Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

*This episode contains very strong language and adult content*A semi autobiographical account from a conflicted man? An ode to a wife’s sexual desire? A criminally obscene novel?Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the most famous texts from the past century, but why?In this episode, we hear from the director of the new Netflix movie Laure De Clermont-Tonnerre about why this story is important to the 21st century. Then, Kate speaks to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence, his final novel, and the trial that made them the sexual mascots of the 1960s.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh my lovely bitwifsters. It's me, Kate Lister. I'm here with your fair do's warning. Well, this week we have a bit of a doozy as fair as the fair doos warning is concerned because we are only talking about Lady Chatterley's Leather.

The book, the film, the scandal, the sex scenes. So inevitably, we will be straying into mucky territory today. We will be talking about adult content, sexual content, And not only that, not only that, there will be repeated reference to swear words and not gentle, mild swear words either. No, no, the real heavyweights. And you just might not want to listen to that. And you know what, that's absolutely fine. You need to get out now while you still can.

And the rest of you, mucky pups, who are more than happy to have such obscenities poured in your ear by me and my guests, then let's do this. Has anyone ever told you that you can't say something, can't print something? That's something that I have certainly been told on a number of occasions. Maybe it was a boss, maybe it was a family member or a publisher, maybe it was a certain CEO of Twitter. In 1960, Penguin Books were put on trial in the UK. What was their crime? Publishing and obscene text.

And here on betwixt, frankly, there is no better text for our ears. The more obscene, the better. And today, we are going to get into the juicy detail of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chattelies lover to find out whether it was really all that scandalous. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. It was D.H. Lawrence's final novel. And on top of being the subject of a landmark obscenity trial in 1960, it is also the basis for numerous TV and film adaptations, each a reflection on the eras that they were made in. Lady Chattelie's lover is probably one of the most well-known novels of the past century. And Netflix have just provided us. with a new option, starring Jack O'Connell and Emma Corrin. And today, I am talking to Francis Wilson about the themes of this censored book,

D.H. Lawrence himself, his interest in female pleasure, and how this new film compares. First, though, we spoke to the film's director, Lord Declare Montanair, to find out what she made of this novel, to find out what she wanted to highlight in her new interpretation, and if she thinks that the story still has the power to shock today. What I really appreciated about this novel is that DeLaurence needed to express the beauty and the purity of sex and the body, the body language. And that's why it was so scandalous and obscene because it was also addressing female sexual pleasure and there was not quite accepted. So I think what was very important for me and also we were all locked in. It was pandemic when I read the script and I needed to talk about human connection and more precisely sensuality, the importance of the

the touch and sexuality without taboo. And that was the message from the original message from Diet Florence. And I think it was so timely and obviously timeless. I think it's still shocking, you know, in the way to accept sexuality as part of a vital need and as a pure act and nothing shameful. And obviously when we see what's happening in Iran, what's the Rowan Wade overturned, there's still a struggle, a political struggle about the woman. the woman's body. And now in that reason, it's still a political statement to bring out the female

sexuality, pleasure in the center of the conversation. I think that we're still experiencing a lot of censor about sex, sexuality. We haven't really come across puritanity, moral, puritanity moral. And obviously, like, the censorship about what we experienced today with politics in Iran, the woman being killed. trying to be free or the one way being overturned, I think the body of a woman is still really challenged by politics. Lady Chathley, her husband and her lover, are all residents of a world in recovery from the First World War and the Spanish flu.

They lived in a time of changing social hierarchies, but also the era of jazz and glamorous fashion, the roaring 20s. We wanted to find out what it was like to recreate the post-World War I world on screen. You know, I wanted to respect the classicism of the 20s and obviously like this time period, but I never wanted to trap the characters and the world into the 20s as if it was a documentary. So I took some liberty with my collaborators to be able to make it very accessible, timeless and timely. And so in that sense, we worked on music and costumes, especially to be always really relatable. So we blended some elements from the 20s and to the days.

