‘Lady C’s’ lifelines: a study in scarlet
D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was notorious in its day and banned in Britain until 1960. It portrays an upper-class woman’s passionate desires and joyous adultery with a social inferior, and contains explicit sexual descriptions. But the novel goes beyond the love story to consider the effects of the war, the horrors of industrialism, the decayed state of England and the oppressive class structure. Lawrence exalts the vital connections between men and women, asserts the triumph of life in opposition to the destructive and sterilizing forces of the modern world, and proposes a radical change in consciousness. Connie Chatterley progresses sexually, from a kind of clitoral masturbation with her prewar German lover and again with the popular writer Michaelis, to early sex with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors where only he is satisfied, to vaginal and simultaneous climax. Her sexual relations change from secular, adulterous and contraceptive with her lovers to sacramental, marital and procreative with Mellors.
Guy Cuthbertson’s lively and amusing Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Yale, 346pp, £20/$30) describes “the life the novel has had over the century since it was first created, the impact of the book and how we have responded to it.” He writes well about the reflective force of mutual nakedness: “When she goes home after seeing Mellors washing, Connie views her own naked body in a long mirror. She has watched Mellors, then she comes home and watches herself. We see what Mellors will soon see.” The best chapters analyse the notorious obscenity trial and the novel’s pervasive literary influence.
Cuthbertson also sees the humorous side of the story. During the Old Bailey trial in October-November 1960, the wealthy prosecutor Griffith-Jones pompously asked, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” For men who wanted to arouse their wives or seduce their servants, the answer would be an enthusiastic “Yes.” When the working-class Professor Richard Hoggart testified effectively for the defence, the prosecutor “came close to spontaneous combustion”.
Hypocrisy was rampant: “fathers, schoolmasters and husbands confiscated copies only to read them for pleasure while feigning disgust.” Some copies were “heavily, almost maniacally, marked up”. “A butcher in Sheffield sold copies to housewives buying meat because some of them were too shy to go to a bookshop and ask for it.”
A schoolboy portrayed on a seaside postcard said, “I’m going to be a gamekeeper when I grow up.” A 12-year-old rewrote the novel and improved it by adding more sexual content. The Chatterleys of Liverpool escort agency ended their advert with a sly pun: “Staff required.” A famous doctored photo shows a City businessman in the tube, with bowler and furled umbrella, reading the orange Penguin Lady Chatterley half covered by the black-and-white Times, as men on each side of him peer over his shoulder for a glimpse of smut.
The critical responses ranged from vehement to ecstatic to ironic. The English poet. Philip Larkin, a passionate admirer of the novel, declared, “Any man who says a word against it needs his teeth knocking down his throat.” In “Annus Mirabilis” he ruefully wrote:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first L.P.
The American poet Sylvia Plath was ecstatic about “living with her own gamekeeper”. Mellors and her poet-husband Ted Hughes “both represented the outdoors and blood-consciousness, and Hughes was an idealised image of a woodsman”. The Field and Stream review of 1960 was regretful and witty: “Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.”
Cuthbertson concludes: “Lady C has meant freedom for many people, whether that be sexual freedom, freedom from modern life, freedom from society, freedom from an unhappy marriage, physical freedom, freedom of speech.” Lawrence was poor for most of his life. The 1960 Penguin edition, published 30 years after his death, sold 3,600,000 copies by 1968.
Cuthbertson has done extensive research, but I can add some significant details to this cultural history. Constance Reid Chatterley is not a constant wife, but a slender Reid. Lawrence sometimes wrote the novel outdoors and leaned against an Italian olive tree. Oliver Mellors’ first name suggests that Mediterranean tree and melior in Latin means better.
Though Lawrence often made sex poetic by describing “the fine brown fleece of Connie’s mound of Venus”, the novel was considered obscene. Lawrence’s friend Enid Hilton told me that she “hid copies of Lady Chatterley in her long knickers and smuggled them into England”, confident that a lady would not be searched. The novel was also banned in Australia. As late as 1969, the title of Frederic Manning’s chaste Great War novel, Her Privates We, alarmed the customs officials who confiscated my copy as I entered the country.
