Love In A Dictatorship - The Possessive Excitement Of Dangerous Places

Phil Archer had spent what he considered his halcyon years in Haiti under the Duvaliers, a time of peace and quiet; but he would have felt no sense of intimacy without the voodoo drums, the scent of jasmine growing in the gardens of the estates above the hotel, or without the rancid smell of the port that drifted up from the city in the early morning when the direction of the breeze changed.  

He danced in Carrefour, spent weekends in cabanas on the beaches of Les Cayes and Macaya, and drove up north to Gonaives and Cap Haitien; but his love affair would never have happened if he and his lover had met across the mountains in the Dominican Republic. Haiti was their go-between, their matrix, their enabler.

They never talked about Haiti, Duvalier, the Tontons, or voodoo.  They talked only about other things, things which were varied but were all told within the context of Haiti. Their home towns of New Brighton and Fort George would always  be remembered as not Haiti. Not hot, tropical, gingerbread, threatening, ominous, passionate, and violent.

It was not surprising that the Haitian love affair continued only as long as the lovers met in Haiti. Neither one ever suggested that they meet in Boston, New York, or Miami; and when her summer internships were over and his last contract delivered, they knew that their affair was over.  Their friendship was uniquely, irrevocably Haitian.

Papa Doc Duvalier and his son were the enablers of the affair.  They had assured that Haiti remain an idyll, an irresistible mix of voodoo, Africa, and La France d’Outre-Mer. The Tonton Macoute, henchmen of the Duvaliers, secret police more brutal and threatening than Sevak or Stasi ever were, maintained order, enforced loyalty, and kept the island a secure redoubt of Duvalierism.  

Phil and his lover went everywhere without a second thought – dancing in Carrefour, dining at the best restaurants in Petionville and Kenscoff, spending weekends in the cabanas of Cormier Plage and Port-Salut. 

The anger, resentment, and civil violence which were to erupt after the Duvaliers were gone were unseen and unspoken.  There were only pleasures, the assumption of idyll, the complete exercise of romance.  For the foreigners who who stayed at the Olaffson, who dined at Cote Cour, Cote Jardin, who ate lambi creole and bouillabaisse by the port, and who slept with their verandah windows open, Haiti was an idyll.

After the Duvaliers Haiti became a violent, dysfunctional, ungoverned and ungovernable place to be avoided.  Its poverty was miasmic, its civil disobedience unruly and dangerous, its prospects nil.  The idyll of the Duvaliers was gone forever.

Phil's story was not unusual nor uncommon - inveterate foreign travelers know that there is a both a suspension of moral and ethical codes when one loves abroad, especially in places like Haiti, Palestine, or the Congo, places of disorder, disassembly, and chaos.  

Phil knew this first hand, for the gunfire in the streets of Ouagadougou, far from dampening sexual interest, increased it.  He could not retrieve anything of what was his stable, sedate, and very prosaic life in Chapel Hill when Fatima Diallo, a Fulani refugee from Eastern Congo, excited as he by the thump of mortars and the crack of assault rifles echoing below, came in successive waves of release, familiarity, and peculiar security. 

'We need to go', he said, but she was insistent. She had been born in violence, lived through it, escaped it, and in some perverse way longed for it again.  Gunfire, threat, danger - those were her enabling variables that made her and from which she not only could not escape but were now an indispensable part of herself.

When the rebels returned to their barracks and calm returned to the capital, they sat outside in the garden of the hotel Independence and drank Belgian beer while the bats fidgeted and assembled in the trees above, waiting their turn for the swarms of mosquitos in the air after dusk. 

Love-making had receded along with the militants. There was no context anymore.  They were both just interlopers who happened upon each other, drawn by the allure of chaotic violence, but now, facing the prospect of predictability, had nothing to say. 

Perhaps this feeling was not unlike that of Graham Greene who wrote about affairs in the tropics, and for years dallied with suicide as an anodyne to boredom.  As a young man he had played Russian roulette, and in later years travelled in the most pestilential, dangerous, and frightful places in Africa. 

Mindful and almost desirous of the horrific fate of Mungo Park, British explorer of the late 18th century, who had been taken, sold, bought, and bartered as a slave for most of his journey up the Niger River, Greene traveled unconcerned, awaiting his final encounter. 

