Destroy Success

Based on an original design by Jamie Reid (1979) [1] 

 

I. 

 

It's hard to believe that November next year is the 50th anniversary of the release of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' 

 

But there you go - time flies and soon, just like Malcolm, Vivienne, Jamie, Jordan, and poor old Sid pictured above, we'll all be brown bread. 

 

The funny thing about the Sex Pistols' debut single is that it ends with the instruction to get pissed, destroy, but it's never made quite clear who or what is to be destroyed other than the passer by [2] and, as a matter of fact, one has to wait until The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle to discover that success is the main target marked for destruction. 

 

This is anticipated in the magnificent statement released by McLaren on behalf of Glitterbest after the band fell apart at the end of their US tour:  

 

"The management is bored with managing a successful rock 'n' roll band. The group is bored with being a successful rock 'n' roll band. Burning venues and destroying record companies is more creative than making it." [3]  

 

A statement which caused much embarassment for the Virgin press officer asked to explain whether it was meant to be taken seriously.  

 

One recalls also McLaren's equally well-known line, often repeated in interviews, that it is "better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success" [4]. 

 

For Malcolm, these words essentially define punk rock and daring to fail was not just romantic and heroic, but the only way to create great art [5]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, McLaren wasn't the only one to despise the notion of success; the early 20th century English novelist D. H. Lawrence - whom I would characterise as the first Sex Pistol (seen as a provocative and amusing analogy by some, but I'm being perfectly serious) - also hated success ...   

 

In his final (and most controversial) novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), for example, the Lawrentian narrator sneers at the figure of the young Irish playwright Michaelis, who had a Mayfair apartment and "walked down Bond Street the image of a gentleman" [6]. 

  

Sir Clifford may admire and envy his success - "for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess Success also" [7] - and even Connie may sleep with him, but we, as readers, are encouraged to find Mick contemptible (a bit doggy).    

 

Elsewhere, in his essays, Lawrence also makes clear his dislike for those who chase success - whether that's in the arts or in industry and the world of business. His mother may look down from heaven and feel chagrined at his lack of real success:

 

"that I don't make more money; that I am not really popular, like Michael Arlen, or really genteel, like Mr Galsworthy; that I have a bad reputation as an improper writer [...] that I don't make any real friends among the upper classes: that I don't really rise in the world, only drift about without any real status." [8] 

 

But Lawrence doesn't care; he has punk indifference to what others think of him - even his dead mother - and doesn't give a shit about getting on and becoming a great success in the eyes of the world. He thinks the bourgeois beastly - "especially the male of the species" [9] - hates the Oxford voice [10], and calls for a revolution "not to get the money / but to lose it all forever" [11]. 

 

And that's why, in part, I regard him as a Sex Pistol ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This image is based on original artwork by Jamie Reid for a full page ad in the Melody Maker promoting the Sex Pistols single 'Something Else', released from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979). 

      It depicts a cartoon version of Sid Vicious, who provided the vocals for the track and who, unfortunately, had died three weeks prior to the single's release. Although I have removed most of the other text added to the design, I have left the slogan destroy success which McLaren and Reid had adopted as their strategy following the firing of Johnny Rotten. 

      The original image can be found in the V&A Jamie Reid Archive: click here.   

 

[2] See the post titled 'I Wanna Destroy the Passerby (Johnny Rotten as Good Samaritan)' dated 28 May, 2020: click here.  

 

[3] This statement, dated 20 January, 1978, is quoted from The Guardian archive: click here. 

 

[4] McLaren repeats this phrase in an interview with Amy Fleming published in The Guardian (10 August, 2009): click here.  

      See the post titled 'Better a Spectacular Failure ...' dated 5 June, 2013: click here. Note how McLaren's son Joe misremembers the line spoken by his father; replacing the word flamboyant with spectacular. 

[5] McLaren took to heart the words of one of his early lecturers at art school who told him that it was only by learning how to repeatedly fail that one would ever become an artist of any note: 'Don't think success will make you better artists.' 

      As McLaren's biographer notes: "The impact of this statement on McLaren was immediate and profound." And he quotes the latter saying: "'I realised that by understanding failure you were going to be able to improve your condition as an artist. Because you were not going to fear failure you were going to embrace it and, in so doing, maybe break the rules and by doing that, change the culture and, possibly by doing that, change life itself.'"  

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), pp. 48-49.  

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 21.

 

[7] Ibid.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Getting On', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 32.   

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'How beastly the bourgeois is', in The Poems Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 373. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Oxford voice', The Poems Vol. I., p. 376.

 

[11] D. H. Lawrence, 'O start a revolution', The Poems, Vol. I., p.  

 

 

On the Art and Politics of Triviality (Wilde Vs Adorno)

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) / Theodor W. Adorno (1903 - 1969) 

 

I. 