Lawrence’s aristocratic wife Frieda was the model for Connie. After eloping from England to Germany, they quarreled. On a sudden impulse, she swam across a river where a woodcutter was working, had sex with the astonished peasant and swam back—just to show Lawrence she was free to do as she liked. One alternate title was Tenderness. In the best scene in the novel, before Connie and Mellors become lovers, Lawrence evokes Connie’s longing for a child when she feeds the pheasant chicks, destined to be slaughtered (as soldiers were in the war) as soon as they reach maturity. She’s afraid of the fierce pecks of the protective mother hen and draws back, startled and frightened. Then Mellors, in a subtle mixture of sexual exploration and midwifery, “slowly, softly, with sure gentle fingers, felt among the old bird’s feathers and drew out a faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.” As Connie holds the soft baby bird and begins to weep about the tragedy of her life, the maternal is linked to the sexual theme.
Lawrence could be wildly inconsistent. He portrayed sodomy in the novel as the ultimate sexual experience, but condemned George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), with the line “My feet were nourished on her breasts all night,” as a “nauseous poem”. Yet in his own poem, “Song of a Man Who is Loved”, Lawrence exclaimed of the bosomy Frieda::
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me chaos and bounce, but the fourth side rests
Sure on a haven of peace, between the mounds of her breasts.
The critical response to Lawrence and his controversial novel was mixed. T. E. Lawrence wrote enthusiastically in the Spectator of August 6, 1927, the year before the novel was published, “Lawrence is a prodigious novelist, whose works need to be studied and re-read frequently because of their rich depth and strangeness and fine artistry.” He also quotes the orgasmic “Ballad of a Wilful Woman”: “While a naked man comes swiftly / Like a spurt of white foam.” The influential critic Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic of July 2, 1929, called the novel “a parable of postwar England and one of Lawrence’s best books.” (Wilson’s own novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, was banned for similar reasons in 1946.) By contrast, in 1932 Lawrence’s repressed friend Middleton Murry, who was too shy to kiss the breasts of his wife Katherine Mansfield, attacked the portrayal of sex in the novel as “strangely wearisome and oppressive”.
Lady Chatterley and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are two of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Like Mellors, Winston Smith is devoted to plein-air sex. André Malraux noted an important aspect of the novel: “The insistent voice of physical pain and the constant forebodings of death made Lawrence determined to write and publish his book before dying.” Both Lawrence and Orwell were ravaged by tuberculosis. Mellors also has TB; Winston Smith’s torture was based on Orwell’s agonising treatments for that disease. Both authors struggled bravely to complete their books. Lawrence died aged 44, Orwell died aged 46.
L.P. Hartley’s fine novel The Go-Between (1953) uses Lawrence’s basic plot and triangle of characters: the war-wounded aristocrat, his young unhappy wife and his working-class employee, as well as the setting of an ancestral house and farm; the themes of postwar malaise and of sexual relationships that transcend class barriers.
In a letter to me of February 6, 1985, Norman Mailer recalled that as a Harvard undergraduate in 1941, he’d read the unexpurgated version of the novel: “it changed my sex life, or rather accelerated it in the direction it had been proceeding on nicely by itself. I accepted Lawrence’s thesis about untrammeled and illimitable rights and liberties and pleasures of sexual love and the union between the two. I don’t think anyone ever before, whether in literature or personal life, had stated it so forcefully for me, that one could not have sex without love or love without sex.”
On September 16, 1989, Iris Murdoch wrote me: “I admire & respect D. H. Lawrence but do not love him. The BBC has just decided to have Lady Chatterley read nightly as a Book at Bedtime, and this has occasioned an amusing fracas, and grave declarations (not always unreasonable) about the permissive society.” When I told Iris that I’d interviewed the doctor who’d been taught as a child by Lawrence, she exclaimed, “How awful to be tutored by D.H. Lawrence!” Despite her eminence and intellectual power, Iris was modest enough, when I challenged her, to admit she was wrong about Lawrence: “Yes, I daresay Lawrence was an inspiring teacher. I spoke out of prejudice! A genius of course & a lovely writer.”
W. B. Yeats gave one of the best accounts of the novel: “Those two lovers, the gamekeeper and his employer’s wife, each separated from their class by their love and by fate, are poignant in their loneliness, and the coarse language of the one, accepted by both, becomes a forlorn poetry uniting their solitudes, something ancient, humble and terrible.”
Jeffrey Meyers has published D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy; The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence, which describes his influence on 50 writers; D. H. Lawrence and Tradition; and D. H. Lawrence: A Biography (1990).
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