From the Archives ... On My Dealings with Channel 4

My application for a job as an Assistant Editor 

(Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4

 

 

I.

 

My first dealings with Channel 4 were in the autumn of 1983, less than a year after the station started broadcasting. Rather naively, I believed that they fully intended to stick to their public service remit and provide a genuine alternative to the shit served up by the BBC and ITV. 

 

That is to say, provide 'a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which [...] demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes; appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society; exhibits a distinctive character.'

I was then collaborating with a spiky-haired student of Communications, Arts and Media called Gillian Hall on various projects and, encouraged by Alan Fountain - an independent producer hired by Channel 4 as a commissioning editor and mentor to new filmmakers - we submitted a proposal for a series that would be profoundly anti-Christian in nature and feature music, dance, witchcraft, sex-magick, and Satanic ritual.

 

In other words, we basically assembled ideas and images from all the usual suspects - from Aleister Crowley to Killing Joke (the album Fire Dances had just been released and I was under its spell all summer) - and visualised a kind of postmodern black mass with a post-punk soundtrack. It may well have been catastrophically bad had it ever been made - but it wouldn't have been Songs of Praise.

Alas, whilst initially intrigued by the proposal, Fountain lost his nerve somewhere along the line and Gillian and I were politely informed by letter that our Pagan TV show was not something that Channel 4 would be willing to commission, not least because many of the ideas that the show intended to explore were ones that the vast majority of people would find profoundly offensive.  

 

 

II.

 

Several years later, I again had dealings with Channel 4 - and again suffered the pain and disappointment of rejection (although these feelings were alleviated by the fact that I didn't give a shit).

 

Having failed to land a role as a presenter on the 24-hour cable and satellite TV channel the Music Box (a sort of naff pan-European version of MTV), Malcolm had advised me that I needed to be a 'little less Johnny Rotten and a little more Simon Le Bon'. With that in mind, I decided to apply for a job as an Assistant Editor (Youth and Entertainments Features) at Channel 4, which I had seen advertised in The Guardian. 

 

The ad for the post (reference number BH01) made clear that applicants should have 'definite opinions regarding youth programmes, journalism and the youth entertainment market in general'. 

 

Well, I definitely had opinions regarding these things; unfortunately, they were largely (if not entirely) negative and, Sex Pistol that I remained at heart, I basically just wanted to destroy everything and cause as much chaos as possible. (Of course, I didn't list this under career goals and ambitions on my CV, though I suspect that something of my underlying nihilism shone through the bullshit that I did write.)

Instead of the requested covering letter to accompany the CV, I sent the above poster which clearly illustrated who and what they would be getting if they hired me. The text on the poster, which paraphrased Zarathustra and referenced a favourite song by Bow Wow Wow reads: 

'If culture is, before all things, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people, then barbarism is surely a lack of style; or a chaotic jumble of all styles. Thus we postmoderns, we parodists of world history and plunderers of the past, are the new barbarians: we are the TV savages! We are that hybrid breed, without meaning, substance, or style: we are Youth!'

 

I don't remember if anyone ever bothered to reply: if they did, I don't have the letter or recall its contents. 

 

And that, pretty much, was the end of my dealings with Channel 4 - a short (and not particularly spectacular) history of failure and rejection (but no regrets).

 

 

From the Archives ... The Bad Mood - by Lorrie

Lorrie Millington: The bad mood (c. 1983/84)
Chalk pastels on paper (210 x 297 mm)

 

 

I've spent the last couple of days going through a small portion of my personal archives - always a pleasure tinged with horror and sadness. 

 

Of course, it should be understood that when I say archives, I actually refer to a large number of cardboard boxes sat gathering dust in the loft, some of which I have been lugging around with me for the best part of 35 years, crammed full of all kinds of papers, photos, drawings, letters, notebooks, diaries, etc. going all the way back to the early 1980s.

 

Obviously, I didn't keep everything. And some things - including some of what were to me the most precious items - have been lost or destroyed; this includes, for example, much of the correspondence from Lorrie Millington (aka the Girl in the Mystery Castle).

 

One of the things I do still have by the above, however, is a self-portrait she entitled The bad mood. From a technical perspective, it may possess lots of faults. But I will always cherish this work; just as I will always fondly remember the young woman who drew it and the happy times we shared in Leeds.     

 

On the Art of Character Assassination cum Eternal Salute: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's 'Memoir of Maurice Magnus'

Lawrence and Magnus photographed in Italy (c.1920)

 

Also - Maurice! Ich grüsse dich, in der Ewigkeit.

 

If I'm grateful to the author of Burning Man for anything, it's for sending me back with fresh interest to D. H. Lawrence's Memoir of Maurice Magnus, a queer text (about a queer figure) first published in 1924, which Frances Wilson regards - like Lawrence himself - as perhaps his greatest single piece of writing as writing [a].  

