In Defence of My Essay on D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia

Illustration by Efrat Dahan

behance.net

 

 

I. 

 

An academic journal [1] has rejected the following short essay:

 

 

On D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia 

 

In an attempt to move beyond established parameters, this short essay examines the perverse materiality of Lawrence's relationship with the botanical world. It affirms dendrophilia not merely as a form of sexual deviance, but as a formal mechanism through which Lawrence facilitates amorous contact with the otherness of the arboreal environment. 

      Lawrence is often situated within the paradigms of vitalism and panpsychism. But such taxonomies often obfuscate the more radical and disturbing dimensions of his work. For far beyond the therapeutic frameworks of nature-immersion and forest bathing, Lawrence delineates a queer ontology of compulsion and, in this context, the tree transcends its status as a mimetic symbol of life to become a literal and figurative object of desire. As a nonhuman entity, its resinous allure facilitates a form of sexual communion that systematically transgresses heteronormative boundaries. 

      In the pornographic imagination, 'wood' is frequently employed as a crude metonym for male arousal. Lawrence, however, specifically via the figure of Rupert Birkin, reclaims the term's material density. Birkin's forest delirium in chapter VIII of Women in Love serves as a seminal text for Lawrentian dendrophilia, characterized by the categorical rejection of human intimacy in favour of a birch tree's tactile specificity; "its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges" (WL 107). 

      This represents a more radical eroticism than the mere instrumentalisation of nature seen, for example, in Fortune and Wells's novel A Melon for Ecstasy (1971). Whereas the protagonist of the latter, Humphrey Mackevoy, requires the artificial modification of the botanical body to simulate human anatomy, Birkin seeks a communion predicated on the tree's alien nature. In other words, Lawrence eschews the anthropomorphic impulse that would reduce the tree to a vaginal substitute; instead, he insists on the tree as an autonomous object-in-itself. Birkin, the amorous male subject, does not seek to master the natural environment, but to be penetrated by its "raw earth-power" (MM 159) and to deposit his seed in the "folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves" (WL 108). This is a sexual communion defined not merely by tenderness, but by a deadly serious longing for ecstatic, inhuman contact and involves violent struggle as much as sensual delight. 

      The specific parameters of Lawrentian dendrophilia are further elucidated through his visceral repudiation of Ben Hecht's Fantazius Mallare (1922). For despite this work's controversial reputation and Wallace Smith's explicit illustrations of a man enjoying coition with a tree, Lawrence dismissed the novel as "crass" and "strained" (IR 215). His critique was not born of moral prudery, but from a fundamental ontological divergence: Lawrence argued that Smith failed because, unlike Beardsley, he lacked a sense of malicious irony; "to be really wicked he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree" (IR 215). 

      In other words, Lawrence's aversion to Smith's artwork again stemmed from its reductive anthropomorphism. By imposing a distinctly all-too-human female form on the tree, Smith transposed a transgressive encounter into a tedious heteronormative cliché. For Lawrence, the erotic charge of the tree resides exclusively in its non-humanity. To "nestle against its strong trunk" (PFU 86) is to engage with an object that is "fierce and bristling" (MM 158), whose "root-lust" (PFU 86) does not mirror human emotion but rather challenges the human subject to reorganise their life in relation to the tree's own onto-botanical reality. 

      This erotic fascination is grounded in a form of object imperative, wherein Lawrence frames his encounter with an American pine, for example, not as a romanticised union, but as a meeting of two lives that "cross one another, unknowingly" (MM 158). This facilitates a materialist union; "the tree’s life penetrates my life, and my life, the tree's" (MM 158). 

      Lawrence's prose adopts an increasingly somatic register when describing this interaction - one which Rupert Birkin describes as a "marriage" (WL 108). In 'Pan in America', he speaks of "shivers of energy" crossing his "living plasm" (MM 158), suggesting a biological and erotic osmosis where the man becomes "a degree more like unto the tree" (MM 159). The "piney sweetness is rousing and defiant" and the "noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness" (MM 158). This is not the language of pastoral bliss; it is the language of a "primitive savageness" (MM 159) that Lawrence seems to find particularly stimulating. To borrow Graham Harman's concept of the withdrawn but irresistible object, the tree's "resinous erectness" (MM 159) acts as a black sun, radiating a gravitational force that holds birds, beasts and dendrophiles in its orbit. 

      Lawrence, then, moves beyond botanical observation or even a chaste form of tree worship, activating "doors of receptivity" that allow the "relentlessness of roots" (MM 159) to fundamentally restructure the internal architecture of human being. His dendrophilia ultimately points toward a perverse and pantheistic sensuality that complicates the traditional boundaries of religious and erotic experience. Lawrence's desire to venerate arboreal being is inseparable from his (Birkinesque) desire to nakedly rub against young fir-trees that "beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles" (WL 107), etc. 

