Somers and his wife Harriet are taking an extended holiday in Australia.  To Somers, recently hounded out of England on suspicion of being a German spy--much like Lawrence himself--Australia represents a new beginning, not just for himself, but as a "new country" that exists as something of a blank slate.

But as the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are, and Somers cannot quite escape his own moody self-isolation and aloofness.  When he falls in with a secret organization of fascist paramilitary groups called the Diggers and their leader, a Sydney lawyer who goes by the name "Kangaroo," he flirts with the idea of contributing his skills as a writer to their cause but cannot commit.

The Diggers are certainly dangerous.  Kangaroo talks to Somers a lot about his deep love for the people of Australia, which comes off as creepily paternalistic, if not something darker and more heinous.  (Somers thinks of Kangaroo "keeping the nation in his pouch.")  But it's not at all clear whether Lawrence himself, who was known to flirt with racist and fascist ideals, thinks that the Diggers' philosophy is all that bad.  Like all Lawrence books, the mushy mysticism tends to be hard to pin down, and open to frequent reversals; it seems as likely that we are meant to be suspicious of Kangaroo as it is that we are meant to see Somers' inability to participate in the Diggers' mission as a kind of tragedy.  You might expect a book about a well-meaning man who falls in with a charismatic, but insidious figure, yet I think you might legitimately ask who here is well-meaning and who is insidious.

It leads to, however, one of the more powerful scenes I've ever read in Lawrence's books: the dying Kangaroo, shot in the gut after an otherwise successful raid on a labor organizing rally, demanding Somers' love while wasting away in a hospital bed.  Somers cannot bring himself to do it; rather than presenting a blank slate, the strange and empty Australia has made him recede farther into himself, in a kind of emulation of the land's blankness.

Kangaro  has all of Lawrence's flaws: It goes on too long, it's something of a mess, its philosophical meanderings go from incomprehensible to reprehensible and back again.  The best thing about Kangaroo, as it always is with Lawrence, is the prose, and it's worth reading just for the vivid and skillful depictions of the Australian landscape:

But he was looking mostly straight below him, at the massed foliage of the cliff-slope.  Down into the centre of the great, dull-green whorls of the tree-ferns, and on to the shaggy mops of the cabbage-palms.  In one place a long fall of creeper was yellowish with damp flowers.  Gum-trees came up in tufts.  The previous world! -- the world of the coal age.  The lonely, lonely world that had waited, it seemed, since the coal age.  These ancient flat-topped tree-ferns, these tousled palms like mops.  What was the good of trying to be an alert conscious man here?  You couldn't.  Drift, drift into a sort of obscurity, backwards into a nameless past, hoary as the country is hoary.  Strange, old feelings wake in the soul: old, non-human feelings.

It's these "old, non-human feelings" that drive Somers away from the company of other people, and make him unable to return the love of Kangaroo.  Lawrence talks a lot about a "dark god" whose identity is warped whenever he is named--as Christ, or Thor, or whatever--and you can see the way that Lawrence, fleeing from the sour gentility of Europe, embraced Australia as a kind of place where that mysticism might be recovered.  Like Lawrence, Somers eventually leaves Australia, and heads to the United States.  Lawrence never wrote a book about the U.S.; the one book he wrote while living in New Mexico was about (old) Mexico.  That's a shame; I'd like to have seen America through Lawrence's eyes.

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill.  And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself.  In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of the iris where the bow should be.  Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow.  The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.

The Rainbow details three successive generations of one English family, the Brangwens: Patriarch Tom, who marries a Polish woman, their daughter Anna who marries her brooding cousin, Tom, and Anna and Tom's daughter Ursula.  At first the story of the Brangwens adheres so closely to Lawrence's favorite images and themes that The Rainbow hardly seems like a necessary book.  Tom's formative years in a bleak English coal town might as well be Paul Morel's; Anna's sexual awakenings might be taken wholesale from Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Even Lawrence's prose, which I really admire, started to feel worn to me--I started to become hyperaware of his favorite trick, which is to repeat a simple word in different grammatical constructions in a single passage.  (Check out the word "colour" in the description of the rainbow above.)

