OK. Behold the man aged 21 in nineteen eighty six.
And here we are over a century later, at the end of a line representing very crudely, according to my estimate, his popularity over time.
Those of you I don't know if anybody did came to my George Eliot lectures last term,
may remember I produced a similar graph for her reception history.
As in this as in that case, the line is crude in that it doesn't distinguish between academic and popular opinion,
between the popularity of the man and of his works, between different of his works with which he's been identified over time.
And it's concerned only with his reputation in England, which has some correlation with that in the States,
but far less so with that, for example, in China or Estonia.
Both George Eliot and Lawrence had a mid century slump,
although in Elliott's case it occurred slightly later in the early 1930s in Lawrences, it coincided with the war.
The feminist criticism of the 70s gave a slight knock to George Eliot,
who was contrasted to other writers are the female writers who were more solidly feminist.
But it gave a swingeing blow to Lawrence, from which I would argue he still hasn't recovered.
Still, in both cases, their reputation since 1980 has been gently on the rise, and new avenues of interpretation are still being opened.
During his own life, his popular and critical success was limited, in part by the difficulties he had with the very publication of his works.
The Rainbow was published on the 30th of September 1915 by Algernon Mathurin, who was then alerted that the chapter, called Shame,
in which Ursula has a sexualised relationship with her schoolteacher, Winifred might fall foul of the eighteen fifty seven Obscene Publications Act.
Matthew and therefore voluntarily withdrew the book and on November the third rendered to the authorities the remaining copies.
This hit Lawrence very hard and contributed to the mood in which he wrote Women in Love.
Its very title bites its thumb at the authorities, which defined representations of lesbianism as obscene.
The irony, of course, is that the novel itself judges its lesbian relationship to be corrupt so that the novel Being the Rainbow.
And here perhaps we have an example of that battle which has been fought in many times and cultures between those who show their disapproval of
something by representing it negatively and those who show their disapproval by repressing its representation under any circumstances at all.
The first version of Women in Love was completed in 1915,
and Lawrence described it to his agent Pinker as a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel.
You will hate it and nobody will publish it but that these things are beyond us.
He was right. Nobody would publish it. He was trying to publish an unpatriotic apocalypse during the First World War.
So his Ukrainian friend, Samuel Solomonov, Cuttle Jansky, suggested Russia as a possible place for its publication.
And it's interesting to imagine how it would have been received in translation
there a country which was far more obviously going through an apocalypse.
My guess is that it would have been very well received. Birkins vision of a world cleared of humanity and nothing but uninterrupted grass and a hair
sitting up is a moderate vision compared to what Russian avant garde artists were imagining,
both before and after 1917.
They created works of art which were not only meant to predict or advocate, but actually to take part in and constitute the apocalypse.
In December 1913, the year in which Lawrence began work on the sisters, that sprawling work which he then split into the rainbow and Women in Love,
the painter Malevich and fellow artists produced an opera called Victory over the Sun.
It ended up with the on stage extinction of the sun, which represented history and nature.
The actors then told the audience who had been forced to stand in the middle of the
room wearing happy masks to go home to Russia in 1915 was an environment in which,
if the paper could have been found for printing and that wouldn't have been easy.
Women in love would have been welcomed as my guests, but it was never pursued.
Instead, Lawrence rewrote the novel, the revised version,
which is now that which is now published under the name of Women in Love, differed from what you can now read.
And it's published under the name The First Women in Love in a number of ways.
The latter version is more influenced by esoteric reading.
It was more engaged with the wariness of what was the soon to be post-war generation.
It was more ironic the sisters were more contemptuous of the common people.
Crucially, its ending was less hopeful. The first version ended with the words, We needn't be like that.
This is Burkin. All is not lost because many are lost.
There's a First World War sentiment for you.
Donald Carswell, Katherine Carswell, husband and a lawyer read this version and was concerned that it would be vulnerable to charges of libel.
Lady Autoline morale compare with the visual description of her Maione in Women in Love.
Lady Autoline morale read a typescript and was greatly hurt to see what she understood to be a portrait of
herself in harmony with the usual irony in such cases that she saw that high minie represent resembled herself,
but argued that she did not resemble her, meaning the art, as Lawrence called her,
expressed her pain to many friends, and the affair caused a sensation in Bloomsbury.
She had the sympathy of others who also felt that Lawrence had unfairly attacked them, including her on off lover Bertrand Russell.
Lady Autoline and Lawrence were entirely estranged for 11 years.
