Chastity (Or the Peace That Comes of Fucking)

 

I. 

 

One of the most surprising things about Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), is that it closes with an affirmation of chastity, or what Oliver Mellors likes to call the peace that comes of fucking. 

 

In his Grange Farm letter to Connie, he informs her of his intention to remain patient during their time apart and abide by the little flame that burns between them, trying not to think of her too often, as this only tortures him and wastes something vital [1]. 

 

He writes: 

 

"So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause and peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. [...] Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace [...]" [2]  

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, this real and accomplished chastity [3] won't come as too great a surprise to readers who are familiar with Lawrence's Pansies, a collection of verse written in 1928/29 in which the cry of noli me tangere rings throughout and the theme of chastity - understood as freedom from the mind and hands exploiting the sensual body [4] - is key.

 

"Great is my need to be chaste / and apart, in this cerebral age" [5], writes the poet for whom sex is a state of grace. All he wishes of a woman is that she shall feel gently towards him when his heart feels kindly towards her: "I am so tired of violent women lashing out and insisting / on being loved, when there is no love in them" [6].

 

Touch comes slowly, writes Lawrence, if ever; "when the white mind sleeps" [7] and cannot be forced: 

 

For if, cerebrally, we force ourselves into touch, into contact 

physically and fleshly, 

we violate ourselves,

we become vicious. [8] 

 

All of these ideas coalesce in the poem 'Chastity' -

 

Chastity, beloved chastity

O beloved chastity

how infinitely dear to me

chastity, beloved chastity!

 

That my body need not be

fingered by the mind,

or prosituted by the dree

contact of cerebral flesh -

 

O leave me clean from mental fingering

from the cold copulation of the will,

from all the white, self-conscious lechery

the modern mind calls love!

 

From all the mental poetry

of deliberate love-making,

from all the false felicity

of deliberately taking

 

the body of another unto mine,

O God deliver me!

leave me alone, let me be!

 

Chastity, dearer far to me

that any contact that can be

in this mind-mischievous age! [9]     

 

III. 

 

Lawrence's notion of chastity is, therefore, distinct from the Christian virtue synonymous with moral purity and closely tied to an ideal of celibacy. 

 

In fact, if anything, Lawrence's model of chastity is closer to Nietzsche's than the Church's and he would doubtless echo Zarathustra in saying that whilst with some Christians chastity may indeed be a virtue, with many others it is almost a vice; such persons may exercise self-restraint, but doggish lust looks enviously out of all that they do.  

 

It is preferable, says Zarathustra, to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the arms of a person driven by lust in which there is no innocence. Individuals who find it difficult to be chaste - and whom it makes resentful and cruel as well as lustful - should be dissuaded from it. 

 

Only those for whom chastity is a form of victory - the peace that comes of fucking - should practice it; for they are kinder (and warmer) of heart and know how to laugh even at their own selves:   

 

"They laugh at chastity too and ask, 'What is chastity? Is chastity not folly? Yet this folly came to us, not we to it. We offered that guest hostel and heart: now it dwells with us - may it stay as long as it will!" [10]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It's debatable what this means, but I read it as a coded confession from a fetishistic masturbator who was previously only too happy to sleep with Connie's flimsy silk nightdress pressed atween his legs at night, for company. See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 249. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 301. 

[3] See A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where Lawrence uses this phrase, writing: "Years of honest thought of sex, and years of struggling action in sex will bring us at last where we want to get, to our real and accomplished chastity [...]", p. 309. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), see Chapter X. The line quoted from is on p. 146.  

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Noli me tangere', The Poems, p. 407. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'All I ask', The Poems, p. 415. 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Touch comes', The Poems, p. 408.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Touch', The Poems, p. 406. 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Chastity', The Poems, p. 407. 

[10] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I. 13, 'On Chastity', in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1988), p. 167.

