1“Things,” a short story by Lawrence, written in May 1928 and published the following August, introduces a couple, Valerie and Erasmus Melville, from New England, who have amassed precious furniture and artifacts during their trips to France and Italy, where they had pursued an ideal life devoted to Buddhism. As the expatriates’ financial means dwindle, they face the issue of finding a suitable home to display their precious belongings.
- 1 For instance, among the things that the Melvilles amass, Valerie falls “on her knees before the cur (...)
2The opening of the story clearly hinges the Melvilles’ peripatetic lives on their quest for spiritual fulfillment inspired by Buddhist beliefs. Their “inclination towards ‘Indian thought’” (VG 79) has suggested biographical commonalities with Achsah and Earl Brewster, close friends of Lawrence’s, versed in Buddhism, who settled permanently in India in 1936. Like the Melvilles, the Brewsters came from the east of the United-States (Brewster from Ohio and his wife from Connecticut). They lived in Italy for almost twenty years, having honeymooned in Sicily, in the Fontana Vecchia, the actual villa where Lawrence happened to be staying when they met in 1921 (see Cushman 86). Also like the Melvilles, they were artists, had one child and volunteered during the war, doing hospital work. However, Lawrence’s biographical input in his works tends to draw from a range of sources and other features of the Melvilles are to be attributed to various people whom Lawrence met during his own travels.1 Aware of the comic, and at times cruel, turn of the story, Lawrence stressed that the Brewsters were remotely involved, writing to his friends about its publication, “You’ll think it is you, but it isn’t” (Brewster 1934, 179).
3This article aims at showing how the narrative tensions of the short story “Things” complicate the question of the couple’s relation to places and in particular to home and homeland. Such tensions, intensified by the economy of the short story as genre, fashion Lawrence’s ironic commentary of idealism and materialism.
4First a consideration of the significance of the home, and its pendant the tree, in Buddhist thought addresses the scope and limits of renunciation and idealism. Lawrence’s letters to the Brewsters prove useful to the discussion, in that they register his ambivalence to living according to Buddhist thought. Multiplicity, signified in the succession of homes the Melvilles dwell in, and the amount of things they amass, is then shown to grow out of a topographical shift from verticality to horizontality embedded in the narrative. This collapse articulates the Melvilles’ oscillating values, that redefine the quest as events unfold. However, a focus on how the characters themselves are constantly and ironically redefined, from the very beginning of the story, will expose the subtle intrusion of the narrative voice. Finally, the Melvilles’ return to their homeland, in the second part of the story, is considered in the light of dialogical tensions created by discrepancies to be found in the status and figurative language of the American couple.
5The story draws attention to fluctuating attitudes to fixed homes within the context of Buddhist thought, that can be better understood thanks to Lawrence’s assiduous correspondence with Earl Brewster. In the first part of the narrative, the Melvilles move from France to Italy, where “much more than in Paris, they felt they could thrill to the teachings of the Buddha” (VG 80). In Europe, they seem to find adequate lodgings easily: “a studio apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse”, or the whole “second floor of an old Palazzo on the Arno” (VG 79, 82). The Brewsters’ similarly peripatetic lives and the lodgings they find generate many remarks throughout Lawrence’s letters. In May 1927, writing to their daughter, Harwood, Lawrence exclaims about her parents: “Heavens, what waifs and strays! I suppose you’ll land in another ‘beautiful pretentious villa.’ It’s become a habit” (Letters VI 57). At the time, Lawrence was himself living at the Villa Mirenda, near Florence, where he stayed from May 1926 to June 1928, a long period considering his own habits (see Letters VI xix).
