Guards! D. H. Lawrence and the Potency of Men

Guards erect with breasts bright red 

and the skins of bears upon their head

All the nice girls love a sailor, so they say [1].

 

But for D. H. Lawrence, it's all the king's soldiers who catch his eye; especially those guards marching stiffly in red tunics and black busbies in whom phallic pride and sun glory is manifest in equal measure. 

 

This is made clear in the early poem 'Guards' [2], where he writes of smouldering soldiers with dark eyes and closed warm lips who advance upon him in a soft-impulsive but somewhat threatening manner, like a wave, before then turning, leaving him to admire their burning shoulders in retreat. 

 

The encounter is clearly, for Lawrence, one with homoerotic overtones. I don't agree with everything that Gregory Woods writes, but it's hard to argue with his claim that in the section of 'Guards' entitled 'Evolution of Soldiers', "their apparent evolution is similar to that of a penis, through tumescence and detumescence" [3]. 

 

Expanding on his theme, Woods continues:

 

"Perspective causes each man to seem to grow as he approaches with red tunic, black busby and 'dark threats'. He passes 'above us', in the classic position of sexual advantage. At 'ebb-time', when the group has just passed by, its phalluses remain erect for a glorious moment, before subsiding." [4]  

 

 

II. 

 

Almost twenty years later, and Lawrence is still thinking of the soldiers in Hyde Park he saw in the summer of 1909. 

 

In a letter sent to Harry Crosby in 1928, he encloses an extended version of 'Guards' - one with an unpublished third section which describes the soldiers as a "column of flesh erect and painted vermillion" and as "Sun-dipped men [...] all blood-potent", who have come together in their maleness [5].

                   

Again, you don't need to be an expert in queer studies to appreciate that this verse is invested with erotic desire for the male body: "And the male body is the symbol of its own sexual focus, the phallus." [6] 

 

Thus, whilst there is "no questioning the fact that his art is primarily hetero-erotic in intention" [7], Lawrence also loves daydreaming about the potency of men and phallic heroes dipped in scarlet.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] "Ship Ahoy! (All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor)" is an English music hall song from 1908, written by Bennett Scott and A. J. Mills. The song was first performed by male impersonator Hetty King.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Guards!', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 34-35. 

      As Pollnitz notes: "DHL regularly visited Hyde Park, in central London. He planned to take Louie Burrows there in July 1909 as he had Jessie Chambers on an earlier visit [...]." See The Poems, Vol. II, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press 2013), p. 843. Whether either young woman was particularly interested in seeing soldiers on parade, I don't know, but Lawrence adored the spectacle of erect young men in uniform marching past.   

 

[3] Gregory Woods, Articulate Male Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry, (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 130.  

 

[4] Ibid.  

[5] See Lawrence's letter to Harry Crosby [30 April - 1 May 1928], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 388-390. The third part of 'Guards' is entitled 'Potency of Men' and consists of five rhyming quatrains. It is reproduced in full on pp. 388-89 from Lawrence's MS.  

[6] Gregory Woods, Articulate Male Flesh, pp. 130-31. 

[7] Ibid., p. 137. 

 

 

To read a sister post to this one, on Lawrence's extended version of the poem 'Gipsy' contained in the Crosby letter, click here. 

Little Weed Vs Havering Council

Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men, with their female friend Little Weed 

To watch a short clip of this BBC TV classic - with or without your mother - click here

 

 

I. 

 

In a very real sense, I belong to what might be termed the Watch with Mother generation (i.e., those whose televisual imagination was formed during the black and white days of the 1950s and 60s). And I remain grateful still to Freda Lingstrom and Maria Bird for the programmes they created; some of my happiest (and earliest) memories are of Andy Pandy, The Woodentops, and the Flower Pot Men. 

 

So it's entirely possible, then, that my love for wild plants is a result of my pre-school fascination with Little Weed, who used to feature (and grow) alongside Bill and Ben in the last of these shows; of indeterminate species, but with a lovely smiling face.

 

 

II.

 

According to a statement on the Havering Council website, the spraying of (the possibly carcinogenic) weed killer glyphosate across the borough in every crack and crevice, is justified because alternative measures have been deemed ineffective and more expensive, and necessary because weeds "growing between paving slabs or along the edge of the road visually impact on an area and  [...] cause damage to property".

 

Thus, from March through to November, "steps are taken to remove weeds and prevent growth". 

 

Although this includes some manual suppression (i.e. the pulling up of weeds by hand, or cutting them with a strimmer), mostly this involves the herbicidal spraying of public highways and footpaths by a subcontracted private company (SH Goss) four times a year, who cheerfully boast of their long experience in maintenance of the environment via the killing of wild plants.     

 

 

III.

 

I'm sure there are other residents who are unhappy about this - if only because they are concerned about the health implications for themselves, their children, and their pets. 

 

But mostly, I suspect the residents of Havering are happy to see little green weeds and colourful wild flowers pulled up or poisoned. Indeed, I watch my neighbours regularly conducting chemical warfare and utilising high pressured pumps in order to protect their driveways from the unwanted intrusion of life. 

       

However, as I've said many times before on Torpedo the Ark, whilst brute force crushes many little plants, they always rise again and, ultimately, "the pyramids will not last a moment, compared with the daisy".*

  

 

Before and after pics taken in the roadside outside my house

 

* D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta De Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 36.

