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D.H. Lawrence
the oppressive Sir William Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary. A
Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, an expansion of My Skirmish with
Jolly Roger (1929), was published in the last year of Lawrence’s life.
It’s importance is that Lawrence must here, in the process of justifying
his unconventional novel, express his sense of cultural and sexual crisis,
and his recommendations as to conduct, with little aid from myth
or metaphysic. His “honest, healthy book” (Phoenix II, 489)—so he
describes Lady Chatterley—is a contribution to that evolved culture in
which taboo and superstition, obscurity and violence, will have been
eliminated from our thinking about sex. Not, he says, that we should
necessarily increase sexual activity; but there must be clear thinking
about it, even by those whose role is to abstain. And this calls for
improvements in sexual education, for the benefit not only of those
tragically ignorant of sex, but also of “the advanced youth” who “go
to the other extreme and treat it as a sort of toy to be played with, a
slightly nasty toy” (491). The “perversion of smart licentiousness” is no
better than the perversion of Puritanism” (492). We live in a world
of fake sexual emotion; only true sex can change it. “When a ‘serious’
young man said to me the other day: ‘I can’t believe in the regeneration
of England by sex, you know,’ I could only say, ‘I’m sure you can’t.’ He
had no sex anyhow. . . . And he didn’t know what it meant, to have any”
(496). To such young people sex is at best the “trimmings,” thrills and
fumbling. Real sex seems to them barbaric.
Lawrence believes in fidelity as essential to good sex, and therefore
in indissoluble marriage; the sacramentality of marriage is the greatest
boon of the Church, a recognition of a balance and a rhythm which is
reflected in the liturgy and binds sex to the seasons. But the marriage
has to be phallic, the column of blood in the valley of blood, the
remaking of Paradise. It is not to be a union of “personalities,” a nervous
indulgence, “frictional and destructive” (Phoenix II, 507). Such sex will
certainly not regenerate England. What is required is not a logos, a
Word, but rather a Deed, “the Deed of life” (510). Only thus may we
be restored to a healthy relation with the cosmos. Buddha, Plato, Jesus
cut us off from life; we have to get back to ancient forms, Apollo,
Attis, Demeter, Persephone; to the threefold relationship of man and
universe, man and woman, man and man. The isolation of “personality”
(typified by Clifford Chatterley) “the death of the great humanity of
the world” (513) is what must end; the restoration of a phallic language
was the means chosen in Lawrence’s last novel to bring this about.