Virginia and the Duckworth Boys

 

"Nothing has really happened until it has been described ..."

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, until very recently my knowledge of Gerald Duckworth was extremely limited. Essentially, I knew he published some of D. H. Lawrence's early work, including Sons and Lovers (1913), and that Lawrence thought him a decent chap. 

 

But I didn't know that Duckworth also published books by Henry James and John Galsworthy. Nor did I know that his middle name - de l'Etang - was the surname of one of his mother's ancestors, Antoine de l'Etang, a page to Marie Antoinette; or that he died whilst on holiday in Milan, in 1937.

 

And I certainly didn't know that Gerald was accused by his much younger half-sister, Virginia, of molesting her as a child; a claim that Woolf first made in a speech at the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in 1920 and which has long been the subject of controversy within literary and feminist circles [1].

 

According to Woolf, Gerald physically picked her up one day, plonked her onto a table, put his hand under her skirt, and then proceeded to fondle her genitals. To Virginia - who was only six years old at the time - this was a shocking incident; one which she never forgot, even if she forgave Gerald and did not accuse him of any further violations (or indiscretions, as commentators who wish to trivialise this incident prefer to write).  

 

Woolf provides a graphic description of what happened in a posthumously published piece of autobiographical writing: 

 

"As I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower, I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too." [2]  

 

Of course, it may well be that Gerald regarded his younger sister more as an object of sexual curiosity, rather than sexual desire. And doubtless such things as this are common in family homes up and down the land. But, even so - perhaps due to the twelve-year age difference between the two parties - this incident makes for uncomfortable reading and it was certainly one that deeply affected Woolf.

 

Indeed, those far more knowledgeable about the impact of childhood sexual abuse than I argue that even a single incident such as this can have such powerful long-term consequences that it's impossible to fully understand Woolf's later life, as a woman and as an artist, without acknowledging what happened to her as a child at the hands of Gerald - and, indeed, his elder brother George, who was (allegedly) a far more serious sex pest ...

 

 

II. 

 

According to Woolf, she and her sister were repeatedly abused over a period of many years by their half-brother George Duckworth. This abuse began when she was aged thirteen; Vanessa sixteen; and George twenty-eight. 

 

Virginia would write of his violent passion and brutish behaviour and the implication was given that he had attempted to establish an incestuous relationship with her and Vanessa (although neither Woolf nor Bell ever accused him of rape, as such). 

 

In '22 Hyde Park', she discloses how, one night, as she lay undressed and stretched out on her bed trying to sleep, George came creeping into her room. When she sat up and cried out he instructed her not to be frightened - and not to turn on the lights. Then, according to Woolf, George flung himself on the bed beside her and took her in his arms [3].  

 

For George Duckworth's defenders, these allegations are not only unproven, but unfounded; some even describe them as far-fetched and suggest that Woolf concocted an imaginative drama out of little more than erotic horseplay, which, whilst not entirely innocent, was neither something to make a fuss about.

 

Ultimately, we have no way of knowing the truth of what happened: but I doubt very much that Woolf invented or fantasised the abuse. On the other hand, however, it's probably wise to retain a degree of skepticism concerning claims that are made without any supporting evidence (particularly claims made by imaginative artists who are often unreliable narrators of their own lives and prone to embroider actual events).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although many Woolf scholars today don't question whether the abuse happened, disagreement persists about the nature and extent of the abuse and what effect it may have had on the rest of her life. I think we can agree, however, that Woolf's speaking out on this subject was a courageous and highly unusal thing for a woman at that time to do.

      

[2] Quoted from Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind, (Sussex University Press, 1976). 

      This collection of posthumously-published autobiographical essays was first discovered in the papers of her husband, Leonard Woolf, and used by Quentin Bell in his biography of his aunt Virginia, published in 1972. In 1976, the essays were edited for publication by Jeanne Schulkind; a revised and enlarged second edition was published by the Hogarth Press in 1985; the most recent edition, introduced and revised by Hermione Lee, was published by Pimlico in 2022.   

