On the Life, Death, and Shameful Maligning of Jill Bennett by John Osborne

Jill Bennett 

(as Aunt Pen in The Nanny, 1965)

 

 

Jill Bennett (1931-1990) was a British actress and - to her great misfortune - the fourth wife of overrated playwright John Osborne. 

 

Although born overseas (in Penang), Bennett was educated at an independent girls' boarding school in Surrey and trained as an actress at RADA. She made her stage début in 1949 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. Her first movie role followed two years later; a murdered showgirl in The Long Dark Hall (1951). 

 

Bennett went on to build a long and successful career on stage, film and TV. I remember her best as sexy Aunt Pen, in the Hammer horror classic The Nanny (1965), and as Jacoba Brink, a Soviet figure skater hired to train Bibi Dahl (played by Lynn Holly-Johnson), in the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only. 

 

Her final film performance was as Mrs. Lyle in The Sheltering Sky (1990). She died - by suicide [1] - in October of that year, aged 58, having long suffered from depression which was in no small degree triggered and intensified by her disastrous ten-year marriage to Osborne (1968-1978).    

The latter, who was subject during Bennett's lifetime to a restraining order which prevented him from writing about her or their marriage, immediately wrote a scurrilous chapter about his ex-wife as an addition to the second volume of his autobiography. The chapter, in which he rejoiced at her death, rightly caused controversy; this wasn't simply looking back in anger by a bitter old man, this was a vile display of toxic masculinity.  

 

Bennett undoubtedly had her faults: maybe, as Osborne claimed, everything about her life had been a pernicious confection and sham. It's true also that she dished out many vicious insults of her own directed towards her husband; publicly mocking his impotence and deriding him as a closeted homosexual, for example. 

 

But, even if all's fair in love and war, you don't need to speak spitefully of the dead and show open contempt for a woman who has taken her own life; describing her suicide, for example, as a tawdry piece of theatricality, if "one of the few original or spontaneous gestures in her loveless life" [2].

 

Nor do you need to add that your only regret is not being able to look upon her open coffin and shit upon the corpse. This doesn't make you a transgressive author who should be celebrated for the brutal violence of their language. It just makes you a prick ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Bennett took an overdose of quinalbarbitone (or secobarbital as it is known in the United States).    

 

[2] John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, (Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 259.  

Musical bonus: In 1992, Bennett's ashes - along with those of her friend, the actress Rachel Roberts (who also died by suicide, in 1980) - were scattered by the film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson on the River Thames, while musician Alan Price sang the Leiber and Stoller song Is That All There Is? 

      Footage of the event was included in Anderson's autobiographical BBC documentary also entitled Is That All There Is? (1992): click here to watch on YouTube.

The Nanny (1965)

Original film poster with artwork by Tom Chantrell

 

Apparently, The Nanny (dir. Seth Holt, 1965) is far superior to the novel (of the same title) by Evelyn Piper upon which it's based. 

 

I can't vouch for that, as I haven't read the book. But I can well believe it, as this British suspense thriller - with elements of real horror, as one might expect of a Hammer Film production - is an exceptionally fine little film that ticks many of the boxes I'm looking to have ticked when it comes to a movie of this kind. 

 

These include, for example: Bette Davis in psycho biddy mode as a kind of anti-Poppins; Pamela Franklin playing a worldly fourteen-year-old obsessed with boys and cigarettes; and Jill Bennett in the role of a sexy aunt.  

Whilst we're speaking of the cast, mention should also be made of Wendy Craig, as Virginia, the neurotic mother of dead daughter Susy and disturbed son Joey (played by ten-year-old William Dix); it's always nice seeing Craig on screen as she reminds me of my own childhood - as does Harry Fowler, who puts in a brief appearance as the milkman.   

 

Now that Talking Pictures TV show this film every now and again, I would encourage readers to catch it if they can - the last Hammer production in black and white and containing one of Jimmy Sangster's best lines: 'He's looking up your skirt, the dirty git'. 

