Thumbing through the delightful little collection On Writing and Writers: A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions by C.S. Lewis [HarperOne, 2022), I came across this lovely laconic aside on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
“Lady Chatterley has made short work of a prosecution by the Crown. It still has to face more formidable judges. Nine of the, and all goddesses.”
Lewis was writing in 1960, when Penguin Books and their publisher had just been found Not Guilty of obscenity under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.
I disclose an interest here, in that my father sat on the jury for this case - he was very tickled when one newspaper referred to him as ‘the distinguished-looking man in the back row’, and was even more thrilled when, at the close of the trial, he found himself instructing a taxi driver to ‘lose those cars’, as the media followed in hot pursuit. That aside, though, it is clear from Lewis’ rather barbed remark that he had, to say the least, reservations about Lawrence’s novel, as do I. But then I have reservations about all of Lawrence’s novels - I much prefer his poetry.
The reservations are not related to any potential or actual obscenity, but rather to Lawrence’s relationship with his readers. He is, in my view, very much a preacher - he has a truth to expound, and by golly, does he expound it! His ardent belief - a phrase he would have approved of - was in ‘blood-consciousness’. As he wrote in a letter to Ernest Collings in 1913, "my great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.” The trouble with that outlook for a novelist - indeed for any artist - is that it turns character into cartoon, and words into brickbats with which to beat the reader into submission.
Richard Hoggart, critic and academic, was called for the defence in the Chatterley trial. When he was cross-examined by the prosecution, he was called to account by Mervyn Griffith-Jones for his previous description of the book as "highly virtuous if not puritanical". "I thought I had lived my life under a misapprehension as to the meaning of the word 'puritanical'. Will you please help me?" "Yes, many people do live their lives under a misapprehension of the meaning of the word 'puritanical'. This is the way in which language decays. In England today and for a long time the word 'puritanical' has been extended to mean somebody who is against anything which is pleasurable, particularly sex. The proper meaning of it, to a literary man or to a linguist, is somebody who belongs to the tradition of British Puritanism generally, and the distinguishing feature of that is an intense sense of responsibility for one's conscience. In this sense the book is puritanical.”
Hoggart clearly had fun with this - and Griffith-Jones was, it seems to me, an appropriate figure to have fun with. In his closing address he asked the jurors whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the kind of book they would leave lying around for their wives or servants to read…
But, back to the topic in hand - it is exactly Lawrence’s tub-thumping puritanism and proselytising which makes his novels unreadable to me. Reading and writing are, for me, essentially attempts at exploration. Perhaps it is my own invincible pig-headedness (to which my school teachers would have wearily attested), but I don’t want to be told what to think, I want to discover it. And that is why I write - and why next week I’ll be writing about exploration.