“I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a di“I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"
Utah’s Reed Smoot was speaking to the 1930 Senate. To demonstrate just how filthy they were, he’d threatened to read from Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Honore de Balzac's Droll Tales, the poetry of Robert Burns, the Kama Sutra� The place was packed. Unfortunately, he was bluffing.
“I'd rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books.�
Opium? Really? So I sat myself down to read. And it was dull. I tried to make myself concentrate on the ideas, consider the times, you know, act my age. But it was so� so� wordy. That seems a strange complaint to make of a book, but seriously � where was the sex? As it turns out, this book isn’t about sex. Well, it is and it isn’t. To me it spoke of wholeness. Lawrence originally titled it Tenderness and that’s what Lady Chatterley’s lover, Mellors, struggles with. Against war, against the endless pursuit of money, against the hardness of life, he strives to protect the tenderness within. He wants to be whole. But hiding from the world � from living � doesn’t satisfy. Constance Chatterley values the mental over the physical in relationships until that’s all she has. And then it’s not enough. As her own father remarks to her husband, it doesn’t suit her to be a demi-vierge. “She’s not the pilchard sort of little slip of a girl, she’s a bonny Scotch trout.�
Being a soft, ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling, brown hair, and a soft voice and rather strong, female loins she was considered a little old-fashioned and “womanly�. She was not a “little pilchard sort of fish,� like a boy. She was too feminine to be quite smart.
Constance and Mellors are throw-backs, more fully female and male than their acquaintances. They don’t fit in modern society. Being more trout than pilchard in appearance myself, I think this is lovely. But Lawrence is getting at something else here. (Why? Where is the SEX??) We’re back to that old theme of metrosexuals ruining the world. Or Man versus Machine. Or agrarian values beset by�
Ah, but here it is! “I love that I can go into thee,� Mellors tells her (This is it! The sex!) but he means more than that. (Of course he does. Good God. Does the man ever stop thinking? It’s annoying and I kind of like it and that annoys me all the more.) What he means is that he can lose himself in her. He can stop thinking about what it all means and worrying where it’s taking them. There’s just female reveling in male and man exulting in woman. In sex, by giving themselves up wholly to one another they become whole.
Finally! The sex!
Okay, I can see why Senator Smoot might not want this lying out where his kids could find it. There are words. Not just that wordy nonsense in the beginning that so perfectly proved to me Lawrence’s point that the mind is not enough. Other words. Shocking words that Lawrence batters you with until they seem ordinary and natural. Yes, there’s sex. Not the forthright, anatomically descriptive eroti� okay, well maybe there� and here, on page 224� and, um� yeah. It's pretty blatant. There’s also the gibberish about Lady Jane and John Thomas and at least one paragraph of conversation with John Thomas. But. For the most part I thought it fairly moving. The expressions may be outdated, but the emotions are not. Constance is trapped in a world where she doesn’t belong, a world where she can not truly live. Afraid of losing that essential part of him, which is not the testosterone driven manliness we imagine, but a more tender one, Mellors has refused to live.
Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his books. She entertained� there were always people in the house. Time went on as the clock does, half-past eight instead of half-past seven.
And then it began again. Life. And this is what will save us from the coldness of the world: life. Blood coursing in our veins, tenderness and feeling for others, “warm-hearted fucking�.
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