Sex and Gamekeeping
What panic in poets’ breasties did Auden cause when he wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen”! Overnight, I am unreliably informed, poets in their thousands wept like a downpour in the tropics and decided that it was time to ditch their pens and apply for a job with Amazon.
Of course, Auden was right. For if poetry could change anything would the world be in the pickle it is in today? I think continually of those who were truly horrified by war and said so. Did the poems of Owen, Brooke, Sassoon, Graves, Thomas et al stop future generations wanting to annihilate their neighbours? If only they had. Imagine Putin reading a poem - not easy, I admit - and then telling his generals that he’d had an epiphany and that they should retreat from Ukraine tout de suite.
But what about fiction? According to John Sutherland in his introduction to a new edition of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Everyman’s Library), “novels that manifestly change society rarely happen”. Lady Chatterley is one of two novels - the other is Nineteen Eighty-Four - that Sutherland believes “have, incontrovertibly, altered worldview and, one can plausibly claim, the world itself”.
My immediate reaction to this was: of what other novels might this be said? First, and perhaps foremost, were several by Dickens, including Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, Oliver Twist and Hard Times, which highlighted poverty, cruelty, horrendous schools and legal malpractice. Meanwhile Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) impacted significantly on Americans’ attitude to the slave trade. Among its millions of readers was Abraham Lincoln who, on meeting its author at the White House, said: “So this is the little lady who made this big war?”
One could make a case, too, for Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914), the house painters’ bible, which left-leaning politicians often cite as formative and which, it has been argued, was a decisive factor in Labour’s landslide victory in the 1945 General Election. Nor, I’d suggest, can we discount Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which continues to inflame passions among those in a permanent state of inflammation.
The case for the transformative power of Lady Chatterley rests much on its banned status. Even in the 1980s, when I worked as a librarian in Edinburgh, copies of it were kept in a locked glass case, along with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, car manuals and guides to tropical fish. Why were books on these subjects not openly accessible? Two reasons: while Chatterley and Portnoy were deemed pornographic, books on keeping fish and fixing cars were “liable to walk”.
Originally published in 1928, Lawrence’s most explicit novel was unavailable to most readers for more than three decades. In 1960, at a trial in the UK, it was finally acquitted of the charge of obscenity. One of the defence witnesses, notes Sutherland, was the Bishop of London who testified that the acts of love - i.e. sex - in Chatterley were acts “of holy communion”. You do not need a novelist’s imagination to appreciate what the tabloids made of that. Nevertheless, the verdict went in literature’s favour and the novel became a belated and phenomenal bestseller for Penguin.
Rereading it, I found much to ponder, and not just the sex scenes. In one memorable passage, her ladyship ventures into a wood where she has an assignation with her lover Mellors. “Perhaps,” she thinks, “this was one of the unravished places. Unravished! The whole world was ravished. Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that; and men. But the earth…” Where did those sardines come from?
Set in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the novel has three principal (and rather loathsome) characters: Constance Chatterley, her husband Sir Clifford, a former combatant paralysed from the waist down, and Oliver Mellors, their lusty gamekeeper. Though it is obviously a novel ‘about’ sex it also says a lot about Britain in the years immediately after the war. Class is another of its main themes. In that respect, while Sir Clifford appears to be happy for his wife to have sex with someone else, that someone else ought not to be beneath her. If you see what I mean.
A final thought. In 1959, on the republication of Lady Chatterley in the US, Field & Stream magazine ran a review praising it for its many passages “on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper”.
But?
“Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping*.”
* This book does not exist.