For Phil travel in unacceptable places which put him in harm's way and the easy accompaniment of complaisant lovers was the same heady mix that Greene had always sought.  Return to anything else was incomprehensible; so he accepted assignments that few wanted - to the upper reaches of the Congo River, to the oil delta of Equatorial Guinea and the ISIS-infested Sahelian provinces of Mali.  

He became a sexual prowler.  The threat of violence was a bother without someone to share it with and there was always a Fatima in the wings. 

Which is why his two marriages failed, for each time he returned from God-forsaken places, he was bored, diffident, spare, and indifferent.  What woman would put up with that?  He took his medicine, but was never cured.  Once love, threat, and violence had been injected, there was no refusal.  He was addicted, unable to return home, always in need; and easily satisfying it with trips to the African bush, denial was not an option. 

There is something good about dictators after all, however personal.  If it hadn't been for the Duvaliers, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Paul Kagame and their like, Phil would never have had Fatima and the indissoluble sexual events with her.  

Theroux and Greene knew this well, and were the prophets of this amoral transition. Phil did not take inspiration from them, but simply recognized them as brothers.  Few appreciate this, but he was a very lucky man. 

The Man With A Dog's Jaw - An Answer To The Existential Question, 'Who Am I?'

It was well known that Mr. Stillwell, the Headmaster at the Lefferts School had a dog’s jaw.  He had his own jaw shot off in the war, and the field medical unit had the presence of mind and the skill to sacrifice Jeff, Charlie Company’s mascot and mine sniffer German Shepherd, and do quick reconstructive surgery. He was immediately evacuated to King’s Hospital, Margate, where he would be further operated on. 

The surgeons, however, were surprised to see that Jeff’s jaw had knit almost perfectly.  Apparently Stillwell’s musculature, tendons, and ligaments had miraculously survived the Nazi mortar round.  The shard of hot steel had shattered his lower jaw completely, but somehow he was left with a lot of wet, dangling, but still useful flesh.  The surgeons decided to leave well enough alone.

Headmaster Stillwell made his rounds about campus, greeted the students as they filed into chapel, met their parents, and cheered on the football team on against Choate, while all anyone could think of was his dog’s jaw.

Twenty-five years later, the school produced a special edition of the Alumni Magazine featuring and honoring Harvey Stillwell for his long and dedicated service.  Every student, by then in their 40s, all quickly turned to the article to see if there was anything at all that would give away his secrets and confirm or dispel the rumors that had persisted.

“Beginnings” was the title of the first chapter of the long article on the Headmaster’s life, accompanied by a formal family photo of him and his five brothers taken in Brent Hollow, Kentucky.  Lo and behold, all six boys had dog-looking jaws – narrow, under-slung, and weak-looking. So either Harvey simply inherited that simpleton look from his father who in the picture smiled a big toothless smile, or the story of the German mortar and the jaw of Jeff, the German Shepherd was true.

Few of us have looked in the mirror and not wished that our underslung jaws were more prominent, the nose was less so, the eyes further apart or closer together, or the mouth finer and less pronounced.  Plastic surgery, that existential game changer, has always been an option, but most of us suspend disbelief, decide that our face has character, strength, or even virtue, and go till the end of days as homely and crudely spun as the day we were born. 

One Lefferts alumnus, Saugatuck (Sandy) Flint, looked in the mirror like the rest of us and was discouraged at what he saw, but unlike us who took it in stride and accepted God's strange Creation, he wondered where that stubby nose, prognathous jaw, simian eyes, and prominent ears came from.  Fixated on the old photo of the Headmaster's Kentucky family, and obsessed with deconstructing his image in the mirror, he began an exhaustive search through family archives to find the genetic culprits responsible for his sadly misshapen face. 

Not that it mattered in the least - what possible good could come from finally knowing that Great Granduncle Hiram had the same closely-set eyes, or that even farther back distant relative Isaiah had his noticeable ears? 

Yet there was something important about deciphering oneself, he thought, something indeed existential, and the more he pored through old family photographs and letters written by desperate husbands and wives recalling the features of loved ones, the more he wondered where his more salient, representative, fundamental bits came from - his timidity when it came to mountains but not to girls; his quick to anger over nothing, but his absolute calm and resoluteness when the stock markets crashed or during an earthquake. 