 

 

See also: 

 

'In Defence of Weeds and Wildflowers' (25 June 2015): click here.

 

'And No Birds Sing' (28 May 2016): click here. 

 

'And Fungal Life Shall Triumph'  (8 Nov 2021): click here. 

 

 

Between Thy Moon-Lit, Milk-White Thighs

Diagrammatic, non-explicit, depiction of a man

performing cunnilingus on a woman

wikimedia.org

 

 

In the spring of 1928, D. H. Lawrence sent Harry Crosby the newly written out and revised MS for his short story 'Sun' [1], by way of thanking Crosby for the five gold coins that the latter had sent him. 

 

Lawrence also enclosed some poems, including an extended version of an early work entitled 'Gipsy' [2]. To the original two stanzas, Lawrence now added a couple more, which contained, he said, a bit of sun. 

 

The first of these reads:

 

Between thy moon-lit, milk-white thighs

      Is a moon-pool in thee.

And the sun in me is thirsty, it cries

      To drink thee, to win thee. [3]   

 

This is certainly an interesting quatrain; one which lends support to the controversial claim that although Lawrence thinks of the female sex organ as a ripe, bursting fruit just waiting to be eaten, the cunt was for him at its most succulent only when "overflowing with semen from the withdrawn phallus" [4].

 

Whether this implies that cunnilingus was, in Lawrence's erotic imagination, a disguised form of fellatio [5], is probably not something we can say for sure. 

 

But what we might note is that via the creampie-loving figure of Oliver Mellors, Lawrence forcefully expressed the view that there is only one place in which it is legitimate and desirable for the male to ejaculate - and that is deep inside the vagina [6]. 

 

Thus, when in the verse above the male speaker uses the term moon-pool, I think we all know that he refers to a deposit of semen and it is this which he wishes to felch from between the milk-white thighs of his beloved; i.e., the sun in him is greedy for the male seed of life, not the female sap that curdles milk and "smells strange on your fingers" [7].  

 

 

Notes

 

 [1] See the letter to Harry Crosby [29 April - 1 May 1928], in The Letters of D. H. Lawence Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 388-90. 

      This MS would provide the base text for the Black Sun edition of the tale published in October 1928.

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Gipsy', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 14-15. And for an earlier version of this poem entitled 'Self-Contempt', see the letter to Louie Burrows (6 Dec 1910) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 196.   

[3] Letters VI. 389. The second added stanza reads: "I am black with the sun, and willing / To be dead / Can I but plunge in thee, swilling / Thy waves over my head."

[4] Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry, (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 131. 

      This is taken from a chapter on Lawrence - chapter four (pp. 125-139) - in which Woods argues (amongst other things) that Lawrence had a "deep and obvious fascination with male homosexuality" and that whilst his "main erotic preoccupation is with the possibility of love between a woman and a man", when this seems impossible or doomed to failure, "he turns to the homosexual alternative [...] as a less problematical version of the same thing". 

      Ultimately, says Woods, Lawrence is promoting a bisexual ideal and his erotic grail is the "passionate, physical union of two heterosexual men". 

      Lines quoted can be found on p. 125.   

 

[5] Woods writes: "Cunnilingus is Lawrence's oblique image of fellatio." Articulate Flesh, p. 131. 

      A little later (p. 132), Woods insists that Lawrence's heroes all long to drink from the cup of semen which is the post-coital (spunk-filled) vagina. The American biographer and critic Jeffry Meyers, who has written extensively on Lawrence and published a volume entitled Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930 (The Athlone Press, 1977), is not convinced, however, and says that statements such as this, made without supporting evidence, simply reveal the author's own obsessions. 

      Meyers's review of Articulate Flesh can be found in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jan 1989), pp. 126-129. This can conveniently be accessed on JSTOR via the following link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27710124  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 203. 

      Speaking to Connie, Mellors angrily condemns those women who "'love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one.'" Such women, he says, even when they do allow vaginal penetration, invariably insist their lovers withdraw prior to orgasm and come instead on some external body part. To be fair, the women are the ones running the risk of an unwanted preganancy - not something that Oliver Mellors allows himself to consider.      

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 233.

      Again, whether this means that Lawrence imagined cunnilingus as an oblique image of fellatio - or whether, rather, he had a neo-primitive belief that the ingestion of semen increased one's own potency thanks to the magical properties it possessed - is not something I know for certain (any Lawrence scholar reading this who may care to advise is welcome to do so). 

      Readers interested in knowing more about the swallowing of semen might find the post entitled 'Gokkun' (7 May 2016) of interest: click here. 

 

 

A note on further reading: 

 

Those interested in this topic might like to see the essay by Isabella Rooke-Ley entitled '"What is Cunt? she said": Obscenity, Concealment and Representations of the Vulva in D. H. Lawrence', in Polyphony, Volume 2, Issue 1 (University of Manchester, April 2020): click here.  

      Rooke-Ley argues that Lawrence's use of the word cunt in Lady C. is not what it seems, in that rather than being a direct (if vulgar) reference to female genitalia, it is in fact a concealment of the latter and linked to the text's figuring of the cunt and its pleasure as obscene and shameful.

      Turning her attention to the (infamous) poem 'Fig', Rooke-Ley attempts to demonstrate how there is also a link made in Lawrence's work between concealment, obscenity, vulval pleasure, and putrefaction.

      Finally, readers may also wish to see my post 'The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack' (1 July 2021): click here.

