Brophy and Brigid
SIR,—Morals apart, lady novelists who advocate masturbation, gentlemen novelists who support them ('not only harmless but positively desirable) and readers who read them might do worse than consider the words of a prophet of our time who has perhaps been insufficiently honoured. This is what D.1-1. Law- rence, who did not think it 'harmless' or a 'minor point,' has to say in Pornography and Obscenity: 'The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs. Something quite new is added as the old surcharge is removed. And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are con- cerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force. and no return. The body remains, in a
sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case of any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation: As to the idea that masterpieces are produced in a post-masturbatory euphoria, Lawrence goes on: 'The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else in a vicious circle of false
and easy sympathy, sentimentalities. The sentimen- talism and the niggling analysis, often self-analysis, of most of our modern literature, is a sign of self- abuse. . . . The author never escapes from himself, he pads along within the vicious circle of himself. There is hardly a writer living who gets out of the vicious circle of himself—or a painter either. Hence the lack of creation, and the stupendous amount of production. It is a masturbation result, within the vicious circle of the self. It is self-absorption made public.'
It is easy to make fun of Lawrence's views on sexual relations; the Warden of All Souls may be right in thinking that, on the famous 'phallic night' in Lady Chatterley, the gamekeeper went in from the wrong side or by the wrong door (Brophy or Brigid or both would no doubt say 'buggered' and have done with it), but none of this detracts from the quality of Lawrence's wisdom in the passages I have quoted. It shows up the shoddiness, the super- ficiality and the silliness of the thinking of Brophy
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