D. H. Lawrence: A Tale of Two Kitties

I. The Death of Mrs Nickie Ben

For cat lovers, there's a very distressing scene early on in D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911). Cyril, the narrator of the story, and his sister, Lettie, are out walking in the woods and fields surrounding the local reservoir, when the latter suddenly lets out a cry:

"On the bank before us lay a black cat, both hind-paws torn and bloody in a trap. It had no doubt been bounding forward after its prey when it was caught. It was gaunt and wild; no wonder it frightened the poor lapwings into cheeping hysteria. It glared at us fiercely, growling low."

Whilst Lettie stands looking on and lamenting the cruelty of man, Cyril takes action:

"I wrapped my cap and Lettie's scarf over my hands and bent to open the trap. The cat struck with her teeth, tearing the cloth convulsively. When it was free, it sprang away with one bound, and fell, panting, watching us."

This is no anonymous stray cat, however. This is a creature known to Cyril: Mrs Nickie Ben, who belongs at Strelley Mill, the home of his friend George Saxton. And so he wraps the poor creature in his jacket and carries her there. 

Unfortunately, however, she is too badly injured to be saved, one of her paws having been broken: "We laid the poor brute on the rug, and gave it warm milk. It drank very little, being too feeble." Even the presence of her mate, another fine-looking black cat, doesn't rouse her. And besides, he seems indifferent to her suffering: 

"Mr Nickie Benn looked, shrugged his sleek shoulders, and walked away with high steps. There was a general feminine outcry on masculine callousness."

George decides to put the cat out of her misery. His preferred method of doing so - and the quickest - is to "'swing her round and knock her head against the wall'", but Lettie protests. And so he decides to drown her: "We watched him morbidly, as he took a length of twine and fastened a noose round the animal's neck [...]"

George smiles as he walks to the garden pond and then drops "the poor writhing cat into the water, saying 'Goodbye, Mrs Nickie Ben'". Vile deed done, he hauls the cat out, amused by the grotesque character of the corpse.

He then buries her in a shallow grave, commenting to Cyril and Lettie: "'I had to drown her, out of mercy [...] If the poor old cat had made a prettier corpse, you'd have thrown violets on her.'"

II. Lady Chatterley's Pussy

Interestingly, there's another black cat who also comes to a sticky end in Lawrence's final novel. In chapter six of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Connie goes for a walk in the woods - as she often did on one of her bad days. The sound of a gun shot nearby startles her out of her vague indifference to her surroundings.

Going to investigate, she hears the sound of a man's voice, followed by the sound of a child sobbing. The thought that someone might be ill-treating the latter rouses Connie's anger: "She strode surging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene."

It was the keeper - Mellors - and a little girl, wearing a purple coat and moleskin cap. The latter was crying, to the irritation of the former: "'Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice", though, not surprisingly, this only  made the child wail louder. 

Connie marches up to them, with her dark blue eyes blazing, demanding to know what's going on. He salutes her ladyship, but with a faint smile all too like a sneer on his face and he tells her - in broad vernacular - that she'd best ask the child, not him, what the problem is. And so Connie turns to the "ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten", saying: "'What' is it, dear?'" with conventionalised sweetness of tone.

     

The child, however, continues to sob; violently, but also self-consciously. In the end, Connie bribes her with a sixpence. This placates the brat and enables her to speak: "'It's the - it's the - pussy!'"

It turns out that the keeper - her father - has shot a poaching cat: a big black cat, that now lies stretched out and bleeding amongst the bramble. Connie is repulsed by the sight and she turns on her soon-to-be lover and tells him it's no wonder the child was upset.

She tries to further reassure the child (whilst secretly disliking the spoilt, false little female), before escorting her home to her grandmother, leaving Mellors to dispose of the dead moggie in a manner undisclosed.


III.

Whether these two scenes reveal anything of import about Lawrence's views on black cats, cruelty, and sexual politics is debatable.

But what they do demonstrate is that there's more than one way to kill a cat and that underlying all of Lawrence's fiction is not so much a naive or innocent vitalism, but a fascination with violence and death and the part these things play in life as a general economy of the whole. In other words, Lawrence's philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism - but a pessimism of strength.   