But by the time that Lawrence gets around to Ursula, the last in the line, the novel manages to individuate itself.  Part of Lawrence's purpose here is to examine human relationships across a span of historical time; Ursula, as the "modern" iteration and free from the traditional expectations of her grandparents, offers a more varied and engaging story.  I especially liked the part in which Ursula, insisting on finding work for herself, becomes a schoolteacher.  As a teacher myself, I've never read such a spot-on description of what it's like to teach at a dysfunctional school.  Like Ursula, I've been squeezed on both sides by the expectations of administrators and students, and I can relate to the way it turns her into a person she cannot recognize:

But she had paid a price out of her own soul, to do this.  It seemed as if a great flame had gone through her and burnt her sensitive tissue.  She who shrank from the thought of physical suffering in any form, had been forced to fight and beat with a cane and rouse all her instincts to hurt.  And afterwards she had been forced to endure the sound of their blubbering and desolation, when she had broken them to order.

Oh, and sometimes she felt as if she would go mad.  What did it matter, what did it matter if their books were dirty, and they did not obey?  She would rather, in reality, that they disobeyed the whole rules of the school, than that they should be beaten, broken, reduced to this crying, hopeless state.  She would bear all their insults and insolences a thousand times than reduce herself and them to this.  Bitterly she repented having got beside herself, and having tackled the boy she had beaten.

I enjoyed Ursula's story because there was space for something other than the spiritual-sexual problems that plague the two earlier generations, although Ursula has plenty of that too.  (Including a lesbian love affair, which seems pretty bold for 1915.)  I found myself wishing that the first two parts of the book were lopped off, though Lawrence clearly wants us to see that Ursula is deeply connected to those that came before her:

Here was peace and security.  Here, from her grandmother's peaceful room, the door opened on to the greater space, the past, which was so  big, that all it contained seemed tiny; loves and births and deaths, tiny units and features within a vast horizon.  That was a great relief, to know the tiny importance of the individual, within the great past.

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have metled away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere--dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.

Paul Morel loves his mother. Saddled with a violent, unhappy marriage to an uncouth coal-miner, she dotes on her son, with whom she forms a tight friendship. As Paul grows to become handsome and ambitious, he becomes attached to two different girls, which strains his relationship with his mother. The grammatical ambiguity of the title is no accident; at times Paul seems more like a boyfriend to his mother than a son, and more a son to his girlfriends than a lover. It is difficult, Paul shows us, to inhabit these social roles at the same time, which threaten to cleave you into parts and prevent you from devoting all of your being to anyone, even yourself.

Sons and Lovers hits many of the same settings and themes as Lady Chatterley's Lover, but it is also hugely different. The latter book is a paean to the physical act of love, which frees Constance Chatterley into herself, but sex in Sons and Lovers is (accurately, I might add) a messy, confusing affair. Paul resists giving himself physically to his lover, Miriam, until very late in the book, and it is not an unqualified success:

And afterwards he loved her--loved her to the last fibre of her being. He loved her. But he wanted, somehow, to cry. There was something he could not bear for her sake. He stayed with her till quite late at night. As he rode home he felt that he was finally initiated. He was a youth no longer. But why had he the dull pain in his soul? Why did the thought of death, the after-life, seem so sweet and consoling?

I thought that Lady Chatterley's Lover seemed strangely void of the Christian mysticism that Lawrence is known for. Sons and Lovers has it in spades, and though I'm sure others have taken to forming a precise catechism of Lawrence's religious philosophy, I must admit that such an endeavor is beyond me. There is the "sweet and consoling" after-life, and the paradoxical life that comes with being still (unlike Lady Chatterley!), and much to do with images of size and importance:

All the while the peewits were screaming in the field. When he came to, he wondered what was near his eyes, curving and strong with life in the dark, and what voice it was speaking. Then he realised it was the grass, and the peewit was calling. The warmth was Clara's breathing heaving. He lifted his head, and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than thamselves that hewas hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.

