When I read the novel for the first time, I was bemused by the in-your-face tone of the narrator, who is even given to exclamatory comments: ‘But that is how men are!’ — ‘But Emma said No!’ — ‘Yes, she sat there!’ — ‘More violent sobs — self-conscious!’ Could one expect anything very profound from such a story teller? But Lawrence knew what he was doing. The tone clears the air and increasingly identifies with Lady C.’s own untrammelled responses to her environment. And as she ceases to be ‘Constance’ and becomes ‘Connie’, so the narrator calms down into that affection, compassion, empathy and understanding of her that are so moving.
* * *
Is it likely that mine owner, ‘first lieutenant in a smart regiment’ and ruling class bastard Clifford Chatterley could become a successful writer of short stories? Well, no; there is nothing in the pre-novel of chapter 1 that suggests he has any interest in or talent for creative writing whatsoever. Lawrence can make it happen before our eyes, however, because he understood so well what made a fashionable writer of his time: ‘That slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end’, as Connie sees it, and ‘a display, a display, a display!’ The only examples of Chatterley’s writing that Lawrence gives are letters. ‘He wrote very good letters: they might have been printed in a book.’ Ouch! There is a brilliant example of Chatterley’s literary phoniness, when he writes that ‘sometimes the soul shoots like a kittiwake into the light, with ecstasy’. The kittiwake, poor bird, is used for mere display.
Kittiwake in flight: a beautiful bird, but a flashy image.
(BBC news)
* * *
The depth of Lawrence’s self-belief and seriousness of intent in this novel is borne out by the fact that he forgets to check whether his words could have a farcical meaning. ‘He [Michaelis] couldn’t keep anything up’, or ‘He [Mellors] was a thousand years older in experience, starting from the bottom’, are likely to be construed within the novel’s central context of sexuality rather than the particular context Lawrence intends. In other words, Lawrence has laid himself open to appearing humourless.
* * *
In 1982 I was reading and helping to order the residual papers of the novelist William Gerhardie (1895-1977) acquired by Cambridge University Library. I was particularly interested in any unpublished manuscripts of his relating to Chekhov, about whom he had written the first book in English (1923).
I came across a typescript of his account of visiting D.H. Lawrence at home in 1925 and was incredulous to read that Lawrence had told him he, Lawrence, was incapable of ‘satisfying’ a woman as he suffered from premature ejaculation. What? The foremost writer about heterosexual sex in the English language? Could this possibly be?
Gerhardie omitted the ‘fact’ from his Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931), but in God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940 (1981) he set it on record and related Lawrence’s condition to the excruciating, almost Expressionist episode in The Rainbow when Ursula attempts to obtain ‘consummation’ from Skrebensky as she lies in the sand hills ‘motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon’.
William Gerhardie, c.1930
I gather it is now accepted that Lawrence suffered from premature ejaculation and could not ‘satisfy’ a woman that way. It would explain his obsession with simultaneous orgasm in Lady Chatterley’s Lover — an odd obsession in today’s world, surely — but also Mellors’s somewhat basic technique. One cannot help hypothesising that Lawrence suffered from p.e. because he saw sex as a sacramental, almost religious act of ecstasy that couldn’t come fast enough, so to speak, once he had embarked on it. The Lawrentian (purely male) conception of sexual climax as sacramental/religious (i.e. virtually spiritual rather than physical) might explain why Skrebensky, Michaelis and Mellors are bitter about their partners not achieving it, rather than blaming themselves (the men).
Mellors’s attention to Connie’s body is wonderful (she herself thinks: ‘he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been’). But does Lawrence intend Mellors’s very juicy use of the ‘c’ and ‘f’ words, and the gamekeeper’s penchant for ‘tail’, to imply there is something superior about Mellors’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ brand of sex?
‘He [Mellors] hated mouth-kisses.’ Why? Nothing, it seems, changes more quickly and is more personal than sexual mores; and this makes the novel peculiarly ‘dated’, or historical, and difficult to discuss today. (It’s a sex and gender minefield!)
* * *
Doris Lessing’s introduction (2006) to the current Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is challenging and in my view superb. She relates how she came to see it as ‘one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written’:
It is not that once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Two defenceless people, their lives already wounded by war, fly into each other’s arms, fugitives from such horrors, trying to find a little safe place, like small animals fleeing from a forest fire, the wings of flame already close behind them [i.e. of the Second World War].
I admit that, unlike Women in Love, whose narrative ends before 4 August 1914, the First World War is responsible for much of the state of things in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Clifford’s injury, Mellors’s restlessness and extreme alienation, the terrible debasement of values and words apprehended by Connie in the passage quoted first in Damian Grant’s preceding post. Lawrence’s own description and diagnosis of PTSD is masterly. But I don’t agree that the war is the central theme. We are explicitly informed at the end of chapter 1 that Clifford Chatterley had been ‘virgin when he married [unlike Connie]: and the sex part did not mean much to him’, nor had Connie’s sexuality been awoken by her experiences with German men. This was all true of them before the War, and is the crux of the problem. The central theme remains the new, or as Lawrence expressed it, ‘phallic’ marriage that the novel actually celebrates. ‘Where there is real sex, there is the underlying passion for fidelity’ (A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’).
* * *
I have now read the novel twice in swift succession and am struck by the parallels with Women in Love: Clifford Chatterley becomes as ruthless a mine-moderniser as Gerald Critch; Mellors is as anti-establishment, and as big a talker, as Rupert Birkin; the let-out for the lovers, as in Women in Love, is a trust fund that will give them a private income; at the close of Lady Chatterley’s Lover a phoney artist is exposed by Mellors in a way reminiscent of Ursula’s argument with Loerke in the earlier novel. In broad terms, Connie’s and Mellors’s love follows a similar curve to Birkin’s and Ursula’s, and is even described in similar language. When Connie achieves her perfect sexual fulfilment with Mellors, ‘it was the sons of god with the daughters of men’. In Women in Love ‘it was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God’. One wonders what had happened in the meantime for Lawrence to demote ‘God’ to ‘god’.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
I have been getting record daily hits for this and Damian Grant’s post, perhaps because of this recent article in ‘The Guardian’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/30/the-female-gaze-on-dh-lawrence . Unfortunately none of the visitors seems stimulated to Comment!