      By situating this engagement beyond the historical paradigms of domestic or recreational intimacy, Lawrence effectively posits a third category of desire: the pursuit of bliss via the non-human. Rejecting, as mentioned earlier, the mimetic reductions of the artificial vagina, Lawrence reconfigures the tree as a site of profound paraphilic contact. This vision moves sex beyond the procreative or banally pleasurable, allowing readers to conceive of his phallic philosophy as a passionate ontological encounter with responsive vegetation. [2]

 

 

For me, this decision taken by the editor on the advice of two anonymous reviewers [3], is disappointing to say the least; as is the accusation that my text lacks nuance, misunderstands Lawrence's language, and fails to see that his dendrophilia is actually just a repressed expression of same-sex desire.  

 

Of course, rejection is all part of the game and, ultimately, every writer has to accept this. However, I'd like to offer a modest (but robust) defence of the essay and attempt to explain some of its finer theoretical points; not by way of launching a formal appeal or seeking the support of someone to intervene on my behalf, but more as a piece of rhetorical pushback (hopefully not too soured with grape juice).  

 

 

II. 

 

Essentially, the thousand-word text was an attempt to make an original and provocative contribution that veers away from the cosy and conventional literary traditions of Lawrence scholarship - such as vitalism or pastoralism - and engages with the visceral, transgressive character of his prose. The essay also aimed to subvert the green readings that would place Lawrence's work within a network of environmental moralism; by boldly reframing Lawrence's relationship to trees as paraphilic, we move the conversation from eco-mysticism to perverse materialism.  

 

And by making a clear distinction between the instrumentalisation of nature and Lawrence's object-eroticism, suggesting that the tree's otherness is the source of Birkin's desire, the essay aligns Lawrence with recent developments in European philosophy, thereby disrupting the tired heteronormative/homoerotic binary that dominates Lawrence studies. It suggests a queer ontology where the human/non-human boundary is the primary site of sexual tension. 

 

Further, the work - if I do say so myself - displays a certain degree of linguistic and critical wit, uniquely connecting well-known Lawrentian texts, like Women in Love, with more obscure cultural references - such as Fantazius Mallare and A Melon for Ecstasy - as well as Graham Harman's philosophy, thus providing a rigorous intellectual framework for what might otherwise be dismissed as an eccentric reading. 

 

 

III. 

 

Ultimately, of course, the reviewers' rejection stems from a fundamental clash between my object-oriented reading of Lawrence's perverse materialism and their traditional humanist framework. It's not that they fail to understand the work; rather, they understand it all too well - and do not like it. And so they fall back on a gatekeeping strategy that reinforces established biographical and linguistic nuances over radical theoretical interventions. 

 

It was said that I had conflated the terms dendrophilia and paraphilia and that this was problematic. Actually, however, the problem is that the reviewers prefer to define dendrophilia via a standard etymological lens; i.e., simply as a love of trees rooted in Lawrence's documented life and his arboreal writings. 

 

But I'm using the term in a wider, more critical and clinical sense to suggest a non-symbolic sexual communion and highlight the libidinal character of Birkin's desire. It's not that I'm being careless or clumsy with language, it's a deliberate theoretical move. Whether it works or not, is, of course, open to debate. 

 

Moving on, we arrive at the (predictably reductive and, frankly, risible) idea that Birkin's dendro-floraphilia is actually a repressed (and/or displaced) form of same-sex desire; that when he rubs against the trees he is actually thinking of Gerald and that the tree is thus merely a human substitute, rather than an autonomous object-in-itself with its own allure. 

 

To be clear: I'm not overlooking or denying Birkin's attraction to Gerald (or, indeed, Ursula), I'm simply not interested in these all-too-human desires and relations. I'm more concerned with taking Lawrence's demonology and dendrophilia seriously. Clearly, however, these are things my critics prefer to leave vague: the latter is the love whose name they dare not speak. 

  

IV.

 

How, then, might we summarise this conflict of opinion? 

 

Clearly, the editorial board of the journal in question tends to favour research grounded in archival evidence and historical context. My essay probably seemed too speculative for a forum that still prioritises Lawrence's intent and his complex relationship with human sexuality over modern queer or object-oriented readings (indeed, it was probably foolish and mistaken on my part to submit it in the first place).  

 

Sadly, the rejection of the essay reflects an all-too-common tension in academic peer review between radical theoretical intervention and traditional scholarly maintenance. I wouldn't say the editorial board is cowardly or even particularly conservative, it's more a case that they are operating in a very different world with different rules to the "unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge" [4], that Nietzsche speaks of and in which Lawrence challenged us to do our thinking.  

 

Thus, whilst they wish to preserve the historical and biographical authenticity of Lawrence's work and safeguard his reputation as an author; I want to corrupt and destroy everything (not least of all journals that operate as academic echo chambers). 