and to always juxtapose different eras together so that you don't feel it's a costume film. You don't feel it's like too dusty. It has to be vibrant and immediate. And that was just with the help of my great collaborators that really added some liberty, some rock and roll music, Isabella Summers, some fabric and texture from today in my friar,

the costume designer. So, yes, and obviously also the dialogue, the lines, and my Corinne and Jack O'Connell sometime redesigned their dialogue so that it would feel extremely contemporary. I enjoyed putting a little glimpse of other authors

that experience censorship which James Joyce Joyce and Virginia Woolf so there was kind of like my little commentary because ultimately those writers from the 20s from the same era experienced a lot of artistic censorship

which we still go through now. I feel like everything is so political and art is always under the pressure of politics. The book and the film both contained their fair share of sex. So finally we wondered, what was it like to film the sex scenes in 2022? We had a lot of rehearsal with Jacob Connell and Emma Corrine. We worked with an intimacy coordinator. She was extremely helpful because we had to break the ice of like being a bit awkward, amberous. And we all talked to. about what should be those scenes, what should they say, what's the narrative in order of making it like little moments of poetry and nothing retreatuous or redundant or boring. And so we approached

it as dancing choreography. And Itta O'Brien, the intimacy coordinator, comes from a dancing background. So she was really helpful into like, you know, exploring shapes and body language and making sure that what we wanted to express emotionally was into the physicality. And so we worked for like two weeks. We were all together. And then on set, she really helped creating the safe space. We had a close set. And by this time, our friendship were very cemented. And we were such a great partner together. And they had so much friendship and trust. So it really helped diving into those scenes and making it moments of freedom. Now let's hear from Francis about D.H. Lawrence himself and his most famous, if not

best novel. But I'm welcome to betwixt the sheets. It's only Francis Wilson. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you. How are you? I'm thrilled to speak to it. Do you have any idea how much I loved your book on Harriet Wilson? It was one of the first books I ever read about a courtesan ever and I loved it. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. That feels like a long time ago. Well, it was a long time ago. It was so good though. It was that publishing be damned line and they just really caught my attention and who she was and yeah it was just such a vivid book i absolutely loved that i really did thank you oh pleasure so to speak to you about our mate and t h lawrence in his book lady chattelie lover yeah is an absolute treat well we'll see about that we'll see good point

yes so there's another film coming out isn't there lady chattelie i think it's this week it's coming out yes i had a look at it last night oh it's very very very, very lovely. It doesn't bear a huge relation to the book. Well, it actually does. It brings out the beauty of the book, but it's cleaned the book up a lot. I enjoyed it very much. The performances were beautiful and they've made Lady Chatterley into the sexual protagonist. Oh, that's interesting. Rather than Oliver Mellers, which I think is fair to the book, to be honest. When you said that they've cleaned it up, that's quite interesting. What do you mean by like they've cleaned it up because I think that's probably what Lady Chattley's lover is mostly known for,

isn't it? Yeah, it's quite rude. Yes, I was wondering whether this would be censored, this film. I thought, no, not at all. I mean, there wouldn't be any trial around this. Now, the book has 13 uses of the word fuck and 12 uses of the word cunt and lots of descriptions about the reverent Smellersfield towards his balls. And all the sex scenes in the book, which only take up about 230 pages. All the sex scenes are tied into kind of Mellar's mansplaining about the importance of his penis, which she called John Thomas, and Lady Chatterley's vagina, which she calls Lady Jane.

So the sex scenes are very much a kind of sex education, and they're incredibly embarrassing. And I think they possibly always were embarrassing. They make me wint to read. There were none of them in the film. I mean, the film was much. more of a love story than a sex story. And there's only two uses of the word fuck. And that's when Lady Chatterley says to Melus, I want you to fuck me. And he says, then I will fuck you, rather than

him initiating all the fuck talk. And her going, you can't say that. And he doesn't do any mansplaining. He doesn't give any of his great long speeches about the daughters of God and the sons of man coming together and fucking our way into a new world. Any of that's all gone. So in that sense, it's been massively cleaned up. It's not embarrassing anymore. That is really interesting. And I'm glad that you said that because when I read Lady Chassis's lover,

I was struck by this thought of, I was only about like 22 at time, but even then I was struck by the thought of like, this doesn't sound like good sex. No. Like for all, like the for all like the furor about it and all the, you know, oh, it's a really dirty book. it sort of sounds like shit sex. It's shit sex, isn't it? And no one is going to masturbate over this book. I think.