 

The sixty-odd page text - which Lawrence wrote as an introduction for Magnus's book telling of his (wretched) time in the French Foreign Legion - opens on a "dark, wet, wintry evening in November 1919" [b]. Lawrence has just arrived in Florence: poor as the proverbial church mouse and Friedaless (she having gone to visit her mother in Germany). 

 

Needing help finding his feet, Lawrence turned to exiled British writer and paedophile Norman Douglas [c], whom he had known for several years and regarded as someone he could trust; someone who had, as he put it, never left him "in the lurch" [11]. Douglas it is who introduces Lawrence to Magnus, a figure who will both fascinate and exasperate, attract and repulse, with his mincing walk and high-pitched voice.

As first impressions seem to matter a very good deal, here's how Lawrence initially sized Magnus up: "almost smart, all in grey, and looked at first sight like an actor-manager, common [...] a touch of down-on-his-luck about him" [11]. Lawrence continues: "He looked a man about forty, spruce and youngish in his deportment, very pink-faced, and very clean, very natty, very alert, like a sparrow painted to resemble a tom-tit" [12].  

 

It's difficult to know quite what Lawrence found so irresistable about Magnus; perhaps it was his light-blue but rather tired-looking eyes, or his "crisp, curly, dark-brown hair" [13] that was just beginning to grey at the temples [d]; or perhaps it was the nice 'n' sleazy element that captured Lawrence's interest every time ... Who knows? But there was something (much to Frieda's later disgust and irritation) [e].

 

Despite insisting on Magnus's essential commonness, Lawrence can't help admiring the man's sensitivity and appreciation of fine things. Entering Magnus's room the morning after a gay and noisy night before, Lawrence notes:

 

"He was like a little pontiff in a blue kimono-shaped dressing gown with a broad border of reddish- purple: the blue was a soft mid-blue, the material a dull silk. So he minced about, in demi-toilette. His room was very clean and neat, and slightly perfumed with essences. On his dressing-table stood many cut glass bottles and silver-topped bottles with essences and pomades and powders, and heaven knows what. A very elegant little prayer book lay by his bed - and a life of St. Benedict. For Magnus was a Roman Catholic convert. All he had was expensive and finicking: thick leather silver-studded suit-cases standing near the wall, trouser-stretcher all nice, hair-brushes and clothes-brush with old ivory backs. I wondered over him and his niceties and little pomposities. He was a new bird to me. For he wasn't at all just the common person he looked. He was queer and sensitive as a woman [...] and patient and fastidious." [15]

 

Rather sadly, Lawrence suspects that Magnus finds him a bit of a bore; someone fearful of spending the money he hasn't got; someone fearful of letting go and getting into the gay spirit of things whilst his wife was away. Without saying there was always something a bit pinched and provincial about Lawrence, it's true that he certainly wasn't a wild bohemian or louche libertine.  

 

When not running round on errands for Douglas and managing his affairs, no one quite knew what Magnus did. Though he liked to hang about with the monks at a monastery near Rome and dream of leading a spiritual life. One day, Lawrence goes to visit him at the monastery, which, according to Lawrence, makes Magnus very happy:

 

"He looked up to me with a tender, intimate look as I got down from the carriage. Then he took my hand. 

      'So very glad to see you,' he said. 'I'm so pleased you've come.'

      And he looked into my eyes with that wistful, watchful tenderness rather like a woman who isn't quite sure of her lover." [21-22]

 

This homoerotic tone is a constant feature of Lawrence's Memoir. He can't help finding Magnus a quaint creature full of a certain tenderness; the sort of man happy to lend you a beautiful warm coat when, like Lawrence, you are feeling the cold: 

 

"Magnus [...] made me wear a big coat of his own, a coat made of thick, smooth black cloth, and lined with black sealskin, and having a collar of silky black sealskin. I can still remember the feel of the silky fur. It was queer to have him helping me solicitously into this coat, and buttoning it at the throat for me." [24]  

          

Of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, he can't just appreciate this act of kindness and enjoy being wrapped in splendour for once: happy to be warm, he nevertheless secretly detests the expensively tailored coat. Nor can he bring himself to simply say something polite when shown a photograph of Magnus's mother:

 

"Magnus showed me [...] a wonderful photograph of a picture of a lovely lady - asked me what I thought of it, and seemed to expect me to be struck to bits by the beauty. His almost sanctimonious expectation made me tell the truth, that I thought it just a bit cheap, trivial." [26]. 

 

It's precisely this kind of remark that prompted Norman Douglas to issue a plea for better manners from Lawrence [f]. As a rule, dear reader, if someone shows or sends you a photo of their mother, newborn baby, much-loved child - or even their cat! - just smile and say something complimentary. 