 

  

Notes 

 

[1] Out of professional courtesy, the title of this journal has been omitted. 

 

[2] The following books by D. H. Lawrence were referenced in the text (as IR, MM, PFU, and WL):

 

-- Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

-- Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 

-- Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious / Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

-- Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

 

[3] Again, out of professional courtesy - and because this is not a personal issue - the name of the editor has been omitted. 

 

[4] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), I. 23, p. 53. 

 

What Was I Thinking? (18 March)

Images used for the posts published on this date 

in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023

 

 

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I can't think of anything else to write about -  it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on the same date in years gone by ...

 

 

Onychophilia: Notes on Two Types of Nail Fetish

 

The first thing to note about this post published back in 2019, is that it is - with almost 5000 views - the most viewed post on Torpedo the Ark. 

 

I suspect that's primarily because the post was mentioned by Dr Mark Griffiths on his excellent blog devoted to addictive, obsessive, compulsive and/or extreme behaviours [1], although I like to think the post also warrants attention on its own merit. 

Starting with those fetish figures made by natives of the Congo region of Central Africa, I swiftly moved from wooden figures with rusty nails banged into them for the purposes of witchcraft on to the sharp, long fingernails of beautiful young women and argued that onychophilia deserves to be considered in its own right and not merely seen as a form of hand partialism. 

 

Somewhat controversially perhaps, I also suggested that those who love nails (like those who love hair) are essentially soft-core necrophiles, secretly aroused by death. 

 

The post finished with a discussion of a related (but distinct) fetish, amychophilia - the desire of a masochistic subject to be cruelly scratched by fingernails. 

 

 

The Bear Necessity: Reflections on the Case of Timothy Treadwell

Not all posts are as popular as the one on two types of nail fetish. 

 

This post, for example, from March 2020, didn't even get a hundred views - which arguably speaks to the fact that there far fewer vorarephiles in the world than there are onychophiles (or amongst my readership, at any rate).

But I found the case of Timothy Treadwell interesting; a failed actor turned gonzo naturalist who ended up being eaten by a brown bear - which, as I punned at the time, is a grisly way to meet your end, but not, I think, the most ignoble way to die. I'd certainly rather be killed by a tiger than run over by a car and I would refute the idea that this makes me a disturbed individual harbouring a bizarre death wish.

 

 

Talaria: On the Secularisation of Winged Footwear from Hermes to Jeremy Scott

This post, from 2021 has so far picked up over a thousand views, so that's not too bad. It opens with the Greek god Hermes and closes with the irreverent American fashion designer Jeremy Scott. 

 

Some might characterise this transition from ancient myth to modern pop culture, as going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but I've never been a great defender of the distinction between high and low culture and I rather like the idea that everyone is entitled to wear winged footwear, not just gods and heroes.

 

 

Arborcide in the U. K.

 

Finally, let me briefly defend the post published on March 18th of last year: I thought it was good then and I still think it's good now.

 

However, the number of views it's had - despite the reworked Jamie Reid artwork - suggests that there are precious few dendrophiles checking out the blog; a fact that suprises and disappoints, as I would say Torpedo the Ark is hugely pro-tree and I have repeatedly expressed my support for those writers who recognise that plants are just as philosophically interesting as animals (perhaps more so). 

 

Reforesting, rewilding, and depopulating the UK is pretty much my position: no more roads; no more houses, no more population increase - just natural regeneration of woodland, scrubland, grassland, and wetland all across the country and serious protection afforded to wildlife. Rupert Birkin was right, there's no nicer thought than that of a posthuman future ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dr Mark Griffiths is a Professor of Behavioural Addiction at Nottingham Trent University. To visit his blog and to read his take on the subject of onychophilia, click here. 

 

 

Forest Bathing

A Walk in the Woods by Frosted Moonlight 

 (SA/2024)

 

 

Having taken an early morning stroll in the woods by the light of a frosted moon, I'm sympathetic to the claim made by many dendrophiles that being in the company of trees is beneficial to one's physical and mental wellbeing. 

 

That even a short walk in the woods - depressing  as this can be when one sees all the litter and fly-tipped items including paint pots, pushchairs and printers - can help lower blood pressure, keep sugar levels balanced, boost immune systems and even improve cognitive function.     

 

Of course, the Japanese living in a land that is still two-thirds covered with a vast number and diversity of trees, have known this for many years and have even coined a (relatively recent) term [1] for finding oneself by losing oneself amongst them: shinrin-yoku - known in English as forest bathing. 

 

But the Japanese are not unique in recognising the health benefits of this practice; the Roman author Pliny the Elder, for example, argued that the scent of a pine forest was extremely beneficial to those suffering with respiratory problems or recuperating from a long illness. 

 

And I've written on several occasions about D. H. Lawrence's great fascination with trees: click here, for example. 