So in that sense, I mean, the whole issue around the trial in 1960 was whether this was pornography or not. You only have to read it to see that it's not. It wasn't going to corrupt or deprave anyway. In fact, it's really a book about words. It's a book about what you are allowed to say in print. That's interesting. And so it's about the language we use about sex rather than,

Sex Act itself. Lawrence's point was, it is completely ridiculous that everybody performs sex, but we haven't got any language in which to describe what we go through, which we just dissolve into dots, as Richard Hoggott said in the Chatterley trial, euphemisms and dissolving into dots. And that makes the discourse around sex seem filthy. But if you just use plain, straightforward words, Lawrence was saying, you call a spade a spade, we embed those words in the language. And it's not dirty anymore, it's practical. And what he was saying really was that sex is a wonderful experience, but it's also quite a basic one.

Yes, there's that scene, isn't there, where he's defining cunt to Lady Chattelieu. And it doesn't mean just a vulva when he's explaining it. It means sex in general, doesn't it, when he's describing it? Yeah. And she quite rightly says, when he says, because he always talks about sex in dialect, which is very, very funny in the book.

Melus speaks either in the King's In, English or in a thick dialect, which is really hard to unravel. And you have to keep going back, don't you? What's he doing to her now? I can't quite what is. And so he says, there are lovely cunt or something. And she says, what is cunt? And he tries to explain it to her.

And his description of cunt isn't what most women would understand by the word. But then nobody really understands what Lawrence means by sex. And this is also what the Lady Chatterley trial was about. He's saying that sex is terrifically important. And he's trying to tell us why, but I'm highly sure what his reasoning is. For anyone that's listening to this that does not know what the basic plot line of Lady Chatterley is. If anyone sat here going, it's a what? Who's Melas? What's happening?

Just give us a very brief summary of what this book is about. Lady Chatterley is upper middle class girl from a bohemian family. And Clifford Chatterley is the man she married. So Clifford Chatterley is an aristocrat. And he's also, very importantly, the owner of a mine and Nottinghamshire mine. So all the family's money comes from mining. Connie is a very passionate woman and she married, to put it mildly. And she married Sir Clifford without knowing him very much.

So Connie's sister Hilda and father were concerned about his marriage. She married him before the war. They have sex once or twice before he goes back to the front. During the war, he suffers a terrible wound, which makes him paralysed from the waist downwards. And it makes him impotent. His paralysis is seen much more as a metaphor in the book for the paralysis of the class structure than a physical paralysis. Because Sir Clifford is not seen as a sympathetic character. No, he's not.

It's one of the strange things, isn't it? You think, poor Sir Clifford, my God, he's been cuckolded by his wife and his servant under his own nose. but Lawrence does not expect us to sympathise with him because the impotence is a mental impotence. So Lady Chatterley gets more and more frustrated and she starts having sex with the gamekeeper who gives her these sex education lessons, teaches her what a cunt is and how important fucking is. And she gradually kind of transforms. But the moment she completely transforms, and again, it's one of very funny bits in the book, is when they have a simultaneous orgasm.

And that's one of Clifford's sex education lessons, is that you've only really had sex if you have a simultaneous orgasm. And if you don't, your sex life is a failure. And he says to her, he says, you know, you see all these couples with that raw look. They've never had a simultaneous orgasm. And so Connie thinks, oh my God, I've clearly never had a simultaneous orgasm. And at that point, she completely changes. And Sir Clifford notices that his wife is glowing in a certain way. And she also becomes pregnant through the simultaneous orgasm.

Obviously, it's a small town, there's a lot of gossip. The relationship is exposed. Lady Chatterley is going to have Mellas' baby. Sir Clifford says, let me bring it up as my own. She says, no, because that's completely disrespectful to the love I feel for Mellers. Melas, by the way, is on the side of the workers and not on the side. It's a book about class more than sex. Well, this is on the side of the workers,

and Sir Clifford is meanwhile trying to navigate a worker's strike in his minds. And Lady Chatterley leaves Sir Clifford and goes off with Melas. And all is well in the end. But it's a bad novel, I think. I'm interested to hear you say that, that it's a bad novel. I guess it's a love story, isn't it? It's like love and sex overcome class and difference. Tell me why you think that this is a bad novel.

