D.H. Lawrence’s Sexual Epiphany Played Out Today– Predictable, Boring Episodes Of A Daytime TV Series

D.H. Lawrence had a very particular if not unique way at looking at sex.  Far from prescribed procreative union of man and wife, nor the expression of love and belonging, nor passionate adulterous, hopeful affairs, nor the refuge from an unconcerned, dispassionate world; sexual union had epiphanic possibilities.  If a man and a woman could come to sexual consummation in a state of perfect sexual balance – male and female impulses and desires for submission or domination, love or hate in perfect equilibrium after a struggle of wills – it would not only be personally satisfying fulfilling, but would represent existential hope.  Both the corrosive and demeaning effects of modern industrialization and the equally disabling influences of sexual primitivism would be dismissed or superseded.  The centrality of sexual expression was not only the core of male-female relationships but a model for post-antagonistic, equal and balanced human relations.



Of course no one who reads Lawrence can take him entirely at his word. At worst he is prolix, repetitive, and boringly insistent.  ‘Enough already’, cry even the most sympathetic critics.

Yet Lawrence was on to something. No matter how much one can see a more balanced, tolerant, and permissive approach to sex and sexuality, the war between the sexes continues unabated with nary a sign of Lawrence’s hoped-for epiphany. No matter where one figures on the sexual spectrum, the struggle is one of wills rather than gender.  Lawrence, despite his insistent focus on the essentiality of heterosexual relationships – no different from the Tao, the concept of ying and yang, Tantrism and Shaktism – was tolerant of alternative versions of sexuality.  Ursula and Ingrid in The Rainbow had a lesbian relationship; and the friendship between Gerald and Birkin in Women in Love while never explicitly sexual, was far more than simple male friendship.



His point was that gender specificity – or lack thereof – made no difference to the essential nature, common to all, of sexual dynamics.  Sex will always determine winners and loser in struggles  of will, regardless of roles.  Gay men will fight their way to sexual equilibrium with just as much investment and just as much pain as their straight colleagues.

Lawrence is intriguing and compelling because of his insistent focus on the expression of sexual will – not as a boring replay of marital discord, but as essential and necessary for emotional, psychological, and spiritual evolution.  Paul Morel, the main character in Sons and Lovers battles his dependency on his mother, hatred for his father, and sexual ambivalence with women because he is sexually naïve, and immature.  He thinks only in traditional terms.  He wants a saint-whore as a partner, the perfect amalgamation of artistic sensitivity, rectitude, and sexual desire.  He cannot appreciate sexual nuance nor the inevitable struggle of sexual will.  He is dismissed by both Miriam who grows impatient with his dithering and Clara, profoundly sexual, who sees him as far less of a man than her abusive husband.

Tom Brangwen is as befuddled by women, sexual enterprise, and the meaning of coupling.  He has no clue about women, wants them to love him and support him, but hates them because of their power.  Will Brangwen is equally perplexed and finds meaning in his relationship with Anna only in the bedroom.  He sense the need for something more, but shares Paul Morel’s and Tom Brangwen’s immaturity and naivete.  Skrebensky cannot abide Ursula’s demanding independence and sexual will, finds his traditional patrician sense of dominance disturbed and waning when he is with her, and ends up more disappointed and alone than ever.

Edward Albee understood sexual dynamics as well if not better than Lawrence.  His Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is the seminal piece on sexual battle, resolution, and epiphany.  At the end of three acts of brutality, meanness, and cruelty George and Martha find themselves flayed not to the bone but to the marrow.  All illusions, all ideals, all preconceptions about dominance and submission, union and independence have been stripped.  They are Lear’s bare, forked animals.  They can only promise each other a better, more informed, more resolute future; but few playgoers agree.  They have done all the right things – as Lawrence’s characters do – but still have not faced who they are and what they must become.



Ibsen, Strindberg, and O’Neill, let alone Shakespeare, understood the fundamental, innate nature of sexual will.  Nothing other than the struggle for sexual supremacy was relevant or meaningful.  Hedda Gabler is a pure Nietzschean figure, but she learned nothing, advanced not at all, and was happy only in her exercise of will.  The women of The Master Builder and Rosmersholm were equally determined and defiant.  Laura (The Father) was a manipulative, dominant, amoral character who knew how to humiliate and destroy her husband to attain her own ends.