 

To watch the original theatrical trailer: click here. 

 

 

We'll Never Have Paris: une critique pour le 14 julliet

Repeater Books, 2019

 

 

I don't want to quibble over a back cover blurb designed to big-up the seventy-nine authors contained in the five-hundred and eighty-three pages of this book, edited by Andrew Gallix, but if they all deserve to be named among the 'most talented and adventurous writers' in the English-speaking word today then je suis l'oncle d'un singe. 

 

However, once you remove from the menu of this moveable feast some of the more bland offerings and half-baked items, then you're left with many things to savour [1] and it's unfortunate that what could have been an excellent slim little book has become (in places) bloated and boring. 

 

The minimalist maxim, less is more, should always determine a project of this kind and every editor should keep a working model of a guillotine on their desk, because, to paraphrase Robespierre, editing is nothing but a form of prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. 

I suppose, like General de Gaulle in his helicopter, one of the things I was looking for was a greater level of cohesion. There were too many times when reading this book that I felt like saying: Gallix, remettez-moi un peu d'ordre dans ce bordel! [2] The idea that a chaos of writers and ideas will automatically result in a work of great beauty (or even great interest) is, sadly, mistaken.   

I also couldn't help feeling that Lee Rourke reveals something crucial with the title of his piece. For this book is ultimately a jigsaw picture of a Paris already imagined, rather than an exciting new vision [3]. 

 

Thus it is, that all the usual suspects - as well as all the usual street names, monuments and myths - appear in this book over and over again, until even the most ardent francophile begins to roll their eyes and look for a way to exit the twentieth century, so that they might concern themselves only with those moments when life shatters the glaciation of literary nostalgia and allows us to enter a Paris to come ... [4] 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] For the record, the pieces I admired most in We'll Never Have Paris are: 

 

Paris at 24 Frames a Second, by Richard Kovitch, pp. 182-190.

The Past is a Foreign City, by David Collard, pp. 191-196. 

Waiting for Godard, by Jeremy Allen, pp. 197-203.

City Not Paris, by Anna Aslanyan, pp. 276-282.

Manna in Mid-Wilderness, by Natalie Ferris, pp. 283-288.

Waiting for Nothing to Happen, by Andrew Gallix, pp. 294-299.

Donut, by Will Ashon, 300-302.

The Arraignment of Paris, by Stuart Walton, 332-336.

Paris Perdu, by Tom McCarthy, pp. 342-344.

Ten Fragments of an Idea of Paris Already Imagined by You, by Lee Rourke, pp. 350-356.

Terminus Nord, by Adam Roberts, pp. 367-377.

Poisson Soluble, by Lauren Elkin, pp. 378-387.

Paris, Isidore Isou, and Me, by Andrew Hussey, pp. 448- 454.  

Anchovies - Brian Dillon, pp. 538-543.

I suppose I should also mention Flogging a Dead Clothes Horse, by Thom Cuell, pp. 255-263, which discusses the influence of Paris on Malcolm McLaren's political and artistic imagination, though, again, it simply rehearsed a lot of the same old ideas.

 

[2] I'm grateful to Richard Kovitch who writes of de Gaulle's lament whilst flying high above Paris; see Paris at 24 Frames a Second, We'll Never Have Paris, p. 184.  

[3] Lee Rourke, Ten Fragments of an Idea of Paris Already Imagined by You, We'll Never Have Paris, pp. 350-356. 

[4] I'm paraphrasing from Leaving the 20th Century, (Free Fall Publications, 1974), a collection of Situationist writings ed. and translated by Chris Gray.   

I Had So Much Rather the Centaur Had Slain Hercules ...

"Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, 

at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, 

half immersed in nature, half transcending it." - Ortega y Gasset

 

 

On viewing an (unidentified) artistic representation of Hercules slaying Nessus [1], Lawrence writes: 

 

"I had so much rather the Centaur had slain Hercules, and men had never developed souls. Seems to me they're the greatest ailment humanity ever had." [2] 

 

Whilst we might ponder what the link is between the killing of Nessus and the development of the human soul, I love these two short lines in which Lawrence recognises that the soul is a type of affliction and that mankind might have been happier and more beautiful - like flowers - had we never experimented with the internalisation of cruelty and subjected the flesh to psychology.  

 

One could quote Wilde at this point - or Nietzsche - but let's remind ourselves of Foucault's fascinating take on this question in Discipline and Punish which ends with a killer twist:

 

"It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised [...] This is the historical reality of [the] soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." [3]

 

In conclusion - and returning to Lawrence - it's obvious that he reads the slaying of the centaur as a triumph of human idealism over instinctive animality and, like Lou Carrington in St Mawr, he dreams of a time to come when men might untame themselves, regain their animal mystery and become-centaur ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In Greek mythology, Nessus, son of Centauros, was killed by Heracles with a poisoned arrow, after the latter saw the former attempt to rape his wife, Deianeira, having carried her across the river Evinos. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 143.  

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 29-30. 

That City of Dreadful Night: D. H. Lawrence's Letters from Paris

Paris est toujours une bonne idée

 

 

I. 

 

I'm currently reading a big fat book of essays, short stories, and poems by over seventy authors, edited by Andrew Gallix [1], exploring the fascination that writers from the English-speaking world have for the French capital - although, as becomes clear, they are mostly enchanted by a myth of their own invention, rather than by Paris as a place that can be located on a map.       

 

Of course, not all English writers have been enamoured with the City of Lights. D. H. Lawrence, for example, famously wrote in 1919: "Paris is a nasty city, and the French are not sympathetic to me." [2] 

 

Five years later, however, Lawrence had changed his tune: "Paris isn't so bad - to me much nicer than London - so agreeably soulless" [3]. 

 

Indeed, in almost every letter and postcard sent to friends at the beginning of 1924 from Le Grand Hotel de Versailles (on the Boulevard Montparnasse), Lawrence was saying much the same thing: "Paris looking rather lovely in sunshine and frost - rather quiet, but really a beautiful city" [4]. He even cheerfully informed his mother-in-law that the Parisians were very friendly [5]. 

But of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, there were sudden (and frequent) mood changes during his short stay in Paris, as this letter written to Catherine Carswell illustrates:

 

"Today it is dark and raining, and very like London. There really isn't much point in coming here. It's the same thing with a small difference. And not really worth taking the journey. Don't you come just now: it would only disappoint you. Myself, I'm just going to sleep a good bit, and let the days go by [...] Paris has great beauty - but all like a museum. And when one looks out of the Louvre windows, one wonders whether the museum is more inside or outside - whether all Paris, with its rue de la Paix and its Champs Elysée isn't also all just a sort of museum." [6]   

Several days later, and Lawrence is still lying low in Paris (whilst Frieda buys some new clothes), but feeling a little more positive about the city and its residents:

 

"Paris is rather nice - the French aren't at all villain, as far as I see them. I must say I like them. They are simpatico. I feel much better since I am here and away from London." [7]

 

And so, despite informing one correspondent that the city was far from gay, Lawrence mostly enjoyed his short stay: "Paris has been quite entertaining for the two weeks: good food and wine, and everything very cheap." [8]  

 

II.

 

In 1929, Lawrence returned to Paris where he oversaw publication of a new (inexpensive) edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover to try and stop the pirated editions then in circulation. If, five years earlier, he had been mostly positive in his response to the city, now he was as hostile to it as he was to most (if not all) large cities:

 

"I don't a bit like Paris. It is nowadays incredibly crowded, incredibly noisy, the air is dirty and simply stinks of petrol, and all the life has gone out of the people. They seem so tired." [9]   

 

Sadly, of course, it was Lawrence himself that the life had almost entirely gone out of; he was to die eleven months after writing this, aged 44, in Vence (428 miles south of Paris, as the crow flies).           

