Mark Gertler: Merry-Go-Round(el)

Mark Gertler: Merry-Go-Round (1916) [1]

Keith Bowler: Spitalfields roundel in memory of Mark Gertler (1995)

 

 

I. 

 

If you ever take a walk around Spitalfields in London's East End, you might notice a fancy series of cast iron roundels [2] designed by the local artist Keith Bowler [3] and embedded at various sites, commemorating the long history and many different peoples who have called the district home. 

 

At the corner of Brushfield Street and Commercial Street, for example, one finds a roundel decorated with apples and pears; a nod both to the Cockney character of Spitalfields and to the old fruit and veg market.

 

On Brick Lane, meanwhile, there's a roundel decorated with buttons and four pairs of scissors in honour of all those - be they French Huguenots, Irish Catholics, East European Jews, or Muslims from Bangladesh - who have traded in textiles and worked in the rag trade.  

 

Whilst, on Hanbury Street, you'll come across a roundel celebrating the matchgirls who worked in appalling conditions for outrageously low wages at the Bryant & May match factory in nearby Bow [4].

 

Fascinating as these roundels are, the one that really interests me, however, is located outside the house at 32, Elder Street, celebrating the life and work of Mark Gertler who lived at this address ...

 

 

II. 

 

Mark Gertler was a British artist, of Polish Jewish heritage, born in Spitalfields, in December 1891. 

 

He is perhaps best remembered today for a 1916 painting entitled Merry-Go-Round  [5], about which his friend D. H. Lawrence - who had just received a photograph of the work - was to say this:

 

"My dear Gertler,

      Your terrible and dreadful picture has just come. This is the first picture you have ever painted: it is the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great, and true. But it is horrible and terrifying. I'm not sure I wouldn't be too frightened to come and look at the original. 

      If they tell you it is obscene, they will say truly. I belive there was something in Pompeian art, of this terrible and soul-tearing obscenity. But then, since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff. I won't say what I, as a man of words and ideas, read in the picture. But I do think that in this combination of blaze and violent mechanical rotation and complex involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation." [6]    

 

Lawrence continued:

 

"I realise how superficial your human relationships must be, what a violent maelström of destruction and horror your inner soul must be. It is true, the outer life means nothing to you, really. You are all absorbed in the violent and lurid processes of inner decomposition: the same thing that makes leaves go scarlet and copper-green at this time of year." [7] 

 

And added as a PS:

 

"I am amazed how the picture exceeds anything I had expected. Tell me what people say - Epstein, for instance.

      Get somebody to suggest that the picture be bought by the nation - it ought to be - I'd buy it if I had any money." [8] 

 

It took some time, but, eventually, Gertler's Merry-Go-Round  - a detail from which can be seen on Keith Bowler's roundel - was purchased for the nation; the Tate Gallery acquiring it in 1984. 

 

And now anyone can buy a fine print of this work to hang on their wall from the Tate Shop, kidding themselves that it's simply an anti-War image, rather than a work which discloses their own coordination - and their own complicity with this coordination - within a great and perfect machine; i.e., "the first and finest state of chaos" [9].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gertler's painting was acquired by the Tate in 1984. Visit their website for more information: click here.

 

[2] Also known as coal hole covers, roundels are sturdy metal plates typically found on pavements in older urban areas. Originally, as the name suggests, they provided access to underground coal cellars, but they are now purely decorative and serve as historical reminders of the past. 

 

[3] For more information on Keith Bowler and the Roundels of Spitalfields click here.  

 

[4] Such low wages and such poor conditions in fact, that the matchgirls working at the Bryant & May famously went on strike in 1888 and formed the Union of Women Matchmakers. The largest union of women and girls in the country, it inspired many other industrial workers across the country to organise and stand up for their rights. For a post on this topic, click here.

 

[5] In some ways, it's a shame that Gertler has become so associated with this one picture - brilliant as it is - for it means the wider body of his work is often entirely overlooked. For the record, I think Gertler produced many fine canvases and was an interesting figure, right up until he committed suicide in his Highgate studio in 1939. I particularly like the fact that he entered a competition run by Cadbury's for a series of chocolate box designs and that his still life design of a fruit bowl was among the winning entries. 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler (9 October 1916), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 660.

 

[7] Ibid. 