There seems today to be nothing of the sort.  There are no existential battles of male and female sexual wills, but victory by attrition.  A pound of flesh here, a minor adultery there, a string of allegations, suspicions, and denials; but nothing epiphanic.  The only result of a bad marriage today is divorce, a period of adjustment, and a re-engagement in rounds of sexual mating.

There is nothing tested, nothing lost, nothing gained, nothing even ventured.  Lawrence wrote:

So with man and woman.  They must stand clear again. Or rather, they must fight their way out of their self-consciousness; there is nothing else.  Or rather each must fight the other out of self-consciousness.  Instead of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our intimate relationships, there should be the most intense, open antagonism.

We are far from and afraid of such contention for fear of what it will uncover – weakness, timidity, submission or worse.  We would rather accommodate, compromise, and settle rather than confront.  Confrontation is antagonistic, against the rules of progressive evolution.  Nothing can be gained, many claim, from sexual conflict.  All is to be decided within a civil, progressive context – one where women ultimately have the final say, where gender rights are finally established, and where peaceful resolution rules.

Worst of all, men have ceded their rightful equal place in the ring  They, according to Lawrence, have become too feminine, too complaisant, too willing to abandon maleness.  Women for their part have filled the sexual void, but their ambition, their insistence on a new, dominant sexual role must come with a price.  No advances either by men or women in the sexual arena should go unchallenged.  Only through challenge, conflict, and resolution can sexual parity ever be achieved.

So one must put up with bickering, bitching, and whining about up-down toilet seats, hair in the sink, and too many days ‘working late at the office’; too much slavish responsibility to children, hearth, home, kitchen refinishing, and  budgets; too much boring,  repetitive sex; and nothing at the end of the day but dry aspirations. 

It would be far better to have the all-out, winner-take-all battles of George and Martha, Anna and Will, Tom and Lydia, and Ursula and Skrebensky than the stale, unpleasant arguments of ‘modern’ Americans. 

Better to have at it, no holds barred.

Sex, Desire, And A Refusal To Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Billy  Baxter had thought his love life was over.  After all, he was a man who, despite all his efforts to the contrary, was beginning to sag and line in all the wrong places.  There was no escaping the fact that he was far beyond usefulness; and unless one calculated his reproductive potential – his sperm count was high enough to populate a small country – he was well beyond his sexual prime.

Yet what was he do do with the relentless sexual fantasies which popped up at the most unsuspected hours and at all hours.   Why hadn’t he been born a pasha, or at least a courtier in the Ottoman Empire? Why was the pony-tailed, sweat-lacquered young trainer off limits?  Or the 40-something mommies eating ice cream cones? Surely there were women who would look up from their pizza pies and see an attractive, seductive man despite his faded and spare looks.  If he could see the virile, potent, and irresistible man within, why would it be so difficult for them to catch a glimpse through age’s shutters?



It is God’s ultimate irony to have created men with indefatigable sexual desire but to have limited their field-worthiness to a few paltry decades; and the older one gets and the closer one approaches the finish line, the worse the penance. An older man has years of regret behind him (opportunities missed, clumsy advances, too many should-haves and too few consummations ).  A young man has only promise, possibility, and hope.  He regrets nothing, despairs of nothing, and pines for nothing.

Billy had no intention of throwing in the towel although his handlers said it was time.  What was the point, they asked? Weren’t the last decades of a man’s life a bonus, a small win in God’s lottery,  a chance to figure out what’s what without the distraction of women and sex?

There were options which short-circuited the normal course of sexual decline.  A man could always order a mail order bride.  Yet the offerings were limited. The most savvy had cornered the market for the most desirable women – blonde, blue-eyed Russian and Ukrainian beauties - shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.  The trade in beautiful, complaisant, dutiful Southeast Asian women had also dried up, leaving nothing but Biafran and Bambara women who would give anything and marry any white man for a song.



Billy was not tempted by the trade.  It would be a come-down at best, and a public display of his failing sexual allure and his increased economic fortunes.  Better to be alone with with a whisky and a one-shilling fire than shout defeat.  At least alone, fit, trim, with only scarce signs of age, clearly had not been consigned to the Macy’s bargain basement of sexual seconds.

