Lady Chatterley's Lover

It’s funny how you can wake up one morning not even aware of something and yet by the end of the day you are absorbed in it. On Monday morning, a Brazilian bank holiday, I logged on to Yahoo News and saw that the top search of the day was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I think the BBC had made a new dramatization of it. It was then that I realized I had never read this book. I often quote Mark Twain, who once said that a classic is something everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read. I tend to agree. People like to display their erudition by discussing Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters, but few people actually want to take the time required to read these hefty works. And yet, I had just finished reading Villlette which, although heavy going, was a very satisfying read. So I took the plunge and downloaded Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I read it in less than twenty-four hours. It is not a difficult book to read and the tale is quite simple. The story begins after the Great War. Sir Clifford Chatterley returns from France badly injured and paralyzed from the waist down. His wife, Connie, sticks by him, but ends up having affairs. She is particularly drawn to the estate’s gamekeeper, Mr Mellors. They handle the affair quite clumsily and Sir Clifford’s nurse discovers it in no time, but keeps quiet. Connie is pregnant and goes to Italy to pretend that the baby was conceived there. Clifford has said he doesn’t mind her providing an heir to the estate but he has no idea that his wife is involved with a gamekeeper. Sir Clifford is an elitist and snob and makes no effort to hide his disdain for the lower classes. Connie tires of all the rigmarole and confesses the affair. She had been worried about her good name, etc., but cannot bear to be married to Clifford anymore and throws caution to the wind. Mellors’s former wife turns up to make trouble, but after a lot of scandalous behaviour, she disappears. Mellors gets his divorce but Sir Clifford refuses to divorce his wife. The story ends on this note, but with Mellors assuring Connie that they will be together and that Sir Clifford will yield eventually.

The story is well written and interesting. It addresses social class and conflict and some passages are devoted to arguing about the idea of living an intellectual life. However, what made the book infamous was its sexual content. The book was published in 1928 and the controversy raged on for decades, culminating in an “obscenity” trial against Penguin Books in 1960. This trial pushed back the boundaries on what publishers could release in print. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 stated that explicit content could be published if it were possible to prove that the work had literary merit. Many publishers around the world had only dared to issue heavily edited or abridged versions of the book. The trial was a huge victory for Penguin. The chief prosecutor made a terrible faux pas when he addressed the court saying that Lacy Chatterley was not a book that one would wish one’s “wife or servants to read”. This made him look very old-fashioned and behind the times. However, by today’s standards, the sexual content seems quite tame or even run-of-the-mill. Sir Clifford, commenting on the scandalous accusations made by Bertha Mellors against her husband, remarks that his gamekeeper liked to “use his wife in the Italian way”. Mellors tells Connie that she has “got the nicest arse of anybody… An’ ivery bit of it is woman, woman as sure as nuts. Tha’rt not one of the buttonarse lasses as should be lads… An if that shits an’ tha pisses, I’m glad. I don’t want a woman as couldna shit nor piss”. The C-word and the F-word are used, not liberally, but they are used. Mellors tells the impotent Sir Clifford: “Folks should do their own fuckin’, then they wouldn’t want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man’s… It’s not for a man in the shape you’re in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin’ a cod atween my legs”. Shocking, especially for the time. However, the court ruled that this work had literary merit, so publication went ahead. I quite liked the story, although some of the characters are a bit stereotypical: the snooty Sir Clifford, Connie’s sceptical Scottish father who accepts Mellors after downing a few glasses of whisky with him, Connie’s disapproving sister Hilda and the prude working class people in the nearby town. But it is an entertaining story. However, it doesn’t really merit all the attention it has garnered in my opinion. It’s amazing what a bit of sex can do.

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. Despite not being from an academic family, he became a teacher and won a prize for a short story in the early 1900s. Ill health, which plagued him all his life, forced his to resign his teaching post in 1912. After the Great War, he and his wife travelled extensively. However, his health continued to deteriorate and he died in 1930, two years after the publication of Lady Chatterley, his last book. Besides Lady Chatterley, he is probably best remembered for his novel Sons and Lovers, published in 1913.