Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB. Described by him as ‘a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards’, the tale is set in his native Nottinghamshire, which he left in 1912 when he eloped with his aristocratic wife Frieda von Richthofen, who was then married to his tutor. Frieda, who valued her freedom, was enjoying an affair with the Italian officer Angelo Ravagli, who became her third husband after Lawrence’s death in 1930. It is believed that Lawrence was impotent for the last years of his life.
In the evenings he would read aloud his finished pages, in which the Lawrentian philosophy is expressed by Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper to Sir Clifford Chatterley. A successful writer who returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, Sir Clifford reluctantly allows his wife Constance to find sexual satisfaction elsewhere. ‘Ay, ma lad. Yi, tha mun rear thy head!’ says her lover Mellors, addressing the organ he calls ‘John Thomas’. ‘Th’art good cunt though, aren’t ter?’ he tells Connie’s ‘Lady Jane’. The root of sanity, Mellors explains, lies ‘in the balls’; when a woman climaxes there is a tinkling of bells. ‘Warm fucking’ will repair the world’s evils, but only if simultaneous orgasm is achieved, and you can tell when a couple has failed on this count by their ‘raw look’.
Lawrence was infinitely silly when it came to sex, but nothing has been sillier, Guy Cuthbertson shows, than the promiscuous afterlife of ‘Lady C’, as Lawrence called the book, which was published in full in Italy and France but banned for obscenity in America, Canada, India, Japan, Australia and the UK. Trawling a vast net through nearly a century of songs, newspapers, menus, shops, cartoons, films and television programmes, Cuthbertson has caught a shoal of ephemera, trivia and titbits relating to Lawrence’s last and least good novel.
Beginning with the book’s censorship and ending with its impact on free speech, Lady C covers the championing of Lawrence by F.R. Leavis and Philip Larkin, the attack on him by Kate Millett and the cultural significance of the various Lady Chatterley movies. Cuthbertson uncovers a Danish cartoon in 1954 which shows a female librarian telling a man wanting to borrow a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that he is too unattractive to read it; a piece in India’s Alive magazine in 2016 called ‘Lord and Lady Chatterjee’s Lovers!’, and a saucy Bamforth postcard in which a young boy tells his mother: ‘That settles it, I’m going to be gamekeeper when I grow up.’
We can now buy ‘Lady Chatterley’ boots, blouses, corsets, thongs, nail polish and earrings. There is a whisky called ‘Lady Chatterley’s Other Lover’; a Lady Chatterley lily; a Chatterley fountain pen; and ‘Chatterley’ restaurants in Lancashire, New Jersey, New Hartford, Cincinnati, Chicago and Ontario. For Valentine’s Day in 1990, the George Hotel in Rye served up ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s soup’.
This mockery and merchandising would have mortified poor Lawrence, whose message to the reader was that we should retreat from the material world, listen to our bodies, spend more time outdoors and consider the power of plain words: ‘Tell me a word/that you’ve often heard/ yet it makes you squint/ if you see it in print,’ he wrote in a poem the year after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published.
Only after the Chatterley trial at the Old Bailey in October 1960, when Penguin books published the first British unexpurgated edition, could we read the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ in the novel, or see Connie dance naked in the rain, or discover that she placed two pink campions in the ‘bush of red-gold hair’ above Mellors’s penis while he threaded forget-me-nots and woodruff through her own pubic mound. What were the grounds for legal action? ‘I put my feet up on the desk and start reading,’ the prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones explained. ‘If I get an erection, we prosecute.’ I have never known anyone else admit to being aroused by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but horses for courses. By the time that Griffith-Jones asked the jury if this was ‘a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read’ (a remark now in the Oxford Book of Quotations), it had become unclear whether it was Lawrence’s novel that was in the dock or Constance Chatterley herself.
The first Chatterley trial took place in Japan, when the publisher of the Japanese translation (which sold 150,000 copies) was fined 250,000 yen in 1951. The second trial was in America, after the Postmaster General refused to deliver the novel through the mail. Grove Books was exonerated by the US Court of Appeals in 1959. Cuthbertson tells us that the name of the Postmaster General was Arthur Somerfield, and that before he became the most important literary critic in the land he was a ‘motorcar dealer in Flint, Michigan’ and ‘president of the Flint City Kiwanis Club’. A newspaper cartoon in May 1959 shows Lady Chatterley’s Lover on a table in the ‘United States Post Office and Literary Criticism and Censorship Department’.
We can now buy ‘Lady Chatterley’ boots, blouses, corsets, thongs, nail polish and earrings
Cuthbertson’s arsenal of facts can feel like a Google dump, and at times he gets carried away. He compares the various covers of the book’s editions; hears echoes of the novel in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty- Four (both use the term ‘sinking ship’ and the word ‘innumerable’, while Winston and Julia also have sex in the woods); shares with us the underlinings in Sylvia Plath’s copy before concluding that ‘we cannot know for sure what she was thinking and feeling as she read’; tells us that Ted Hughes wrote an essay on wanting to be a gamekeeper for his 11-plus exam, and that Plath and Hughes called their daughter Frieda, which was also the name of Plath’s aunt. Aside from making a mark on British culture, it is not clear what conclusions Cuthbertson is drawing about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or even at times what his argument is.
The most striking and moving aspect of the novel is that while Lawrence cast Mellors and Connie as his born-again Adam and Eve, he himself identified with the wounded husband. The British have always made fun of cuckolds, but for the Americans, Cuthbertson notes, the wealthy but paralysed Sir Clifford, rather than the penniless but priapic Mellors, is the book’s true hero. After all, we are reminded in a smart aside: ‘America had won the second world war under a president in a wheelchair.’
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