Serendipity – the most underrated of life’s surprises.  Who could have foretold Laura Barnes, Assistant to the Director of Human Enterprise, 30ish, single, looking, often disappointed, sexually mature, and ready?  Billy worked in the same wing of the Avex Building, far from Human Enterprise and more in commercial development, so their paths should not have crossed.  Had it not been for an unexpected absence, a necessary slot to fill, and few employees uncompromised, the paths of Billy and Laura would have gone on for months without notice. All it took was one meeting, one final after-hours en charrette push to finalize the proposal, celebratory martinis at the Mayflower, and a kiss goodnight to set the clock to a new time. 

The affair lasted almost two years, a closeted, hermetic Saturday- and sex-only adventure in Laura’s tight, ill-lit Adams Morgan walk-up; but it was ‘transformational’, the term Laura had learned at the company’s gender workshop to describe sexual epiphany.  The workshop facilitators had meant the term to mean the transformation of the individual from gender-locked to sexual chrysalis; but Billy understood it quite differently. His old, sagging, lined, and flagging body had been rejuvenated.  He had been transformed from an alte kocker to virile performer in the bat of an eye. 

More importantly, the passion and desire of the affair aside, it meant that his pull-by date had been extended.  If lowly Laura from Human Enterprise would have him, who else even more attractive, younger, and less needy might welcome his advances.

Yet the curtain on the hoped-for second act never rose.  After Laura he languished in the later years of a dry, forty-year marriage, troubled once again by dreams of Ottoman delights, young women crossing his path, and now persistent, insistent sexual memories of Laura.  Had it been worth it, he wondered?  Was the sexual salvation he experienced really any such thing?  Had he not set himself up for an obvious and inescapable letdown?

Of course it had all been worth it.  What was life if not serendipity? He had been given an early Christmas gift, nothing to sniff at, as important as any other expected reward.  To dismiss it lightly would have been niggardly, self-important, and ignorant.



Billy knew that hitting the jackpot twice was unlikely.  The likelihood of another Laura was unthinkable; and better to  forget the possibility and return to predictability before it was too late. 
Yet since God created this Universal Irony – the fate of men to desire women long after the possibility of conquest and consummation – Billy could not like down and curl up like a lapdog before the fire.  He was not done for by any means.  A woman as desirous as he, as interested in extending life by any means possible, and as optimistic about sexual/emotional congress regardless of age, was out there waiting.

D.H. Lawrence, the master of sexual expression believed that the sexual union of man and woman was existential.  Far more than sexually satisfying or procreative, the act was liberating and affirming.  Nietzsche pronounced that the only validation of life  in a meaningless universe was in the expression of pure will.  Lawrence concurred but added a proviso – the resolution of the battle of individual sexual wills. 



Lawrence died very young at 44, so never had to experience the consequences of his convictions.  What was to  become of a man who fails to realize such an epiphany in youth? Is he animated by the conviction that such complete sexual, existential union is still possible? Or must he be tormented until his dying day in realization that his time has long since passed?

Billy Baxter, for better or worse, never gave in.  He had come close to Lawrence but knew that his affair was little more than simple satisfaction.  Laura saw the affair differently – a gateway to the marriage, family, and children that had heretofore escaped her.  A traditional, predictable, sympathetic, never-to-be-realized hope.  Neither she nor Billy came away rewarded.  She got no husband and he no epiphany.  Neither, however, left empty-handed.  He in a renewal of sexual anticipation and a validation of maleness.  She in a passing but no less important tapping of her sexual and emotional reserves.

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is the story of an aging foreign correspondent who falls in love with a Vietnamese girl and who assents to complicity in his rival’s death because of her.  Fowler like Billy Baxter sees Phuong as a last, desperate desire for sexual love and companionship.  She has been bought, negotiated a promising trade, and dependent on Fowler, his prospects, and his life.  Love is not an issue nor the question.  He does not love her so much as depend on her.  He can not return to his wife in England, and knows that marriage to a beautiful, opportunistic woman in wartime Vietnam is tentative and precarious. Yet he knows that he has what few of his older colleagues have – the (temporarily) free, pure, unlimited sex with a younger woman.



Fowler abandons his wife, betrays his friend, sexual competitor, and colleague Pyle. One cannot blame him. He abandoned his principles, and his God because of his awful desperateness.  A life alone was simply unthinkable, and his betrayal of Pyle, despite the moral cover Greene gives him - ridding his beloved, suffering Vietnam of an enemy - was an act of jealous revenge, nothing more.  Fowler was more of a man than Billy could ever be - complicity in murder, yes, but a willful, natural act of self-preservation and conquest that Billy could only imagine.

