Introduction

1In her 2011 literary introduction to the Vintage Classics Edition of Lawrence’s The Rainbow (reproduced in her volume of essays Coventry), Rachel Cusk claims that Lawrence’s novel ‘offers an account of how the old world became the new’ (2019, 203). The same might be said of her 2021 novel Second Place, which by reworking Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1932) affords Cusk an opportunity to revisit, from a more contemporary perspective, many of the themes found in Lawrence’s writings, with which as we will see, Cusk was intimately familiar. The author of Lorenzo in Taos was an American patron of the arts, living in New Mexico with her Indian husband Tony, who over a period of many years invited a number of artists and writers to visit their ranch. Having come across Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia, Luhan decided that he would be the ideal writer to describe the beauty of the New Mexico lifestyle and the native American Indians, and invited him to visit. Despite some initial prevarications, Lawrence eventually accepted her invitation and Luhan wrote down her recollections of the time he had spent there in the book Lorenzo in Taos.

2Cusk’s debt to Luhan’s book is by no means a superficial one. The similarities are deep-rooted and numerous, and a detailed comparison reveals that Second Place is heavily dependent on the former text not merely with regard to the narrative structure, but also with regard to the themes tackled and even the phrases employed. Indeed, some of the striking phrases that appear to be Cusk’s own are in fact drawn directly from Luhan’s account, and their very similarity also serves to highlight the differences between the texts. In an article ‘A Theory of Resonance’, Dimock argues that texts are ‘dialogic’ in Bakhtin’s sense of the term, and that the literary ‘is not an attribute resident in a text, but a relation, a form of engagement, between a changing object and a changing recipient’ (Dimock 1064). Cusk’s Second Place engages with Luhan’s literary text as, following Dimock’s definition, ‘a diachronic object: objects that extend across time, across a temporal gulf between language users’ (1060). It constitutes in itself, Cusk’s own very personal and contemporary reading of Luhan’s book (itself an individual interpretation of her own relation with Lawrence).

Anxiety of Influence: Transition from the Ancient to the New

This book was about me chucking D. H. Lawrence, getting him out of my life. I will survive without D. H. Lawrence. I turned against him and got rid of him. That was what happened in this book. . . . He was wrong. And that was extremely difficult for me to admit because he’s a writer who has freed a lot of women writers, who has enabled women writers, some of them, to find their voice.

5And yet, ultimately, this ‘chucking Lawrence’ is not the impression that the novel conveys. For one thing, the character L. in Second Place, is correctly described in a review by John Powers as ‘the walking embodiment of male privilege . . . selfish, amoral, irresponsible, flagrantly misogynistic and monstrously at ease with all this’, but L. is clearly unlike the real Lawrence, who has a completely different background, does not comport himself in the same manner as L. himself did, and does not die in solitude in Paris. As a result, it is difficult to see L.’s total loss of dependence as a result of his stroke as any kind of inversion of the original situation. Powers also correctly describes M. as finding herself ‘pulled between two self-contained men who, in very different ways, symbolize freedom’ , a tension which is far less pronounced in Lorenzo in Taos, and which, instead, seems to reflect Cusk’s own more personal preoccupations with the idea of freedom and identity rather than any kind of ideological stance about male privilege: ‘In most of my stories, I allow the truth to look after itself’, writes Cusk in her essay ‘On Rudeness’ (Cusk 2019, 48).

6Furthermore, Cusk’s relationship to Lawrence is a complex and profound one, and long before writing Second Place, Rachel Cusk had explicitly acknowledged the influence Lawrence had had on her writing. Cusk’s writings, both non-fictional and fictional, are peppered with allusions to Lawrence, such as her travel book The Last Supper (2009) in which she quotes the opening lines of Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia as an epigraph, and throughout which Lawrence’s descriptions of his experiences in Italy are clearly uppermost in Cusk’s mind. Apart from the afore-mentioned introduction to the Vintage Classics Edition of The Rainbow (2011), there are also many allusions to Lawrence in her semi-autobiographical novels or life writings. In Life’s Work she incorporates a long passage, from Lawrence’s The Rainbow. In the semi-autobiographical novel Outline the narrator Faye, clearly modelled on Cusk herself, describes Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers as the ‘book that has inspired me more than anything else in my life’ (Cusk 2014, 209). And in the same novel, the character Sylvie describes Lawrence in the following terms: ‘I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try’ (Cusk 2014, 209). In an interview for the Paris Review in 2020, Cusk said: ‘I think a lot of women writers have similarly found their voice as a result of reading Lawrence, and I think it was because he was a working-class man. So hearing a voice that is not a privileged male voice makes you realize that there is another voice in you’ (Heti). She even describes Lawrence as a ‘mentor’. There is, therefore, little debate to be had about the importance of Lawrence for Cusk. Yet it is perhaps in Second Place that Lawrence’s legacy is clearest: for Lawrence’s ideas are embedded in the very heart of this text. In spite of her protestations to the contrary, Lawrence’s ideas transition into Cusk’s novel, and are indeed an integral part of the narrative tissue.