 

Pretty soon, Lawrence finds life at the monastery unbearable: "'The past, the past. The beautiful, the wonderful past, it seems to prey on my heart, I can't bear it'" [33]. It wasn't the rich authenticity of the past that distubed him per se, but that he was reminded of just how much he remained a "child of the present" [27] who could never return to a time gone by, no matter how nostalgic it made him feel. 

 

This is important: too many Lawrentians mistakenly believe Lawrence wants to go back and worships the peasant and noble savage. He doesn't. 

 

Thus, for example, whilst he rather admires the mindless Italian peasants living their lives "as lizards among the rocks" [30], Lawrence is quick to add that this doesn't make them superior beings: "I don't give much for the wonderful mystic qualities in peasants. Money is their mystery of mysteries" [31] - just like the industrial workers living in the big cities and worshipping the machine. 

 

Ultimately, says Lawrence, one has to press on and accelerate the process of modernity and in this way hope to get beyond it.     

 

At some point, mention is made by Magnus of a manuscript on which he is rather pinning his hopes. Lawrence reads it, but thinks it poor: "And yet there was something in it that made me want it done properly" [29]. And that - in part - is how and why Lawrence ends up adding an introduction and overseeing publication of the work (then called, rather wonderfully, Dregs).

 

The book - eventually published under the title Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, in October 1924, was, sadly, not one that Magnus would ever hold in his hands; for he had committed suicide in November the year before, just three days shy of his 44th birthday (the age that Lawrence would die at in 1930) [g].    

 

Lawrence tells us that news of Magnus's death (briefly) caused the world to stand still for him: 

 

"I knew that in my own soul I had said, 'Yes, he must die if he cannot find his own way.' But for all that, now I realised what it must have meant to be the hunted, desperate man: everything seemed to stand still. I could, by giving half my money, have saved his life. I had chosen not to save his life. 

      Now, after a year has gone by, I keep to my choice. I still would not save his life. I respect him for dying when he was cornered. And for this reason I feel still connected with him: still have this to discharge, to get his book published, and to give him his place, to present him just as he was as far as I knew him myself." [62-63]

 

That's kind. And generous. But what follows in the introduction is rather less so; in fact, one might describe Lawrence's words as unkind and uncharitable - even cruel:

 

"The worst thing I have against him, is that he abused the confidence, the kindness, and the generosity of unsuspecting people [...] He did not want to, perhaps. But he did it. [...] What is one to feel towards one's strangers, after having known Magnus? It is the Judas treachery to ask for sympathy and for generosity, to take it when given - and then: 'Sorry, but anybody may make a mistake!' It is this betraying with a kiss which makes me still say: 'He should have died sooner.' No, I would not help to keep him alive, not if I had to choose again. I would let him go over into death. He shall and should die, and so should all his sort: and so they will. There are so many kiss-giving Judases. He was not a criminal: he was obviously well intentioned: but a Judas every time, selling the good feeling he had tried to arouse, and had aroused, for any handful of silver he could get. A little loving vampire!" [63]

 

Magnus's book, says Lawrence, is dreadful. But Magnus is worse than dreadful; he is a liar and hypocrite. Particularly when it comes to the question of sodomy. For like his friend Norman Douglas, Magnus had a taste for young boys and willingly paid for sexual favours. 

 

For Magnus, however, it's not what's done that matters - it's how its done (and who's doing it); a brutal legionaire raping a boy-child lacks the sophisticated spirituality and style of the educated man who looks to the ancient Greeks for his code of sexual conduct. Lawrence doesn't agree:

 

"To my mind he is worse than the poor devils of legionaires. They had their blood-passions and carried them defiantly, flagrantly, to depravity. But Magnus had whitish blood, and a conceited spiritual uplift, and he kept up appearances: and filched his sexual satisfactions, despising them all the time." [64]

 

Memoirs of the Foreign Legion is, says Lawrence, "in its way a real creation" [67]. But he would "hate it to be published and taken at its face value, with Magnus as a spiritual dove among vultures of lust" [67]. But again, on the other hand, Lawrence's introduction isn't merely an exercise in character assassination; he also passionately sticks up for the dead man, admitting his courage and saluting him in eternity:

 

"He had his points, the courage of his own terrors, quick-wittedness, sensitiveness to certain things in his surroundings. I prefer him, scamp as he is, to the ordinary respectable person. He ran his risks: he had to be running risks with the police, apparently. And he poisoned himself rather than fall into their clutches. I like him for that. And I like him for the sharp and quick way he made use of every one of his opportunities to get out of that beastly army. There I admire him: a courageous isolated little devil facing his risks, and like a good rat, determined not to be trapped. I won't forgive him for trading on the generosity of others, and so dropping poison into the heart of all warm-blooded faith. But I am glad after all that [a friend] has rescued his bones from the public grave. I wouldn't have done it myself, because I don't forgive him his 'fisacal' impudence and parasitism. But I am glad [someone] has done it. And, for my part, I will put his Legion book before the world if I can. Let him have his place in the world's consciousness. 