      The title was a phrase used by Woolf to describe those rare moments (not necessarily positive or beneficial) in which an individual directly experiences reality, in contrast to the states of non-being which separate us from reality or serve to protect us from its tragic (or traumatic) nature. Arguably, an incident that scars the individual for life - such as a sexual assault in childhood - might be construed as just such a moment. 

 

[3] This essay, '22 Hyde Park', can be found in Moments of Being, op cit.

 

 

Readers interested in learning more about this topic will find the following essay by Lucia Williams helpful: 'Virginia Woolf's History of Sexual Victimization: A Case Study in Light of Current Research', Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 10, (August 2014), pp. 1151-1164. Click here to read online.  

 

Twins

Doublemint Twins Patricia and Cyb Barnstable

pose on the cover of Playboy (March 1981)

There is a persistent fascination with twins within the cultural imagination which is, appropriately enough, dual in character ...

On the one hand, twins signify all that is queer, uncanny, and sinister within the realm of horror; the terrifying suggestion often being made that we all possess an evil twin or doppelgänger, just like the character played by Roger Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970).

Whilst on the other hand, twin obsession has a pervy fetishistic component; particularly, of course, when the twins are young, female and sexually attractive. Advertisers and pornographers alike, have been quick to exploit the (mostly male) desire for a threesome involving twin sisters with the promise that this will instantly double their pleasure, double their fun.* 

And if this also involves transgressing the taboo against incest - which it does - well that only serves to intensify the experience for the illicit lover. (What it does for the self-esteem of the women involved, however, one can only guess, but I suppose sleazy characters ranging from Austin Powers to Tony Stark don't really consider that an issue.)

* Note: I'm paraphrasing the famous slogan used to promote Wrigley's Doublemint chewing gum, a brand which has long exploited the twin fetish, beginning in 1939 with illustrated print ads such as the one above and then via a long running series of TV commercials featuring actual twins. To enjoy a classic example of the latter, from 1987, click here.   

On Genetic Sexual Attraction (With Reference to the Case of Jinnie Blair)

Image: someecards.com

I.

The tale of Shelagh Money, the nineteen-year-old actress who goes by the stage-name of Jennifer Blair, is another of Daphne du Maurier's short stories that continues to intrigue long after it's been read.

Particularly as it anticipates the (pseudoscientfic) idea of genetic sexual attraction, a term coined in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, an American woman forced to give up her baby son for adoption, but who developed amorous feelings for him when, twenty-five years later, she tracked him down.

Wishing to understand (and justify) her incestuous urges - that she describes as wonderful and frightening - Gonyo came up with the concept of GSA and even though there's very little hard evidence for this as an actual phenomenon, Greek myth, psychoanalysis, and pornography all attest to the fact that sexual attraction can (and does) occur between individuals who are related in some manner.

As does 'A Border-Line Case' ...


II.

Shortly before his death, Shelagh Money's father expresses a wish that he might see his estranged friend, Nicholas Barry, once more, in order to shake him by the hand and wish him luck in the future.

In order, also, that he might be forgiven for not recommending his pal for promotion when he had the opportunity to do so and thus inadvertently playing a part in Nick's decline in later years; years spent as a recluse living in Ireland and soured by disappointment.  

Despite having been told that Nick was "mad as a hatter" [108] and a border-line case, Shelagh decides to track him down in order to inform him of her father's death and of his regret that their friendship had ended in acrimony.

"Shelagh had acted on impulse. She knew she always would. It was part of her character, and had to be accepted by family and friends. It was not until she was on her way, though, driving north from Dublin in the hired car, that her journey, hastily improvised, took on its real meaning. She was here on a mission, a sacred trust. She was carrying a message from beyond the grave." [111]

When Shelagh finds herself at Nick's island home and is waiting in his study to meet him, she notices a photograph in a blue leather frame. It was a photograph of her mother on her wedding day:

