The Queen, Princess Margaret, and Lady Chatterley

Sisters reading Lady Chatterley's Lover 

outside a bookshop in 1960

 

 

I. 

 

Following the Lady Chatterley Trial in 1960 - a key moment in the sexual, social, and cultural revolution that was to follow in the UK and elsewhere - there was widespread consternation in some quarters at the jury's decision to find for the defendant, Penguin Books, and thereby open the doors to a more permissive era.   

 

Indeed, if one ever pops along to the National Archives, in Kew, one can find a Home Office file of letters sent to Her Majesty's Government concerning this case, including one from an Angry of Mayfair type imploring that the Queen personally intervene:     

"I beg of your Majesty to use your influence to reverse the decision to allow Lady Chatterley's Lover to be retailed to the public at a price within the allowance of youths and girls still at school. The depravity of this book is unspeakable, and with your sheltered upbringing in a Christian home Your Majesty cannot conceive the immoral situations which will be put before innocent minds." [1]

 

Whilst the writer's views were duly noted - and, indeed, his letter filed - the Queen did not in fact attempt to overturn the court's decision; as a constitutional monarch, Her Majesty does not involve herself in any political or personal disputes and letters requesting that she do so receive a standard reply to this effect.

 

 

II.  

 

The question that comes to my mind is: Did the Queen read Lawrence's notorious novel? 

 

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to this. 

 

I do know, however, that she was familiar with works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Romantic poets including Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson, and didn't just settle down with The Racing Post and a copy of Tatler when she retired to her reading room. 

 

So, it's not inconceivable that she would know more recent works of English literature, although she undoubtedly preferred the novels of P. D. James and Dick Francis to books by writers such as Lawrence (even if the character of Lady Chatterley was partly based on her first cousin twice removed, Lady Ottoline Morrell, who once had a brief affair with a young gardener and stonemason employed at Garsington Manor) [2]. 

 

Her younger sister, Margaret, however, was a different kettle of fish ... 

 

III.

 

Princess Margaret was one of the world's most celebrated socialites; famed for her glamorous (somewhat bohemian) lifestyle and reputed romances, including, most scandalously, her affair with Peter Townsend, a married RAF officer in the royal household that was to end in heartbreak for both parties [3].

 

In 1960, she married photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, whom Elizabeth created Earl of Snowdon. The couple had two children, but both parties engaged in extramarital affairs [4], and they separated in 1976, divorcing two years later. 

 

Margaret, then, was an unconventional member of the British Royal family; an intelligent, amusing, and lively young woman with a rebellious streak, whom I'm sure would have read Lady Chatterley's Lover and been delighted by it. 

 

But again, I don't know that for a fact and, ultimately, she seems to have been more passionate about music, dance, and fashion, rather than books. 

Notes

 

[1] See the article 'Primary Sources From the 1960s Show Public Reaction to The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover' (16 December 2010) on the website amdigital.co.uk: click here. 

[2] To what extent Ottoline Morrell influenced the fictional Lady Chatterley is debatable. But Lawrence certainly had her in mind when he created the character of Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1921) - much to her chagrin, as she thought the portrayal grossly unkind and unfair. Lawrence, of course, denied there was anything more than hint of Ottoline in Hermione, along with traces of a million other women. 

      Readers interested in this might like to see an article by Maev Kennedy entitled 'The real Lady Chatterley: society hostess loved and parodied by the Bloomsbury group', in The Guardian (10 October 2006): click here.   

[3] Townsend divorced his wife in 1952, the year that Elizabeth ascended to the throne. He proposed to Margaret the following year, but the powers that be decided he would make an unsuitable husband for the Queen's 22-year-old sister. When the Archbishop of Canterbury made clear his opposition to Margaret's marrying a divorced man, she abandoned her relationship with Townsend.

[4] Claims that Margaret was romantically involved with Mick Jagger, Peter Sellers, and Australian cricketer Keith Miller are unproven. But there is evidence to show she had affairs with, amongst others, David Niven, Warren Beatty, and London gangster John Bindon. 

 

Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here.