…If you see the point of the great old commandment know thyself, then you see the point of all art.___D.H. Lawrence from an essay in Adelphi
D.H. Lawrence by Brenda Maddox; Hardcover, 624 pages; Published November 1st 1994 by Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 0671687123 (ISBN13: 9780671687120); Edition language: English; Original title: D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage
…If you see the point of the great old commandment know thyself, then you see the point of all art.___D.H. Lawrence from an essay in Adelphi
Unfortunately, and contrary to the ideas presented by Geoff Dyer in a book I reviewed last summer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence, I believe the answers to the enigmas of D.H. Lawrence will be found in his fiction rather than in biography or his non-fiction works. Certainly fiction is where he would have wrestled with all of his demons, provided he had not yet the answers his heart was demanding of him. To effortlessly discover for yourself what Lawrence already knew the reader must look and read no further than the words in his travel memoirs, his essays, and his collected letters. My job over the last summer has been to read these non-fiction books, an enterprise I am not yet finished with, and also to mix these books in with certain biographies I felt I must add to my research of him, so it seems I won’t complete my initial task until sometime around this coming Christmas, if not later. But to learn what it was he hadn’t had the answers to I believe we must all read his fiction for the truth, and that could take years for me to muddle through all that.
This well-written and thoroughly researched biography by Brenda Maddox offers many theories to ponder regarding several aspects of the Lawrence character. There is so much confusion and disagreement over the Lawrence oeuvre that I will not discuss here on this page quite all of the arguments or even a few of the aspects. Instead I will focus only on the sexual enigma of this most-famous and notorious English writer of the Twentieth century. The author, Brenda Maddox, has presented every fact she could find and because of them has offered her own ideas regarding the Lawrence marriage. It was obvious to me that Ms. Maddox attempted to be fair and would even come to the defense of Lawrence regarding some of the mean-spirited and unfair criticism offered on behalf of feminists over the last fifty years or more. Granted, David Lawrence was awful at times, he certainly was opinionated, but so far in my own studies I have found Lawrence quite fair in his assessments of both men and women. He either liked them or he did not. His severely high and tyrannical standards included an honesty and consistent behavior required of all his acquaintances and especially those he called his friends. I felt time and again that Lawrence treated each gender with the utmost respect, liking more the opposite sex, but wishing to acquire deeper physical and emotional relationships with males than were possible in his lifetime. From early on a given fact of life to Lawrence was that women held the ultimate power, and little changed to alter that belief by the time he succumbed to his lung disease at the too young age of forty-four years. Whether that power was believed by him to have been generated from what was between a woman’s legs is inconsequential to understanding D.H. Lawrence. What bothers me most was what drove him crazy enough to act out inappropriately from time to time.
Brenda Maddox entertained the idea that Lawrence was conflicted in his ideas and feelings regarding the male sex. She reported at least one incident of homosexual love and surmised there may have been others. But her main premise was that Lawrence perhaps searched his whole life for a bisexual male lover and never found the right match. A theory such as this compounds the answers and results in a more specific question as to why? It is possible that the answer can be found in his fiction of which I have had no part of in my life except frankly as other young men did, looking for phrases and passages in which to excite in myself an erection in which to masturbate. Like my teenage peers, at least those who could read, I never read fictional Lawrence for any other reason than to turn myself on. As a much older and more experienced man today I read Lawrence’s works as a student would, and wish to learn what I can from a person so tormented as he. I do believe too much attention has been placed on the homoerotic Lawrence and not enough on his hunk of burning desire to please sexually once and for all his beloved and one-abiding-love, Frieda.
I am not aware or privy to any homosexual male writers who have created or are creating erotic heterosexual fiction of the first rank. In his time though, Lawrence was doing just that, enough to have him crucified and burned at the stake if it were even remotely possible for such a judgment to be issued. He did what none other before him had accomplished with coitus on the page. He was accused of being a pornographer, and as I have already confessed, I only have the memory of a few short paragraphs I read so many years ago in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to even cross reference to. I doubt any of his fiction-writing today would be deemed pornographic. You can most likely get more graphic displays of the sex act on our current network TV. The subtitle of this Brenda Maddox book is A Story of a Marriage . And I think to present this story responsibly and with full disclosure one must look to the letters, memoirs, essays, and even hearsay of the Lawrence relationship in its totality and with every person involved in it. Hard to accomplish such an enormous affair as the Lawrence marriage occupied. But Brenda Maddox did a very admirable job and her book exceeded my expectations as not only a factual recounting of their lives, but also a fantasy of what may have been, which is very good to me because it makes me think, and that is something more of us might want to do in order to make this world a better place for all of us to live in.