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 12-13.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 58-59.

The Man Who Slept: Notes on an Autobiographical Fantasy by D. H. Lawrence

I. Opening Remarks

We are extremely grateful to Professor Hiroshi Muto of Keio University for providing us with a new and more accurate version of Lawrence's unfinished and untitled 'Autobiographical Fragment' - a queer mix of fiction and essay often known as 'A Dream of Life' - in which he corrects the multiple errors of transcription that had crept into the (supposedly authoritative) Cambridge Edition of the text published in Late Essays and Articles and edited - somewhat carelessly it would seem - by James T. Boulton.    

Admittedly, some of these fifty errors are minor. But even minor errors can result in ungrammatical sentences, or, indeed, sentences which are both grammatically and semantically compromised. Thus, as Lawrence's eagle-eyed Japanese translator says, a new version of the work - using the holograph manuscript (i.e. Lawrence's notebook) as the base text - was necessary.   

The 'Autobiographical Fragment' was written by Lawrence in October 1927. What begins as an essay about returning home to the East Midlands, mutates halfway through into a bizarre and at times ludicrous tale set a thousand years in the future, in which the narrator-protagonist discovers the coal-mining village of Newthorpe has become a kind of heaven on earth or New Jerusalem.

Whilst I admire most of Lawrence's writing, I have always disliked this piece - and still dislike it now, even after the many corrections made by Hiroshi Muto. I've no problem with the autobiographical material, it's what follows that irritates and nothing depresses me more than Lawrence in full utopian mode ... 

II. A Dream of Life: Synopsis

Having fallen asleep in a quarry cave, or, more precisely, "a little crystalline cavity in the rock [...] a little pocket or womb of quartz, among the common stone", the narrator is disturbed from his (almost deathly) deep sleep by a strange motion and reborn into the world in a manner reminiscent of the man who died. Like the latter, he has to fight his way back into consciousness, into life:       

"There were some dizzy moments, when my I, my consciousness wheeled and swooped like an eagle that is going to wheel away into the sky and be gone. Yet I felt her, my I, my life, wheeling closer, closer, my consciousness. And suddenly she closed with me, and I knew, I came awake."

The man who slept is acutely aware of his own physicality; of the fact that he has a face, a throat, and "a body that ended abruptly in feet and hands" and wasn't merely a disembodied, free-floating consciousness. He can hear the words of a stranger speaking to him and feel the warm hands of men, who laugh, as they bathe his flesh:  

"So as they washed me, I came to myself. I even sat up. And I saw earth and rock, and a sky I knew was afternoon. And I was stark naked, and there were two men washing me, and they too were stark naked."

He is helped up and dressed by these strangers with their healing hands, soft voices and "formal, peaceful faces and trimmed beards, like old Egyptians". They accompany him to the town and he notices that all signs of industrial civilization - the colliery, the railway, the enclosed fields - had all gone. A cart, drawn by oxen, slowly passes in the distance, led by a man who is also entirely naked.

The town itself - now called Nethrupp - had "something at once soft and majestical about it, with its soft yet powerful curves, and no sharp angles or edges, the whole substance seeming soft and golden [...] as in the hymns we sang in the Congregational Chapel". 

Then three men on horseback canter up from behind:

"They were men in soft, yellow sleeveless tunics, with the same still, formal Egyptian faces and trimmed beards [...] Their arms and legs were bare, and they rode without stirrups. But they had curious hats of beech-leaves on their heads. They glanced at us sharply, and my companions saluted respectfully." 

As the man who slept and his companions approach the town, more and more people are to be seen; mostly men "wearing the sleeveless woolen shirt of grey and red", but there are women too, "in blue or lilac smocks", although some of the younger ones "were quite naked, save for a little girdle of white and green and purple cord-fringe that hung round their hips and swung as they walked".