 

 

For a sister post to this one, on Lawrence's extended version of the poem 'Guards' contained in the Crosby letter, click here.                 

 

 

May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1921 - 1929)

Claude Flight and Edith Lawrence Maypole Dance (1936)
goldmarkart.com 

 

 

1 May 1921 

 

Lawrence is back in Germany - staying at a country inn just outside Baden. 

 

He informs his American literary agent Robert Mountsier that it's lovely, although in a lettter written two days earlier, also to Mountsier, he confesses he doesn't really like Germany - even though things are cheap (always an important consideration for Lawrence). 

 

He expands upon this in a letter written the following day - May 2nd - to Mary Cannan, the actress wife of the British writer Gilbert Cannan: 

 

"The country is beautiful, Baden a lovely little town, and there are some exquisite things in the shops. Everybody is very nice with us: and we live for about 5/- a day the pair of us. Food is very good: wonderful asparagus." [1] 

 

And yet: "Germany is rather depressed and empty feeling [...] The men are very silent and dim." [2] 

 

To be fair, they had just lost a war and Germany had not fully recovered from the shock caused by the overthrow of the old way of life and the ongoing economic misery caused by the Treaty of Versailles's demand for punitive war reparations. 

 

Soon, however, the Nazis would be along, promising to address these issues ...

 

 

1 May 1923 

 

Two years later, and Lawrence is in Chapala, Mexico - which he describes in a telegram to Frieda as paradise (whether this is meant ironically or not, I don't know). 

 

She duly arrives from Mexico City the following day by train and they move into a little house of their own (near but not overlooking Lake Chapala): "It is hot and sunny and nice: lots of room." [3] 

 

They even have bananas growing in their garden - so much more exotic than the apples growing in mine! 

 

 

1 May 1925 

 

Many of Lawrence's short letters written from Del Monte Ranch, New Mexico, are full of relatively dull domestic details and conventional remarks about the weather and his state of health. 

 

And this includes his May Day letter to the American modernist painter (and early exponent of Cubism) Andrew Dasburg: thanks for sending a new ribbon for the typewriter; we've got the workmen in laying pipes; the cold winds cause my chest to play up, etc. [4] 

 

There's really not much one can say about this. But it's reassuring to know that Lawrence wasn't raging or in genius mode all of the time. 

 

 

1 May 1926 

 

Although Lawrence mockingly portrayed Reggie Turner as little Algie Constable in Aaron's Rod (1922), I will forever hold him in high regard due to the fact that he was one of the few friends who remained loyal to Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned and supported him after his release.

 

On May Day, 1926, Lawrence wrote to Reggie from the pensione where he was staying, in Florence, hoping to clear up a misunderstanding. Apparently, they had agreed to meet at a popular bar, but, due to some confusion over the day, they managed to miss one another. 

 

Surprisingly, rather than be angry about this and blame Reggie, Lawrence sincerely regrets the lost evening and confesses that he was involved in a similar mix-up in Mexico City "with the one man I really liked in that damnable town: he said Thursday, and I heard Friday ... But anyhow I'm awfully sorry, and a thousand apologies" [5]. 

 

This is maybe explained by the fact that, as well as needing spectacles, Lawrence was a little deaf.

 

 

1 May 1928 

 

Harry Crosby, the young American playboy, poet, and publisher, epitomized the Lost Generation and would, in December 1929, commit suicide, aged 30, having first shot his young mistress, Josephine Rotch, through the head as part of an apparent death pact.

 

Twenty months earlier, however, in the spring of 1928, Lawrence had offered to write an introduction to a collection of poetry by Crosby and he sent this off to him at the beginning of May [6]. 

 

In a letter of April 29, Lawrence writes: "I have done the introduction to Chariot of the Sun [...] You can cut this introduction, and do what you like with it, for your book. If there is any part you don't like, omit it." [7] 

 

That's very generous of Lawrence; as was his proposal to promote Crosby's book by trying to get the introduction published separately; "a magazine article would be a bit of an advertisement for you" [8].

 

Just before Lawrence had the chance to post this letter, however, he received some further poems from Crosby in the mail. Unfortunately, he didn't think much of them - and in a PS written on May 1st, he advised Crosby not to add them to Chariot of the Sun:

 

"They don't belong; they are another thing. Put them in another book. Leave Chariot as it is. I send my foreword [...] It's good - but it won't fit if you introduce these new, long, unwieldly, not very sensitive poems. Do print Chariot as it stands. The new ones aren't so good." [9] 

 

 

1 May 1929

 

This would be Lawrence's final May Day; he was to die the following year on March 2nd. 

 

And he spent it in Spain (Palma de Mallorca): "Brilliant sunny May Day here, but wind cool - everything sparkling." [10]

 

In fact, he liked Mallorca so much he thought about staying the whole month and then do a little tour around Spain: Burgos, Granada, Cordoba, Seville, Madrid ..."I don't expect to like it immensely [...] Yet it interests me." [11]  

 

In fact, Lawrence had already decided the Spanish were rancid and lifeless: 

 

"The people seem to me rather dead, and they are ugly, and they have these non-existent bodies that English people often have [...] Dead-bodied people with rather ugly faces and a certain staleness. [...] The Spaniards, I believe, have refused life so long that life now refuses them [...]" [12]

 

Despite this, Lawrence lingered on in Palma until June 18th, when he finally sailed for Marseille (and from there headed by train to Italy).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 710. 

