Once upon a time, when I was very young indeed, this novel caused a sensation. You can read all about the trial here. The trial was essentially a snobbish, misogynist enterprise. Not just 'would you like your wife to read this book?' but how would the 'working classes' read it? In summing up, the judge said it would 'be available for all and sundry to read. You have to think of people with no literary background, with little or no learning,' he said. In other words, rude books are for the intelligentsia.
The jury took only three hours to find Penguin not guilty of an obscene publication. Yay for the jury some of whom at least must have been part of that 'working class all and sundry'.
My parents bought a copy.
I remember it on our bookshelves and I also remember them laughing about it.
I have it still - it's the 1961 reprint, a yellowing Penguin edition, complete and unexpurgated, costing three shillings and sixpence. We had spent a year in London, where my father was working in a research institute, and came back to a flat in Bramley, in Leeds. It must have been there that I saw it. Nothing was off limits as far as books were concerned, so I must have had a brief look at it, in search of the sexy bits, but there was so much small print to plough through that I quickly lost interest.
Cue forward till now. In one of those odd, circuitous routes by which we sometimes go back to old favourites - or not-so-favourites - we started watching the whole series of Sharpe, on ITVX. I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It's wonderful. But that made me remember that I'd admired Sean Bean in other performances - and so I went back to the BBC's 30 year old dramatisation simply called Lady Chatterley. (You can find it online.) And then I went back to the book.
I'm not sure why the Beeb felt the need to meddle with the title, because the original novel focuses quite as much on Mellors, the gamekeeper, as it does on Connie Chatterley. The adaptation more or less does the same thing, although poor old DHL (as snobbish in his own way as those 1960s lawyers) feels the need to make him more educated, more well read, more 'delicate' - more like DHL himself? - than the excellent Bean's performance. In the book, Mellors' dialect comes and goes. He sometimes weaponises it, which I can sort of understand. Still, I much preferred Bean's interpretation, which was his own north country (Sheffield, I believe) dialect that could fluctuate a little depending on circumstances, but was always there, a barrier or a bridge between two people. Which it might be, barrier or bridge, is really what the book is about. Bean manages to make Mellors attractive, angry and at the same time vulnerable. You can see what Connie, starved of love, starved of human touch, finds irresistible.
I loved the dramatisation, and I didn't love the book.
It was as though the drama had taken the heart of the book, the important bits, the central story that was engaging and moving, and left out all of DHL's maundering misogynistic diatribes. It was strange because I kept wanting to like the book. There were whole passages that I loved. And then something would trigger him and off he would go again, interminably, with his borderline fascist view of the working classes and women. And I know we were supposed to be hearing Mellors' thoughts, but we weren't. The author was right there, haranguing us. 'I am Mellors' he must have thought, considerably to his own satisfaction.
This was a book that I thought ought to come with trigger warnings Not for the sexy bits. No. A sort of 'here he goes again, you can skip this bit' kind of trigger. As in Stella Gibbons' hilarious Cold Comfort Farm, a send up of rural novels, but with a considerable side swipe at DHL, the reader could do with asterisks denoting the most turgid, repetitive passages. Of which there are many.
It also reminded me that we read quite a lot of DHL at university, albeit not this one. I think it would have embarrassed some of our more perjink lecturers. Many of my female friends either disliked DHL or were indifferent to him. The more I read, the more I fell into the former camp. How on earth did he enter the 'canon' when there was so much more exciting work - much of it by women - out there?
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