Althouse: "If I live to be 100, I’m never going to be a fan of the flowers-in-the-pubic-hair episode."

April 18, 2014

"If I live to be 100, I’m never going to be a fan of the flowers-in-the-pubic-hair episode."

"But Lawrence’s attempts at describing the transcendent possibilities of 'warmhearted' sex no longer seemed quite so ludicrous. Next to the 'yuk' I had scribbled as a 20-year-old, there now stands a new note: 'Not so bad after all.'"

12 comments:

Ann Althouse said...: The referenced Chapter 15 can be read here. Excerpt:

Connie was half listening, and threading in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a little icy.

`You've got four kinds of hair,' she said to him. `On your chest it's nearly black, and your hair isn't dark on your head: but your moustache is hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little brush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It's the loveliest of all!'

He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on his groin.

`Ay! That's where to put forget-me-nots, in the man-hair, or the maiden-hair. But don't you care about the future?'

She looked up at him.

`Oh, I do, terribly!' she said.

`Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel the Colonies aren't far enough. The moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough away to get away. But when I get a turn, I forget it all again. Though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can, I'd better hold my peace, an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one to live, which I rather doubt.'; 4/18/14, 1:08 PM
Anonymous said...: My freshman year response to it was that the author was a creeper. I got a "condescending dirty old man who pretentiously intellectualizes to hide his creepiness and sucker the girl" vibe, but I don't really remember any of the plot. Nor do I have any memory how old the characters were - 30-something would have qualified as super old to me - just that I disliked one of the guys and blamed the mind of DH Lawrence.

My roommate, who was of a rather classical romantic turn of mind, loved it. She was romantic in a way that would have fit a previous generation: white girl crush on Sarah Vaughan, dreams of Paris, Peace Studies, etc.

I have no idea how I'd feel about it now, but it's too long a slog to find out. (I will now mosey over to the Gabriel García Marquez thread since I loved his stuff immediately.); 4/18/14, 2:14 PM
richard mcenroe said...: I'm sorry, but flowers in the pubic hair? SOMEONE needs a shower.; 4/18/14, 3:09 PM
gadfly said...: If I live to be 100 . . .; 4/18/14, 4:44 PM
rhhardin said...: Kenneth Burke describes Milking the Cow, a game involving daisies, looked back on fondly by an old man.; 4/18/14, 5:03 PM
David said...: "But when I get a turn, I forget it all again."

There you go. The meaning of life.; 4/18/14, 5:10 PM
Sam L. said...: Yuk.; 4/18/14, 7:55 PM
Anonymous said...: Well that's an episode that at least 85% to 90% of women could never do today.
God damn it.

Peter; 4/18/14, 9:46 PM
William said...: When I was a kid bukkake did not exist. In those porn starved years, you had to turn to crap like this and --God help us-- Molly Bloom's soliloquy for porn. But I suppose we should be grateful for pioneers like him. If D.H. Lawrence had not led the way, we would live in a world without bukkake.......He also got the industrial epoch wrong. The industrial prols lived in ghastly conditions, but they still lived better than agricultural workers. Those workers lived at subsistence level and frequently starved during crop failures. Not much dancing around the May Pole. It seems that nearly all the major writers of the world failed to notice the quantum jump mankind made during this epoch.; 4/18/14, 9:58 PM
jr565 said...: Rereading Howl made me realize how bad Allan Ginsburg is as a writer.; 4/19/14, 10:32 AM
jr565 said...: "When I was a kid bukkake did not exist. In those porn starved years, you had to turn to crap like this and --God help us"
WHen asked to define porn Chief Justice Potter Stewart said "I Know it When I see it".
I think if you see bukkake in the picture, it's definitionally porn.; 4/19/14, 10:36 AM
jr565 said...: If you're going to san francisco "If be sure to wear some flowers in your pubic hair"; 4/19/14, 10:40 AM