      The May Day letter to Robert Mountsier is also on p. 710. 

 

[2] Letters, III. 711. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, writing in a letter to Thomas Seltzer (2 May 1923), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 436. 

      The short May Day telegram to Frieda is on p. 435 of this volume. 

 

[4] See the letter to Andrew Dasburg (1 May 1925), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 248. 

 

[5] Letters, V. 445-46. 

 

[6] This introduction by Lawrence - entitled 'Chaos in Poetry' - can be found in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116. It is one of my favourite pieces of writing by Lawrence and, I think, one of the most important. It was first published in Echanges, in December 1929.  

 

[7-8] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cabridge University Press, 1991), p. 389.

[9] Letters VI. 390. 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Nancy Pearn (1 May 1929), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cabridge University Press, 1993), p. 269.

 

[11] Letter to Maria and Aldous Huxley [9 May 1929], Letters, VII. 276. 

[12] Letters, VII 275-76. 

      Lawrence is still denigrating the Spanish - whom he compares disavourably to both the Italians and the French - in another letter to Aldous Huxley written on the 17th of May [VII. 283]. Just for the record: I love Spain and I love the Spanish.

 

 

To read the first part of this post - May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1911 - 1917) - click here.

May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1911 - 1917)

Edith A. Cubitt: Children Dancing Round a Maypole (c. 1900) 

Watercolour drawing (commissioned by Ernest Nister)

vam.ac.uk

 

 

1 May 1911

 

After his advances to Agnes Holt in the autumn of 1909 had come to nothing - not even a handjob - Lawrence convinced Jessie Chambers to become his lover. 

 

In the two years that followed, finally free from the bonds of chastity, Lawrence actively pursued several women - or bed bunnies as he referred to them - in the hope of further sexual experience; "years of enforced virginity had given way to a kind of compulsive arousal" [1].

 

One of these women was the lovely Louie Burrows, to whom he wrote on May Day 1911:

"I would sell birthrights and deathrights for an embrace of thee, Louisa: toss 'em out of the window, poetic powers, perceptivity, intellect - pouf: for a few kisses and a tight clasp." [2]

 

 

1 May 1912 

 

Lawrence has now met and fallen in love with a woman whom he believes to be the most wonderful in all England. 

 

Unfortunately, Frieda Weekley is married with children. Still, that doesn't deter either of them from beginning an illicit affair and on May Day 1912 he writes a letter in which he expresses his anxiety and guilt - but also his commitment to the relationship - having arranged to effectively elope with her to Germany:

"I feel so horrid and helpless. [...] And what was decent yesterday will perhaps be frightfully indecent today. [...] 

      What time are you going to Germany, what day, what hour, which railway, which class? Do tell  me as soon as you can [...] I will come any time you tell me - but let me know.

      You must be in an insane whirl in your mind. I feel helpless and rudderless, a stupid scattered fool. [...] I would do anything on earth for you [...] but I don't like my feeling [of] presentiment. I am afraid of something low, like an eel which bites out of the mud, and hangs on with its teeth. I feel as if I can't breathe while we're in England." [3]

 

 

1 May 1913

 

Although he and Frieda are now an established item, Lawence is still thinking back to his (mostly sexless) relationship with Jessie - and doing so with increased bitterness. In a letter to Edward Garnett, he writes:

 

"It's all very well for Miss Chambers to be spiritual - perhaps she can bring it off - I can't. She bottled me up till I was going to burst. But as long as the cork sat tight (herself the cork) there was spiritual calm. When the cork was blown out, and Mr Lawrence foamed, Miriam said 'This yeastiness I disown: it was not so in my day.'" [4]  

 

It's always surprising how explicit Lawrence was with his sexual metaphors. Reading this, however, makes one wonder whether Jessie (or her fictional alias of Miriam) had a fear of semen and/or the act of ejaculation? In other words, was her intense disgust-response to male sexual activity rooted in a genuine phobia, or was it merely a consequence of her moral beliefs and idealism? 

 

Either way, this would explain (in part at least) why she was so bitterly ashamed of having allowed Lawrence to fuck her; it was as if he had "dragged her spiritual plumage in the mud" [5]. 

 

 

1 May 1915

 

American readers will probably know that William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York.

 

English readers will probably ask: So what? 

 

Well, it turns out that Lawrence was fascinated by this event and much amused by a song (of anonymous origin) that was written about the shooting and Czolgosz's execution in the electric chair. On May 1st 1915, he enclosed the lyrics to the song in a letter to the English author Eleanor Farjeon (presumably at her request) [6]. 

 

 

1 May 1916 

 

In a letter to his Freudian friend Barbara Low - a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society - written from his cottage in Cornwall, Lawrence expresses his complete dismay with the world at war:

 

"I would write to you oftener, but this life of today so disgusts one, it leaves nothing to say. The war, the approaching conscription, the sense of complete paltriness and chaotic nastiness in life, really robs one of speech." [7]  

 

Of course, having said that, Lawrence then goes on (at some length) to speak of the local flora, his work on what he still at this time calls the second half of The Rainbow, and the current state of his health: "I was very well, but have been seedy again these few days ..." [8] 

 

But mostly he complains of the utter nausea he feels for humanity; "people smelling like bugs, endless masses of them, and no relief: it is so difficult to bear. [...] I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me." [9]. 

