The Horrible Paws: D.H. Lawrence’s Australian Nightmare

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In Australia in 1922, novelist DH Lawrence had a number of nightmares that were to haunt his novel, Kangaroo, which he started writing in the coastal village of Thirroul in May, and completed in Taos in America four months later. The most famous one provided a chapter ( The Nightmare ) in his Australian novel, touched off by a scarifying encounter with the leader of the secret army Lawrence ran across in Sydney. It was as if the silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of a reptile, and the horrible paws , he wrote. Those blood-caked paws were not only the metaphorical extremities of the sinister organisation he had stumbled on in Australia, but the unwelcome attentions of its bear-like secret army leader, portrayed in the novel as Benjamin Cooley. For, hidden in the text of Kangaroo, Robert Darroch has discovered a hitherto unrecognised homoerotic encounter that, paradoxically, gives the lie to accusations of homosexual tendencies in probably the 20th-century’s most misunderstood author.