And then we'll get into why Lawrence wrote the thing. Lawrence is a genius. Lawrence's writing could be at its best so good that it just floats off the page. It explodes your mind, especially his travel writing and some of his finest poetry, is just extraordinary. And his short stories are just extraordinary. And Sons and Lovers is the best novel. It's the best novel of 20th century.

So this is a bad novel in Lawrence's terms. You know, it's a novel which is marred by the Laurentian hero by Melos, because he always destroyed his novels. Every time the Laurentian hero, like Burke and Women in Love, marches in and stands on his soapbox and starts preaching, you think, oh God, you're just going to ruin your novel. Melos was a prick. He's a prick.

Yeah, he's a prick. One of the things that's so amusing about Lawrence makes him so interesting for me is that he had absolutely no idea where his talents lay as a writer. And so he thought that the strongest bits of his novels were the mansplaining bits, but they are the weakest bits. I'm sure the expurgated Lady Chatterley, which circulated for the first 30 years, before Penguin brought out their first unexpigated edition in 1960. I've not read the expigated one, but I'm sure it's much better.

It is really tedious, isn't it, to listen to this guy. He has bad sex with this woman and then proceeds to give her a lecture about why that was okay to do. Yes. And Lawrence always has his women. He has very interesting women because he has women who mock the Laurentian hero in the way that Lawrence's own wife, Frida, always mocked him. I mean, she never ever stopped teasing him. So he has these very kind of amused and witty women who mock the mansplaining, but they still obey. They still learn and obey.

They still follow. Why do you think Lawrence wrote this book? Presumably he didn't think this was bad sex. Presumably he thought he was writing a fabulous sex scene. But what was the motivation for him to write a book that was really sex-heavy, do you think? Oh, it's very interesting. I mean, the motivation is what's interesting about the novel, really. The two interesting things about Lady Chatterley's lover are A, the motivation and B, the trial.

So the motivation was Lawrence was dying. He wrote the book in 1928. He was dead by 1913. I didn't know that. It's a novel about life by a man who was living in death. And it's a novel about sex by a man who was now impotent. Lawrence probably became impotent a few years before this. And his wife, Frida, was already having an affair with the man that she would marry when Lawrence died. Did Lawrence know that? Oh yes. Oh, yes. Oh, he did, yeah.

Freeders' freedom, sexual freedom, was both Lawrence's muse and his personal curse. Oh, wow. And so if Lawrence identifies with anyone in Lady Chattley's lover, it's Sir Clifford sitting in his wheelchair, watching his young wife have an affair with a potent man. So it's a very masochistic novel because Sir Clifford is not represented sympathetically. So here's Lawrence, a dying man, hardly able to breathe. His lungs were like two shriveled balloons,

weighing about seven stone, writing about life and vitality, as his wife has an affair with someone else. The mellas he describes in the book is Lawrence's ideal self. The man he always hoped that he would have been in his prime, but he never really had a prime because he was always so ill and he was always so frail. Was it tuberculosis that he was dying? Yeah, he had TB like everyone. TB in syphilis, everybody.

Everyone had TB in syphilis. Lawrence had always been in denial about his TB. but he'd always been very weak. And so this is a man writing about life whilst being inside death, but it's also a man thinking about his life's work that Lawrence saw himself as a sexual prophet. And he's trying to do a summation in this book of his sexual manifesto. And his sexual manifesto was,

what has destroyed mankind as a species is the division between mind and body, that we only credit the mind. If we overvalue the mind and the intellect, and we undervalue the intelligence of our body. But if we listen to our body, our body has a great deal to say to us. And I think this is very pertinent to young people today who are listening to their bodies all the time

and saying, my body is telling me a lot of stuff that my mind is not tuned into agreeing with. And so Lawrence was saying, we need to attend to what our body is telling us. Our bodies house our instincts and our unconscious lives. And that's why we've got to live intensely in them. And sexual relations are a language that we need to inhabit fully. So we should never have cold sex because that's an insult to sex.

Sex should be warm and embodied and loving and tender. He was very anti-pornogyn. and anti-sexual violence. Oh, was he? I didn't know he was anti-porn. That's interesting. This is one of the things that's never understood about Lawrence. Lawrence was a Puritan in the strictest sense of the word, which is a man who is bound by his own conscience.