Perhaps most importantly, would some of the profound belief from ancestor Phelps Harrington, Puritan pastor of Salem, prosecutor, and man of unquestionably divine inspiration, have come down to him?  As it was, he was a religious diffident whose spiritual sentiments clicked at Christmas and Easter but went quiet for the rest of the year.  

 

However, what if there were something to the notion of a religious gene?  After all, all human societies had worshipped one thing or another since monkeys came down from the trees and even if his family genes had been crossed and double-crossed over the infinite generational rewiring of DNA resulting in his own desuetude, they might be recoverable. 

Why had nature so complicated life by creating every individual so differently?  Darwinism went only so far to explain such diversity.  The gene pool needed refreshing to survive, but with so many variations?  In such cacophony, such irrelevant distinctions, family lineage was the only validating aspect of one's legacy.  The 'me' that looked back in the mirror if deciphered logically and traced back to the beginning of one's time, would make more sense that an image made up of nothing but random bits. 

One of Sandy's roommates at Yale had had a similar interest in genetic makeup.  Because of his long commitment to issues of civil rights and social justice, he wanted to be sure that there were no slave-owning plantation grandees in his past. If it were found that he had some black blood (think Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, he reminded us), his credentials would be that much more respectable. 

Yet to Sandy this missed the point, a historical chimera only with no real destiny or existential import.  He was after a more essential genetic legacy, the answer to 'Who am I?'

William Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about such legacy.  Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen created a mixed race family whose members were obsessed with their parentage, their legitimacy, and their place in the world; and such investigation unearthed truths better left buried.  Absalom, Absalom is a book about legacy, family, and origins. 

 

Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is about the permanent influence of the past.  The painting of the Pyncheon patriarch hanging on the wall was a reminder to his descendant, Hepzibah, of his corrupt but inescapable legacy.  The book is a story about the ineluctable and insistent nature of family history. 

Yale used to be a university that understood this well, and for over two centuries it served the families of the New England elite.  Legacy admissions were simply an acknowledgement of this sense of tradition and respect for a republican ethos. The offspring of the men who had created America and led it to prosperity and international prominence would never wavered in their sense of responsibility, noblesse oblige, and patriotic duty.  While the university might have selected for such traits among a wider pool, it chose to rely on genetic legacy.

 

Sandy's search of course led nowhere.  There were so many interferences in what he thought was a direct lineage - suggested but unknown mistresses, dalliances across every possible social line, marriages far afield from the family's patrician base - that figuring out what was what let alone who he was, was impossible. 

Besides, the whole issue had become moot as America had become more than ever a potpourri - lines of caste, class, and family were things of the past.  The gene pool had become so indifferently varied and randomly sorted that any genetic search would lead only through a dense, pathless forest. 

The face in the mirror that looked back at Sandy Flint as an old man bore little resemblance to that which appeared to him as a young one - family traits were now all but indistinguishable - so it was not surprising that he wondered what all the fuss had been about.  A spark of that indeterminate religion clicked again after so long - God's unknowable plan etc. etc. - but age has a way of calming the waters, so he went back to his books, his garden, and his wife of many years. 

The Myth Of ADHD - How 'Inclusivity' Denies The Bell Curve Of Intelligence

Digby Swinton was a good boy, obedient, dutiful, pleasant and kind although he had trouble from an early age learning how the world worked.  His inability to add, subtract, and make logical conclusions was just an indicator of his lack of more serious cognitive skills and his perceptual limitations. 

His parents were of course concerned that their pride and joy needed remedial help in every academic subject, that he puzzled over the simplest Legos, stumbled over the most basic readers, and at the age when most children were drawing complete representations of family, home, and environment, Digby was still drawing stick figures. 

When finally his school, unable to push him up the ladder any farther but were reluctant to keep him back (it was unconscionable to place a boy in sixth grade when he was barely doing third grade work), suggested to his parents that he needed professional help, Mr. and Mrs. Swinton abandoned the fiction that their child was just as bright as any other, just ill-adjusted to the new, highly competitive environment of today, and agreed.  

"He has ADHD", said Marfa Potter, a progressive activist and educational reformer, about the Swinton boy. Of course to the more objective observer unaffected by the wave of progressive 'inclusivity' making the rounds, he had nothing of the kind.  

To most ADHD had become a convenient cover for congenital slowness and indifferent parenting, and medication was an equally convenient and advantageous out for those who could not admit that they had produced a dummy.   