      Let him have his place, let his word be heard. He went through vile experiences: he looked them in the face, braved them through, and kept his manhood in spite of them. For manhood is a strange quality, to be found in human rats as well as in hot-blooded men. Magnus carried the human consciousness through circumstances which would have been too much for me. I would have died rather than be so humiliated, I could never have borne it."  [68-69]

 

This last idea is vital for Lawrence: man can only achieve his self-overcoming by daring to know himself and know everything at last, with "full, bitter, conscious realisation" [69]; this includes all the great horrors and agonies of life. Knowledge, concludes Lawrence, is a kind of vaccination: "It prevents the continuing of ghastly moral disease." [69] 

 

Magnus dared to enter the sewers and to know what lies beneath. But he also had the courage to fight to retain (or regain where lost) his integrity and spiritual liberty:

"And so, though Magnus poisoned himself, and I would not wish him not to have poisoned himself: though as far as warm life goes, I don't forgive him; yet, as far as the eternal and unconquerable spirit of man goes, I am with him through eternity. I am grateful to him, he beat out for me boundaries of human experience which I could not have beaten out for myself. The human traitor he was. But he was not a traitor to the spirit. In the great spirit of human consciousness he was a hero [...] a strange quaking little star." [70]  

Thus, whilst not trying to forgive Magnus, Lawrence beautifully attempts to do him justice and, in this way, allow his restless spirit to be appeased.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 152.      

      Readers interested in the fascinating background and publication history of the Memoir can either read Wilson's book, or, of course, they can consult volume two of the Cambridge Lawrence biography - Triumph to Exile 1912-1922, by Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, Memoir of Maurice Magnus: Introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, by Maurice Magnus, in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 11. Future page references will be given directly in the text.   

[c] For a recent post in which I discuss child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome with reference to the case of Norman Douglas, click here. 

[d] Later, Magnus would admire the colour of Lawrence's hair - though was sure the red-brown tint had come from a bottle, much to Lawrence's amusement. See Memoir of Maurice Magnus, p. 18.  

[e] Frieda first meets Magnus when he turns up at a house she and Lawrence are renting in Taormina, Sicily. He's on the run from the law who wish to question him about unpaid debts. If at first she thinks he seems quite nice (having kissed her hand in the correct German fashion), she soon calls him a dreadful person and a nuisance and is annoyed at Lawrence getting involved with him. See Memoir of Maurice Magnus, p. 40.  

 

[f] In response to the introduction written by Lawrence to Magnus's book, Douglas published a small pamphlet entitled D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners (1925). The work attacked Lawrence on a number of fronts and voiced the author's unhappiness with the mean and unfair manner in which, he said, Lawrence had portrayed him and his friend Magnus. Lawrence was eventually obliged to reply and set the record straight in a letter published in the New Statesman (20 Feb 1926).      

[g] 44 is a dangerous age for men - particularly men of artistic temperament and/or a philosophical frame of mind - and there is a long list of figures who have died at this age, including: Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Hancock. Pop stars, of course, always keen to live faster and die younger, have their own fatal age of 27.   

On Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (With Reference to the Case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton)

Norman Douglas by unknown photographer (1949) 

Photographs Collection NPG 

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, that whilst familiar with the idea of Stockholm syndrome - i.e., the (contested) condition in which hostages are said to develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity [1] - it is only recently that I learnt of something similar said to occur within the world of illicit intergenerational relationships: child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome (or CSAAS as it is known in the literature).

 

Of course, as with Stockholm syndrome, CSAAS is not an officially recognised diagnostic term and many have challenged an idea which is used by some to explain the uncomfortable truth that not only do young people who have had sexual encounters with adults frequently fail to report incidents or later withdraw complaints of abuse - making prosecution of offenders difficult - but that many claim to have actively enjoyed their experiences and benefitted from the attachements formed with people often much older than themselves.   

 

In other words, rather than just accept what the children tell them, some social scientists working in the area of child sexual exploitation have developed a concept that allows them to morally condemn and legally prosecute the adult without blaming the child for their misperception and misunderstanding of events; their false consciousness, it is argued, is simply another aspect of their victimhood; a form of coping mechanism [2].

 

Now, as I don't have any real knowledge or experience in this field, I don't know what to think. On the one hand, I don't wish to defend the sexual abuse of minors. But, on the other hand, as a philosopher, I'm fully aware that different peoples in different times have understood intergenerational sex in radically different ways from us; the ancient Greeks providing a very obvious example. 

 

In other words, how cultures think about loving children is shaped by a wide range of beliefs, values, and social norms. Plato and friends regarded pederasty as a perfectly legitimate relationship between an adult male (the erastes) and an adolescent male (the eromenos) and it was characteristic of the Classical period in Greece [3].         

