Lady Chatterley's Lover Visits Harold Hill

My local boozer, The Pompadours - 

and some Lawrence scholars find the Sun Inn, Eastwood, a bit rough ...

 

 

Harold Hill is a long way removed (in every sense) from the fictional mining village of Tevershall, which Lawrence imagines in his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

And of course, I'm no Oliver Mellors, the ex-soldier turned gamekeeper who strides through the pages of the above in his dark green trousers "with a red face and red moustache" [1], angry at the world. 

 

Having said that, sometimes when walking around the postwar housing estate on the far north-eastern fringes of Greater London that is Harold Hill [2], I'm tempted to tell the natives - whom my mother always disparagingly called Cockneys - something similar to what Mellors wishes to tell the working men and women of Tevershall:

 

"'I'd tell 'em: Look! look at yerselves! One shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves [...] Spoilt yerselves an' yer lives. [...] Take yer clothes off an' look at yerselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead.'" [3] 

 

Of course, I'd not say this with a broad East Midland's accent. 

 

And I can't blame the degenerate condition of the locals on years of hard physical toil - on the contrary, it's the fact that many of them don't work (or exercise) that's the problem; that they prefer vegetating on the sofa watching Netflix, eating junk food delivered to their doors, driving even the shortest distance, rather than walk a few hundred yards.

 

To paraphrase Mellors: Their spunk's gone dead - e-scooters and mobile phones and cannabis suck the last bit out of them. Which is a shame, but there you go. 

 

I won't bore readers with statistics, but the stats for the London Borough of Havering when it comes to things like health don't make for happy reading. Obesity, for example, is the norm; if the 18th-century Essex grocer Edward Bright were alive today and decided to ply his trade at Hilldene shops, no one would blink an eye at his great girth. 

 

People down south often like to joke that it's grim up north, but, believe me, it's fucking grim on Harold Hill too [4].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 46. For a full description and character analysis of Oliver Mellors, see my post of July 2020: click here. 

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Harold Hill are reminded of the post published on 28 May 2016 entitled 'And No Birds Sing': click here. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 219. 

 

[4] And if you don't believe me, see the report in the Romford Recorder which revealed that whilst Havering is home to some extremely affluent neighbourhoods, six roads in Harold Hill have been classed by the UK government as among the most deprived in all England: click here.  

 

   

Between Thy Moon-Lit, Milk-White Thighs

Diagrammatic, non-explicit, depiction of a man

performing cunnilingus on a woman

wikimedia.org

 

 

In the spring of 1928, D. H. Lawrence sent Harry Crosby the newly written out and revised MS for his short story 'Sun' [1], by way of thanking Crosby for the five gold coins that the latter had sent him. 

 

Lawrence also enclosed some poems, including an extended version of an early work entitled 'Gipsy' [2]. To the original two stanzas, Lawrence now added a couple more, which contained, he said, a bit of sun. 

 

The first of these reads:

 

Between thy moon-lit, milk-white thighs

      Is a moon-pool in thee.

And the sun in me is thirsty, it cries

      To drink thee, to win thee. [3]   

 

This is certainly an interesting quatrain; one which lends support to the controversial claim that although Lawrence thinks of the female sex organ as a ripe, bursting fruit just waiting to be eaten, the cunt was for him at its most succulent only when "overflowing with semen from the withdrawn phallus" [4].

 

Whether this implies that cunnilingus was, in Lawrence's erotic imagination, a disguised form of fellatio [5], is probably not something we can say for sure. 

 

But what we might note is that via the creampie-loving figure of Oliver Mellors, Lawrence forcefully expressed the view that there is only one place in which it is legitimate and desirable for the male to ejaculate - and that is deep inside the vagina [6]. 

 

Thus, when in the verse above the male speaker uses the term moon-pool, I think we all know that he refers to a deposit of semen and it is this which he wishes to felch from between the milk-white thighs of his beloved; i.e., the sun in him is greedy for the male seed of life, not the female sap that curdles milk and "smells strange on your fingers" [7].  

 

 

Notes

 

 [1] See the letter to Harry Crosby [29 April - 1 May 1928], in The Letters of D. H. Lawence Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 388-90. 

      This MS would provide the base text for the Black Sun edition of the tale published in October 1928.

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Gipsy', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 14-15. And for an earlier version of this poem entitled 'Self-Contempt', see the letter to Louie Burrows (6 Dec 1910) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 196.   

[3] Letters VI. 389. The second added stanza reads: "I am black with the sun, and willing / To be dead / Can I but plunge in thee, swilling / Thy waves over my head."

[4] Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry, (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 131. 

      This is taken from a chapter on Lawrence - chapter four (pp. 125-139) - in which Woods argues (amongst other things) that Lawrence had a "deep and obvious fascination with male homosexuality" and that whilst his "main erotic preoccupation is with the possibility of love between a woman and a man", when this seems impossible or doomed to failure, "he turns to the homosexual alternative [...] as a less problematical version of the same thing". 

      Ultimately, says Woods, Lawrence is promoting a bisexual ideal and his erotic grail is the "passionate, physical union of two heterosexual men". 

      Lines quoted can be found on p. 125.   

 

[5] Woods writes: "Cunnilingus is Lawrence's oblique image of fellatio." Articulate Flesh, p. 131. 

      A little later (p. 132), Woods insists that Lawrence's heroes all long to drink from the cup of semen which is the post-coital (spunk-filled) vagina. The American biographer and critic Jeffry Meyers, who has written extensively on Lawrence and published a volume entitled Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930 (The Athlone Press, 1977), is not convinced, however, and says that statements such as this, made without supporting evidence, simply reveal the author's own obsessions. 

      Meyers's review of Articulate Flesh can be found in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jan 1989), pp. 126-129. This can conveniently be accessed on JSTOR via the following link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27710124  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 203. 

      Speaking to Connie, Mellors angrily condemns those women who "'love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one.'" Such women, he says, even when they do allow vaginal penetration, invariably insist their lovers withdraw prior to orgasm and come instead on some external body part. To be fair, the women are the ones running the risk of an unwanted preganancy - not something that Oliver Mellors allows himself to consider.      

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fig', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 233.

      Again, whether this means that Lawrence imagined cunnilingus as an oblique image of fellatio - or whether, rather, he had a neo-primitive belief that the ingestion of semen increased one's own potency thanks to the magical properties it possessed - is not something I know for certain (any Lawrence scholar reading this who may care to advise is welcome to do so). 