6After the Brewsters left for India in March 1926, remarks about Buddhism increased significantly in number in Lawrence’s letters to them. In April 1926, Lawrence owned up to warming to his friend’s spiritual position when he mentioned the sacred fig tree, or bodhi tree, under which, according to tradition, Siddhartha Gotama, the future Buddha, found spiritual enlightenment. “I am convinced that every man needs a bho tree of some sort in his life,” he wrote. “What ails us is, we have cut down all our bho trees […]. And I’m going to sit right down under one, to be American about it, when I come across one” (Letters V 437). A few months later, Brewster published a translation of collected pali texts called The Life of Gotama the Buddha, that he sent to Lawrence in October 1926 (Burwell 102). Tellingly, in The Life of Gotama the Buddha, the exhortation “go forth from the house into the homeless state” (with variations, “go forth from my home into the homeless,” “go forth from the household life into the homeless state”) rhythms the text to delineate the Buddha’s ascetic example from which followers should learn (Brewster 1926, passim 12-164). Again in Lawrence’s letters written at the time of the publication of Brewster’s book, homelessness is a recurrent topic, as in “You ought really to solve at least a bit of your present difficulty – the homeless houseless bit” (Letters VI 90) when, in the same letter, Lawrence imparts the idea that “the danger of Buddha to us is that he tends to foster in us a peculiar paresse de l’âme” (Letters VI 90, italics in the original). Brewster regularly confided in Lawrence his doubts and misgivings, which Lawrence called “his vacuities” in a letter written just one month after his friends’ departure for India: “Your letter today. So the vacuities are still empty! – especially the material and domiciliary ones” (Letters VI 49).
- 2 Ultimately in Buddhist thought, “renunciation takes place within the frame of the human body, which (...)
7Undeniably the letters and the short story predicate the spiritual quest on a homeless peripatetic life. Buddhist literature concurs with this outlook. As Kazi K. Ashraf reveals in his discussion of dwellings in ascetic culture, the home in Buddhist traditions, and the Buddha’s house in particular, is “the site for reflecting on the scope and limits of renunciation” (225). The house is primarily a literal dwelling place, that the Buddhist disciple is urged to leave in order to seek spiritual enlightenment. In this way, the Buddha was “an arch-ascetic whose life practice and teaching were about the critical relinquishment of ‘home’” (Ashraf 225). Since the house belonged to a peripatetic teacher, Buddha’s actual home is both the house of absence and the absence of home. That’s why his home is often represented as a flowery and fragrant pavilion that evokes his holy presence during his absence, while the tree, under which the Buddha came to rest and teach, “became [his] prevalent sanctioned ‘dwelling’ in Buddhist monastic literature” (Ashraf 227).2
8In this light, Lawrence’s story “Things” encompasses the paradox of renunciation by juxtaposing spiritual and material quests which pivot around the aspiring Buddhist couple’s homelessness and their search for a house. I argue, however, that the Buddhist move from dwelling in a house to resting under a tree finds its way into the narrative through a vein of metaphorical language. Indeed, Lawrence’s syncretic writing builds an arboricultural metaphor when the characters, likened to vine tendrils, embrace the trunk of European culture, clutching to it in their quest for an ideal: “For up the old tree-trunk of Europe the green vine had been clambering silently for more than ten years, ten hugely important years, the years of real living” (VG 82). Tree imagery merges and shifts from the tree-trunk of Europe to the Buddhist bho-tree, and again, yet apparently arbitrarily, to the fabled beanstalk, in “the bean-stalk of ‘Indian thought’ had given way, before Jack and Jill had climbed off the tip of it to a further world” (VG 81).
9Although the image of the beanstalk debunks the sacredness of the bho-tree in a comic twist, commonalities can be found between the fabled stalk and the Buddha’s tree, as Christine Goldberg suggests in her compelling article “The Composition of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.” Both the stalk and the bho-tree reach, Goldberg shows, from an earthly world to another “upper world” (20), or “further world” (VG 81), a property found universally in other creeds where the tree mediates verticality and transcendence. To establish a parallel between the beanstalk of the fairy tale and the bho tree, Goldberg refers to The Sacred Tree: or, the Tree of Religion and Myth written in 1897, by Mrs J.H. Philpot, according to whom each Buddha was
- 3 Mrs J.H. Philpot’s work was, and still is, valued among Buddhist researchers as shown in a biograph (...)