      It was by developing such a line of thought - one which unfortunately veers into metaphysical antisemitism ("It would take a Jew to paint this picture.") - that Lawrence (in part) created the character of Loerke, the Jewish artist who features in Women in Love (1920); although, in a letter dated 5 December 1916, Lawrence attempts to reassure Gertler that Loerke is not in fact based on him. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 46.  

 

[8] Ibid., p. 661. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 231.   

 

In Memory of Glenda Jackson

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love (1969) 

and as Cleopatra in The Morecambe and Wise Show (1971)

 

 

I. 

 

I wouldn't say I was a huge fan of the actress Glenda Jackson [1], who died a few days ago, aged 87. But I do remember with a certain degree of fondness her appearances on the Morecambe & Wise Show - particularly the cod-classical Cleopatra sketch, in which she delivered the immortal line: "All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got." [2]

 

And, of course, I also admire her Academy Award winning performance as Gudrun, in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969) [3]. The critic Brian McFarlane was spot on to describe Jackson's "blazing intelligence, sexual challenge and abrasiveness" [4] in the superbly written role; I think even Lawrence might have been impressed by her fearlessness.  

 

 

II. 

 

Born, in 1936, into a solidly working-class family from Birkenhead, Glenda was named after the wise-cracking Hollywood blonde Glenda Farrell. 

 

A politically-conscious and talented teenager, Miss Jackson won a scholarship to study at RADA in 1954. 

 

Prior to this, she spent two years working at Boots, which she hated; as she did the series of soul-destroying jobs she was obliged to take whilst unable to land roles in the early years of her acting career [5].

 

Fortunately, fame, fortune, and critical success were just around the corner and Jackson became a huge star of stage and screen in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

 

However, she decided to quit acting in 1991, in order to devote herself to politics full-time as the Labour Party candidate for Hampstead and Highgate. 

 

Entering Parliament the following year, Jackson declared her determination to do anything legal to oppose the Tory government, still led at this time by Margaret Thatcher, whom she despised. 

 

(As a staunch republican, she wasn't a great supporter of the British monarchy either.)

 

In 2015, having retired from politics, Jackson returned to her first love; even treating us to a magnificent (gender-transcending) interpretation of King Lear, in Deborah Warner's 2016 production at the Old Vic: 

 

 

 Photo: Tristram Kenton (2016)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] As lengthy obituaries for Jackson have (rightly) appeared in every major news publication, I'm not going to recap her life and career in detail here. Primarily, I wanted simply to remind readers of her roles as Cleopatra and Gudrun Brangwen. However, I will add a few biographical details in part two of this post discussing her later years.    

 

[2] See The Morecambe & Wise Show (S5/E5), dir. John Ammonds, written by Eddie Braben, which aired on 3 June, 1971. Click here to watch the lengthy (14:32) Cleopatra sketch on the Facebook page Classic TV Moments. The line quoted begins at 5:57.  

 

[3] Interestingly, Jackson was pregnant whilst filming Women in Love - though I'm not sure if this fact helped, hindered, or made no difference to her astonishing performance. 

      Click here to watch the famous scene in which Jackson - as Gudrun - dances in front some (bemused and increasingly agitated) Highland cattle, whilst her sister Ursula (played by Jennie Linden) watches on fightened of what might the beasts might do. Eventually, Gerald Crich (Oliver Reid) arrives to put a stop to her fun and games, demanding to know why she wished to drive his cattle mad.

 

[4] Brian McFarlane (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film, (Methuen / BFI, 2003), p. 339.

 

[5] These jobs included: waitress in a coffee shop; receptionist for a theatrical agent; and a shop assistant at British Home Stores. Being a woman with an artistic temperament from a traditional working class background, surely helped Jackson in the role of Gudrun.   

 

 

Rupert Birkin and the Ichthyosaur

French illustrator Édouard Riou 

gives us his take on the ichthyosaur in 1863 [1]

 

I. 

 

Rupert Birkin famously declares that he would like to see a pristine world empty of people: "I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away." [2] 

 

And that's fair enough; many of us share his vision of a posthuman future and find it an attractive and liberating thought to imagine a world in which new species arise and the unseen hosts move about freely. 

 

And many of us are convinced that man is not exceptional or the measure of all things. Indeed, some of us are even tempted to promote a programme of voluntary human extinction - click here - or to adopt an object-oriented philosophy that challenges all forms of anthropocentrism - click here.      