 

Still, it is from such nausea and violent anti-humanism that great art is born and the greater health discovered. For as Lawrence says: One sheds one's sickness in books.

 

 

1 May 1917

 

Today, of course, when we are all supposed to stand with Ukraine and wear a little blue and yellow ribbon or badge in solidarity, to say anything positive about Russia is almost taboo. But in May 1917 Russia was, for many people, the country that held out the greatest promise. 

 

And so it is that Lawrence writes to his Russian-born friend S. S. Koteliansky:

 

"I feel that our chiefest hope for the future is Russia. When I think of the young new country there, I love it inordinately. It is the place of hope. We must go, sooner or a little later. [...] Send me a Berlitz grammar book, I will begin to learn the language - religiously." [10]

 

Notes

 

[1] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 252.  

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 264. 

[3] Letters, I. 388-89. 

      It should be noted that this letter was actually written on April 30th, 1912, and not May 1st, but I'm using a little artistic and historical license for the sake of the post.

 

[4-5] Letters, I. 545. 

      This letter has been dated by the editor as 2 May 1913. It is mostly famous for the following boast made by Lawrence: "I know I can write bigger stuff than any man in England." [546]. 

[6] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 332.

[7-9] Letters, II. 602. 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 121. 

 

 

The second part of this post - May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1921 - 1929) - can be read by clicking here.

On D. H. Lawrence and Circus Elephants

The people watched and wondered, 

and seemed to resent the mystery that lies in beasts. [1]

 

 

I.

 

Put two men in a ring and there's a fight on. Add some performing animals to the mix and you have a very different type of spectacle: circus. 

 

Circus is a form of popuar entertainment involving men and beasts that, in its modern form, developed in England in the mid-18th century. Although there were travelling zoological exhibitions and clowns and acrobats before this time, it was the combination of these elements within the confines of a circular arena that was unique, and for this we can thank Philip Astley [2]. 

   

For some people, the star of the circus is the ringmaster; for others, it's the trapeze artists, or the showgirls on horseback wearing their sparkling costumes and feathers. But for D. H. Lawrence, the figures which seemed to best capture his imagination were the elephants. 

 

 

II. 

 

As far as I know, Lawrence never saw elephants in the wild; only captive beasts at London Zoo in 1911 [3]; ceremonial creatures taking part in a Buddhist festival in Ceylon in 1922 [4]; and trained elephants at a circus in Toulon (France), where he went with Frieda in December 1928. 

 

Whilst the magnificent tusker elephants in Kandy certainly left their impression on Lawrence (and his poetry), it's the much shorter series of verses - or pansies - that he wrote about the circus elephants that I wish to discuss here. 

 

These verses are:

 

 

Elephants in the circus [5]

 

Elephants in the circus

have aeons of weariness round their eyes

Yet they sit up

and show vast bellies to the children.

 

 

Elephants plodding [6]

 

Plod! Plod!

And what ages of time

the worn arches of their spines support!

 

 

On the drum [7]

 

The huge old female on the drum

shuffles gingerly round

and smiles; the vastness of her elephant antiquity

is amused.

 

 

Two performing elephants [8]

 

He stands with his forefeet on the drum

and the other, the old one, the pallid hoary female

must creep her great bulk beneath the bridge of him.

 

On her knees, in utmost caution

all agog, and curling up her trunk

she edges through without upsetting him.

Triumph! the ancient pig-tailed monster!

 

When her trick is to climb over him

with what shadow-like slow carefulness

she skims him, sensitive

as shadows from the ages gone and perished

in touching him, and planting her round feet.

 

While the wispy, modern children, half-afraid

watch silent. The looming of the hoary, far-gone ages

is too much for them. 

 

 

III. 

 

What these verses suggest is that elephants not only look old and worn out - their saggy, wrinkled skin doesn't help with this - but belong to a prehistoric world or time gone by, as if they were relics or living fossils, who have nothing more to offer than entertainment value (and ivory). 

 

It's often assumed by stupid people that animals that predate man and haven't physically changed much for thousands (if not millions) of years are somehow less evolved than us, or have reached an evolutionary dead end and are thus deserving of no place in the modern world. 

 

But whilst it's true that most species of proboscidean are extinct - and the future's not looking hopeful for the remaining elephants that do roam the Earth in ever-dwindling numbers - this mistaken line of thought is simply an example of anthropocentric conceit. Elephants are as evolved as us and belong as much to the world today as we do.    

 

I'm surprised Lawrence doesn't see this. And disappointed that he suggests performing elephants are having fun. For whilst I'm not an expert in elephant psychology and welfare, I very much doubt they enjoy exposing their vast bellies or find it amusing to balance on a ball or drum. Nor - I imagine - do they want to plod or shuffle around a ring, or crawl on their knees in utmost caution.  

 

Does anyone really imagine that the strange postures and poses they are forced to take up - "showing the pink soles of their feet / and curling their precious live trunks" [9] - come naturally? Or that training doesn't involve cruelty and the brutal use of bull-hooks, whips, and electric prods?  

 

And let's not even mention the physical and emotional abuse these poor creatures are subjected to when they are not in the spotlight; confined and chained for hours on end, or transported from town to town in the back of trucks and boxcars. 

 

Obviously Lawrence was writing a hundred years ago and so can't be expected to share a contemporary view of zoos and circuses in terms of so-called animal rights. But it is strange that a writer who was acutely sensitive to animals in all their wild otherness or mystery - and who hated the attempt by mankind to impose its will over the natural world - should have not been angered or outraged by the indecent sight of an elephant performing on command. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'When I went to the circus', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 386. Click here to read in full online.