      Readers interested in knowing more about the swallowing of semen might find the post entitled 'Gokkun' (7 May 2016) of interest: click here. 

 

 

A note on further reading: 

 

Those interested in this topic might like to see the essay by Isabella Rooke-Ley entitled '"What is Cunt? she said": Obscenity, Concealment and Representations of the Vulva in D. H. Lawrence', in Polyphony, Volume 2, Issue 1 (University of Manchester, April 2020): click here.  

      Rooke-Ley argues that Lawrence's use of the word cunt in Lady C. is not what it seems, in that rather than being a direct (if vulgar) reference to female genitalia, it is in fact a concealment of the latter and linked to the text's figuring of the cunt and its pleasure as obscene and shameful.

      Turning her attention to the (infamous) poem 'Fig', Rooke-Ley attempts to demonstrate how there is also a link made in Lawrence's work between concealment, obscenity, vulval pleasure, and putrefaction.

      Finally, readers may also wish to see my post 'The Obscene Beyond: It is So Lovely Within the Crack' (1 July 2021): click here.

 

 

For a sister post to this one, on Lawrence's extended version of the poem 'Guards' contained in the Crosby letter, click here.                 

 

 

The Best Things in Life Are Dirty: Reflections on Malcolm McLaren's Nostalgie de la boue

Malcolm McLaren and friends in a photo taken outside 

Nostalgia of Mud by Neil MacKenzie Matthews (1982)

 

 

 

I. 

 

The phrase nostalgie de la boue was coined in 1855 by the French playwright Émile Augier [1]. 

 

It refers to a decadent attraction to primitive culture or a yearning for some form of debased experience outside of what is regarded as socially and morally acceptable according to the bourgeois norms and conventions of European civilisation [2].     

 

One might even think of it in terms of Freud's death drive; i.e., as a desire on the part of complex life to revert to an earlier stage of evolution that allows one to contentedly wallow in a primordial mud pool (though when Augier used the phase he was thinking of the desire to return to humble social origins, rather than the origins of life [3]). 

 

For me, the phrase nostalgie de la boue has a further resonance, however; one that is rooted in the music and fashion of the early-mid 1980s - a time of buffalo gals, b-boys, hobo-punks, and Zulus on a time bomb ...

 

 

II.

 

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened their new (short-lived) West End shop in March 1982. Located at 5, St. Christopher's Place, it was spitting distance from Selfridges (but a long way from King's Road). 

 

Ben Westwood recalls:

 

"The shop front was covered by a 3-D relief of the map of the world made out of plaster and coloured mud brown. The interior featured the cave-like look of an archaeological dig. Scaffolding surrounded the walls, brown tarpaulin was stretched across the ceiling and a central pillar (or stalagmite) rose out of a bubbling pool of oily liquid." [4]

 

What Ben doesn't offer is an explanation for the name of the shop - Nostalgia of Mud - except to say that this was also the name of Vivienne and Malcolm's inspired Worlds End collection for A/W 1983 [5]. 

 

Keen-eyed readers will immediately notice the unusual translation of the original French phrase discussed above; nostalgia of mud, rather than the more standard nostalgia for mud. 

 

I don't know why this was so: I doubt that Malcolm wished to assign agency to the mud, as if it were the earth itself yearning for something. Probably he just mistranslated or misremembered the phrase. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - and, to be honest, I rather like the idiosyncratic reworking of nostalgie de la boue. 

 

As to when McLaren first heard the phrase, or from where he took it, again, I don't know ... 

 

Paul Gorman reminds us in his biography of McLaren, that it can be found in Tom Wolfe's famous essay 'Radical Chic' (1970), where it is used to mock those rich white liberals who host fundraising parties for revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and thus seemingly endorse a brand of militant radicalism that would violently drag them from their own elevated social position [6].  

 

But I'm not convinced that McLaren took the phrase from Wolfe. And even if he did, he means something very different from what the American author means by it, giving the term mud a wholly positive new interpretation [7]. 

 

Anyway, let's close by giving the last word to Malcolm himself: 

 

"I wanted the shop to look permanently closed down, making it appear as if we were digging up the place to find the London that lay under the pavements and eventually I found that all that lay under there was mud." [8]

 

        

viviennewestwood.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Émile Augier, Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Act I, Scene I. 

      Interestingly, however, as Rosalind Krauss points out, the expression nostalgie de la boue "is not in fact idiomatic French; indeed, it is not part of spoken French usage at all, being instead a purely Anglophonic invocation of the English notion of slumming transposed into the magically resonant frame of a supposedly French turn of phrase". See her essay 'Nostalgie de la Boue', in October, Vol. 56, (The MIT Press, Spring, 1991), pp. 111-120. The line quoted is on p. 112.

 

[2] Sir Clifford Chatterley famously accuses his wife of being "'one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue'" after she confesses her affair with the gamekeeper. Suddenly seeing himself as the embodiment of moral goodness, Clifford regards Connie and Mellors as "the incarnation of mud, of evil". 

      See Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 296.

 

[3] In Act I, Scene I of Le Mariage d'Olympe, Augier wrote: "Mettez un canard sur un lac au milieu des cygnes, vous verrez qu’il regrettera sa mare et finira par y retourner." We might trans-paraphrase this as: Put a duck rocker amongst clean-cut new romantics, and you'll see that he soon longs for a muddy hole that he can retreat to. 

 

[4] Ben Westwood writing in a post entitled 'Nostalgia of Mud' on the World's End blog (20 Feb 2014): click here. Note I have very slightly modified the text. 

      

[5] Rather than try to describe this collection, I encourage readers to watch a ten minute video posted by Ben Westwood on YouTube, which affords a glimpse of the magical scenes that unfolded on the catwalk in the Pillar Hall (Olympia), on 24 March, 1982: click here. 

 

[6] Tom Wolfe's essay, 'Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's', originally appeared in New York magazine (June 8, 1970): click here to read online. Paul Gorman mentions it in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 496. 

      For my take on the question of radical chic - with reference to the case of AOC - click here.  

 

[7] As I wrote in an earlier post, for McLaren, the term mud implied more than merely low-life experience or primitive culture. It was a glorious synonym for authenticity, something that he has always striven for in his work; the true look of music and the real sound of fashion (even though he surely knew, as a reader of Wilde, that realism is just a pose and authenticity merely another form of fabricated reality or myth).  

