Dan Snow's History Hit - D. H. Lawrence and the Lady Chatterley Trial

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

D.H. Lawrence is best known for his work Lady Chatterley's Lover and the obscenity trial relating to the book's publication in the early 1960s. But Lawrence is in fact one of the most important British writers of the 20th century and there is much more to his work and story than Lady Chatterley. He was one of the first successful novelists from a working-class background, he wrote a number of other successful novels including The Rainbow and Women in Love as well as short stories, travelogues, poetry, history and even a school textbook. He was also a complicated and sometimes difficult character and a thorn in the side of the British writing establishment. To tell us about his all too short life Dan is joined by Frances Wilson who has recently written the first biography of Lawrence by a female author in thirty years.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've recently had the Profumo affair on the pod, we had the anniversary of that,

and we talked to you about the Profumo affair, the sex, espionage and lying scandal that brought down the British government, mostly sex and lying scandal that brought down the British government, mostly sex and lying to be fair. Now we've got another landmark event in a similar train from the same period, D.H. Lawrence and the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial. D.H. Lawrence is one of the most important British novelists of the 20th century, in many ways the first novelist from a truly working-class background. His book, Lady Chatterley's Lover, shot to fame after it was banned by the British government, which is basically the best thing you can ever do

if you want to boost sales. And there was even a trial in which the publisher was taken to court for obscenity. It's one of the trials that shaped the cultural conversation, the cultural transformation of the 1960s. And so we thought we'd get Frances Wilson on. She has just written a biography of D.H. Lawrence. She's his first female biographer in 30 years. And she tells me about this extraordinary man, what a career he had, what a talent, what a tragic life he led. And we also talk about that infamous book and the trial as well. You can head over to historyhit.tv, which is the world's best history channel.

We've got all these podcasts on there without the ads. We have hundreds of documentaries on there. My show on the Vikings with Kat Jarman is doing well at the moment. We've got the documentary on the lost ninth legion, still getting a lot of views. And we've got Eleanor Janneger's Medieval Lives doing very well well up there as well so head over there and subscribe to historyhit.tv we can also listen to the denning report which is the report written by lord denning on the profumo affair we've got an actor to read it all out from start to finish it's all available there it's a hell of a listen in the meantime though everyone here is the very brilliant Frances Wilson. Enjoy.

Frances, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Now, D.H. Lawrence, I mean, if ever there was a guy whose reputation has gone from zero hero, zero back again, it's D.H. Lawrence, right? What a fascinating character. I know. Well, the subtitle of my book is The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence, but obviously most people associate D.H. Lawrence with descent. You know, his reputation, as you say, it went up and down and up and down. But throughout the whole of my lifetime, it's been going steadily down. Because I was born in the 60s, at the end of which decade, Lawrence was effectively cancelled

by this book called Sexual Politics by an American academic called Kate Millett. And she accused the man who had previously been a feminist hero of phallocentrism and misogyny. And he was snuffed out like a candle. Cancelled culture, eh? It's a tough one. Wow. I know. It's the earliest example. He's the earliest example of cancel culture. Yep. I'm sure there's a few Roman and Greek historians on here who would say, well, there's a few others.

I would be so interested to know, actually, who had been through what Lawrence had been through before him. Podcast on cancel culture coming up, I think. Well done, you. Yes. So talk to me about his early life. Lawrence was, and it's really, really important not to forget this. He was our first working class English novelist. This is so erased when we think about Lawrence's treatment by the English establishment. And of course there was snobbery attached to it. Lawrence wasn't only working class, he was the son of a collier. And he was born in 1885. He's in a small purpose-built mining town in Nottinghamshire called Eastwood, where every

single man was a collier. The only men he knew who weren't colliers were the preachers and the teachers. And so Lawrence was raised to go down the pit himself. But he was a very sickly boy. He had tuberculosis more or less all his life. It's amazing he lived as long as he did. He died at 44. And his mother had social aspirations and she was determined that her sons would not go down the pit. And Lawrence had this fantastic sensibility. And he was determined he was going to be an artist. But the atmosphere at home, the war between his father, who represented in Lawrence's mythology, he lived inside his own mythology, the underworld, real hard men

