On the (Lost) Art of Swearing

The Filth and the Fury: 

Sex Pistols x D. H. Lawrence

 

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

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

 

I. 

 

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

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

IV. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

V.

 

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

 

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

  

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

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

      Click here to watch on YouTube.

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

 

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

 

[6] Ibid., p. 309. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

The Queen, Princess Margaret, and Lady Chatterley

Sisters reading Lady Chatterley's Lover 

outside a bookshop in 1960

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

II.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

III.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Notes

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Tale of Two Parliamentarians

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

    

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

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Vs the Tin Man

 

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

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

 

 

 I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

The Tin Woodman 

by W. W. Denslow (1900)

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Wandervögel

Wandervögel [1] by H. M.Brock [2]

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Notes

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 240.  

[8] Ibid. 

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

 

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

 

 

Reflections on a Plastic Penis

Plastic Penis Silhouette 

(SA 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

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

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

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

Seven Little Geese and One Little Greek

Seven Baby Geese

 Raphael Park, (May 2024)

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Visits Harold Hill

My local boozer, The Pompadours - 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

   

Between Thy Moon-Lit, Milk-White Thighs

Diagrammatic, non-explicit, depiction of a man

performing cunnilingus on a woman

wikimedia.org

 

 

In the spring of 1928, D. H. Lawrence sent Harry Crosby the newly written out and revised MS for his short story 'Sun' [1], by way of thanking Crosby for the five gold coins that the latter had sent him. 

 

Lawrence also enclosed some poems, including an extended version of an early work entitled 'Gipsy' [2]. To the original two stanzas, Lawrence now added a couple more, which contained, he said, a bit of sun. 

 

The first of these reads:

 

Between thy moon-lit, milk-white thighs

      Is a moon-pool in thee.

And the sun in me is thirsty, it cries

      To drink thee, to win thee. [3]   

 

This is certainly an interesting quatrain; one which lends support to the controversial claim that although Lawrence thinks of the female sex organ as a ripe, bursting fruit just waiting to be eaten, the cunt was for him at its most succulent only when "overflowing with semen from the withdrawn phallus" [4].

 

Whether this implies that cunnilingus was, in Lawrence's erotic imagination, a disguised form of fellatio [5], is probably not something we can say for sure. 

 

But what we might note is that via the creampie-loving figure of Oliver Mellors, Lawrence forcefully expressed the view that there is only one place in which it is legitimate and desirable for the male to ejaculate - and that is deep inside the vagina [6]. 

 

Thus, when in the verse above the male speaker uses the term moon-pool, I think we all know that he refers to a deposit of semen and it is this which he wishes to felch from between the milk-white thighs of his beloved; i.e., the sun in him is greedy for the male seed of life, not the female sap that curdles milk and "smells strange on your fingers" [7].  

 

 

Notes

 

 [1] See the letter to Harry Crosby [29 April - 1 May 1928], in The Letters of D. H. Lawence Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 388-90. 

      This MS would provide the base text for the Black Sun edition of the tale published in October 1928.

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Gipsy', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 14-15. And for an earlier version of this poem entitled 'Self-Contempt', see the letter to Louie Burrows (6 Dec 1910) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 196.   

[3] Letters VI. 389. The second added stanza reads: "I am black with the sun, and willing / To be dead / Can I but plunge in thee, swilling / Thy waves over my head."

[4] Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry, (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 131. 

      This is taken from a chapter on Lawrence - chapter four (pp. 125-139) - in which Woods argues (amongst other things) that Lawrence had a "deep and obvious fascination with male homosexuality" and that whilst his "main erotic preoccupation is with the possibility of love between a woman and a man", when this seems impossible or doomed to failure, "he turns to the homosexual alternative [...] as a less problematical version of the same thing". 

      Ultimately, says Woods, Lawrence is promoting a bisexual ideal and his erotic grail is the "passionate, physical union of two heterosexual men". 

      Lines quoted can be found on p. 125.   

 

[5] Woods writes: "Cunnilingus is Lawrence's oblique image of fellatio." Articulate Flesh, p. 131. 