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Andrew Gallix (ed.), We'll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019). If I ever manage to work my way through the book's 560+ pages, then I'll doubtless post some kind of review of the work here on Torpedo the Ark.  

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 18 November 1919, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 417. It should be noted that Lawrence hadn't at the time of writing this letter actually been to Paris and wasn't to make his first trip there until January 1924.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler, [2 February 1924], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elzabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 567. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [24 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 561. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 24 January 1924, in Letters IV, p. 561. In the original German, Lawrence wrote: "Paris ist doch netter wie London, nicht so dunkel-grau. Die Leute sind ganz freundlich."

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Catherine Carswell, [25 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 563. 

      This letter has parallels with a short essay written at the same time in which Lawrence asserts that whilst Paris is still monumental and handsome, it has lost its true splendour, and become "like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail". He blames this sorry state of affairs on: (i) modern democracy; (ii) too much bare flesh on display in French works of art;  (iii) an overly rich diet; and (iv) the dead weight of history and its architecture.

      See: 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 141-146. The line quoted is on p. 143.

      As for the idea of Paris disappointing: 

      "Disappointment, according to Stuart Walton, is actually a 'constitutive factor' in English speakers' experience of France, and its capital in particular: 'It is at least as important to the British, for example, that Paris should fall short of what they expect of it as it is to the Parisians that les Anglais have never really understood it' (p. 332)." 

      See Andrew Gallix's Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 29. And see also the TTA post 'On Disappointment' (24 May 2020) in which I discuss (amongst other things) le Syndrome de Paris: click here.  

        

[7] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, [31 January 1924], in Letters IV, p. 565. 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Hon. Dorothy Brett, [4 February 1924], in Letters, IV, p. 568. The fact that Paris was, at one time, cheap to live in, was absolutely crucial:

      "Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s as a place 'where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were', adding that this was 'like having a great treasure given to you'. That treasured lifestyle was swept away by the onset of the Depression in the 1930s. As Will Ashon remarks, artists thrive where there is 'affordable, preferably semi-derelict, real estate. Which is to say, you can't be an artist in Paris, anymore, or in London either' (p. 301)." 

      See Andrew Gallix, Introduction to We'll Never Have Paris, p. 24.   

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 3 April 1929, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 234. 

Those interested in knowing more about Lawrence's 1929 visit to Paris - and how his stay at 66, Boulevard de Montparnasse has now been officially commememorated with a plaque - might like to read Catherine Brown's blog post of 29 May 2019, available on her website: click here.     

 

And those interested in Lawrence's wider relationship with French culture, might like to read the following essay by Ginette Katz-Roy: 'D. H. Lawrence and "That Beastly France"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, (1991), pp. 143-156. This essay is available to download or read online via JSTOR: click here.   

 

 

Musical bonus: the debut single from Adam and the Ants, Young Parisians (Decca, 1978): click here. 

 

 

Lord, Open Thou My Lips ...

Andreea Anghel: 

Le Noir's Jesus Wound as a Vagina (2017)

saatchiart.com

 

I. Lord Jesus Crucified, I adore the Sacred Wound in thy most holy side ...

 

It's always amusing - and important - to be reminded that Christianity is not only a form of moral fanaticism but sexual perversion; that Jesus was not only full of his own righteousness (to the extent that he believed himself the Son of God), but gloried in his own suffering as a form of passion, only finding his consummation when nailed naked to a cross wearing a crown of thorns. 

 

The faithful to this day still delight in masochism and martydom and have a fetishistic fascination with the Five Holy Wounds left upon the body of their Lord [1]. Such loving devotion to the physical signs of cruelty inflicted upon the body of Christ - or what we might term stigmatophilia - has recently attracted the attention of scholars working within the area of queer studies and it's to their research that I turn here ...         

 

 

II. Domine labia mea aperies ut cunnum meum laude ut cantem

 

For those historians and theologians who choose to examine the life of Jesus through a queer lens, the question of his gender identity - and its representation in medieval art - is of significant interest. 