"We must do something for these children", said Mrs. Potter, "they try so hard".  

A generation or two ago, before the currency of dyslexia, ADHD, and Parker-Bing Syndrome, the boy would simply have been dumb - not developmentally challenged, but playing with fewer cards in the deck. 

  

In those days having trouble with math or reading was a given for many children.  No matter how teachers might have worked patiently with the likes of the Swinton boy, he would still be stumbling along sounding out his letters, guh-guh-guh, buh-buh-buh like a kindergartener, or wracking his brain to add two and two. That's the way it was, and the teacher would have moved on to more promising students. 

"Poor Digby Swinton", Marfa Potter went on, " he reads everything backwards, and God only knows what his brain makes of it", but this was the modern age and Digby was given all the latitude in the world to try to turn the sentences around.  Of course he finally figured out that English was not Arabic but remained befuddled by anything more than Dick and Jane or the McGuffey Reader.   

His teachers, especially those recently graduated from the School for Remedial Enterprise, a post-graduate institution designed to deal with the learning impaired, never looked beyond their noses.  

Marfa Potter like others in this progressive enclave of Northwest Washington, were convinced of environmental determinism.  The 'my child cannot possibly be dumb' syndrome of inclusivity.  To admit that Digby’s wiring had gotten crossed and his DNA spliced the wrong way was unconscionable.  The teaching paradigm was at fault, and the new crop of teachers trained at the School for Remedial Enterprise would turn things around.  Even Digby would soon be able to perform like his peers.

   

According to Mrs. Potter and her friends, there seemed to be no normal children in the neighborhood.  The bell curve did not seem to apply there, with all boys and girls grouped at one asymptote.  This one had ADHD, that one dyslexia, this one with Parker-Bing.  Then there were those who must have been neglected or even abused, left dangling, cognitively, emotionally abandoned, shuttled from pillar to post by two-income parents for whom childcare was donkey work.  These children needed care and professional attention. 

 

Learning disability has now become part of 'inclusivity', victimhood, and environmental abuse.  It was not, as in the old days, a stigma.  The idea was a statement against hyper-individualistic conservatism which only values the traditionally smart, able, and quick-witted.  These youngsters jumping over the bar and the herd on their way to Sidwell Friends and Harvard were bred not for success but dominion. 'The rich kids' shamelessly wanted nothing to do with the likes of Digby Swinton. 

Move a few blocks out of the Swintons’ progressive neighborhood into one of Washington's wealthiest and most conservative, and you hear no whining and whingeing about learning disabilities.  There are simply smart children and dumb ones, and everyone else is on some part of the bell curve. 

In the Potter-Swinton neighborhood everything was a psycho-social problem - children who ignored walk-don't walk signs were discipline-impaired; those who spoke scrabbled English were growing up in culturally positive families and needed to share their linguistic patterns with other rather than be corrected. 

It was a free-for-all, and Mrs. Swinton could simply not get over the fact that her son was 'otherly advantaged'  and would never be la creme de la creme of anything.  The cover was kept up well into the boy's late adolescence, and whenever she had a chance she touted his mastery of what just about everyone else took as a matter of rote.

"If only that Potter woman would shut up", said a member of the wealthy side of the tracks who heard her banging away about dyslexia and ADHD every time he stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.  She was loud, incessant, and bloody everywhere, he complained; but then again, it was but a hop, skip, and a jump back into his corner of Washington. 

The new American Secretary of Health and Human services, Robert F Kennedy, Jr., nephew of former President John Kennedy, has asked, 'Where was ADHD in my uncle's day?', a rhetorical question of course, because there was no such thing, although the bell curve was just as applicable then as now.  In those days school classes were divided by ability - the smart students were put in the top level, the most rigorous and demanding one, and the slower ones placed lower.  No one complained, each student felt accomplished and valued, and no one was ever consigned to a group.  If you showed higher level mastery of math or reading, you were moved up. 

The whole idea of social stigma, identity, and inclusiveness is only a latter day affair; but everyone is happy.  The pharmaceutical companies are delighted at the increased billions of dollars in revenue from Ritalin and its clones; doctors are happy they can serve their patients with a sure-fire treatment; teachers have a reprieve from having to bang away at impossibly slow learners, and parents suffering from Not My Child fantasies have a nice, comfortable explanation. 

