The Third Lady Chatterley

For 30 years, literary-minded U.S. schoolboys and girls have counted it an achievement of academic daring to read an unexpurgated copy of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. This week the surreptitious passing of tattered, badly printed copies comes to a halt. What may start is the noisiest censorship yap since James Joyce's Ulysses was declared literature by Federal Judge John M. Woolsey in 1933. Into the bookshops goes an unexpurgated edition (Grove Press; 368 pp.; $6), the first ever published in the U.S. It comes forearmed with assurances by pundits (Edmund Wilson, Jacques Barzun, Mark Schorer, Archibald MacLeish) that Lady Chatterley is not only a decent but an important book. And the publishers, listening for the bugling of the censorship hounds, are ready with an advance printing of 30,000 copies.

Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley three times. By the time he was satisfied, the novel contained enough explicit love scenes and enough short Anglo-Saxon words to sate the appetite of the keenest pornographer. But is it pornography? The answer of literary people is no. Lawrence, a fretful neurotic always at war within himself, was a serious writer. But there is another question: Is Lady Chatterley dull and tiresome? This time the answer must be yes.

The story is simple enough. Sir Clifford Chatterley comes back from World War I paralyzed from the waist down. An upper-class snob, he stuns his wife by telling her that she ought to have a child by another man. Connie Chatterley falls in love with Mellors, her husband's gamekeeper, learns for the first time what real sex is all about. Sir Clifford, of course, is incensed at Connie's betrayal of her class. Why make love to a workingman? By this time Sir Clifford is more than half in love with his lady attendant, and the book ends with Mellors working as a farm laborer and waiting for Connie to join him.

Lawrence was attacking three pet foes in Lady Chatterley: 1) unwholesome relations between men and women, particularly in bed; 2) unwholesome class stratification in English society; and 3) the evils of industrial civilization. That his book was revolutionary at the time is beyond question. In a way it was briefly important, though it contains some of Lawrence's most wooden writing. The characters are talking symbols, and when Mellors and Connie do come to life in the lovemaking scenes, the reader, conditioned though he may be by modern novels of lesser stature, is not so much shocked or moved as embarrassed by Lawrence's curious, four-letter vulgarity.

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