 

However, I think Birkin is wrong to describe the poor old ichthyosaur as "one of the mistakes of creation" [3]. I mean, say what you like about mankind, but why take a pop at these large marine reptiles which thrived during the Mesozoic era and survived well into the Late Cretaceous period ...?

 

Modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years or so - and even if you can trace our ancestors belonging to the Homo genus back a couple of million years, that's nothing compared to the 160 million years that the ichthyosaurs clocked up.

 

And so I find it puzzling - as well as irritating - that Birkin insists on making a comparison between humanity and the ichthyosaurs: "The ichtyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do." [4]  

 

But then, at heart, Birkin is more of a flora-dendrophile than a zoophile, believing that bluebells (more than butterflies) are the greatest example of pure creation and that there's nothing sexier than a young fir tree [5].      

 

 

II.

 

I suppose the question that might be asked is why does Birkin pick on the ichthyosaurs rather than the four-legged, land-dwelling dinosaurs? I don't really know the answer to this, but I suspect it might be due to the fact that throughout the mid-late nineteenth and early-twentieth century ichthyosaurs were very much in vogue ...

 

Although bones, teeth and fossilised remains of these beasts had been found prior to the early 19th-century, nobody really knew what they were looking at. Usually, remains were wrongly classified as belonging to fish, dolphins, or crocodiles, although in 1708, the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, identified two ichthyosaur vertebrae as being human in origin. 

 

However, as more complete skeletons were unearthed, the suspicion grew that these were from a distinct species of animal, although many still argued they were merely the remains of giant lizards, or some transitional form, and uncertainty around classification continued. It wasn't until 1835 that the order Ichthyosauria was named by French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville.    

 

The discovery of an extinct group of large marine reptiles generated huge publicity and captured both the scientific and popular imagination. People were fascinated by the strange anatomy of the creatures and astonished at the fact that they had lived so many millions of years before man. 

 

Some hoped that living specimens might yet be found; others, like the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell argued that since God's Earth was eternal, it was therefore inevitable that the ichthyosaurs would eventually return [6]. Meanwhile, crackpot fossil collector Thomas Hawkins believed that ichthyosaurs were the monstrous creations of the Devil and in 1840 he published a book denouncing the great sea-dragons. 

 

Fourteen year later, in 1854, when Crystal Palace was rebuilt in South London, the surrounding park was filled with life-sized, painted concrete statues of extinct creatures, including three ichthyosaurs, much loved by the public.

 

Finally, as the nineteenth century moved towards and into the twentieth, thousands of new finds - particularly in Germany - greatly improved the scientific understanding of these animals. In some cases, the quality of the finds was remarkable; not only were complete skeletons unearthed, but even preserved soft tissue.     

 

This, then, is the cultural background in which (and out of which) Birkin's thinking was formed. So not surprising, then, that he should refer to the ichthyosaurs - but still disappointing that he should dismiss them as evolutionary failures (or mistakes in creation, as he puts it) [7].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although it was known that ichthyosaurs lived in the open seas, they were often shown basking on the shore, or splashing about in the shallows; a convention followed by many nineteenth-century artists, which led to the belief that they had an amphibious lifestyle. Note how Birkin mistakenly says the ichthyosaurs 'crawled and floundered', whereas actually they happily swam about like modern marine mammals.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey amd John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 127.  

[3] Ibid., p. 128.

[4] Ibid. 

      Later in the novel, when reflecting upon the death of his friend Gerald, Birkin muses: "God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them." [p. 478]

 

[5] For a discussion of Birkin's flora-dendrophilia, please click here.   

[6] The possibility of this was ridiculed in an 1830 caricature by Henry De la Beche. See the related post entitled 'On Posthumous Revenge and the Resilient Cretaceous' (6 Mar 2023), where this amusing illustration by can be found: click here.  

[7] Having said that, it is true that after 160 million years or so, the ichthyosaurs did become extinct. However, this was probably due to external events (i.e., environmental upheaval and sudden climatic changes), rather than a long decline, loss of pride, or lack of resilience on their part. 

 

On Art and Hippology (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Fig 1: D. H. Lawrence, Laughing Horse (c. 1924)

Fig 2: Josef Moest, Lady Godiva (1906) 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence had very definite ideas on most things, including the art of representation. 