      Critics of McLaren will doubtless argue at this point that he is another prime example of the sort of person Wolfe is satirising; someone who exploits the experiences and appropriates the cultural cachet of those he liked to call the dispossessed; someone claiming to be nostalgic for mud, whilst rarely getting their own hands dirty in the process of making cash from chaos. For me, however, there's a big difference between Malcolm and someone like Leonard Bernstein.     

 

[8] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 497.

 

        

Chastity (Or the Peace That Comes of Fucking)

 

I. 

 

One of the most surprising things about Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), is that it closes with an affirmation of chastity, or what Oliver Mellors likes to call the peace that comes of fucking. 

 

In his Grange Farm letter to Connie, he informs her of his intention to remain patient during their time apart and abide by the little flame that burns between them, trying not to think of her too often, as this only tortures him and wastes something vital [1]. 

 

He writes: 

 

"So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause and peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. [...] Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace [...]" [2]  

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, this real and accomplished chastity [3] won't come as too great a surprise to readers who are familiar with Lawrence's Pansies, a collection of verse written in 1928/29 in which the cry of noli me tangere rings throughout and the theme of chastity - understood as freedom from the mind and hands exploiting the sensual body [4] - is key.

 

"Great is my need to be chaste / and apart, in this cerebral age" [5], writes the poet for whom sex is a state of grace. All he wishes of a woman is that she shall feel gently towards him when his heart feels kindly towards her: "I am so tired of violent women lashing out and insisting / on being loved, when there is no love in them" [6].

 

Touch comes slowly, writes Lawrence, if ever; "when the white mind sleeps" [7] and cannot be forced: 

 

For if, cerebrally, we force ourselves into touch, into contact 

physically and fleshly, 

we violate ourselves,

we become vicious. [8] 

 

All of these ideas coalesce in the poem 'Chastity' -

 

Chastity, beloved chastity

O beloved chastity

how infinitely dear to me

chastity, beloved chastity!

 

That my body need not be

fingered by the mind,

or prosituted by the dree

contact of cerebral flesh -

 

O leave me clean from mental fingering

from the cold copulation of the will,

from all the white, self-conscious lechery

the modern mind calls love!

 

From all the mental poetry

of deliberate love-making,

from all the false felicity

of deliberately taking

 

the body of another unto mine,

O God deliver me!

leave me alone, let me be!

 

Chastity, dearer far to me

that any contact that can be

in this mind-mischievous age! [9]     

 

III. 

 

Lawrence's notion of chastity is, therefore, distinct from the Christian virtue synonymous with moral purity and closely tied to an ideal of celibacy. 

 

In fact, if anything, Lawrence's model of chastity is closer to Nietzsche's than the Church's and he would doubtless echo Zarathustra in saying that whilst with some Christians chastity may indeed be a virtue, with many others it is almost a vice; such persons may exercise self-restraint, but doggish lust looks enviously out of all that they do.  

 

It is preferable, says Zarathustra, to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the arms of a person driven by lust in which there is no innocence. Individuals who find it difficult to be chaste - and whom it makes resentful and cruel as well as lustful - should be dissuaded from it. 

 

Only those for whom chastity is a form of victory - the peace that comes of fucking - should practice it; for they are kinder (and warmer) of heart and know how to laugh even at their own selves:   

 

"They laugh at chastity too and ask, 'What is chastity? Is chastity not folly? Yet this folly came to us, not we to it. We offered that guest hostel and heart: now it dwells with us - may it stay as long as it will!" [10]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It's debatable what this means, but I read it as a coded confession from a fetishistic masturbator who was previously only too happy to sleep with Connie's flimsy silk nightdress pressed atween his legs at night, for company. See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 249. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 301. 

[3] See A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where Lawrence uses this phrase, writing: "Years of honest thought of sex, and years of struggling action in sex will bring us at last where we want to get, to our real and accomplished chastity [...]", p. 309. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), see Chapter X. The line quoted from is on p. 146.  

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Noli me tangere', The Poems, p. 407. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'All I ask', The Poems, p. 415. 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Touch comes', The Poems, p. 408.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Touch', The Poems, p. 406. 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Chastity', The Poems, p. 407. 

[10] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I. 13, 'On Chastity', in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1988), p. 167.

Reflections on Lady Chatterley's Daughter (Part II: Chapters 12-22)

 

Cover of the first US edition 

(Ace Books, 1962) [a]

 

 

V. Chapters 12-14

Chapter twelve picks up where chapter eleven left off, with Clare still musing on her encounter with a kindly lesbian, called Jo. Receiving a note from the latter, Clare tears it up; "she felt no sympathy for Jo [and] certanly did not intend to see her" [139], despite feeling desperately lonely and unhappy:

 

"She began to be morbid. She might die in a raid - die never having found the true perfect love that the poets wrote about. She found herself praying with a kind of despair that she would meet the right man soon and that all her present bitterness and doubt would be swept aside." [139]

 

Then along comes Jacques ... A piano playing Frenchman with a penchant for redheads. Oh how she enjoys dancing with him at the Savoy and accepting his kisses at the end of the evening:

"She felt a new person - full of the joy of life [...] He was so masculine and so right after the episode with Jo Albiss which had left an unpleasant taste in her mouth." [145]

And so, one night, Clare agrees to return to the house in Chelsea that Jacques is staying in, so she might listen to him play Chopin and Debussy, whilst lying stretched out on the sofa with her eyes closed. Soon, the conversation turns to sex. Clare confesses her lack of feeling, but Jacques refuses to accept the possibility of asexuality: "'I do not believe that there lives or breathes a man or woman who is quite sexless'" [147]. 

 

Well Jacques, mon ami, I suggest you click here ... Although, maybe he's right; for suddenly, Clare decides she wants him to fuck her: "Her whole mind suddenly demanded surrender. It would be such a blessed relief to know that she was not neurotic or cold or abnormal in some way like Jo." [147]

 

Jacque lets down Clare's hair and even manages to quickly and skilfully remove her dress. But then he makes the fatal error of leaving the room for a few moments. For when he returns, wearing only his silk dressing gown: "She looked up at him and in an instant the old horror gripped her, completely smothering all desire." [149]

 

To be fair, Jacques doesn't rage or make a scene. In fact, he comforts Clare and draws from her the following confession ... When she was 13 - thus a year younger than when she discovered she was born out of wedlock - she came across a young couple fucking behind a haystack and this so upset her that she ran off and hid in a hedge until dark, crying her eyes out. 

When she tells her mother, the latter calls her a silly goose for getting upset, and explains that such things are (a) perfectly natural and (b) even beautiful. To make matters worse, Clare later discovers her parents at it, after entering their bedroom to look for a hair-slide. 