7Even if Cusk’s novel transposes Luhan’s memoirs of the time Lawrence spent in Taos to a landscape more familiar to her (a marshy coast land in modern day England) and replaces the original Lawrence with a narcissistic painter called L., the basic storyline is retained. Both Mabel and M. take the decision to invite the man they admire (respectively Lawrence or L.) to stay in a second home on their land, and in both cases, when the protagonists have initially agreed to come, they both pull out at the last moment. Lawrence, for his part, says it is too early and heads off to Ceylon instead, whilst in Second Place L. decides to go play at being Robinson Crusoe on a paradise island somewhere (Cusk 2021, 29). Eventually, of course, both do finally resolve to come. M. like Mabel for Lawrence, wills L. to come in the hope that he will give her something she feels she lacks. Luhan, for example, writes ‘I’d had the idea of having him come to Taos, and I’d sit there and draw him until he came. I’d go down inside myself and call that man until he would have to come’ (Luhan 14). M. herself says that the narrative is ‘partly a story of will and of the consequences of exerting it’ (Cusk 2021, 14). Furthermore, both are also motivated by similar desires: Luhan writes: ‘I wanted Lawrence to understand things for me. To take my experience, my material, my Taos, and to formulate it all into a magnificent creation. That was what I wanted him for’ (Luhan 61); almost identical sentiments are proffered by M. who states towards the end that ‘the very thing that I had wished for all along—that L would find a way of capturing the ineffability of the marsh landscape, and thereby unlock and record something of my own soul—was occurring’ (Cusk 2021, 198). Stylistically too, Cusk chooses (like Luhan), to address her text to a character named Jeffers who otherwise does not figure in the story.

10But the similarities go well beyond these structural differences, and are also to be found in the interplay of the themes and preoccupations of Cusk’s text. Second Place can, in fact, be seen, as a kind of knot between the threads of different visions of the world—the themes shared by all three writers resonate with each other throughout, and perhaps most particularly between Lawrence and Cusk, bringing Cusk’s modern-age preoccupations to the fore. In her reworking of Luhan’s account, Cusk shows that ‘the hermeneutical horizon of the text might extend beyond the moment of composition, that future circumstances might bring other possibilities for meaning’, that the same words might bring ‘a different web of meaning’ (Dimock 1061). Nicolas Boileau makes a similar argument in his introduction to a series of articles about Cusk’s work, where he highlights Cusk’s importance as a ‘neo-modernist’ in whose work the ‘dissection of thoughts, multiplication of viewpoints, poetic prose, interest in the insignificant in which the significant looms large . . . are adapted to the contemporary world, making necessary alterations in the process’.

M.’s Conception of the Second Place: ‘more wrestling, than dancing’

11The manner in which Cusk’s concerns resonate with some of Lawrence’s can be ascertained by the extent to which certain of Lawrence’s key ideas are incorporated into the vision of the novel. As mentioned earlier, M. in Second Place defines the phrase ‘second place’ in terms of competition: she has the impression that she has already come second in life. Lawrence looked to redefine the modern understanding of the word conquest, by arguing that while we normally conceptualise it in terms of victory or loss, there is also another form of conquest, more stoical (or Schopenhauerian), which, rather than seeking victory, entails acceptance—a state of peace. Accordingly, the title of the book may have been inspired by these lines from Mabel Dodge Luhan’s text:

• 6 The ensuing references to stars—‘what holds the stars firm in their constellations, able to withsta (...)