 

Take a look fig. 1 above, for example, which he produced for a possible cover to an edition of Spud Johnson's two-bit literary magazine, The Laughing Horse [1].

 

It's arguable that what Lawrence is attempting here is to give us an impression of a horse that has something childlike about it. For Lawrence believed that a child sees things differently, more magically, than the average adult:

 

"When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does not see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is not the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't want him to see a proper horse. The child is not a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature." [2]

 

However, if an adult is passionate enough - like an artist - then they retain the ability to see things like a child; i.e., as a kind of vibrating blur in which nothing is fixed and final. They can still see the horse as a darkly vital presence composed of a mane, a long face, a round nose, and four legs.

 

 

II.

 

I remembered what Lawrence wrote here when recently re-reading a discussion about art in Women in Love (1920). Or, more precisely, enjoying the argument between Ursula Brangwen and Loerke over the latter's sculpted bronze figure of a naked young girl sat upon a horse [3].

 

Ursula doesn't care for Loerke - despite the fact her sister Gudrun is very much drawn to him. And so, when he produces a photogravure reproduction of a statuette signed with his name, she is more inclined to be confrontational than complimentary: 

 

"The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands. 

      Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse. 

      The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power." [4]

 

Gudrun, who is also present, is clearly affected by the work: she turns pale, "and a darkness came over her eyes" [5]. She finds the horse phallic and wishes to know its size. But also she was thinking "of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze" [6]. 

 

Ursula, however, hates it:  

 

"'Why,' said Ursula, 'did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.'" [7]

 

Somewhat affronted by this, Loerke merely repeats the word stiff, obliging Ursula to expand upon her accusation: 

 

"'Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.'" [8]

 

At this, Loerke "raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody" [9], before attempting to explain "with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice" [10], that the horse is not an actual living creature:

 

"'It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see - it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.'" [11]

 

That, of course, in one sense at least, is quite true. But the opinionated somewhat provincial Brangwen girl is having none of it and creates quite the scene:

 

"Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly de haut en bas, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face:  'But it is a picture of a horse, nevertheless.'

      [Loerke] lifted his shoulders in another shrug. 

      'As you like - it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.' 

      Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula's foolish persistence in giving herself away. 

      'What do you mean by "it is a picture of a horse?"' she cried at her sister. 'What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in your head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that your horse isn't a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.'

      Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came. 

      'But why does he have this idea of a horse?' she said. 'I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really -' 

      Loerke snorted with rage. 

      'A picture of myself!' he repeated, in derision. 'Wissen sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.' 

      'That is quite true,' cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. 'The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have nothing to do with one another. I and my art, they have nothing to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.' 

      Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured: 

      'Ja - so ist es, so ist es.' 

      Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both. 

      'It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,' she replied flatly. 'The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.' 

      He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge. Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But there - fools must be suffered, if not gladly. 

      But Ursula was persistent too. 

      'As for your world of art and your world of reality,' she replied, 'you have to separate the two, because you can't bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say "it's the world of art". The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that's all - but you are too far gone to see it.' 

      She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief." [12]

  

What, then, do we think of this? 

 

Well, I hate to say it - and don't want to sound like Clive Bell ecstatically singing the praises of significant form [13] - but I tend to agree with Loerke and Gudrun and think Ursula is being almost wilfully naive. 

 

Ultimately, it is irritating when individuals like Miss Brangwen insist that the plastic arts have to be representational; that a sculpture or painting must forever be referred back to a model in the real world; or that a horse is a horse of course of course ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Laughing Horse was irregularly published between 1921 and 1939 and celebrated the contemporary literary and artistic culture of the American West. 

      Willard ('Spud') Johnson was the principal editor and contributed much of the poetry, prose, and artwork himself. He also encouraged friends and acquaintances to submit material, including D. H. Lawrence, who had an entire issue devoted to his work in April 1926 (#13). 

      The laughing horse sketch by Lawrence was unused - perhaps because Lawrence got the price wrong; Johnson's magazine always sold for 25¢ (or two bits). It is reproduced in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, ed. Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 145. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.

      Lawrence was not alone in the view that the child sees - and draws - in a manner that is difficult for the adult to replicate. As Picasso once famously said: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."  

