The Trial of Lady Chatterley

"The two remaining books are Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (still the most important book about the English novel, and one that has guided me through my thinking about censorship) and The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by C H Rolph, which is a summary transcript of the trial. Well, of course, it itself represents an intervention in the censorship wars of the 1960s, because it was written from the point of view of the publishers. It was self-published by Penguin. There was a sense that everything that was good and healthy and forward-looking and unstuffy and liberatory about the possibilities in English culture attached itself to the defendants in the case. Everything that was obscurantist and stifling and reactionary and oppressive attached itself to the prosecutors and their champions, and that’s what this book represents. It’s a wonderful, clear-throated song, like the one sung by Miriam, Moses’s sister. The Israelites crossed the sea, and she delivers this wonderful song of triumph and jubilation: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; / Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’ Rolph’s book is a bit like that! And then, almost in a blink, the cultural conjuncture changes, and the feminist attack, by Kate Millett and others, on Lawrence starts – the argument that Lawrence was a misogynist, and so on. Suddenly Lawrence becomes a representative of something very patriarchal and phallic and oppressive. That’s fascinating, how a book can be a champion of anti-censorship, but then also in a sense be the champion of censorship or oppression. I think it’s very compelling, but, in the end, wrong. It’s a somewhat reductionist reading of Lawrence. Though Millett’s reading is very sophisticated, it’s eventually reductionist. The point about Lawrence is that he’s constantly eluding these categories. He says himself: ‘Trust the tale, not the teller.’ He’s very sensitive to the risk of the novel being diminished to the level of a tract – as is Hardy, as is Rushdie . All three of them would say, ‘You’re quite wrong. You’re reading this is as though it’s an argument. It’s not. It’s an impression.’ That’s Hardy’s word. Well, in one sense it is, but in another sense, it’s true. It’s just true. Novels are not tracts. Yes."