 

The narrator of Lady Chatterley's Lover identified the modern era as an essentially tragic age; one in which the skies have fallen and we are left among the ruins, with no smooth road into the future. Nevertheless, we are encouraged to live and learn, rather than weep and wail; to scramble over the obstacles and build new little habitats, have new little hopes. [1]

 

However, this post-cataclysmic emphasis on the small scale - on being more modest in all things, including our architectural ambitions and personal aspirations - does not mean a fall into triviality, as I very much doubt that Lawrence wants us simply to peel potatoes and listen to the radio, even if this is arguably a preferable alternative to tragically wringing our hands [2]. 

 

That said, Lawrence is surprisingly ambivalent when it comes to this subject: one might have expected him to be strongly opposed to things lacking significance or a certain grandeur and, at times, he is; often contrasting the elemental beauty and primeval darkness of a natural landscape with the ugly triviality and falsehood of modern life [3]. 

 

But, at other times, Lawrence criticises those who hold themselves aloof from small talk and playful banter, suggesting that it is this refusal that hinders their ability to develop more meaningful relationships: 

 

"They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse." [4]

 

 

II. 

 

Unlike Lawrence, some people are not so ambivalent on this question: they aggressively condemn those individuals who devote themselves to activities regarded as trivial pursuits; i.e., childish games, old-fashioned hobbies, pointless pastimes, amateur undertakings, etc. 

 

Doubtless, this includes blogging ...   

 

In fact, I recently received an email from an anonymous reader informing me that blogging in the almost obsessive manner that I blog - about what are trivial personal concerns disguised with philosophical or literary references in order to appear of import or possible interest to others - reveals me to be an affected narcissist who, in avoiding the serious challenges of the real world is effectively part of the problem. 

 

They close their email thus: 

 

I'm sorry to say, but you're essentially a complacent conformist who blogs more as a coping mechanism, rather than to bring about much needed social and political change and I would remind you of these lines from Adorno: 

 

"Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil." [5]    

 

 

III. 

 

Now, appreciative as I am of such criticism, I can't say that I'm persuaded by Adorno's identification of triviality with evil (nor of evil with inertia, when the latter is not merely the negative ideal that he would like us to believe, but a vastly complex state) [6].      

 

Ultimately, as with his broader critique of the Kulturindustrie, I find Adorno's thinking on this question somewhat exaggerated and overblown; no one, as far as I'm aware, is attempting to consummate triviality and thereby lead us into absolute horror. 

 

The fact is, being trivial does not make you evil; it simply means that you prefer to linger at the crossroads, uncertain of which way to head, but happy to chat with others you may encounter rather than forge ahead on a single path leading you to the mountain top.  

 

And so, push comes to shove, I'm more inclined to side with Oscar Wilde rather than Adorno, who advised: 'We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.' [7]  

 

It seems to me that it is this mode of thought - more comical than critical - that offers us the best chance of surviving among the ruins; for it allows us to find something more important than meaning and that's humour. Refusing to take things tragically, means learning how to laugh in the face of adversity, which might not make us better human beings, but it will almost certainly make us less earnest and the enemy of ascetic idealism [8].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing (and quoting words and phrases from) the opening paragraph to D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). I have written about this opening in a post dated 21 September 2019: click here.  

 

[2] In the second version of Lady C., the narrator of the tale says: "We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. Having tragically wrung our hands, we now proceed to peel the potatoes, or to put on the wireless." How we read this line is very much open to interpretation.

      See The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 223.  

 

[3] See, for example, the letter to J. D. Beresford (1 February 1916), in which Lawrence contrasts the Cornish coastline, with all its heavy black rocks, to the "dust and grit and dirty paper" of the modern world in all its non-elemental triviality and shallowness. 

      The letter can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. II., ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge Universty Press, 1982), p. 519. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapter VII, p. 178.

 

[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 115: 

 

[6] I know this because inertia became a key term in D. H. Lawrence's understanding of energy and materiality. Unlike other modernist writers - including Adorno - who disliked inertia and always wrote in praise of dynamism, Lawrence contrasted negative inertia (associated with industrialism and the ideal of limitless production) to positive inertia (associated with the limits and fragility of life and its generation). 

      Readers who are interested might like to see the essay by Andrew Kalaidjian, 'Positive Inertia: D. H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Generation', in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, (Indiana University Press, Fall 2014), pp. 38-55. This essay can be accessed via JSTOR: click here. 

      See also a follow up post to this one on the law of inertia and the principle of evil (21 July 2025): click here. 

 

[7] Oscar Wilde, from an interview with Robbie Ross, published in the St. James Gazette (18 Jan 1895): click here. This, of course, is the philosophy behind The Importance of Being Earnest (1895): 'A Trivial Play for Serious People' as it was originally subtitled.      

 

[8] In the third essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche concludes that the ascetic ideal has "even in the most spiritual sphere, only one type of real enemy [...] these are the comedians of the ascetic ideal", i.e., those who arouse mistrust in the latter via a refusal to take things seriously. See On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), III. 27, p. 125. 

      Readers interested in this, might also like to see Keith Ansell-Pearson's essay 'Toward the Comedy of Existence', in The Fate of the New Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill (Avebury Press, 1993).     