 

[3] Lawrence was most likely thinking of a patinated bronze sculpture by the German artist Josef Moest (1873-1914) entitled Lady Godiva (1906); see fig. 2 above.

 

[4-6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 429.    

 

[7-11] Ibid., p. 430.

[12] Ibid., pp. 430-31. 

[13] Significant form was a theory developed by English art critic Clive Bell which specified a set of criteria for what qualified as a work of art. In his 1914 book Art, for example, Bell argues that art transports us from the actual world of existence to one of aesthetic exaltation. 

      Lawrence hates this kind of abstract idealism, so popular amongst the Bloomsbury elite of his time, and he openly attacks Bell in his own writings on art, which can be found in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For an excellent discussion of all this see chapter 4 of Anne Fernihough's, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Oxford University Press, 1993).   

 

 

Blue Balls (With Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons and D. H. Lawrence)

Jeff Koons with one of his blue gazing balls

Photo by Lucy Young

 

 

Like the American comedian Jena Friedman, I've long admired the artist Jeff Koons and so I would share her sadness at having to write something "even remotely negative about this purveyor of the shiny and provocative" [1] - we can leave this to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who loathes the aesthetics of the smooth and famously compared Koons's artwork to Brazilian waxing [2]. 

Fortunately, therefore - and unlike Ms Friedman - I have a rather more positive view of the blue gazing balls [3] that Koons has ingeniously placed on little shelves in front of various reproductions of classical and modern masterpieces, including works by Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso - he even stuck one in front of his enlarged version of the Mona Lisa (see below).   

According to Koons, these large glass baubles represent the vastness of the universe, whilst also giving us a sense of the intimacy of the here and now [4]. I'm not sure about that - and this isn't why I like the gazing balls. 

 

I like them, because they make me want to smash them; make me want like an excitable child to cup the little globe of magnificent full dark-blue in my hands and then toss it up in the air, allowing it to fall with a little splashing explosion on the floor; make me want to take one of the fragments and examine it closely in all its broken brilliance [5].   

 

More, I feel like taking one of the spheres and bringing it hard down on the head of the viewer who stands before it and admires their own reflection; they who only see themselves in each and every great work of art (their experiences, their desires, their lives); they who only want to know what an image means so they can explain it away.

 

This lust for knowledge is what Rupert Birkin describes as the conceit of consciousness: "'You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut'" [6] - isn't that what he says to Hermione the great lover of art and culture?  

   

And yet, ironically, it's she who brings a ball of lapis lazuli crashing down on his head five chapters later, achieving her voluptuous consummation:

 

"Her arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it around in her hand as she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious. 

      Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning, and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head." [7]

As I say, that's what I'd like to do with one of Koons's gazing balls, thereby transforming it from an object of narcissistic self-reflection into a weapon to be used against those who just have to put themselves into every picture.

 

 

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball (da Vinci Mona Lisa) (2015)

Oil on canvas, glass, and aluminum 

jeffkoons.com 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Jena Friedman, 'Why Jeff Koons's Blue 'Gazing Balls' Give Mona Lisa Something New to Smirk About', Artnet News (22 June 2017): click here. 

[2] See Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018). The opening sentence of the first chapter reads: "The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, i-Phones and Brazilian waxing." 

      For my discussion of the aesthetics (and politics) of smoothness with reference to the above text and the work of Jeff Koons, click here. 

 

[3] Gazing balls - or what Americans rather prosaically call yard globes - are mirrored spheres, ranging in size, and now mostly used as garden ornaments. Traditionally made of glass, they are now often stainless steel, ceramic, or plastic.

      The speheres originated in 13th-century Italy, where they were hand-blown by skilled Venetian craftsmen, but were popularised by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in the 19th-century and appear in a number of gardens designed in the modern period (particularly in the 1930s). However, they seemed a bit naff by the 1950s - only slightly more sophisticated than garden gnomes. 

 

[4] See the article by Alex Needham - 'Jeff Koons on his Gazing Ball Paintings: "It's not about copying''', The Guardian (9 November, 2015): click here.

 

[5] I'm recalling the scene from chapter I - 'The Blue Ball - of D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod (1922) in which a young girl (Millicent) breaks a Christmas ornament and her father (Aaron) then carefully examines one of the pieces. See pp. 10-11 of the Cambridge edition, ed. Mara Kalnins, (1988).   