He lived strictly according to his own conscience. He was disgusted by pornography because pornography degraded sex and sex, he thought, was almost religiously significant. significant and important act. It was worshipful. It was a worship of the body. I guess that makes sense. Because I've always thought that Ladies Chattley's lover,

that it was, when you said it was a class thing, that's kind of how I've always understood it. It's like, there's Lady Chattley, and she's now an aristocrat. She has all the titles and all the privilege and all the trappings of being of elevated social rank. And yet she also wants to have sex. And that becomes this kind of overriding passion. And it doesn't matter any of like the, you know,

the head that stuff that you mentally know, you intellectually know you shouldn't be doing it. So I thought that it was like that he was writing sex to being a kind of a great leveler, almost. This is why it's so hard to understand what Lawrence means by sex. Not really. Okay. One of the baffling things in his books, you probably sort of, anyone who's read women in love will find it as a major problem, women in love.

But Lawrence has a very strong theory about what is good sex and what is bad sex. And you often think, I can't tell the difference. And he has it here in Lady Chattley's level where before Lady Chatterley starts having good sex with Mellas, she has bad sex with Michaelis, the Irishman, Michaelis. You go back to Patrick's, you think it looks like exactly the same sex. I mean, she's having orgasms with Michaelis, which I think is good sex.

Sounds like reasonable sex to me. But no, Michaelis has to be exiled as the representative of bad sex and therefore he's a dark, bad character who needed to be kind of shunted off into the margins of Lawrence's world, into Lawrence's hell. But then you realise, of course, it was because they weren't having a simultaneous. That was his big thing, was it? We've got to come at the same time. We've got to come at the same time. And if you don't, there has been no meeting of the bodies. What he hated was women bringing themselves off after intercourse.

Well, I'd agree with that. Yeah, and then he's got a good point, mate. He makes a good argument. But he said, what's the point in us actually being together? So there'd be a long speech from mellows saying to Lady Chatterley, what's the point of us being in bed at the same time if you're just going to bring yourself off? Do you want me to just bring myself off lying next to you? I mean, we have to have some kind of spiritual rise together.

And boy, does he describe the spiritual rises. Does he? Yeah. I think I'd get really bored of a lover every time we had sex proceeded to go on this kind of big spiritual rant about. Yeah. I'll be back with Francis after the short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit.

Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday.

So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Lawrence himself, tell me about his sex life. Do we know much about it? How much of that was filtered into the book? Lawrence was very against what he called Sex in the Head. and that's people who think about sex a lot and talk about sex a lot, but don't have it very much. But I'm afraid he suffered from sex in the head. He'd always been very fascinated by sex without being in any way dirty-minded or a sex maniac.

What he was interested in was loving sex, sex within marriage. Okay. Sex with your wife. He was an incredibly loyal husband. His wife wasn't very loyal to him. What makes him interesting, I think, and important to women readers, is that his major interest was in what sex was like for a woman. And so before Lawrence wrote any of his books,

he explored the sexual and unconscious and internal life of his female friends. So behind each one of Lawrence's books, there is a woman. Wow. Yeah, there's a muse. And when he met Frieda, when he started writing The Rainbow, she became his muse. And Frida was fascinated by sex. It was her only interest.

Oh, really? And orgasms were her only interest. Yes. When Lawrence said that Frida was mindless, that was a compliment. Okay. I mean, she just, she was an enormous, bosomy, big smoking sex machine. I like Frida. Yeah, Frida's good.

Lawrence's friends hated her. They all of those love him, hate her. Couples! They hated her because she was so unintellectual. but Lawrence worshipped her absence of intellect and was completely sort of thrilled by her capacity to engage sexually with more or less anyone. And he thought that this was, that Frida was,

not only a pure woman in her essence, but this is what a human being should be like. She had no guile. It's back to the get in your body, enjoy the sensations and get out of your head stuff. Yes, yes. But of course, the flip side of it for Lawrence was that he suffered terribly.

Oh, Lawrence. She even had an affair on their honeymoon. Oh, Frida, now really behaves. I know with a much younger man. Jesus Christ. And Lawrence, of course, couldn't say anything because his philosophy was that, you know, you had to live the truth of the body. That's such a bind to find himself.