 

[2] Philip Astley (1742-1814) staged a show at an ampitheatre in London in 1768, featuring trick horseback riding and music. He later added other acts which quickly became associated with the circus, a term coined by Astley's rival, Charles Dibdin, who opened The Royal Circus in London in 1772.

      Readers who are interested, can find more details and a brief history of circus on the website of the National Fairground and Circus Archive (part of the Special Collections and Archive Division of the University of Sheffield Library): click here. 

 

[3] In a letter written to his girlfriend at the time, Louie Burrows, on 9 May 1911, Lawrence is excited by the prospect of her visiting at the weekend (if only for a day) and he proposes taking her to London Zoo, where, he says, he has never been (but presumably wanted to go). See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 266. 

      Whether they did go, is uncertain. But if they did visit, they surely called in at the Elephant-House, to see one of the Zoo's main attractions. Readers who are interested to know what other creatures were on display in 1911 might like to consult the illustrated official guide to the London Zoological Society's gardens in Regent's Park, by P. Chalmers Mitchell, published in that year: click here.   

[4] In the Spring of 1922, the Lawrence's spent six weeks in Ceylon. On arrival, they witnessed the Pera-hera (or Festival of the Tooth); a night-time procession involving savage music and devil dancers, as well as huge tusker elephants dressed in gorgeous apparel. Lawrence was impressed, particularly by the latter stepping forth to the beat of a tom-tom and illuminated by torch-light, and he wrote a powerful poem entitled 'Elephant' shortly afterwards which was published in the English Review (April 1923).

      See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 338-43. Alternatively, to read 'Elephant' online, click here. 

      My recent post on Lawrence's time in Ceylon can be read by clicking here.  

[5] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems I. 369.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, I. 370.

[7] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, I. 370.

[8] D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, I. 370. 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'When I went to the circus', The Poems, I. 386.

 

For a sister post to this one in which I discuss Lawrence's poem 'The elephant is slow to mate', click here.

Is the Elephant Slow to Mate?

And what ages of time

the worn arches of their spines support! [1]

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence wrote several poems featuring elephants, one of which makes the claim that they are, as a species, slow to mate: 

 

 

The elephant, the huge old beast 

    is slow to mate; 

he finds a female, they show no haste 

    they wait 

 

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts 

    slowly, slowly to rouse 

as they loiter along the river-beds 

    and drink and browse 

 

and dash in panic through the brake 

    of forest with the herd, 

and sleep in massive silence, and wake 

      together, without a word. 

 

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts 

   grow full of desire, 

and the great beasts mate in secret at last, 

    hiding their fire. 

 

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts 

    so they know at last 

how to wait for the loneliest of feasts 

    for the full repast. 

 

They do not snatch, they do not tear; 

    their massive blood 

moves as the moon-tides, near, more near 

    till they touch in flood. [2]

 

 

It's a lovely poem. 

 

But is what it says about the mating habits of the elephant true, or is Lawrence simply constructing another of what Amit Chaudhuri identifies as a dummy creature [3]; i.e., one which fits nicely into his own philosophy, but has little or no relation to natural history or mammalian biology? 

 

Unfortunately for those who like to believe that Lawrence has an uncanny insight into the essence of animals (and plants), I think it's the latter. That is to say, I don't think this verse tells us much about the love lives of actual elephants - and what it does tell us is misleading. 

 

For the fact is elephants - despite their huge size and weight - are not slow to mate and have been successfully fucking and evolving for tens of millions of years (i.e., long before there were any human beings to watch and wax lyrical about their sexual habits).

 

 

II. 

 

As is so often the case, the facts about most things - including elephant sexual behaviour - are at least as interesting as the musings of a poet. And so, for the record ...

 

Adult male elephants enter a state of amour fou known as musth when searching for a mate; massively increased testosterone levels produce highly aggressive behaviour and this helps them not only see off or gain dominance over potential love rivals, but increases their chance of reproductive success with the ladies (musth enables females to determine the condition of the male, as weak or injured males cannot cut the mustard).    

 

As for female elephants, they have their own recurring periods of sexual madness when they are receptive to male advances. When on heat, they release pheromones in their urine and vaginal secretions, signalling their fertility and the fact they are ready and willing to be mounted. (Males will often collect a chemical sample from a potential mate with their trunks and analyse such with their vomeronasal organ.) 

 

Elephants are polygynous by nature; i.e., they subscribe to a mating system in which one male lives and breeds with multiple females (although each female only mates with a single male). And once a bull elephant has his harem, he will jealously guard it, thereby ensuring paternity of any offspring that result from union with the cows. 

 

Although Lawrence suggests elephants mate in secret, actually, for young females, the attentions of a large older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives will often stay nearby to provide support and reassurance. The deed itself - i.e., of copulation - lasts for less than a minute and does not involve any pelvic thrusting by the male, whose penis has a remarkable degree of independent mobility. 

 

Having ejaculated, the male's sperm then have to swim six feet in order to encounter and penetrate an egg. If all goes well and one manages this mammoth task (no pun intended), then two years later a baby elephant will be born into the world (and as an endangered species - thanks to poaching and habitat destruction - that's an increasingly rare and vital event).          

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephants plodding', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 370.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The elephant is slow to mate', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 403-04.  

