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Lady Chatterley’s Lover 89
one primary lie;” for example “the monstrous lie of money . . . Kill the
purity lie, and the money-lie will be defenceless” (Phoenix, 185). So
once again sexual reform is the key to cultural and economic reform.
Lawrence here has the consistency that a fully developed metaphysic
affords. And as usual in the midst of death he finds some hope of
rebirth; there is a minority, he ends, which “hates the lie . . . and
which has its own dynamic ideas about pornography and obscenity”
(186–87). One may doubt that the achievement of that minority—the
Obscenity Act of 1959 and its successors, the successful defense of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover but also of other books which Lawrence would
probably have wanted to censor—would have gratified him. But this
is part of the general truth that the revolution which has occurred
in our handling of the “dirty little secret” is hardly at all the revolution
Lawrence wanted. Our literary sex, like the pill and the modern
commune, would have had him once more prophesying the last days
and the need for rebirth. He always thought of the movies as a masturbatory
medium; he castigated them in The Lost Girl, in the late poem
“When I Went to the Film,” in which the audience is “moaning from
close-up kisses, black-and-white kisses that could not be felt” (Collected
Poems, 444) and in Pornography and Obscenity. It is not conceivable that
the sex-in-color of our cinema would have pleased him more. The
reason why he is so often called a Puritan is that he thought that sex
was the key to life and spiritual regeneration, and also that these were
solemn matters.
NOTES
1. Earl H. Brewster, in Edward H. Nehls, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A
Composite Biography, III, 135.
2. Edward H. Nehls, op. cit., I, 62.
3. See George W. Knight, “Lawrence, Joyce and Powys,” Essays
in Criticism, XI (1961) , and in Neglected Powers: Essays on
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (New York, 1971) ;
J. Sparrow, “Regina vs. Penguin Books,” Encounter, 101 (1962),
pp. 35–43; F. Kermode, “Spenser and the Allegorists,” British
Academy Warton Lecture, 1962, reprinted in Shakespeare,
Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (New York, 1971); George
Ford, Double Measure ; Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution; Mark
Spilka, “Lawrence Up-Tight,” Novel, IV (1971), pp. 252–67;