 

On the (Lost) Art of Swearing

The Filth and the Fury: 

Sex Pistols x D. H. Lawrence

 

Obscene language ... what language is that? I speak nothing but the fucking English language. 

And if that's obscene then tough shit. - Johnny Rotten [1]

 

I. 

 

Whilst their manager Malcolm McLaren tried to package the band as a combination of sex, style, and subversion, the press had other ideas following the Bill Grundy incident (see below) and would often discuss them in relation to another trio of terms beginning with the letter S: swearing, spitting, and scandalous behaviour. 

It's the first of these things - i.e., the use of language regarded as coarse, blasphemous, or obscene - that I wish to briefly touch on here with reference both to the Sex Pistols and, firstly, to the writer D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II. 

 

Following publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence conceded that he would henceforth be known as the author who (re-)introduced the so-called obscene words into English literature [2]. 

 

But despite the abuse he received for this, Lawrence insisted on the necessity of having published his book unexpurgated and maintained that "the words that shock so much at first don't shock at all after a while" [3]. 

 

And that's not because we are corrupted by the words and quickly become depraved; rather, says Lawrence, it's because "the words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at all" [4]. 

 

He continues: "People with no minds may go on being shocked, but they don't matter. People with minds realise that they aren't shocked, and never really were; and they experience a sense of relief." [5]

 

For Lawrence, words such as shit, fuck, cunt, and arse, refer to perfectly natural acts and to organs we all possess: "Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body ..." [6] and so it is the mind we have to liberate, bringing it into harmony with the body and its potencies. Otherwise, we will fall into a kind of madness: like Swift [7].

 

Thus, whether one agrees or disagrees with Lawrence's use of four-letter words throughout Lady C. - and whether one thinks his attempt to cleanse language and free the mind works or fails - it cannot be said that he was merely attempting to épater le bourgeois. 

 

Obviously, it was a novel "written in defiance of convention" [8], but the ridiculous desire simply to shock the respectable middle-class and offend slow-minded and mob-indignant members of the public, was not Lawrence's intention. 

 

The bold (if slightly naive) attempt to give back the body its own phallic language and to startle individuals out of their word-prudery - to remind us that the word arse "is as much god as the word face" [9] - is an attempt to keep society sane.      

 

 

III.

 

I'm not sure that the Sex Pistols shared Lawrence's philosophical concern with revaluing language and preserving social wellbeing, etc. Nevertheless, these foul-mouthed yobs as they were branded, managed to place the question of swearing back on the agenda for discussion - not once but twice.      

 

The first occasion followed what is known as the Bill Grundy incident, in December 1976; a televised early evening interview which, as Paul Gorman says, has attained folkloric proportions within the cultural imagination:

 

"The impact of [Steve] Jones closing the encounter by calling Grundy 'a fucking rotter' - in the process uttering the expletive for only the third time in four decades of British television broadcasting - was to make the Sex Pistols both media demons and free speech causes célèbres." [10]  

Amusingly, one viewer claimed that he had been so outraged by the incident that he had kicked in the screen of his new £380 colour television set, though I suspect he would be one of those mindless morons that Lawrence describes. 

 

Still, it demonstrates that even fifty years after the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover - and sixteen years following the Chatterley trial at the Old Bailey - expletives could still cause shock and outrage amongst some sections of the Great British Public.   

 

 

IV. 

 

The second time the Sex Pistols brought the question of what does and does not constitute offensive language to public attention was in November 1977, following release of their debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks ... [11]

 

The album, banned from sale by several highstreet retailers - including Boots, Woolworth's, and WH Smith - was available at Virgin Records, including the Nottingham branch where, on 9 November, the police arrested the store manager, Chris Searle, for displaying promotional material which included the word 'bollocks' in the window, after previously warning him on several occasions not to do so.  

 

Searle was charged with contravening the Indecent Advertisement Act (1889) and found himself in front of three local magistrates two weeks later. 

 

What might have remained a small matter, became a story of great national interest when Richard Branson - owner of the Virgin Record Stores and the Virgin Records label that the Sex Pistols were signed to - hired the famous barrister John Mortimer QC to (successfully) defend the case.

 

By calling a professor of English at the University of Nottingham as an expert witness, Mortimer was able to show that bollocks in the context of the album title clearly meant nonsense and derived from an Old English term for the kind of rubbish spoken by clergymen in their sermons and had no obscene sexual meaning, even if, etymologically, the term referred to the testicles. 

The chairman of the court hearing reluctantly concluded that as much as he and his colleagues wholeheartedly deplored the 'vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of commercial profits', they must find the defendant not guilty of any crime. 

 

Helped in part by the publicity surrounding the case, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols topped the charts and quickly went gold; Punk? Call it filthy lucre - a prime example of how to generate cash from chaos, as Malcolm might say. 

 

V.

 

Of course, all of this is a long, long time ago and we live today in a very different world from the one in which Lawrence wrote or even the one in which the Sex Pistols recorded. 