In 1917, the same Algernon Mathurin, who had published and then recalled the Rainbow,
accepted the new version of Women in Love before in December 1917.
Revoking that decision again, Sir Lawrence set about changing it again,
notably in response to a threat of libel action from Lawrence's friend Hasseltine.
He changed the characters of Haliday and the Possum to disguise their resemblance to the actual hasseltine and his on off mistress,
the model Minnie Channing nicknamed the Puma.
So he called the person Minett, and he turned her from a brunette, which is what the puma was into a blonde.
And he made Haliday dark and slim, which he wasn't.
These changes have been reversed in the Cambridge edition, which is why you are presumably all familiar with the dark bobbed possum and a plump,
pale haliday lady afterlives husband threatened legal action but didn't proceed with it.
So finally, in November 1920, it was published, but not in England in the States by Thomas Seltzer,
the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took out an action against it,
but Seltzer won the case and Martin Secours Edition came out in England the following year.
In both countries, but especially America, the novel was a moderate popular success, and it changed his financial fortunes for the rest of his life.
The third and last novel, which had major problems with publication, was, of course, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
He wrote three versions of this, not only because he wanted to make changes, but because the first two versions were rejected.
He even had difficulties getting it typed. Same is true of Ulysses.
Of course, his typist got up to a certain point and then refused to go on.
So Catherine Caswell stepped in to type the secretary to take the rest of the first half.
And Maria Huxley, wife of Aldous Huxley, typed the second.
In the end, Lawrence got the third volume sorry, third version of his novel, privately published by Florentine publisher O'Rielly.
And then soon afterwards, a French publisher came out with a cheaper edition and then there were many pirated editions.
By nineteen twenty nine, British authorities were seising copies at the English ports,
the same year in which Lawrence gave the first and only exhibition of his paintings at Warren Gallery in Mayfair.
After a member of the of the public complained police seised 13 of the 25 paintings and held them in a police cell.
Lawrence was only able to recover them by undertaking not to show them in England again.
In the following year, he died, the obituaries, predictably, were mixed.
Then in the next year, 1931, John Middleton Murray published his psycho biography of Lawrence, son of Woman.
I mentioned this towards the end of the lecture on Lawrence and Christianity, but I didn't have then have time to say much about it.
It shouldn't be assumed that because this book was considered by Lawrence's friends to be an
act of betrayal that is in their eyes and Laurentian critic necessarily disapprove of it.
I think it's one of the most interesting and at times perceptive books about him that's ever been written.
But it is about him rather than his writings on their own terms.
His works are interpreted entirely as extensions of himself.
Lawrence is therefore the white peacocks, Cyril and Aníbal, and conversely, Aníbal is the key to Laurence.
The Psycho biographical biographical thesis is that Lawrence had an extraordinary capacity to love,
but he was frightened by this capacity and so he ran away from it and denounced it.
It also argues that Lawrence was physically frail and therefore unable to meet Frida's sexual demands.
It is rumoured that Freeda wanted to or did have an affair with Murray when she briefly returned from New Mexico to England on her own.
For both reasons, Murray argues, Lawrence's love turned to hate of himself, the world, sensuality, and especially women of women in love.
He Murray writes, I believe that Lawrence changed while Women in Love was actually being written,
that he really did mean to reject the way of sensuality and dissolution and that he succumbed to it in spite of himself.
He confused the two. He finds Fantasia of the unconscious to be Lawrence's greatest book,
but to be a high point that he couldn't hold, quote, at bottom, he was not concerned with art.
This fits with several Critics' comments during his life that he was not really a novelist,
he was a philosopher and or a poet, a point which was also made by contemporary critics of Emily Bronte.
So amongst Lawrence's novels, Murray views values Arun's Rhod most highly because in it,
Lawrence demonstrates some self-knowledge, including of his desire for a male partner.
From this point on, according to Murray, the power urge takes over.
This opinion in particular has been highly influential.
He denounces the stories the princess and the the woman who rode away as very bad stories in the plumed serpent, he says.
Lawrence rises again as Arama Rahman Carrasco and Lady Chatterley's Lover is Lawrence's creeping,
creeping back into the womb with a return to his old problems,
including precisely the mentalising version of sex which he tried so strongly to denounce in his response to the escaped cock or the man who died.
He pits Lawrence directly against Christ.
As I mentioned before, he says that Lawrence had nothing to teach people about how to deal with death and bereavement, whereas Jesus did.
