BOOKS

Lawrence's Evils

By D. W. HARDING

ONE of the tasks for criticism now, thirty-odd years after Lady Chatterley's Lovers was written, is to distinguish between the social symbol it has been and the novel it still is. An artist like Lawrence, a challenger, finds himself fulfilling a role that his society itself helps to define: his seemingly independent work is to some extent directed by, because directed against, barriers of convention whose strength is due to be tried. Their social testing over the last thirty years culminated in the late prosecution. His book was ideal for a test case through its free- dom from the taint of pornography. The porno- grapher wants the conventions maintained— otherwise the price of his contraband would fall —white, the challenger wants so to change con- vention that after a time it takes an effort of historical, imagination to see what all the fuss was about, as it does now with Ghosts or with Manet's Olympe.

But we have to be clear what changes Law- rence did and did not aim at. He was not trying to sweep away all the reticences and bring taboo words and detailed accounts of sexual intercourse into everyday conversational currency. The taboo words have a specially complex function in the book. They are used not by the narrator but between the lovers as part of their intimate com- munication about what they do. We may ask, why make them use words at all? and if they must, why those words? By making them talk together of their physical relation Lawrence emphasises that even as intelligent, thinking people they are completely committed to it, not • holding their minds aloof and waiting to pick up the civilised threads again when the primitive act is finished. Sex as an interlude for the intel- lectual was Lawrence's abhorrence. But if the lovers use words at all, they must be words other than the neutral terms of the biologist, for those, with their deliberate non-emotionalism, would be false to the excitement and psychological signi- ficance of the experience. As Lawrence indicates, the taboo words not only have their obscene currency for swearing and sniggering, but also retain traces, especially among working people, of being used seriously, not freely in general talk but still without obscene intention; and it is to this use that Mellors introduces Connie.

The fact, however, that for us the obscene uses are the more prominent allows Lawrence to insist at the same time on the threat to the lovers—to all lovers—represented by the social attitudes that have made sex shameful and given the words their obscene force. He shows that in the full love relation those associations, strong as they are, can be overpowered, even though, as Mellors reminds Connie, they are reinforced by embar- rassment over the proximity of the sexual to the excretory organs. It suited his purpose that the folk-rotted words should be outside everyday currency, for he wished sex to remain 'taboo' in * LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER. By D. H. Lawrence. (Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.) the primitive sense of being something of intense power and therefore dangerous unless ap- proached in the proper way. Consequently the effect of the- impolite words is quite different here from that produced, for instance, when Lawrence Lipton uses one of them as the ordinary term for copulation in reporting the love-life of his beatniks, those outcasts from the nursery, banded together and sucking ritually on their marihuana comforters, whose attitude to sex would have made Lawrence spew.

As for the explicit descriptions of intercourse, their chief necessity lies in Lawrence's conviction that the quality of the sexual act—not. the more fact that intercourse has occurred—is crucially important and expresses the quality of the lovers' wider relation with each other. Without it the extreme difference between Lady Chatterley's ordinary, rather silly adultery with Michaelis and her relation with Mellors would not be evident. Similarly, Mellors's account of his unsatisfactory sexual relations with other women is needed in order to show that what he was now engaged in was supremely different, and to bring it into the category of the monogamous relation that Mrs. Bolton is made to specify in the light of her own marriage:

Once you've been really fond of a man, you can be affectionate to almost any man, if he needs you at all. But it's not the same thing. You don't really care. 1 doubt, once you've really cared, if you ever really care again.

Although the explicit sexual descriptions are central to Lawrence's purpose it can be objected, I think fairly, that fewer of them would have been sufficient, even though they do show variants of mood, with different degrees of passion, playfulness or quieter physical com- panionship. An element of narcissism or ex- hibitionism seems to enter with some of Mellors's speeches and in the decoration of the lovers' bodies with flowers from the wood (though that has its symbolic value). At these moments Law- rence is in danger of making the events 'sexual' in his special derogatory sense: 'Sex is a thing that exists in the head, its reactions are cerebral, and its processes mental.' The trace Of ex- hibitionism, the frequency of the sexual scenes, the man's unusual degree of potency and the 'perversions' on the last night in the cottage (Lawrence here is as discreetly allusive as the most respectable of novelists) come in the end to suggest less a real and satisfying experience of sex than a fantasy springing from disappoint- ment or privation, like the imagined meals of explorers or prisoners of war which outrun the realities of appetite.