He can't help admiring their "slender, rosy-tanned bodies" and the fact they were as "comely as berries on a bush". In fact, that was the quality of both sexes: "an inner stillness and ease, like plants that come to flower and fruit". 

The man who slept is introduced to a figure of authority, reclining on a dark-yellow couch and guarded by men in green. He had the beauty of a flower rather than a berry. This chieftain of some kind gives him permission to stay in the town and he is supplied with clothes of his own: "a blue-and-white striped tunic, and white stockings, and blue cloth shoes" and housed in a small, sparsely furnished room, containing a bed, a lamp, and a cupboard - but no chairs.

At sunset, the town square erupts to the "queer squeal of bagpipes". The men start to stamp their feet, like bulls, while the women "were softly swaying, and softly clapping their hands" and making a series of strange sounds. Everyone dances "with the most extraordinary incalculable unison", but according to the man who slept, there was no external choreography:

"The thing happened by instinct, like the wheeling and flashing of a shoal of fish or of a flock of birds dipping and spreading in the sky.  [...] It was as once terrifying and magnificent, I wanted to die, so as not to see it, and I wanted to rush down, to be one of them. To be a drop in that wave of life."

Almost as quickly as it started, the dance ends: the townspeople disperse in silence. Even the man who slept recognises that this is odd and disconcerting behaviour: "I was afraid: afraid for myself. These people, it seemed to me, were not people, not human beings in my sense of the word. They had the stillness and the completeness of plants."  

Next, the man who slept is shown a communal washing area and toilets. Then taken to the communal dining room, where the men sat naked on the floor round a blazing wood fire, enjoying an evening meal of porridge and milk "with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples". Everyone helps themselves to what they want and everyone washes their own utensils, each hanging his own spoon and plate in his own little rack. This greatly impresses the man who slept: "There was an instinctive cleanliness and decency everywhere, in every movement, in every act."

Deciding to join in, the man who slept takes some porridge and watches as more men arrive, slipping out of their clothes at the first opportunity, softly talking and laughing, and playing board games. Then he's taken to meet the supreme spiritual leader, who wears a deep red-coloured tunic: 

"He had brown hair and a stiff, reddish-brown beard, and an extraordinary glimmering kind of beauty. Instead of the Egyptian calmness and fruited impassivity of the ordinary people, or the steady, flower-like radiance of the chieftain in yellow [...] this man had a quavering glimmer like light coming through water."

He informs the man who slept that he fell asleep in "one of the earth's little chrysalis wombs" and after a thousand years woke up "like a butterfly". That whilst he may not live for much longer, he shouldn't be afraid; just take off his clothes and let the firelight fall on him.


III. A Dream of Life: Analysis

I know that many readers of Lawrence - including Hiroshi Muto - find this tale beautiful; a poignant attempt by Lawrence late on in his life to provide a glimpse of the kind of society that he dreamed of. But when one examines this utopia of touch it reveals a number of troubling aspects. Here are ten points of concern:

1. It's a phallocratic order based on an eroticised fantasy of male homosociality. And ultimately, that's just another way of perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes and reaffirming patriarchal authority. Mellors might find himself very much at home, but I wonder what Connie would think ... 

2. Life in this utopia seems to involve an awful amount of stripping off - so much so, that one could imagine such a fantasy going down well with militant naturists who insist that truth loves to go naked and that it's more healthy and vital to go around without clothes: only it doesn't and it isn't. Rather oddly, if there's one thing that Lawrence fetishises more than nudity, it's clothing (as will be clear to readers of this and other works).    

3. If militant nudity is simply crackpot, then the utopian politics of post-industrial agrarianism is all a bit Pol Pot: I really don't fancy returning to Year Zero and nor do I desire to see naked peasants working the fields with oxen in order to earn a bowl of rice a day. There are times when reading this work that one imagines heads skewered on stakes.

