D. H. Lawrence and the
Flight from History
Millicent Bell
THERE is no escape from history, nor
is there from historical meaning. There are moments in human time when the
flight from history is the very motive of the artist and the theme of his work,
and yet that flight is itself the most historical of literary gestures. This
flight is what is dramatized in Lawrence's Women in Love.
In many ways it
is a baffling novel, but most of all because of the omissions Lawrence allowed
in the presentation of Rupert Birkin. When he is compared to others around him,
this chief character is curiously unexplained. Of course, if we have read his
The Rainbow, which chronicles the preceding generations of Brangwens, we already
know the family history behind the two most recent Brangwens, Ursula and Gudrun.
But even without this preparation we understand fully the sisters' own social
placement in this sequel. Although he is newly introduced in Women in Love, we
know everything the realist novel requires we should know about Gerald
Crich--his class and social position, the economic role he plays at a particular
point in the growth of the industrial economy of England, and his family
relationships and his personal past. Lawrence provides both a psychological
explanation for his character and a brilliant historic interpretation of his
development into an "industrial magnate." But Birkin, also new to the later
book, is never supplied with a prehistory. We know only that he is a school
inspector and a university graduate. Where does he come from? What family has
he? What has been his experience before the time he appears as an old lover of
Hermione? And how can we explain without such information the extraordinary
bitterness that seems to fill him, his rejection not only of all inherited
social forms but his dread of marriage, his desire to redefine it so radically
that it seems hardly realizable even to the woman who loves him?
In some
respects Women in Love is so powerfully a novel in the realist tradition that
one may be tempted to think that the odd informational vacancy about Birkin is a
flaw. To acclimatize this figure to the realist context that supports the other
characters, we will be tempted to go outside the novel --for, if he is least
explained and recognizable as coming from a real world, he is the character most
directly drawn from life. There is plenty of evidence that Lawrence was thinking
of Frieda and himself and of his friends Middleton Murray and Katherine
Mansfield when he determined his quartet of characters, particularly of his own
struggle to achieve love for both man and woman. As we inevitably remember this,
we also remember Lawrence's painful experiences during the war years and see at
once how his view that mankind had become "a dead tree, covered with fine
brilliant galls of people" comes out of the Cornwall period. Such a prehistory
is not supplied for Birkin, but it can be imagined, and we can see the way it
can justify and explain a Birkin-like searcher if we read the later Kangaroo, a
novel that brings into direct view some of Lawrence's war experience.
We
can also make Birkin more credible psychologically if we reinsert the excluded
"prologue" that survives in manuscript. Here, surely, is a missing part of the
novel, we say, for in it Birkin's homosexuality is made explicit--it is not
merely the idealized blutbruderschaft that Birkin longs for in the novel. The
prologue is precise, not only in identifying the conscious sexuality of Birkin's
feelings for men, which seize him overmasteringly from time to time, but also in
abolishing the mystery of his difficult heterosexuality: "It was for men that he
felt the hot, flushing, roused attraction which a man is supposed to feel for
the other sex." Homosexuality as a cause of Birkin's difficulties in loving
Ursula can also be confirmed if we choose to restore the passage in which he
reflects that his love for Gerald "was complemented by the hatred for
women"--words that Lawrence eliminated in the published novel.
It might, then, seem only a sort of textual emendation, the reparation of
mutilations imposed upon Lawrence by others, to add authorial biography or
rejected manuscript material to what the published novel offers. While we will
not actually insert such "restorations" on the pages of the book one holds in
one's hand, our informed awareness of what has been left out may create a truer
text in our minds, closer to the artist's intent. The writer himself must have
felt compelled, in a period of war hysteria, to eliminate direct criticism of
the government or any record of his own sufferings caused by anti-German
prejudice. And homosexuality was still a forbidden subject, so that the prologue
would have equally prevented publication. Lawrence had reason to self-censor,
anticipating the public censor who had already suppressed The Rainbow as soon as
it was published.
And perhaps, too, the novel may be said amply to
justify readings that fill its gaps not so much with the author's own life or
rejected manuscript elements as with the stuff of general history. Without
reference to these one may say too simply that it is a novel about modem
marriage, a search for a better relation between men and women. Not only in the
character of Gerald but in Birkin's rage and despair of finding authentic
selfhood we may suspect an abstraction from Lawrence's view of modern
industrialism which, more than any society before it, seemed to reduce human
individuality to a function in the vast mechanism of a profit-making
society-which was Raymond Williams's way of reading Lawrence. And one may even
agree with George H. Ford that this novel, which does not once mention war, is
"about war" and nothing else, though one should note that there is some
ambiguity in Lawrence's statement that it "took its final shape in the midst of
the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself." Lawrence had
added: "I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the
war may be taken for granted in the characters."
