D.H. Lawrence called them joy-hogs. Until I came across the word I hadn’t realised that the condition could be summed up so succinctly; that this societal malaise had already been perfectly described in a novel written long ago by a tuberculosis-ridden Englishman.
We like to distinguish between the traveller and the tourist. We believe in hierarchies of intent. But Lawrence knew. “People were all alike, with very little difference. They all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone. Poor mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did people mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves?”
I began reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover this summer in the hills of Kodaikanal surrounded by joy-hogs. Joy-hogs with their paper plates of biryani posing by Suicide Point. Joy-hog families puffing on pedal boats. Joy-hogs taking artisanal cheese-making classes. Joy-hogs like myself complaining about other joy-hogs, wishing for the non-joy-hog Kodai days, which is a joy-hog myth, because people have always been joy-hogs.
The joy-hog section in Lady Chatterley is a mere page, when Connie, the heroine, goes to Venice and disgusted by the abundance of tourists, has a brief rant. The rest of the book, as even those who have not read the novel will know, has to do with sex. So much sex that it was banned in the U.K. until 1960.
Reading the book I found myself sympathising with those poor post-war Edwardians. No amount of “khaki fever” could have prepared them for Lawrence’s imagination. What could they have possibly made of this man’s obsession with vitality? His veneration of the human body? His rage against the mechanical?
Don’t cry, my pretty
Lawrence was a snarler, a first-class whinger. Well before he began writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1926, he had been accused of being overly engrossed with matters of the body—a writer “with one hand always in the slime.” John Worthen, Lawrence’s biographer, notes that he struck back at the “drivel of the impotent” by writing a text to readers and critics alike, “So, darling, don’t look at the nasty book any more: don’t you then: there, there, don’t cry, my pretty.”
In Lady Chatterley , Lawrence refers to the majority of the population as “professional corpses,” whether they are “riff-raffy expensive people,” or miners with the “thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots.” Doesn’t matter. He believed there was only one class—“the moneyboy and the moneygirl,” all prostituting themselves to the bitch-goddess of Success, resulting in a bad state of the soul called “money-deadness.” His disdain only comes to rest when talking of the body and desire. It is in this messy area of flesh and blood, Lawrence seems to suggest, that we can cease being corpses.
D.H. Lawrence
What I found most modern about Lawrence’s work is the devotion he harbours for women. It’s unusual to find male writers of any epoch who believe so ardently in the idea of the female principle. And while his positions on gender and sexuality can be contradictory and do change over the course of his life, you understand that his rejection of the male world of machinery, greed and materialism implies an embrace of the opposite—something traditionally attributed to female primeval powers. Things connected to the woods and mud, like dancing naked in the rain and decorating your lover’s “love-hair” with forget-me-nots (something Connie does with her game-keeper lover, Mellors).
Some critics have accused Lawrence of being a misogynist because his heroines are frequently jobless, or they give up their occupations as soon as they fall in love. But they do not take into account that Lawrence is advising everyone give up their jobs, including men. We should all be praising the arse! Lawrence would prefer “a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.” For him, the human body was paramount.
T.S. Eliot, a fine poet, who occasionally got things wrong, said that the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover “seems to me to have been a very sick man indeed.” He complained that Lawrence’s characters did little else other than lovemaking, which they did without any refinements. And it’s true, there’s a lot of copulation going on between Lady Chatterley and her lover, but they also speak to each other while making love, and it is this language of intimacy, so seldom found in literature, that elevates it from penny romance to a work of lasting value.
You’d think that in these sex-bombarded times, reading a book written almost a century ago, no matter how sexy, would be a snooze. On the contrary, I found it filled with richness. Not just because there is unexpected humour in Lawrence’s descriptions of sex: “Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant moist little penis,” but also, because he is still radical.
Engaging with sexuality
For all our supposed unfettered sexual mores, the body seems further away than ever. We live in increasingly mechanised times. All the things Lawrence was wary of have only intensified: materialism, greed, genuflecting to the money god. To read Lawrence now is to read a man committed to the idea of sensuality. While he was writing Lady Chatterley , he apparently referred to it as a “nice and tender phallic novel.” And while he wrote a great deal about sex, his real interest lay in the idea of sexuality, something that could connect us to a wider world. Sex was performance, sexuality was engagement.
I like that Lawrence insisted on hope. That he believed in blood-nodality and magic and transference. That he railed against joy-hogs while retaining a sense of idealism. Never mind that his body gave up on him before he gave up on the world. Never mind his occasional tantrums. He is asking us to reject the mundane. To have belief in the little flame. To end a novel with the private bit of one protagonist bidding goodnight to the private bit of the other—“John Thomas says goodnight to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart”—is to affirm that fulfilment is a worthy goal. Not joy-hoggian fulfilment, but something rarer, and more mysterious.
A writer and dancer, the author’s poetry book Girls Are Coming Out Of The Woods will be out soon.