 

Like Lawrence, I'm conscious of the fact that you can never really know a tree - something which is so much bigger and stronger in life than we are - but only "sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk" [2], in silent contemplation [3]. But that's good enough for me. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The term shinrin-yoku was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama - Director of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries - who, worried by increasing urbanisation, hoped to inspire the Japanese public to reconnect with nature and protect their forests by reminding them of the free health benefits that the latter afforded them.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 86. 

[3] Having said that, Rupert Birkin does rather more than sit in silence with his favourite young sapling; see chapter VIII of Lawrence's novel Women in Love (1920). I discuss dendrophilia in its erotic (and daimonic) aspect in a post published here on 3 October 2020: click here.  

Arborcide in the U. K.

Jamie Reid: Anarchy in the U. K. flag design 

for the Sex Pistols first single on EMI (1976) 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2023)

 

 

I.

 

An anonymous reader writes:

"I was disappointed to see you buying into lazy eco-propaganda in a recent post [1] concerning the multi-million redevelopment of Plymouth city centre. As a resident, I can assure you that this revamp is not only necessary to ensure the future of the city, but long overdue. 

      It's unfortunate that a number of trees have had to be removed. But, as you mention in the post, the council have pledged to replace these and consider a wider planting scheme in the future, thereby addressing the concerns of people like yourself who seem to think that protecting trees and the needs of wildlife matters more than growing the economy and providing people with the urban infrastructure that enables them to lead pleasant, prosperous and productive lives."              

 

 

Obviously, I don't want to disappoint anyone. Nor do I wish to buy into lazy eco-propaganda. However, as dendrophile, I think it more than unfortunate whenever a healthy mature tree is cut down. 

 

And, further, I don't believe a word that's spoken by any elected official of any political stripe, be they a humble town councillor or a prominent MP, so any promise to protect the natural environment or plant more trees is one that I view with scepticism to say the very least. 

 

And a report by Tom Heap on the Sky News website this morning nicely illustrates why I am justified in such cynicism, exposing as it does the shocking fact that over half-a-million newly planted trees have been left to die next to a new 21-mile stretch of road between Cambridge and the market town of Huntingdon ...

 

 

II. 

 

As part of a £1.5 billion upgrade of the A14, completed in 2020, National Highways boasted of planting 850,000 saplings to replace the mature trees they destroyed during construction of the new carriageway. 

 

But they have now been forced to admit that almost three-quarters of these saplings have since perished; for it turns out that young trees need care in the early stages of their life if they are to survive and grow, not just sticking in a hole in the ground and then left to look after themselves.        

 

National Highways admit in an internal review that this is an unusually high fatality rate and blame it on poor soil and climate change resulting in extreme heat. 

 

But, actually, this low survival rate is mostly due to the fact that developers - like politicians and city councillors - are only ever concerned with numbers and not with ensuring that the right species of tree - at the right age of development - is planted in the right kind of soil, etc.  

Anyway, National Highways is planning to replant this autumn; at an estimated cost (to the tax payer) of £2.9 million - and they promise to take better care of the trees this time over a five year period: we'll see ...

 

Finally, here's something else that my correspondent might like to consider (or dismiss as simply more eco-propaganda if they so wish):

 

"Across the country, planting rates are [...] running at less than half the 30,000 hectares per year that was pledged by the Conservatives at the last election. So fewer saplings than hoped with troubling survival rates. Bad news for our nature and climate aims." [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post to which they refer is entitled 'Murder! Murder! Murder! Someone Should Be Angry' (17 March 2023): click here. 

 

[2] Tom Heap, 'Half a million trees have died next to one 21-mile stretch of road, National Highways admits', on the Sky News website (18 March 2023): click here. 

 

 

Wood You Believe It? Another Post on Dendrophilia (With Reference to the Case of Humphrey Mackevoy)

Dendrophilia

ALCU (A Little Crazy Universe) 

on tumblr.com

 

 

'I am just back from the woods. My thighs are cold from the touch of bark 

and that instrument of my pleasure is still gently throbbing ...'

 

 

I. 

 

For many men, particularly those who subscribe to slang terms popular within the American porn industry, to have wood simply means that one is sporting a sturdy erection. But for dendrophiles - that is to say, those tree lovers who are sexually attracted to our leafy friends - this verb implies a great deal more. 

 

Rupert Birkin, for example, famously entered into a state of erotic delirium when surrounded by various plants, bushes, and young trees and found nothing more fulfilling than to clasp the silvery trunk of a birch against his naked flesh and feel "its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges" before then ejaculating on the leaves [1].

 

Many readers will of course be familiar with Birkin's case. But I'm guessing that far fewer readers will know the story of Humphrey Mackevoy, as told by John Fortune and John Wells in their 1971 novel, A Melon for Ecstasy ... [2]

 

 

II. 