 

They are particularly fascinated by the gash in his side which undeniably appears to resemble a vulva, thus implying that the resurrected Christ - risen in his wholeness - possessed both male and female sex organs. This intersex (and gender-fluid) Christ figure radically challenges the more conventional ideas of him as purely male and, indeed, as a divine embodiment of the masculine ideal.                

 

In other words, long before J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg fantasised about the new flesh and the flowering of wounds into sex organs that promised the possibility of perverse new pleasures, medieval Christians were opening their prayer books and touching and kissing images of Christ's wounds, to which they assigned miraculous properties.

 

Obviously, this was performed as an act of religious veneration. But to deny the kinky aspect would be absurd; believers were surely aware, for example, of the linguistic associations in Latin between the word for wound and the word for womb (vulna / vulva) and dismbodied wound images were often explicitly - not just symbolically - connected with the female sex organ from which blood seeps and new life is born [2]. 

 

  

III. Ostentatio Vulnerum

 

I'd like to close this post with another astonishing artwork ... Believed to be by Giovanni Antonio Galli and painted c. 1630,  it is usually known in English as Christ Displaying His Wounds, but could just as fittingly be called I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.

 

I think most people would agree that it's an obscene and profoundly disturbing work; for the Christ figure appears to not only invite us to inspect his wound - which he draws open for this purpose - but to touch it and penetrate it, just as he challenged his apostle Thomas to do (John 20: 19-29). 

 

Again, one can't help thinking of Crash [3], in which that nightmare angel of the expressways Vaughan assumes the Christ role and flaunts his injuries and scars to his disciple Ballard whilst unfolding his perverse teachings centred on the mysterious eroticism of wounds. 

 

Indeed, I think that just as Vaughan imagined the whole world ending in one apocalyptic car crash, Christ secretly desired the flagellation and crucifixion of all mankind ... But that's a post for another day ...  

  

 

Source of image: 

Wikimedia Commons

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Jesus received numerous injuries in the course of his Passion, but medieval piety liked to particularly focus upon the five wounds associated directly with his crucifixion, i.e., the nail wounds on his hands and feet, as well as the wound made by the lance which pierced his side. Many prayers from this period, as well as later poems, paintings, and pieces of music inspired by the Sacred Wounds of Christ, have been preserved. The Rosary also helped to remind the faithful of Christ's suffering; for whilst the fifty small beads refer to Mary, the five large beads represent the Five Wounds of Christ. 

 

[2] Some medieval artists carried this idea to its logical end point and showed a human body - either that of a baby or a fully-grown adult - being birthed from the side wound and cleansed in the life-giving blood of Christ. This body is often said to symbolise the Church. 

 

[3] J. G. Ballard, Crash, (Jonathan Cape, 1973). 

 

 

To read a related post to this one on stigmatophilia and sexual healing, click here. 

 

 

The Scar is the Eye of the Violet: On Stigmatophilia and Sexual Healing

Illustration attributed to Jean Le Noir from 

The Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg (c. 1345)

showing Christ's side wound in detail

 

 

I. Long Live the New Flesh

 

In his beautiful erotico-blasphemous short novel The Escaped Cock [a], D. H. Lawrence has an almost fetishistic interest in the wounds and scars left on the body of the man who died, following his crucifixion and resurrection [b]. 

 

The climax of the tale sees the man stripping naked before a priestess of Isis and submitting to her touch, in order that he may be healed and released from past pain and old suffering:

"'Let me annoint you!' the woman said to him softly, 'let me annoint the scars! Show me, and let me annoint them!'

      He forgot his nakedness in the re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand. And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness. The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: 'What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life, the scar is the eye of the violet.'" [157]

 

This is an astonishing piece of writing - particularly the last line, which is one that David Cronenberg would have been proud of. 