in the underworld, and his mother, who represented what he thought of as the bourgeoisie, underworld. And his mother, who represented what he thought of as the bourgeoisie, the mental aspirational life of the bourgeoisie, that formed his thinking. And we see this in the binary structure of his thinking throughout his whole life. It was hard men versus intellectual women. How fascinating. And how did he avoid or simply not end up down the pit? Well, it was really to do with his mother. I mean, his mother worked very, very, very hard to ensure that there were books in the house. It was a very unusual miner's cottage. They had a piano.

They had volumes of books. They read Dante at home. They sang around the piano. They talked about modern music. Lawrence was very interested in contemporary art. He went to the theatre in Nottingham. This was his mother just ensuring that this happened so that her son would rise socially. He was very smart. And so he won a scholarship to go to the local grammar school. He left when he was 15 and went to work in a prosthetics factory for a year. But

until then, he had as good an education as most middle class boys. And so he may have been from the kind of aristocracy of the working classes, really, the Nottingham minors, but he was very well educated. And by the time he was 16, he was also evidently fragile. And so he couldn't lead a normal life because his lungs were so weak. And almost every winter, he just about died. I mean, it was just a matter of pulling him back from the brink. His lungs were so bad. And so that prevented him from leading a normal life. He had to be a writer. And then how old was he during the First World War? Yes. So Lawrence had a terrible time in the First World War.

So he was born in 1885. The war broke out in 1914. He was 29 and he was just on the brink of becoming an important novelist. And he couldn't fight because of his tuberculosis. And he made a big deal about being very anti-military. And I think on the one hand, he was against this war. He thought this particular war was nonsensical, but he was very pro-fighting. And people often get this wrong with Lawrence and describe him as a pacifist. He was the opposite of a pacifist. He believed deeply in warfare. He just didn't believe in modern warfare.

And I think if the men had gone to the trenches with bows and arrows, he'd have been absolutely thrilled. He wanted warfare to be primitive rather than machine guns and tanks. And so he didn't fight. He made a deal about the war being appalling. And he was married to a German wife. And so he was seen by the British establishment as anti-English and not supportive of our boys. Therefore, I think this is all leading to the reason why his novel, The Rainbow, published in 1915, was banned and then publicly burnt. Pretty barbaric, the old public burn. But also, it wasn't just the establishment. His neighbours almost ran him out of town, didn't they?

Tell us why. Yeah. But also, it wasn't just the establishment. His neighbours almost ran him out of town, didn't they? Tell us why. Yeah. So Lawrence was living in London when the Rainbow was banned for obscenity, as Lady Chatterley would be.

But nobody could find any cause for obscenity. Nobody could find the evidence of obscenity in the novel. And so it became increasingly apparent that what was obscene was the fact that he was a jumped up, working class loudmouth who voiced his opinions to anyone who was prepared to listen, was married to a German woman, and he dedicated the book also to his German sister-in-law. And the book published in wartime had nothing to do with the war. So it was very much not celebrating the war effort. He was so unhappy in London after the burning of the rainbow that he took himself into exile in Cornwall, which he saw as not only another country,

but another age. He saw it as kind of going back in time, going back to the primitive world that he admired so much. And in Cornwall, he was hounded out by his neighbours, by a pitchfork-wielding mob who assumed that Lawrence, with his flaming beard and his anti-war sentiments and his German wife, was a spy. And they assumed that the cottage, which looked out onto the sea, whenever they drew the curtains at night or lit a candle, they were making signals to German submarines. And so he then had to leave Cornwall and go back to London.