 

And, even in modern Europe until relatively recently, it was silently accepted that certain sophisticated older gentlemen - particularly of an artistic persuasion - often had a penchant for young boys and girls [4]. By way of example, let us consider the case of the now mostly forgotten British author Norman Douglas ...

 

 

II. 

 

Douglas was born in 1868. He died in 1952 of a drug overdose. 

 

In his day, he was highly respected and much loved as a popular novelist and writer of travel books. He was also widely known to be a pederast and accused on numerous occasions of what we would now term child sexual abuse. 

 

In November 1916, for example, British prosecutors charged Douglas with indecent assault on two boys; one aged twelve, the other only ten. Given bail, he fled the country and exiled himself in Italy. However, in May 1937, he was forced to flee Florence, fearing he was about to be arrested for raping a ten-year-old girl. 

 

Although reports of these cases appeared in the British press, Douglas's reputation remained relatively untarnished and, if anything, his outrageous behavior and outlaw status only increased his popularity with the public.    

 

His circle of friends and acquaintances - which included Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence [5], Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and Oscar Levy (the German-Jewish intellectual who famously oversaw the first English translation of Nietzsche's work) - also turned a blind eye on his activity with children of both sexes, just as they seemingly accepted the sexual subculture that enabled a man like Douglas to indulge his tastes whilst always remaining one jump ahead of the law. 

 

Indeed, it was Levy who provided Douglas with refuge in Monte Carlo after he fled Florence and told him that not only was he unconcerned by the allegations against him, but that, in his view, the Italians ought - in recognition of his genius - to have provided him with an annual supply of virgins in the same way the Athenians once supplied the Minotaur [6].  

 

It was only after his death that criticism of Douglas's behaviour began to grow, although even in in 1952 Greene was prepared to publicly defend his friend and try to secure his posthumous reputation [7]. Today, as one commentator on the Douglas case writes, "it's impossible to imagine how such a notorious paedophile could be admired by so many people despite his sexual behaviour" [8].    

 

But this same commentator - the historian Rachel Hope Cleves - doesn't just leave things there; she explores the Douglas case at length and in depth, demonstrating how it can not only tell us much about sexuality in the late-19th and early-20th century, but perhaps also help us understand "present-day willingness to turn a blind eye to blatant sexual abusers, such as the American financier Jeffrey Epstein and the French writer Gabriel Matzneff" [9], though that's not really my point of concern here, as the first part of this post makes clear. 

 

What most interests me is this: what the case of Douglas and one young object of his affection, Eric Wolton, tells us about the phenomenon of CSAAS ...

 

 

III. 

Eric Wolton was a young Londoner whom Douglas first picked up in Crystal Palace, in 1910, when the former was twelve. Douglas took the boy - with parental consent - to Italy and, on their travels together, he tutored Wolton, helping him improve his reading and writing abilities, as was "in keeping with the pederastic model" [10]. 

 

Of course, in between lessons, Douglas expected sexual favours from the boy in return ... But what is perhaps most shocking, however, is that like many of the other children who had sexual relations with Douglas, Wolton later expressed nostalgia for their time together and gratitude for all that Douglas did for him as an educator and mentor. 

 

Indeed, as he got older these feelings only intensified and Wolton not only claimed that Douglas had saved him from a life of crime and set him on the path to personal and professional success, but, in the early 1950s, Wolton took his own children to visit Douglas shortly before the latter died: 

 

"His loyalty and affection for the writer were fairly typical of Douglas's past connections. Many of Douglas's boys remained on friendly terms with him throughout their adult lives, inviting the writer into their homes and introducing him to their wives and children." [11]

 

Is this evidence of child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome? 

 

Or is it that these men had genuinely positive feelings and happy memories about their relationships with Douglas? I don't know: as I said earlier, I'm not qualified to give an opinion on this either way. The fact is, however, there's "almost no evidence of children speaking out against Douglas either during their connections or afterwards, as adults" [12].

 

Ultimately, all we can say is that the past is a very (very) different world to the one we live in now ... In Douglas's day, as Cleves wryly notes, sex with children was seen as questionable but commonplace (and all too human); now, it's seen as terrible but exceptional (something that only monsters engage in).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stockholm syndrome is a contested condition due to doubts about its legitimacy; it has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders due to the lack of a consistent body of academic research. If it does exist, then the syndrome is rare; according to data from the FBI, only about 5% of hostages show any signs of positive feeling or sympathy for their captors. The term was first used by the media in 1973 when four peope were held hostage during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. Not only did they defend their captors after being released, but they refused to testify against them in court.

 

[2] In a dialogue with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, Michel Foucault argued that when a child speaks of his "sexual relations, his affections, his tender feelings, or his contacts", we should learn to trust him and accept what he says. In other words, even if a child cannot legally give consent, they can be believed when articulating their own desires and they are perfectly capable of talking about themselves and their relations (particularly on the question of whether there was violence or coercion involved): "And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable."