"There was something wrong, though. The groom standing beside her was not Shelagh's father. It was Nick, the best man [...] She looked closer, baffled, and realised that the photograph had been cleverly faked. Nick's head and shoulders had been transposed on to her father's figure, while her father's head [...] had been shifted to the lanky figure behind, standing between the bridesmaids. It was only because she knew the original photograph on her father's desk at home [...] that she recognised the transposition instantly. A stranger would think the photograph genuine." [125]

Naturally, this is rather disconcerting to the young woman. Why - and who - was Nick hoping to deceive? If the answer was himself, then, thinks Shelagh, he must be at least a little crazy: "What was it her father had said? Nick had always been a border-line case ..." [125]

Shelagh feels a strange sense of revulsion and apprehension come over her: "The room that had seemed warm and familiar became kinky, queer. She wanted to get out." [125]

Unfortunately, before she can leave, in walks Nick - or the Commander, as his staff refer to him. When he asks her name she instinctively replies Jinnie, even though nobody except her father had ever called her that (presumably as a dimunitive of her stage-name, though one might have expected that to be Jennie, rather than Jinnie, which is usually short for Virginia): "It must have been nerves that made her blurt it out now." [127]

They talk - some might even describe their exchange as a flirtatious form of banter. She notices he has an attractive smile; not in the conventional sense, but in her sense, and she recalls her mother saying that Nick was always great fun at parties. He reminds her of someone: and she reminds him of someone.

The next day, she decides that Nick is very different from the resentful figure her father described. They have a little picnic together, sat side by side on his boat - hard-boiled eggs and chicken - and she's relaxed enough to discuss her sex life with him: "'I'm not really permissive. [...] I don't strip down at the flick of a hat. It has to be someone I like.'" [139]

Well, Shelagh must have really liked Nick, because shortly after this she finds herself with her shoes off and drinking whiskey with him in the back of a grocer's van, where they have a highly charged sexual encounter amongst the loaves of bread and tinned goods.

"It's body chemistry, she told herself, that's what does it. People's skins. They either blend or they don't. They either merge and melt into the same texture, dissolve and become renewed, or nothing happens, like faulty plugs, blown fuses, switchboard jams. When the thing goes right [...] then it's arrows splintering the sky, it's forest fires, it's Agincourt." [148]

Shelagh decides that she has, in fact, just experienced the fuck of her lifetime: "'I shall live till I'm ninety-five, marry some nice man, have fifteen children, win stage awards and Oscars, but never again will the world break into fragments, burn before my eyes [...]'" [148]

She only hopes that her father's ghost will forgive her for what she's done - and hopes to do again before the night is over: "'It was one way to settle your last request, though you wouldn't have approved of the method.'" [150]

Shelagh also realises that she's fallen hook, line and sinker for Nick. He sees their relationship, however, more in terms of love-hate: "'Attraction and antagonism mixed. Very peculiar.'" [152]

In fact, their relationship is more peculiar than either yet know: for it turns out that shortly after her parents were wed, Nick called one evening, unexpectedly. His friend was out, so he got his friend's wife - Shelagh's mother - drunk and "'had a rough-and-tumble with her on the sofa'" [153].

Being, perhaps, a bit naive or slow on the uptake, Shelagh still doesn't grasp what this might mean. Indeed, even though she describes this act of adultery as revolting, she still wants desperately to stay with Nick in Ireland: "'What I really want,' she said, 'deep down, is stillness, safety. The feeling you'd aways be there. I love you. I think I must have loved you without knowing it all my life.'" [154]

She says this, fearful that Nick will kick her out of the van and effectively abandon her by the roadside - which is pretty much what he does: "'I sacrifice the lamb that I do love to spite my own raven heart [...]'" [155]. Having made his poetic farewell, he does invite her to visit him again, any time she likes ...

