Dear P_,
I’m going to make an appointment with the doctor here to see if there’s a medical reason why I feel so low all the time. It’s winter now. We barely get five hours of full daylight — that’s if the clouds part. My starting point is social awkwardness. I’m in a foreign country. I’m at — a disadvantage. Perhaps it’s a lingering symptom of my fixation on the recent past — the divorce etc — but that is years ago now. Can grief and self-pity hang around that long? I tell myself not, most days anyway.
Yes, I read the short story we discussed last week in our session. It’s odd; even though I found it in my collection and shared an image of the header page with you, I still somehow managed to fix the title in my memory as Jimmy and the Dangerous Woman.
When I got your WhatsApp message yesterday asking me what I thought about the story, naturally then my thoughts sprouted from the seed that I thought Lawrence had planted. He wanted us to take it as given that poor downtrodden Mrs. Emilia (Emily) Pinnegar was ‘dangerous’. Dangerous to whom exactly (other than Jimmy)? Well I can see it clear enough, I thought. He tells us so; she has slow, cat’s eyes…smoldering, like a predator weighing up her next meal, coiled and languid in equal measure. When she washes her coalminer husband’s dust-caked back before the fire, she does it as if she were prepping a turkey for the table: industriously, dispassionately. She can switch off — up there. Or perhaps she has long ago switched off, and the recession of life’s spirit has left behind an imprint, a cold shadowy place where joy, kindness, happiness once used to jostle energetically. Does that make her dangerous though? That she might appear sinister and derisive while fulfilling the unpleasant daily duty of washing her husband’s back without prospect of reward by way of a kind look, a smile, a recognition that she was anything more than a household appliance? Did that make her dangerous — the vacuum, the absence where emotion should be?
Well of course, as I went back to thinking about the story again I realised the mistake I’d made, and I couldn’t then help thinking how telling it was, that I’d transposed that adjective with that one. Desperate. Dangerous. A cornered creature. But then more fertile ground came into view. Why would Lawrence want to mark Emily as ‘desperate’ anyway? Surely it’s Jimmy who’s desperate? Really. He’s the pathetic, middle-aged divorcee of no obvious allure. Poor little Jimmy. But he’s still the ‘man’ — with the instincts of his sex intact (and this is Lawrence’s work after all.) What is not desperate about determining in an instant to plunge yourself into an open-ended commitment — to a wo-man, a hu-man about whom and about whose living situation you know nothing — and to which you’ve applied little if any practical aforethought? What is not desperate about defining one’s desirable future self by alliance with an inferior? Imaginative self reconstruction…with magic mirrors.
Is it salvation that Jimmy the beta, shambling man wants to sell to this stranger of a woman who sends him poetry for publication? Desperate Emily? Is that the lure and the power he wishes to dangle in front of her? Can he (does he) really become the Solomon in the eyes [and heart] of this lowly, chosen novitiate? I wonder, knowing just a little about myself (and by extension perhaps about the nature of things for others (one hopes to not be alone)) that there’s first the declared propositions we make to ourselves: the justifications, the ‘reasons’, the product of our admirable, shiny cogitations. And then there’s the animus — the primal — within us. It thinks too, wordlessly, and more quickly than ‘I’ can. It decides, before I can, why a certain thing should really be done — to soothe the storm inside perhaps, to settle scores or balance the books, to refloat the sinking boat. Sharp, unscrupulous Id motions in our heads that our conscious selves mostly have to sheath in acceptably safe justification: countering moderations. What Jimmy really wants is revenge. Revenge for being rejected goods, the cuckold. He even admits it (on Page 584 in my copy). Desperate and adventurous he feels he’s been — to enter another husband’s house and boldly steal his wife away. Poor, desperate Emily, who cannot make up her mind for so long whether she wants to leave even this grey existence she has, who puts him off and delays her departure as long as possible. To her, it’s a viable business proposition I would think — an exchange of known misery for something different; at least not so oppressive, she thinks. Clarissa the former and Emily the future might not be so different after all. And Jimmy will realise this — too late of course. The story ends and I think he realises it, too late of course. The worm has indeed turned: back on itself. Poor Jimmy.