 

Constructed from fictional newspaper reports, letters, and diary entries by the novel's young male protagonist, A Melon for Ecstasy describes how Humphrey Mackevoy could only become sexually aroused and achieve his satisfaction by penetrating trees in which he has carefully bored a suitable hole to accomodate his erect penis [3] - a tall, slender laburnum being the primary object of his desire.

 

Whilst initially his dendrophilia causes him shame and confusion, he eventually comes to accept and, indeed, feel a certain degree of pride in his perverse form of love - even though it leads to his imprisonment [4].    

 

The book is intended as a satirical depiction of British sexual mores at the time and the manner in which the press sensationalise stories involving illicit sex acts in order to sell papers, whilst at the same time moralising in the name of public decency and family values. 

 

The novel also contains a series of comic sub-plots, involving local naturists keen to know the origin of the mysterious holes and town councillors worried about the damage being caused to trees located in parks and woodlands over which they exercise authority. 

 

However, whilst this book sounds like a fun read, it is, in fact, a profoundly irritating and disappointing work. 

 

Alwyn W. Turner may like to pretend on his Trash Fiction website that A Melon for Ecstasy is a strangely beautiful book of startling genius, containing some stupendous ideas and elegant prose, but he also describes Humphrey's tender embrace of a tree as an act of rape, so I'm not sure we should take anything he says too seriously [5].  

 

For me, Harry Crews is the critic who best identifies the problem with A Melon for Ecstasy. Writing in a review for The New York Times, he asks: "Is there anything so tedious as comic novel that is not serious?" [6] 

 

I don't know if we always need the skull behind the laughter to turn comic fiction into great literature, but, like Crews, I don't much care for books that only sneer and giggle and go for cheap gags. 

 

Ultimately, I feel about A Melon for Ecstasy what D. H. Lawrence felt about Ben Hecht's novel Fantazius Mallare (1922), which includes an illustration by Wallace Smith of the protagonist enjoying coition with a tree: I'm sorry, it didn't thrill me a bit ... [7]

    

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-08. 

      And see my post 'Floraphilia Redux' (17 Oct 2016) in which I discuss the case of Rupert Birkin: click here.  

 

[2] John Fortune and John Wells, A Melon for Ecstasy, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971). 

      Note that there is also a Penguin edition (1973) and, more recently, a Prion Books edition published in their Humour Classics series (2002).

      John Fortune (1939 - 2013) was an English satirist, comedian, writer, and actor, best known for his work with John Bird and Rory Bremner on the TV series Bremner, Bird and Fortune. John Wells (1936 - 1998) was an English actor, writer and satirist; one of the original contributors to Private Eye.

 

[3] Heterosexual non-dendrophiles will of course insist that such a glory hole carved into the body of a tree thirty-three inches from the ground and at just the right angle, is an artificial vagina and is therefore merely a substitute for the real thing (i.e., the female sex organ which they prefer to penetrate). 

      In this manner, they seek to reassure themselves that no one really desires a tree as an object in itself and reaffirm the view that there is only one legitimate orifice in which to place the erect penis and ejaculate. One might remind these people, however, of the old saying popular amongst the Arabs and Turks: One penetrates a woman from duty; a youth for pleasure; and a nonhuman animal or object to experience ecstasy (the title of the novel by Fortune and Wells is a reference to this).  

 

[4] Fifty years later, and the law will still come down hard on those who love trees - or those, such as William Shaw, 22, of Airdrie, Scotland, posing as a dendrophile and simulating sex with a tree in his local park, in broad daylight and in plain sight of passers-by, including a woman walking her dog.             

      Convicted on a charge of public indecency, Shaw was sentenced to five months in jail in February 2010 and told by the judge that his behaviour was disgusting. Shaw was also put on the Sex Offenders' Register for seven years. Readers who are interested can find the full story in The Scotsman (15 Feb 2010): click here. 

      However, they should also see the report on the BBC news website published three months later, in which it is revealed that the Airdrie park flasher won his appeal and not only had his prison sentence quashed and name removed from the SOR, but also had the allegation of dendrophilia struck from the public record. Following his appeal, Shaw was put on a year's probabion and ordered to carry out 150 hours of community service. Click here to read the report in full.

 

[5] To read Turner's review of A Melon for Ecstasy on Trash Fiction, click here.   

[6] Harry Crews, review of A Melon for Ecstasy, in The New York Times (8 Aug 1971): click here.

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, by Ben Hecht', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 215.

      As Lawrence goes on to explain, a man's coition with a tree might serve as the stuff of comedy, but so too is it - as a form of contact between two alien natures - a deadly serious affair, involving violent struggle as well as sensual delight. By simply turning Humphrey Mackevoy's story into a joke, Fortune and Wells miss an opportunity to tell us something really interesting about paraphilia and the inhuman character of sex. 