 

Indeed, one is almost tempted to speak now of the lost art of swearing as a once precious verbal resource has almost entirely been robbed of its potency. Rendered banal through endless repetition, the word fuck, for example, no longer shocks, no longer offends, no longer amuses, no longer endears. 

  

That's not to say, however, that the present doesn't have its own list of taboo terms and one smiles to see the content warnings given at the start of TV sitcoms from the 1970s: discriminatory language is what gets Gen Z viewers clutching their pearls and calling for the morality police, not foul language.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have slightly altered the transcript of an interview that Rotten gave to Dutch TV in 1977. 

      The interviewer asks (rather strangely) about infamous language and although Rotten twice repeats this term in his answer, one suspects that he was aware that the interviewer intended to say obscene language, although, one cannot be quite sure; the Dutch translation that appears on screen is schuttingtaal, which is usually given in English as 'jargon' or 'secret language'. 

      Click here to watch on YouTube.

[2] As he writes in his 'Introduction to Pansies' (1929): "I am abused most of all for using the so-called 'obscene' words [...] all the old words that belong to the body below the navel [...]" - words that cause the censor-morons to get excited and allow policemen to think they have the right to arrest you. See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664.

 

[3-5] D. H. Lawrence, 'A  Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 307.

 

[6] Ibid., p. 309. 

      In his 'Introduction to Pansies', Lawrence writes: "What is obvious is that the [obscene] words [...] have been dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental association. The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job." See p. 664 of The Poems, Vol. I (2013). 

 

[7] See Lawrence's remarks on Swift and his horror at the fact that his beloved Celia defecates in 'Introduction to Pansies' ... pp. 665-666. But see also my post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and (Alleged) Coprophobia' (2 April 2024): click here.     

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'A  Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' ... p. 334

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies' ... p. 664.

 

[10] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 339. 

      For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today show at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the UK', and explain what punk rock was all about. 

      Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - were not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to a female member of their entourage called Siouxsie Sioux. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a 'dirty sod' and a 'dirty old man'. 

      Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to 'say something outrageous' - which he did; calling Grundy a "dirty bastard" and a "dirty fucker". Grundy responded, "What a clever boy!" to which Jones hilariously replied, "What a fucking rotter!" 

      Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI and were now branded as public enemies. 

      The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time. It will be noted that Johnny Rotten having muttered the word 'shit' prior to Jones's outburst almost apologises at first for his use of a 'rude word'.    

 

[11] The album was originally going to be called God Save the Sex Pistols, but the title was changed based on a phrase favoured by Steve Jones, which, as Rotten explained, was a popular working-class expression meaning 'stop talking rubbish'.

 

 

The Queen, Princess Margaret, and Lady Chatterley

Sisters reading Lady Chatterley's Lover 

outside a bookshop in 1960

 

 

I. 

 

Following the Lady Chatterley Trial in 1960 - a key moment in the sexual, social, and cultural revolution that was to follow in the UK and elsewhere - there was widespread consternation in some quarters at the jury's decision to find for the defendant, Penguin Books, and thereby open the doors to a more permissive era.   

 

Indeed, if one ever pops along to the National Archives, in Kew, one can find a Home Office file of letters sent to Her Majesty's Government concerning this case, including one from an Angry of Mayfair type imploring that the Queen personally intervene:     

"I beg of your Majesty to use your influence to reverse the decision to allow Lady Chatterley's Lover to be retailed to the public at a price within the allowance of youths and girls still at school. The depravity of this book is unspeakable, and with your sheltered upbringing in a Christian home Your Majesty cannot conceive the immoral situations which will be put before innocent minds." [1]

 

Whilst the writer's views were duly noted - and, indeed, his letter filed - the Queen did not in fact attempt to overturn the court's decision; as a constitutional monarch, Her Majesty does not involve herself in any political or personal disputes and letters requesting that she do so receive a standard reply to this effect.

 

 

II.  

 

The question that comes to my mind is: Did the Queen read Lawrence's notorious novel? 

 

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to this. 

 

I do know, however, that she was familiar with works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Romantic poets including Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson, and didn't just settle down with The Racing Post and a copy of Tatler when she retired to her reading room. 

 

So, it's not inconceivable that she would know more recent works of English literature, although she undoubtedly preferred the novels of P. D. James and Dick Francis to books by writers such as Lawrence (even if the character of Lady Chatterley was partly based on her first cousin twice removed, Lady Ottoline Morrell, who once had a brief affair with a young gardener and stonemason employed at Garsington Manor) [2]. 

 

Her younger sister, Margaret, however, was a different kettle of fish ... 

 

III.

 

Princess Margaret was one of the world's most celebrated socialites; famed for her glamorous (somewhat bohemian) lifestyle and reputed romances, including, most scandalously, her affair with Peter Townsend, a married RAF officer in the royal household that was to end in heartbreak for both parties [3].

 

In 1960, she married photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, whom Elizabeth created Earl of Snowdon. The couple had two children, but both parties engaged in extramarital affairs [4], and they separated in 1976, divorcing two years later. 