Billy was never as desperate nor never so much infatuated nor in love with a woman as Fowler.  He was predictable, dishonest, and insecure; but never determined and not the slightest bit willful or heroic.   He took his serendipity for what it was worth, a cheap toy under the Christmas tree, threw it away when he was done with it, and like a child, hoped for something better next year.

Yet because Billy is like all men, like the rest of us, he deserves some attention.  His was never a life on the chaise lounge, defeatist, and happy enough with a sedate old age to last him till the end.  He was an ordinary man with ordinary wishes but who refused to go quietly.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Dylan Thomas)

Throwing The Unnecessary, Irrelevant, And Distracting Overboard - Clearing The Decks For Running

Carson Blythe had always been a social man, a man of dinner parties, formal teas, and poker at the 19th hole.  He liked company and the more the merrier.  He celebrated every birthday with more elaborate events on the fives.   It was not that he liked being the center of attention, although that was a pleasant by-product.  He simply liked being surrounded by friendly people, a social coterie whose members like him simply loved association with others.  There was no point to these gatherings – no agendas or purpose.  Religion and politics were off the table, contentious issues which would fray the carefully woven fabric of the events.  Carson did not explicitly orchestrate these gatherings nor conduct them away from serious issues.  Such a baton was never needed because there was a common understanding that affinity was the only organizational principle and good fun was the only rule of order.

Carson’s hospitality was well-known in the West End of New Brighton.  An invitation to the Blythes was a guarantee of good food, superb cadre, and marvelously lively and witty conversation.  Carson and his wife went out of their way to make each event special. In warm weather they arranged tables on the lawn, shaded by the oaks and maples which had been on the property and in their family for generations.  The tables were set with damask tablecloths, silver, and crystal – settings which would have been elegant inside in their formal dining room but even more impressive outside, set off by the rich, green, manicured grass, the intricate tracery of the early Spring leaves, the rose garden, the picket fence, the trellis of bougainvillea, and the antique buckets of impatiens.

Dinners were never less than three courses which he selected with a symphonic ear.  Each course was a movement which both stood on its own, anticipated the next, and formed part of a well-balanced whole.  His guests appreciated each course for its uniqueness, color, architecture, and presentation; and most importantly discussed them.  They were stimulators of common interest.  Each course added a new dimension of discussion which began with food but always continued well past it – lunches on the porch of the Whittens on Gay Head, the time the cat ruined the soufflé at the Middletons,  Scarlett Johansson and the Macron family at Bofinger, the strawberry endowment at Yale.  No points were made or conclusions drawn at these dinners which were indeed never meant to be anything more than congenial gatherings to appreciate food, table, and each other.

Carson’s outings were no different in intent, style, and bonhomie from dinners at home.  He selected restaurants, bars, and cafes with the same attentiveness  and attention to orchestration and symphony.  A badly-chosen restaurant would be remembered even longer than a great one, especially because it was hors série – memorable not for its excellence but its lack thereof.  Thanks to Carson’s experience and well-adjusted taste, he never went wrong.  The oysters were always briny and brimming with liqueur, the grouper properly charred and succulent, the steaks from the best Kansas City wholesalers, and the wines from celebrated but small vineyards in Sonoma and Willamette Valley.  The cadre was attractive, modern without too much glass, steel, and track lighting.  The atmosphere was always lively but never overdone – happiness but no din – and the service impeccable.  In short, the restaurants served to enhance Carson’s famous ‘affinity’, a value added to an already congenial group.

He and his friends – never the same group, but always the same core – carried their happy friendship sailing on the Chesapeake, hiking the Camino de Santiago, summering in Kaş or wintering in Gstaad. 

The experience was always enough for them.  They had no need for guided tours with Harvard docents.  Turkish Mediterranean beaches were enough for them without following in the footsteps of St. Paul to Ephesus.  Carson and his friends were by no means uneducated.  In fact most of them had an Ivy League pedigree.  It was simply that their idea of the good life was one free from intellectual entanglements, an epicurean life of pleasure without guilt.  None were on a mission, none had ever been. Society – the Victorian meaning of one’s social group with which one always associated – was their be-all and end-all.

