What you describe is not how things are normally done with Suds. Usually the body is automatically created by Suds by invoking methods that are defined in the WSDL. If you control the SOAP server endpoint and wanted to pass arbitrary XML, you could always create a custom method (eg sendXML) with a string parameter for the XML body you wanted to send. It's a bit hacky, and you'd have to make sure things were properly encoded, but it would work.

 - Chris