4. Lawrence may write of a democracy of touch, but that doesn't mean there are no class divisions in his New Jerusalem. We note, for example, there are men on horseback whom ordinary citizens must salute respectfully. And just like the gender divisions, these class divisions are colour-coded and sartorially inscribed. For someone who was so sensitive to the issue of class, it's surprising that Lawrence doesn't seem to appreciate how his own perfect society would invariably be prone to tensions and conflict arising from its hierarchical structure.      

5. I'm quite happy living in a room that is sparsely furnished. But Lawrence takes his ascetic idealism too far when he doesn't even allow people to have a chair to sit on. Just as I don't want to salute some prick on a horse or walk around the streets naked, nor do I wish to sit on the floor like a dog, thank you very much.

6. The people play bagpipes. 

7. Communal dancing: despite what the man who slept says, this is obviously compulsory and strictly choreographed in a manner that would make even Kim Jong-un smile. As for pagan sun-worship, that's all very lovely until it goes a bit Aztec or Wicker Man and ends with human sacrifice. Many readers of Lawrence like to believe he put such fantasies behind him after The Plumed Serpent but, as a matter of fact, that's not quite the case as this text shows (though, to be fair, even the narrator of the tale is disconcerted by the inhuman nature of individuals dissolved in a mass).

8. Communal showers and toilets: again, no thanks. It looks like it could be fun in Carry on Camping, but surely no one really wants to have a cold shower with strangers, or shit in a field.

9. Communal dining areas: and on the menu - let us remind ourselves - porridge and milk, with liquid butter, fresh lettuce, and apples. I would quite literally prefer to starve to death than have to comply with this invalid's diet. 

10. Not only is Nethrupp a totalitarian society, it's a theocracy - ruled over by a Lord Summerisle figure with a red-beard, a bit like Lawrence's own. All in all, it's very disappointing. Lawrence repeatedly claims to value men and women, but surely then he should acknowledge that they are not plants, or birds, or fish. Or even butterflies. That their beauty and unique potential as a species lies in the very complexity that he would strip them of.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, ['Autobiographical Fragment'], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49-68.

Hiroshi Muto, 'A New Edition of D. H. Lawrence's [Autobiographical Fragment (A Dream of Life)], Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, ed. Susan Reid, Vol. 5, Number 1 (2018), pp. 11-57. All lines quoted above are from this new and corrected version of the text. 

Hiroshi Muto, 'D. H. Lawrence's Forgotten Dream: The Significance of "A Dream of Life" in His Late Works', The English Society of Japan (July 1990): click here to read online courtesy of the National Diet Library, Japan.

In this essay Professor Muto shows how 'A Dream of Life' closely relates not only to The Escaped Cock, but also to Lawrence's Etruscan writings and Lady Chatterley's Lover, providing a unique insight into these works. Thus I agree with him that it deserves serious critical attention within the world of Lawrence studies.

Toilettenphilosophie

"[There are] three different attitudes towards excremental excess: 

an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; 

a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way."

- Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)

I.

Faced with a 48-hour (non-figurative) shitstorm, I've come to the conclusion that there's really nothing funny about anorectal dysfunction and that bowel incontinence is not only beyond the pale, but beyond a joke.

Scatological humour might solicit laughter, but I agree with Cindy LaCom that this laughter is always rather hollow and "limited in its power to diminish public shame around the biological fact of shit".

Indeed, we might think of such gross-out comedy as a nervous defence mechanism designed to reduce anxiety and distance ourselves from the grim - often disgusting - reality of bodies subject to chaotic violence (bodies that have lost all integrity and self-control).     


II.

If the obscene is a loss of perspective that renders aesthetic judgement impossible, then horror might be defined as a shattering of taboo that results in a loss of illusion; i.e., it's the way in which the world rubs our noses in our own filthy mortality and its own base materialism. No matter how idealistic you are, you can't polish a turd. And you can't stop it stinking. 

Thus, even if there's nothing to laugh about when a frail and demented old woman shits her pants seven times in a weekend (the consequence of prescribing an aggressive laxative administered during a month long stay in hospital), there is something philosophically important to reflect upon ...


III.

