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Lady Chatterley’s Lover 79
The change in consciousness which would make Lady Chatterley’s
Lover acceptable as “tenderness” rather than “obscenity” is one that
the book itself desperately advocates, though at the same time taking
it to be impossible without the intervention of the “bad time” that
it announces as on the way. It seems certain that the changes of
consciousness which have in fact occurred to allow the free publication
of the book are not of a kind that Lawrence would have approved;
I expect he would have campaigned against the unrestricted use of a
word such as fuck in books and conversation. They can hardly be said
to have acquired a tender, let alone a numinous quality; acceptable in
common use, whether as expletives or as part of a genuinely sexual
language, they have no doubt also been restored to the bourgeois
bedroom; but they remain part of sex-in-the-head, or as instruments
of the wrong kind of letting go, which Lawrence detested equally,
as a betrayal of the self. Hence Mellors’ use of them, though it may
impress liberal bishops, strikes most people as a bit comic, doctrinaire
almost—at best the language of a lost paradise.
It may be that the whole attempt was misguided. The need, as
Lawrence saw it, was to avoid euphemisms which are in themselves
evidence of the sell-out of the passional to the intellectual; to restore
the words which belong to the old blood-consciousness. But insofar
as these words were secret and sacred, they had value as ritual profanities;
and so they became a part of the culture, proper to the expansive
movements of constricted lives—a fact reflected in the heavy use made
of them by soldiers and sailors, poor men in circumstances of sexual
privation. Perhaps a good society would use them only with great
semantic purity; but the history of our society, as Lawrence knew,
and the history of the words, also, were such that a lexical could not
induce a spiritual purgation. Lawrence must, as he wrote and rewrote
his story, have been partly conscious of this. The vile press reaction to
the book, as represented by the hysteria of his old enemy John Bull,
cannot have surprised him; nor, I suspect, would the knowledge that
for thirty years after publication this innocent work was converted, by
the minds of furtive purchasers, into precisely the pornography that
he so abhorred. More recently we have come, now that it has sold its
paperback millions, to find it tame, a reaction which would certainly
have shocked him just as much.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is about the need for a re birth of phallic
consciousness, and this is conceived, in a familiar Lawrencian way,