 

Jacques, for all his knowledge of l'amour, doesn't quite know what to say: "He had a kindly heart and he knew that something was very wrong with this young girl's outlook." [153] So he tells her to get dressed, then drives her home. 

 

Shortly afterwards, Clare has a nervous breakdown and ends up in hospital for a month:

 

"She felt nothing, and nothing mattered - not Robin or Jacques or Jo - nor her parents, the past, present or future. Just nothing. She lay in a corner of the busy ward, sometimes sleeping, sometimes watching drowsily the activities in the long brightly-painted ward, but always remote, withdrawn, as though in a secret uncaring world of her own.

      She wished she could remain in this void for ever. It was wonderful not to mind - not to feel. [...]

      She was not, however, allowed to remain in this apathy too long." [156-57] 

The psychiatrist assigned to her case tells her to pull herself together and to trust that one day she'll find the right man and all will be well: "'You must wait, Clare, quietly, patiently, until it happens to you. Love will come quite suddenly, and out of the blue, I promise you, but wait for it.'" [160]

 

Funnily enough, this little talk results in a strange new peace coming over Clare and her health begins to rapidly improve: "She was able to smile again." [160] (Who needs Freud?)

Post-recovery, Clare heads off to see her parents once more, down on the farm. Her father drives to the station to pick her up - yes, that's right! Oliver Mellors who, at one time, would rage about how "mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and [...] roaring with traffic" [b] would lead to the destruction of the natural world, is now happy to motor around in a car! 

According to Robins, even whilst driving Mellors was "able to distract his thoughts [...] and lose himself in an ecstatic acceptance of the beauties of nature" [163], but I think we all know that's bullshit; much the same kind of thing that is said by those eco-hypocrites today who express their concern about the environment and global warming, but still drive their gas-guzzling 4x4s to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, or take their precious darlings to football practice. 

 

Whilst alone with her mother, Clare reveals her plan to complete her convalescence with her friend Liz at the latter's home, Long Endon, five miles from Wragby. She also says with sudden complete frankness that she intends to call upon Sir Clifford. Connie thinks this is an act of peculiar disloyalty: 

 

"Why, why did her daughter want to resuscitate the past like this? What strange malicious fascination drew her towards Cliffird Chatterley?" [171]

 

 

VI. Chapters 15-17      

 

Whatever her motivation, Clare visists Wragby Hall: "She felt her cheeks colour. Also her heart beat in a curiously quick, uneven fashion." [172] Her friend Liz (and her parents), didn't know she was the love-child of Constance Chatterley. And Clare still wasn't sure whether she would reveal her maternal origin to Sir Clifford.  

 

Now a mature gentleman with beautifully-brushed white hair, Clifford still looked the part, handsome and well-dressed as always; some might even call him a silver fox. Clare is immediately very fond of him; Clifford seemed suave and sophisticated, yet also rather vulnerable and sensitive. Despite it feeling a bit strange to be drinking tea with her mother's first husband, she was excited to be with him.

 

And Clifford, of course, is smitten by Clare:

 

"This was a very beautiful girl, he thought. His interest in her was purely aesthetic. He admired her fine bones, her long slim figure, her narrow aristocratic ankles. [...] He could see that she had taste. He admired her very simply, well-cut, grey linen dress with its white collar and bolero-coat to match. He always liked a well-tailored woman." [176] (Who doesn't?)

 

Clare reminds Clifford of Connie (though she was slimmer and more graceful than the latter). And Clare could have sat listening to Clifford talk for ever: "It was utter bliss to [...] converse with a man like this who had so much to teach her - to give to a woman, mentally." [178] 

 

She realises that she has to tell him who she is; that it would be unfair to go on accepting his kindness and hospitality without doing so. And so the big reveal: she tells him who her parents are and apologises for visiting under false pretences: 

 

"'I suppose I should have told you at once. It was awful of me. [...] But I wanted so much to meet you. My mother has so often spoken of you, and Wragby [...] I felt I must see you. It wasn't just idle curiosity. It was a sort of compulsion ...'" [180]

 

Clifford receives this revelation in silence, like a figure made of stone. 

 

Finally, he is able to speak and express his astonishment. Obviously, he has mixed feelings about the situation he has been placed in and the young woman before him. Nevertheless, he behaves with perfect decency and, rather than throw her out, as might have been expected, he allows her to stay and even invites Clare to visit him again the following day.

She leaves Wragby strangely elated: 

 

"It was as though with this elderly paralysed man who had once been her mother's husband, she found a deep bond ... a more spiritual and intelligent understanding ... than she had received from any of the younger men. [...]

     She had no wish to be disloyal to her parents, but she had to admit she found Sir Clifford a fascinating character, His concise brain - his interest in learning - in all the things of the mind, had given her an exact answer to her desire to ignore the physical and live on a more intelligent plane." [186]

 

To which we can only ask: what would her parents think - and what would Lawrence make of this? I suspect that the latter would be spinning in his grave, if Frieda hadn't had his corpse exhumed and cremated. Because this is a real turn up for the books - and, if I were Robins, I would have Connie marry Clifford and thus square the love triangle that existed between him and her parents. (Spoiler: this isn't going to happen.)  

For Clare, Wragby has everything that her parents home - Swanningdean - lacks:

"There, her mother and father lived in the little snug farmhouse more or less in each other's arms, oblivious to anything that went on around them; not caring particularly what had been done in the past and what might happen in the future. Only the present mattered to them, within the narrow confines of their egotistical passion." [188]

 

Wragby has grandeur and a rich history and belonged to no one individual, but to generations past and generations to come: 

"At Wragby [Clare] found the strength, the vision and above all the restraint which appealed to everything fundamental in her. [...]

      Here, at Wragby, she could feel her own views vindicated. Passion played no part in Sir Clifford's life and yet his mind was free to roam at will over every aspect of living - enriched by past generations, by beauty, art, and an intellect far beyond her own." [188]

 

Of course, this is Clare's take on things: it would never be Connie's. For her mother is one of those women who believes in love über alles and that, for a woman, biology is a destiny: "that aesthetic pleasures could not bring complete fulfilment to a woman; nature did not fashion a woman's body for procreation, nor endow her with the desire to love and be loved to no purpose" [188-89].

Ultimately, for Connie (and I suspect for Robins): "No matter how Clare might try to run away from this basic truth, she would realize it in the end [...]" [189]

 

God save us all from basic truths ...!