He's like, live the truth of your body. Not like that. Not like that. I know. It's so bad, isn't it? But before Lawrence met Frida, he'd really struggled to meet him. He met Frida in 1912. and he'd been really struggling to meet a woman who would introduce him to sex without, as he called, the dirty coin of marriage.

So he just wanted to know what sex was like. Did he lose his virginity to Frida? No, he'd lost his virginity already, but I don't think it had been a very satisfying experience. And he was very open about how unsatisfying his early sex with Frida had been as well. He spoke very honestly about sex and his good sex and his bad sex because he revered it so much. I mean, when that couple had bad sex, they really suffered. It wasn't like, oh, God, forget it. It was an insult to his whole philosophy.

He's going to write a sodden book about it. I mean, the pressure that freedom must have been in if he's had bad sex. And he's going to go and write a flipping poem about it and publish it somewhere. I know, and he really did. Yes. But Lawrence says, for all that he's famed and denounced for his fallacentrism, as the critic Kate Millett called it in 1970 when she did her big denunciation of him in sexual politics.

It was really the cunt he was interested in. So by fallow centric for anyone that might not be familiar with that term, but it's a very fancy and academic way of saying he is obsessed with the cock, right? Yeah, yeah. All of his sex worldview is about the penis. The penis goes into things, the penis is sex, that it's all centred around the schlong.

Yes. You do not read it like that, and I think that's really important, actually. Nor does the new film of Lady Chatterley. That doesn't read it like that either. When it's less about Melos is coming into Lady Chatterley than Lady Chatterley enclosing Melos. It's a really interesting take on it,

and I think it is right, because Lawrence does a very intriguing thing in Lady Chatterley. He atones his anger and rage against Frida and her sexuality in his previous novel, which was called the Plumed Serpent. The Plumed Serpent is, a terrible book. It's not only Lawrence's worst book, it's probably the worst book ever. Wow. And it was written by a really angry man. And one of the things that Lawrence was angry about

was he just got his diagnosis of tuberculosis. One of the things he was angry about was Frida's life, the life in her. And he was really anxious about what Frida would do after he died, and quite rightly so, because Frida did live on to have another man. marriage after he died. So he was thinking hard about this. And in the Laurentian hero in the plumed serpent denies his lover orgasms. That's crap. That's, yeah, I'm not on board with that. That's wank. That's, no. It's a really unforgivable and hateful part of the book. When his lover is climaxing, he stops her. Or he withdraws just at the moment of her pleasure. And he sees this says yes, he sees this as a token of his masculine power. And it is, it's so violent and

hateful. And you just kind of read the book and you think, what the fuck? What's going on? What are you doing, Lawrence? But he's changed his tone completely in Lady Chatterley, where he decides that this book is going to be entirely about allowing Frida her pleasure. And if it is a book in which he is imagining Frida's life after his death, It's an incredibly generous book. And he imagines her a really wonderful, sexually fulfilled, loving life, filled with simultaneous orgasms. When you think about it like that, he's a dying man, he's an intense pain, he can't have sex with the woman that he loves. And he writes a book where he kind of pours out this feeling that he wants her to go on and have amazing sex.

And it's incredibly generous when you look at it that way. My book wouldn't have been like that. My book would have been, you're going to have me stuffed and put on the sofa as a constant reminder. I completely agree. It is so masochistic. Massacistic's a good word for it. It really is. We think of him as a sadist, but he was completely masochistic.

So it's a very, very strange book. And this is what I mean by saying the circumstances around the book make it much more complicated as a book than you would otherwise say. If you didn't know anything, about this dying, impotent man and his unfaithful wife, who was also his muse, and the fact that he was worried about her future. And in the previous book, he hadn't wanted her to have another lover in the future or to ever have sexual happiness. But in this book, he was offering her everything.

You just think that this was a dirty book. That's so true. Is it true that Lawrence had had some same-sex relationships, or is that just some internet gosset that I've heard? I think he probably had, well, he's definitely had same-sex attractions. But he was very conflicted about homosexuality. He was conflicted about everything. In every book contradicts the previous book, as I've just said. But on the one hand, he was absolutely horrified by homosexuality. And on the other hand, he was absolutely fascinated by it.