But mostly I enjoyed reading Sons and Lovers more than Lady Chatterley because it is a novel more in tune with its protagonist's psychology, more interested in human detail. Lady Chatterley's reputation as pornographic, I feel, may have as much to do with its positivity about sex as its graphicality. Most of us, I think, simply have never felt as unabashedly pure and overjoyed about human intimacy as Connie does--though if you feel otherwise, I am quite happy for you. I feel much more in tune with the confused, needy, insolent Paul, who says things like this:

"You know," he said, with an effort, "if one person loves, the other does."

"Ah!" she answered. "Like mother said to me when I was little, 'Love begets love.'"

"Yes, something like that, I think it must be."

"I hope so, because, if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing," she said.

"Yes, but it is--at least with most people," he answered.

Love is a terrible thing, as Paul will find out, at least terrible in capability. Paul is never able to give himself wholly to either Miriam or Clara because the prospect is too frightening; he uses words like "freedom" but the subtext is of diminishing, of vanishing into the other, which is both appealing and horrifying.

Shadows by DH Lawrence

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding,
folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches
of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

To my mind DH Lawrence's "Shadows" and Thomas' "Poem on His Birthday" are so alike in spirit and message that they seem companion poems. Lawrence preceded Thomas by some decades, of course, and his vision of afterlife is more idiosyncratic, but would you be surprised to read that wonderful line of Thomas', "Dark is a way and light is a place," in the clear, solemn stanzas of "Shadows?" Dark is the way:

And if, in the changing phases of a man's life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life...

"My wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead": I do not know what it is to be on one's deathbed, but that seems more accurate and more vivid than anything I might imagine. If you put an infinite number of emo bands in a room with typewriters, would they ever write a phrase so heart-rending?

But light, that place, greets us as the poem begins:

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

Lawrence, like Thomas and Clare, yearns for communion with God, and yet here is much more: here is a resurrection in God, and a sort of transformation toward divinity. I love "Shadows" because it uses such simple autumn imagery to describe this process, a trope so well-worn it is beyond cliche. Echoes here, too, of Macbeth, who says, "My way of life has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf..."

And yet the simplest images have the most power, when they are done so well. Thomas' poetry suffers from its labyrinthine qualities; at times it is as much a mystery as the "brambled void" itself. Lawrence's clarity is, by contrast, shattering. As Thomas writes of the souls like "blackberries in the woods," Lawrence too gives us images of plants, grown from the soil where dead things are, not fruit this time but flowers:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me...

I love that. Oblivion is "lovely," lovely because it belongs to God, and is his medium for the creation of a new spirit. Oblivion is not oblivion; it is something Lawrence tells us that we must pass through to emerge, new, from the other side.

The Broken Estate by James Wood

The last and titular essay in James Wood's The Broken Estate is uncharacteristically schizophrenic. It is sometimes about literature and sometimes about religion, and only infrequently about both. In it, Wood claims that both our literary and religious landscape are an inheritance of the nineteenth century, when "historical biblical criticism began to treat the Bible as if it were a biography or even a novel, and when, in turn, writers such as Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold began to treat the Bible as if he were the hero of a mystery tale." This "broken estate," Wood argues, blurs the line between truth and fiction, and thereby blurs the line between belief and the pretense to belief, the kind of believing we do with a novel and the kind of believing we do with a hymnal. Wood, in a sternly un-postmodern mood, condemns this empty religiosity:

Were Christianity simply true, its effect on the world could not be a way of measuring its truth. "Success" would be immaterial. But Renan and Arnold do not believe it to be true; its "truth" lies only in its usefulness. It is painful to see them wallow in the most primitive consequentialism. Both are defensively triumphant, and entirely circular... Such thinking, which does not deserve to be called thinking, with its clownish contradictions and repulsive evasions, positively deserves Nietszche's decisive hammer.

This is contrasted with Wood's defense of his own atheism, buttressed by the story of his own evangelical upbringing in England. It is not a unique defense but it is lucid, and takes a mutant form of the pretend-religion that he deplores:

The child of evangelicalism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference. He is always evangelical. He rejects the religion he grew up with, but he rejects it religiously... Nominal belief is insufficiently serious; nominal unbelief seems almost a blasphemy against earnest atheism.