Whilst clearly understanding the complex psycho-cultural reasons behind coprophobia, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence both affirm the fact that human beings shit. Indeed, rather than seeing the act of defecating as something shameful, they think it should be acknowledged and celebrated.

Thus, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, Mellors famously tells Connie as he strokes her soft sloping bottom and fingers the two secret openings to her body - "'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'" 

I understand the point that Lawrence is trying to make here: he wants the human mind to free itself of its fear of the body and the body's potencies. For in his view, "the mind's terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted" and it's monstrous that anyone should be made to feel morally ashamed of their natural bodily functions.

That's fine. But I can't help wondering whether Mellors would be quite so un-Swiftian if Connie experienced a catastrophic loss of bowel control during the night of sensual pleasure ... Further, I have to admit - following recent experiences - that perhaps we need our illusions, our taboos, our lies surrounding the body.

Ultimately, perhaps it's preferable to have stars rather than shit in our eyes and not so unforgivable to find comfort in the reassuring smell of bleach ...

Notes

Cindy LaCom, 'Filthy Bodies, Porous Boundaries: The Politics of Shit in Disability Studies', Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter/Spring 2007, Volume 27, No.1-2. Click here to read online. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 223 and 309.  

To read a related post to this one from March 2015, click here. 

On Living a Solitary Life: the Case of Elsie Eiler

Elsie Eiler and the Monowi town sign 

Photo: Reuters (2011)

I.  No Man is an Island

For Lawrence, who passionately believed in generating new forms of relationship and the establishment of an immanent utopia that he termed the democracy of touch, the idea of an individual living a solitary life was anathema and invariably ended badly (see the case of the man who loved islands, for example).  

As Aaron tells Lilly: you've got to be alone at times - and know how to be alone - but to just go on being alone is not only pointless, but impossible; sooner or later you begin to look around for other people with whom to form living connections.* Even Birkin, for all his talk of starry singularity and a posthuman world, knows that he ultimately needs to be part of a wider society. **

And Mellors, too, accepts that he can't stay alone forever in his forest hut; that he has to be broken open again and accept the pain as well as the pleasure that comes with a new set of social and sexual entanglements: 'There's no keeping clear', he tells Connie, 'And if you do keep clear, you might almost as well die'.***        

Yet the rather touching story of Elsie Eiler seems to demonstrate that, actually, isolation can be a splendid thing ...


II. The Case of Elsie Eiler

84-year-old Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of America's smallest town: Monowi, Nebraska, est. 1902. Everyone else, including her two children, has either moved away or, like her husband, Rudy, passed away (a fate that befell many other small communities in the Great Plains as the big cities exerted their pull).

But Elsie, a life-long resident of Monowi, can see no good reason to leave: it's her home, she likes it, and she intends to stay. And - contrary to what Lawrence might think - she's doing just fine and is perfectly happy.  

She still opens up the little tavern that she and her husband bought in 1971 - around the same time that the local grocery store and the post office closed - and passing truckers and travelling salesmen will frequently stop by for coffee and a chat. So, admittedly, whilst leading a solitary life, she's not entirely devoid of all human contact, like some kind of hermit.    

Elsie is also very conscious of her civic duties as Monowi's only resident. In her capacity as town mayor, for example, she is required to collect taxes and produce a municipal road plan every year in order to secure state funding for the town's four street lamps.

Elsie also maintains the 5000-volume library founded in memory of her husband, so she has plenty to read - and who's to say our relationship with dead authors isn't as vital as that with living beings? As a homotextual, I know I'd sooner live alone with a few good books, than in the company of most people ...

See:

* D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

** D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

*** D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

'Population of one: the smallest town in the US', a 3 minute BBC film about Elsie Eiler and her life in Monowi: click here.


Thanks to Simon Solomon who kindly suggested this post and sent me a link to the above film.

