Glimpses of puritanical streak

WHAT would DH Lawrence think of those extremely public conveniences, designed for nighttime revellers - the indiscreet street urinals - which pop-up, and disappear, on London pavements and elsewhere?

Our enlightened author could be shockingly puritanical. When writer friend, Catherine Carswell, visited the Lawrence’s at their Cornish cottage in 1916 Lawrence felt it indecent she enter the living room wearing her attractive nightie. “It would indeed be easy to call him prudish,” Catherine reflected.

Lawrence wrote a short verse about those who let bullies have their way, and suffer slight incontinence, called Willie Wet-leg!

But his story, The Thorn in the Flesh, is more sympathetic to the effects of brutality on a sensitive individual. Young soldier, Bachmann, has no head for heights, yet during drill must scale steep fortifications, surrounded by a moat, on a flimsy long ladder.

A burly sergeant barks out commands. Bachmann’s “bowels turned to water”. Others perform the task “lightly”. No-one is aware of his “condition”. He’s at “fusion point” before reaching the top, and must find relief. There comes “into his consciousness a small foreign sensation.” “His water had run down his leg.” Clinging on “in depths of shame”, he’s hauled over the edge of the earthworks, an “enraged sergeant” screaming in his face. Bachmann reacts, fetching the officer such a blow he reels “backwards over the ramparts, his hands clutching the air.” There’s “silence, then a crash of water.”

In a self-deprecating comic verse, The Little Wowser, Lawrence says that all our trouble is due to “John Thomas by name”, because “for every bloomin’, mortal thing that little blighter’s to blame”, concluding “of all the little brutes as ever was invented that little cod’s the holy worst. I’ve chucked him, I’ve repented.”

This, from the man who penned that hymn to “phallic tenderness”, Lady Chatterley’s Lover!

100 years ago, 2nd Jan 1920, sees Lawrence asking agent Pinker how things stand with The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers. Wishing Thomas Seltzer “all good luck to you” for “the New Year”.

He’s “left off Aaron’s Rod and begun Lucky Noon”, and “if the infernal gods” allow “shall finish it this month.” It gives him “wicked joy”, meaning the world may “detest it”. It’s “unique”, which he knows “from a publisher’s point of view” is “a misfortune.” Mimosa in blossom, “sun on the sea”, but he’s “tired of Taormina” and too many foreigners “peering with mean noses.” So plans “a little dash to Sardinia” and would like a “few dollars” if it “suits” Seltzer, signing off “All good wishes for 1921.”