Lady Chatterley’s Lover (thoughts)

Let’s kick off Banned Books Week with a review, shall we? I signed up for the Banned Books Challenge, which involved me reading one banned book during September. But being me, I came up with four options, and the only one of those I won’t have read by the end of this week is The Perks of Beings a Wallflower, because I’m #13 or something on the library’s hold list (yay for popular banned books!). First I read Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, and you can read my gushing review here. Next up this week is Rudolpho Anaya’s coming-of-age classic Bless Me Ultima.

But for now, we are talking about D.H. Lawrence and possibly his most infamous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A little backgroud. Before I started blogging, Lawrence was on my mental list of ‘Scary classic authors I don’t want to read.’ I’m not sure why, but there you go! Then towards the end of 2007 Imani of the now-defunct Books of My Numberless Dreams hosted an Outmoded Authors challenge, where we read books by authors who used to be popular and aren’t anymore. Lots of participants seemed drawn to Lawrence, and that softened me up. (As a side note, I loved that challenge! Someone should bring it back! I made the buttons, so feel free to use them if you want to host!) Then last year (for Banned Books Week!), Nymeth reviewed Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She was so enthusiastic, I decided to give Lawrence a try and asked for a short story recommendation. She suggested “Daughters of the Vicar, which I read and loved back in January. At that point, I knew I’d read one of Lawrence’s novels this year. Flash forward to me making my Banned Books Challenge list-I wanted to keep the books under 250 pages since the challenge only lasts a month. On Amazon, this was listed as 272 pages, which was close, so I decided to go for it.

I’m telling you all of this first because I love finding out why people read the books they do, but more importantly so you can know my expectations going in, because they had a large impact on how I read the book. Here they were:

1. It would have a late nineteenth-century setting and style to it.
2. It would pretty short.
3. There wouldn’t be that much sex in it, especially not to my modern sensibilities.

Imagine my surprise when I picked it up at the library and found that in the Modern Library hardcover edition the text itself is 457 pages long (it also includes the US judge’s decision on a court case brought by the publisher agains the Post Office for refusing to deliver unexpurgated copies of the book). I can only imagine the book I looked at on Amazon was one of the edited versions (and now that I look it up on Powell’s, it’s listed at 400 pages. Yet another reason to prefer Powell’s!). So if you’re planning on reading the book, and it’s not significantly longer than 300 pages, you’re probably not reading the full edition!

So when I actually began reading it, and it wasn’t reading super-fast, I was a little confused. My mind was expecting a short book that I wouldn’t spend hours on, so it took awhile to adjust my reading and not be impatient.

My biggest shock was that this is very much a Lost Generation book. It’s set post-WWI (the husband Lady Chatterley, or Connie as she’s mainly called, has been paralysed from the waist down during that war), and the style isn’t anything like “Daughters of the Vicar.” Now I’ve looked it up and discovered that this novel was published a full 14 years after the story collection that include “Daughters,” but when I began reading I thought this would be early Lawrence. Once again, it took me awhile to adjust my expectations.

Now on to that last expectation. Darlings, this is the first banned book I’ve read that I fully understand why people in the 20s sought to ban it. Not that I encourage that sort of behavior, and not that I found it pornographic per se, but sex plays a large role in the novel. I wouldn’t call it gratuitous, since the book is all about relationships, and some of those relationships are borne out through sex. But I haven’t encountered this many sex scenes since my mom had me read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series! And the characters talk about sex a lot as well. The language is very direct; here are some quotes (I’m using astericks to prevent creepy internet searches ending up at my blog)

“You do believe in love then, Tommy, don’t you?”
“You lovely lad!” said Tommy. “No, my cherub, nine times out of ten, no! Love’s another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with swaying waists f*cking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks, like two collar studs! Do you mean that sort of love? Or the joint-property, make-a-succes-of-it, My-husband-my-wife sort of love? No, my fine fellow, I don’t believe in it at all!”
“But you do believe in something?”
“Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy p*nis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady.”

“Th’art good c*nt, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ c*nt left on earth. When ter likes! When th’art willin’!”
“What is c*nt?” she said.
“An’ doesn’t ter know? C*nt! It’s three down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.”
“All on’t,” she teased. “C*nt! It’s like f*ck then.”
“Nay, nay! F*ck’s only what you do. Animals f*ck. But c*nt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter? ever ter f*ck! C*nt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass.”
She got up and kissed him between the eyes that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unbearably beautiful.

I picked these two dialogues for a reason, besides the amount of direct language in them. Throughout the book, at one point I’d be happily surrounded by Lawrence’s beautiful language, as in the latter selection. And then suddenly there’d be a bit that had me rolling my eyes and thinking of adolescent boys, like in the former (or in some of the sex scenes, which are often described from Connie’s point of view and which I sometimes thought ‘only a man would write that’). The phrase “that bitch goddess success” was used at least ten times and every time my hackles rose. I’m not sure if these parts of Lawrence’s writing felt hackneyed at the time. Probably not, in fact, since the Roaring Twenties were the first really ‘modern’ decade. But as a twenty-first century reader, I was not impressed by character’s ‘insights’ into love, sex, or money.

Fortunately, most of the time, Lawrence’s prose is beautiful and introspective. Take this:

She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oak-wood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.

Doesn’t it take your breath away?

In addition to marvelous visual imagery, Lawrence’s other strength is almost exhaustively analysing the relationships between people. The main characters in the book are Connie, her husband Clifford, and later her lover Mellford and his nurse/caretaker Mrs. Bolton. The way that history, attitudes, social class, affection, etc. all combine to make the characters interact with each other, and how those interactions and relationships change over time (the book covers quite a stretch of time in the beginning, with several years flying by, and then focuses on several months) is handled beautifully. I could sympathise with, in the literal sense of ‘enter into someone else’s feelings and thoughts’, all of them (Lawrence does a third person narrative that shifts focus, although it spends by far the most time on Connie), and I truly cared how the novel would end, what their various fates would be (and I loved the ending!).

So to sum up: the poor book had a lot going against it when I began, due to my misplaced expectations. However, Lawrence managed to overcome that, and I’m very glad I read this novel. I don’t think this is a perfect book, since the writing is uneven and at times unconvincing. But when Lawrence gets it right, which he does about 70% of the time, he gets it so perfectly right I want to quote whole pages to you. I don’t completely love this one the way I did “Daughters of the Vicar,” but I definitely want to read more of Lawrence in the future, and in a couple years I plan to reread this one. I have a feeling, the second time around I’ll end up adoring it. Even though I’m at 1500 words, so I’m going to stop, I haven’t talked about half of the things I’d like to-this would be a marvelous book club selection! (Plus, wasn’t Lawrence a cutie? I totally would have discussed the meaing of love and class with him.)

Have your expectations ever had a strong effect on how you read a book?