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Sex Appeal and the Beauty of Flames

Image: Desktop Nexus

I. Sex on Fire 

Just as for Lawrence sex and beauty are one and the same thing, so too is being something he always conceives in terms of fire, or what he calls the god-flame, burning in all things. Indeed, Lawrence ultimately conflates terms so that his erotico-aesthetic and ontological speculations form a unified metaphysics.

Thus it is, for example, that Mellors characterises his illicit relationship with Connie in terms of a little forked flame that they fucked into being.

And thus it is that Lawrence asserts in a late article that whilst he doesn't quite know what sex is, he's certain that it must be some sort of fire: "For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty."

This communicating of warmth and beauty is what Lawrence understands by the term sex appeal, something which he believes to be a universal human quality and not just something belonging to the young and conventionally attractive. In a typically Lawrentian passage, he writes:

"We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

      Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex had gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

      But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is." 

I quite like this (re)definition of a golem as a human being in whom the fire of sex has been extinguished and who communicates only a cold, ugly deadness (unfair and as meaningless as it may be). 

And I like the idea of fire calling to fire and of sex appeal kindling a sense of joyful warmth and optimism. Lawrence is right, the loveliness of a really lovely woman in whom the sex fire burns pure and fine not only lights up her whole being, but transforms the entire universe. Such a woman - extremely rare even in a world of numerous good-looking girls and cosmetic enhancement - is an experience.  

Lawrence concludes:

"If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or flowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things …

      Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in life now."

II. Light My Fire

I don't know if Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran read Lawrence when young - his obsessions led him towards German and French thinkers, rather than English novelists - but there are certainly quasi-Lawrentian resonances in his early work for those of us familiar with the writings of Lawrence.

Thus, like Lawrence, Cioran was interested in love in all its forms, particularly the concrete and monogamous love between man and woman which he took to be the quintessential form; not only in its sexual aspect, but as a "rich network of affective states". Love, born not of suffering, but of sincere generosity, is what Cioran most cherishes.

And, like Lawrence, Cioran ties his idea of love to beauty, being, and to fire. Man's sensitivity to beauty, he writes, intensifies as he approaches the joy that love brings. And in beauty "all things find their justification, their raison d'être".

Further, beauty allows us to conceive of things as things and to accept existence as is: "To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be [...] even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and its charm." This, of course, is a profoundly Nietzschean as well as a Lawrentian idea.

Beauty, concludes Cioran, may not bring salvation, "but it will bring us closer to happiness" and to the point where we can make a total affirmation of life. And what is more beautiful than the nakedness of flames, dancing in darkness:

"Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. [...] The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn."

It's not only moths, it appears, that are transfixed by candlelight and dream of a fiery climax to their lives ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the famous letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lawrence closes the novel.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Often known as 'Sex Versus Loveliness', this article can be read online by clicking here. 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (the University of Chicago Press, 1992). See: 'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' (75), 'The Beauty of Flames' (88), and 'Beauty's Magic Tricks' (119). All lines quoted above from Cioran are taken from these three sections.

Readers interested in earlier posts that compare and contrast Lawrence's work with that of Cioran on questions to do with becoming-animal and becoming-ash, can click here and here.

Musical bonus #1: click here. Musical bonus #2: click here. I must admit that I don't much care for either of these (hugely overrated) songs, but readers of a more hippie-persuasion will doubtless enjoy listening to them once more.    

He Stands, and I Tremble Before Him (Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Phallic Poetry)

As elsewhere in his work, Lawrence offers a phallic eroticism in his poetry which, on the one hand, affirms and naturalises heterosexual intercourse as the great clue to being, whilst, on the other hand, challenging conventional thinking on sex and gender. 

For as always with Lawrence, it's complicated ... There's a perverse spirit (or queerness) in his text that frequently deconstructs its own authority. He advises us to trust the tale, not the teller - fully aware of the narrator's proneness to unreliability - but often even this is risky as the tale (or verse) is never as straight - or straight-forward - as we might anticipate.

But what we can say for sure, however, is that Lawrence is fascinated with erect penises (including his own) and the thought of them deeply penetrating expectant bodies (including his own), to instill newness therein and ejaculate their masculine gleam.