Okay. Everything the Greeks did was good as far as he was concerned, because the Greeks had it right. And so he couldn't be completely against it. But he was profoundly threatened. Interesting. Possibly in proportion to the degree to which he was. profoundly attracted. A very conflicted man then. I hope he did manage to have some good sex in his lifetime.

I hope he did. We've got to talk about the trial about what happened here, because that's sort of what, it's not what made the book famous, but it's certainly what kind of made to this sort of huge juggernaut of when it was finally published again. Why was it banned? When was it banned? And did Lawrence, he didn't live to see that, did he?

He didn't know it was banned. No, so all of this happened 30 years after Lawrence's death. the dateline is Lady Chatterley was published privately. So it was self-published in 1988 in Italy. The novel was set, typeset by Italians who couldn't read English, so they didn't know the words they were typesetting. So they didn't know it was filthy. So he had it privately published because he knew otherwise it would be censored. Then in 1932 it was this exfagated edition, you know, the sex in the bad language, factual language taken out.

And it was the expurgated edition that circulated between 1932 and 1960. Then in 1960, Penguin Books decided to bring out an unexpigated edition in paperback at a cheap price. And so the problem here was that Penguin Books were going to be selling Lady Chatterley's lover

at a price that the working man could afford. My God. No, not the Plebs. that the plebs could afford. And so they got themselves caught up with the obscenity laws and penguin books were taken to the old Bailey and tried for obscenity. Now, the trial, it's really worth reading an account of the trial.

There have been a couple of dramatizations of the trial and they're very, very amusing because the trial is really about ushering in the 1960s. It's about the end of the 1950s and ushering in the 1960s. So there are 30 or so academics standing on the stand explaining very, very earnestly about what the word fuck actually means for Lawrence. So when he talked about a man's bulls, he was talking puritanically about a man's balls and all these things. And the judges are going, I see, I see. And the jury kind of writing it all down.

The jury were unanimous. This was not a dirty book. No work of literature has ever been discussed. more seriously in public than Lady Chatterney's lover during the trial. And it was in the headlines of all the papers. This was a book which was closely read in court number one at the Old Bailey to try and explicate its meanings. And Lawrence won.

And he became the sexual mascot of the 1960s. So when the Lady Chatterley trial exonerated Lawrence and Lady Chatterley, the 60s began sexual liberate. And at that point, Lawrence was a hero to women. Interesting. Okay. Who was he a hero to? Because he described so fulsomely all the bells that rang when Connie Chatterley had her orgasm, women just saw him as their spokesman. He had described what no woman had described in a novel. And so he would seem to be this very strange kind of feminine beast, if you like.

By the end of the 60s, Lawrence had become an enemy to women because the aforementioned Kate Millett published her book, Sexual Politics, in which she described Lawrence as fallocentric. And she said that all of Lawrence's descriptions of sex are about male power and female submission. And actually, both arguments hold up completely, because everything with Lawrence's contradictions. So yet, I could argue for Lawrence as a feminist or the cows come home. and I could argue for Lawrence as a misogynist till the cows come home. There were two Lawrencees

and both of them existed at the same time as each other. Didn't the trial get off to quite a bad start? I can't remember the name of the guy who was for the prosecution, but he opened it by basically saying, is this a book you'd want your servants to read? And everyone sort of fell about laughing at the ridiculousness of the statement.

It's so funny. Yes, the prosecution said, is this a book you would want your wives or servants to read? It's just so strange. And, you know, women in their mini skirts and little pillbox hats, they just rocked with laughter. Because this showed the kind of the divide that the country was at. So out of touch. I mean, we always laugh at kind of barrisons and judges being out of touch.

But this was absolutely the best moment of out of touchness ever. It was never going to win from that point on, was it? Because you're dealing with a world where people don't have servants really anymore. And we just, yeah, sort of carry the same ridiculous. as if somebody was to say it today, wouldn't it? And the irony was, talking about a man's control of his wife and servants, was exactly what Lawrence was condemning in Lady Chatterley's lover, Clifford Chatterley's control of his wife and servant.