 

Clare agrees to sit for Liz's brother, Francis, who fancies himself as a portrait artist. Of course he falls in love with her and even asks for her hand in marriage. She turns him down [c]. Which was just as well, for shortly afterwards he develops leukaemia and dies (see chapter 18, pp. 216-17). 

 

Clare spends more time with Clifford, talking about English architecture and the beauty of fireplaces. On the last night but one, they dine together and then watch a film; Henry V, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier (1944) [d]. 

 

When the time comes to say goodbye, Clifford extracts a promise from Clare that she'll return one day (a promise he'd also once extracted from her mother of course): "She had brought him great joy in a fashion which he found hard to explain to himsef." [201]      

 

Annoyingly, even Clifford can't resist saying something stupid at the end:

 

"'Your mother wasn't altogether wrong, you know - about the need of men and women for love. Few people can live altogether on an intellectual plane. There can be no survival for life without the attraction of male and female and vice versa.'" [201-02]    

Clare - like the rest of us - was deeply shaken by this: "Here was Sir Clifford, of all people, advocating her mother's way of life [...]" [202] and seemingly ignorant of the fact that life would continue just fine without 'the attraction of male and female'; that asexual reproduction is the primary form of reproduction for single-celled organisms and that many eukaryotic organisms (including plants, animals, and fungi) can also reproduce asexually.

Anyway, after leaving Wragby, Clare heads off to visit her parents. She finds Connie in the kitchen "making a bacon and cheese pie for her husband's supper" [203] - what a life! It turns out Gloria has done a bunk and abandoned her baby boy, even though he had "a profound, primeval wisdom in his round blue eyes" - or maybe because he had "a profound, primeval wisdom in his round blue eyes" [210].  

 

As Clare sits feeding the baby - whom Connie and Mellors plan to raise as their own - she ponders again on Clifford's final words to her.

 

 

VII. Chapters 18-22 

   

We pick up the tale on January 4th - three days after Clare's twenty-first birthday ... 

 

Apart from the odd date, Clare has managed to avoid getting entangled in any new love affairs, though has become caught up in the lives of Colin Talbot (a former patient) and his wife, Evelyn. Colin has been injured again in the war, this time suffering terrible facial wounds, much to Evelyn's horror: "Try as she might, she could not stop trembling when she was anywhere near him." [219]

 

Of course, Clare isn't very understanding of the young wife; she found Evelyn's physical revulsion pathetic and thought that "when a woman loved a man, facial disfigurement or any other kind of disablement could not possibly alter her feelings towards him" [219]. 

 

In private, however, Clare too "felt depressed [...] when she saw Colin's once delightful face so fearfully altered and scarred" [219]. Who wouldn't? For as he himself acknowledges, he resembles a gargoyle and it's not a sign of superficiality or lack of character to find such monstrousness problematic. 

 

That is to say, there's a reason why healthy people feel repulsed by sickness or injury; why disfigurement and disability disconcerts. And the reason is one that Nietzsche reminds us of in Twilight of the Idols: "Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and oppresses human beings. It reminds them of decay, danger, powerlessness; it actually makes them lose strength." [e] 

 

Clare's judgement of Evelyn - that she is of a shallow nature and therefore "incapable of strong enduring love" [226] - simply displays her own lack of depth and sound instinct. 

 

Clare's moralistic nastiness is arguably reflected in the author's decision to pass a death sentence on Evelyn - although perhaps this was just a fast and convenient method to advance the plot and clear the way for Clare and Colin to finally recognise their feelings for one another ... (As we will see later, a second fatality will prove even more advantageous to the couple.)   

 

Anyway, poor Evelyn dies - aboard a ship headed for Malta which is torpedoed by a German U-boat. Clare tries to make Colin forget that his wife is lying in a cold sea grave and look on the bright side. After all, he's still alive and "should be glad" [229]. On the train home she congratulates herself on her caring nature: "It's funny [...] that I should do people good [...] and can give them so much more of myself." [229]

Months pass, and Colin eventually stops talking about Evelyn and concentrates on his own recovery. Via extensive plastic surgery, he slowly has his face rebuilt and although still badly scarred, he no longer looks monstrous. Clare is pleased to see him doing so well: "Not for the first time she felt that it was a good thing Fate had removed Evelyn from his life. She might have found even this new face difficult to accept without a tremor of distaste." [231]. 

In the summer of 1945, the war in Europe ends. Clare is still visiting Colin regularly in the hospital. When he is given permission to leave for a weekend, Clare takes him to meet her parents. Mellors likes him and Connie adores him: "'I think he's so nice, so sweet. It doesn't seem to matter at all about his poor face'" [234],  she said, indicating that, actually, it is an issue for her. 

She and Mellors thinks Colin is in love with their daughter and advise her to marry him. So too does Clifford Chatterley, with whom Clare has continued to correspond. Eventually, Clare comes to the same conclusion: that it's Colin she loves; not his appearance, but the fact that he so reminds her of herself. She tells him:

"'Colin, it is no sacrifice for me to be with you. You're everything I've ever wanted in a companion. We think the same way about life, enjoy the same kind of entertainments, read the same books. When I'm with you it's almost like being with my twin.'" [236]

Lawrence, of course, would point out that having the same tastes and interests is an excellent basis for friendship, but disastrous grounds on which to marry [f]. I don't think narcissism much helps matters either.

 

Anyway, Colin decides that the love between him and Evelyn hadn't been the real thing after all; merely an attraction of the senses. Besides, she's dead. And so he and Clare agree to marry. But she feels she has to warn him about her little problem, i.e., her coitophobia. Colin realises that "it was essential for him to deal with all her complexities with the utmost tact" [242] - and so immediately asks her if she's seen a shrink.  

 

They decide not to worry - that it'll be alright on the wedding night. In fact, Clare feels so grateful that Colin is so understanding that she decides she wants to fuck him there and then on the sunlit South Downs: 

 

"Clare found herself able to surrender almost completely to the call of the blood that now moved hotly through her veins. [...] She believed in that moment that she would find nothing but joy in their ultimate union.

      Now, at last, she felt she understood the power of the love that had made her mother leave everything for the man she loved." [246]

 

Colin, however, the perfect getleman, decides not to take advantage of the moment, but to display perfect self-control. And so, instead of fucking, they sit up and enjoy a non-postcoital cigarette, before returning to the farm to inform her parents of their decision to wed.

