Comparing 2 Lawrence stories: Prussian Officer - Thorn in the Flesh

D.H. Lawrence was incredibly prolific in his shortened life - the Joyce Carol Oates of his day - and it's obvious that to create so many works, stories, poems, novels, essays, he reworked lots of material - some of this for creative reasons and others no doubt to turn a buck. Interesting to read two stories in sequence in vol 1 of Lawrence's Complete Stories (Penguin, 3 vols): yesterday posted on The Prussian Officer, and the next story, A Thorn in the Flesh, is a companion piece in a way: both are about a German army troop, in Officer the protagonist is an orderly who's severely beaten by his commanding officer, kills the officer, flees from the troop, and dies of exposure - an extreme and disturbing story. Flesh is about an ordinary soldier, Bachmann, on a drill, panics about having to climb a ladder up a rampart because of his fear of heights, pisses himself while climbing and is shamed and terrified, at the top of the rampart an officer berates him, Bachmann accidentally knocks the officer off the rampart (he thinks he may have killed the officer and later learns he did not, flees the troop (as in Prussian), and takes refuge with his "sweetheart," a maid in service to a local Baron, and eventually is caught and led back to the barracks to face uncertain punishment. Lawrence is extraordinarily good at entering the consciousness of a character - we viscerally feel Bachmann's fear and shame as he faces his phobia. In Lawrence's day and in his mind, this may have seemed a more daring and unconventional story than Prussian, in that in this story Bachmann has sex with his sweetheart in a scene that by today's standards is allusive and over-written but in 1920 or so would have been considered pretty graphic. Actually, today, we see that it's far more conventional than Prussian, in which the sexual element is furtive and twisted - the sadistic homoerotic attack on the orderly is far weirder and more disturbing than Bachmann's tryst in Emilie's virginal bedroom. Flesh is hindered by Lawrence's weird and archaic philosophizing - Emilie wants to be dominated by a powerful man, etc. - but its structure and ending seem more contemporary: the melodramatic double death of Prussian compared with the simple scene of the soldier being led away while Emilie and the Baron watch, and the Baron says something like: What a fool. What's with the flesh reference, though? I don't see Bachmann as a Christ-like figure in any particular way.



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