Our insight into
Birkin's implicit homosexuality increases rather than diminishes historic
meaning. We can say that Birkin's sexual responses represent his impossible
position as a man between classes, unable not only to choose between men and
women as sexual partners but unable, even in his homosexual life, the prologue
makes clear, to choose between the "northmen" of power like Gerald, the
mine-owner's son, and proletarian "night-smelling" men, a policeman, a soldier
casually encountered, or a miner. But one can discover the same historicity
without the aid of this inclusion. The very indefiniteness of characterization
resulting from Lawrence's refusal to provide Birkin with a representative
typological explanation permits one to see him as an undefined that is,
"classless"-man. He represents precisely that historic escape from class
categories and confining origins of which Lawrence himself was an example: he
might be a scholarship boy, a miner's son, who had gone to the university,
changed his accent and his style of dress, and moved into the bohemia of London
and Garsington. That he is a school inspector relates him to the process of
education that makes possible such a translation out of the working
class.
But I am going to argue, nevertheless, that we must hesitate
before making even these recuperations; that, in fact, as the work was shaped to
allow its curious lapses of realist logic, it attained a form that made use of
its deprivations. It is not a perfect achievement of explicatory realism no, it
is a metaphysical novel consciously directed against the logic of character and
circumstances which constitutes the realist tradition. Birkin, its hero, becomes
the agent of the writer who would try strenuously to dispense with the
conventional formulas by means of which stories make sense; in his relation with
others this hero himself strives to strip them of their inauthentic social
selves, to reach some inexpressible essence. Such an attempt both the novelist's
and his character's could not help but fail, and yet it results in Lawrence's
most profound novel of modern negativity. To have included any immediate causes
of disillusion in his prophet's history would have diminished the poetic
strength of his desperate mission --which is, precisely, to discover a selfhood,
a life story, that escapes altogether the conventions not only of literature but
of ordinary social experience. Even the most justified addition of historicist
or biographical meaning reduces the extravagance, the afflatus, of Lawrence's
aim. For the novel goes beyond its implicit social critique, seeking to rescue
selfhood from bondage to all compacts, all conventions. Its violent Dies Irae
tone may be allowed to represent the desperate end-of-the-world mood which
accompanied this attempt, a realization that such a freedom was nothing less
than annihilation of the self--and of the universe of concepts that support the
self--rather than seeing in that violence simply the reflection of the war's
violence.
Few studies of Women in Love or of The Rainbow fail to quote the famous letter
to Edward Garnett in which the novelist declares his abandonment of "the old
stable ego of character" and asks his reader to expect to find "another ego,
according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through,
as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been
used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged
element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon
...)." He says, "that which is physic-non-human, in humanity, is more
interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element--which causes one to
conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent." This
provocative directive forecasts not only the surrender of those conventions of
coherence, rooted in social habits of thought, which enable us to understand
ourselves and others, but it announces the search for a core in human nature
which, while it dispenses with all the signs by which we know individuality is
yet the very essence of individuality.
It is in Women in Love more
radically than in The Rainbow that Lawrence enacts the statement's negative as
well as positive implications. In its mood of end-of-the-world, of the
diminution of the Western sense of the self in the cosmos and in society, the
novel is quite different from its predecessor. The Rainbow's mystical confidence
in the possibility of personal relation to the forces of nature--which he had
admired in Hardy--makes itself felt less strongly. One may ask what Lawrence
means by his rejection of the naturalist viewpoint in Wells, Bennett, and
Galsworthy, whose characters, he thought, lacked "real being." In the foreword
written for his publisher's advertising pamphlet, he had written, "a fate
dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate"--which
is not only a declaration of personal faith in a free self but an injunction to
the novelist to loose his characters from old-fashioned conceptions of
causation. But what was to take the place of these?
Lawrence's admiration
for Hardy has its mystical side. While he said that a Hardy character possessed
a "real, vital, potential self," he also noted that that self was made manifest
by "explosive" and "unreasonable" action. Such action was also inexplicable.
Lawrence, at this very time, was stimulated by Futurism's obsession with the
combination, in human behavior, of incompatible opposites, of violently
irreconcilable qualities which no naturalistic analysis, psychologic or
sociologic, can reconcile. From 1909 to 1914, as Emile Delavenay has shown,
Lawrence was deeply absorbed in study of Marinetti, Boccioni, and the Italian
Futurists and wrote of his agreement with Marinetti's desire to "destroy all
psychology" and to substitute some sort of "physics."
