GLR November-December 2024

Cyril’s description of the unsurpassed “perfect love” that he and George shared “for a moment” mirrors what Lawrence said when reminiscing with the writer Compton Mackenzie in the lat ter’s house on Capri when he was 34: “I believe the nearest I’ve ever come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about sixteen.” Lawrence’s biographers often conflate the coal miner with Alan Chambers. Brenda Maddox, in her D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage explains: “If Mackenzie mis took, for understandable reasons, the word ‘farmer’ for ‘miner,’ the loved one would have been ... Alan Chambers.” I’ve found no record of Chambers ever working in a coal mine, but Not tinghamshire had many, so it’s possible that Lawrence’s perfect love and Alan Chambers were in fact the same person. That said, I worry that merging two boyfriends into one could be a way for heterosexist biographers to explain away bisexuality as a one time sexual experiment. In the less frequently quoted passage that precedes Law rence’s revelation of his “perfect love,” Compton Mackenzie, his host on Capri, defines the standard by which Lawrence judged a love to be “perfect”: “What worried him particularly was his inability to attain consummation simultaneously with his wife, which according to him must mean that their marriage was still imperfect in spite of all they had gone through. I in sisted that such a happy coincidence was always rare, but he be came more and more depressed about what he insisted was the only evidence of a perfect union.” more plausible to say that he was homosexual with heterosex ual tendencies than the reverse. In his 1913 letter to the poet and reviewer Henry Savage, Lawrence wrote that a man “can al ways get satisfaction from a man, but it is the hardest thing to get one’s soul and body satisfied by a woman.” In the 1919 draft of his essay on Walt Whitman, he wrote: “The last perfect bal ance is between two men in whom the deepest sensual centres ... vibrate in one circuit ... as does the circuit between man and woman. ... And the port, of egress and ingress, is the fundament, as the vagina is port to the other centre.” Whether women were his main dish with a side helping of men or vice versa, it’s clear that Lawrence’s appetites flowed in more than one direction, and that he acted on both. Even biographers who concede Lawrence’s bisexuality will often cast doubt on his or any bisexual’s reports of same-sex ac tivity. My favorite examples of this are in Mark Kincaid Weekes’ monumental D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile (1996), and Frances Wilson’s recent Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence (2021). Kincaid-Weekes appends a footnote to Frieda Lawrence telling Katherine Mansfield, who was bisexual, that she too had known lesbian passion in her youth, flagging Frieda’s story as unlikely given the time that would have passed between the alleged event and its telling, or because Frieda may have just invented it to placate Mansfield, or because it could Most of Lawrence’s biographers will admit, however reluctantly, that he was at tracted to men as well as women, but they seem reluctant to use the word “bisexual.” Lawrence is often presented as a man whose essential heterosexuality is tainted with “ho mosexual tendencies” or the like. If we had to assign Lawrence to one of the cardinal points of the sexual compass, it would be

easily have been “a semi-fictionalized memory ... shaped by The Rainbow rather than the other way around.” Kincaid-Weekes does not consider that Frieda Lawrence may have remembered her own memories, understood the difference between fact and fiction, and told Mansfield the truth. Similarly, in Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence , Frances Wilson dismisses Lawrence’s memory of “perfect love” as something he only “allegedly” confided to Compton Mackenzie and calls it “the kind of gossip that people liked to spread about Lawrence.” The only other event from Lawrence’s life that Wilson dismisses as gossip is his later fling with William Henry Hocking, a neighbor of the Lawrences in Corn wall, and another farmer he helped harvest the hay. Early in her book Wilson judges that this relationship couldn’t have hap pened because, spurred by jealousy, “it was Frieda who started the rumor,” but then—shame on the editor who didn’t catch this—Wilson fails to notice a few chapters later that this is the same affair that Lawrence had with a “young Cornish farmer during the war” that is cited by Frieda to Mabel Luhan as a cause of her ill mood. When I was growing up, D. H. Lawrence belonged to het erosexuals, specifically to straight men such as my father and his generation, for whom the Internet didn’t exist, and the best porn a straight teenager could get his hands on was a paperback copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the drugstore. That left The most famous scene of man-on-man action in Lawrence’s works is undoubtedly this naked wrestling scene in Women in Love , but it should not be allowed to eclipse the sweet, sexy swim in The White Peacock , the oil-lubed massage of Aaron’s Rod , or the hands-on eldritch intimacy of The Plumed Serpent . The 1969 film adaptation of Women in Love is the main reason for the novel’s notoriety, though as faithful as the movie is to the action and mood of the original, it could not do justice to Lawrence’s language—not without earning an X rating. As Lawrence’s text describes it, Rupert Birkin “seemed to penetrate into Gerald’s more solid, more diffuse bulk”; he “interfused his body through the body of the other”; his “whole physical intel ligence interpenetrated into Gerald’s body”; and “his fine subli mated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man.” This is the Lawrence that I first met in The White Pea cock —the young man who realized early on that he was at tracted to both men and women, struggled with a severe case of internalized homophobia, and then slowly, haltingly, began to reconcile his intellect with his sexual feelings. While his death at 46 ended his struggle to resolve his identity before he could fully explore his options, in his short life D. H. Law rence was able to see his queerness from a more elevated and even a mythic perspective that would not have been possible for any of his contemporaries. Lawrence in a rarely visited backyard shed of my mind between a dried-up paint can and a stack of useless Playboys . I only knew the queer Lawrence from a videotape of the movie Women in Love , in which the great English actors Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestle in the nude in a protracted scene. The “pause” button on our VCR got a workout with the copy that I smuggled home from my teenage video store job.

Cyril and his hunky farmer crush, George, jump into a pond and end up in each other’s arms: “The sweet ness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb.”

TheG & LR

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