I.
Not for the first time when reading an essay, article or - as in this case - a book review by the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, one is left feeling exhausted and a bit bewildered; not quite knowing how or where to begin fashioning a response. And not entirely convinced it's even worth the effort. For Hitchens is a man of firm moral conviction and thus extremely confident as well as forthright in his beliefs. He knows what he thinks and he thinks what he knows is true.
However, as the book subjected to Mr Hitchens's ire happens to be Lady Chatterley's Lover, I feel obliged as a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society to try and say something - even though, in my view, the best and most powerfully argued defence of the novel was supplied by the author himself and I would strongly recommend those interested in the work to also read Lawrence's 1929 essay, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.
Having said that, here are a few thoughts of my own in response to the Hitchens review which appears in the latest edition of the American Christian and conservative journal First Things ...
II.
Hitchens opens with a story of the sixth earl of Craven, appalled by the decision taken in a London criminal court on November 2nd, 1960, to permit the unexpurgated publication of Lawrence's final and most controversial novel. It marked the end of the world as he knew it and his soul howled with pain.
In a sense, it's a faint echo of this angst-ridden, slightly hysterical scream that echoes throughout all of Hitchens's writings, including this latest review. He says the novel is risible, but it doesn't seem to provoke much laughter of any description in Hitchens - even of a nervous kind. Above all, one senses fear. And Hitchens is right to find the book dangerous and threatening at some level. For like Nietzsche, Lawrence is calling for a revaluation of all values and not simply sexual liberation. The democracy of touch that the work invokes - a kind of immanent utopia - is undoubtedly not the future that Hitchens dreams of.
Indeed, even as a youth, Hitchens wasn't taken with Lawrence: "By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion."
However, as the book subjected to Mr Hitchens's ire happens to be Lady Chatterley's Lover, I feel obliged as a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society to try and say something - even though, in my view, the best and most powerfully argued defence of the novel was supplied by the author himself and I would strongly recommend those interested in the work to also read Lawrence's 1929 essay, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.
Having said that, here are a few thoughts of my own in response to the Hitchens review which appears in the latest edition of the American Christian and conservative journal First Things ...
II.
Hitchens opens with a story of the sixth earl of Craven, appalled by the decision taken in a London criminal court on November 2nd, 1960, to permit the unexpurgated publication of Lawrence's final and most controversial novel. It marked the end of the world as he knew it and his soul howled with pain.
In a sense, it's a faint echo of this angst-ridden, slightly hysterical scream that echoes throughout all of Hitchens's writings, including this latest review. He says the novel is risible, but it doesn't seem to provoke much laughter of any description in Hitchens - even of a nervous kind. Above all, one senses fear. And Hitchens is right to find the book dangerous and threatening at some level. For like Nietzsche, Lawrence is calling for a revaluation of all values and not simply sexual liberation. The democracy of touch that the work invokes - a kind of immanent utopia - is undoubtedly not the future that Hitchens dreams of.
Indeed, even as a youth, Hitchens wasn't taken with Lawrence: "By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion."
This is a surprising remark. For one might've imagined that Hitchens - a man once described by James Silver in The Guardian as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" whose columns contain "molten Old Testament fury" - would rather like elements of portent and prophecy. And it's difficult to imagine Hitchens caring about the dictates of fashion, eagerly pursuing all the latest literary fads and trends as he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight, but there you go! His views are reactionary, but never square.
III.
As for the trial of Lady C., Hitchens seems to believe things were rigged from the start. That there was "scarcely a chance" of the jury deciding that the novel should remain banned, "and almost everyone involved knew it". I don't know if that's true. And I don't really care. For ultimately the right decision was reached. Not because the work has redeeming social and literary value, but because ancient obscenity laws drawn up by those grey ones whom Lawrence terms censor-morons brought greater shame upon us as a people than their abolition.
I suspect that saying this is enough for Hitchens to lump me in with all those liberals, libertines, and libertarians whom he so despises, even though, for the record, I don't think of myself as any of the above. Nor do I live in a square, paint in a circle, or love in a triangle; there's absolutely nothing Bloomsbury about me. Or Fabian socialist. Like Lawrence, I grew up in a working-class community and if I speak up for him and his writing it's for reasons other than those imagined by Hitchens. It's not because I'm a sandal-wearing vegetarian, naturist or health nut; it's because I feel a sense of solidarity with Lawrence and regard his enemies as my enemies.