 

Margaret, then, was an unconventional member of the British Royal family; an intelligent, amusing, and lively young woman with a rebellious streak, whom I'm sure would have read Lady Chatterley's Lover and been delighted by it. 

 

But again, I don't know that for a fact and, ultimately, she seems to have been more passionate about music, dance, and fashion, rather than books. 

Notes

 

[1] See the article 'Primary Sources From the 1960s Show Public Reaction to The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover' (16 December 2010) on the website amdigital.co.uk: click here. 

[2] To what extent Ottoline Morrell influenced the fictional Lady Chatterley is debatable. But Lawrence certainly had her in mind when he created the character of Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1921) - much to her chagrin, as she thought the portrayal grossly unkind and unfair. Lawrence, of course, denied there was anything more than hint of Ottoline in Hermione, along with traces of a million other women. 

      Readers interested in this might like to see an article by Maev Kennedy entitled 'The real Lady Chatterley: society hostess loved and parodied by the Bloomsbury group', in The Guardian (10 October 2006): click here.   

[3] Townsend divorced his wife in 1952, the year that Elizabeth ascended to the throne. He proposed to Margaret the following year, but the powers that be decided he would make an unsuitable husband for the Queen's 22-year-old sister. When the Archbishop of Canterbury made clear his opposition to Margaret's marrying a divorced man, she abandoned her relationship with Townsend.

[4] Claims that Margaret was romantically involved with Mick Jagger, Peter Sellers, and Australian cricketer Keith Miller are unproven. But there is evidence to show she had affairs with, amongst others, David Niven, Warren Beatty, and London gangster John Bindon. 

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Tale of Two Parliamentarians

D. H. Lawrence - Sir W. Joynson-Hicks - Lee Anderson

 

 

I have to confess, I was surprised to hear Lee Anderson mention the name of D. H. Lawrence in his speech to the Reform UK National Conference at the NEC in Birmingham yesterday ...

 

I know the MP for Ashfield is from the same neck of the woods and has a similar working-class coal mining background as Lawrence, but, even so, I was not expecting to hear England's most controversial author of the early twentieth-century namechecked by someone once described by the Daily Mirror as the worst man in Britain. 

 

Celebrating English culture, Anderson arguably revealed his Romantic nature by referring not only to Lawrence, but also to Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron [1]. Just how familiar he is with these writers I don't know; although in his maiden speech to parliament in January 2020 Anderson did claim to have read Lady Chatterley's Lover several times [2]. 

 

It might also be noted that, the following year, Anderson stood up in the Commons to thank the Government for the extra funding they had given to the D. H. Lawrence Centre in Eastwood and to ask whether the Secretary of State would support his bid to get a Lawrence statue erected in Eastwood in order to celebrate the author's life and works [3].     

 

Times have certainly changed: a 100 years ago Tory members of parliament such as Sir William Joynson-Hicks were openly calling for the censorship and destruction of Lawrence's work ...

 

 

II. 

 

Best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government (1924-29), Joynson-Hicks (or Jix, as he was called) gained a reputation for moral authoritarianism. Not only did he clamp down on nightlife, but he vigorously opposed what he regarded as indecent literature. This included, for example, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

 

Postal workers - acting under instruction from Scotland Yard and the Home Office - intercepted copies of the latter being sent into Britain from Florence (where the book had been privately printed). Even more outrageously, the Postmaster General also opened another parcel which Lawrence had sent (by registered post) to the London office of his literary agent, containing two typescripts of a collection of poems entitled Pansies. 

 

The typescripts, confiscated (and eventually destroyed) on the grounds of indecency, gave Joynson-Hicks another chance to attack Lawrence in parliament as part of a relentless secret war waged by the authorities against Lawrence since 1915 and publication of arguably his greatest novel The Rainbow [4]. 

 

Lawrence was understandably enraged by this. However, despite being mortally ill in late 1929, he summoned the strength to go on the attack: "the Pansies seizure inspired him to keep up his campaign against hypocrisy and censorship" [5], memorably describing Jix as a censor-moron and a "miserable mongrel" [6].

 

One can't help wondering what he'd think of Lee Anderson and whether or not he too deserves to be thrown down a well of loneliness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Anderson's list of a dozen British literary greats seemed somewhat random and lacked chronological consistency. It ran in full: D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Jane Austen, Ian Fleming, C. S. Lewis, and George Eliot. 

[2] For those who are interested, the text of Anderson's maiden speech in the House of Commons (27 Jan 2020) can be read by clicking here. 

      Anderson is mistaken to say that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover in his home region - he wrote it in Italy - although it is based in and around the village of Teversal. Lawrence had made his final visit to what he called the country of [his] heart shortly before he began work on the first version of his novel in the autumn of 1926, so he was certainly in the process of assembling ideas.  

[3] Anderson's contribution to parliamentary debate on 16 September 2021 can be found in Hansard: click here. According to Nigel Huddleston - the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who responded to Anderson's request - there were "many D. H. Lawrence fans" in the House - which, if true, is another great surprise to me.  