associated with his own bodhi-tree […] for the Bo-tree, under which truth gradually unfolded itself to the meditating Gautama, is regarded as sacred by Buddhists in much the same way as the cross is by Christians. There can be no doubt, however, that in the earliest forms of worship current in India, the alliance between the plant world and the divine essence was extremely intimate. (43-44, see also Goldberg 14)3
10Therefore, thanks to Lawrence’s syncretic writing, the metaphor of the tree branches out, so to speak, to encompass various worldviews that shift from ascetism to idealism and ultimately to materialism. The symbolism of trees and vines structures the first part of the narrative, creating a twofold satirical effect. First, narratorial metalinguistic asides depict the paradoxical complexities of the expat Americans’ relation to place, as in “to go back to our metaphor, the pole up which the green and anxious vines had clambered so far now proved dry-rotten” (VG 81). The narrative voice is therefore quite intrusive, providing a running commentary on the characters with comic twists. Second, such syncretic shifts build a “vertical and horizontal image pattern” (Harris 236), explicitly enunciated in the text: “While their Soul was climbing up to the sun of old European culture or old Indian thought, their passions were running horizontally, clutching at ‘things’” (VG 82). Accordingly, topographic imagery along vertical and horizontal lines not only transcends polarities, it also redefines the quest, the home and characters.
11As materialism overtakes idealism and religious thought, verticality collapses within Lawrence’s narrative to make way for horizontality. The text reads “It was another bean-pole, another vine-support crumble under the green life of the vine,” (VG 82). In this way, the narrative’s topographical shift complicates the couple’s relation to places and to homes in particular.
12Interestingly, in his impressive discussion of Lawrence’s engagement with Buddhism, Gerald Doherty relates horizontality to the Melvilles’ geographical wanderings, writing that
[t]he central theme of this story, the basic self-contradiction inherent in all idealist thinking, is generated through the contradiction latent in its topographical structure, the couple’s horizontal and literal movement, their incessant travelling from America, through Europe, and back again. (61)
13According to Doherty, this horizontal movement is “crossed by their metaphorical climbing and falling”, creating an “implicit crucifixion figuration” (61, italics in the original) to express the sacrifice of idealism and freedom to materialism.
- 4 Multiplicity can be read in Lawrence’s own break with Buddhist thought that Doherty shrewdly links (...)
14I would add that, paradoxically, because of their very textual, and therefore linear, recurrence, the arboricultural metaphors, i.e. the tree-trunk of Europe, the Buddhist bho-tree, the beanstalk and the vine, no longer express verticality only. The rhizomatic expansion of these metaphors introduces a horizontal movement in the text that reinforces the shift from the spiritual to the material. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize the properties of the rhizome, itself a horticultural borrowing from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα, rhízōma meaning “mass of roots,” which typifies plurality as opposed to polarity (7-11). Thus in Lawrence’s text, the rhizomatic expansion of arboricultural metaphors conveys the move away from dualism, induced by verticality, in favour of multiplicity and heterogeneity. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s horticultural imagery, meaning is “deterritorialised” from one tree metaphor and “reterritorialised” in another, to the effect that the metaphors “interlink and form relays” to convey the shift in the Melvilles’ quest (10). In “Things,” multiplicity and heterogeneity, induced by the rhizomatic pattern, are also literally rendered by the miscellaneous objects amassed by the Melvilles and by the number of houses the couple dwell in successively.4
15The narrative move to multiplicity creates linguistic tensions in the way possessions are listed and homes are designated. The accumulation of the titular things purchased as the couple travel around Europe generates linguistic accumulations, including anaphora, as when “They got used to the marvellous Bologna cupboard, they got used to the wonderful Venetian book-case, and the books, and the Siena curtains and bronzes, and the lovely sofas and side-tables and chairs they had ‘picked up’ in Paris” and further on, “her Bologna cupboard and Louis Quinze chairs, above all, her ‘Chartres’ curtains” (VG 83, 85). Analysing the couple’s syllogomania, or compulsive hoarding, Stéphane Sitayed rightly points out the syntactic features of the narrative, for instance, when “all the objects are juxtaposed in a concatenation of long compound substantives preceded by adjectives evoking several national origins with little coherence” (141). Such juxtapositions can however be argued to have coherence in that their very point is to convey multiplicity while the home, redefined as a place to display a collection of things, is endowed with a mere social function.
