[In the following essay, Balbert argues against Trilling's interpretation of D. H. Lawrence's Mr Noon.]

“Is not the marriage bed a fiery battlefield as well as a perfect communion, both simultaneously.”

Diana Trilling's prominent, severe attack in The New York Times Book Review on the ethics of D. H. Lawrence and the ethos of Mr Noon requires a response. Trilling's pioneering criticism on Lawrence in the 1940s and 1950s is well-known and often helpful; through the years—although not recently—she has written several intelligent and largely sympathetic assessments of both the novelist and his work. In her 1984 review of Mr Noon, she correctly asserts that “for anyone interested in the derivation and interpretation of Lawrence's sexual doctrine, it is mandatory reading” (24). Why then does Mr Noon provoke such a hostile reaction in her that she concludes the essay with the specter of self-deceiving D. H. Lawrence also misleading generations of readers and critics about his true feelings on marriage, infidelity, and sexual license?

In brief, she argues that in the newly published Part II of Mr Noon, primarily because of both the depiction of Gilbert Noon's permissive answer to the news of Johanna's affair with Stanley, and the consistent evidence of Johanna's inveterate promiscuity so tolerantly and exuberantly dramatized in the novel, Trilling angrily concludes that the seminal celebration in his other works of marriage, monogamy, and sexual responsibility must now be read as a species of hypocrisy and pretense by an uncloseted, decadent novelist. She regards Mr Noon as the emergence of Lawrence's dirty little secret, as the startling disclosure of his concealed libertinism—as the smoking gun, in effect, that he manages to camouflage with a veneer of puritanism throughout his career. Further, Trilling confidently deduces that such marital infidelity “was a condition on which Lawrence built his marriage,” and thus—for here is the radical assertion of her unrelenting logic—everything else that Lawrence wrote must now be reinterpreted as an attempt “to deceive us that he wrote from within the boundaries of monogamous marriage”; she concludes by arguing that such hypocrisy by Lawrence “must shadow … our view of him as among the bolder of our modern authors” (25). So Trilling considers Mr Noon as a form of pernicious high disclosure—indeed, she sees it as nothing less than a revealing showdown at noon that leaves us with the corpse of established Lawrencean dialectic.

I propose to respond to Trilling in three ways. First, I shall isolate a provocative pattern of metaphors in this novel, a virtual “utensil erotica” of various spoon and fork references that integrate the two parts of Mr Noon and ultimately suggest a nurturant and quintessentially Lawrencean doctrine of marriage and sex that Trilling misses in the heat of her indictment of apostasy. Second, I shall glance at the confrontation scene between Gilbert and Johanna concerning her night with Stanley; my attempt here will be to place that episode within the brilliantly developed pattern of the seven preceding arguments between Gilbert and Johanna; those seven intimate dramas comprise an interrelated thematic sequence that helps determine the motivations both for her affair with Stanley and for Gilbert's unorthodox approach to her confession. Lastly, I shall suggest that Trilling's character assassination fails to contemplate an interesting clue at the end of this unfinished manuscript about the emotional direction of their present “honeymoon” and coming marriage.

II

Part I of Mr Noon was published posthumously in a 1934 volume appropriately titled by his publishers as A Modern Lover. Gilbert Noon's variously frustrating and titillating amorous exploits make him an eminently contemporary and decidedly un-Lawrencean lover early in the twentieth century, as he predictably plays out his games amid the regulated customs of Midlands social dating and marriage. Such regional habits of customized and mildly daring love, of course, are offensive to Lawrence's doctrinal emphasis throughout his career—and noticeably in Part II of Mr Noon—on the need for risk-taking, polarity, and achieved “otherness” in marriage and sexual courtship. Despite his possible rebellious impregnation of Emmie and his consequent dismissal from the school, Noon remains as much a bored, mechanical, and “modern lover” in Part I as he is an unconventional, committed, and instinctual mate to Johanna by the end of Part II.