      See: 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', trans. Alan Sheridan, in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 264-274. Lines quoted are on pp. 272-273. 

      For an earlier post that discusses Foucault's views on the question of paedophilia (with reference to the case of Gabriel Matzneff), click here.   

 

[3] For a post in which I discuss the Ancent Greek love of boys and the benefits that a revival of pederasty as an institution might bring, click here.

 

[4] As one commentator writes: 

 

"It might feel natural to presume that the moral injunction against sex between adults and children is timeless. But today's extreme antipathy to paedophilia dates only to the 1980s, when contests over masculinity and homosexuality inspired an outburst of panic about child abuse. [...] Before the 1980s, attitudes towards sexual encounters between adults and children or youths - boys and girls - were far more ambiguous."

      - Rachel Hope Cleves, 'The Case of Norman Douglas', Aeon (9 April 2021): click here.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence had a long and complex (love-hate) relationship with Norman Douglas, whom he satirised in his novel Aaron's Rod (1922) and again in his Memoir of Maurice Magnus (1924). Interestingly, despite his loathing of the grand perverts as he called them, Lawrence doesn't mention Douglas's pederasty and seemed happy to enjoy his company in Italy, even if at some level the two men were natural enemies. See the section entitled 'Purgatory: Italy, 1919-1922', in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 147-275. She provides a fascinating account of the queer threesome formed by Lawrence, Douglas and Magnus and how it ultimately ended in acrimony, suicide, and an astonishing piece of writing.

 

[6] The fact is, pederasty had long had its defenders. To quote once more from the above essay by Cleves: 

 

"In the mid-19th century, a neo-Hellenist intellectual movement swept German and British universities. Scholars such as Karl Otfried Müller, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds embraced ancient Greek history and philosophy as models for modern liberal politics and society. These neo-Hellenists placed pederasty at the centre of the Greek model, defining the pederastic relation as one 'by which an older man, moved to love by the visible beauty of a younger man, and desirous of winning immortality through that love, undertakes the younger man’s education in virtue and wisdom.' In this lofty vision, pederasty didn't entail a sexual relationship, but took place on a higher spiritual plane. In point of fact, both Pater and Symonds were sexually attracted to male youths. Their writings influenced Douglas and other pederasts who came of age in the late 19th century."

 

[7] Ultimatey, Greene and others failed in this attempt to secure the reputation and literary status of their friend Douglas. Cleves notes:

 

"If Douglas escaped condemnation during his lifetime, he couldn't escape the assault on his reputation following the intensification of anti-paedophilic sentiment after his death. The shift in public mores during the 1980s towards viewing paedophiles as monsters made it impossible to defend Douglas. He disappeared from literary memory, except as an example of historical villainy [...]" 

 

[8-12] Rachel Hope Cleves, op. cit. 

 

As well as the above essay, I would highly recommend the excellent book-length study by Cleves of Norman Douglas and his exploitation of children: Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality, (Chicago University Press, 2020).

Black is Not Beautiful: Black is Sublime (A Note on Race and Aesthetics)

 

Zanele Muholi Self-Portrait (2016) from the series 

Somnyama Ngonyama ('Hail The Dark Lioness')

The Cooper Gallery

 

 

I. 

 

Racism is often ugly and yet, interestingly, it is clearly related to the question of aesthetics and what constitutes the beautiful (and thus, by transcendental implication, the good and the true; a linkage that Nietzsche describes as philosophically shameful). 

 

I suppose we can trace this back to the Age of Enlightement, when, as Sander Gilman notes, the relation of blackness to questions of representation and perception was at the heart of the debate concerning artistic value and aesthetic judgement [1]. 

 

For whilst black was certainly not seen as beautiful by Kant and company, it was impossible to conceive of the latter without also formulating ideas about the former and so blackness came to serve as the ideal counterpoint not only to beauty, but morality and reason. 

 

In brief, race - and by extension racism - was at the heart of aesthetic theory in the modern period. Artists, philosophers, and scientists all wanted to know if there was an innate reason for the usually negative response to blackness, or whether this was acquired socially and culturally. 

 

Which is why a curious case concerning a 13-year-old boy with impaired vision became central to this debate ...

 

 

II. 

 

According to Gilman's account, after operating on the child and restoring his sight, Dr. William Cheselden was keen to observe and report on his young patient's response to colours (of which he previously had only a vague idea). 

 

Whilst the boy found all the bright colours pleasing - particularly red, which he thought the most beautiful - black made him feel distinctly uneasy, although eventually this feeling passed. However, when, some months later, he encountered a black woman for the first time, the child was, according to Cheselden, struck with great horror at the sight: Mama, look! It's a negro! I'm frightened!

