The Captain's Doll

As luck would have it my copy of 'The Tales of D. H. Lawrence' ecaped the various culls and was sitting on its usual shelf. A fat book, inscribed in pencil 'First edition thus' and published by one Martin Secker in 1934, presumably the Secker who subsequently morphed into Secker & Warburg, before eventually being gobbled up by Random House in 1997. Despite being fat there was no critical apparatus, not even the date of first publication of the stories therein, the only concession to such matters being a chronological presentation, with 'The Captain's Doll' about half way through. I have to go to Wikipedia to find that this tale was first published in 1923, more than forty years after Ibsen published his play of similar name.

As it turns out the rather guarded phrase 'there was overlap' does about cover what I now find to be the case. Lawrence is writing about one partner in love treating the other as a doll, although in his case he is more concerned about the wife or lover doing it rather than the husband.

A strong story; not sure if I have read all of it before, although I had certainly read the beginning before. Strong evocation of the life of displaced aristos. in post first world war Germany, even stronger evocation of hearty holidays in the Austrian Tyrol. The whole wrapped around a subtle love story, although structurally simple, being a story in two halves: the Captain and his German mistress in occupied Germany pivoting over the unexpected death of the wife onto the Captain getting his mistress back from the Tyrolese moutains. Quite a lot of mentions of 'Jews of the wrong sort'. I don't know how anti-Semitic or not Lawrence was but it is not the sort of language which would do these days and some of his other work does have a rather fascist flavour about it, at least in the sense of being full of life forces and such like. In mitigation it seems that the Jews of the wrong sort did not much care for the atheletic, hearty and bare limbed Germans marching up and down the mountains in their droves, a species which Lawrence seems to have had a special antipathy for, perhaps, in part at least, reflecting his own tubercular physique.

Lawrence does not seem to be very keen on mountains generally, hating the great expanses of barren stone and ice. An odd echo here of the odd feeling I had recently outside a church porch in King's Lynn, a feeling of the unsuitability of stone as a building material. Clumsy great stuff, imbuing the porch with its massiveness & clumsiness; much better to use something a bit lighter like steel, brick or timber. I think I have got over it.

With the added interest of Lawrence himself having married a German aristo. - at least to the extent of her name including a 'von' - but I have no idea whether she was displaced.

As luck would also have it, Leavis on Lawrence - from the Seven Arts Book Club - also escaped the cull and offers an essay on this very story. Clearly the next stop, although a quick riffle suggests that it might be rather heavier going than the story itself. Nevertheless, a strong story and a strong (if presently unfashionable) critic, so probably worth a bit more effort.

While Amazon, for once, fails. It seems that there was a television film of the story made back in 1983, transposing the action to a US naval captain during the cold war and adding in some sex absent from the story (I suppose the adaptor thought that sex was mandatory for Lawrence), but never issued as a DVD. Probably not missing much as I see it as an arty film shot on location in costume, in black and white and in which all those clean limbed young Germans whom Lawrence so disliked would come out very well. Very Riefenstahl?