Lawrence gradually disintegrated his own integrity and to recreate a quotation I gave before he
became the anti type of the man who is from the beginning and will be to the end his veritable hero,
Jesus Christ. Correspondingly, only Jesus can judge Lawrence because he loved, as Lawrence did, but overcame whatever fear he felt through Lawrence.
Then we learnt to know ourselves. Murray argues in a way in which men have never known themselves before.
If he was crucified as she surely was, it was for us that he was crucified.
The terms on which one agrees or disagrees with Murray will be large scale and will, of course, include ones attitudes towards Jesus.
But most critics today would argue that Murray made certain mistakes of interpretation and that he made several
perceptive points in the former category would be his assertion that Lawrence had no sense of humour and his
interpretation of Birkins demand for separateness as a demand for cold sensuality in the latter category would
fall Murray's understanding that Lawrence imaginatively endured the war and that it saturates his writings.
Some might also agree with his argument that Lawrence confused his own needs with general necessity.
Murray candidly states that his relationship with Lawrence was ultimately a painful failure.
He says that he set up the Adelphi magazine for Lawrence to take over from him,
but that when Lawrence returned from Mexico, his first words to Murray at the station were, I can't bear it.
He tried to convince Murray to go back to Mexico with him in order to found Rantanen there, but he returned to Mexico without him.
Their friendship over the book as a whole is very Laurentian.
He uses some of Lawrence's Lexus and he takes them entirely seriously.
Unlike some contemporary and subsequent critics, he does not mock.
He ends by saying this betrayal he puts it in inverted commas, was the one thing you lacked.
The one thing I had to give that you might shine forth for amongst men.
The thing of wonder that you were.
T.S. Eliot called the book brilliant and definitive and said that the victim and the sacrificial knife are perfectly adapted to each other.
Part of the background to this is that Murray and Eliot have been enemies running the rival journals, Adelphi and Criterium.
Elliott delighted to see his former enemy turn against his own former idol, someone he had always disliked.
Indeed, when E.M. Forster, in his obituary of Lawrence, had called him the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.
Elliot asked him to explain what he meant in that phrase by each of the world's greatest imaginative and novelist.
Faustus reply to this is a riposte, perhaps, to keep up your sleeve in the case of being similarly defeated in an argument
when you nonetheless remain convinced of the rightness of the opposition.
He argued that Elliott had entangled him in a web, but that on such occasions he would prefer to be a fly than a spider.
In a sense, Murray's book or did almost as much for Lawrence's reputation as harm to it by provoking others to leap to his defence.
One of these others was the young F.R. Leavis, who in any case thought that he discerned digs at him in this book.
Leavis had been had been a disciple of Elliotts,
but now he turned against him and along with a group of his fellow Cambridge students sympathetic to Lawrence,
set up a new journal as a rival to Elliotts Criterion. Some of the students wanted the title to be Phoenix, the Christian symbol of resurrection,
which Lawrence had adopted as his own in 1914 and repeatedly sketched.
But in the end, the title Adult adopted was less narrowly Laurentian.
It was scrutiny. In this journal, Leavis defended Lawrence with vigour.
Here was a man with the clairvoyance and honesty of genius whose whole living was an assertion of what the modern world has lost.
He particularly admired Lady Chatterley's Lover and the short stories, but was lukewarm about the rainbow and women in love.
In part, he was still Elliot's disciple.
The other defence came from Kathryn Carswell, who published The Savage Pilgrimage in 1932, like son of a Woman and indeed,
like much discussion of Lawrence in the 1930s, it was concerned less with Lawrence's art than with his soul.
It bravely vindicated Lawrence's sexual prowess and negatively praised the plumed serpent as his greatest novel.
If that sounds eccentric, she was not alone in this opinion.
E.M. Forster had made the same judgement in a radio broadcast two years before.
In the same year, Lawrence's late best friend, last best friend, Aldous Huxley, came out with an edition of his letters Leavis.
This, in reviewing these letters, commented that they showed that Lawrence was normal.
And this is a favourite of mine saying to the point of genius. This he also said that Lawrence was the greatest literary critic of his time,
this unnamed bullet was meant for Elliott, but he also made explicit attacks.
He said that Lawrence offered serious classicism as opposed to Elliotts classy osity, that Lawrence was life affirming.
T.S. Eliot was life denying.
In 1934, Frida's memoirs of Lawrence, made up largely of extracts from his letters, came out under the title Not I, but the Wind.
This is worth reading, particularly for its moving portrayal of Lawrence's death.
And in 1935, Jesse Chambers's memoirs came out, D.H. Lawrence, a personal record.
This is a useful complement to Frida's book because it covers the early years before he met her in the 30s.