In this coquettish, inhibited environment, all is tolerated in necking provided it stops short of copulation and/or legal fuss. Even those restrictions are circumvented when the affair is quickly channelled into a marriage contract, and thus the community-sponsored habit of “spooning” is preserved as a sanctioned, safe mode of Sunday evening dating practice. When early in Part I Lewie Goddard argues, in his silly defense of this teasing, undignified custom of spooning, that it is “natural” (15), Lawrence thus uses Lewie's error to define the craven sexual spirit of an era: the stimulating lubrication of a tongue on the face and neck of a lover pretends to satisfy the more urgent needs of a country's aroused suitors and ladies. It is a supposedly informed generation that, to Lawrence's disgust, congratulates itself on its liberated notions, on its trendy tolerance for restricted groping in dark hallways. To Lawrence this mild reaction against Victorian restriction and prudery promotes an alternate danger: it ultimately unsexes young men and women by regulating and publicizing their sexual customs, and thus—the ultimate direction of this century's conformity—it makes their secret lusts tepid and casual. But Lawrence knows it is too late for his disapproval, as a mere twenty years has transformed the Midlands. “There are only spooners now, a worldful of spoons” (20), as the narrator is drawn to the popular name of this unconsummating and closed-ended game; Lawrence highlights a dainty food implement to suggest the measured and routinized response to sexual appetite that is the accepted rage for modern lovers.

Throughout his prolific career—in novels, stories, and essays—Lawrence comments with conviction and precosity on an obsessive theme: the insidious relation between that superficially more tolerant, “progressive” attitude about sexuality emerging during World War I, and the consequent—or parallel—domesticating, deprivatizing, and mechanizing of the sensual instinct in man. What Lawrence's contemporary intelligentsia and trend-setters consider to be a beneficent socio-cultural revolution, he regards as the cutting edge of a modernist madness. He has no sentimental attachment, however, to an earlier world of dark Victorian taboos and inhibitions; but he is equally horrified by the early twentieth-century impulse to tame sex by submitting it to the public scrutiny of medical do-gooders, opportunistic politicians, and fashionable social scientists.

Just two years before Lawrence began work on Mr Noon, Dr. Marie Stopes published an eminently liberal and crusading book on sexuality, governmental responsibilities, and reproductive issues for women, and it was titled—with an unintended irony Lawrence would appreciate—Modern Love. This popular and controversial study focuses particularly on England's failure to address openly such issues as women's rights, birth control, sexual passion, and problems of pregnancy. While Stopes does not directly analyze the raging phenomenon of spooning, she encourages the pragmatic spirit of a realistic and demystified post-war age; she sees the time as propitious to save people, at last, from the excesses of their unregulated instincts. The redemptive mechanisms urged by Stopes include mass federal programs, unrestricted medical pamphlets for the young, and a more clinical discussion of the needs and vices of female sexuality.

D. H. Lawrence was characteristically offended by Stopes's dominant notion that sex is better and healthier when mystery is removed from it, when it is subordinated to the prime goal of child-rearing, and when it is unabashedly “clarified” by the expertise of medical educators and humane public officials. His most direct response to her work occurred nearly a decade after Modern Love, in his 1929 essay “Pornography and Obscenity.” In that spirited and urgent message from a dying man, his scathing criticism of her school of what he calls “wise and scientific” idealism seems especially appropriate to the wasteful sexual dalliances of Gilbert Noon in Part I. Before I quote from Lawrence's essay, here is part of his most extended description of spooning in the novel; I intrude in the middle of Emmie and Gilbert's little diversion, just as the heat begins to envelop them:

Let us mention that this melting and ripening capacity is one of the first qualities for a good modern daughter of Venus, a perfect sweetness in a love-making girl, the affectionate comradeship of a dear girl deepening to a voluptuous enveloping warmth, a bath for the soft Narcissus, into which he slips with voluptuous innocence. … Only let him kiss her ears, and it was a consummation. … Yet we have hardly fathomed the heights and depths of the spoon in the Co-op. entry. (21-23, my emphasis)

In Lawrence's criticism of Stopes a decade later, it is hard not to recall such a passage about Emmie and Gilbert in their degrading posture of sexual semi-ecstasy, as they stand and grope amid the defined limits of exploration near the book stalls. Their fundamental hypocrisy is caught so precisely and bitterly by Lawrence with his oxymoronic phrase, “voluptuous innocence”; their pretense of eternal virginity in spooning; the sentimental imagery of flowers and of unearthly heights achieved; the big lie that purity is the requirement for sexual indulgence; the pretense that “consummation” is a matter of workmanship by a crafty spooner rather than a special gift brought by the instinctual delivery to the unknown; the inevitable boring drift by Emmie into dispassionate union with another man in marriage—all these recollections about Emmie and Gilbert have relevance for Lawrence's blast in “Pornography and Obscenity” at the destructive habits of a meek sexual revolution:

The idealists along the Marie Stopes line, and the young bohemians of today have killed the dirty little secret as far as their personal self goes. But they are still under its dominion socially. In the social world, in the press, in literature, film, theatre, wireless, everywhere purity and the dirty little secret reign supreme. … The young girl, and the young woman, is by tacit assumption pure, virgin, sexless. … She herself knows quite well she isn't sexless and she isn't merely like a flower. But how bear up against the great social lie forced on her? She can't! She succumbs, and the dirty little secret triumphs. She loses her interest in sex, as far as men are concerned, but the vicious circle of masturbation and self-consciousness encloses her still faster. (76-77)

As in the above passage on their spooning, Lawrence's mock-heroic contempt for their exercise in lovemaking is conveyed as Noon's clever mouth takes mind-centered Emmie to new heights of fantasy and titillation; their acrobatic gamesmanship never moves, of course, to real consummation here—neither her expectations nor society's conventions permit that; but the romantic transport is just high enough to give her the self-involved illusion of real ecstasy. She is repeatedly described as a “spoon,” and he the “sport” as the athletic typology makes sense in Lawrence's humorous acknowledgment of society's verbal integration of the playing fields of England with the back-lanes of love. In cricket a “sport” who “spoons” the ball manages “to hit or loft it mildly in the air, with a soft or weak stroke,” as the OED defines the action (2978); it is a mere holding shot, an unengrossing passing of the time, in which technical contact is made but nothing is really accomplished in the game. There is, to use our own downright idiom, no real score.

Further, in Mr Noon, the spoon, as the utensil with a limited and balanced capacity, is to be contrasted with a variety of sharper and less subtle instruments, such as forks, spades, prongs, knives, and plough-shares. These more “predatory” tools and utensils have that greater potential for capacity and strength, as they can exert the powers both of leverage and insertion; they can carry food, unearth the land, and stab through prey—multiple abilities, in effect, provided you have the courage to get near enough to swallow the whole hog, engorge the entire feast, or capture the prize quarry. “He should have a long spoon that sups with the Devil”: it is an appropriate proverbial gloss on this novel's penchant for discrimination between classes of utensils. This conventional and cautious advice, which Lawrence might have known and despised, suggests not only the infamous hot fork with which Lucifer both eats and attacks, but also the timid and lengthy spoon that waits for a visitor to the underworld—indeed, that waits for a “modern lover” who wishes merely to suck the devilish brew while he stays safely far away from the encompassing heat of the cauldron. As Part I of Mr Noon develops, Lawrence begins to interweave aspects of these images in strict dualistic terms. He consistently contrasts patterns of spooning courtship, dainty spoon-feeding, and spoony coyness with versions of fork-like directness, earthy and demonic shovelling, and plough-share power:

It doesn't matter what you do—only how you do it.—Isn't that the sincerest of modern maxims? … Why bother about spades being spades any more? … Ah, dear reader, you don't need me to tell you how to sip love with a spoon, to get the juice out of it. … And there is nothing low about our goings, even if we go to great lengths. A spoon isn't a spade, thank goodness. As for a plough—don't mention it. No, let us keep the spoon of England bright, between us. (20-21)

By the end of Part I, with Noon the spoon-conditioned victim of the inevitable consequences of his affair with Emmie, and with him now adrift and without vocational plans or amorous connections, Lawrence brings down the curtain (where it shall stay for more than sixty years) with a telling warning to the reader. The next section of his novel, we read, shall take his protagonist closer to the real core of sexual love, to the land of predatory forks and the risk of real proximity to hot desire. Lawrence promises, in effect, to move us from the protective shield of a silver spoon to the close, dangerous heat of a devil's prong: “But the second volume is in pickle. The cow in this vol. having jumped over the moon, in the next the dish, dear reader, shall run away with the spoon. Scandalous the elopement, and a decree nisi for the fork. Which is something to look forward to” (93).