Kennedy hopes to reverse the trend, eliminate the medicalization of dumbness, and get back to opportunity.  Push children to the limits of their intelligence, whatever that might be, and be satisfied with the bell curve.  Not everyone is equal. 

Progressives, of course, shout 'Racism' and insist that everyone is equal and only environmental pressures create a temporary inequality; but their objections, now familiar, old tired, and shopworn fall on deaf ears.  The country wants sense and sensibility to return.  Along with DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) ADHD and all other fantastical coverups of reality will go. 

It's The Emperor's New Clothes all over again.  Once Kennedy called out progressives for their idealism and Utopian fantasy, suddenly everyone recognized the truth they had always known but had been too intimidated to admit. 

The Black Widow Spider– D.H. Lawrence And A Devouring Woman Of Great Beauty

Brent Lively had known since the beginning that his marriage to the daughter of an Iowa farmer, successful investor in iron works and copper, would never amount to much.  She was the classic calm, practical reasonable anodyne to the tempestuous relationship with his former lover, a woman who had eaten him to an inch of his life.  

An inch was enough to survive, and although his virility was almost indistinguishable from what it was before her, so neutered had he been, he was still alive.  His sexual fires had been banked, his sexual soul temporarily kept under wraps, both waiting for an opportunity to reignite and emerge.

Lacey had devoured him out of lust, ambition, and Lawrentian purpose.  She was woman who considered orgasm her birthright, the defining element of womanhood, the only event worth noting in an otherwise humdrum evolution; and the fact that Brent had been the first lover of any promise – a confident, strong, and equally sexually purposeful, desirous Mellors to her Lady Chatterley – was incidental.  

She cared little who the gatekeeper to her sexuality was, only that he perform as was expected. Her great beauty – classic, imperious, and perfect was both a source of sexual power and a foil to her ultimate interests.  Physical beauty distorted the sexual calculus – too many incompetent men were drawn to her; and too many competent men were distracted by it.

Her previous lovers had been promising but inept, desirous enough, male enough, but without the will to make love as existential as Lawrence saw it, central to everything, incidental to nothing. Maleness and femaleness, Lawrence thought, were absolute, clearly defined, and primal, and true sex was the way for men and women to realize, appreciate, accept, and fulfill their sexuality.  

The phallus might be the initiating instrument of sexual union, but a woman’s sexual energies stimulated and released by it were no less valid and important to physical and spiritual consummation.

Two rivers of blood are man and wife, two distinct eternal streams that have the power of touching and communing and so renewing, making new one another, without any breaking of the connecting link between the two rivers, that establishes the two forever.  And this, this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a lifetime in twoness is the highest achievement of time or eternity.  From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things, all true creations of humanity. And all we know of the will of God is that he wishes this, this oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime, this oneness within the great dual blood-stream of humanity (Lady Chatterley’s Lover)

Brent had had the sexual confidence, the purposefulness, and the desire to mate with Lacy; but he teetered on the edge, balked at her omnivorous sexual appetite, pulled away before he was consumed, unsatisfied, wanting more, but too fearful to give up and give in.

Lacey, like Lady Chatterley reviewed her options.  Mellors was as sexually sophisticated as Lady Chatterley and as aware of the sexual premium of mutual ‘finality’ but too diffident, too concerned with social class and propriety – like Miss Julie’s valet who needed to do the right thing and was always chattel to it – and Brent was no different.  A likely candidate, a good choice, but ultimately too timid and withdrawn to perform.

Which is why he escaped Lacey and retired to the arms of a woman who had no such designs, no such hunger, and no such sexual demands.  Life with her, while ordinary, would never be feral or dangerous; and sex while never existential and always predictable, would always be procreative, physical and uncomplicated.  Neither she nor sex would change anything. 

Of course Brent quickly tired of the routine and longed for Lacey, although she was long dead and buried in an Amboy cemetery, visible from the Garden State Parkway, unceremoniously laid to rest with only a few mourners by the graveside and none of her lovers.  His failure with Lacey, his non-compliance with her non-negotiable sexual demands, and his being left on the curb did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm and his awkward sexuality.  Lacey would always be his Marilyn Monroe – a sexual icon, unattainable but more desirous because of it.