      A little later (p. 132), Woods insists that Lawrence's heroes all long to drink from the cup of semen which is the post-coital (spunk-filled) vagina. The American biographer and critic Jeffry Meyers, who has written extensively on Lawrence and published a volume entitled Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930 (The Athlone Press, 1977), is not convinced, however, and says that statements such as this, made without supporting evidence, simply reveal the author's own obsessions. 

      Meyers's review of Articulate Flesh can be found in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jan 1989), pp. 126-129. This can conveniently be accessed on JSTOR via the following link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27710124  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 203. 

      Speaking to Connie, Mellors angrily condemns those women who "'love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one.'" Such women, he says, even when they do allow vaginal penetration, invariably insist their lovers withdraw prior to orgasm and come instead on some external body part. To be fair, the women are the ones running the risk of an unwanted preganancy - not something that Oliver Mellors allows himself to consider.      

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 233.

      Again, whether this means that Lawrence imagined cunnilingus as an oblique image of fellatio - or whether, rather, he had a neo-primitive belief that the ingestion of semen increased one's own potency thanks to the magical properties it possessed - is not something I know for certain (any Lawrence scholar reading this who may care to advise is welcome to do so). 

      Readers interested in knowing more about the swallowing of semen might find the post entitled 'Gokkun' (7 May 2016) of interest: click here. 

 

 

A note on further reading: 

 

Those interested in this topic might like to see the essay by Isabella Rooke-Ley entitled '"What is Cunt? she said": Obscenity, Concealment and Representations of the Vulva in D. H. Lawrence', in Polyphony, Volume 2, Issue 1 (University of Manchester, April 2020): click here.  

      Rooke-Ley argues that Lawrence's use of the word cunt in Lady C. is not what it seems, in that rather than being a direct (if vulgar) reference to female genitalia, it is in fact a concealment of the latter and linked to the text's figuring of the cunt and its pleasure as obscene and shameful.

      Turning her attention to the (infamous) poem 'Fig', Rooke-Ley attempts to demonstrate how there is also a link made in Lawrence's work between concealment, obscenity, vulval pleasure, and putrefaction.

      Finally, readers may also wish to see my post 'The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack' (1 July 2021): click here.

 

 

For a sister post to this one, on Lawrence's extended version of the poem 'Guards' contained in the Crosby letter, click here.                 

 

 

The Best Things in Life Are Dirty: Reflections on Malcolm McLaren's Nostalgie de la boue

Malcolm McLaren and friends in a photo taken outside 

Nostalgia of Mud by Neil MacKenzie Matthews (1982)

 

 

 

I. 

 

The phrase nostalgie de la boue was coined in 1855 by the French playwright Émile Augier [1]. 

 

It refers to a decadent attraction to primitive culture or a yearning for some form of debased experience outside of what is regarded as socially and morally acceptable according to the bourgeois norms and conventions of European civilisation [2].     

 

One might even think of it in terms of Freud's death drive; i.e., as a desire on the part of complex life to revert to an earlier stage of evolution that allows one to contentedly wallow in a primordial mud pool (though when Augier used the phase he was thinking of the desire to return to humble social origins, rather than the origins of life [3]). 

 

For me, the phrase nostalgie de la boue has a further resonance, however; one that is rooted in the music and fashion of the early-mid 1980s - a time of buffalo gals, b-boys, hobo-punks, and Zulus on a time bomb ...

 

 

II.

 

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened their new (short-lived) West End shop in March 1982. Located at 5, St. Christopher's Place, it was spitting distance from Selfridges (but a long way from King's Road). 

 

Ben Westwood recalls:

 

"The shop front was covered by a 3-D relief of the map of the world made out of plaster and coloured mud brown. The interior featured the cave-like look of an archaeological dig. Scaffolding surrounded the walls, brown tarpaulin was stretched across the ceiling and a central pillar (or stalagmite) rose out of a bubbling pool of oily liquid." [4]

 

What Ben doesn't offer is an explanation for the name of the shop - Nostalgia of Mud - except to say that this was also the name of Vivienne and Malcolm's inspired Worlds End collection for A/W 1983 [5]. 