III

Part II of Mr Noon begins with an important echo of the conclusion to the Noon-Neville saga; there is an immediate resolution by Lawrence about his intentions in this fiction, and it is accompanied by announcements of its dominant symbology, of the new character of Mr Gilbert Noon, and of the transfiguring love that is at center-stage the rest of the work. Thus Noon awakens in Germany on the first page, in a story where “[y]ou'll not hear another word about Emmie” (97). It is to be a transformed Gilbert Noon, whose vision and experience of love will soon be embattled, unadulterated, and etched with blood on the sharp point of a fork: “So pray cast out of your mind that spoon association, and be prepared for the re-incarnation of Mr Now. Noon is Now” (99). This significant change conforms to the consequences of Lawrence's growing impatience with the comic tone and preoccupations of Part I; Gilbert is no longer Neville but recognizably Lawrence himself, just as the rest of Mr Noon chronicles and contemplates his own singularly undainty, unspoony, and unmodern love affair with his future wife, Frieda, named Johanna Keighley in the novel. The developing alteration of tone in Part II is also corroborated by the new set of adjectives Lawrence uses in his work-in-progress letters on Mr Noon. When Lawrence writes to friends and editors about Part I, it is always its comic elements that he proudly stresses (e.g., see Letters III 626, 639); but the words that appear in his correspondence on the Gilbert- Johanna section are “dangerous” and “unsettling” (e.g., see Letters III 653, 717).

In her first conversation with Noon, Johanna quickly notices their attraction to each other. But she is often disappointed by a lack of erotic authenticity in other men, and she now warns him, in effect, of her experienced contempt for a version of spoon-love—what she calls “sex all in your head” (127). Thus Johanna early establishes her seminal demand for only the most legitimate, unharnessed, and organically complete approach to physical love. She says it simply and without pretense or bravado; it is a cautionary statement of her essential belief, as it announces a profound dissatisfaction with contemporary modes of loving. She believes you must press near enough to feel the earth, you must not settle for the compromise of bright fantasy or for any version of coitus interruptus: “But you can have your sex all in your head, like the saints did. But that I call a sort of perversion. Don't you? Sex is sex, and ought to find its expression in the proper way—don't you think” (127). Noon must hear it as a relevant warning, for he knows with what exuberance he recently entertained himself with flirtations and impotent fixations over Louise, Marta, and now Johanna. In each case his mentalized stimulation at female proximity was sufficient for him, and Johanna Keighley recognizes that momentum for uneventful satisfaction in all modern men. But she wakes Gilbert out of his ingrained habits of evasion. If you “come on” to Johanna and she reciprocates the gambit, you better be prepared not at noon, but now to show her how much you care.

Trilling's adamant dismissal of Lawrence rests primarily on her insistence that the depiction of Stanley's affair with Johanna negates Lawrence's vaunted stress on monogamous marriage, and that such acceptance of infidelity by Noon-Lawrence may even align the writer with the decadent lyricists of open-marriage today. Yet the central passage of doctrine in Mr Noon—that Trilling conspicuously never mentions—remains an open celebration of the institution of marriage; it reads in the novel no less emphatically because of the crucial qualification that concludes Lawrence's praise:

And as for the leaping into the chasm to pure connection with the woman, that needs a basic courage and a strange concerted unison between the two protagonists, which life alone can give. It is absolutely useless going to a prostitute or a libertine. The deep accustomedness of marriage is the only way of preparation. Only those who know one another in the intricate dark ways of physical custom can pass through the seven dark hells and the seven bright heavens of sensual fulfilment. And this is why marriage is sacred. And this is perhaps the secret of the English greatness. …

But now alas the English adventure has broken down. There is no going on. There is cul de sac and white-livered fawning.(191)

What is insisted in this novel, doctrinally through the intrusive narrative sermons, and dramatically through the confrontations between the two lovers, is that the only true, “sacred” marriage remains intense and unstable, risky and transcendent, and—this above all—it is always changing, always “going on” through “dark hells” and “bright heavens,” even when it appears bogged down in the most acute personal struggle. In this demanding marital dynamic, any transitional tension or heated argument, provided it is directly addressed and fully expressed, becomes the intermittent vehicle for avoiding the stasis of spoon adjustment, that intolerable condition Lawrence calls “cul de sac and white-livered fawning.” Thus often the narrator in Part II takes his utensil symbology to the very meat of the matter: “If we are to have yon tasty tuft of grass, or yon patch of sweet-herb, we've got to hop perilously down a precipice for it. And that is what we prefer. God, I don't want to sup life with a spoon. I'd rather go lean-bellied till I'd caught my bird” (152).