All of which made Carson’s sudden divestiture surprising and worrisome.  As he got older, he began to lose interest in the gatherings which had been de rigeur for decades.  He grew impatient with what he now considered idle chatter.  What difference did it make, really, whether the coquilles St. Jacques were overdone? What possible difference could a walk through the Cotswolds make alone or in company?  What was the point of birthday parties, outings on the Bay, or afternoons by the pool?

“I’ve had enough”, Carson said to his wife when she asked him about his growing reclusiveness; but she could not leave it there.  Any aberration from predictable behavior, especially that which had been at the very center of one’s life and well-being must signal the onset of depression and dark days.

First to go were the Parkers whom Carson had always suspected of airiness. While his other friends might be airy and bright at dinner but who had sparkles of wit, the Parkers showed nothing and nothing showed through.  There was no there there, and whereas Carson had never noticed it before - so competently did the brass, strings, and percussion play together - he noticed it now.  Clearing this one lone pine from the stand might even make it more beautiful and serene.

The Parkers went without much notice, the absence of a moth in a complex ecosystem, but the gatherings like the ecosystem would never be quite the same.  When Carson disinvited the Wentworths the disruption in the formerly well-tuned harmony was noticed; and when the Abbots were absent, the group had finally lost its character.  Although no couple substantively added to the substantiality of the group – no one added anything except their enjoyment – absences were felt.  A symphony can be rescored, but if enough sections are missing, the music is flat and not worth playing.

Carson chose to dismantle the group rather than simply leave it.  He felt, before his insistence on divestiture had become irreversible, that perhaps he could do with a smaller group, fewer parties, less ambition while pursuing his other, new, much more personal interests.  He soon realized that he was wrong.  He had created an orchestral wonder, but when looked at through his older, now severely critical lens, it was worth nothing no matter how big or small. 

“What’s the point”, was his irritating, repeated bar.  How could a man of Carson’s intelligence, talent, and ability fallen into such nihilistic inaction?  Would this downward spiral increase, or would he pull up, redirect his energy, and right his ship?

Carson was unconcerned.  It was about time that he ridded himself of the clutter he had accumulated; and although he wondered how he had put up with it for so long, he knew it was time to clear the decks for running; to get rid of excuses – which is what he now saw his compulsive socializing to be – and to get alone and serious.

It was not an easy transition.  Not only was his wife unhappy – she loved her husband’s social affairs and missed them – but he found that while one might get rid of the unnecessary, where was one to find the necessary? For a man used to company, camaraderie, and bustle, it was not easy to settle down and read.  Read what, actually? Nor was it easy to reconfigure his days, especially now that he was retired.  He was only sure that he wanted no more part of the Middletons, Parkers, and the Whittens.  In his new incarnation the thought of spending a dinner with just the four of them was horrible.  Whereas the symphony of friends played itself, he would have to work at some kind of harmony with only one couple at the table.

It wasn’t long however before the void was filled.  Carson had given up his socialness but never his sociability.  He began to keep up with friends he had ignored in the shuffle of the moveable feast – classmates, former business associates, childhood friends – and make new ones.  Soon Starbucks and the Irish Inn replaced Gatsby, Hemingway, and St. Tropez.   Carson was now on a need-to-know basis, his version of K Street focus and dismissal of the irrelevant.  While his mates for coffee and beer were not that different from his big party friends – Ivy League pedigree, wealth, and overall well-being – the conversations were.  They were more personal, even more intimate, and certainly – in Carson’s eyes anyway – more relevant and satisfying.  Bert, Ray, Joe, and Bill might not be the answer to what’s what, but at least they were edging closer to it than the crowd at Bofinger ever had.

Carson’s wife was unfortunate collateral damage in this transformation.  She had never expected their gay life to end, at least not so abruptly and so completely.  What was she to do while her husband schmoozed with his buddies?  She had none of her husband’s later-life angst and his need to fill the void; and would have been happy carrying on with the group; but Carson’s systematic dismantling of it rather than simply absenting himself, eliminated it.  None of the pieces were the same once they had been hived off from the whole.

“I am social”, Carson replied when his wife brought up their lack of friendships and events.  “Just not in the usual way.”  A collectivity of friends, each met individually and personally, was a social entity even though it never met.  Carson had shown that remaking oneself was indeed possible; and while his transformation was far from religious epiphany, it was still significant.  He had used his natural and native social need – deformed in the past by lack of intent – to good use.  He was neither fulfilled nor particularly happy, but good enough.  He sailed on an even keel, finally admitted his destination, and was content.