 

Keen-eyed readers will immediately notice the unusual translation of the original French phrase discussed above; nostalgia of mud, rather than the more standard nostalgia for mud. 

 

I don't know why this was so: I doubt that Malcolm wished to assign agency to the mud, as if it were the earth itself yearning for something. Probably he just mistranslated or misremembered the phrase. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - and, to be honest, I rather like the idiosyncratic reworking of nostalgie de la boue. 

 

As to when McLaren first heard the phrase, or from where he took it, again, I don't know ... 

 

Paul Gorman reminds us in his biography of McLaren, that it can be found in Tom Wolfe's famous essay 'Radical Chic' (1970), where it is used to mock those rich white liberals who host fundraising parties for revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and thus seemingly endorse a brand of militant radicalism that would violently drag them from their own elevated social position [6].  

 

But I'm not convinced that McLaren took the phrase from Wolfe. And even if he did, he means something very different from what the American author means by it, giving the term mud a wholly positive new interpretation [7]. 

 

Anyway, let's close by giving the last word to Malcolm himself: 

 

"I wanted the shop to look permanently closed down, making it appear as if we were digging up the place to find the London that lay under the pavements and eventually I found that all that lay under there was mud." [8]

 

        

viviennewestwood.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Émile Augier, Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Act I, Scene I. 

      Interestingly, however, as Rosalind Krauss points out, the expression nostalgie de la boue "is not in fact idiomatic French; indeed, it is not part of spoken French usage at all, being instead a purely Anglophonic invocation of the English notion of slumming transposed into the magically resonant frame of a supposedly French turn of phrase". See her essay 'Nostalgie de la Boue', in October, Vol. 56, (The MIT Press, Spring, 1991), pp. 111-120. The line quoted is on p. 112.

 

[2] Sir Clifford Chatterley famously accuses his wife of being "'one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue'" after she confesses her affair with the gamekeeper. Suddenly seeing himself as the embodiment of moral goodness, Clifford regards Connie and Mellors as "the incarnation of mud, of evil". 

      See Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 296.

 

[3] In Act I, Scene I of Le Mariage d'Olympe, Augier wrote: "Mettez un canard sur un lac au milieu des cygnes, vous verrez qu’il regrettera sa mare et finira par y retourner." We might trans-paraphrase this as: Put a duck rocker amongst clean-cut new romantics, and you'll see that he soon longs for a muddy hole that he can retreat to. 

 

[4] Ben Westwood writing in a post entitled 'Nostalgia of Mud' on the World's End blog (20 Feb 2014): click here. Note I have very slightly modified the text. 

      

[5] Rather than try to describe this collection, I encourage readers to watch a ten minute video posted by Ben Westwood on YouTube, which affords a glimpse of the magical scenes that unfolded on the catwalk in the Pillar Hall (Olympia), on 24 March, 1982: click here. 

 

[6] Tom Wolfe's essay, 'Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's', originally appeared in New York magazine (June 8, 1970): click here to read online. Paul Gorman mentions it in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 496. 

      For my take on the question of radical chic - with reference to the case of AOC - click here.  

 

[7] As I wrote in an earlier post, for McLaren, the term mud implied more than merely low-life experience or primitive culture. It was a glorious synonym for authenticity, something that he has always striven for in his work; the true look of music and the real sound of fashion (even though he surely knew, as a reader of Wilde, that realism is just a pose and authenticity merely another form of fabricated reality or myth).  

      Critics of McLaren will doubtless argue at this point that he is another prime example of the sort of person Wolfe is satirising; someone who exploits the experiences and appropriates the cultural cachet of those he liked to call the dispossessed; someone claiming to be nostalgic for mud, whilst rarely getting their own hands dirty in the process of making cash from chaos. For me, however, there's a big difference between Malcolm and someone like Leonard Bernstein.     

 

[8] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 497.