So he was a man during the war years who had fallen out very, very badly with his country, and he couldn't get out. And there are analogies with today, with being stuck in a country that you might, I mean, I felt it very strongly writing this book, I was stuck in a country that I wasn't feeling much in sympathy with over the last couple of years after Brexit and the pandemic. And so I got Lawrence's sense of rage and claustrophobia. Well, I hope like Lawrence, he didn't almost die of the influenza pandemic, which he did following the First World War. It's incredible that Lawrence didn't die of the influenza epidemic. And it left him even weaker. Even weaker. Yes, he just got weaker and weaker and weaker. And he was six stone when he died.

And it is just extraordinary that he kept going at all because he lived with such velocity. As soon as the war was over, he flew around the country. He never stopped moving. He never stopped writing. He was so restless. It almost seemed demented. He never owned a house.

So he'd leap from island to island, from coast to coast, from mountain to mountain and write furiously and then go on these arduous treks where he dragged his wife along with him. He would take his belongings in a trunk and just drag that trunk around the world. Well, I hope we don't lose you to that peripetechic lifestyle, but we'll understand if you go. He wrote in the 1920s, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Was that even published at the time? No. Well, it was published in Italy. Well, I'm not surprised. I mean, come on. Yeah, exactly. I think the important thing to remember about Lady Chatterley's Lover is that

it was written to provoke. I mean, Lawrence liked to present himself as a victim. He was just doing this innocent thing of writing innocently about innocent human bodies. But in fact, everything he did was aggressive and done to provoke. And after the Rainbow fiasco, he declared himself a literary outlaw. And he said, I am now going to retire from the herd and throw bombs into it. And Lady Chatterley, which was his last novel written in 1927, when he was dying quite quickly, was one of these bombs that he threw into the establishment. It was his final word on sex and sexuality and what the novel of the future should look like if we were going to

acknowledge that people had bodies. You're listening to me talking to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence. More after this. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new

podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And he died tragically young. Yes, he was 44. Well, that to me, that is tragically bloody young, I tell you. It is, I know. That's hoving onto the horizon for me. But let's talk about his afterlife. What was his reputation when he died?

Well, his reputation when he died was very high. And what people knew about Lawrence was very different to what we know about Lawrence now, because Lawrence in his lifetime was not simply seen as a novelist. He was a man who wrote eight novels, but he also wrote thousands of poems and 70 short stories. And he wrote very important travelogues. He wrote a history book, history primer for schoolchildren. He wrote plays. He wrote very important, magnificent work of criticism of American literature, studies and classic American literature. And so he was seen as a man of letters. And he was also seen as a prophet, which is how Lawrence wanted to see himself. He took his

writing much less importantly than he took his sense of himself as a seer into the future. And he was also, he was a thorn in the establishment side. He was very famous and he was seen as very, very brave. And so when he died, there was a sense of a kind of a star having gone out. Following his life was such an extraordinary business and instantly 30 of his friends wrote memoirs of him. I mean, knowing Lawrence was such a strange business because his presence was so strange, his character was so bizarre, so impossible, really, that everyone who'd known him even for a weekend would write a book about him. And so the Lawrence that we know now is so different from that. Lawrence we know now is a

writer of three novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love and Lady Chatterley. The rest of him has just been completely forgotten. And that's just simply not who Lawrence was. His novels were a drop in the ocean compared to the rest of his writing. And so his reputation was very high when he died. And then it got very, very high in the 1950s when he was championed by the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis, who was the maker of literary taste. And F.R. Leavis was on the search for a canon of English writers who represented authenticity and what he called life, with a capital L. And three of Lawrence's novels, Sons and Lovers, The Home Women in Love, fitted that category. So he kind of quarterised Lawrence even more. He described Lawrence as a novelist of three novels and turned him into a

kind of fetish figure in universities. And then there was the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, and Lawrence had ascended so high by the end of the 60s when those Alan Bates films came out with Lawrence wrestling by the fire with Oliver Reed. His reputation was so high, of course, he had to fall. And then he fell. Talk to me just about the trial a little bit, because it's so difficult for people, I think, now to comprehend this. It was around the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the UK. Yes, it was the first unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the UK. Yes, it was the first unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, published by Penguin Books. And what happened in that trial was a clash between Victorian Edwardian values and English values of the future. So you had on the one hand, the judge

