GLR November-December 2024

ESSAY

D. H. Lawrence’s White Peacock A NDREW W HITE

“‘F ETCH A TOWEL,’ he called, ‘and come on!’” So begins Cyril and George’s steamy swim in D. H. Lawrence’s first all-male erotic scene, which is found in his debut novel, The White Peacock . And Lawrence didn’t stop there. His fiction would go on to feature a massage in which one man rubs “every speck” of his male friend’s “lower body,” including the “abdomen, the buttocks, [and] the thighs” with oil; a four-para graph naked wrestling match in which the word “penetrate” ap pears three times; and a chthonic ritual in which one man blindfolds and binds another from head to toe with belts of black fur while feeling him all over, including in the “loins” and “se cret places” while guiding him through the invocation of an Aztec god. Briefly stated, for an ostensibly heterosexual writer, Lawrence sure found a lot of ways to introduce male nudity and intimate male-to-male contact into his fiction! Were he alive today and facilitating a wilderness retreat for men, I’d be the first to “fetch a towel and come on.” The narrator of The White Peacock is the first of Lawrence’s fictionalized self-portraits. Cyril Beardsall is an artist, and his body recalls a description that Lawrence wrote of himself in a letter when he was 23: “I am thin ... my skin is very white and unblemished; soft.” In the eighth chapter of The White Peacock , Cyril and his hunky farmer crush, George, jump into a pond with George’s dog, chase each other, laugh, and end up in each other’s arms: “The sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb.” Men from different social classes going skinny-dipping is one of many parallels between E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), and The White Pea cock (1911). (Fans of the former may have wondered how the bourgeois Lucy and her railway clerk swain George would have fared had they not crossed social barriers to marry. TheWhite Peacock provides an answer. Read it and weep.) That Cyril enjoys naked snuggling with a man comes as no surprise. The only kisses he receives from women are “honor ably” transacted in “a most correct manner” under mistletoe at a Christmas dance. On the other hand, the fine physiques of other male characters are of great interest, and are promptly com mented upon. Cyril is queer-coded in other ways, obligingly lis tening to Wagner and collecting Aubrey Beardsley prints. As they climb back on land, Cyril and George compare and joke about each other’s bodies, and Cyril says: “I had to give in, and bow to him, and he took on an indulgent, gentle manner. ... [H]e knew how I admired the noble, white fruitfulness of his form.” While George “polished his arm, holding it out straight and Andrew White, based in Philadelphia, works in libraries, museums, and sometimes at the zoo. Now and then he publishes a short story.

solid” and “rubbed his hair into curls,” Cyril watches “the deep muscles of his shoulders” and in his state of distraction forgets to dry himself off. So George takes over, “as if I were ... a woman he loved and did not fear. … [T]o get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him. [O]ur love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman.” In the same 1908 letter in which Lawrence described his own physique and complexion, he also wrote: “The man I have been working with in the hay is the original of my George. ... I am very fond of my friend, and he of me. Sometimes, often, he is as gentle as a woman towards me.” This man was Alan Chambers, the brother of Jessie Chambers—the woman who worked so hard to launch Lawrence’s career as a writer, and one of the first women whose kisses moved Lawrence’s heart and “sex fire.”

November–December 2024

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