The Fall of John Thomas

-ä^The Fall of John Thomas' James C. Cowan In "The Little Wowser" (composed in 1928), one of the poems in Pansies, D. H. Lawrence, with his recent and continuing censorship battles in the background,1 satirizes official attitudes toward the penis, which society blames as the culprit responsible for practically everything since the Fall: There is a little wowser John Thomas by name, and for every bloomin', mortal thing that little blighter's to blame.2 Adopting ballad measure, dialect, and a mocking, Kiplingesque tone, Lawrence says that it's John Thomas who tempts you to sin, and "leads you by the nose / after a lot o' women" till someone marries you "to put him through 'is paces." But, he concludes, I think of all the little brutes as ever was invented that little cod's the holy worst. I've chucked him, I've repented. (lines 21-24, CP, 493) Where his own life was concerned, Lawrence had neither "chucked" John Thomas, exactly, nor "repented." Social satire aside, he was alluding with self-deprecating irony to his own present condition. Lawrence was, at the time, impotent.3 In this essay, I first consider, from medical and psychological per- * I wish to thank Gerald Pollinger, Laurence Pollinger Ltd., and the Estate of Mrs. Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for permission to quote from the published works of D. H. Lawrence in the editions cited. I also wish to thank David Ellis for his helpful comments on the manuscript. Literature and Medicine 11, no. 2 (Fall 1992) 266-293 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press James C. Cowan 267 spectives, Lawrence's impotence in his last years. In discussing the physiological and psychological issues, I evoke, from several medical disciplines , the authority of specialists in human sexuality and psychology, whose scientific approach to sexuality Lawrence would surely regard with the same reservations he had for the work of Marie Stopes and Sigmund Freud in his own day.41 turn then to Lawrence's attempts to come to terms with his condition in two of his last literary works, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) and Pansies (1929). Lawrence's frequently cited statement that "one sheds ones sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them"5 acknowledges that his literary work provided him with an important means of coping. Lawrence was both a sensitive, self-aware man and an exceptionally articulate writer. These two qualities make his efforts to employ his writing in coping with one of the most frustrating medical problems seen by clinicians especially valuable for our understanding of how such a man experiences the condition and the strategies he follows in incorporating it into his work. What makes Lawrence's work so instructive in this respect is that it illustrates, not merely the literary representation of a medical condition, but the literary adaptation of the personal experience of sexual dysfunction by the most prominent literary writer on psychosexual issues in the twentieth century. Derek Britton believes that "[t]he absolute impotence of Lawrence's last years may have been the final stage in a gradual decline in sexual capacity that afflicted him for much of his married life."6 According to Britton, "Clinical studies of potency disorders of this type, characterized by a progressive and accelerated falling-off in sexual potency over a period of years, suggest that the origins of the condition typically lie in a combination of psychogenic and constitutional factors, with the latter often exerting a dominant influence."7 William B. Ober suggests that whether Lawrence's "alleged reduction of potentia was due to decreased libido, inability to achieve erection, or ejaculatio praecox, . . . [i]t is not unreasonable to infer that a man suffering from far advanced pulmonary tuberculosis would be sufficiently debilitated to be unable to respond to sexual stimuli and unable to perform as satisfactorily or as frequently as before."8 Britton also believes that Lawrence's impotence during his last five years was secondary to general metabolic disturbances occasioned by his physical deterioration in the advanced stages of pulmonary tuberculosis , but he speculates as well on a number of ancillary psychogenic factors in the etiology of Lawrence's condition...