So Mellers was saying, I might be in your employ, but I'm my own man. I'm not your creature. I'm not actually your servant in that full 24-7 cents. And Connie was saying, I might be your wife, but not really your wife, because we don't have sex. so therefore I can do what I want. So here was the prosecution saying exactly what Clifford Chatterley was saying

and totally failing to see what the thesis of the book was. And then it became, as these things tend to do, if you have an obscenity trial about a book, then everybody wants to read the Sodom book, don't they? And my favourite historical footage about the whole Lady Chatterley trial is the footage of the days afterwards with people queuing down the streets to buy this thing. And everyone the interviewed says,

I'm just buying it for a friend. Yes, I know, and reading it on the tube in brown paper. Oh, yeah, and it sort of made it into this huge cultural smash, didn't it? Whereas before, maybe it wouldn't have been that. No, not at all. The only reason to read Lady Chattelis for the dirty bits, there is no other reason. You don't read it for the plot. No.

You know, it's a very, very simple story. But there are wonderful reasons to read it. You know, I'm not interested in the sex bits, but we're not anymore, you know, because I'm not a teenager. When I was a teenager, I was hugely interested in them, and I learned all about my body through Lawrence. But now, when I read Lady Chatterley, which I do, for pleasure, I return to it. It's his nature writing. Lawrence was essentially a nature writer. When I was saying that Lawrence had no idea where his talents as a writer lay,

he did this so instinctively and so unconsciously, he didn't know that this is where the book shone. If the book is great literature and it is in parts, it's his descriptions of the forests. his descriptions of the sky and the bear trees and the melancholic. I mean, it's very much a pathetic fallacy. You know, nature carries the deep sense of melancholy that he was feeling. And when he describes this kind of desecrated landscape, the book is set in the landscape of his birth in the mining industry in Nottinghamshire, when he writes about this landscape and the way in which its beauty has been destroyed by industrialisation,

and now the miners themselves are being replaced by machines. And so he's writing, it's got an apocalyptic tone to it. And so what we have left are trees and birds and flowers. And there's one scene where it, which is particularly unbearable, where he has mellows and Lady Chatterley threading wildflowers into each other's pubic hairs. And you think I can't actually go on with this. It's so ridiculous. But really, it's about wildflowers.

I think that's why women started waxing so much, isn't they? It's like, no, no, you're not doing that, sunshine. That's so true. They'd have to glue them on that way. But really, it's his love of flowers rather than his interest in pubic hair, I think. And you'd lose that, wouldn't you? You'd have to go back and read that a few times before you got this. This isn't actually about somebody threading things through someone's pubic hair.

He actually really likes the flowers. Yes, he loves the flowers. And Lawrence loved flowers so much that people just going on walks with him said that he would bend down and caress them with the deepest tenderness and concern. Wow. He was really, really a man extraordinarily attuned to nature. That's what makes Lady Chatterley sing. My final question to you, I suppose, would be, what do you think Lady Chatterley's legacy is? Is it still relevant for 2022 post-Me2 movement? What can new generations get from this book? Well, I would have said before having seen the Netflix film last night, that there really wasn't a legacy.

And so I'm slightly baffled by why Lady Chatterley is continually being refilled. I mean, there's only just been a film, you know, a few years ago. I think this is a fifth or sixth film that's been made. So I can't really understand why, you know, we keep returning to the story. But having seen what's now been done to it, I think his legacy is writing about women from the inside. I'm very, very pleased for Lawrence that this has happened. And I hope that it will turn his fortunes around because he has been kicked around for so long. Franz, you've been just incredible to talk to.

If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? My last biography was of Lawrence. It's called Burning Man, the Ascent of D.H. Lawrence. And that's my Lawrence manifesto. Go and buy it. And are you on social media? Are you smarter than that? I stay well aware.

You can't find me anywhere except in printed books. That's probably the best thing. Oh, thank you so much for joining me today. You've just been wonderful. Complete pleasure. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Francis for joining us. And if you like what you've heard,

please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcast. Before we get put on trial for obscenity, it's only a matter of time. Coming soon, we have got two special guests. Dan Snow will be here to talk about Kassanova and the one and only Neil Gaiman is here to recite a little bit of lewd, rude poetry from the Restoration's filthiest poet, Rochester.

Join me again betwixt the sheet, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.