 

[4] Readers who think this sounds overly-dramatic might like to see Alan Travis, 'The hounding of DH Lawrence', in The Guardian (10 April 1999): click here. 

      The key point is Joynson-Hicks misled his fellow MPs when he informed the House of Commons that the package containing Lawrence's typescripts had been sent via the 'open book post' and had been subject to a random search to ensure the contents had been charged at the correct rate, when, in fact, it had been registered and Lawrence's mail was routinely checked as part of a long-running police surveillance operation. 

 

[5] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane, 2005), p. 389.

    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Juliette Huxley [12 January 1929], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 132. 

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Vs the Tin Man

 

Oliver Mellors portrayed by Jack O'Connell in Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022)

The Tin Man portrayed by Jack Haley in The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

 

 

 I. 

 

According to Oliver Mellors, the whole of mankind is not only becoming increasingly tame and sexless, but slowly transforming into what he calls tin people and what we might term today cyborgs (i.e. human beings who have been augmented and enhanced via the integration of artificial components or technology; the sort of bio-mechanical beings that Donna Haraway once encouraged us to embrace with open arms). 

 

One evening, before they both strip off their clothes and fuck like animals in the rain, Mellors informs his lover, Lady Chatterley, that there's no hope to be found in either the ruling class or the working class, nor in any of the coloured races - that all men have been dehumanised by industrialisation:  

 

"'Their spunk's gone dead - motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with indiarubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people!" [1]

 

 

II. 

 

I know for sure that Lawrence didn't see The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), as it was released nine years after his death. 

 

However, he might have read - and almost certainly would have been aware of - the children's novel by L. Frank Baum upon which the film is based, first published in 1900 (with illustrations by W. W. Denslow). And so it's quite possible that when he writes of tin people he was thinking not only of Rossum's Universal Robots [2] but also of Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman.

 

Of course, even Baum wasn't writing in a vacuum; in late 19th-century America, men made out of various tin pieces often featured in advertising and political cartoons and Baum was said to have been inspired by a figure built out of metal parts he had seen displayed in a shop window [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

In Baum's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy befriends the Tin Woodman after she finds him rusted in the rain; using his oil can to help free up his movements [4]. 

 

Axe in hand, he joins Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, accompanied by the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, headed for the Emerald City, where he hopes to be given a heart - although, funny enough, he already possesses the capacity for feeling and the display of various emotions (even for accidently crushed insects). 

This is explained by the fact that, unlike Tik-Tok the wind-up mechanical man that Dorothy meets in a later story, the Tin Woodman is still essentially human and alive. For Nick Chopper was not a robot, but rather a man who had his organic body replaced with artificial parts bit by bit [5], after self-mutilating with an accursed axe (don't ask). And, far from regretting his becoming-cyborg, he often delighted in his enhanced status. 

 

Unfortunately, the Wizard can only provide him with an artificial heart made of silk and filled with sawdust, although the Tin Woodman seems happy enough with this. And, after Dorothy returns home to Kansas, he becomes the ruler of Winkie Country and has his subjects construct a palace made entirely of tin. Even - and this would horrify Lawrence/Mellors still further - the flowers in the garden are made of metal. 

 

 

The Tin Woodman 

by W. W. Denslow (1900)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217.

 

[2] In 1920 Czech writer Karel Čapek published a science fiction play with the title R.U.R., an initialism standing for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti. The play - which premiered on 2 January of the following year - was both popular and influential; by 1923 it had been translated into thirty languages and had introduced the word robot (from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour) into English.

      Lawrence used the word in his late poetry on the subject of evil, declaring: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving." See 'The Evil World-Soul', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 626.

 

[3] The mechanical man was a common feature in political cartoons and advertisements in the 1890s and various scholars have argued that the work of Baum and Denslow is derivative. That seems a little unfair to me; like most writers and artists, they were atuned to their times and happy to exploit whatever ideas and materials were available to them.

 

[4] The threat of rusting when exposed to rain, tears, or other forms of moisture was a constant concern for the Tin Woodman and so, in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) - the first of thirteen full-length sequels written by Baum to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - the character has himself nickel-plated. The Tin Woodman remains a central figure throughout the whole series of books; unfortunately, I do not have time here to explore his entire history, fascinating as it is.

 

[5] As the author of The Generalist Academy points out in a post entitled 'The Tin Woodman of Theseus' (5 Dec 2020), L. Frank Baum's character took a classic philosophical thought experiment in a novel direction: click here.

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Wandervögel

Wandervögel [1] by H. M.Brock [2]

 

"And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and, above all, to say what they liked." - D. H. Lawrence [3]

 

 

In his 1924 'Letter from Germany', D. H. Lawrence briefly mentions the queer gangs of youths and maidens carrying rucksacks, he has observed in Heidelberg. They strike him as strange and somewhat primitive; "like loose roving gangs of broken, scattered tribes" [4], full of a new kind of faith born of the silent forest and the unalterable German soul.