Lawrence's critics
have honored his hope that pure essence may somehow emerge in his novels, but in
ways he would have rejected, to be sure. It is common to assume, for example,
that his idea of "carbon" essentially refers to a psychological substratum in
personality, and that we see an eruption into view of the Freudian unconscious
in unanticipated moments of explosion in which normal behavior ceases--as in the
scenes of Gerald with the mare at the crossing, or Gerald and Gudrun and the
rabbit, or Gudrun and the bullocks, where the animals in these scenes may be
said to represent the suppressed "animal" part of the psyche. But such
explanation only offers, I would say, alternate "diamond" or "coal" definitions
of character--identifications based on old or new categorical reading of
behavior, on social structures of significance to which the definitions of modem
psychology may now be added. They are no more "carbon" and no more express an
abstract essence of personality than do more obvious or conscious aspects of
selfhood.
Yet, as Mary Freeman has pointed out, Lawrence's
characterizations are not truly Futuristic but attain their own
consistency--Gerald as the "chained wolf," Ursula in her "dangerous
helplessness," Gudrun in her "will-to-power," even Birkin's "chameleon
flexibility." The novelist in Lawrence could not rest satisfied with incoherence
and discontinuity, for it is only by some characterizing, totalizing scheme that
one can assimilate one's impressions of others--in fiction or in life--to a
sense of meaning. It is paradoxically true that Lawrence is actually more
successful in this novel than almost anywhere else in his fiction in using the
techniques by which the novel has always differentiated and explained human
lives--making a broad survey of "types" in an integrated local world in which
character finds its place. And the critics who describe his characters in terms
of the conventions of modem psychology are not altogether wrong: Lawrence
focused more deeply upon psychic states that can be related to the character's
sexual as well as social tensions than had novelists before him. Yet this, too,
is not really a departure from the idea that personality, both in its emotional
and its logical operations, constitutes a definable entity.
For Lawrence such achievements were not a true victory, however. The sense of
failure or partial failure with which the novel closes is often understood to be
the result only of Birkin's grief at the loss of his chance of a male union,
which had existed in Gerald, and the persisting experimentalism of his marriage
to Ursula. Yet this failure and this continued doubt--of author and
character--derive, fundamentally, from the fact that a transcendent personal
element that he has sought not only in others but in himself is only to be
posited mystically while remaining unrealized. The attempt on the part of both
the writer and his fictive persona to reach a "carbon" of the self more
fundamental than coal or diamond is doomed, for it is only by means of the
discarded idea of character that human beings can conceive themselves or their
destinies. Just as "carbon," the chemical element, never exists save in one or
another of its allotropic states, since there is only a theoretical physical or
chemical definition of carbon which is neither diamond nor coal nor any other
existence in space of its molecular nature--so it was equally impossible for
Lawrence to reach a "nonhuman" definition of personality dispensing with
conceptions of consistency and cause, the illustration of traits, or a context
of social or psychologic typology or "moral scheme." This failure--embraced as
much as it is struggled against--brings Women in Love to the threshold of an
existential skepticism about the meaningfulness of events and the integrity of
personality.
But the novel wonderfully dramatizes its negativity, the
casting off of forms. As though acting for the conventional novelist, Ursula,
watching the guests at the Crick wedding in the first chapter, sees "each one as
a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a
marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognize their
various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own
surroundings, settle them forever as they passed before her along the path to
the church. She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished
with, for her." Only the Cricks seem "not quite so preconcluded." And the
strange Mrs. Crick gives an early statement, to Birkin, of the irrelevance of
this very process of defining persons: "What has Mr. So-and-so to do with his
own name?" she asks, while Birkin, replying, expresses a view still more
radical, "Not many people are anything at all .... They jingle and giggle, it
would be much better if they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don't exist,
they aren't there."
Lawrence's very opening in Women in Love is an
announcement, hard to miss, that the Brangwen sisters, no less than their
creator, are braced to resist the definition of female selfhood by the
traditional marriage plot. His choice of this moment for our first view of them
when they are about to attend a wedding, is an intertextually conscious
reference to a long tradition of novelistic openings in which young women are
found poised to contemplate their futures. Often it is a pair of sisters who so
meet us--as in Middlemarch or The Old Wives' Tale. Ursula and Gudrun, also, are
sisters at the brink of marriage who will, in seeking this end, find the only
kinds of plots available to them. But Ursula, who does marry, says immediately
that marriage is "likely to be the end of experience"--and this is not only a
statement concerning the married state itself but a warning to the reader
against expectation of the English novel's commonest mechanism of closure. Of
course, like all the heroines whose example they "affront" in the fashion of
Henry James's Isabel Archer, the Brangwen sisters are about to encounter the
very men with whom they will form unions.