The fixation Maddox had on sodomy was the one serious problem for me in this biography. I do believe Maddox, for whatever reason, had for herself a fixation on the anus. I say this given as much as she reported and offered proof of their repeating the one sexual act binding the two lovers together as deemed “special” and “separate” from all others in all their affairs. It is possible that this special privilege between them was true, and the fact that it not only was unlawful but an even unspeakable act may have held great interest for both of them, but for some reason I just wasn’t buying it. And the possible homoerotic suppression of his own tendencies toward loving sexually a person of his own sex, and his hatred or inadequacy present in his quest for supremacy over the women in his life may or may not have contributed to his surly and disagreeable behavior at times. But again, I am not advancing any of these theories either. I do believe, based on my incomplete study thus far, that Lawrence had ideas he ultimately did suppress from Frieda, but only because he could not discover the way in which to manifest them in their lives. He, I suppose as most of us do, took his failures out on the closest person to him, that being Frieda, and was also, perhaps as a consequence of his bad behavior, still very loving and grateful, needing her almost-constant presence in his life most of the time.
I would not say that this biography is, as one reviewer has stated, “Gossipy fluff from the distorted view-point of the politically correct dogma.” On the other hand I would call it a study, somewhat scientific even, based on the correspondences between several parties connected with the Lawrence couple as well as the writings and collected Cambridge letters of D.H. Lawrence himself. Maddox is careful not to brand Lawrence a homosexual, but she does go to some length in advancing her theory of suppressed feelings of Lawrence for persons of his own sex and the trouble it caused him in his relationships with women. At any rate, if true, it allowed for his readers a smorgasbord of sexual and sensual delight. It is somewhat surprising to me as well that after his death others mentioned his long work throughout his entire life in search for a bisexual partner. I am not sure if this means that Lawrence desired the same male lover for himself to join in the conjugal affairs with his wife Frieda. I have not read anything to make me believe this theory to be true, but it would not surprise me if it were. In my own complicated experience I have desired for my wife to be the stand-in for me as I am not homosexual but do love a certain person of the male sex so much that I have felt many times the relationship needed to be consummated. The idea of our own marriage adding another person to it is not out of the question for either of us, but we have never acted out beyond our words the desires pressing on our own troubled souls.
Many of my poems, paintings, photographs, and films employ the central theme of sharing my wife with another man (or woman) and providing for this third person the same joys of being with her in the biblical sense that I have had. This juicy and erotic idea has been a great enabler for the manner in which our art is composed. In our fiction the idea has never been compromised, but in our life never realized. It all has been the cause of both much relief and consternation. For example, after my great fall from the roof of my cabin in Michigan I was so relieved and grateful we had not gone through with any of this adulterous nonsense as I lay in my hospital bed on my back, broken and immobile. My wife at my side nursing me as no other has ever done in my past and beyond all my expectations of what she was even capable of giving in her care-taking of me. And then just two years later, returning again to more thoughts of this triangle of sex, herself initiating the idea as a way to regain her own deliverance as a full and complete human being after her own fall and the breaking of her finger joint affecting her entire hand and one whole side of her body. Her life, as she knew it, having been taken from her and now she wanting to take it back even with such extreme methods of sexually spending privately an entire night in the ravenous clutches and penetrating fluids coming through and out of my very best friend. And the more I think about it the more I am against the whole endeavor. And that is exactly where D.H. Lawrence comes full circle for me.
Throughout their long relationship, almost from the very beginning, it is widely documented that Frieda had affairs with countless other men. Whether these affairs were meant to punish Lawrence for his extreme or controlling behavior, or to teach him more about the liberating effects of sexual freedom, Frieda was most certainly the one in charge of their sex life. There was nothing Lawrence could do to stop her sexual promiscuity and Brenda Maddox dutifully reports that he skillfully and wisely used her experiences and tales of sexual freedom in the many characters present in his novels and short stories. And that is where I think the other revealing truths just might be found. Where homoerotic incidents located in the fiction can be found to create triangles and sexual tension between the partners, I might guess are the answers that I myself am looking for in my continuing study of D.H. Lawrence. It is my somewhat outlandish premise that Lawrence too was looking to share his marriage bed, but with a man he loved as much as he did himself, a man he could not himself have sex with but embrace and hold as partners in love, both sexually loving the same beautiful, free, and voluptuous woman in the wide-open presence and nakedness of each other. What a love and friendship that might be? An often ravaging sexual caress together consummated by two great friends both day and night, and always among and with the very same, but now glorified, woman. But that man never did exist for Lawrence, or for me for that matter, and it is quite possible he could not have exacted either love, even as much and as hard as he might have diligently searched and desired for them all. In the meantime, I will continue my research into D.H. Lawrence and any new ideas he might offer me. But I can tell you this, Lawrence is not one to take marital or child-rearing advice from. And his spiritual beliefs were as whacked-out as any crazy person I have ever known, and not so few I could have left the planet with, however biblical, the circumstances sweeping their cards from off the betting table.