Undergraduate classes and general histories of modern Britain invariably quote Philip Larkin’s famous lines: ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixy-three/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP’. The trial over whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was fit reading for a moral society was quite a circus, with a host of authors and critics being mustered in defense of the book, which even by then was beginning to look mediocre rather than brilliant.
I personally think it is an awful little novel. I’m not a fan of Lawrence. The dialogue and emotional reactions of the characters are unrealistic, the characters themselves lacking any sense of realism, and the book itself hypocritical in its use of euphemisms and innuendo when Lawrence himself pushed for clear speaking on matters of sex. But the trial was important, and has, as suggested above, become one of those useful cliches that always makes it into popular history.
Recently I came across a compelling account of the trial by an author who had been asked to possibly act as a witness, but was not called. However, Anthony Powell, writer of the epic, brilliant series A Dance to the Music of Time, did sit in, and recorded his observations, among which he observed a curious paradox. Noting that the proceedings themselves, with all the people in the courtroom talking seriously about things that they couldn’t quite say explicitly, were actually very funny, he observed:
The Prosecution was hindered from laughing at some of the patently absurd assertions [as to the literary merit and importance of the novel] of the Defence, because to show jocularity might have cast doubt on the alleged harmfulness of the novel; while the Defence was equally in no position to allow any laughter at the Prosecutions ineptitude of understanding, since the Defence’s intention was to prove the high seriousness of the book.
In that one sentence, Powell captures perfectly the worst of both sides of the argument. His memoirs themselves are fascinating, and I want to write something about them relative to Dance; however, I fear that it would be difficult to do justice to such an extraordinary work by a fascinating character in a short space. Suffice it to say, for now, that Powell’s memoirs are strangely different yet strikingly similar to the narrative told by the first-person narrator Nicholas Jenkins in the twelve-book series. The effect is a disorienting one, and I’m fairly sure that now Jenkins and Powell are blended in my mind to an irreversible degree.