The sexual ethic here is clear and unadorned, and its ramifications have particular relevance for Gilbert Noon's accumulated habits from Part I of spooning and “modern love.” Lawrence now warns that it is better to do without, to starve oneself for the real thing, than to settle for the passing satisfaction of easy prey. The following lines from Part II elucidate the same doctrine and employ comparable images; they must be read as exhortations to move close to the fire and the earth, and to have those forks or plough-shares prepared for a reward that is beyond the scope of a petty spoon:

No, damn it all, what was the good of love that wasn't a fight! … Be damned, he did not care to fancy mingling with a woman, as if he and she were two spoonfuls of honey put into the same pot. (173-74)

… If one must reckon the costs, at least let us have the dinner first and reckon afterwards. No matter what the cost is, if we've once had the dinner nobody can take it from us.(179)

… Man is a smith, and it behoves him to smite while the iron is hot, if ever he is to get any shape into life, or any sharpness on his plough-share. (146)

IV

Trilling fails to locate the Stanley incident as the eighth disagreement in an integrated line of seven major quarrels between the two lovers. Such a pattern of conflict confirms the novelist's consistent judgment that lasting marriage must come “out of the sheer, pure, consummate fight,” and that Noon and Johanna are embarked on “a very painful shedding of an old skin” (290) in the process of this struggle. Their first argument may reflect the most representative disagreement between them. Gilbert Noon, who is both profoundly unsympathetic to the pained anthropomorphism of the Christ statues in the mountains, as well as unimpressed by the platitudes of organized religion, pokes fun at the crosses by addressing them in a mocking manner. When Johanna Keighley, a lapsed but still believing and frightened Catholic, objects to his satirical tone, she appropriately reminds him that she was educated in a convent. His cutting response that he was educated “in a Board School” (201) would be fair enough as riposte if Johanna's only concern was the residue of her non-secular belief. But she legitimately worries in a more subjective, superstitious manner that Gilbert can neither understand nor tolerate. She really fears the specter of some vague and abstract punishment to be levelled on her and her children for her own abandonment of a husband and a family. When Noon virtually scoffs at this obsessive anxiety in her, she tells him to leave their bed; he spends a restless, unhappy, and illuminating night alone, in which he begins to realize the desperate extent of his need for her. Perhaps Johanna was vicious to evict him; at bottom, however, the quarrel is the result of Gilbert's typical self-involvement clashing with Johanna's unreserved concern for other people. Writing eight years after the event, D. H. Lawrence demonstrates that Noon-Lawrence knows he is to blame, although in 1912 Noon-Lawrence does not know exactly why: “But probably it was his own fault. Johanna could be horrible like some werewolf that ate men's hearts: only their hearts. His heart still pained him in his left breast.—But probably, probably he had brought it to pass upon himself. There can be no werewolf unless men loose it upon themselves. He must have wanted it” (204).

The second conflict between them develops when Johanna objects to his pompous and inaccurate generalizing about the life of soldiers, which Gilbert naively believes they enjoy as a romantic vocation. The tension here grows beyond the surface issue, for Johanna senses that it really reveals Gilbert's ambivalence about the prospect of his giving up—by way of marriage—a large portion of single male freedom; Gilbert imagines a soldier's life as more open-ended and comradely than it is, and Johanna realizes the childish insecurity that influences his exaggerations about the texture of military service. Their third argument occurs after he excoriates her, as Paul Morel did to Miriam Leivers, for prating about fireflies without necessary emotional restraint. Yet Gilbert's outburst significantly follows his own depressing realization about a major difference between them: she is impressively unashamed about her own nudity and the mundane postures and habits of the human body; he remains tense about his own appearance, and he prefers the quiet peace after consummation to the chaos of engaged passion. No doubt the Gilbert Noon who angrily asks Johanna Keighley to calm down about the insects—“don't gush” (213), as he puts it—is correct in a Lawrencean sense; the intensity of his anger, however, reflects his recognition that her charge that he is an insufferable “dried English stick” (214) has enough validity to justify her compensating over-effusiveness about insects.