Unfortunately, things, initially, do not go well ... Clare remains stupidly afraid on the first night of her honeymoon: "Lying in the big double bed, waiting for him to join her, she had felt her whole body cold with fear [...]" [245]

But she needn't have worried. For when Colin comes to bed he yawns and says: "'I'm tired - aren't you poppet? Weddings are frightful affairs. It's always the poor bride and bridegroom who come out of 'em exhausted.'" [246] Then he goes to sleep. 

 

This amazes - and relaxes - Clare: "He was so sweet and understanding [...]" [246] But when after several nights of lying like two children beside each other all through the night - "secure in each other's intimate presence" [247], yet passionless - she begins to worry; maybe he didn't want her? She began to wonder just how long they could go on living with a "strange, unnatural, unmentioned barrier between them" [248].   

Her mother advises her that she must totally surrender herself to Colin: "Perfect fulfilment can never be attained without this complete giving." [250] And this seems to do the trick; for apparently, this was what he had indeed been waiting for all along. And so, finally, Colin does the deed and Clare was lifted "into a new world, a new deeper understanding, a new life" [252]. 

But as happy as this makes her, I suspect it doesn't come close to the joy she feels when she learns of Sir Clifford's sudden death and the fact that he has left his entire estate, including Wragby Hall, to her. She and Colin immediately put their mews cottage up for sale and make plans to move in to the above as soon as possible (with the intention, apparently, of turning it into the Glyndebourne of the North). 

 

This news makes Connie shake with laughter: '"Oh, Clare, Clare, we must go and tell your father,' she said, gasping, 'he'll be so amused!'" [256]

 

And on that note ends the story of Lady Chatterley's daughter - surely one of the most objectionable figures in English fiction ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The edition I'm reading is the original UK edition, published by Consul Books, 1961. Page references given in the post above are to this edition - not the first US edition published by Ace Books (1962).

[b] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 119. 

[c] Shortly afterwards, poor Francis develops leukaemia and dies: 

      "Clare had cried quite unashamedly over this. It seemed awful that Francis had to die without even the glory of being killed in defence of his country. And it made her feel almost guilty because she hadn't been able to love him as he had loved her." [216] 

      She really is a stupid girl and as self-absorbed as her mother.

 

[d] Unless Clifford had managed to get hold of a pre-release print of the film, there is no way he and Clare could have watched Henry V in the summer of 1944; it was released in British cinemas on 22 November of that year. Robins's claim that this movie was an old favourite of Clifford's and that Clare had also seen it before, when much younger, is simply careless on her part.

 

[e] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. 'Skirmishes of an Untimely Man', §20. 

[f] See D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 325-26, where he writes:

"Modern people are just personalities, and modern marriage takes place when two people are 'thrilled' by each other's personality: when they have the same tastes in furniture or books or sport or amusement, when they love 'talking' to one another, when they admire one another's 'minds'. Now this, this affinity of mind and personality is an excellent basis of friendship between the sexes, but a disastrous basis for marriage. Because marriage inevitably starts the sex activity, and the sex activity is, and always was and will be in some way hostile to the mental, personal relationship between man and woman. It is almost an axiom, that the marriage of two personalities will end in a startling physical hatred. People who are personally devoted to one another at first end by hating one another with a hate which they cannot account for [...]"

 

To read the first part of this post - on chapters 1-11 of Lady Chatterley's Daughter - click here. 

Reflections on Lady Chatterley's Daughter (Part I: Chapters 1-11)

Front cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter 

by Patricia Robins (Consul Books, 1961) [a]

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence's final and most notorious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), has been a gift that keeps on giving to parodists and pornographers, as well as more earnest filmmakers and writers of popular romantic fiction, such as Patricia Robins, author of over 80 novels between 1934 and 2016, including, in 1961, a sequel (of sorts) to Lawrence's banned book.

 

Readers familiar with Lawrence's novel will know that it ends (a little droopingly) with the lovers separated; Connie goes with her sister, Hilda, to their parental home in Scotland and Mellors gets a job on a farm in the Amber Valley district of Derbyshire. 

 

It's agreed that they'll remain apart for six months, so that he can get his divorce (regardless of whether Connie obtains hers from Clifford or not), then reunite in the late spring and buy a small place of their own. By then, their baby will have been born - assuming Connie doesn't miscarry, or decide to have an abortion and forget all about a man who regards their child as a side issue. 

 

The point is, that not only does Robins presuppose that Connie and Mellors do, in fact, reunite, but that the baby is born - and is female. Lawrence gives us the hope of such a happy-ever-after ending, but does not provide such and I think it important to note this before we begin. 

 

 

II. Chapters 1-3      

 

Set twenty years after Lawrence's novel, in wartime London, Lady Chatterley's Daughter is the tale of a nurse, Clare Mellors, and the guilty secret which held her on the edge of a surging passion. 

 

Clare is engaged to a young officer called Robin. Whilst he's fighting with Monty and the boys in Tripoli, Clare is living with her aunt Hilda (and cousin Pip) in a flat near Sloane Square. She's a friendly and attractive young woman: "Her figure was perfect and her colouring - the red hair, milk-white skin and very large blue eyes - made her very striking." [7] 

 

But she is withdrawn, even, we might say, a little cold; "there was always an invisible barrier between herself and the opposite sex" [8]. Luckily, her fiancé "seemed to understand and appreciate the quality of reserve in her" [8]. Indeed, he respected her modesty so much that he hadn't attempted to initiate pre-marital sexual relations - which she considered improper - with any real determination.

 

Clare, then, is the very opposite of her mother, Connie, who had indulged in love affairs both before and after her marriage to Clifford without any sense of shame or wrongdoing, as discussed in a recent post: click here. 

 

Indeed, Clare is somewhat estranged from both her parents: 

 

"There weren't often rows [...] but undercurrents of dissension and misunderstanding which were turning Clare against her parents and making her less inclined to go home [...] Aunt Hilda seemed to understand her much better than her mother did." [8]

 

That, I think, is a nice touch by Robins, who appreciates that a couple such as Connie and Mellors, who only ever think of their own fulfilment, would probably have had little time for poor Clare. And I rather like the fact that their daughter is determined to lead a morally conventional lifestyle, upholding traditional ideas to do with sex and marriage and wearing warm and sensible pyjamas to bed.   