Do the electrons which compose the atom shove each other about and try to displace one another? Does each and every one want first place? Or is each one always equidistant from all the others and satisfied to be where it is? [. . .] (151)⁶

For me, Tony’s differences were a test of my ability to contain my own will, which was always straining to make everything how I wanted and thought it should be, to make it conform to my idea. If Tony were to conform to my idea, he would no longer be Tony! (Cusk 2021, 165)

13On the other hand, if M. is someone who seeks to make things happen as she wants them to, Tony, she says, is ‘not someone who interferes lightly in the course of things, knowing as he does that to take on the work of fate is to incur full responsibility for its consequences’ (Cusk 2021, 37). Indeed, Tony’s way of thinking is far more representative of Lawrence’s approach to the world, and M. does seem to drift more towards Tony’s vision—of accepting rather than imposing—as the novel progresses. In another letter to Mabel, cited in Lorenzo in Taos, Lawrence advises her to ‘try, above all things, to be still and to contain yourself. You always want to rush into action. Realize that a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action, like a seed can wait. One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not be a mere rushing on’ (Luhan 238; emphasis added). Cusk repeats the same words in Second Place when M. watching L. painting in the second place realises that ‘a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action’ (2021, 197).

A long course of merely negative ‘freedom’ reduces the soul and body both to numbness. They can feel no more and respond no more. Only the mind remains awake, and suffers keenly from the sense of nullity; to be young, and to feel you have every ‘opportunity’, every ‘freedom’ to live, and yet not to be able to live, because the responses have gone numb in the body and soul, this is the nemesis that is overtaking the young. It drives them silly. (Lawrence 2005, 116; emphasis added).

Least of all did I understand what freedom was and how I could attain it. I thought it was a mere unbuttoning, a release, where in fact—as you know well—it is the dividend yielded by an unrelenting obedience to and mastery of the laws of creation. The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music-lover can ever be. I suppose this explains why great artists can be such dreadful and disappointing people. Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way. (Cusk 2021, 45)

17M.’s definition of the ‘second place’ is also bound up with the issue of identity, something which as Isabelle Rannou points out was already a central theme in Cusk’s work by the time she wrote the travel book The Last Supper in 2009. In the eponymous opening essay of the collection Coventry, this question of identity is clearly bound up with the concept of attempting to impose one’s will on someone and on the issue of actual freedom. Cusk discusses the concept of being sent to Coventry: ‘every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry’ (Cusk 2019, 23), but she makes it clear that the phenomenon has been a real source of suffering for her in her life: it is a kind of bullying. Sending someone to Coventry she says, ‘is the attempt to recover power through withdrawal . . . Then they’ll be sorry! It’s a gamble, with oneself as the stakes. My mother and father seem to believe they are inflicting a terrible loss on me by disappearing from my life. They appear to be wielding power, but I’ve come to understand that their silence is the opposite of power. It is in fact failure, their failure to control the story, their failure to control me . . . By sending someone to Coventry you are in a sense positing the idea of their annihilation, asking how the world would look without them in it’ (Cusk 2019, 24–25). In other words, her parents’ decision to forcibly impose silence upon her deprives her of the freedom to be herself . . . or at least, for as long as she allows it to do so.

Tony’s Conception of the Second Place: An Alternative Reality

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experience of social and moral content, of such concepts of freedom and truth, and, most importantly of individuality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation and conformity . . . the language system . . . so intrinsic to every social and personal network, has given rise to a ‘false’ self . . . language is the medium, the brokering mechanism, of self. (2019, 181)

20M. actually wants, deep down, to get free of her ‘identity’, which she describes as ‘the whole web of deeds and associations that contained both past and future and was clogged with all the evidence of the great dirty passage of time, yet always failed somehow to capture the living moment’ (Cusk 2021, 139). One of L.’s criticisms of M. is that she lacks authenticity; she is always trying to force things, rather than letting things run their course: ‘“Why do you play at being a woman?”’, he asks her. Hence it is that when Kurt warns M. that L. intends to destroy her, M. is attracted by the idea of having her will destroyed: ‘the thing was, Jeffers, part of me wanted to be destroyed’ (Cusk 2021, 139). She goes on to suggest: ‘There was a greater reality, I believed, beyond or behind or beneath the reality I knew, and it seemed to me that a lifelong pain would be ended if only I could break through to it (Cusk 2021, 139). It is in this respect that Tony’s definition of the second place as a ‘parallel world. Alternative reality’ makes sense, and much of Second Place seems to be devoted to examining the possibility of an alternative reality, suggesting a more spiritual dimension. In an interview for the Yale Review , Cusk asserts that in Second Place she wanted to ‘destabilize the book from its narrative or linear foundations and to suggest some unreality, some kind of other realm’.

