Report of the Forty-Fourth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Nicholas Royle
‘Reading Lawrence’s ‘Second-Best’: In the Wake of the Mole’
May 22nd 2025, by Zoom, 18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
23 people attended, including, outside of England, Lucas Campoli in Canada, Shanee Stepakoff in Connecticut, Shirley Bricout in Brittanny, Philip Chester and Robert Bullock in Paris, Maria Treijling in Stockholm, Marina Ragachevskaya in Gdansk, and Kathleen Vella in Malta.
INTRODUCTION
‘This talk offers a reading of Lawrence’s ‘Second-Best’ (first published in 1912), giving particular attention to the moles that feature in this story. It draws on Lawrence’s letters and Fantasia of the Unconscious, as well as other writers including Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Marx, Forster, Kafka and Bertrand Russell. The figure of the mole in ‘Second-Best’ invites a fresh thinking of the human in relation to the queer and anomalous, the demonic and the ‘new fantastic’’.
BIOGRAPHY
Nicholas Royle has been Professor of English (now Emeritus) at the University of Sussex since 1999. He has also taught at the Universities of Oxford (1981-87), Tampere (1987-92), and Stirling (1992-99); and he has given lectures, classes and readings in many countries around the world. Royle is the author of many books, including Telepathy and Literature (1990), E.M. Forster (1999), The Uncanny (2003), How to Read Shakespeare (2004), In Memory of Jacques Derrida (2009), Quilt (2010), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), Mother: A Memoir (2020), Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (2020), and David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (2023). In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (1995), An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (6th edition, 2023) and This Thing Called Literature (2nd edition, 2024). He is joint managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review: his edited collection of essays on Kafka’s The Trial, 100 Years On will appear in July 2025. He has recently written a detective novel and is currently completing a monograph on The New Fantastic.
READING
‘Second-Best’. ‘Death Drive’ in The Uncanny and ‘Veering with Lawrence’ in Veering might be helpful if readers want to have a clearer sense of my engagements with Lawrence. There is also David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, but Lawrence’s presence there is perhaps more oblique (except in terms of thinking about ‘the Croydon of our lives’).
HANDOUT
Summary of ‘Second-Best’:
The document explores the complex emotions and interactions between two young women, Frances and Anne, against a rural backdrop.
Characters
- Frances is 23 years old, practical yet whimsical, struggling with her feelings for Jimmy and Tom. Anne is a younger girl, innocent and curious, often looking up to Frances.
Themes
- The struggle between innocence and experience is evident in the characters’ interactions.
- The document highlights the complexities of relationships and unrequited love.
- Nature serves as a backdrop, reflecting the characters’ emotional states.
Plot Development
- The story unfolds in a rural setting, emphasizing the tranquillity and heat of summer.
- Frances grapples with her feelings for two men, Jimmy and Tom, leading to emotional turmoil.
- A pivotal moment occurs when Anne captures a mole, symbolizing innocence lost and the harsh realities of life.
Emotional Tone
- The narrative conveys a sense of melancholy and introspection, particularly through Frances’s character.
- There is a juxtaposition of light-hearted moments with deeper, more serious themes of loss and indifference.
- The characters experience a range of emotions, from joy to despair, reflecting their inner conflicts.
Helena wanted the day-wanness to be quite wiped off the west. She asked for the full black night, that would obliterate everything save Siegmund. Siegmund it was that the whole world meant. The darkness, the gorse, the downs, the specks of light, seemed only to bespeak him. She waited for him to come back. She could hardly endure the condition of intense waiting.
He came, in his grey clothes almost invisible. But she felt him coming.
‘No good,’ he said, ‘no vestige of a path. Not a rabbit-run.’
‘Then we will sit down awhile,’ said she calmly.
‘“Here on this mole-hill,”’ he quoted mockingly.
(The Trespasser)
‘And you are a miner!’ she exclaimed in surprise.
‘Yes. I went down when I was ten.’
She looked at him in wondering dismay.
‘When you were ten! And wasn’t it very hard?’ she asked.
‘You soon get used to it. You live like th’ mice, an’ you pop out at night to see what’s going on.’
‘It makes me feel blind,’ she frowned.
‘Like a moudiwarp!’ he laughed. ‘Yi, an’ there’s some chaps as does go round like moudiwarps.’ He thrust his face forward in the blind, snout-like way of a mole, seeming to sniff and peer for direction. ‘They dun though!’ he protested naïvely. ‘Tha niver seen such a way they get in. But tha mun let me ta’e thee down some time, an’ tha can see for thysen.’
She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly opened before her. She realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch of appeal in her pure humility.
‘Shouldn’t ter like it?’ he asked tenderly. ‘’Appen not, it ’ud dirty thee.’
She had never been ‘thee’d’ and ‘thou’d’ before.
The next Christmas they were married […].
(Sons and Lovers)
But answer made it none. Yet once methought
It lifted up it head and did address
Itself to motion like as it would speak.
But even then the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away
And vanished from our sight.