Argument four, quite major in its dimension, erupts when Johanna villifies him for not speaking up to the imperious Baroness. It is an accurate but unfair charge, as there was little for an inhibited Gilbert to say in that scene that would not foment more discontent all around; his possible responses to the Baroness would not affect either the adamance of her decision or the resolve of Johanna to stay with him. But Mrs. Keighley will never tolerate passivity in Mr Noon, even when it is understandable and justified. So she goads him to the point of fury about his allegedly unmanly failure with her mother. She incites Noon to a threatening emotion she has never witnessed in him, one that resembles the murderous wrath Gudrun provokes in Gerald before she just escapes behind a door.

The fifth argument, which visibly builds in Johanna for several pages in the novel, is caused by her disgust with his periodic pattern of coldness to her. She correctly sees that such defensive aloofness is occasioned by his inability to resolve, maturely for himself, the circular and essential paradox of any intimacy: that is, the more that Noon realizes his dependency on her and their passionate connection to each other, the more insecure he becomes about his ability to hold a woman whom he now recognizes is crucial to his life. Thus more than once, profound fear nags at Noon after transcendent sex with Johanna, and she notices his moody capitulation to the pangs of worry. Argument six similarly implicates Gilbert as the major culprit, as dangerous Louise collars him when he is most vulnerable; Gilbert is still a soft touch for feminine wiles, and the sister makes him pour out his soul on the state of his relation to Johanna and on the couple's prospects for the future. Johanna is understandably furious at this violation of their own privacy and at his inability to perceive the insidious strategy of a vindictive Louise. Soon Johanna, with a variety of motivations in mind, enacts a mild but public flirtation with a lusty Tyrolese villager at a dance. While Gilbert watches them and correctly interprets Johanna's essential contempt for the man—she would never yield to the man's sense of “over-weening possession” (250), argument seven is now assured. Gilbert is angry at her coquettish game, and he concocts some nonsense of his own. He writes letters to Emmie and Violet, for he knows Johanna will read them. When she rips up his foolish messages, they reconcile once more, and that dangerous state in him—always noted by Johanna—develops again out of a blissful communion: he begins to feel trapped in his relation to her, and he becomes distant and unaffectionate. In short, he returns to the anxieties about the loss of his single self, as he subtly but perceptibly steps back from Johanna; she is left to honor a reconciliation that he has just forgotten in the perversity of his unresolved emotions.

It is at this point in the novel that Johanna sleeps with Stanley. There seems little doubt that the act is foolish on many levels. It not only provides a supreme violation of a tacit, seminal understanding of loyalty between Johanna and Gilbert—who, in essence, are on a honeymoon—but it also strikes us as a gratuitous infidelity with a simpering mother's boy; Stanley is the prototype of the immature male that Johanna persistently denigrates in Mr Noon. She never provides a convincing explanation for having had sex with him; she only offers the lame excuse that she had fallen for the unusual package of his boyish charm combined with his desperate need. She seems stunned by the consequent lack of antagonism from Gilbert over her actions as he instinctively provides a reaction other than the fury she wanted and expected. I believe that Gilbert's mild response is neither cowardice nor ploy; it is the immediate expression of a developing awareness in him that Lawrence, in the writing year of 1920, delicately charts through the depiction of those seven previous arguments in his autobiographical fiction. Mr. Gilbert Noon begins to sense, as early as the initial disagreement between them, that in fundamental ways during their first months together he did not provide Mrs. Johanna Keighley—a woman who dares to leave her own family and her parents for his love—with the confident, unreserved, “basic courage” (191) of active passion that she would require as they make their initial pilgrimage across mountains, countries, and cultural taboos.

It is difficult to assess first cause within the dialectic of a continuing argument between lovers, but it is also hard not to conclude that the confident, secure, and enlightened Lawrence of 1920 is more retrospectively critical of himself than of Johanna. As my capsule summaries of those seven arguments indicate, they comprise lines of developing intensity that both bring us close to the time of Johanna's infidelity, and suggest that a large portion of error is on Gilbert's side. The priapic Mr Noon found it easy to be energetic and engaged during his episodes of uncommitment in Part I, but he never really opens himself up to the more demanding and mature Johanna Keighley. Often when he feels the apocalyptic passion of his closeness to her, Gilbert rebounds with the indulgent isolation and introspection that shield him from further requirements of true intimacy. In short, what Lawrence vaguely senses about his unformed self in 1912, the experienced novelist of 1920 can confirm with artistic certainty.