      For a further discussion of Lawrence's daimonic dendrophilia and his criticism of Ben Hecht's notorious novel, see my post of 3 Oct 2020: click here. 

 

 

This post is for Dr Mark Griffiths at Nottingham Trent University, who writes a fascinating blog on addictive, obsessional, compulsive and/or extreme behaviours - including a wide variety of paraphilias. His post on dendrophilia can be found by clicking here. 

 

 

Reflections Beneath an Old Tree at Halloween

Halloween Tree (SA/2021)

 

 

It's amusing how, at Halloween, everyday objects can take on a slightly spooky aspect (and I'm not just talking about the cat). 

 

Indeed, some things, like the tree at the end of my road, actually possess a sinister quality; the naked, twisted branches reaching upwards remind one of Lawrence's description of bare almond trees sticking grimly out of the earth like iron implements and feeling the air for strange currents [1].

Faceless and silent, trees terrify in their primeval beauty and the manner in which they combine natural, supernatural, and even unnatural elements - just ask the Roman soldiers as they entered the German forests:

 

"Brave as they were, the veterans were filled with mysterious fear when they found themselves in the dark, cold gloom of [...] the northern, savage land." [2]     

 

The ancient Germans practised Baumanbetung and would nail the skulls of their enemies to sacred trees. For tree-worship always entails human sacrifice and even the Tree of Life is dark and terrible and its roots, thrust deep into the soil where dead men rot in darkness, feed on blood.      

 

Again, this naturally enough horrified the Romans, despite the fact that they were no shrinking violets themselves when it came to acts of atrocious violence:

 

"And the soldiers shrank: shrank before the trees that had no faces [...] A vast array of non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable energy. [...]

      No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them: silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones." [3]  

 

Happy Halloween!  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bare Almond Trees', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 253  The poem can be read on allpoetry.com by clicking here.

      See also the related verse, 'Almond Blossom', in which Lawrence develops his gothic-industrial dendrophilia, asserting that "Even iron can put forth, / Even iron." Poems, pp. 259-262. It can be found on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 44.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 87. 

On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 1: Getting Jiggy with a Soap Bark Tree

Even a tree has its own daimon. 

And a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. 

- D. H. Lawrence 

 

 

I. 

 

As regular readers will know, dendrophilia has featured in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, including, most recently, one in which I discuss an illustration by Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare (1922): click here. 

 

However, as you can never have too much of a wood thing, I thought I might share details of the happy liaison between Michel Tournier's reimagined Robinson Crusoe [a] and a fallen soap bark tree (Quillaja saponaria) ...    

 

 

II.

 

With time on his hands, Crusoe develops many new interests. Among these, is an interest in the "marital rites of the creatures surrounding him" [113]. Not the mammals and birds, "whose couplings seemed to him a repulsive caricature of human love" [113], but the insects. 

 

He was particularly fascinated by the role the latter play in pollination, a process that seemed to him "both moving and supremely elegant" [113] and he spent many long hours observing the queer relationship that existed between a wasp and an orchid [b]. 

 

This "wonderful mingling of subterfuge and ingenuity" [115], makes him not only reconsider his religious beliefs - "had the natural world been contrived by an infinitely wise and majestic God, or by a baroque Demiurge driven to the wildest whimsicalities by his love of the bizarre?" [115] - but also wonder whether there were trees on the island which "might be disposed to make use of himself" [115] in a similar manner that the orchid exploits the wasp ...

 

Suddenly, "the branches of the trees were transformed in his mind into voluptuous and scented women whose rounded bodies were waiting to receive him" [115]. And so Crusoe sets off to find a suitable lover:     

"Searching the island from end to end, he finally discovered a quillai tree, which had been blown over by the wind but not wholly uprooted. The trunk, which lay on the ground, ended in a fork of two main branches rising a little into the air. The bark was smooth and warm, even downy at the point of the fork, where there was a small aperture lined with silky moss.

      Robinson hesitated for some days on the threshold of what he later called his 'vegetable way'. He hung about the quillai with sidelong glances, discovering in the two branches thrusting out of the grass a resemblance to huge, black, parted thighs. Finally he lay naked on the tree, clasping the trunk with his arms while his erect penis thrust its way into that mossy crevice. A happy torpor engulfed him. He lay dreaming with half-closed eyes of banks of creamy-petaled flowers shedding rich and heady perfumes from their bowed corollas. With damp lips parted they seemed to await the gift to be conferred on them by a heaven filled with the lazy drone of insects. Was he the last member of the human race to be summoned to return to the vegetative sources of life? The blossom is the sex of the plant. Innocently the plant offers its sex to all as its most rare and beautiful possession. Robinson lay dreaming of a new human species which would proudly wear its male and female attributes on its head - huge, luminous, scented." [115-116]

 

