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78
D.H. Lawrence
In letters written when he was halfway through Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, Lawrence called it “the most improper novel ever written,” but
denied that it was pornography. “It’s a declaration of the phallic reality”
(Collected Letters, 1028). He knew no English printer would handle it,
and arranged for a private edition to be printed and published in Florence,
“the full fine flower with pistil and stamens standing” (1046).
He talked a great deal about this reassertion of the phallic as against
“cerebral sex-consciousness” (1047), asserting that, while “nothing
nauseates me more than promiscuous sex,” he wanted, in this novel,
“to make an adjustment in consciousness to the basic physical realities”
(IIII). His attitude, as he admitted, was Puritan; he respected natural
impulses but hated “that pathological condition when the mind is
absorbed in sex . . . It is true that Lawrence himself was possessed by
the subject of sex—but in what a different way! His possession was
like that of a doctor who wishes to heal.” 1 He was perfectly aware of
the trouble he would bring on himself by this last effort “to make the
sex relation valid and precious instead of shameful” (972). There is no
doubt that Lawrence, although he was later to be ill with bitterness
against his countrymen for their response to this and other late works,
intended to shock; that was part of the therapy.
He wanted to call the book John Thomas and Lady Jane, though
sometimes he preferred Tenderness. Tenderness, as he explained in a
letter already quoted, was to replace leadership as the quality most
necessary to the health of the world. But first it was necessary to
purge the very lexicon of sex. The four-letter words (which were still
occupying so much attention at the trial of 1960) were obscene, he
argued, only because of “unclean mental associations”: the important
task, then, was to “cleanse the mind,” to end the associations of fear
and dirt, to get rid of the taboo on such words.
The Kangaroo is a harmless animal, the word shit is a harmless
word. Make either into a taboo, and it becomes most dangerous.
The result of taboo is insanity. And insanity, especially mobinsanity,
mass insanity, is the fearful danger that threatens our
civilisation. . . . If the young do not watch out, they will find
themselves, before so very many years are past, engulfed in a
howling manifestation of mob insanity, truly terrifying to think
of. It will be better to be dead than to live to see it (Introduction
to Pansies, Complete Poems, 420).