Also saw many posthumous writings come out, particularly non-fiction, poetry and plays.
They included Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, sketches of Etruscan places and other Italian essays,
last poems, more Pansy's Fire and other poems and the plays.
The Fight for Barbara and a Collier's Friday night.
A lot of non-fiction, including a study of Thomas Hardy, was collected in a volume called Phoenix in 1936.
The fact that the the Laurentian Erva itself was changing affected how the works previously published were read.
In particular, the non-fiction was used to understand,
perhaps also to forgive aspects of the fiction which had been found incomprehensible or rebarbative.
The truth is the war. Lawrence had plenty to say about mechanical destruction, militarism and the First World War,
but not in a way that spoke to many people, it would seem, during the second.
He was also accused by some of Proteau fascism, for example.
But Bertrand Russell, who in nineteen fifty three claimed that Lawrence's writings had led, quote, straight to Auschwitz.
Having said this, Lawrence did have the support of certain prominent left wing cultural figures, including Ordon Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly,
during the war itself, resistance to Lawrence Moore took the form of marginalisation, then attack.
The 1950s was the take off decade for Lawrence kicked off by Richard Eddington's biography of him in 1950,
Hyneman produced the Phoenix edition of The Complete Works, complete insofar as they were known across the 50s.
These red cloth covered towns are still to be found knocking around in college libraries.
This is the place to go for the blonde minett, the Slim Haliday and the Lady Chatterley's Lover,
for which I flipped through for the most interesting parts when I was about 12 and wondered what the fuss could have been about.
More importantly, a rather older Leavis emerged as the St. Paul of the Laurentian Gospel in his
articles for scrutiny and is nineteen fifty five book D.H. Lawrence Kolon novelist,
which reprised and built on a number of those articles. For those of you who don't yet know Leavis, you do.
He has entered the bloodstream of Anglophone literary criticism and Flo's even,
or perhaps especially in those people who most most particularly repudiate him.
He taught at Downing College, Cambridge from 1927 to 62 and wrote nine major books.
His criticism combined new critical attention to language with Protestant moral seriousness
and the largest possible claims for the importance of literary criticism as a subject.
Indeed, he thought of English as the central subject in any university from people from which people can then go out to become doctors,
prime ministers,
solicitors, farmers, or perhaps best of all, schoolteachers of English and do this job better and live better by virtue of that education.
The fact that I sympathise with this view is one of the reasons that I do what I do.
He profoundly affected two generations of students who went on to become school teachers and to send their students,
many of them, to study English at Cambridge, preferably at Downing.
And the modern novelist whom he most championed was, of course, Lawrence.
His book on Lawrence followed the great tradition of 1948 in which he had argued, and I quote, The great English novelists are Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad to stop for the moment at that comparatively safe place in history.
In the last few pages, he added that Lawrence was probably Conrad's successor.
Then, seven years later in D.H. Lawrence, novelist, he goes on to confirm this.
He argues that, quote, Lawrence belongs to the same ethical and religious tradition as George Eliot,
both of them provincial Protestants, nonconformists, and that Eliot would have approved the opening parts of the rainbow.
However, where Eliot is ethical, Lawrence is religious.
He has neither working class resentment of the upper classes nor snobbery.
Leavis is still in this book fighting his battles against Eliot, who, of course,
was still alive, I repeat, with, if possible, even greater conviction.
What I have said before, Lawrence has an unfailingly sure sense of the difference between that which makes for life.
This is very much the literate vocabulary of Leavis and of his time,
that which makes for life and that which makes against it of the difference between health and that which turns away from health.
It is this that makes him so much better a critic than Eliot, whose major value judgements,
when he risks them, especially in the contemporary field, have nearly always been bad, often disastrously bad.
So rather than rejecting the terms in which Eliot and Murray had criticised Lawrence,
he reverses them and argues for Lawrence's spiritual health and normative tea leaves, also argues that you have to choose between Lawrence and Joyce.
And he encourages, of course, to choose Lawrence as the healthier,
the more truly creative, even though he had less obvious influence on subsequent writers.
Quote, It is true that we can point to the influence of Joyce in a line of writers to which there is no parallel issue from Lawrence.
He identifies a switch in Lawrences mode after sons and lovers when he became a most daring and radical innovator in form method technique.
As far as the canon is concerned, he now places women in love at the peak just above the rainbow, both of which he called astonishing works of genius.
He also says that the large body of short stories and nouvelle are as indubitably successful works of genius as any the world has to show.
