Of course, it's by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). And it's another book (the third in a row) that I've read purely because of location, since we spent time just down the road from a couple of his old haunts...

This was Lawrence's last novel, and as everyone knows, it had a complex publication history. It was published privately in Italy in 1928 (Edmund Wilson complains the following year that "it is difficult and expensive to buy"). When it came out in England, in 1932, it was in a heavily expurgated version, and that was all that was available until 1960, when Penguin decided they "wanted to publish an unabridged cheap paperback version for three shillings and sixpence, the same price as 10 cigarettes, to make it affordable for the 'young and the hoi polloi'". This decision amounted to a test case for the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which introduced a get-out-of-jail card if a work was of sufficient literary merit, and was for the public good. As we all know, Penguin won.


A woman sets about the book with a pair of scissors

So what had been the problem? Catherine Baksi explains it very succinctly: "Aside from the fact that both protagonists were separately married at a time when divorce was only granted on proof of a matrimonial crime, the book became notorious for its explicit descriptions of sex, its use of then-unprintable four-letter words and a reference to anal sex, which was illegal at the time [and remained illegal in the UK for heterosexuals until 1994]." (For more detail on the case, see here.)

I started reading the text, but then switched to an audio-version, which was beautifully narrated by Holliday Grainger. As with A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, hearing the portrayal of the various accents really enhanced my enjoyment of the book.

The basic plot revolves around the Lady Chatterley of the title. She's Constance, aka Connie, and she is married to Sir Clifford, who has come back from World War I paralysed from the waist down. Clifford is open to the possibility of her having a child by another man, since he cannot father one himself. The problem is that the person who claims Constance's affections is Oliver Mellors, her husband's gamekeeper. Falling in love with some blue-blood might just have washed. Falling in love with someone from the "lower classes", on the other hand, is much more of a problem.

Mellors is intelligent and well read, has had some education, and has learnt a good deal about the world from his commanding officer in the army. But the fact remains that he is a collier's son; he has opted to do manual work (first as a blacksmith, and then -- after the war -- as a gamekeeper); and although capable of speaking standard English, he chooses very deliberately to revert to the Derbyshire vernacular -- a characteristic that even Connie finds off-putting. The end is left hanging. Both partners are still entangled with their respective partners. We don't know whether they will ultimately find happiness. It's clear that a lot stands in their way.


The famous cover

It is still a work that divides critics. My audio-version started with an Introduction by cultural historian Fern Riddell, who praises "this incredible, beautiful book". Edmund Wilson, writing in 1929, says it is "probably one of Lawrence's best books". For Doris Lessing, it is "still potent and persuasive". For Nicola Barr it has "undoubted raw power". Germaine Greer, on the other hand, sees it as "a thoroughly nasty book"...

Overall, I enjoyed it -- with some reservations which I'll come back to later.

The aspects that put it beyond the pale for all those years are now so commonplace that they draw little attention (those who do comment, such as Lessing and Greer, are mainly concerned to point out the uninformed quality of some of the sex scenes).

But the character studies are still engaging, and it has very interesting things to say about post-WWI England, class differences, capitalism, and the environment.



Characters first:

Connie is a feisty woman, whose sexual experience predates her marriage to Clifford. Although brought up in a cultivated milieu ("well-to-do intelligentsia"), she is alive to what she can learn from those born in different spheres (Mellors, for example, or Ivy Bolton, the widowed nurse who increasingly sees to Clifford's daily needs).

Clifford is given such short shrift by Lawrence that our modern sensibilities are utterly offended. Disabled through no fault of his own, he is depicted as unreasonable, irascible, shallow, and child-like. True, we don't expect a hagiography just because a man is disabled. But the total lack of authorial sympathy is grating. Clifford's physical paralysis is used as a metaphor for everything that contrasts with Mellors, and you can't help but feel this is cruel and unfair.

Undeniably objectionable, nevertheless, is Clifford's upper-crust inability to conceive of life outside the dictates of class: The people, for him, "are animals you don't understand, and never could... The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves."

One of the most interesting characters is Mrs Bolton, who is a gloriously believable mix of upwardly mobile aspiration coupled with resentment against the very ruling class she is trying to get closer to. She's employs a carefully calculated blend of assertiveness and subservience, and wields a lot of influence over Clifford, who becomes increasingly dependent on her as his relationship with Connie fizzles out.



Mellors, meanwhile, is a dark, wounded, brooding, solitary character. You can't help but feel for him, even when he is being annoying. He has not come across very many of the kind of people who bring out the best in him, and when he has, they've been taken away from him for various reasons. He has not had an easy life, even though it's obvious he is in many ways his own worst enemy.

It is not difficult to sympathize with some of his views. He's a man before his time, seeing clearly how the people are destroying themselves with work -- "What have yer done ter yerselves, wi' the blasted work... Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead" -- and how the bosses are destroying the earth: "The fault lay there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron."

He's a pessimist: "There's black days coming for us all and for everybody." It was the end of the 1920s, so of course, he was right...

He's also a quintessential loner: "I can't stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That's why I can't get on." But he's also an idealist. If relations between the sexes could proceed on "warm-hearted" lines, he believes, everything would come right... That's the kind of baloney that I can't endorse...