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 42.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 105. 

 

 

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. 

 

 

Rabbit: On the Obscene Beyond and Other Abhorrent Mysteries

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit 

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit ...

 

 

One of the most astonishing and disturbing chapters in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) is entitled Rabbit. 

 

And although there is a large lagomorph at the centre of the chapter, our main concern here is with what Lawrence terms the obscene beyond and the manner in which Gudrun and Gerald conduct their love affair in relation to this material reality which threatens to disrupt life as it is lived ideally beneath the Great Umbrella that mankind has erected between itself and the inhuman chaos of actuality which is neither Good, True, nor Beautiful.   

 

Gudrun is acting as art mistress to Gerald's young sister, Winifred, and it is decided they will draw the latter's pet rabbit, Bismarck. Gerald is hanging around watching - disconcerted by Gudrun's pale-yellow stockings, but in love with her all the same. He can't help admiring her body and imagining the silky softness of her flesh; "she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful" [a] and he wanted only to give himself to her.

 

(Be careful what you wish for ...)

 

Bismarck, it turns out, is not only big, he's also strong - and he doesn't like to be handled:

 

"They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms' length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind." [240]

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the midlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her." [240]    

 

At this point Gerald steps forward to offer his assistance and, after a further struggle, the demonic bunny is eventually subdued. But this incident has brought him and Gudrun into a fateful relation of some kind and there was a mutual hellish recognition: "They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries." [242]  

 

Ignoring his own scratches, Gerald is perversely fascinated by the deep red gash on the silken white arm of Gudrun: 

 

"It was as if he had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm [...] The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. [...] 

      There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. [...]

      Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition." [242-43]  

 

These lines tell us something crucial about Gudrun and Gerald's relationship and indeed about the violent metaphysics of obscenity underlying Lawrence's thinking. 

 

He, Lawrence, obviously uses the term knowledge here in the biblical (i.e., carnal) sense, which implies that the gaping wound on Gudrun's arm has a sexual (as well as deathly) aspect, although Gerald doesn't merely equate it with her vagina, but sees within it a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities [b]. 

 

And Gudrun knows it: they both delight in recognition of this fact and that soul-destructive obscenity is at the heart of their passion.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 239. Future references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the text. [b] 

 

This phrase - which I hope I recall correctly - is from J. G. Ballard's brilliant novel Crash (Jonathan Cape, 1973).    

 

 

In Defence of Women in Love and the Teenage Mentality (A Response to Frances Wilson)

Photo of Frances Wilson by Jonathan Ring

 

 

I. 

 

Once, in 1983, when I was twenty-years-old, I was riding in a car with a producer from the BBC's Community Programme Unit, on the way to Derby to film a piece of CND propaganda masquerading as investigative journalism, entitled 'Doctors Against the Bomb'. 

 

Heading as we were to the East Midlands, it was perhaps inevitable that the name D. H. Lawrence entered the conversation: I said I loved Lawrence and his writing; he - the producer - told me with a patronising tone and superior little smile: "Everybody does when they're young. But, don't worry, you'll grow out of it."

 

It's something I've never forgotten: and I determined at that moment to never abandon Lawrence or repudiate his influence on my thinking (and, indeed, my life).  

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this incident when I read the following crass sentence in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man (2021):         

 

"Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does [Women in Love] become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers." [1]

 

What this reveals, I'm sorry to say, is that Wilson is one of those high-brow readers who, whilst posing as a Lawrentian loyalist, sneers from her privileged position at his immaturity and despises a character like Rupert Birkin for displaying the uncompromising intensity of youth.  

 

She writes:

 

"There are wonderful things in Women in Love, but it is not the flawless masterpiece that Lawrence believed he had written. It is an experiment in the art of fiction [...] but we only have to compare the result with Virginia Woolf's The Waves to see that Lawrence has failed." [2] 

 

Did Lawrence ever claim to have written a flawless masterpiece? I don't think so. He wasn't interested in literary perfection - nor, for that matter, in comparative success. Besides, doesn't all great art ultimately fail? Its tragic beauty rests upon this fact.   