He decisively dismisses the plumed serpent. Many subsequent critics, if not the general public, have followed him in these relative rankings.
Penguin Books responded to the Leavis driven rise in Lawrence's popularity and over the course of the 50s, reprinted many of his works.
By nineteen fifty nine, they got around to publishing an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover.
In May 1960. They decided to republish it in a reprise of the incident with the typist penguins.
Normal printers refused to fulfil the contract. So another print was found.
But Penguin was cautious and gave a police officer a dozen copies of the novel and said that
they would hold back further release indefinitely until it was cleared for general sale.
As Penguin feared, they were charged by the Director of Public Prosecutions at Bow Street Magistrates Court.
Obscene publication formerly known as obscene libel, has been a common law offence in Britain for centuries.
In 1857, it was codified under Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act.
This had a major effect on subsequent Victorian literature because lending libraries such as Moodies refused to stock certain works,
for example, by George Moore and Thomas Hardy out of fear of prosecution.
It was because of this act that the rainbow was recalled,
was because of this act that Ulysses was forbidden until American courts cleared it in 1933 and British courts decided to quietly allow it.
After the Second World War, there was a wave of prosecutions for obscenity,
and it was thought that that might it might be time for a reform of the law.
In nineteen fifty nine, a new Obscene Publications Act was passed.
It was milder in its definition of obscenity, was tighter, and it demanded that a work be considered as a whole, not just in terms of its parts.
It allowed that certain material might be fit for adults and not children.
It made a distinction between art and pornography,
and it allowed a defence in terms of the public good penguin elected for trial by jury at the Old Bailey.
They had really been testing out this new act in the publication that they'd done.
The trial began on the 20th of October nineteen sixty before Lord Justice Byrne,
the first counsel to the Crown and chief prosecutor was Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Griffith Jones,
who had already led the prosecution for the British at the Nuremberg trials.
Incidentally, his son is the reverend and valiant master of the temple.
So if you ever happen to visit the Temple Church in the ends of court in London and find a man who
looks like that he is happy to discuss his father's and indeed his mother's role in this affair,
since he thinks that his father was very much influenced by his wife's reaction to the novel.
The defence was led by Mr. Gerald Gardner QC, who went on to become a reforming Lord Chancellor from nineteen sixty four to 70.
This was the period in which homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 were legalised, for example.
The trial was six days long, but these days were not consecutive.
There was some debate as to the circumstances under which the jury were allowed to be able to read the novel.
It was decided that they should not be allowed to take it home because then other people in their households might be able to read it.
So they had to sit in the jury room and read it day after day.
It's like sitting in the Bodleian until the slowest person was done. There were nine men and three women.
Their task was to decide whether the novel had a tendency such as the deprave and corrupt persons who were likely to read it, and if so,
whether it was nevertheless in the public good in terms of science, literature, art, learning or anything else to publish it.
The prosecution called no witnesses.
The defence called witnesses, many of whom had already read the novel in a smuggled copy, of course, they would have to have in order to defend it.
They included Dame Rebecca West, E.M. Forster, S. Day Lewis, the bishop of Woolwich,
and three other prominent Anglicans and Oxford's own Helen Gardner.
Crucially, Mr Norman's son John Stevens, who draughted the nineteen fifty nine Obscenity Act,
said that I would not say that it was the best book Lawrence ever wrote,
but I think it is a very well written book and is a contribution of considerable value to English literature.
The chief parliamentary sponsor of the Obscene Publication Act, Roy Jenkins, also said that the novel was literature.
Leavis, however, was not there. He refused to stand and defend what he called an inferior work by Lawrence and indeed,
most of the witnesses who came for the defence admitted that there were bad passages in the book.
Griffith Jones famously asked the prosecution, would you approve of your young son's young daughters reading this book?
Is it a book you would wish to have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife and your servants to read?
This raised a titter from the jury, the first of several which he was to raise in his opening speech,
he said, but members of the jury, when you've seen this book, making all such allowances in favour of it as you can,
the prosecution will invite you to say that it does tend certainly that it may tend to induce lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it.
It goes further. You may say it sets upon a pedestal promiscuous and adulterous intercourse.
It commends and indeed it sets out to commend sensuality almost as a virtue.
It encourages and indeed even advocates coarseness and vulgarity of thought and of language.
Later, he says, the book abounds in bawdy conversation, even a description of the girl's father, a royal academician,
has to introduce a description of his legs and loins and members of the jury, even the old nurse who is eventually employed to look after her husband,
the heroine's husband, without any point to it whatsoever, without adding anything at all,
you may think to the story has to have her breasts felt by him while she is looking after him in his bed.