(Hamlet 1.2.215-20)
They shrink in, as Moles
(Nature’s mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from Light – then listen for its sound; –
See but to dread, and dread they know not why –
The natural alien of their negative eye.
(S.T. Coleridge, ‘Moles’)
And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion!
(‘Mountain Lion’)
PRESENTATION
Nicholas started by reflecting on the figure of the mole: the generally-ignored figure of the subterranean, or miner, or penis, or spy. He argued for the centrality of moles to ‘Second-Best’, as ‘a telltale messenger of human cruelty and anthropocentric violence, species extinction, climate collapse and AI meltdown.’ Regarding the last, and in contrast to his own characterisation of the story, he provided us with Adobe’s proffered AI summary of ‘Second-Best’, which appears on the handout above; during the pause in which the AI ‘thought’, he sensed that he was detecting a small animal furtively busy, as yet invisible. He found what came to the surface to be emotionally-illiterate ‘disgusting, inedible, fake-intelligible language’, selecting for especial critique the term ‘rural backdrop’, and the description of the mole as a symbol.
Nicholas found in the ‘second-best’ of the title an echo of Shakespeare’s ‘second-best bed’ – the term, a verbal moudiwarp, having burrowed its way through the centuries – and noted that the ghost of Hamlet’s father, supposedly once played by Shakespeare, is an Old Mole. (He found the relationship between Lawrence and Shakespeare to be an untapped vein of criticism, not least in relation to The Trespasser, with its own moles.)
Whereas the mole in ‘Second-Best’ appears to be second-best to man, woman and girl, it is in fact aligned with the narrator itself. It could be described as ‘molelike’, as well as ‘secretive’, ‘cryptic’, ‘queer’, ‘demonic’, ‘anomalous’, ‘unpredictable’, ‘unidentifiable’, ‘blind’, ‘veering’, ‘shrinking’ and ‘telepathic’ – all more adequate terms than the traditional critical lexicon of omniscience and focalisation. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, too, the mole is also a figure for the writer which, with its free-fall improvisatory associations, deprivileges sight and pays attention to the vibrations of the surroundings (this book was published in the year that Kafka began ‘The Burrow’). Lawrence once counselled Russell to become a mole – feeling his way rather than thinking, and not doing but being; Forster was nicknamed the taupe by Strachey, and surfaced unexpectedly, and flittingly, in Lawrence’s life.
In ‘Second-Best’ the mole is not only a repository of metaphors, and a fetish object in the relationship between Frances and Tom, but an animal – two individuals – of intrinsic value, burrowing beneath the story’s and characters’ apparent dismissal of them. He noted that moles do not in fact bask in the sun; they appear to do so only during drought (such as occurred during the summer of 1911) due to lack of worms, making them visible victims of what today resonates as climate emergency. Finally, the mole in ‘Second-Best’ invites the reader herself to become a mole, to veer off, and to create a new form of the text.
DISCUSSION
Maria Trejling wondered about the relationship of moles to Nicholas’s key concept of veering; they seemed to her to be, rather than veerers, slow, persistent diggers. Nicholas found the structure of their burrows to be characterised by veering, and that they themselves veer within them (as Kafka represents in ‘The Burrow’) – but that, indeed, they do not dart like a rat or mouse; ‘Second-Best’ itself points this out in the painful failure of the mole to escape Anne’s cane. He added that he himself felt himself as much followed by, as following, moles. His friend Hélène Cixous calls him ‘mole’, and he embraces this especially since he finds this animal singular in its otherness to the human.
Shanee Stepakoff thought that rebirth, as well as the underworld, is suggested by Women in Love’s likening of Loerke to a rat. Catherine Brown, though, found rat analogies across Lawrence’s oeuvre (for example as applied to Dostoevsky) to be overwhelmingly negative rather than fecund, and as implicitly occupying a low position in the existential hierarchy adumbrated by Lawrence in ‘Reflections in the Death of a Porcupine’. That same essay embraces horizontal equality too, but the vertical dimension should not be lost sight of.
Naomi Wynter-Vincent observed that the concept of ‘second-best’ is connected to ‘settling’ (as Frances does in accepting Tom Smedley), but that settling is the opposite of what moles do. Nicholas acknowledged that moles’ matings are brief, but that they do have a home, from which they veer but to which they return. In the story as a whole there is much homecoming, as there is in the parallel story of ‘Fanny and Annie’. Naomi shared Nicholas’s critique of AI, but thought that in moles’ short-sightedness, lack of teleology, and simple burrowing forwards, they resembled AI in its functioning. Nicholas concurred, saying ‘there is a mole in Elon Musk’.
John Worthen wondered why farmers kill moles. Nicholas wasn’t sure, but didn’t accept that they were significant pests, as is largely born out by this Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust article, with its repeated hypotheticals, and its overall recommendation of leaving moles alone.
Catherine took from Nicholas’s likening of moles to Palestinians the observation that it is visual images – of the mole snuffling in the sunlight, or Palestinians in their suffering – that most cut through the discourses that deny or discount them.