 

Commenting on this case, Simon Gikandi writes:       

 

"The conclusion here was that since the boy had not seen a black woman before, and had certainly not acquired the ability to associate blackness with ugliness through his culture and instruction, his terror was immediate and intuitive. Located on the level of physiology, that is, the eyes' immediate association of blackness with values not acquired through social association, the Cheselden experiment would be used to counter Locke's view that the association between darkness and fear was acquired through association. In its overpowering negativity, blackness was accorded an immanent value." [2]

 

Of course, whether that's a legitimate conclusion to draw is, of course, debatable; though it's one that Edmund Burke was happy to reinforce. Referring directly to the Cheselden study in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that terror was innately associated with darkness and that blackness instinctively triggered a feeling of horror independent of any learnt associations:

 

"Blackness terrifies us not simply because we have been taught to fear it, Burke claimed, but because the fear of darkness has a physiological source: it causes tension in the muscles of the eye and this, in turn, generates the terror; it is precisely because of its innate capacity to produce terror that blackness functions as the source of the sublime." [3] 

Again, whilst I'm not sure how valid Burke's claim is - particularly the physiological explanation in terms of eye-strain - it's certainly an interesting proposition to say the least; one which rationalises (and thus legitimises) white racism as a natural response and which posits dark bodies as frightening yet, at the same time, awe-inspiring.

 

We continue to see this played out within Western culture even now; not least of all within the pornographic imagination wherein blackness is both fetishised as desirable, but also portrayed as something powerfully threatening to white masculinity and the socio-sexual order. 

Notes

 

[1] Sander L. Gilman, 'The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory', Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, (1975), pp. 373–391. To access on JSTOR, go to www.jstor.org/stable/2737769

 

[2]  Simon Gikandi, 'Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic', Michigan Quarterley Review, Vol. XL, Issue 2, (Spring, 2001). To read online click here. 

      Locke's views on the nature of darkness etc. can be found expressed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689-1691). 

[3] Ibid. 

Freedom? There Ain't No Fucking Freedom!

 

What the tabloids like to call Freedom Day - June 21st - the day when the UK is due to abandon the last of its lockdown restrictions and allow citizens to finally throw off their face masks and socially interact, is increasingly likely to be postponed amid mounting concern among scientists and government advisors about the rapid spread of the so-called Delta variant (i.e. the mutant version of Covid-19 that was first recorded in India and is thought to be much more transmissable). 

 

Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, is absolutely open to the idea of a delay and one suspects that a significant number of the Great British Public would rather like the lockdown to continue indefinitely, so scared witless have they become over the last 16 months and so happy to have the authorities micromanage their every activity in the name of health and safety (i.e., the greater good as conceived within an era of biopolitics). 

To be honest, I think the cynically-named Freedom Day is a sham and that talk of the world post-pandemic is mostly in vain. Things will never return to normal; our liberty has been fatally compromised and the Great Reset is in motion. We are all now just NHS numbers.

 

To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence writing after the Great War:

We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come back. Each one of us has had something injected into them. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world. [1]

 

Sadly, in Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock, we have got the leaders we deserve. To quote Lawrence speaking of Lloyd George and Horatio Bottomley, but with Johnson and Hancock in mind:

 

"These two spoke the Voice of the People [...] They said what the vast majority were choking to say. They said it all enormously, endlessly, and with complete success." [2]

 

My hope is that one day we'll remember these two gentlemen with shame:

 

"Why? - Because they said things that were not true, and because they urged us to actions that were meaner, smaller, baser, crueler than our own deep feelings." [3]    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 260. The original passage reads: "We thought the old times were coming back. They can never come. We know now that each one of us had something shot out of him. So we have to adjust ourselves to a new world."

 

[2] Ibid., p. 259. 

 

[3] Ibid.  

Further Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

I.

 

What does it mean when a biographer of D. H. Lawrence declares that she is "unable to distinguish between Lawrence's art and Lawrence's life"?*

 

It means that she fails to understand that literature is more than merely the expression of lived experience and that the artist is engaged in a creative enterprise of thought; not merely recalling past events and providing (sometimes amusing, often malicious) portraits of persons known to them, but playing with percepts  and affects.** 

 

And so (once more) to the case of Frances Wilson ...

 

 

II.

 

The problem with failing to understand how and in what way writing exceeds life, is that once a biographer has successfully mapped the fiction on to a reality that is external to the text and checked for accuracy of representation, there's not much more for them to do or say. The vol-au-vent is stuffed and it's stuffed with chicken.

 

This partly explains why, in a study of over 400 pages, Wilson has very little to tell us about several of the major works produced by Lawrence in the period that is her main focus of interest (1915-1925). What it doesn't explain, however, is why a self-professed Lawrence loyalist is so dismissive of his novels.