Members of the jury, not only that type of background, but words, no doubt they will be said to be good old old Anglo-Saxon four letter words.
And no doubt they are. But they appear again and again and again.
These matters are not voiced normally in this court, but when it forms the whole subject matter of the prosecution and we cannot avoid voicing them,
the words [INAUDIBLE] or [INAUDIBLE] occur no less than 30 times.
I have added them up, but I do not I do not claim to have added them all up.
[INAUDIBLE] 14 times balls 13 times [INAUDIBLE] and arse, six times a piece, cock four times, [INAUDIBLE] three times and so on.
Gerald Gardner said, Do you know of any civilised country in which the unexpurgated book,
the subject matter of this prosecution, cannot be bought except Lawrence's Commonwealth countries?
On day five, he said Lawrence lived and died suffering from a public opinion caused by the banning of this book
that he had written that he had written a piece of pure pornography called Lady Chatterley's Lover,
and if this case is done, nothing else.
It is enabled for the first time, this book to be dragged out into the light of day so we can see it for what it really is.
And so those who are qualified to judge can express their opinion about it.
The slur was never justified all the time.
This book was a passionately sincere book of a moralist in the Puritan tradition
who believed he had a message for us and the society in which we live, whether we agree with this message or not.
Is it not time we rescued Lawrence's name from the quite unjust reputation which this book has always had and allow our people,
his people to judge for themselves its high purpose?
Members of the jury? I leave Lawrence's reputation and the reputation of Penguin Books with confidence in your hands.
You rejected the suggestion made to Penguin Books that the novels Purple Passages be replaced by asterisks,
pointing out that this would, quote, make the thing just a dirty book.
Griffiths Jones specifically countered the defence of the novel's puritanism as it had been made by the bishop of Woolwich, something sacred.
The bishop said, in the real sense, as an act of Holy Communion, that was the quotation of the bishop.
Do you think that is how girls working in the factory are going to read this book as something sacred in the real sense of an act of Holy Communion?
Or does it put my Lord Bishop, with all respect to him,
wholly out of touch with a very large percentage of the number of people who are going to buy this book at around three and sixpence?
He goes on to quote from the novel Beauty What Beauty?
A sudden little flame of new awareness went through the unspeakable beauty to the touch of the warm living buttocks,
the life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness, and the strange weight of the balls between his legs.
That, again, I assume you say is puritanical answer.
It is puritanical in its reverence. I say, what reverence to the balls, reverence to the weight of a man's balls.
Answer indeed. Yes. Towards the end of the trial, he cites the passage, which strongly suggests anal sex should be remembered,
that in nineteen sixty anal penetration between a man and a woman was still punishable by imprisonment for life.
The defence had specifically stressed that there was no perversion in the book.
After quoting the passage, Griffiths Jones relies heavily on the rhetorical device of a Perea pretended indecision.
I do not know what it means. You will have to think.
I do not know. I do not suggest there is more than one reading which you can put to those two pages if you want to take offence.
Who knows what is the effect on the young man or woman reading these two pages? What is she going to think?
Is it going to be a good influence? What is the tendency of it?
What again is the good that a book can do in any book which contains a passage such as that?
But it crucially will not name anal sex in court, perhaps because of the very sense of obscenity on which the prosecution is based.
Had he done had the defence had to deal with this charge, then the outcome might have been different.
The summing up of Judge Justice Byrne leant towards the prosecution.
The jury were out for nearly three hours, after which they came back with the unanimous verdict of not guilty.
The judge never asked whether their verdict was obscene, but justified or not obscene.
So this is not known. There was clapping and cheering in the public gallery.
Gardner immediately applied for costs because he said the defence had been expensive and the novel was being used as a test case for a new law.
The judge, who was clearly disappointed by the verdict, made no order as to costs Lawrences.
One surviving brother, George, who was then 88, said, I have followed the case with interest but disagree with the verdict.
I don't think this book is fit for young people. These books that introduce a lot of sex I don't like.
I had more than one argument with him, but I did not manage to persuade him.
So here we have a smiling Sir Allen Lane, chairman of Penguin Books, during a press conference at the company's offices in High Hoeben,
when he announced that it would be another week before the public could buy the book.
And this is the second of November,
nineteen sixty Leicester Square people waiting for the stroke of 12 when they would be able to buy the book for the first time.
This is Stan Buckel, a window cleaner who bought a copy of the book in Leicester Square before going back to work.