saying to the jury, is this a book you would allow your wife or servants to read? And on the other hand, you had the whole literary establishment, including Margaret Drabble, standing up in the witness stand and talking about Lawrence as a writer of fantastic sensibility and taste. And the sex scenes were read out to the jury and the sex scenes were argued that this was not pornography. It was not erotica. This was beautiful, sensitive writing about intimacy between men and women. And the prosecution was destroyed. They didn't anticipate their own destruction. So it's a kind of typical story of a judge being completely out of touch with the people. And then Lawrence became as counter-culturally

cool as someone like Che Guevara. And the world of the 60s was the world that Lawrence really had foreseen. He said, this has to happen. Sexual freedom has to happen. And apart from anything else, a tactical error by the government, it then sold millions of copies. Sold millions and millions of copies. And it's not Lawrence's best book. So this is kind of very frustrating for Laurentians. That book and the trial kind of fixes Lawrence in the public eye as a priest of love. And my feeling about Lawrence is that he did a lot for allowing kind of bad sex scenes in literature, if you like. But my sense of him is that what he had to say about sex and sexuality in writing was the least interesting part of him as a writer. I acknowledge that he did so much to invent us, but returning to

Lawrence, as I've done in this book, I found that the sex side of him really was unimportant. What's more important? Is it class? Yes, he was someone who battled against class so badly. Can you imagine what it must have been like being a working class writer in the Edwardian age when literary culture was represented by Virginia Woolf, represented by the Bloomsbury's who were fantastic snobs. These people, Lawrence's peers, had never met a working class man ever before. The only working class people they'd met had been their servants the men who delivered the coal which was effectively what Lawrence's father did and they'd certainly never spoken to a working

class man as an equal and so Lawrence downplayed this because he was so fantastically proud he had a Nottinghamshire accent and one of the Bloomsbury group David Garnett, said that seeing Lawrence around the other Bloomsburys was like watching a mongrel in a herd of Pomeranians. He looked and sounded like an outsider. So what else? He imagined the 60s. In which other ways did his vision of society, was that sort of played out in the 60s? Okay, well, just before the 60s, in the 50s, we got the birth of the Angry Young Men, the Angry Young Men playwrights and novelists of John Brain and his cohorts. Now, the Angry Young Men dramas were directly anticipated by Lawrence, whose earliest writings in 1909 and 1910 were set in the parlours of Collier's Cottages,

where there is an angry young man, representing D.H. Lawrence, kind of debating with his father and his mother and desperate to get out of the claustrophobia of the working class home and embrace the world. Lawrence's plays, which were never performed in his lifetime and have occasionally been performed since, always to uproar us ecstatic reviews. I mean, his plays are absolutely sensational. George Bernard Shaw said that he made other dialogue look like typing. His dialogue was so natural because the plays were written in dialect.

So he brought us into working class homes and he brought us into what was said in working class homes. He brought us into the battle of generations in working class homes long before this genre was apparently invented in the 50s and 60s. And so in that sense, he was massively ahead of his time. A popular culture. Yes. Also, his travel writing was so extraordinary that he sort of invented a kind of travel writing where the journey is both interior and exterior. And it's a kind of comedy of travel writing, where he describes himself kind of flying around Italy and flying around Sardinia and dealing with Mexico and Mexicans and the American Southwest. And he sets himself in the heart of these travelogues as a kind of comic character, now a man at sea in his surroundings.

And so there's an internal and external journey. And the writing is so vivid. I don't know why he didn't become one of our great travel writers. Well, the problem is I've just had Ken Burns on here talking about Ernest Hemingway. And now I'm working through Ernest Hemingway's entire bloody back catalogue.

And now I'm going to have to get going on Lawrence's. You've sold him to me, I'm afraid. And I can't wait to get to grips with all his lesser known works. Frances, thank you very much for coming on Lawrence's. You've sold him to me, I'm afraid. And I can't wait to get to grips with all his lesser known works. Frances, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. What is your book called? It's called Burning Man, The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.