 

One day, Robin arrives on leave. It turns out her fiancé is rather like Clifford; fair-haired, good-looking, well-mannered, full of charm and always smartly dressed: "One never associated him with untidy clothes - or untidy principles." [16]           

 

Unfortunately for Clare, war can change a man: as can too much champagne. And after dancing the night away at the Savoy, they return to the flat in Chelsea, where he attempts to seduce her, much to her chagrin: 

 

"She thought she would die of disappointment. She had counted on his integrity and understanding of her feelings. [...] Now, suddenly, Robin was not only completely disregarding the conventions he approved of but was showing a side of his nature she had never seen before." [25]

 

She asks him to stop and return to his bedroom. But he doesn't: "He was no longer the chivalrous and noble Robin but a stranger who disgusted her." [26] In a frenzy, she finally manages to fight off her fiancé-turned-would-be-rapist. Whilst Clare is understandably upset, Robin is indignant and tells her that if she is so repulsed by sex then she should inform him now: "'I don't want a frigid wife who gives her body as a duty [...]'" [26]  

 

Clare calls him an animal - and hands back her engagement ring. Robin leaves, "nursing his frustrated passions" [28] - which I take to be a euphemism for epididymal hypertension - and ends up in a basement night club in Knightsbridge, where he bumps into an old pal from Nottingham to whom he blurts out his troubles and expresses disbelief that the daughter of the scandalous Lady Chatterley could be so sexually unresponsive.   

 

 

III. Chapter 4-7

 

Clare decides to go home for a week; to the beautiful old Sussex farmhouse, just outside Brighton, where her parents had settled and raised her. 

 

Her mother, who is now a plump figure in her forties, had made the house "warm, homely, and comfortable" [33] with thick carpets and curtains; she had even installed central heating (one can't imagine Mellors approving of this, but I suspect he spent most of his time outdoors with his prize herd of cattle).        

 

Clare tells her mother what happened between her and Robin ...

 

On the one hand, Connie is pleased that the latter is out of the picture, as she and Mellors had never considered him a real man: "Oh, so charming, and English, and well-bred, but too conventional for words" [37]. But, on the other hand, she thinks Clare is being terribly unreasonable and ought to "'forgive the poor boy'" [40]. 

 

And with that, Connie returns to stuffing a chicken; proud of her own moral unconventionality. Unfortunately, Clare's father isn't any more understanding: 

 

"Queer that a child of his shouldn't feel the body's urge. Pity if some chap couldn't wake her up. [...] A woman without love and loving must be miserable [...] half-fulfilled, ever-seeking to solve the unknown mysteries of life." [44]

 

It's depressing to discover that - twenty years on - Mellors is still subscribing to the same cod philosophy. But, alas, all too believable. Rather less believable is the fact that two days after breaking things off with Robin, Clare is canoodling with a tall, slim-hipped, dark-haired American airman from Virginia called Hamilton Craig: "Perhaps Ham would help to lay Robin's ghost completely." [52] 

 

And so she let's him cop a feel of her "rounded little breasts" [53], beneath her pale green woolly jumper. I mean, a gal's got to move on, but this seems a bit hasty and out of character. That said, the minute he tries to raise the stakes, she's playing the virgin card once again and that's the end of their brief romance. 

 

Next up, is Bill Roberts; a handsome naval officer. They have fun together, but in a purely platonic manner. For Bill is engaged to another and so "did not attempt to become either serious or intimate" [69], much to Clare's relief; "it was good to know that she could actually enjoy this sort of thing and feel light-hearted and wthout the old burden of fears and repressions" [70]. 

 

This last line makes one wonder if, actually, there is something wrong with Clare; had she had some terrible childhood trauma involving sexual abuse? Or was it the shame she felt at having been born out of wedlock? 

 

If I'd written the novel, I would've opted for the former explanation and revealed Oliver Mellors as an incestuous paedophile à la Eric Gill [b]. But it seems that Robins prefers the latter, telling us how, aged fourteen, Clare was horrified when she discovered her illegitimacy and "the facts about her mother's sensational love-affair with her father" [71]. 

 

Rightly or wrongly, Clare felt herself the product of sin - and this is why she has been reluctant to love. And this is why she decided to devote herself to nursing in an attempt to atone for her parents adultery. Again, rightly or wrongly, the shame had stayed with her ever since: 

 

"Even now in the middle of the war, when she was an adult and a nurse, and such things as illegitimacy seemed less terrible, her abhorrence of the whole situation remained." [76]

IV. Chapters 8-11

On another visit to her parents, Clare finally gets to meet her half-sister (i.e., the daughter born to Mellors and his first wife, Bertha), about whom she has almost no knowledge or memory:

 

"She had a rather curious figure, short, dumpy, with a shabby duffle-coat stretched around a large stomach. She was hatless, with short, lanky hair falling in crimped waves on either side of a long, narrow face. Definitely an unhealthy and unattractive looking person, Clare thought, judging her to be in her early thirties." [82]

 

Having said that, the woman had a queer wild attraction and brilliant blue eyes. And, it became clear, she wasn't fat, but heavily pregnant. She has come to see Mr. Mellors; so Clare invites her in to await his return. 

 

As the stranger sits drinking a drop of brandy, Clare takes the opportunity to pass further silent judgement upon her; noticing the ladders in her cheap silk stockings, for example, and the awful earrings that make her look like a poorly educated gipsy. Apparently, such snobbery laced with racism was acceptable at the time, but it doesn't help contemporary readers to much like Miss Mellors.

 

It turns out she - Oliver's eldest daughter (now going by the name Gloria) - had become involved with an American serviceman, who had been "generous with the dollars, nylons, chocolates and cigarettes" [85]. Generous too with his affections, leaving her knocked up, before getting himself posted elsewhere.           

Eventually, the woman reveals her identity: "Clare stood perfectly still. It was as though she had been struck by lightning. She went deadly pale." [86] Strangely enough, when Mellors gets home and is confronted by his first child, he too turns pale (maybe it's a family thing). 

 

As for Connie, she reacts rather like Clare at the sight of the wretched figure sat on her sofa, i.e., with cruel judgement and class hatred: "This girl with her dissipated face and dirty nails repelled Connie. [...] She even felt unclean because of the contact with 'Gloria' [...]" [92]

 

Nevertheless, she abides by her husband's decision to help (and house) the girl in a nearby cottage. And soon enough, she's warming to Gloria and trying to convince Clare not to be so hard on her - an accusation that causes the latter to erupt: "'Why is it that if somebody wants to live decently and stick to their ideals, they are called 'hard'?" [98]

Connie sighs, and decides that her daughter is not only intolerant, but inhuman; whereas Gloria, for all her faults, weaknesses, and vices - in fact, because of these things - is at least human. This doesn't stop Connie walking her daughter to the bus stop, however, when the latter leaves to go back to London. 

