a classic -- must read!!! ( )

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D.H. Lawrence is such an interesting writer that even his failures are worth reading, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a bit of a failure. Today, with virulent pornography always a click away, I expected the famous sexy bits of this book to lose their shock, but I did not expect them to be comic. Yet they were, unless you do not find tropes such as “mound of Venus” rather funny. Still, these howlers came as a relief, because Lady Chatterley’s Lover is starkly humorless. Whether describing the miasma of industrialization or the rapacious drive of the clitoris, D.H. Lawrence is in deadly earnest. He shouts from the pulpit, and righteousness can never afford much laughter.

So why read it? First and least, the text is an historical landmark in development of the English novel, both for it’s famous sexual content and the even more famous censorship battles it inspired. But historical landmarks are often bores to read, and Lady Chatterley Lover, for all it’s flaws, still engages. Much of it’s allure stems from the profound and maverick strangeness of the author’s mind. By the time Lady was written, decrying the evils of industrialization was common practice. But Lawrence surpassed all his peers in pure rage. Unlike the well-to-do members of the Bloomsbury group, Lawrence was a coalminer’s son who personally witnessed the mines physically and mentally cripple the community of his childhood. Add to this fact his atavistic love of nature, rarely shared by his modernist colleagues, and imagine him watching factories level the forests and pollute the air. It was a shock to me to discover that a seemingly erotic novel turned out so unconditionally angry. And this anger explains in part why Lady still has an edge; the sex may seem silly and tame, but the molten rage beneath it continues to unnerve.

Much to his credit, Lawrence did not merely condemn industrial society, he proposed an alternative. Now, his solution, taken in the extreme manner in which he believed in it, is where the book shows its age. “Organic Fucking” is the best summary I can give his vision of redemption. It is the fierce ancestor of the milk toast “Make Love Not War” ethos of the 1960s. “Mound of Venus” references aside, I believe Lawrence would ultimately reject the willed naiveté of the hippy movement; he was too discerning, too acquainted with struggle and sacrifice, to merely hold up the flower and bliss out. But both Lawrence and the flower children drew on adolescent fantasies in order to overthrow grim realities. Like all utopian visions, it ultimately failed. Lawrence shares this fate with another articulate and outraged enemy of industrialization, John Ruskin.
Yet while their respective solutions failed, Lawrence and Ruskin’s fiery salvos against modernity cannot be easily dismissed, nor can their willingness, at great personal sacrifice, to try and build a better world than the one they saw around them.

But Lawrence’s fighting spirit does not mark the beginning and end of his appeal. While even in his more successful works his writing is uneven, with clods of purple pose choking the flow of the page, at is best it is nigh perfect: sensuous yet limpid, reaching depths of emotion that seldom surface on the cool waters of English prose. At times he manages to combine dazzling complexity of language with a irresistible primitivism of feeling, like a frightening ancient and barbaric statue wrapped in exquisite lace. Once more, his insight into the relationships of men and women are unsurpassed in all of English literature. No one has written on that ancient subject with such honesty, observation, and intelligence. And this is the real reason that I still enjoy Lawrence, for all of his flaws. As I write this I have been married to a woman for five years, and I hope for many years to come. Lawrence helps me make sense, and ultimately helps me better appreciate, this wonderful, frightening, protean, beloved, despairing, baffling, joyous, mercurial bond that is a cornerstone of my life. ( )

This is the 1st North American printing of D H Lawrence's uncensored, unedited Lady Chatterley's Lover

Well, I think this is my third attempt at a classic and I'm still not feeling any fonder of them. I'm positive that there are many insights that one is supposed to get from reading this novel and I'm also positive they all flew right over my head. I have to admit to skimming over some of the more dreary and draggy parts that just went on and on but didn't accomplish anything-I know naughty me but it couldn't be helped.

I do think the premise of the story is good. Connie is married to Clifford who was hurt in the war and confined to a wheelchair. Connie, being a young woman, starts to realize that she's missing a lot in terms of being loved by a man, both physically and mentally. Not to mention that she wants children and this is something that Clifford will never be able to give her although he says that if she were to get pregnant with another man's child he would raise it as his own and it would be his heir.

So, Connie embarks upon one affair that leaves her upset and empty and she becomes even more depressed. After a while she comes in contact with the game-keeper, Mellors, and falls in love with him, has an affair and becomes pregnant. She has become disgusted with anything and everything to do with Clifford and doesn't want to be with him at all anymore. She leaves on a trip with her sister with intentions of never returning. She asks Clifford for a divorce, which he denies. So, Mellors ends up working on some farm in the end and waiting for Connie to come to him or at least that's what I understood to be happening.

I can see why this novel would have been banned back in the days of 1928 although I disagree with banning books on any level. My thoughts are if you find the material offensive, don't read the book. However, there is a fair amount of bad language in this book and fairly explicit sexual content. I'm not easily offended and truthfully I found some of Lawrence's descriptions of things downright amusing.

There were pieces of Lawrence's writing that I really liked-he is very descriptive with all things. In this section Connie is having a little spat with Clifford and she is thinking to herself:
'He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton's cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs'.
This was just an amazing play on words in my opinion.

So, ultimately I didn't love it but I didn't hate it either. Now it's on to Little Women which I'm reading for both my Book Club and The Classics Challenge and I'm really looking forward to it.

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