Odour of Chrysanthemums [short story]

This takes you to the heart and hearth of a Nottinghamshire coalmining village, for a single evening, c1909. There’s no big twist. The transformative event is no surprise. It’s about context, consequences, and self-awareness.

Contrasts

The opening paragraph pits the power of technology (“threats of speed” and “inevitable movement” as “the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms”) against ordinary people (a woman “insignificantly trapped” between a hedge and racing train) and the natural world (the “withered oak”). The third paragraph foreshadows what's to come (“miners... passed like shadows”, a clawing vine, and “dishevelled pink chrysanthemums”).

Symbols

Symbolism can be a useful short-cut or something show more obscure that many readers miss. Lawrence makes it plain, without it feeling heavy-handed - even from the very first word: “odour”. Flowers normally have fragrance, scent, or perfume, whereas an odour is usually unpleasant, and often signals decay and death. Chrysanthemums traditionally symbolise love and they flower as late as November, when everything around is dying. This will not be a story of joy.

Image: “Dishevelled pink chrysanthemums”, long past their best (Source)

Setting

Elizabeth has two young children and is pregnant with a third. She is waiting for her husband to come home from the pit. She talks of him “bitterly” (the word is used five times) because he’s probably frittering his meagre wages in the pub, as he has before. Like the woman between train and hedge, she’s trapped. Darkness and shadows pervade the little house. As she continues to wait, “her anger was tinged with fear”.

Turning point

Really not a surprise, but news comes of an accident. Elizabeth is immediately practical: wondering if she’ll be able to keep Walter off the drink if he’s merely injured, and how she’ll cope if she’s widowed (no unencumbered happy remarriage, as her recently-widowed father is planning), fully aware of how much her children need her. Her mother-in-law, like the neighbour and unlike Elizabeth, speaks in lower-class dialect. She acknowledges her son’s faults as a drunken husband, but blames Elizabeth.
“You've had a sight o' trouble with him, Elizabeth, you have indeed. But he was a jolly enough lad wi' me, he was, I can assure you.”
When it comes to washing and dressing the body, she’s almost competitive about it and Elizabeth feels pressure to grieve the way her mother-in-law expects.

Image: Hucknall Torkard colliery, a few miles from Brinsley, at the time of this story (Source)

Chrysanthemums

Earlier, Elizabeth had plonked some wan chrysanthemums in a vase, after she chided her little boy for throwing petals on the path.
“The air was cold and damp... The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.”

Later, the vase is broken. A trivial, commonplace accident, but laden with meaning.

Image: A surreal take on a broken vase, by Erik Johansson (Source)

Elizabeth comes to realise how little she and Walter knew and understood each other:
“And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh.”

Quotes

• “The withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly.”

• “A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof.”

• “As the mother watched her son's sullen little struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in her child's indifference to all but himself.”

• “It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.”

• “She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.”

See also

This is good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as many others of his, so 3.5*, rounded down.

• I’ve reviewed several of DHL’s short stories, HERE. Many of them have themes that overlap with those here, including autobiographical elements.

• Chrysanthemums feature prominently in Sons and Lovers, which I reviewed HERE.

• A couple of years after he published this story, Lawrence adapted it for the stage, as The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd.

• There’s a short film from 2002, which I’ve not watched. See imdb.

• This is set in Brinsley Colliery - the same mine Lawrence’s father worked at. His mother, like Elizabeth, was middle class (and determined her son wouldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps). Monty Python were probably thinking of Lawrence in their sketch about a working-class playwright and his coalmining son. See HERE.

Short story club

I reread this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

When people die in front of me nowadays- I don't have a reaction (initially). I go stone cold, the cadaver becomes a separate entity. The memories with that person become hazy as if my mind desires to bury them, their body becomes something to be processed (apologies best word I could think) for cremation, burial, etc.
It's hard to react when there are people relying on you, perhaps this is why I randomly start crying almost after a year with no reason nor rhyme. What a confusing gift we've been given.

So there was almost a modest storyline here, what with the wife and all thinking one way, and events happening another, which could have provided fertile ground for some philosophizing and what not; instead, she goes off on another random mental tangent

This is the first piece of writing by D.H. Lawrence I’ve read.

We’re introduced to a woman, Elizabeth Bates, and her little son, John, and Elizabeth’s father, who is an engine-driver.

The woman’s husband, Walter, is a miner; he is fond of the drink, and spends a lot of money at the pub.

At this particular time, the miners are coming home, but Walter has not come home yet, and they have too wait for him before they can have tea.

Elizabeth suspects Walter of slinking past his door to go to the pub.

So the mother, John and the little girl, Annie, who has now come home from school, wait and wait for their husband and father.

They begin to eat. Elizabeth becomes more and more resentful about her husband’s lateness.

She is expecting show more another child.

Annie is enamoured of the chrysanthemums her mother has in her apron band.

It is twenty to six and Walter hasn’t come home. Elizabeth is angry now. She says “What a fool I’ve been! The children were put to bed. Now Elizabeth’s anger is “tinged with fear”.

A neighbour’s husband tells Elizabeth he doesn’t know where Walter is, but he’s not in the “Prince of Wales”, the pub.

Walter’s elderly mother arrives in her black bonnet and black shawl. She tells her that Walt has had an accident..

Two men came with Walter on a stretcher – he is dead.

One of the men knocks off a vase of chrysanthemums. “There is a deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.”

Elizabeth feels she has nothing to do with Walter. She tries to get some connection to him, but cannot.

“The wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul.”

”Life with its smoky, burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her.”

She now knows what a stranger he was to her. She sees he was a “separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh.”

There had been nothing between them though they repeatedly had had marital relations. They had been far apart, just as they were now he was dead.

She saw now that she had never seen him for what he was, and he had never seen her for what she was.

She was grateful to death which “restored the truth”.

For the first time she had empathy and compassion for him. She now knew how awful it had been to be a wife, and how awful it must have felt to him to be a husband.

If they met in the next world, he would be a stranger to her. The children did not unite them. Eternally, he had nothing more to do with her.

“Now he had withdrawn.” I take this to mean that he had voluntarily left his life.

I’m not sure what Lawrence totally means by his description of Elizabeth’s insight.

As I understand it, they had not been really meant for each other and should not have married, since they were so different.

Now, at any rate, they had nothing to do with each other.

But I feel Lawrence is contradicting himself; because though she now feels they were so different and separate beings, she still for the first time feels empathy for him.

The final sentence is:

“From death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.”

Why was she fearful and shameful? I cannot see the need for fear; is she shameful because she did not previously see him as he really was? And what does she mean by this?

Re the title, in some European countries, chrysanthemums are only given in time of mourning. Elizabeth had previously received them when she married Walter, and the first time they brought Walter home drunk he had chrysanthemums in his button-hole. So this is perhaps why the author uses the word ”odour”” instead of the usual word “scent”.

I didn’t quite understand this story, but Elizabeth’s insight is its crucial part.

I did not previously realize what a gifted writer D.H. Lawrence was. show less

10/10