Alas, this blissful life is fated not to last beyond several happy months. First the rains come. Then a spider ruins everything: for one day, as he lay spread upon the wooden body of his beloved soapbark, "a searing pain in his gland brought him sharply to his feet" [116] and he spotted a large red spider running along the trunk of the tree before vanishing into the grass. "It was some hours before the pain abated, and his afflicted member looked like a tangerine." [116] 

 

Ouch! Perhaps not surprisingly, this incident puts Crusoe off dendrophilia: 

 

"Robinson had suffered many misadventures during his years of solitude amid the flora and fauna of a world enfevered by the tropical sun. But the moral significance of this episode was unavoidable. Although it had been caused by the sting of a spider, could his malady be regarded as anything other than a venereal disease [...]? He saw in this a sign that the 'vegetable way' might be no more than a blind alley." [116] 

 

That's a shame - and I think this an absurd reading of what happened. However, it has the significant effect of transforming Crusoe from a dendrophile into a full-blown ecosexual, as we will see in part two of this post ... [click here].    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation, simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.

      The subject of Crusoe's sexual life whilst on his island has intrigued many authors. Diana Souhami, for example, wrote an award-winning study of Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway whose story inspired Daniel Defoe, in which she cheerfully speculated on his masturbatory habits and erotic preferences, ranging from buggery to bestiality. What she doesn't suggest, however, is that Selkirk/Crusoe may also have been a tree-hugger, in the carnal sense. If you want to know about that, you have to read Tournier's novel.

      See Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). Best-known for her unconventional biographies of famous lesbians, this book was perhaps a bit of a surprise for Souhami's readership. Combining elements of fiction and fantasy with fact, it is difficult to categorise as a work. It should probably be noted, however, that Selkirk's own memoirs contain no hint of impropriety with goats.  

[b] Gilles Deleuze, who praised Tournier's novel - suggesting that it traced a genesis of perversion - would later, in collaboration with Félix Guattari, use this double figure of the wasp and orchid to illustrate the concepts of rhizome, becoming, and deterritorialization. Like Crusoe, Deleuze and Guattari were fascinated by the manner in which certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to entice male wasps into unnatural relations and co-opt them into their own reproductive cycle. 

      See Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980), trans. into English as A Thousand Plateaus by Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). The material I refer to is in the Introduction: Rhizome. As far as I am aware, Tournier has never received the credit he is due for initiating this line of thinking; indeed, there is but a single reference to Tournier in A Thousand Plateaus (p. 261) and this quotes from his later novel Les Météores (1975), not Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. 

      However, Deleuze did write a lengthy essay on the latter, which was published as 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others' in an appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 301-321. 

 

 

The third and final part of this post on the sex life of Robinson Crusoe - sun-fucked - can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

D. H. Lawrence's Daimonic Dendrophilia

Wallace Smith: Illustration for 

Fantazius Mallare (1922)

I have discussed D. H. Lawrence's dendrophilia elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [click here] and readers will surely recall the scene in Women in Love in which Birkin enters into a state of erotic delirium whilst surrounded by various plants, bushes, and young trees: 

 

"The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles [...] and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. [...] He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place." [1]

 

So one might imagined that Lawrence would have loved the above image by the American artist Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) [2], showing a man having sex with a tree. 

 

Only you would be mistaken: Lawrence hated the novel and hated the illustrations by Smith. In a letter-cum-review of the work written shortly after publication - having had a copy of the book sent to him by a friend - Lawrence says this:

 

"Many thanks for sending me the Ben Hecht book. I read it through. But I'm sorry, it didn't thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. Think of the malice, the sheer malice of a Beardsley drawing, the wit, and the venom of the mockery. These drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained, and so would-be. It isn't that they've got anything to reveal at all. That man's coition with a tree, for example. There's nothing in it but the author's attempt to be startling. Whereas if he wanted to be really wicked he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. Beardsley saw these things. But it takes imagination." [3]   

 

That, I think, is very interesting - particularly the part about the daimonic aspect of a tree and the possibility of a human being forming an erotic relationship with such, thereby adding an occult element to Lawrence's dendrophilia. 

 

I think Lawrence is right to suggest that a sexual encounter between any two objects involves a "contact between two alien natures" [4] and is always therefore as much a violent struggle as it is a sensual delight. And, personally, I dislike Smith's drawing because it anthropomorphises the tree; by having it take on a distinctly all-too-human female form he produces a heteronormative rather than truly transgressive artwork. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 107-08. 

[2] Those interested in reading Hecht's novel and taking a look at Smith's illustrations can do so thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, by Ben Hecht', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 215 

 

[4] Ibid.,  p. 216. 

On the Fall and Rise of British Woodland in the Last Hundred Years

The Major Oak, Sherwood Forest

Photo: FLPA / Rex Features

Sir Clifford Chatterley was very proud of the fine (if somewhat melancholy) park and woodland - a remnant of Sherwood Forest - that belonged to the Wragby estate; "he loved the old oak-trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world." 