 

Next, the woman of Isis chafes the man's feet with oil and tender healing, before directing him towards her goddess: "And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing" [158], the woman stooped in order to examine the scar "in the soft flesh of the socket of his side" [158]; a scar which resembled  "an eye sore with endless weeping" [158]. 

 

It was from this deep wound just above his hip, that the man who died had lost his life ...

 

"The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her palm over over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed his life again [...] And in the dark, wild pain and panic of consciousness rang only one cry: Oh, how can she take this death out of me? [...]

      In silence she softly, rhythmically chafed the scar with oil [...] while the vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power [...] gradually warmth began to take the place of cold terror, and he felt: I am going to be flushed warm again, I am going to be whole!" [158] 

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth [...] And the wailing died out altogether, and there was stillness and darkness in his soul, unbroken dark stilless, wholeness." [159] 

 

At the same time, the man who died experiences a new sun dawning within the perfect inner darkness of his body. Not only that, but he feels the blaze of his manhood rise up. So he unfastens the woman's linen tunic and slips the garment down, exposing her white-gold breasts. Pulling her to him "with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire" [160], they fuck - not once but twice.

 

"Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his side with her finger-tips, and said:

      'But they no longer hurt?'

      'They are suns!' he said. 'They shine from your touch. They are my atonement with you.'" [160] 

 

 

II. The World Was Beginning to Flower into Wounds 

 

Of course, Lawrence isn't the only author to explore the eroticism of wounds as sites of perverse bliss and to imagine what Foucault would later term a new economy of bodies and their pleasures ... 

 

In his novel Crash J. G. Ballard provides the following tender (but disquieting) scene between the narrator of the tale - also named Ballard - and a severely crippled young woman, Gabrielle, in the back of her small, specially adapted car: 

 

"As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. [...] Our sexual acts were exploratory ordeals." [c] 

 

Ballard continues, in the uniquely erotico-clinical language that characterises the novel and which, almost impossible to paraphrase, can only be quoted at length:

 

"In the inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked depressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps. As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina. This depraved orifice, the imagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the small wounds on my own body [...] I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm - these were the templates for new genital organs, the moulds of sexual possibilities yet to be created [...] As she sat passively in my arms [...] I realised this bored and crippled young woman found that the nominal junction points of the sexual act - breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris - failed to provide any excitement for us."

 

"Gabrielle placed a drop of spit on my right nipple and stroked it mechanically, keeping up the small pretence of this nominal sexual link. In return, I stroked her pubis, feeling for the inert nub of her clitoris. [...] Gabrielle's hand moved across my chest. Her fingers found the small scars below my left collar bone [...] As she began to explore this circular crevice with her lips I for the first time felt my penis thickening. She took it from my trousers, then began to explore the other wound-scars on my chest and abdomen, running the tip of her tongue into each one. In turn, one by one, she endorsed each of these signatures [...]  As she stroked my penis I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake of the car in which she had crashed. My right arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries. I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast, as she in turn explored mine, deciphering together these codes of a sexuality made possible by our two car-crashes.

      My first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch. Holding the semen in her hand, she wiped it against the silver controls of the clutch treadle. 

      My mouth was fastened on the scar below her left breast, exploring its sickle-shaped trough. Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman, but celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile. 

      During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which Gabrielle had met her near-death."

 

Like the man who died and the priestess of Isis, it might be argued that Ballard and Gabrielle were implicated with each other in sacred mysteries - albeit within an age shaped by technology - though whether inseminating wounds with sperm might trigger the evolution of new sex organs, is, I suspect, rather fanciful ...  

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Lawrence's The Escaped Cock was originally published by the Black Sun Press (Paris, 1929). I am referring to the version of the tale published in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 123-163.    

[b] I'm aware that this same fetishistic adoration of holy wounds was a significant aspect of medieval Christian worship (as the illustration to this post shows) and I also know that this has since become of great interest to those wishing to queer the gospels and feminise the body of Christ. I will develop this theme at length in a post to be published shortly entitled Lord, Open Thou My Lips ...

