46
PARTISAN REVIEW
surely it is difficult to rid Mellors's exercises in sensuality of the
charge that they are efforts-and why not, indeed?-to achieve new
sensations, new thrills. It's striking that Lawrence never tells us what
Mellors and Constance Chatterley actually do on their
big
sensual
excursion; this is the one sexual scene in
Lady Chatterley's Lover
where Lawrence himself did the expurgating. We can conjecture
that he drew back at this point as much because he realized he was
violating a cardinal tenet of his own faith-his injunction against
sensation-seeking- as because of his puritanism.
Whoever has read Lawrence with any thoroughness and tried
to grasp his sexual doctrine must at last ask himself, what did Law–
rence
really
want of the relationship between a man and a woman,
not in metaphoric terms-in the realm of metaphor we accept the
fact that we are expected to make our own interpretations and that
we may be mistaken-but in didactic terms. (This is another of the
contradictions in Lawrence: so much a poet, he yet insists that we
read him as a preacher.) Does he want sex without love? Obviously
not. Does he want love without sex? Obviously not. Does he want
sex and love together? Well, yes and no. Certainly he wants them
in conjunction more than he wants them separate, and yet when
he puts them in conjunction he is at once and quite automatically
driven to attack the quality either of the love or of the sex. The an–
swer is, I'm afraid, that he wants neither sex nor love but some com–
bined transcendence of both,
a,
transcendence that has its source and
fulfillment only in phantasy. This transcendence he calls marriage.
"Your most vital necessity in this life," he wrote Dunlop, the friendly
consul at Spezia, "is that you shall love your wife completely and
implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit.... You asked
me once what my message was ... this that I tell you is my message
as far as I've got any." And you recall that little story he wrote
called "Love" in which the girl refuses adoration, appreciation, caress–
ing, anything we commonly think of as love-making. She doesn't
want her sweetheart to touch her and yet it's not that she is averse
to sexuality, it's just that she wants no demonstrations either of
physical or spiritual courtship, all she wants is marriage. Marriage
was Lawrence's message. But no marriage on land or sea:, Norman;
no marriage you or I have ever known, no marriage he had ever
known. Lawrence spoke about marriage as he spoke about a return