 

At the beginning of her study, Wilson says that, as an adolescent, she found Lawrence incomparable as an author and loved his fierce certainties:

 

"I liked the fact his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings." [3] 

 

Alas, returning to Lawrence as a middle-aged biographer, she now finds that things have changed: 

 

"Where once I found insight, I now find bewildering levels of naivety; for all his claims to prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world." [4] 

 

Rather than consider that this disenchantment shows a loss of her own vitality, however, Wilson makes her snide little remark about Lawrence's fiction appealing only to teenagers. But, as Lawrence himself says, perhaps the mentality of a teenager is preferable to that of a jaded intellectual who now chooses to sit safely in judgement rather than risk falling in love.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 113. For a series of reflections on this book, click here and here.

[2] Ibid., pp. 112-113. 

[3] Ibid., pp. 2-3.

[4] Ibid., p. 3. This is a sentence that could have been written by Geoff Dyer; another author who claims to love Lawrence and has in part built his own career as a professional writer upon Lawrence, but then dismisses much of his work and transforms him from a figure of hate into a figure of ridicule, as if that's performing him a service.     

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

The Ballard of Jazz the Knife 

(c. 1992)

 

 

I. Opening Remarks 

 

Piquerism - for those of you unfamiliar with the practice - is a perverse sexual interest in penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives. 

 

Most often, the targeted areas of the body are the breasts, buttocks, and genitals and whilst for many lovers it's a form of edge play or risk-aware consensual kink, for the true sadist - who laughs at the idea of obtaining permission or that libertinism should conform to a code of health and safety - piquerism only becomes interesting when it results in extreme suffering and death or is performed post-mortem.   

 

 

II. Biofictional Remarks

 

As a young child, I might be said to have had something of a piqueresque liking for sharp objects myself. I far preferred, for example, pricking balloons with a needle, than inflating them. And once, at school, I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she too would explode with a bang [1].  

 

And whilst I had an extensive range of toy guns, my favourite thing to play with was a plastic dagger with a retractable blade with which I could create the illusion of having stabbed myself through the heart (or knifed a friend in the back).    

 

 

III. Literary Remarks

 

I don't know how D. H. Lawrence felt about this subject, but the following scenes are worth noting:

 

(i) Women in Love (Ch. VI) [2]

 

Pussum has confessed that she's not afraid of anything except black-beetles. She's certainly not afraid of blood ... 

 

So when a man with a pale, jeering face laughs at her, she suddenly jabs a knife across his hand, causing him to leap up, cursing. He glares at her with sardonic contempt as the blood begins to flow from the wound inflicted by this feline young woman. 

 

Birkin looked on with obvious displeasure, but Gerald is aroused by the girl's action. Later, in the taxi home, she sits close to him and grasps his hand in hers; "rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain [...] and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity".     

 

(ii) The Plumed Serpent (Ch. XXIII) [3] 

Cipriano strips and publicly executes a group of prisoners with a bright, thin dagger ...

"'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he said in a loud, clear voice. 

      And swift as lightning he stabbed the blindfolded men to the heart, with three swift, heavy stabs. Then he lifted the red dagger and threw it down.

      'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he repeated." 

Later, Cipriano and his fellow revolutionaries indulge in a little fetishistic blood play, dipping their hands into blood collected from the bodies of the executed men in a stone bowl and raising wet, red fists. They then sprinkle some of the blood on a fire in a neo-pagan religious ritual.   

(iii) The Woman Who Rode Away [4]

 

A bored, middle-class white woman goes in search of adventure and to give her heart to the god of the Chilchui Indians ... 

 

Two men grip her arms whilst two others "with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her". 

 

They also remove the pins from her hair and touch her on the breasts and back. Then they drug her and groom her over the course of several weeks into the role of sacrificial victim. Her captors, the Indians, are superficially kind to her; gentle and considerate. Yet she sensed their cruelty underneath and when the time comes for her to die, they show no hesitation in killing her:

 

"When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and legs. Behind stood the aged man [...] holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife."

 

They are waiting for the right moment, when the red sun is about to sink: Then the old man will strike with his flint blade and accomplish the sacrifice ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] She didn't. And rather than encouraging my scientific curiosty, the teacher, Mrs. Horncastle, gave me a telling off in front of the class and made me apologise to poor, red-faced Mandy Howard.    

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 73. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 380.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Rode Away', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted are on pp. 55 and 70. 

 

For another post involving knife play (and with reference to the case of Sid and Nancy), click here.