 

Later, whilst in flowery Tuscany in the spring of 1927, Lawrence is stirred to comment on two German youths striding purposively southwards toward the sun. And this time he even names them for what they are:

 

"Yesterday, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno at evening, I saw two German boys [...] They were dark-haired, not blondes, but otherwise the true Wandervogel type, in shirts and short trousers and thick boots, hatless, coat slung in the rucksack, shirt-sleeves rolled back, above the brown muscular arms, shirt-breast open from the brown, scorched breast and the face and the neck glowing sun-darkened as they strode into the flood of evening sunshine, out of the narrow street. They were talking loudly to one another in German, as if oblivious of their surroundings [...] And they strode with strong strides, heedless, marching past the Italians as if the Italians were but shadows." [5]  

 

Emphasising the uncanny, almost inhuman, but nontheless wonderful aspect of their presence, Lawrence continues:

 

"In spite of the fact that one is used to these German youths, in Florence especially, in summer, still the mind calls a halt, each time they appear and pass by. If swans, or wild geese flew honking, low over the Arno in the evening light [...] they would create the same impression on one. They would bring that sense of remote, far-off lands which these Germans bring, and that sense of mysterious, unfathomable purpose."  [6] 

 

For whatever strange reason, the Wandervögel "make a startling impression" [7] on Lawrence in a way that other youths tramping about - including the English - do not. Watching them, transports him back in time and "Germany becomes again to me what it was to the Romans: the mysterious, half-dark land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry of wild geese and of swans, the land of the stork and the bear and the Drachen and the Greifen" [8]. 

 

There's nothing ridiculous about the Wandervögel: they are simply extraordinary and one is left not quite knowing what to think or feel about them; genuinely other, they seem to belong to an unknown race and far-off land. 

 

Perhaps that's why having been sent to Dresden as teenagers in order to complete their education, both Hilda and Constance Reid gave the "gift of themselves" [9] to sturdy German youths with whom they talked, and sang, and camped under the trees; for there's nothing as exciting as loving "creatures from the beyond, presaging another world" [10].

 

Notes

 

[1] The Wandervögel were members of a bourgeois anti-bourgeois youth movement or subsculture that existed in Germany between the years 1896 and 1933 and who subscribed to an eco-völkisch philosophy that rejected many aspects of modern urban-industrial civilisation. 

      Mostly, they went hiking in the woods, sang songs, sunbathed, and dreamed about reviving old Teutonic pagan values. They might be thought of as a more radical version of the Boy Scouts, although some commentators, such as Gordon Kennedy, prefer to regard them as proto-hippies. At its peak, the movement - which was divided into three main national groups - had up to 80,000 members. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the movement was outlawed and members were absorbed into the Hitler Youth or, if female, into the League of German Girls.      

 

[2] Henry Matthew Brock (1875 - 1960) was a British illustrator. Many works of Victorian and Edwardian fiction contained his drawings. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 6-7.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Letter from Germany', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 151. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Flowery Tuscany', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Smonetta de Filippis (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 239.

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 240.  

[8] Ibid. 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover ... p. 7.

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Flowery Tuscany', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, p. 241. 

 

 

Reflections on a Plastic Penis

Plastic Penis Silhouette 

(SA 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

It's an amusing irony of the world we live in today that just as silicone sex dolls become ever-more life-like with their synthetic skins and other technosexual advances, actual flesh-and-blood human beings are becoming-plastic [1].

 

So, it was no great surprise to read this morning [2] that microplastics have been discovered in the male member for the first time - having already been found in the testes and semen - effectively turning the penis into an organic dildo. 

 

Now, you might have thought that would have certain advantages; perhaps enabling harder and longer-lasting erections, for example. But, as a matter of fact, the opposite is true and questions are now being raised (no pun intended) about the role of these tiny pollutants in erectile dysfunction and falling fertility rates.

The penis, as a vascular, spongy organ with high blood flow, is particularly vulnerable to contamination with microplastics, which we are continually breathing in and swallowing in our food and drink. First they get into the blood; then they lodge themselves in the smooth muscle tissue of the penis. 

 

Maybe they do or maybe they don't cause damage and lead to problems in the bedroom. But the fact is they shouldn't be there; although how we might remove them from the environment - and from our bodies - is a question no one knows the answer to.

 

II. 

 

Of course, D. H. Lawrence foresaw all this a hundred years ago: we should've listened, but we didn't.

 

One is reminded, for example, of a passage in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) in which Oliver Mellors protests against the becoming-machine of the human being - 'with India rubber tubing for guts' - and the manner in which technocapitalism is emasculating men and destroying both their virility and fertility; 'making mincemeat of the old Adam' and sucking the spunk out of each and every individual [3].

 

Notes

[1] I have written on this in earlier posts: see, for example, the post on RealDolls (17 July 2017); or this one on Living Dolls (10 Jan 2013).

[2] See Damian Carrington's report in The Guardian entitled 'Microplastic discovery in penises raises erectile dysfunction questions' (19 June 2024): click here. 

      The multi-authored scientific report that Carrington based his article on was published in the International Journal of Impotence Research (June 2024): click here for online access provided by Springer Nature.   

