DH Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In 1960 you might have been forgiven for thinking “Lady Chatterley”s Lover’ was the only book Lawrence had written.
After being thrown out of Cornwall in October 1917, Lawrence and Frieda headed back to London, followed by a short break, for Lawrence, in Derbyshire. Soon after the Armistice of 1918 new passports arrived for them both, with Frieda immediately taking-off for her mother’s home in Metz. Lawrence stayed behind to deal with the publication of a new collection of poems. In December 1918 he joined Frieda in Germany. After Christmas the couple headed south for Rome. Their nomadic lifestyle had begun.
In those peripatetic years after World War One Lawrence wrote some of his most thoughtful, angry, and beautiful books, most notably Women in Love (1920), which was a sequel to The Rainbow, where he’d first introduced the tantalising Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, who are, without question, two of the strongest, and most appealing, women in 20th century English literature. In 1921 came several essays and travel pieces for various magazines and journals. 1922 saw the publication of Aaron’s Rod, followed by more essays, and perhaps his finest collection of short stories, England My England. The following year saw the publication of his most disturbing novel, Kangaroo, which, in essence, is an essay on the power and attraction of fascism. Lawrence also published a collection of wonderful poetry entitled, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. The years 1924 and 1925 saw more essays, stories, and his strange co-written novel(with M.L.Skinner), The Boy in the Bush.
1926 saw Lawrence start his most controversial novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which progressed slowly. By the May of that year Lawrence and Frieda had moved into the Villa Mirenda, situated at San Polo, just to the southwest of Florence. They rented the top half of the villa for £25 a year. Lawrence described the place as big, bare and comfortless.
He did little writing that spring, which may have been because he was nervous as to the reception of his latest novel, The Plumed Serpent.
And he was right to be nervous: it was not well received at all, with the Times Literary Supplement describing it as “rather feeble…”, with P.C.Kennedy of The New Stateman labelling it as “negative, barren, and empty”. If we read the novel today it is, as it was then, a beautifully crafted piece of work that was obviously beyond the critics of the day. Lawrence vowed he would never again write a novel, which is a bit like saying a fish will avoid water.
The poet and biographer, Richard Aldington, visited Lawrence in the autumn of 1926, whose good company, and continuous encouragement, undoubtedley inspired Lawrence to continue with Lady Chatterley’s Lover; which is a novel, according to Aldington, that was probably inspired by a motoring trip Lawrence had made to Nottingham in 1925, where he’d had a high old time at the Goose Fair.
Lawrence wrote and re-wrote very quickly, and we know that the novel went through three versions before Lawrence was happy with it. And because of its explicit sexual content he also realised that his regular publisher would be unable to take it on. So, with the novel finished Lawrence decided to publish the book himself and “earn myself a thousand pounds, which I can do very well with…”.
Eventually Lawrence found a printer in Florence – Giuseppe Orioli – who was prepared to print and bind the book. Lawrence placed an order for a thousand copies, which he then planned to sell by private subscription for 2gns (£2.10) each. And such was Lawrence’s bargaining skills that Orioli – who had become joint publisher – agreed that Lawrence could take 90% of the profit.
With the book published, and the Villa Mirenda looking more like a warehouse, all went well with orders coming in from Lawrence’s many friends in Britain – most especially the Bloomsbury Set – and America. Lawrence packed and posted the books himself, and the money started coming in. But as always happens word got out that a salacious publication was being sent through the public postal systems. Customs officers in Britain and the US began to seize copies, as they had done with James Joyce’s Ulysses just a few years before.
But Contance Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover were out of the bag, and it wasn’t long before pirated copies started appearing in Germany, as well as the US. The first commercial, and heavily abridged, version appeared in Britain in 1932, becoming an instant best-seller, although the readers must have wondered what all the fuss had been about.
But in 1960 you might have been forgiven for thinking that the only book Lawrence had ever written was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and only then because of the Old Bailey obscenity trial, where the prosecuting council, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones, asked the all male jury (they’d been allowed to read the unexpurgated version) if they would allow “their wives or servants to read such a book?”. That pompous, class-ridden statement, plus a fine defence by such barristers as John Mortimer QC, ensured Penguin Books won the day. It was a landmark decision that helped liberate not only the mainstream publishing industry and the film industry, but also society itself. It heralded in the Swinging Sixties.
When Penguin published the unexpurgated version on the 10th of November, 1960, 200,000 copies were sold in the UK on that one day alone.
Sadly, Lawrence never experienced the kind of free society he’d always dreamed of, a society that welcomed sich novels as his, and when he died in France, at the Villa Robermond, on the 2nd of March, 1930, aged just 44, he was an extremely unhappy and unfulfilled man.
Read the other parts of this series on Lawrence.
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