16As the couple’s spiritual quest gradually fails, multiplicity is achieved when the Melvilles move from apartments and rooms − lodgings which suggest verticality − to detached houses − a cabin in the mountains, a cottage on the Californian coast, a little house on the college lot of Cleveland University – momentarily leaving their homeless things in storage. Like the titular character of “The Man Who Loved Islands”, who grows restless when difficulties arise on each island, the Melvilles quickly grow tired of their dwelling places, and the succession of vignettes depicting such oscillations convincingly suggest that living in successive homes also turns out to be a form of homelessness. Writing to Earl Brewster, Lawrence did in fact own up to his own boredom with places at times. “And like you, I’ve had a spell of loathing the Italian countryside altogether, and feeling that Italy is no place for a man to live in. I nearly decided to go off to Bavaria” (Letters VI 56, italics in the original). Arguing financial considerations, he nevertheless contradicts himself, announcing that he has “taken the house [Villa Mirenda] at least for six months more” (Letters VI 56).
17Living in successive homes encapsulates the “crisis of self-contradiction” (Doherty 62) staged within the confines of the short story. After devoting ten years to their spiritual pursuits, founding the quest on materialist considerations painfully magnifies financial constraints, since the quest for an adequate home to display their things is assimilated to building a “cage” (VG 87) around Erasmus Melville, who will have to find employment to secure a house. Interestingly, Lawrence had already associated homes, and in particular detached houses, with work and other mundane social realities, for instance in Kangaroo (1923), where bungalows stand for the inevitability of dwelling in a specific place. On arriving in Sydney with Somers, her husband, Harriett’s suggestion that they should white-wash the walls of their rented house is met with disapproval by Somers, to whom she replies “Why not? You must have walls” (K 12). More significantly the bungalow of one of their acquaintances, Jack Callcott, is called “Wyework”: “it had been built by a man […] who had written thus permanently his retort against society on this door. ‘Wyewurk?’ said Jack. ‘Because you’ve jolly well got to’” (K 42).
18In “Things,” such constraints are significantly embedded in the text when the intrusive narrative voice takes linguistic control over the characters to foreground the paradoxes of idealism coupled with materialism. Indeed, in his discussion of the short story, John Preston astutely points out that, like the quest for their ideal, the characters themselves undergo a “process of constant and continuing re-definition” (252), thanks to an accumulation of correctives “but,” “yet,” “however,” “still,” characterisation being syntactically contradicted by the narrator, as in “They both had a little money. Not much, however” (VG 79). The narrator’s voice, mingling with the free indirect speech of the characters, fashions, in Bakhtinian terms, a dialogized heteroglossia which partakes, in my view, in the overall multiplicity and heterogeneity promoted in the narrative and is intensified by the economy of the short story. The modernist process that consists in destabilising characterisation, in this instance by resorting to correctives, thus builds what Preston calls “a linguistic trap” which seems to “snap shut” on the characters, to convey that “the story is about being trapped” in materialism (251). The deluded characters are never in control of their fate and Erasmus will have to consider earning a living.
19What is more, the correctives also resonate with Lawrence’s cautious warning to Brewster not to misread the story. “You’ll think it is you, but it isn’t,” he wrote (Brewster 1934, 179). Using the corrective in his letter, Lawrence makes sure to distance his friends from a short fiction which oscillates between delusion and disillusion.