Heartbroken back in London, she throws herself into rehearsals for a production of Twelfth Night. A package arrives from Ireland, containing an old photograph, of Nick, in costume as Cesario. An accompanying letter explains:

"'I have been burning some papers [...] and came across the enclosed photograph amongst a pile of junk in the bottom drawer of my desk. I thought it might amuse you.You may remember I told you that first evening you remided me of someone. I see now that it was myself!'" [161]

"She looked at the photograph again. Her nose, her chin, the cocky expression, head tip-tilted in the air. Even the stance, hand on hip. The thick cropped hair. Suddenly she was not standing in the dressing-room at all but in her father's bedroom [...] He was staring at her, an expression of horror and disbelief upon his face. It was not accusation she had read in his eyes [shortly before he died], but recognition. He had awakened from no nightmare, but from a dream that had lasted twenty years. Dying, he discovered truth." [161]

Now she had discovered it also: but she doesn't seem to find anything very wonderful or liberating in it. On the contrary, she stares at herself in the mirror with horror and rips the photograph apart, throwing the pieces into the waste-paper basket:

"And when she went back on to the stage it was not from the Duke's palace in Illyria that she saw herself moving henceforth [...] but out into a street [...] where there were windows to be smashed and houses to burn [...] where there were causes to despise and men to hate, for only by hating can you purge away love, only by sword, by fire." [162]

See: 

Daphne du Maurier, 'A Border-Line Case', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 101-162. All page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

For those who would like to read more on GSA, see Alix Kirsta's piece in The Guardian (17 May, 2003): click here. 

You Can Take the Girl Out of Sodom ... (Notes on the Story of Lot and His Daughters)

Jan Matsys: Lot and His Daughters (1565)

I.

I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly have opportunity to say it again: the Bible is the world's most transgressive work of literature; a mytho-historical novel that contains page after page of terrible events and wtf incidents.

And there are none more shocking than the story of Lot and his daughters ...

II.

Having escaped the destruction of their hometown of Sodom and witnessed their mother turned into a human condiment, the two young women and their elderly father find themselves seeking refuge in a mountain cave.

Here, according to the account in Genesis [19:30-38], they ply their old man with wine and then engage in drunken sex with him over consecutive nights. This is done not only without his consent, but, apparently, without even his knowledge or memory of what occurred. In this manner, each girl conceives a male child as hoped, thereby illicitly preserving patrilineality or their father's seed.       

Now, I'm no prude - but, really, this is a bit much, isn't it?


III.

Having said that, there is something perversely pleasing about the daughters initiating and perpetrating the incestuous rape of their father, after he previously offered them as sexual playthings to the Sodomites if the latter would but agree to leave his angelic guests unmolested. For it hints at the idea of what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object. 

However, some commentators prefer to turn the biblical account on its head and insist that women can only ever be victims of patriarchal power. Thus, they argue that it was more likely that Lot raped his daughters and that the narrative we are given in Genesis is a perversion first and foremost of the truth concerning incest and sexual abuse.

Such a cover-up - if that's what it is - may have been done in order to exonerate Lot and preserve the family honour. For whilst he may have been something of a black sheep, Lot was still the nephew of Abraham, father of the Covenant and progenitor of the nation of Israel. It could well be that the familiar practice of victim-blaming and shifting responsibility for sexual abuse away from the male perpetrator is first given religious sanction in this tale.  

Notes 

Readers interested in the idea that it was Lot who raped his daughters rather than vice versa, might like to see the following article by Ilan Kutz: 'Revisiting the lot of the first incestuous family: the biblical origins of shifting the blame on to female family members', in The BMJ, 331 (7531), pp. 1507-1508, (24 Dec 2005). Click here to read online. 

For a sister post to this one on strange flesh and sodomy, please click here.

  

Three Brief Extracts from a Study of Eric Gill

Photo of Eric Gill by Howard Coster (1927)

National Portrait Gallery

I: Two Men With Red Beards

Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).

This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.

To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.


II: It All Goes Together

A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.

Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.

As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.


III: Always Ready and Willing

Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*

Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.

The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:

He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.        


* Afterword on Gill's Diaries

Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.

MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.       

See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.  

Readers who are interested, might also like to see D. H. Lawrence's 'Review of Eric Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays' in Introductions and Reviews, ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is believed to be the last work written by Lawrence before his death on March 2nd, 1930. Frieda sent the MS to Gill in 1933.  

