D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.  

Put on a Little Makeup ...

One of the things that I find a joy to watch is a young woman putting on her makeup in the morning whilst on the tube and, presumably, on her way to work; particularly when she does so with real concern and concentration and completely oblivious to the presence of her fellow passengers. 

For me, there's always something moving and magical about seeing a woman perform an otherwise private function in public; creating a little space and time for herself and about herself in a busy world with nothing more than foundation, blusher, mascara, and lipstick.

One invariably thinks of what Baudelaire wrote on the female use of cosmetics:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accompanying a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

                                                                                                                   
- Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press Ltd., 1995), p. 33.