The other doubt about the sexual part of the novel arises from the small degree of contact between the lovers in any way except through sex. Early in the book Connie argues against a man friend who says that loving a woman and liking and talking to her are mutually exclusive. '"It isn't true," she said, "Men can love women

and talk to them. I don't see how they can

love them without talking, and being friendly and intimate."' But her relation with Mellors starts from sex, when 'She, poor young thing, was just a young female creature to him,' and at several crucial points her lack of any close knowledge of him is deliberately emphasised and her adoration unexplained by anything other than his fulfilment of her deep physical needs.

'He lay there with his arms around her.. .

And completely unknown.' When she asks a question he evades answering; 'And she knew that he would never tell her anything he didn't want to tell her.' Her sister, whose marriage has failed, had wanted 'a complete intimacy,' and Connie thinks

that meant revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing

everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that weary self-consciousness be- between a man and a woman! a disease!

In spite of this some emphasis is placed on the fact that Mellors is educated and presentable, and after a night at the cottage Connie saw he had a shelf with some books: She looked. There were books about bol- shevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron, another about the composition of the earth's core, and the causes of earthquakes: then a few novels: then three books on India. So! he was a reader after all. It looks as though Lawrence thought it well not to rely exclusively on sex when he sent them off on their life together beyond the end of the book.

I think he raises and evades a problem here in the question of the part played by sex in the

full relation between a man and a woman. Ho

sees that a faulty sex relation points to flaws in the personality of the lovers or their attitude

to each other—anxious greed, a struggle for

power between them, self-distrust, desiccation, a withholding or qualification in the mutual sur- render. But he seems to regard it as a cause rather than an index of the more general failure, and at least his dimmer devotees have some excuse if they take him to be advocating good sex relations as a cure of other ills.

For all the importance of the sexual theme, it would be a grotesque mistake to think of the novel as merely an exercise in writing about sex. Sex is there because in Lawrence's quasi- religious outlook it provided the one great posi- tive and good with which he could oppose the great evils which the book is at least equally about. They are summed up in industrialism and expressed through it, though Lawrence is not at his best in seeking their causes in industry, and Mellors's daydream (half-apologetic, it is true) of redeeming the miners by ,making them display themselves in red trousers and exist on a minimum of money is an absurdity. But there is tremendous power in the symbol Lawrence makes of the industrial Midlands. The setting of the story, the material and social setting in the coal and iron area, is sombrely convincing.

All through the story there runs the tension be- tween the gamekeeper's wood, responsive to natural powers of storm and sun, spring and re- current life, and the encroaching pits and furnaces.

The social setting provides the other pervasive tension in the novel, the tension of class, and here Lawrence is at his most observant and ac- curate in showing the complications of feeling on both sides. In contact with Mellors the upper

classes come off worse, notably in the fine scene where Sir Clifford, overbearing' and powerless, is let down by his stubbornness and conceit in

expecting too much of his mechanical chair, and Mellors has to exhaust himself to get his master going again. But Mellors is given no illusions about the working people from whom he has sprung. The balance is kept. The tension is there all the time and creates one of the difficulties the lovers have to overcome through their per- sonal relation.

Some of the subtler aspects of the situation are presented admirably in the relation between Sir Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, the nurse who gains a strong maternal hold on him. But Sir Clifford himself is so overloaded a symbol as to seem in the end beyond belief. He carries nearly all Lawrence's negatives. His physical impotence is only part of the great wound done to his emotional life by the war; he hardly regrets it, he regards the body as an encumbrance. Early in the book he wins success by writing stories, 'clever, rather spiteful, and yet,, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact.' He is an assiduous worshipper of 'the toktch-goddess, success,' first through his writing and then (with a switch that badly breaks his continuity as a character) as an industrial magnate, actively directing his mines, 'with a hard efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior.' For the purposes of the story he has to be emotionally dependent on his wife in a way that never becomes quite con- vincing. His submission to Mrs. Bolton and his abject collapse on her in the end are much easier to accept. The only one of the great nega- tives he does not embody is 'enjoyment,' repre- sented at its most vulgar in the 'good time' Michaelis offers Connie—' "Dress, jewels up to a point, any night-club you like, know anybody you want to know, live the pace. . . ." '

Lawrence's evils are as formidable now as they were then. Against them he sets his positive value of full and faithful sexual love and the possibility he saw there of continued contact with the springs of natural life. We may think the wider personal context of the sexual act has more importance than Lawrence seemed to allow, and we may not see in the fully shared joy of the primitive relation the mystical signi- ficance which he gave it. But that was his faith. It was his determined effort to get it stated once and for all, in the form in which he understood it, that led him to challenge the proprieties of his time.