His father, however, Sir Geoffrey, had been rather less proud and protective of the ancient oaks. In fact, he was more than willing to chop them down for timber during the War. Blinded by patriotism and "so divorced from the England that was really England", he failed to see the difference between Lloyd George and St. George.  

Thus it was that, post-War, when Clifford inherited the estate, there were large clearings in the wood, "where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken, a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there, big sawn stumps, showing their tops and their grasping roots, lifeless."

Standing on the crown of the knoll where the oaks had once been, you could look over to the colliery and the railway and the sordid-looking houses of the ever-expanding town with their smoking chimneys. It felt exposed and strangely forlorn; "a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood", that revealed the industrial world triumphant: 

"This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry. He had been through the war, had seen what it meant. But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill. He was having it replanted. But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey."

This hatred of his father and his father's generation for their wilful destruction of the heart and soul of England, makes me rather love Clifford - even though, of course, his dream of securing such is in vain and he ultimately proves himself more concerned with modernising his coal mines than he does with replanting trees and preserving the natural world. 

Thus, there's not only a certain pathos to his words, but falseness and perhaps a degree of self-delusion. The wood, as Lawrence notes, "still had some mystery of the wild, old England", but the War had had a truly devastating effect and exposed forever the lie of England as a green and pleasant land entrusted to the care of a benevolent ruling class.

For if truth be told, in 1920 - the year when Sir Clifford and his wife Constance enter into their married life at Wragby Hall - the amount of land covered by trees in Britain stood at less than 5%. This is an outrageously low figure, particularly when recalling that the entire country was originally (and is potentially) one huge forest thanks to ideal conditions for tree growth, including relatively mild winters, plenty of rain, and fertile soil.

The good news is that in the hundred years since, things have significantly improved and, today, about 12% of land surface is wooded, with plans to increase this figure to 15% by 2060. However, before getting too excited about this, it's sobering to recall that other European countries already average between 25-37%. France and Germany, for example, both possess almost three times the number of trees that England has.

Further, whilst the planting of young trees is to be welcomed, the real issue is preserving what remains of the UK's ancient woodland - defined as woodland that has existed continuously since 1600 in England and Wales and 1750 in Scotland; i.e. long enough to develop incredibly rich, complex, and irreplaceable ecosystems.

It is ancient woodland that provides home to more rare and threatened species of flora and fauna in the UK than any other type of habitat. But presently just 2% of land is covered with ancient woodland, which means there are very few oaks still standing as majestic as the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest; a thousand-year-old tree which is said to have provided a safe haven for Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men.

In sum: there is cause for celebration; British woodland has returned to the levels of the 1750s, with tree cover having more than doubled since Lawrence's day. But it would be foolish to become complacent on this issue and not acknowledge that there is still much that needs to be done (the present government is already falling well below its own target for reforestation - a target that one might argue was insufficient in the first place). 

Like Lawrence, I adore the stillness of trees, "with their crinkly, innumerable twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown bracken". And I marvel at how gaily the birds and forest creatures and lovers move among them.  

See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Lines quoted are from Chapters 1 and 5. 

This post is dedicated to David Brock; an Englishman with a heart of oak. 

Notes on Object Imperative and Pantheistic Sensuality

17thC print depicting a happy dendrophile

Lawrence loves trees and although he concedes they're mindless, he excitedly writes of sap-consciousness and root-lust and assigns them a unique soul. They are, he says, powerful, inhuman beings reaching up to the sky and reaching down into the dark earth. And reaching also into us.

Speaking of an American pine, Lawrence writes:

"Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my life, and my life, the tree's. We cannot live near one another, as we do, without affecting one another.”

Confronting the forceful reality of the tree, Lawrence speculates what might be thought of as a form of object imperative which, to paraphrase Graham Harman, radiates over him like a black sun, holding him in its orbit, demanding his attention and insisting that he reorganise his life along it axes:

"Something fierce and bristling is communicated. The piney sweetness is rousing and defiant ... the noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness. ... I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree ... And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of my life, within itself. ...

      Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one’s attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in one’s self: or one can open many doors that are shut.
      I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree. Its raw earth-power and its raw sky-power, its resinous erectness and resistance, its sharpness of hissing needles and relentlessness of roots ...”

Lawrence describes this as a form of pantheistic sensuality, thereby indicating how his dendrophilia has a religious aspect and is not merely an erotic fascination.

Trees, we might say, give him a sense of god as present in all things and not merely wood. Thus Lawrence wants to venerate them as well as rub up against them (enjoying the feel of their bark and depositing his seed, like Birkin, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves).

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pan in America', Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lines quoted are from pp. 158-59. 

For a related post on Lawrence's dendrophilia, click here.