[3] See Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      Amongst other things, Chaudhuri demonstrates how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence as a poet is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms. In other words, he recreates and imitates various birds and beasts for his own artistic and philosophical amusement, assembling a menagerie of textual mannequins.

 

 

For a sister post to this one on D. H. Lawrence and circus elephants, click here. 

Tropics Not Really My Line: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Ceylon

So long Ceylon - and tell the Buddha to stand up!

Image: thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com

 

I. 

 

On or about this day in 1922, D. H. Lawrence set sail for Australia, having spent six weeks in Ceylon - a place which he was glad to have seen, but which, due to the heat, a tummy bug, the unbearable sense of the prehistoric past, and the fact that the Buddha sat cross-legged in front of temples that reminded him of decked up pigsties, he really didn't care for, as the following passage from a letter written to Lady Cynthia Asquith makes clear:

 

"Here we are on ship again [...] I did not like Ceylon - at least I liked looking at it - but not to live in. The east is not for me - the sensusous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes - and the heads of elephants and buffaloes poking out of primeval mud - the queer noise of the tall metallic palm-trees: ach! - altogether the tropics have something of the world before the flood - hot dark mud and the life inherent in it: makes me feel rather sick." [1]

Watching a native festival and night-time procession attended by the Prince of Wales certainly made an impression on Lawrence, with its "huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches [...] savage music and devil dancers" [2], but it was entirely alien to him and, mostly, he was conscious of the fact that it was impossible as a white European to ever truly return to a dark, far-off past wherein insects and people swarmed. 

 

Similarly, he was aware that eastern religion wasn't his cup of tea either: "I don't believe in Buddha - hate him in fact - his rat-hole temples and his rat-hole religion." [3] 

 

 

II.

 

Funny enough, the trip to Ceylon had started so well. After an excellent 15-day voyage with perfect weather, Lawrence and Frieda landed at Colombo on the 13th of March, where they were met by their American friend Earl Brewster - then an ardent student of Buddhism - and travelled the next day to Kandy. 

 

Despite the soaring temperature and high humidity, Lawrence was hopeful of learning to love the tropics. Ten days after arrival, he wrote to his sister Emily:

 

"We have been in the bungalow a week. It is about a mile or mile and a half from Kandy, looking down on the lake: very lovely. It stands uphill among a sort of half wild estate [...] almost like the jungle. We sit on the verandahs and watch the chipmunks and chameleons and lizards and tropical birds among the trees and bamboos [...] It is very hot in the sun - we have sun helmets and white suits - but quite pleasant sitting still. If one moves one sweats. [...] It is rather fascinating, but I don't now how long we shall stay." [4]

 

He closes the letter:   

 

"One doesn't do much here, I tell you - though Brewster goes every day to the Temple to learn the sacred language of the Buddhists - Pali. I wish you could see it all - it is most strange and fascinating. But even at night you sweat if you walk a few yards." [5]

 

 

III. 

 

The heat - my God the heat! - was clearly problematic for Lawrence; as was the sense of malaise and his inability to work. It quickly dawned on him that he would never feel at home - or even himself - in Ceylon and his hostility towards the natives, the local wildlife, tropical fruit, and Buddhism intensified by the day, as these extracts from seven of his letters written from Ceylon demonstrate:

  

"One realises how very barbaric the substratum of Buddhism is. I shrewdly suspect that high-flownness of Buddhism altogether exists mostly on paper: and that its denial of the soul makes it always rather barren, even if philosophically etc. more perfect. In short, after a slight contact, I draw back and don't like it." [6]

 

"Here it is monstrous hot, like being in a hot bell-glass. I don't like it a bit. I don't like the east. It makes me feel sick in my stomach: seems sort of unmanly." [7]

"This is the hottest month in Ceylon - and the heavens are white hot from 10 till 6. The bungalow is outside Kandy on a hill among trees [...] birds shriek and pop and cackle out of the jungle, creatures jerk and bounce about. [...] The east, the bit I've seen, seems silly. I don't like it one bit. I don't like the silly dark people [...] or their hideous little Buddha temples, like decked up pigsties - nor anything. I just don't like it. It's better to see it on the cinema: you get the whole effect, without the effort and the sense of nausea." [8]

 

"Here the heat is terrific - and I hate the tropics. It is beautiful, in a lush, tangled, towsled, lousy sort of way. The natives too are quite good looking, dark-skinned and erect. But something about it all just makes me sick - there is something smooth and boneless, and a smell of cocoanut oil and sickly fruits - that I can't bear. I loathe the tropical fruits, except pineapples, and those I can't digest: because my inside has never hurt me so much in all my 36 years as in these three weeks." [9]  

 

"No, the east doesn't get me at all. Its boneless suavity, and the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night; and the scents that make me feel sick, the perpetual nauseous overtone of cocoanut and cocoanut fibre and oil, the sort of tropical sweetness which to me suggests an undertang of blood, hot blood, and thin sweat: the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of the temples: all this makes up Ceylon to me, and all this I cannot bear. [10]

 