Of course, the case was an important precedent. Fanny Hill, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,
which was written in seventeen forty nine, was brought out in nineteen seventy without difficulty.
More previously unpublished. Lawrence came out in the 60s 62.
The Letters 60 for The Complete Poems. Sixty five. The Complete Plays 68.
Phoenix too, which is mainly essays. By the end of the decade, Sons and Lovers was accepted onto the school syllabus.
Lawrence's popularity also rose because he was working class and because that decade saw a sudden expansion in higher education,
which meant that more men from the working classes were entering the professions, the newspapers and so on.
The message of Lady Chatterley's Lover and indeed, if you like, of his own life, was that male sexual charisma could overcome class barriers.
Raymond Williams, interviewed in nineteen seventy seven,
said that if there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war to the point of caricature, it was Lawrence.
He was someone to be, not just someone to admire. People, men, war.
Lawrence, beards. But as has been repeatedly pointed out by Lawrence critics,
the Association of Lawrence with the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s implicates Lawrence as a very largely unwilling partner.
After all, in psychoanalysis and the unconscious he had written, our important moral standards are,
in my opinion, quite sound and offer no serious bars to anybody.
And sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy.
There must be the great purpose of inspiration, always present.
That is why, as he said in studies in classic American literature of Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne and Sue Brideshead,
these women are never satisfied till they have shattered the men who responded
to them because sex is the most important thing they have in their lives.
Wronski was wrong to resign his commission in the Army when he starts his career with Anna because it leaves him sex orientated.
Lawrence responded to Russell's accusation that he was sex obsessed with the retaught.
I'm not. But mind yourself, Bertie. In his essay on John Galsworthy, he specifically repudiated self consciously rebellious sex.
Indeed, in his 1964 book The Quest for Love, the critic David Holbrook tried to present Lawrence,
as did many of the witnesses in the Lady Chatterley trial, as a corrective to sexual looseness.
From this point on, because of the very large amount of time I've spent getting from 1913 to 70, I'm going to speed up.
But we are now entering critical territory, which in any case is probably more familiar to you.
Lawrence's great popularity came to an end with feminist backlash.
Kate Millet's 1970 excellent and important book, Sexual Politics,
attacked Lady Chatterley's Lover not always convincingly as misogynist and phallocentric.
She turned the previous Lawrence on his head into a dealer in death.
She overlooked hetero, glossier or convicting voices in Lawrence's fiction, for example, Ursula's resistance to Burkin.
That's to say it's an extremely important work of feminism. But as criticism of Lawrence, I think it often misses the point.
This blow struck Lawrence's reputation hard. What has helped it to rise thereafter, like a phoenix from the ashes,
was increasing recognition of an obvious fact that had been overlooked by Leavis and militar like that,
Lawrence's works, as I've tried to stress, are full of contradiction and change.
Certain post-structuralist critics decried Lawrence as naive and locker centric in his use of language.
But others amongst them recognise that precisely by virtue of his opposite applications of the same word like ideal,
conscious, absolute inhuman, he had opposed structuralist sense of languages instability.
Gender theorists made a far more subtle assessment of gender and sex in Lawrences works than had the early 70s feminists.
In 1980, Carol Dix's D.H. Lawrence and women argued that Lawrence was in fact spiritually female.
Others have argued him to be androgynous.
He came off well from some 80s and 90s critics who found his theories of race to be more egalitarian than than was typical of his time.
The expanding field of eco criticism is finding much to work with in his anti industrialism and in the ongoing vogue for interdisciplinarity.
That's benefited an author who wrote in so many genres, Anglophone academia is now increasingly aware,
although not aware enough, of Lawrence's reputation around the world.
Before we finish, I just want to mention two books from the nineties, which I find particularly interesting.
The first is Mychal Bell's D.H. Lawrence language.
And being of nineteen ninety two, it starts with the argument, quote, Lawrence's fiction is inescapably philosophical.
It explores modes and qualities of being and consciousness of those modes and qualities.
He stresses that the philosophy which is relevant to Laurence is German and contemporary with him, not French,
and subsequent in particular, he considers Lawrence in terms of the Heideggerian shift from epistemology to ontology.
He argues that both Heidegger and Lowrance independently developed their thought
through nature and made some of the same criticisms of his theories of power.
They also shared a sense that primitive man had cosmic sensibility with no division between human and natural life,
and that the separation of human and non-human worlds took place over time,
along with a destructive rise in self-consciousness on the part of humanity.
Bell describes Lawrence's mode of characterisation as competing forces rather than autonomous entities,
and this determines his conception of impersonality, which is very distinct to its conception of impersonality.