His current wife was temperate, forgiving, longsuffering, and loving; and no matter how often or how far Brent strayed, she took him back; and he always came back, never contrite but exhausted.  She was always a safe haven.  Burton, Mungo Park, and Speke all had homes to which to return; or at least the dream of having one.  For Brent, he could never have had his own adventures without the guarantee of safe return and safe haven. 

Why, one might ask, would a man like Brent Lively seek another Black Widow, a woman whose sexuality was impossible to satisfy and whose demands were intimidating and threatening?  Yet most men are like Mellors and see sex as metaphysical as Lawrence did.  While sex might be incidental and forgettable, without significance, a burnishing of ego at best, and a drunken and clumsy event at worst, the idea of sexual balance - an expression of complementary wills -  an ineradicable  piece of memory, and a defining experience was irresistible.

From this perspective Brent’s affairs were desultory and predictable.  There were sexually hungry women but whose voracity came from some petty psychological and all too familiar twist – an indifferent father, a demanding mother, a bad marriage, an overactive ego, or a distorted self-image – and never from the Nietzschean lust described by Lawrence. 

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits.

As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

Sex without something more than simple physical satisfaction or the temporary resolution of old, minor sexual issues was never worth it.  There had to be something more.  Connie found it in Mellors, a sexual twin, an ontological partner, but few other women or men ever do.  Lacey was too devouring, too insistent on reaching a transcendental orgasm, to emasculating to find complementarity.  Brent was too timid, and although sexually aware, was reluctant to be devoured and consummated.

For Lawrence sexual complementarity was far from today’s sense of mutual respect, patience, and carefully-balanced parity.  It was the complementarity of wills – one dominant, the other submissive, regardless of gender.  Women in Love, Lawrence’s long, often preachy, and windy book about the sexual dynamics between the partners of two couples, gets at this idea of will.  

Each of the characters struggles to come to grips with their sexual will or lack of it; and most are conflicted between desires of submission and desires of dominance.  They challenge all the social conventions,  parental authority and patriarchy, feminine and masculine expectations to try to achieve sexual independence and identity.  They stumble and get so caught up in their intellectual pretensions to follow their natural instincts. 

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book published after Women in Love and Lawrence’s last, he creates in Connie a woman without such pretentions.  Connie is as desirous as Gudrun and Ursula and as motivated, but far more mature and honest.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.

And a woman had to yield; but a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.

 

Mellors, while sharing sexual experience with Connie, follows her.  The women in Lawrence’s novels are always sexual leaders.  They are the ones with will, determination, and purpose; and the men in their lives rarely match up.  From Margaret, Paul’s mother in the autobiographical Sons and Lovers to Connie Chatterley, it is the women who have an insight into the limitless potential and power of sex. 

While Mellors and Brent may have sensed the importance of mating with powerful women, they were not always up to it.  Brent was nearly devoured and Mellors lost his way.  Strindberg’s Miss Julie was another sexually powerful, determined woman who used Jean, her valet for her own sexual ends; but both were too confined by society, culture, and bourgeois expectations to fulfil them. Ibsen’s women succeeded in realizing their power, but – like Lacey – destroyed the men they sought to manipulate.

In Women in Love after Birkin and Ursula have finally made love, Birkin expresses Lawrence’s central idea:

He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity. It was very difficult to speak; it was so perfect to sit in this pure living silence, subtle, full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force, upheld immemorially in timeless force…

  

Yet Birkin like Gerald cannot retain the focus, and have mated with imperfectly sexual women.  Neither Ursula nor Gudrun have achieved the sexual maturity of Connie Chatterley and therefore are distracting.  Although Birkin has an intimation of the power of sex, without the clear singularity of purpose of his lover, his intentions are diverted.

Lawrence’s idea of complete sexual parity, a complementarity of sexual wills, and the epiphanic nature of a perfect sexual union, is Platonic at best and romantic at worst.  Yet Brent like most men understood it well. Being nearly devoured by Lacey was only the beginning of his sexual maturity; and he had the resolve to keep looking.

Most men keep looking well beyond their ability to attract and keep a mate.  God’s greatest irony was to create men with a limited sexual life but condemned to an obsessive perennial fascination and desire for women.  A sexual Sisyphus, doomed to desire and flogged daily for it, almost reaching their sexual ideal, but turned back near the top.

Brent, like most men, returned to his wife and their predictable, comfortable older years.  At least he had tried, although that was cold comfort since he never stopped looking for another Lacey, albeit from his armchair.