There is a final station this train of thought that does not quite reach: "Only when Christianity is understood as a set of truths," he writes, "does it retain uniqueness... [t]he 'great strength' of biblical Christianity is that we need it." Except it isn't true, and therefore we don't need it. In this way Wood neatly justifies any and all suspicion and revulsion toward religion he has exhibited in the 200 pages of literary criticism that precede this essay.

At least Wood is upfront about the origins of his points of view. I say this without sarcasm; we should all be so honest. After all, "the writer-critic, wanting to be both faithful critic and original writer, does it acutely, in a flurry of trapped loyalties." But it puts the two of us at eternal odds. Eliot's orthodoxy is "clenched, spiritless, and wrong." Luther's belief of justification by faith "was a cruelty that not only demanded an inhuman mental loyalty, but that, brought to its logical end, abolished the purpose of Christian conduct on earth." The narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger begins to devour himself because to do so is a "Christian perversion" by which "infinite humility is the soul's aim." Gogol's conflicted sense of self becomes Manichean:

On the one hand, he is the earnest Christian who argued, in an essay in 1836, for satire's traditional moral divide-and-rule... this Gogol renounced literature and food, incinerated the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls and, in 1852, starved to death.

On the other hand, there is the satirist who is always falling over in laughter, who is never a convincing Christian, whose fanaticism seems parodic... The fanatical Gogol, we are told, destroyed Part 2 of Dead Souls because fiction was an unworthy activity for a saint. But it is not possible that the writerly Gogol, who had devoted twelve years to this manuscript, saw that a fiction of religious exhortation was no fiction at all, and not worth having?

It is possible, but not quite probable enough to justify the monstrous imposition of proclaiming Gogol's thoughts. I can buy the split-personality theory of Gogol, but the Puritan Gogol won out; Wood's stony absolutism--religious fiction is worthless!--cannot rewrite the historical record. Without irony, he later writes that D. H. Lawrence "is a mystic literalist. He is always a poet and a preacher at the same time. He should not be opened in two."

I find most of this fascinating but wrong. If The Broken Estate cleaved as tightly to this framework as I have so far suggested, I doubt I would have enjoyed it. But "Jane Austen's Heroic Consciousness" has little to do with the literature of belief, and "Thomas Pynchon and the Problem of Allegory" even less. These and many other essays seem to be here for no other reason than Wood wanted to write them. They hang together not because they have been marshaled into his anti-Crusade, but because Wood remains tremendously readable and thoughtful. He eschews the inscrutability of the academic in favor of writerly metaphor and turns of phrase: The preacher Lawrence is "the bully of blood, the friendless hammer." Pynchon's sense of allegory points "like a severed arm to nowhere in particular." I love John Updike, but I am continually amused (and a little chastened) by the thought that Updike "finds the same degree of sensuality in everything, whether it is a woman's breast or an avocado."

Wood's How Fiction Works succeeded because it was written with a non-academic, though educated, reader in mind, but when compared with the author of The Broken Estate he seems to be stooping low. The Broken Estate is simultaneously more academic and more personal, both more enthusiastic and more savage. It is brilliant but bitter, and despite Wood's assertion that loss of faith "brings great unhappiness to others, but not to oneself... It is like undressing," his book finishes disconsolately:

Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?

Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little chick was greyish-brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! Even when it scampered a little scramblingly into the coop again, and disappeared under the hen's feathers in answer to the mother hen's wild alarm-cries, it was not really frightened; it took it as a game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny sharp head was poking through the gold-brown feathers of the hen, and eyeing the Cosmos.

Connie was fascinated. And at the same time never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a kind of anti-Madame Bovary. The latter book is about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who takes refuge in adultery, patterning it after the romances she adores, but the adultery itself becomes a kind of cage and she is ultimately done in by her own profligacy and petulance. Emma Bovary shuns the reality of things for convenient fantasies of sex, but Constance, the titular Lady Chatterley, achieves the opposite result through similar methods: Instead of pulling the veil further down over her eyes, her affair with her husband's servant frees her from the drudgery of her existence and imbues her, like the chick she spies in the passage above, with "sparky, fearless new life."

