Sex-mad DH Lawrence

His amoral wife made the jealous writer think sex was a tragedy. By Frances Wilson

- Frances Wilson

In his poem Tortoise Shout, D H Lawrence describes tortoise sex from the perspective of the male.‘Mounted and tense’, as though nailed to the cross, he ‘cleaves behind the hovel wall of the dense female’ and, with his wrinkled neck and long limbs vulnerably ‘extruded’, curves his ‘deep, secret, all-penetrating tail’ beneath her carapace ‘’til suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!’ It is the only description I know of tortoise orgasm.

Lawrence liked tortoises, but this poem is about himself and not only because he and his wife also carried their homes upon their backs (the Lawrences never stayed put for more than a few months). The Lawrentian heroes who strut through his novels, like Birkin in Women in Love or Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, are domineering sex gods but, in Tortoise Shout, the fragile party is the male of the species, smaller than the female and impaled upon her like a martyr.

Forget the ‘priest of love’ of the Ken Russell films, where Alan Bates plunges his tongue into the flesh of a fig while eyeballing Eleanor Bron: Lawrence in the sack was a beast of burden.

Fewer writers have been as misunderstood as D H Lawrence, long considered the Richard Desmond of the literary world. The Rainbow, published in 1915, was not only banned for obscenity: 1,011 copies were burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. Where, you might wonder, are the novel’s juicy bits?