 

[c] J. G. Ballard, Crash, (Jonathan Cape, 1973). Unfortunately, I can't give page references as don't have my copy of the novel to hand. I'm relying here on a pdf made available on booksvooks.com: click here. All the material quoted is found in chapter 19. 

 

For an earlier post on Ballard's novel Crash, please click 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).    

 

 

The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack

I love you delicious rottenness ...

 

I. 

 

As might be imagined, the concept of the obscene within philosophy is rather more complex than that found within the moral and legal debates surrounding pornography and censorship which simply define the obscene as that which offends or outrages public decency, often involving the graphic representation of sexual acts or bodily organs.   

 

For me, the obscene is more interestingly thought of as the violent intrusion of the material world into an ideal culture which likes to keep hidden or deny all that it cannot assimilate into its all too human system of transcendental meaning based upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 

 

This might include what is commonly thought of as inappropriate content, but, ultimately, I would suggest, there is nothing more obscene than death and it's knowledge of death - not sex - that makes moralists and idealists of all stripes turn away in horror and disgust, even if - as in Sade and Bataille, for example - death is eroticised (and love morbidified). 

 

This notion of the obscene as that which is sooner or later exposed like the inside of a bursten fig, is magnificently illustrated in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II.

 

In the first of his fruit series - 'Pomegranate' - Lawrence insists on the importance of the fissure. 

 

For it is via the painful looking split in the skin of the pomegranate that we catch a glimpse of what he terms the obscene beyond - a troubling ontological notion underlying his philosophy which shapes his ideas about the reality of love, life, death, and how we might know and represent these things. 

 

Of course, many people prefer to look at the smooth unbroken skin of the fruit and are disturbed by the fissure and all that lies rosy and glittering within: 

 

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?

No glittering, compact drops of dawn? 

Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.

It is so lovely, dawn-kaeidoscope within the crack. [1]

 

 

In the poem 'Fig', meanwhile, the narrator explicitly - some would say obscenely - relates this scarlet fissure in the skin of a ripe piece of fruit to the female sex organ, to which one might put their mouth and enjoy the moistness and strange smelling sap that curdles milk.    

But what might start out as an ode to cunnilingus, quickly becomes a warning:

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too. [2]

In other words, the ideal fantasy of womanhood is dispelled once their obscenity or delicious rottenness bursts forth and we realise - as Bataille wrote - that the vagina is synonymous with a freshly dug grave. 

 

That's a hellish thing to recognise. But it's also a liberating thought, providing one can find the courage to think it through and accept that "wonderful are the hellish experiences" [3]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pomegranate', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 231. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 232-35. Lines quoted are on p. 234.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Medlars and Sorb-Apples', in The Poems, Vol. I., pp. 235-37. Line quoted is on p. 234.      

With Wings Spread Silent Over Roofs: In Defence of the Urban Gull

 

Image: Gary Hershorn / Getty Images

Apparently, whilst the number of coastal birds continues to decline, the number of seagulls making a home in our towns and cities is booming and this makes me happy. 

 

For whilst gulls can certainly be noisy and messy - and may even steal your chips - they are also beautiful and intelligent birds which, I like to believe, act as messengers of the ancient sea goddess Leukothéa; she upon whom all men look with misty eyes, such is her loveliness.

 

Despite this, there are people who react to urban gulls with the same irrational hatred that they do to other creatures that have made their home amongst us, such as foxes and grey squirrels. Personally, I'd like to see those who call openly for extermination or speak euphemistically of pest control subject to a reduction in numbers. 

 

For to paraphrase Lawrence writing of a mountain lion [1]:

 

I think in this lonely city there is room for me and a seagull.

And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans

And never miss them. 

Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-surf face of that long-legged bird!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Mountain Lion', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 351-52. 

 

To read another defence of seagulls, see Stephen Moss's article in The Guardian (19 Aug 2009): click here.