"Ceylon is very interesting to look at, but would be deadly to live in [...] I nearly sweated myself into the grave [...] I am glad I came. I am glad I looked at this corner of the east. Then one has no more illusions about it. From a cinematograph point of view it can be fascinating: the dark, tangled jungle, the terrific sun that makes like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you: the palm-trees and the noise and the sullenness of the forest: and then the natives, naked, dark, in all shades of darkness [...] suave, smooth, in their way beautiful. But curiously enough, the magnetism is all negative, everything seems magnetically to be repelling one. You never for a second feel at one with anything: always this curious black tropical hostileness, this underneath gloom [...] the sense of apathy, black, dark empty apathy, as if nothing ever could matter, not really, not in our sense of the word: and the feeling that there is a lid down over everything. [...] Queer it is, so different from what I expected. I am glad to have experienced it: but would die if I had to stay. I am glad to have seen something at least of these Oriental millions, and of this vaunted Buddhism. The last is to me a barren, dead affair: and the teeming millions don't seem to me as if they would ever do much, unless it were something wicked." [11]

 

"It has been lovely to see Ceylon. But I feel the east is not for me. It seems to me the life drains away from one here. [...] One could quite easily sink into a kind of apathy, like a lotus on a muddy pond, indifferent to anything. And that apparently is the lure of the east: this peculiar stagnant apathy where one doesn't bother about a thing, but drifts on from minute to minute. [...]

     By the way I detest Buddha, upon slight contact: affects me like a mud pool that has no bottom to it. One learns to value what one actually knows and possesses, and to have a wholesome indifference to strange gods. Anyhow these little rat-hole Buddhist temples turn my stomach." [12]

 

IV.

There are many things that one might comment on here: for example, Lawrence's sense of white privilege and cultural superiority. As John Worthen notes, the letters from Ceylon illustrate how quickly Lawrence could turn to "colonial and racist explanations" [13] to justify his own feelings of bitter disappointment and estrangement - or even make sense of a stomach upset.

 

More surprising, perhaps, is Lawrence's suggesting that, rather than travel to faraway and profoundly foreign lands, one is better off staying in Blighty and watching a travel film at the local cinema - or that dark gods and exotic creatures aren't all that he thought they were. As Worthen says, such a "fantastic reversal of almost everything he had been saying and thinking for the last seven years [...] is a useful reminder not only of his contradictoriness, but of how divided he was" [14].    

What I really want to discuss, however, is Lawrence's hatred of Buddhism, a religion which, in his view - typical of the period in which he wrote - was a form of ascetic idealism; one that encouraged an introspective quietism, or non-engagement with the world (as perfectly illustrated by the representation of the Buddha as a fat seated figure) ... [15]

 

 

V.

 

By his own admission, Lawrence much prefered Hinduism to Buddhism and thought more highly of Jesus on his Cross than Buddha seated beneath his Bo Tree. But how much he actually knew about Buddhism is debatable; there is no evidence that he ever studied its central texts with the same enthusiasm that he read works of theosophy, for example. 

 

According to Gerald Doherty, Lawrence probably acquired his knowledge of Buddhism indirectly from three sources: the philosophical musings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the esoteric teachings of Mme. Blavatsky, and from semi-popular 19th-century books on the subject [16]. 

 

From Nietzsche, Lawrence would have picked up the idea of Buddhism as ultimately a form of decadence. It might be a religion beyond good and evil, but it's also a religion of fatigue and decline. From the studies written by English colonial types who had spent a good deal of time in India or Ceylon, Lawrence would have absorbed the belief that underneath its ethical sophistication, Buddhism was a primitive (and inferior) form of religion compared to Christianity. 

 

But it was only when in Ceylon that Lawrence really seems to have developed a visceral (and aesthetic) hostility towards Buddhism: now the latter is holy nihilism pure and simple; "a vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space" [17].     

 

In one of his final essays, Lawrence places the Buddha alongside Plato and Christ as one of the grand idealists responsible for destroying the vital relationship between men and women, as well as the (equally vital) relationship mankind has with other forms of life and, indeed, the cosmos itself:

 

"Buddha, Plato, Jesus, they were all three utter pessimists as regards life, teaching that the only happiness lay in abstracting oneself from life, the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in living in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit. But now, after almost three thousand years, now [...] we realise that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia. And the great saviours and teachers only cut us off from life. It was the tragic excursus." [18]

 

I think this is a profound insight on Lawrences part - one which can be placed alongside his more humorous conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion ... [19] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1-3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith  (30 April 1922), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 233-34.

 

[4-5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Emily King (24 March 1922), Letters, IV 215, 216.

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Pratt Barlow (30 March 1922), Letters, IV 218.  

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier (3 April 1922), Letters, IV 220.

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mary Cannan (3 April 1922), Letters IV 221.

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mary Canaan (5 April 1922), Letters IV 224.

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne (10 April 1922), Letters IV 225.

     

[11] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier (16 April 1922), Letters IV 227. 

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky (17 April 1922), Letters IV 228.

 

[13-14] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 265. 

[15] David Ellis warns us that it would be dangerous to "place too much emphasis on any one statement" made by Lawrence in his letters, "when his attitudes were always so highly volatile and full of contradictions". But, on the other and, he admits that it would be mistaken to "ignore how extreme Lawrence could be in the declaration of his opinions" or fail to take him seriously. 

      See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 18.

[16] Gerald Doherty, 'The Nirvana Dimension: D. H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Buddhism', D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1982), pp. 51-2. Click here to access on JSTOR. 

[17] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne (10 April 1922), Letters IV 226. 

[18] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 330-31. 

[19] I have discussed this remark (also from one of Lawrence's letters) in an earlier post: click here.