IV.
Hitchens describes Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "frankly rather terrible book". And, interestingly, many of Lawrence's own followers seem to agree; often acting as if a little embarrassed by it. But a novel isn't a fixed object. It's a literary machine that invites you to enter the space that it opens up and invest it with external forces; to send it zooming in new and unexpected directions. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that there are no bad books per se, only poor - by which I mean lazy, reactive and judgemental - readings.
And, despite Hitchens insisting that Katherine Anne Porter's 1960 essay on the novel is a supremely honest and courageous reading, I'd place 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper' in this poverty-stricken category. For all it boils down to ultimately is a superior woman shaking her head in condescending despair over poor Lawrence and his artistic inferiority in comparison to the real literary greats, like Tolstoy, James, and Joyce. And the novel itself ... well, that is nothing but the fevered day-dream of a dying man, or "the product of a once-fine author's sad decline", as Hitchens puts it with a little more compassion.
As Nietzsche taught, however, whilst strength preserves, it is only through sickness that cultures develop and that we as a species advance. Thus, even if true - even if Lady C. is the product of a diseased imagination and a body corrupt with tuberculosis - we need these works for what they paradoxically teach us of the greater health.
V.
Eventually, even Hitchens has to admit that the book does, in fact, contain "some moving and thoughtful passages [...] though they are mostly about the industrial ravaging and gouging of the English countryside and the wretched consumer society coming into being after World War I." However, as he then notes: "The idea that these miseries might be redeemed by adulterous sex in an old hut on an army blanket, by twining wildflowers in one’s pubic hair, or by capering naked in the rain is far-fetched."
This, I think, living as we do after the orgy, is hard to deny. Also difficult to deny is that Lady Chatterley's Lover contains "blots and scabs of anti-Semitism", as well as troubling elements of racial bigotry, sexism, misogyny and lesbophobia. But, again, it's Lawrence himself who teaches that the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it and not merely use these things in order to judge a work and condemn an author. And, to be fair to Hitchens - although he clearly has no interest in saving this particular tale - by offering us a far more sympathetic reading of Sir Clifford than Lawrence encouraged, he invites an interesting reappraisal of the work (one that I have myself also considered: click here).
VI
Finally, we come to the 'night of sensual passion'. Hitchens seems as baffled by the redemptive possibilities assigned to anal sex within Lady C. as he is perplexed by the importance given to red trousers. But that's because he's ignorant of the wider body of Lawrence's work and fundamentally hostile to the philosophical project of which it's part. Which is fair enough; he isn't and doesn't pretend to be a Lawrence scholar. But it does rather lessen the force and validity of his criticism.
For Hitchens, like Freud, "shame and hypocrisy" are crucial social components; they protect, he says, the boundary "between normal, respectable life and the sordid and dirty". Lawrence disagrees. Not because he desires the latter or despises the former, but because he sees the possibility of a new innocence that lies beyond such a false dichotomy, or what Marcuse terms the fatal dialectic of civilization.
I'm sorry that Mr Hitchens didn't find a way to enjoy this novel; find a way, that is, to impose his own abrasions upon its surface. And I'm sorry that, unable to ban it or to burn it, he seems determined to foreclose the text and its pleasure with his intransigent moral conformism, his political and social conservatism, and his refusal to allow his body to pursue its own happiness just for once. Despite this, rather perversely perhaps, I retain a fair deal of respect and admiration for Peter (as I do for his much-missed brother, Christopher): May the peace that comes of fucking be upon him.
See:
Peter Hitchens, 'Chatterley on Trial', First Things (Feb 2018): click here to read online.
Katherine Anne Porter, 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper', Encounter (Feb 1960): click here to read online.
Note that whilst Hitchens was reviewing the 2017 Macmillan edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the standard text is the Cambridge University Press edition, 1983, ed. Michael Squires, which also includes Lawrence's 1929 essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' that I mention above.
Peter Hitchens, 'Chatterley on Trial', First Things (Feb 2018): click here to read online.
Katherine Anne Porter, 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper', Encounter (Feb 1960): click here to read online.
Note that whilst Hitchens was reviewing the 2017 Macmillan edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the standard text is the Cambridge University Press edition, 1983, ed. Michael Squires, which also includes Lawrence's 1929 essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' that I mention above.