20Throughout the story, the Melvilles’ status as expatriates is repeatedly stressed so as to foreground the irony of the couple’s quest. While travelling through Europe, they have, in fact, maintained an illusory and nostalgic image of their homeland and which belongs to the past, before America turned into “the Sodom and Gomorrah of industrial materialism” (VG 84). After their first exalted illusion that “they became real Parisians,” they grow disappointed with the French capital city, finding that “the endlessly clever materialism of the French […] gives a sense of barrenness and incompatibility with true New England depth. So our two idealists felt” (VG 80, emphasis added). Beyond “our,” which signals another intrusion of the narrative voice, the irony lies in the fact that the couple gauge place according to their homeland rather than to European standards, as when Italy “seemed much nearer to the New England conception of beauty […]. The two idealists seemed to breathe their own true air in Italy” (VG 80, emphasis added). Thanks to the recurrent juxtaposition of the couple’s origins and their location in Europe, the text thus bears the trace of the geographical displacements and conflicting worldviews that characterise the quest. A parallel can be drawn with the previous owners of Lou Witt’s ranch, in St Mawr (1925), and in particular the wife of a trader whose origin is similarly linked to her search for beauty, as in
if it had been a question simply of living through the eyes, into the distance, then this [the landscape in New Mexico] would have been Paradise, and the little New England woman on her ranch would have found what she was always looking for, the earthly paradise of the spirit. (146)
21In America, the Melvilles’ thwarted efforts to find a house suited to their needs dispel their illusions completely. The sharp contrast between the geographical and domestic features of the cabin in the mountains and the cottage on the Pacific coast strikingly renders the extent of the couple’s frustration, since the simple life in the mountains is marred by the daily chores of housekeeping while the labour-saving amenities of the cottage only expose the couple more to the overwhelming brute force of the ocean. The stark contrast between the two dwelling places is emblematic of the oscillating values of the Melvilles, where the crucial question of “dwelling”, of home, is subordinated to their desperate hunt for a home that is, above all else, a place in which to display their things.
22As life in their homeland impresses on them the need for Erasmus to find a scholastic position thanks to his qualifications, a crucial linguistic shift takes place, the couple reverting to American phrases and idioms, as David Lodge astutely argues, in “Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin: D.H. Lawrence and Dialogic Fiction,” writing:
the couple’s acceptance of a way of life antithetical to everything they had previously aspired to is represented by the change in their speech, from the refined, cultured, “European” cadences and constructions of the earlier part of the story, to a native American idiom characterised by a kind of crass, cracker-barrel folk-wisdom. (quoted in Cushman 88)
23It is noteworthy, however, that the narrative voice maintains a distance with such idiomatic language by signaling its occurrences, as in “But it had been the strange, vague threat that the Statue of Liberty had always held over them ‘Thou shalt get a job!’ Erasmus had the tickets, as they say” (VG 84, emphasis added). Lodge’s Bakhtinian analysis of free indirect style and the doubly-voiced speech of the narrative rightly demonstrates how “Lawrence reveals the superficiality of the couple’s pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful by describing it in their own kind of language” (quoted in Cushman 88).
24I would also suggest that a pivotal scene which reinforces such linguistic disruptions takes place when the Melvilles return to New England, to pay a visit to Valerie’s parents who live in Massachusetts (VG 85-86). In this double-homecoming scene, that combines country and parents, Valerie’s mother, the only other character to speak in the short story, introduces the idea that the couple “are living like rats in a hole” (VG 86), a comparison which marks a break with the so far subdued phrasing used to depict the couple’s circumstances. The rat imagery is followed through when Erasmus accepts a faculty position; “He glowered at her [Valerie] like a cornered rat […] He was inside the cage […] Erasmus look[ed] at her with queer sharp eyes of a rat” (VG 87).
