Gladiatorial

D.H. Lawrence published Women in Love  as a limited-print first edition in New York on 9 November 1920. The novel is 99 years old today. (It received a wider publication in the UK in 1921.) Its pivotal chapter, titled "Gladiatorial," is the reason I adore it - I merely admire the rest of the book . "Gladiatorial" was my first confrontation with the fact that my erotic feelings towards wrestling were not individual to me. There are others - including an ostensibly "straight" 20th-century English novelist - who see it as I do. Even if you don't read novels, particularly old ones, you should at least read this chapter.

Last month Krushco released (for free!) a six-minute custom video of the nude wrestling scene that seduced me - most famously memorialized in the 1969 film adaptation. I've always preferred the literary version (because I'm an English professor?), but Krush patterned his version after the fireplace-lit scene in Ken Russell's film. (Produced and scripted by noted LGBTQ-rights activist Larry Kramer.) The Krushco version captures the tone of both book and movie admirably. If I had the money for it, I'd custom order a version of the scene from every underground wrestling site I know of, in celebration of the book's 100th anniversary next year. The differences in style and translation might be illuminating.

Here is, for me, the money shot of the novel:

So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense. He seemed to penetrate into Gerald's more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection, always seizing with some rapid necromantic fore-knowledge every motion of the other flesh, converting and counteracting it, playing upon the limbs and trunk of Gerald like some hard wind. It was as if Birkin's whole physical intelligence interpenetrated into Gerald's body, as if his fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man, like some potency, casting a fine net, a prison, through the muscles into the very depths of Gerald's physical being.

So they wrestled swiftly, rapturously, intent and mindless at last, two essential white figures working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room; a tense white knot of flesh gripped in silence between the walls of old brown books. Now and again came a sharp gasp of breath, or a sound like a sigh, then the rapid thudding of movement on the thickly-carpeted floor, then the strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh. Often, in the white interlaced knot of violent living being that swayed silently, there was no head to be seen, only the swift, tight limbs, the solid white backs, the physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness. Then would appear the gleaming, ruffled head of Gerald, as the struggle changed, then for a moment the dun-coloured, shadow- like head of the other man would lift up from the conflict, the eyes wide and dreadful and sightless.

- Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence, Viking Compass Edition, 1960, pp. 262-263