Lady Chatterley's Daughter

Cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter, ed. Lawrence Lariar, 

(Popular Library, 1960)

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Connie is carrying a child of unknown sex. But, of course, within the pornographic imagination, it has to be a girl; a daughter who will inherit her mother's desire for unlicensed pleasure and sexual freedom; a Lawrentian nymphet who would make Nabokov smile.

For the pornographic imagination unfolds within a universe in which, as Susan Sontag points out, everything is conceived as an opportunity to fuck and everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to screw everyone else. This is what makes it a total universe; one with "the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative".

The dream, ultimately, is of a pornotopia in which there are no fixed distinctions between the sexes and no inhibitions can be allowed to endure. Gender, for example, is fluid; something to be performed and perverted. And taboos surrounding things such as incest are simply another means to intensify pleasure and multiply the possibilities of sexual exchange.

Whether the incestuous fantasy of the hot milf and her even hotter daughter was one of Lawrence's, I don't know. Probably not: for Lawrence relates incest to idealism and he is keen to reject and overcome the latter. For Lawrence, incest is just another example of what he terms sex-in-the-head. He writes:

"Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul-de-sac, man proceeds to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal."

Thus, incest is a logical deduction of human reason, filtered through the pornographic imagination. If at first it rouses deep instinctive opposition, this can soon be eroded or persuaded away. But this motivizing of the passional sphere by idealism is, for Lawrence, the great danger facing us today; "the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle".

However, Lawrence also says that we have no choice but to fulfil these ideals in their extremity. In other words, the pornographic nihilism of our culture cannot be ignored, reversed, or transcended; it can only be consummated.

But note, this doesn't mean spending all day surfing internet porn; it means, rather, rediscovering something of the pristine unconscious - and for this we still need our really great artists and poets.


Notes

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

D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 2, 'The Incest Motive and Idealism'. 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', essay in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009).
 

Bad Romance

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Kristyla at deviantart.com

What was it about incest that so obsessively fascinated the Romantics? 

Although only Byron had experience of it as a practice, the theme was imaginatively explored by many other poets, including Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom it seemed to function as a spiritual principle of absolute identification of the self with the non-self or other. 

The tragic psychodrama of Wuthering Heights, is founded upon an incestuous bond formed between Catherine and Heathcliff. For whilst they are not blood-siblings, they are nevertheless brought up as brother and sister within the Earnshaw family home. Thus their mad striving for an impossible union is somehow shocking and toxic; giving off a kind of 'chthonian miasma', as Camille Paglia writes, which infects and corrupts the social world.        

Like Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe is also concerned with love, the limitations of love, and the fatal transgression of those limits. For whilst we might live by love, we die or cause death if we take love too far; be it in either a spiritual or a carnal direction. Thus, whilst it's perfectly legitimate to be interested in the object of one's affection and quite natural to want to know a good deal about the person one is perhaps planning to marry, it's profoundly mistaken to totally identify with another and attempt to suck the life out of that being. Each of us kills the thing we love most when we love with the terrible intimacy of the vampire.

In his brilliant reading of Poe, Lawrence writes:

"When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem."

                                                

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (Final Version 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 75.

Via incest, lovers can achieve sensational gratification with the minimum of resistance. But it gradually leads to madness, breakdown and death - as we see with Heathcliff and Catherine, or Roderick and Madeline in Poe's classic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher. Both Catherine and Madeline die having had the life and the love sucked out of them, whilst still unappeased. And so both return from the dead in order to drag their lovers with them into the grave:

"It is lurid and melodramatic, but it really is a symbolic truth of what happens in the last stages of inordinate love, which can recognise none of the sacred mystery of otherness, but must unite into unspeakable identification ... Brother and sister go down together, made one in the unspeakable mystery of death."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (First Version 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 238. 

Both Poe and Emily Bronte were great writers, doomed to die young. Was it, one might ask, the same thing which ultimately killed them? For both experienced the same heightened consciousness of desire taken to its furthest extreme as they entered what Lawrence describes as the 'horrible underground passages of the human soul', grimly determined as they were to discover all that there is to know about the obscene disease that ruins so many idealists: Love.