 

Women in Love (1920), for example, is described by Wilson as a work lacking in the atmospheric grandeur of The Rainbow and judged to be a failed literary experiment when compared to Virginia Woolf's The Waves. It can only be considered the prophetic masterpiece that Lawrence believed it to be, she says, if readers are prepared to agree with the views of Rupert Birkin: "and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers" [113].***

 

The Lost Girl (1920), meanwhile, is described by Wilson as a book that is both mad and bad: "Its badness is because Lawrence had lost interest in human psychology [...] And its madness is the result of his tearing along like a dustball without having the faintest idea of what's coming next." [223] 

 

Aaron's Rod (1922), on the other hand, "is not a mad book in the sense of engagingly bonkers" like The Lost Girl, but is neverthess barely sane and yet another good book gone bad: "Lawrence allowed his anger to spoil his beautiful story [...] shouting and yelling and ranting about love and power and how women must submit to men ..." [256-257]  

 

As for The Plumed Serpent (1926), well this is simply a sour-flavoured version of the superior Quetzalcoatl: "Writing with his usual rapidity, he doubled its length and spoiled its beauty" [398], says Wilson. She goes on to add: "The Plumed Serpent is alien and alienating, hard to forgive and hard to forget. It is also boring, at times brutally so." [399]    

 

One can only conclude that with friends like Frances, Lawrence hardly needs enemies ...

 

 

Notes

 

* Frances Wilson Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 3. Future page references will be given directly in the text.   

** These terms, used by Deleuze and Guattari to discuss literary practice as distinct from philosophy, have a very precise and important meaning. Percepts are not merely perceptions; they are independent of the subject who experiences them. Similarly, affects are not merely feelings or affections; they pass beyond those who undergo them. Together, percepts and affects form a bloc of sensations, or what is usually referred to as a work of art existing in itself and not forever tied to a dead author. If one must talk about literature as life, then it's important to conceive the latter in a complex onto-ethical manner as a non-organic power (i.e., as something singular, impersonal, and beyond good and evil). The task of literature is to free life from what imprisons it - not capture it in words.  

      See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, (Verso, 1994), Part. 2, Chapter 7.  

      See also Daniel W. Smith's excellent Introduction to Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1996), pp. xi-liii. As Smith crucially notes: "For Deleuze, writing is never a personal matter. It is never simply a matter of our lived experiences [...] Novels are not created with our dreams and fantasies, nor our sufferings and griefs, our opinions and ideas, our memories and travels, nor 'with the interesting characters we have met [...]'" [xv].

      Unfortunately, Wilson doesn't appear to be much interested in any of this; she just wants to talk about autofiction in the most personal sense. She writes on literature not as a philosopher or even a serious critic, but as a biographer concerned with human lives, telling tales, and passing the word along.

 

*** To read my original reflections on Frances Wilson's Burning Man, click here. And to read my response to this attack on Women in Love and the teenage mentality, click here. 

Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here. 

 

 

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.     

Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy

Bright Red Poppy (SA/2021)

 

 

This morning, a large bright red poppy has burst into flame at the top of my garden and it naturally triggers thoughts of Sylvia Plath's famous short verse* and, of course, D. H. Lawrence's philosophical remarks on the flower in his Study of Thomas Hardy** ...

 

Whilst for Plath the red poppy is a symbol both of pain and the release from pain (of sleep, of death), for Lawrence, the poppy reminds us that there is more to life than the will to self-preservation; that man - like flower - achieves his consummation or fourth-dimensional splendour by wasting himself, with no thought of the morrow.   

Even an old man, afraid of the coming winter, who warns the young against behaving like a "reckless, shameless scarlet flower" [8], can't resist watching as the poppy unfolds into being. For he knows in his innermost heart, where there is no fear, that the poppy's blaze of colour is what matters most; that even "the latent seeds were secondary" [8] and that without its outrageous redness, it is just another herbaceous plant growing wild by the roadside.  

 

And it is better that we too blossom like the poppy, rather than "linger into inactivity at the vegetable, self-preserving stage [...] like the regulation cabbage, hide-bound, a bunch of leaves that may not go any farther for fear of losing market value" [12]. For if we cannot flower into being, then we will thrash destruction about ourselves until we are rotten at heart. 

Lawrence concludes:

"The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax [...] 

      And I know that the common wild poppy has achieved so far its complete poppy-self, unquestionable. It has uncovered its red. Its light, its self, has risen and shone out, has run on the winds for a moment. It is splendid. The world is a world because of the poppy's red. Otherwise it would be a lump of clay. [...] I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth." [12-13]  

 

 

Notes

 

* I'm referring here to 'Poppies in July', rather than 'Poppies in October'. But both poems can be found in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965), Plath's second book of verse, published two years after her death and edited (somewhat controversially) by Ted Hughes. (In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored Plath's own selection and arrangement of the poems.)  

 

** D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press,1985), pp. 1-128. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. Note that although I only quote from chapter I, Lawrence it still singing the praises of the red poppy coming into bloom in chapter II: 

 

"His fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy, submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little while, imminent on the unknown, a signal, an out-post, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag, quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently [...]" [18]