As I have remarked, the
sacrifice of Birkin's historicity is necessary if we are to see him as an
apostle to others of a selfhood that owes nothing to cause. Lawrence's dramatic
sense makes his hero's quest itself the means of imposing another plot, a
struggle between himself and those others whose companionship in pure
absoluteness he obscurely craves-Ursula and Gerald. Yet in his inability to
find, through them, what he wants, he is prompted to surrender his dedication to
a heroic history. "Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life?" he thinks. "Why
not drift on in a series of accidents--like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why
bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously--male or female? Why
form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking
all for what it was worth?"
Nevertheless they begin, he and Ursula, that journey which is more flight into
dissolution than search for "somewhere where we can be free." The metaphysical
is lost in the banal when Birkin dreams of a place "where one needn't even wear
much clothes--none even." Birkin's longing is really for a freedom to be
unrestricted by social forms of all sorts, to be free of prescribed roles, to be
inexhaustibly potential and unbounded by relationships or possessions or
conventional rituals--by what James's Isabel calls those "appurtenances" (and
not merely the clothes which express her dressmaker) that fail to express her.
They must not even buy that charming chair which reminds Birkin, thinking of
himself in terms of novels, of "Jane Austen's England." All houses and furniture
are "the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible"; even if you have a perfect
modem house done by the designer Paul Poiret, he says, "it is something else
perpetuated on top of you." It is not a question of new or old forms, but of
dispensing with forms of any kind. Their fugue is, as Birkin admits, not to
anyplace in particular in the real world but "away from the word's somewheres,
into our own nowhere."
So, the home, that frame, physical and emotional,
which contains and explains the individual life and expresses the continuity of
generations in the realist novel, is metaphysically dead, not merely outmoded in
some immediate sense. Beldover and the Brangwen house represent to Ursula and
Gudrun in the first chapter not only, socially speaking, an "obsolete life," a
dead society, but as though it were Plato's cave, divorced from the real forms
of outer life, a "country in an underworld" in which "the people are all ghouls,
and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world...
all soiled, everything sordid." When the two women go for the last time to the
emptied house which had enclosed their parents' lives and their own youth they
are stirred to revulsion. "One must be free, above all, one must be free. One
must forfeit everything else but one must be free--one must not become 7,
Pinchbeck Street--or Somerset Drive--or Shortlands." The rejection of home and
family is a rejection of all attachment to place and to one's generative
past.
Birkin's view of the disjunction between the "essential" self and
everything else seems to produce in him an uninterest in society, even a feeling
that "humanity is a dead letter" and that the impersonal something of which it
is an expression might be better expressed if mankind were to pass away.
Lawrence's utopianism, his hope of a "Rananim," is absent here. "Man is a
mistake. He must go," leaving the earth to "the grass, and hares and adders, and
the unseen hosts," Birkin tells Ursula. When, at Breadalby, talk arises
concerning a new state of man, Birkin rejects both Sir Joshua's idea of social
equality and Hermione's rhapsodic "in the spirit we are all one." He insists.
"We are all different and unequal in spirit--it is only the social differences
that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or
mathematically equal .... But spiritually there is pure difference and neither
equality or inequality."
In the "On the Train" conversation with Gerald,
Birkin had begun by saying, intransigently, "First person singular is enough for
me," but then he qualifies this by the declaration that life must center upon "a
perfect union" with a woman. Yet by this "union" he would reject even more
absolutely than Ursula the kind of marriage which is "the end of experience."
"The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription .... The
merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him."
Human beings are not broken halves of a whole, he muses, rejecting the old myth.
"Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things that
were mixed." In this he feels himself different from Gerald, who seems doomed,
"as if he were limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a
sort of fatal halfness, which to himself seemed wholeness."
More and more
Birkin loses interest in what is conventionally called personality--"people were
all different, but they were ail enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation."
The union which he wants to forge with Ursula is more a divestment than anything
else. "One must throw everything away, everything--let everything go, to get the
one last thing one wants... freedom together," he tells her. He insists that at
the last one is beyond the influence of love. "There is a real impersonal me,
that is beyond love, beyond emotional relationship." It is in that condition in
which they are "two stark, unknown beings" that he wants them to approach each
other. Only negatives define this condition of formless, unnameable being where
"nothing known applies." "We will both cast off everything, cast off ourselves
even, and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place
in us .... I want to find you, where you don't know your own existence, the you
that your common self denies utterly. But I don't want your good looks, and I
don't want your womanly feelings, and I don't want your thoughts nor opinions
nor your ideas--they are all bagatelles to me."
