“I had a rather nice letter from somebody — “Hugh Walpole.” Is he anybody? Could I wring three ha’porth of help out of his bloody neck. Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime.”
Wow. D.H. Lawrence was one colourful man.
I remember reading one poem of his, several years back, in which he had been arrested for having painted a nude, including privates, a practice which wasn’t allowed in England at the time. No kidding.
That’s not what the swearing and cursing of the people of England in the lines above is about, though. He just happened to be going through a really tough time; the love of his life wouldn’t be given a divorce and the husband kept writing her letters to return home, a publisher had rejected Sons and Lovers, and he was generally distraught and furious at his fellow countrymen.