25Besides the rat imagery, the figurative reference to a lobster further contributes to a doubling of voices, as when Erasmus, exclaims towards the end of the story, “Europe’s the mayonnaise all right, but America supplies the good old lobster – what?” (VG 87). Although this statement seems jovial enough, by berating the experience in Europe it only expresses a downhearted attempt to give in to the American modern way of life and settle in Ohio. As Harris remarks, “Europe has descended from ‘the fountainhead of tradition’ and beauty to the supplier of mayonnaise for American lobster” (236). What is noteworthy, though, is that Erasmus Melville’s quip about America supplying “the good old lobster” ironically follows a description of “the furnaces of Cleveland, vast and like the greatest of black forests, with red and white-hot cascades of gushing metal, and tiny gnomes of men, and terrific noises, gigantic” (VG 87), a juxtaposition which concurs with the fact that, in Lawrence’s works, the lobster carries rather derogatory undertones, suggesting a spiral of descent into a mechanized and unauthentic world. In St Mawr, for instance, lobster and mayonnaise are strongly associated with the characters’ ambivalence towards other Americans. During a stop in Havana, Jamaica, on the way to the United-States, Lou’s mother watches “transfixed” an American couple dine on lobster, white wine, champagne and port (128). Her fellow Americans’ indulgence in food and drink leads Mrs Witt to leave the scene hastily. Similarly, in Santa Fé, “for two days mother and daughter ate in the mayonnaise intimacy of the [hotel] dining-room” and when, disgusted with the touristic crowd, Mrs Witt decides to have her meals in her room, Lou feels “this was worse than Europe” (133).
26More significantly, the lobster is plainly associated with the industrial world in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published the same year as “Things,” when Clifford Chatterley is described as
drifting off to this other weirdness of industrial activity, becoming almost suddenly changed into a creature with a hard, efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and lobsters of the modern industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the crustacean order. (110)
27In “Things,” then, once the Melvilles return to their native country, the figurative rat and lobster supplant the tree imagery that pervaded the first part of the story, a subtle shift that clearly signals the failure of the spiritual quest, and the concessions the couple are compelled to make to modern America.
28The modernist story is therefore one of polarity challenged by multiplicity, as aspirations for spiritual elevation give way to passions “running horizontally” (VG 82). Eventually the dialogized voices at play, together with the shifting imagery, point to an outcome based on compromise. This ambivalent resolution of the “crisis of contradiction” caused by the Melvilles’ unremitting need to display their possessions for guests to admire calls into question the definition of “home.” Given the couple’s utter failure not to compromise, it comes as no surprise that the Melvilles’ new home on the college lot of Cleveland University becomes the site of discrepancies and contradictions. When guests are entertained, the Melvilles can actually display their heterogeneous collection of things, now qualified as “that woebegone débris of Europe,” however their possessions “all loo[k] perfectly out of keeping” in their “up-to-date little house” (VG 87). The Melville’s home further accommodates the contrast between Europe and America, in the way the characters themselves have turned into exhibits to be admired, as when, for instance, Erasmus, hosting guests, “show[s] off his best European manner, but still quite cordial and American” (VG 87). The geographical and cultural dichotomy comically supplements the couple’s shift to the American idiom, which can be said to be “out of keeping” with both the narrator’s voice and the European mannerisms that characterised their speech in the first part of the story.
29The modernist ending, leaving open to conjecture how long the Melvilles, and Erasmus in particular, will endure living with such concessions, bears out the redefinition of the home as a space dedicated to collections, a sort of museum. In this respect, the Melvilles’ home is remarkably similar to that of Lou Witt in London, where she “saw her pale, delicate room with its little green agate bowl and its two little porcelain birds and its soft, roundish chairs, turned into something ghostly, like a room set out in a museum” (121). Reflecting that little museum labels could be placed on her furniture, she too feels that her things, at once old and fashionable, are “out of keeping” with the kind of life she aspires to lead. Contrary to the materialist couple that the Melvilles turn out to be, Lou still aspires to authenticity, wondering, before she leaves for her homeland, America, “My house, my house, my house, how can I ever have taken so much pains about it!” (121). Thus, while their homeland is actually the place where the materialist trap snaps shut on the Melvilles, America still offers Lou, and to Lawrence as a British expat, opportunities to reconnect with authenticity. After all, Lawrence did eventually find his bho tree, a large ponderosa pine tree known as “the Lawrence tree,” on the Kiowa ranch, the only dwelling place he and his wife, Frieda, ever owned.