It is also noteworthy that only after the revelation of Johanna's affair does Gilbert love her, and for the first time, “with a wild self-abandon” (277). So who can contemplate the complex brilliance of Johanna's own motivations for the infidelity? Did she unconsciously see Stanley as the way to break down Gilbert's wall of inhibition and reserve? Or as the way, quite simply, to enact revenge for his aloofness? Or as the available way to confirm her own vital self once again amid the fears of her own commitment to another man? Or was it none of the above, and was Johanna-Frieda merely being Johanna-Frieda, a woman willing to violate an understanding with Gilbert-Lawrence that she feels deprives her of her promiscuous rights?

An emphatic answer is not possible, but the questions raise a larger issue that is more provocative to contemplate. There is no indication by Gilbert Noon in 1912, or by Lawrence the writer in 1920, that such infidelity by Johanna is likely to repeat itself. Lawrence's biographers are quite uncertain about Frieda's fidelity in the last years of Lawrence's life, but they conspicuously have not demonstrated or implied—and neither has Lawrence—any instance of further cheating by her in the eight years between their difficult early months together and the composition of Mr Noon; we know of the Stanley-Harold Hobson affair of 1912, and of David Garnett's allegation that, during that same year, Frieda had sex with a woodcutter, but there is, at least, a likely presumption of fidelity to Lawrence by Frieda in the ensuing decade. In his self-advertising ecstasy in 1912 at the end of the novel, about the birth of his sensual soul, the Lawrence of 1920 confidently recalls his earlier implicit belief that Johanna's betrayal will not occur again. Let us assume that it has not occurred—to Lawrence's knowledge—as he writes Mr Noon. If he was right about her from 1912-1920, was his guess about her fidelity right in the long run—that is, in the decade after his unfinished novel is discarded? Or was his permissive response in 1912 even wise in the short run, and is there more to tell about Johanna's sex life in the months immediately ahead, and about Noon's response to her conduct?

It sounds as if Mr Noon was ready to tell us more about unhappy developments shortly after the affair with Stanley, and we can only speculate on why he never returned to it. Note a place in the novel that is most provocative. It occurs just after Johanna claims that her night with Stanley meant nothing to her. Lawrence writes: “He did not answer. The words fell into the deep geysers of his soul, leaving it apparently untroubled. But in the end the irritable waters would boil up over this same business” (278). What form would this slow boil take? Did Johanna cheat again? More likely, did resentment about Stanley emerge from Gilbert in another context of argument? None of these questions, of course, is answerable, but at least the unfairness of Trilling's charge of hypocrisy must be acknowledged. This is a relationship, a developing, intense marriage that is dynamic, changing, and growing. Trilling does not like Johanna's conduct or Gilbert's response to it. That is her right. But there is no abrogation in this novel of Lawrence's stress during his life and career on monogamous marriage. Gilbert wants Johanna as his wife, and Mr Noon suggests his assumption that he will not have to share her again with another man. Even as the novel closes, there is the distinct sound of the sharp fork, or the tearing ploughshare and spade, or even the cutting knife, all utensils that Lawrence celebrates to replace the conventional silver spoon. Now he uses the instrument not only to eat the dinner of life, or to engage the bounty of earth, but also to be born anew. Gilbert Noon is forgiving to Johanna Keighley because he sees his own emotional failures as a contributing factor in her infidelity, and he is still grateful for the new life she gives him. Who can know for sure if Lawrence was naive to allow, even once, such dispensation in a mate?

If he had married some really nice woman: for of course, gentle reader, we have decided long ago that none of my heroines are really nice women; then he would never have broken out of the dry integument that enclosed him. He would have withered with the really nice woman inside the enclosure. For the act of birth, dear reader, really is not and cannot be a really nice business. It is a bloody and horrid and gruesome affair. And that is what we must face. (291)

Works Cited

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary . New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Lawrence, D. H. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume III: October 1916-June 1921. Ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

———. Mr Noon, Ed. Lindeth Vasey, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

———. “Pornography and Obscenity.” Sex, Literature, and Censorship, Ed. Harry T. Moore. New York Viking, 1959, 64-81.

Trilling, Diana. “Lawrence in Love,” New York Times Book Review. 16 Dec. 1984: 3, 24-25.

Additional coverage of Trilling's life and career is available in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8R, 154; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 10, 46; and Major 20th-Century Writers, Vols. 1, 2.