Conclusion

22Notwithstanding Cusk’s dependence in Second Place on both Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs, and on Lawrence’s thought, she has transitioned to something more modern and personal. In a world which is, for Cusk sometimes ugly and depressing, Second Place represents a quest for something more beautiful, more wondrous, more permanent. Elsewhere, Cusk suggested in an interview that her art entails the quest for this other dimension, the ‘there’ which entails a dissolution of the identity: ‘Definitely where I’m heading to is a kind of writing that I want to be much more akin to visual art . . . I’d like to make something where the imprint of identity is much less palpable. I am sort of bashing my head trying to work out how to do it’ . By turning Lawrence into a painter, this may be what Cusk was attempting to do for, according to Cusk in The Last Supper, ‘to look at a painting is to feel looked at, comprehended, yourself. It is to experience empathy, for what is art but the struggle to acknowledge the fact that we ourselves are created’ (2009, 177); indeed, a painting like Piero’s ‘The Last Supper’ teaches you that ‘you must seek a truth that lies beyond human concerns’ (2009, 66). In this sense, Cusk’s novel can be seen as the fruit of a dialogic relationship to Luhan’s memoirs, and more indirectly with Lawrence himself, so that in the words of Dimock it shows how ‘literary texts are to be cherished for the likelihood that they will arrive at new and strange junctures and yield new and strange arguments (1065)’.

23Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: OUP, 1969.

24Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Oxford: OUP Press, 1997.

25Boileau, Nicolas Pierre, ‘Introduction’, E-Rea 10.2 Kay Boyle/Rachel Cusk: (Neo)Modernist Voices (2013), last accessed on 17/02/2025 at https://journals.openedition.org/​erea/​3190.

26Cusk, Rachel, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

27Cusk, Rachel, Outline, London: Faber & Faber, 2014.

28Cusk, Rachel, Coventry, London: Faber & Faber, 2019.

29Cusk, Rachel, Second Place, London: Faber & Faber, 2021.

30Dimock, Wai Chee, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112.5 (1997): 1060–1071, last accessed on 7 February 2026 at http://www.jstor.org/​stable/​46383.

31Emre, Merve, ‘Interviews; Rachel Cusk: The novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being”’, The Yale Review, 112.1 (2024), last accessed on 31 August 2025 at https://yalereview.org/​article/​rachel-cusk-interview.

32Heti, Sheila, ‘Rachel Cusk, The Art of Fiction No. 246’, The Paris Review (Spring 2020), last accessed on 20 August 2025 at https://www.theparisreview.org/​interviews/​7535/​the-art-of-fiction-no-246-rachel-cusk.

33Kinney-Kobre, Hannah, ‘An Ordinary Female Life: On Rachel Cusk’s “Parade”’, Cleveland Review of Books, 24/10/2024, last accessed on 04 May 2025 at https://clereviewofbooks.com/​rachel-cusk-parade/​

34Lawrence, D. H., Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, Cambridge: CUP, 1985.

35Lawrence, D. H., Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine & Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, Cambridge: CUP, 1988.

36Lawrence, D. H., Introductions and Reviews, eds N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

37Luhan, Mabel Dodge, Lorenzo in Taos, London: Woolf Haus Classics, 2021.

38Powers, John, ‘Rachel Cusk’s “Second Place” Offers Sharp Perceptions About Love And Creativity’, Iowa Public Radio 9 May 2021, last accessed on 29 August 2025 at https://www.iowapublicradio.org/​2021-05-19/​rachel-cusks-second-place-offers-sharp-perceptions-about-love-and-creativity.

39Rannou, Isabelle, ‘“Like journeying through a painting”: Travel Writing and the Exploration of Textual Boundaries in Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper’, E-Rea 10.2 (2013), last accessed on 7 February 2026 at http://journals.openedition.org/​erea/​3235.