 

But Clare, having been called inhuman and an intolerant snob by her mother, is in no mood to reconcile and tells of the great discomfort she felt as a child when her parents paraded naked around the house "preaching the 'Beauties of Nature' [and] giving each other let's-go-to-bed looks'" [101]. 

 

In a powerful and moving indictment of her proto-hippie parents, Clare continues: 

 

"'You never have asked yourself what I thought or felt. For instance - if you'd had the smallest understanding, the least you and Father could have done was to reserve exhibiting your great passion for each other until you were in your own bedroom. [...] I suppose you couldn't help it. I've read in books some women are made that way but I think you might have tried a little harder to control yourself in front of me. As for Father, well, the only excuse for him is that he's never known how decent people behave.'" [101-02]

 

"'If I am a snob, you made me that way. You sent me to the 'best' schools which meant I made friends amongst the 'best' people. How do you think I felt comparing Father with the father of that girl Cynthia who used to be my best friend at school? [...] He was erudite and appreciative of art and music; he could talk about opera, science, history - so many things. How could I ask Cynthia back to our house with you and Father mooning over each other and no other topic of conversation but the birds and the bees.'" [102]        

 

Obviously, this reduces Connie to tears. When she gets home she tells her husband what happened. Mellors tells her to stop fretting and have some tea; his answer - along with fucking - to everything. Strangely, despite feeling heart-sick with a sense of maternal failure, a nice cuppa does the trick: 

 

"Dear Oliver, thought Connie. He was always so kind. This man who had been able to lead her to the ultimate rapture of loving could soothe her just as miraculously." [104]  

Thus soothed, Connie learns nothing.

Back at the hospital, it turns out Clare has a friend, Elizabeth Peverel, who "came from a very wealthy family with a big estate up in Derbyshire" [110], only five miles away from Wragby. Liz has even met Sir Clifford, once or twice, whom she describes as a friend of her father's and "'an attractive man in a queer sort of way'" [111].     

This serves to further kindle Clare's interest in Sir Clifford, about whom she has been thinking a great deal recently. Chapter ten ends, however, on a rather nasty note: Clare is pestered by phone and letter, before being finally accosted in person, by a former patient who is erotically obsessed with her. 

 

Luckily, before things turn very nasty, she is saved by a passing member of an ambulance crew - a woman with "strong brown attractive hands and  [...] rather handsome in a boyish way" [117], called Jo, who invites Clare back to her place for a drink ...

 

Clare finds Jo to be extremely pleasing company. Despite her masculine appearance "she had a distinctly feminine understanding of what another woman needed" [121] and it was a huge relief for Claire "not to have to be on her guard as was inevitable with a man" [121]. Jo was without doubt a "most unusual, charming woman" [121].

 

The two women enjoy fish for dinner - served with "one of Jo's wonderful sauces" [125] and a bottle of white wine. Afterwards, Jo made some excellent coffee. Then the sirens sound, announcing another German air raid. Jo insists Clare simply must stay the night at her flat, as the bombs fall all around them. 

 

To her credit, Jo refuses to let the Luftwaffe spoil her evening; she puts on another record and makes some more strong coffee. The two women talk and laugh until long past midnight:

 

"Clare allowed herself to be completely organized by Jo. She had to admit that Jo seemed to know exactly what she most needed. A hot bath - even a big hot towel, warmed by Jo in front of the fire and tossed to her when she was ready for it. Perfumed essence to make the water especially tempting and fragrant [...] She had put fresh linen on the bed in her little room and in spite of Clare's protests finally tucked her up there. [...]

      Clare was a little bewildered by all this attention but grateful. She had never known anybody look after her as well as Jo did." [130]

As she drifts off to sleep, Jo stands looking down at her, admiring her beauty ...

 

The next morning, Jo leaves for work whilst the objet de son désir makes herself some coffee. Unfortunately, it's at this point that Monica - Jo's ex-girlfriend - turns up and there's a scene. She tells Clare: "'I think you're a bitch, to stay here with Jo, knowing just what she means to me and how things are between her and myself.'" [133]

 

Still the sexually naive Clare doesn't click what's going on. It's only after Monica screams: "'I loved Jo. And I know she loves me. I won't let you take my place here!'" [134] before collapsing on the sofa in tears that - finally! - the penny drops. 

 

And once the penny has dropped, Clare responds with the same level of hateful prejudice and homophobia that her father displays in a famous rant in Lady Chatterley's Lover (see chapter XIV or click here for my discussion of this in a post from June 2013):

 

"At last she realized what this was all about. She knew what Jo was. One of those. Her attention, the wonderful way she had cherished Clare ... all that thoughtful care, sprang not from the normal desire for friendship but from perversion. [...]

       Now that Clare remembered the look in Jo's eyes and the way those long nervous fingers had grasped hers, she shivered [...] She, who had had sex flung at her in its natural form all her life, had never come up against this sort of thing before. It did not hold out a vestige of attraction for her. [...] The very thought of facing Jo again horrified Clare. Better Cas Binelli [ - the former patient from whose clutches Jo had rescued her -] than that." [134-35]

 

That, for me, is the final straw: having overlooked her ascetic idealism, her judgemental snobbery and casual racism, I cannot simply turn a blind eye to her lesbophobia. 

 

Clare Chatterley may be a good nurse. And she may be very beautiful. But she's a nasty-minded woman; one whom would rather be raped in a back alley by a straight man, than treated with loving kindness by a queer woman. The only positive thing that can be said is that, unlike her father, at least she doesn't think lesbians should be killed.

 

That is the end of Part One of Robins's novel. My hope is that in Part Two Clare will learn to see things differently ...      

 

Notes

 

[a] All page references given in the post refer this edition of the text. 

 

[b] Eric Gill (1882-1940) was an English sculptor, designer, and printmaker, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. He is perhaps best known today however, as an incestuous paedophile, who not only had illicit sexual relations with his sisters and daughters, but also with his dog: click here for further details.

      Interestingly, in chapter XVII of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Clifford interviews his gamekeeper about the local scandal surrounding him and at one point the ever-impertinent Mellors says: "'Surely you might ma'e a scandal out o' me an' my bitch Flossie. You've missed summat there.'" Which is a strange thing to say and suggests that Mellors must himself at some point have entertained such a zoosexual fantasy. 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 268-69. 

 

To read part two of this post on Lady Chatterley's Daughter, click here.