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. 

You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning and Ask Yourself: Does D. H. Refer to D. H. Lawrence?

Two of England's great punk perverts: D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) 

and Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)

 

 

At number 7 on Malcolm McLaren's top 10 books of the moment - as compiled by the man himself in February 2000 for The Guardian - is Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, which he describes as: "The most melancholic and blissfully romantic novel I have recently re-read." [1]

 

And so, it's not entirely unreasonable to ask the question first raised by Paul Gorman [2]: do the letters D. H. on the right hand side of the 'You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning ...' shirt refer to the author of English literature's most scandalous novel?   

 

The fact that McLaren had "recently re-read" Lady C. in 2000 and still responded so positively to it, would suggest that he was a longtime fan of the work and we can probably assume he admired Lawrence for confronting the English with the one thing which, in McLaren's view, really scares them: sex.   

 

Of course, Lawrence would have hated McLaren and the Sex Pistols, but then Lawrence pretty much hated everyone and there's no denying that in his willingness to provoke and outrage and challenge the moral and political authority of the Establishment, Lawrence had an attitude which those who later identified as punk rockers would very much recognise as similar to their own.    

 

Rather strangely, if there's one person who forms a kind of bridge between Lawrence and McLaren its the author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. 

 

For not only did the latter openly admire Lawrence and his writings, even at a time when it was not fashionable to do so, but he was on friendly terms with McLaren whom he famously referred to as the Diaghilev of punk [3] at the opening of an episode of The South Bank Show devoted to the latter [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'Malcolm McLaren's top 10 books of the moment', The Guardian (21 Feb 2000): click here.  

[2] See Gorman's blog post on paulgormanis.com: click here. Or click here for a revised and updated version of this post with fresh links.  

[3] Whether he coined this phrase, I don't know; but it makes a nice change from the usual description of McLaren as the Svengali of punk. 

[4] See the post 'When Melvyn Met Malcolm (A Brief Reflection on The South Bank Show Episode 178)' published on Torpedo the Ark on 10 April 2023: click here. 

Seven Little Geese and One Little Greek

Seven Baby Geese

 Raphael Park, (May 2024)

 

 

Watching Maria interact with seven recently hatched goslings in the local park, I was reminded of that scene in Lady Chatterley's Lover when Connie encounters the pheasant chicks: 

 

"Life! Life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life. New life! So tiny, and so utterly without fear!" [1]

Like Connie, M seemed fascinated by the adorable young birds; golden-coloured and bobbing about on the green water, whilst watched over by anxious parents.

I only hope she wasn't feeling the same agony of forlornness felt by the former. 

 

(I didn't notice any tears, so that's a good sign, I suppose.)     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 114.  

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Visits Harold Hill

My local boozer, The Pompadours - 

and some Lawrence scholars find the Sun Inn, Eastwood, a bit rough ...

 

 

Harold Hill is a long way removed (in every sense) from the fictional mining village of Tevershall, which Lawrence imagines in his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

And of course, I'm no Oliver Mellors, the ex-soldier turned gamekeeper who strides through the pages of the above in his dark green trousers "with a red face and red moustache" [1], angry at the world. 

 

Having said that, sometimes when walking around the postwar housing estate on the far north-eastern fringes of Greater London that is Harold Hill [2], I'm tempted to tell the natives - whom my mother always disparagingly called Cockneys - something similar to what Mellors wishes to tell the working men and women of Tevershall:

 

"'I'd tell 'em: Look! look at yerselves! One shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves [...] Spoilt yerselves an' yer lives. [...] Take yer clothes off an' look at yerselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead.'" [3] 

 

Of course, I'd not say this with a broad East Midland's accent. 

 

And I can't blame the degenerate condition of the locals on years of hard physical toil - on the contrary, it's the fact that many of them don't work (or exercise) that's the problem; that they prefer vegetating on the sofa watching Netflix, eating junk food delivered to their doors, driving even the shortest distance, rather than walk a few hundred yards.

 

To paraphrase Mellors: Their spunk's gone dead - e-scooters and mobile phones and cannabis suck the last bit out of them. Which is a shame, but there you go. 

 

I won't bore readers with statistics, but the stats for the London Borough of Havering when it comes to things like health don't make for happy reading. Obesity, for example, is the norm; if the 18th-century Essex grocer Edward Bright were alive today and decided to ply his trade at Hilldene shops, no one would blink an eye at his great girth. 

 

People down south often like to joke that it's grim up north, but, believe me, it's fucking grim on Harold Hill too [4].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 46. For a full description and character analysis of Oliver Mellors, see my post of July 2020: click here. 

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Harold Hill are reminded of the post published on 28 May 2016 entitled 'And No Birds Sing': click here. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 219. 

 

[4] And if you don't believe me, see the report in the Romford Recorder which revealed that whilst Havering is home to some extremely affluent neighbourhoods, six roads in Harold Hill have been classed by the UK government as among the most deprived in all England: click here.