Obviously, as an author, it was vital for Lawrence to put pen to paper. But it's the phallus - not the pen - that is the bridge to the future and writing is ultimately a poor substitute for coition. As Mellors tells Connie in a letter: "If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle."

But, as indicated, Lawrence doesn't just dream of fucking the girl next door; in the poem 'Come Spring, Come Sorrow', for example, he fantasises about being fucked by a solar phallus and inseminated by a fiery surplus of life, as if he were an open flower. 

Failing that, the young Lawrence seemed happy enough admiring his own hard-on and trying to resist the urge to masturbate ... 'Virgin Youth' is an amusing poem born of adolescent sexual excitement mixed with anxiety: "He stands, and I tremble before him."

As one critic notes, the stirring of the silent but sultry and vast [!] phallus provokes "contradictory and unreconciled attitudes". The erect member is both a wonder to behold - a column of fire by night - deserving of quasi-religious veneration and a cause for embarrassment; an independent creature which, willy nilly, rises up and provokes all kinds of desires and frustrations.  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Come Spring, Come Sorrow' and 'Virgin Youth', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Note that there are two versions of 'Virgin Youth'. For many readers, the earlier, shorter, less comical version is the more successful.  

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 19. 

R. P. Draper, 'The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence', in D. H. Lawrence: New Studies, ed. Christopher Heywood, (Macmillan Press, 1987), p. 16.

This post is for Nottingham based writer James Walker. 

Where the Turtle Doves Sing (Reflections on Pubic Hair with Reference to the Cases of D. H. Lawrence and Eric Gill)

Gustave Courbet: L'Origine du monde (1866)

Oil on canvas (55 × 46 cm)

Controversial D. H. Lawrence aficionado, David Brock, reminds us in his latest column for the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser that the young Lawrence was shocked and horrified to discover that women, like men, possess pubic hair on and around the genital area, as a secondary sexual characteristic.

When, after sketching a female nude that he believed to be full of life and the carefree promise of youth, Lawrence was told by a friend that he needed to add hair under the arms and to the lower body if he wished it to look like an actual woman, rather than an idealised figure, the future priest of love physically assaulted his friend whilst shouting 'You dirty devil! It's not true, I tell you!'   

This lack of knowledge regarding female anatomy was fairly widespread, of course, amongst young men in Lawrence's day, even though they were growing up long after Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray was annulled for non-consummation - so repulsed was he by the sight of her pubic hair on their wedding night - and after Gustave Courbet painted his voyeuristic masterpiece, revealing the hirsute origin of the world.

Indeed, even Eric Gill was surprised to find out - having seen photographic evidence - that women had hairy cunts. But whereas this realisation shocked Lawrence and tragically disconcerted poor Ruskin, it was, for Gill, a source of erotic excitement and soon established itself as one of his fetishistic delights; filling all the nooks and crannies of his pornographic imagination, both day and night, for the rest of his life.

As his biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, notes:

"Gill's fascination with the hair of the female, hair of the head as well as the belly, its waviness and density, its soft but springy texture, its symbolic use in both attracting and concealing, recurs all through his work, from his very early sculptures to the last of his nude drawings in the year in which he died."      

Of course, as David Brock also points out, Lawrence eventually overcomes his horror of pubic hair becoming something of a champion of the au naturel look and an exponent of such in his painting. And, in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), there's a famous scene in which Connie and Mellors examine and play with one another's pubes; he threading a few forget-me-not flowers in her soft-brown maidenhair.      

In sum, whilst I don't think Lawrence's pubephilia was ever as strong as Gill's, he was nevertheless partial to a bit of bush in his maturity, for sexual, aesthetic, and philosophical reasons and - somewhat ironically - one suspects he would react with reverse shock and horror at the thought of Brazilian waxing.


See: 

David Brock, 'Book revealed author's 'late development'', Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser, (25 Aug 2017), p. 22. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 15.

Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 46-7.