On the other hand, he also points to the continuity between Lawrence's novels and those of the Victorian period,
arguing that the transformation of the moral sentiment tradition in the Victorian novel
made it a particularly delicate and inward instrument for the study of emotional life.
No one was more alive to this achievement and the particular value of the novel to the life of feeling than Lawrence.
On the subject of language which he's got in his title,
he points to the reflections which Lawrence's narrators and characters themselves make about language
and the interaction between the narrative and the way in which language is discussed within it.
This tells us how we should read Lawrence's statements of position.
Quote, When Lawrence talks about philosophy, that philosophy is not central.
It's like the foam on water.
The point at which being Capital B is apparent is also at the point is also the point at which intellectual formulations are Ottos or banal.
The other book of the 90s I want to mention is Anfernee Huff's D.H. Lawrence Aesthetics and Ideology of the following year 93.
This is the first book length study of Lawrence's writing about aesthetics as opposed to the aesthetics of Lawrence's writing,
although, as she points out, he would not have accepted the designation designation aesthetics because this is the term
itself concentrates on sensation and on being divorced from the object which you contemplate.
She argues there are two kinds of organism in. Lawrence was influenced by contemporary German folkish theories and can be connected to fascism.
That's one of the things will be considering next week.
The other kind of organism which she identifies is a fragmented and idealistic organic which fits better.
Many of his works, like Béliveau Fernyhough, considers his strong links to nature like Bel's.
This book is published by Cambridge University Press.
Leave US Philco Laurentian ism.
His legacy lives on in Cambridge, even though Lawrence only visited the place once and had nightmares about beetles afterwards.
In 1979, the University Press started publishing the Cambridge edition of The Complete Works of Lawrence.
It's still not finished. Crucially, the poems are yet to come out, but they are the standard works of they.
They are the standard edition of his works. There's a note about those editions on your hands out.
Unfortunately, they are extremely expensive to buy,
but they have sold the rights of some of the texts to Penguin, who are publishing them in much cheaper editions.
The crucial thing is that you look at the beginning and see whether or not
it is the Cambridge text because that is now the standard scholarly edition.
It's even got in the Cambridge version line numbers, which I don't know of anybody using and is rather on Laurentian.
I've put on your hand out a summary of works which have been most esteemed and by whom when.
The one observation I would make is the Lawrences later works were most esteemed before the Second World War.
Since the war, their admiration has overwhelmingly fallen on the early works up to and including women in love.
The poems have a committed following, but are not widely argued to be Lawrence's best work.
The stories tend to be placed on a par with the rainbow.
Women in Love, Sons and Lovers is is also pretty high in standing,
but is also Loren's for people who don't like Lawrence, if you want to recommend Lawrence someone he doesn't like.
And it would be that the non-fiction now tends to be read pretty much exclusively by Lawrence specialists and of interest in terms of the fiction.
But I would say that they are independently interesting and and for some of the same reasons.
Lawrence's place in the canon is secure, although he's critical and and general popularity is not what it was at an English faculty drinks party,
I was tracked down by Professor Stephen Gill, emeritus professor of English literature here.
He had wanted to know who the Dr. Brown, who was giving that many lectures on Lawrence Wilson, was very surprised to find out that he was a woman.
Aficionados of Lawrence, like me, joined societies. That is the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America,
which publishes the DH Lawrence Review and the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia, Japan, South Korea and of course, of eastward.
It's set up a journal inelegantly titled The Journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society.
This holds monthly meetings and makes occasional pilgrimages to places such as the school where Lawrence taught in Croydon.
There is also an international online Loren's discussion society touchingly named Rantanen,
where everyone from Lawrence Biographer's like John Wazzan, in other words,
the foremost Lawrence critics of the world to people who have just read one Lawrence poem and liked it,
can voice their views and ask and answer questions. The atmosphere of this group is friendly and supportive.
People have different perspectives, levels of education, grasps of English and knowledge of Lawrence.
But no one is ever strident in their disagreement with anyone else. How?
Unlike Lawrence the Lawrence who would take his best friend's chambers, Russell Murray,
Hasseltine morale, Mansfield freeda by the metaphorical throat and tell them how they ought to live.
He doesn't know us, so we are out of reach of his direct attack.
But a significant number of people still think it's worth hearing what that attack was.
Or in addition, they are interested in his kind of romantic modernism or his spiritual ontology or his appreciation of Batz men's children and God.
Thank you for being sufficiently interested to come.