The book was roundly derided as pornographic. No wonder, it is basically an extended paean to sex. Consider Lady Chatterley's husband, Clifford, literally deadened from the waist down by a war injury. He and his friends extol the virtues of a "life of the mind," divorced from the "sex thing," which is banished to a lower sphere of human activity. Clifford remarks to Constance that he wouldn't mind if she had a child by another man (they would just lie and tell everyone that Clifford's boy bits work every now and then), but the man she chooses is not the kind she can go back and present proudly to her husband. He is Oliver Mellors, the estate gamekeeper, of a radically different class.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of those strange books in which people make plans that are not torn horrifically asunder; Constance plans to be impregnated by Mellors and he obliges. His ability to engender life in her is two-fold: He gives her a child, but also their passionate love affair brings her an unbridled joy.

This may be, without exaggeration, the most well-written book I have ever read. Lawrence is a master of style--eminently readable, vivid, graceful. I dog-eared maybe a dozen sections to show this, but could have marked a dozen dozen. Here is one:

The hard air was still sulphurous, but they were both used to it. Round the near horizon went the haze, opalescent with frost and smoke, and on the top lay the small blue sky; so that it was like being inside an enclosure, always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure.

How much more wonderful is Lawrence's "small blue sky" that lays on top than Malamud's "cerulean ocean-sky"? One of Lawrence's most successful techniques is to repeat certain words five or six times in the course of a paragraph, moving them around syntactically, like a form of jazz:

There had been no welcome home for the young squire, no festivities, no deputation, not even a single flower. Only a dank ride in a motor-car up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding, to the knoll where the house spread its dark brown facade, and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering, like unsure tenants on the face of the earth, ready to stammer a welcome.

How simple these words are, and their repetition ought to be irksome, but somehow the rearrangement of them gives them new life, enables their expressiveness. The drive is dark and damp, the sheep are damp, the house is dark--instantly we know what is preoccupying the mind of Clifford, the "young squire," reflecting on his homecoming with some chagrin.

Even the sex writing is terrific:

Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting all her molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last.

But then again, it's just that sort of thing that made Lady Chatterley's Lover impossible to publish in the United States until the 1960's. This didn't take Lawrence by surprise. It was his last novel, and he had been castigated for this sort of thing before. Naturally, it reads as sort of a response to his critics, who would do as Clifford and his friends would, and separate the world of sex from the "life of the mind." They talk, and talk of sex, and even talk of sex as a kind of talk, but this is a kind of subordination that seeks to describe the body on the mind's terms. When Constance is with Mellors, the sex is not like talking; what she receives from it is not knowledge but life, health, well-being.

It is this also, I think, that makes Lady Chatterley's Lover not as satisfying to read today. The sexual revolution has come and passed, and the idea that the life of the body and the life of the mind must coexist is, while not roundly accepted, a not very fresh idea. Sex as empowerment is old hat. Most of the critics that would suppress the book are gone, and unable to push against them, Lady Chatterley's Lover seems to me to lack bite.

But it was wonderful to read all the same. It is unthinkable that anyone ever considered it pornographic; any porno shot from Lady Chatterley's Lover would have to have absurdly high production levels to capture the clarity and nuance of Lawrence's descriptive prose.

I admit that there is something pornographic in the ethos of it--the extolment of the sexual act as worthy and fulfilling on its own. But to call it pornography, point blank? Laughable--after all, pornography generally serves one person alone, it only values the approximation of the sexual act, which requires two people. Lady Chatterley's Lover's message is far different: Go have sex! Speaking on its terms, the book seems to dismiss the idea that anyone might derive a purely sexual pleasure from it.

As a last thought, I leave you to consider how true pornography encourages the kind of character that Constance sees in Clifford:

He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and through the close bond of family defense, with [his sister] Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there as nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.