Classic revisited Erotic
Masterpiece Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I didn’t understand Lady Chatterley’s Lover the first time I read it. Or, perhaps more accurately, I didn’t understand DH Lawrence. Te writing seemed overwrought to me, and the emotions untrustworthy. I had no sense, aged 20 (how could I?), of what it might be like to be Connie, trapped in a stultifying marriage where ardour has died but no one is to blame. Or of how trapped you may feel by prevailing social mores and how deep the yearning could be to jump the fence. I didn’t have a clue that it can take several decades to begin to understand your own desires and the ways in which they are best sated. I hadn’t yet fully experienced the strange seesawing of intimacy, followed by momentary alienation, that can happen in the most intense love affairs. I thought it mawkish when the gamekeeper Mellors arranged wild flowers in his lover’s pubic hair – although later I would come to see it as one of the most erotic moments in literature. My awakening to Lawrence’s masterpiece happened in 2011,
courtesy of Sebastian Faulks, who was fronting a BBC series on great fiction. I was asked to appear on the episode entitled “Te Lover” to discuss Britain’s most notorious work of erotic fiction. Te book that inspired a prosecuting counsel to say in the famous 1960 obscenity trial: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Te novel I read aged 43 was not the novel I’d read over half a lifetime ago and I suddenly understood why Faulks praised it so highly. Tat’s the curious thing about truly excellent writing: it reveals itself in ever more profound and startling ways each time you re-read it. I was amazed by the way Lawrence captured Connie’s mercurial shiſts of consciousness during sex and Mellors’ instinctive understanding of her needs. When she was swept down deep under conscious thought by the tidal force of her feelings, I sank with her: “And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass.” Most startling of all, I was aroused by the earthy detonation of
the word “cunt” in the woodland bower; as fitting in mid-life as it was embarrassing when I was young. I knew by this time in my life that the best sex crosses boundaries and embraces the forces that shock us. Furthermore, the prohibitions of social class explored in the novel still seemed alive in British society, it was just that the specific battle lines had shiſted. How curious that a novel first published in 1928 should still electrify its readers. Even though the ravishing illustrations by “Schen” (real name Raoul Serres) shown here were published in an illicit 1950’s edition, before everyone’s wife and servant could read a copy.
08 The Amorist May 2017
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