True, there's a poignant contrast between the man at the beginning, with his dog and his gun and his freedom, and the man at the end, all caught up in the machinations of Constance's family, the persecution of Bertha, his estranged wife (painted as the absolute caricature of the evil woman), and the impossibility of escape in a world where your every move can now be followed.

But you feel he's a man who can never be happy. The book, as I said, ends noncommittally. Mellors is waiting for a divorce from Bertha; Connie is waiting for Clifford to finally see reason and divorce her; the baby that has resulted from the relationship between Connie and Mellors is waiting to be born. We don't know how any of this will turn out.

The concluding section is a letter from Mellors to Connie. He exudes a kind of dismal contentment, as he sits out this waiting period. But you wonder if he is only capable of savouring states that have not been realized...

Certainly, this letter is a continuation of the despairing commentary of earlier sections. Mellors writes: "The men are very apathetic. They feel the whole damned thing is doomed, and I believe it is. And they are doomed along with it. Some of the young ones spout about a Soviet, but there's not much conviction in them... We've got this great industrial population, and they've got to be fed, so the damn show has to be kept going somehow... That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out... If only you could tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing!... That's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend. But you can't do it... Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't... There's a bad time coming, boys, there's a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there's nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses." Again, he wasn't too wrong...



It is easy to forget the book's historical context, I suppose -- firstly amid all the furore about its so-called immoral aspects, and more recently amid the other criticisms that are hurled at it. But for Lessing, Lady Chatterley's Love is "one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written".

It opens like this: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes... We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

It's this aftermath that is affecting the colliers. When they talk of a strike, Connie feels it's "not a manifestation of energy, [but rather] it was the bruise of the war that had been in abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep... the bruise of the false inhuman war." Everything has been degraded: "All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day... It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing." At one point she is "crying blindly, in all the anguish of her generation's forlornness".

Wilson maintains: "Lawrence’s theme is a high one: the self-affirmation and triumph of life in the teeth of all the destructive and sterilizing forces -- industrialism, physical depletion, dissipation, careerism and cynicism -- of modern England; and in general, he has given a noble account of it." And Lessing argues: "It is permeated with the first world war, the horror of it. And against the horrors, the rotting bodies, the senseless slaughter of the trenches, the postwar poverty and bleakness -- against the cataclysm, 'the fallen skies', Lawrence proposes to put in the scales love, tender sex, the tender bodies of people in love."

Which does all make it sound a bit less twaddly, I grant you...

Meanwhile, we have much dark description of the industrialized Midlands. All the industrial archaeology we now delight in visiting was then active machinery, running full bore, and constantly creating a noisy, bleak, and degraded environment. So, for example, we hear about "Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile", or "the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything."

Well ahead of Evelyn Waugh, Lawrence also documents the disintegration of England's stately homes. They're too expensive to maintain, and in any case, the gentry want to live in "pleasanter places, where they could spend their money without having to see how it was made".

And look who else we have, loaded with stereotyping: "Connie looked at Venice far off, low and rose-coloured upon the water. Built of money, blossomed of money, and dead with money. The money-deadness! Money, money, money, prostitution and deadness."

All this is interesting and engaging. Extraordinarily prescient in places.

What galls me about the book, though, is its undeniable misogynism...

True, it acknowledges that women have a sexual life, and a legitimate will of their own. Connie is not some hapless victim, but a woman who knows her own mind, and makes things happen.

But the undermining of women is like the drip, drip, drip of a tap. The centrepiece is the extended section where Mellors recounts to Connie the litany of women who he feels have done him wrong. It's all about him: Women are there to serve his needs in exactly the way he wants them to be served. You can't help but hate him at this point.

Generally, there's far too much about the noble phallus, which is proud and active (as opposed to the womb, which is all emotions and receptivity). Mellors' male body is worshipped, while Connie's female body is disparaged.



Pretty much every female is described in negative terms -- primarily, as deceptive and manipulative. Even Mrs Bolton -- who is generally portrayed in an interestingly rounded way -- gives vent to anti-women views: "The older men are that patient and good, really, they let the women take everything... The women are positive demons..." Later, she tells Connie: "If you care for a man, you have to give in to him once he's really determined; whether you're in the right or not, you have to give in. Else you break something."

So many examples:

-- Mellors to his daughter: "Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!"
-- Connie about Mellors' daughter: "Connie disliked her; the spoilt, false little female."
-- Connie about Mrs Flint's baby: "It was a girl, and not to be daunted... [You could see] its little female dauntlessness... Of course it's a girl, or it wouldn't be so bold..."
-- Mellors about Connie: "He dreaded her will, her female will, and her modern female insistency... She had wakened the sleeping dogs of old voracious anger in him, anger against the self-willed female."
-- Mellors about Bertha: "Her ghastly female will: her freedom!"

I don't agree with Greer that we should dismiss the whole work on this count. But the misogyny is like a big, evil scar across a canvas that is otherwise often perceptive and beautiful.

I have a few more Lawrence and Lawrence-related works on my list. We'll see what a bit more context offers.