We are quite ready to hear this as impatiently as does Ursula who does make him
say, at the end of the "Mino" chapter: "I love you. I'm bored by the rest." But
Lawrence only temporarily undermines Birkin's yearning demand for that "carbon"
absolute that cannot be expressed in the forms of life. Birkin may say, "I love
you," but he doubts his own sense of an "I" that speaks so. "How could he say I
when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old
formula of the age, was a dead letter .... How can I say, `I love you' when I
have ceased to be and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and
transcended into a new oneness."
Reflecting upon the alternatives of the
African statuette and the "snow-abstract annihilation" of the white race, Birkin
still urges a third way, the entry into pure single being. "Singleness" is a
repeated word in the book, representing Lawrence's undefinable carbon, for it is
by relation, comparison and contrast, that we define ourselves socially but lose
our uniqueness. Yet Ursula draws back from Birkin's invitation to a marriage
defined as "mutual unison in separateness." She opposes Birkin with what seems
to him a female demand for "fusion." "Fusion, fusion, this horrible fusion of
two beings, which every woman wants and most men .... Why could they not remain
individuals, limited by their own limits," he says. Birkin can use the word
transcended speaking of a condition when he and Ursula have lost sense of the
"I," and this seems to imply a romantic conception of transcendent spirit
rolling through all things. But in Women in Love the implication of essence
seems without religious basis. Hence the attraction of death, of dissolution, so
important a theme in this and others of Lawrence's novels. It is not in life but
in death, after all, that the "pure inhuman otherness" might be reached. The
journey that she agrees to undertake with him is a passage from the known and
the knowable into an abstract world of alpine ice, a place that is inimical to
life. The long chapter "Continental" begins the journey with a marvelous
symbolic representation of the departure further and further away from all
things familiarly human or marked by our recognitions of ordinary meaning, and
symbolically reminiscent of mythic representations of the passage to the land of
death.
Ursula already has come to feel that "loss of self" which has been
identified as the characteristic malaise of the modem consciousness--yet the
language Lawrence employs to represent her has biblical overtones, and strains
towards the religious conviction of coming rebirth after the necessary death of
the seed. The night journey across the Channel seems to her a return to chaos
with promise of a recovery of a lost Paradise:
There was no sky, no
earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping motion,
they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling through dark,
fathomless space .... In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to
glow on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. Her heart
was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey of darkness, sweet like
the warmth of day, a light which was not shed on the world, only on the unknown
paradise towards which she was going, a sweetness of habitation, a delight of
living quite unknown, but hers infallibly.
But Birkin has no such
confidence of "bliss in fore-knowledge." Like Milton's Satan he feels himself
"falling through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across
the chasm between the worlds. The world was tom in two, and he was plunging like
an unlit star through the ineffable rift."
Their landing on the continent
continues the images, classical or biblical, of loss of the human world:
"Strange and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the
desolated underworld, was this landing at night." As they wait for their train
at Ostend, everything seems "desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt
grey, desolate, forlorn, nowhere--grey, dreary nowhere." As the train takes them
across Belgium, Ursula's vision of the vanished human past is represented in a
matchless passage:
She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm life
at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was
she still to go! In one lifetime she had travelled through aeons. The great
chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of
Cossethay and the Marsh Farm--she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give
her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar in the old living-room where the
grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on
the face--and now when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter
stranger--was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she
had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not
really herself.
Her childhood memories of herself as "creature of history" come back again, in
the mountains, and painfully she struggles to divest herself of them, to regard
them as mere shadows on the walls of Plato's cave:
Oh, God, could one
bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it had
ever been! She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and
powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic lantern; The
Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a
shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal,
and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all be
broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which was
broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes
of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her
childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a
dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should `remember'?
Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth without any recollections or
blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life here in
the high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and
antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no mother,
no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she belonged only to
the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper notes, sounding into the
heart of the universe, the heart of reality, where she had never existed
before.
It is an awesome, apocalyptic passage, a climax in which the
inheritor of all the rich experience of Lawrence's double novel, Women in Love
and The Rainbow together, strives to become, like Birkin, a character without
history. But the pages that follow before the end belong more to the sterile
struggle of Gudrun and Gerald than to any progress forward for Ursula and
Birkin. Women in Love is still a novel, and Lawrence, still a novelist, will
show them at the last on a recognizable human plane, surviving to argue over
their marriage, exhibiting the shape of coal or diamond because carbon has no
other mode of being than one or another of its allotropic
forms.
_______________
Source: Sewanee Review, Fall98,
Vol. 106 Issue 4, p604, 15p.
