D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

 

As I said when writing about John Thomas and Lady Jane, the previous draft of Lady Chatterley, I had the wrong idea about Lawrence's final book, having read somewhere that it had been written in anger with Dave, somewhat weary of his novels being described as pornography, deciding to give his critics an extended letter to Fiesta as a sort of fuck you. This may even have come from Lawrence's own letters, in which case he was clearly joking. As we all know, the book was subject to charges of obscenity, which - as I now appreciate - says plenty about the mid-twentieth century and not very much about Lady Chatterley's Lover. Where Lawrence made use of medical terminology such as fuck, cunt, shit, and arse, it appears in short agricultural bursts limited to a few moments of conversation, then back to the kind of language of which my wife's aunt would approve for the next three chapters. That said, there's a whole lot of nobbing going on, most of which is described in Lawrence's usual terms, mapped by means of emotions, symbols of the same, plenty of stuff about flowers - notably woven into pubes at one point - but it really isn't about the sex, or at least it's about a whole lot more than just the sex.

All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.

'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'

I've a feeling that may have been the passage (no pun intended) which made everyone angry. I'm sure there's been a bongo magazine called Secret Openings at some point but I doubt it could have been easy to find at your local WHSmith.

Anyway, to get to the point, Lady Chatterley's Lover is more or less the same novel as John Thomas and Lady Jane. The same encounters involve the same people, albeit with minor variations, but the emphasis is much expanded. Lawrence was approaching the end of his life to the point of his existence having become defined almost entirely by its termination. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality, as Clifford writes in a letter. Where the previous version was concerned with class, the relationships between men and women, and the law of diminishing social returns - as were most of his novels - Lady Chatterley imagines a world without the author, that which was to come after his passing and how much worse it would be.

They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing coal, where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines.

In places, it's the closest Lawrence came to writing science-fiction - which is admittedly not conspicuously close. Brave New World was still four years away, but it seems likely that he'd been discussing some of his concerns with Aldous Huxley.

'I do think sufficient civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities,' said Clifford. 'All the love-business for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in bottles.'

As with John Thomas and Lady Jane, it's written with a clarity and sense of focus which he seemingly developed during those last five or so years. His arguments are clear without sacrificing the poetry to the kind of pedantic analysis he despised, which is why this novel gets away with doing so much, even breaking new ground for Lawrence; which is why its reputation is so well deserved - here referring to the literary achievement rather than its potential as erotic testimony.

Yet for all its qualities, I still prefer John Thomas and Lady Jane, which is more typical of what Lawrence did, but arguably nails it like no previous book, possibly excepting Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow - neither of which have anything like the concision. Additionally, this retelling closes with a number of letters exchanged between the main characters, which feels a little hurried. Nevertheless, as yet another account of why everything used to be better than it is now - or was in 1928 - it remains difficult to disagree with Lawrence's main objections, and hard to fault his foresight.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Ralph Blum - Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974)

Where vintage UFO literature is concerned, I tend to prefer the weirdly implausible to droning lists of moving lights seen in the sky which, while doubtless unnerving for those who saw them, don't necessarily make for interesting reading. So I'll make exceptions to my preference for the writing of John Keel or Brad Steiger where the author actually claims to have been taken to Venus, but that's about it. Until now, for this was recommended by a person on facebook as dealing extensively with the Pascagoula encounter wherein an angler found himself forcibly interviewed by things which looked like this:

Happily for me, it turns out that Ralph Blum was a legitimate journalist before he was a believer, who came to this subject having been commissioned to write about flying saucers for Cosmopolitan, of all things. So beyond the obligatory cover reference to von Däniken - and its use of the font which launched Eric's shabby efforts - we have a well-written, beautifully argued, and entirely sober account of what happened to Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, extending into a much broader examination of the saucer phenomenon and what it meant in 1974. Blum doesn't bother with any of the overly defensive stuff about how so-called scientists will mock, or - on the other hand - dismissing everything as having been Venus seen through swamp gas; and so we have an account and its analysis which seems very much consistent with present times, given that the US Air Force can no longer be bothered to pretend it ain't happening. The tone is closer to that of political biography than to that of most UFO literature, making allowances for sake of argument and taking the rest from there yet without going full Brad Steiger. I'm inclined to wonder whether a few more of those published taking this approach might have brought about the thawing of officialdom a few years ahead of schedule.

D.H. Lawrence - Selected Essays (1950)

 

This feels a little more stimulating after the above undifferentiated adventure porridge*, and although Lawrence was known to produce his own porridge from time to time, it was mostly in the novels and short stories. We seem to be on safe ground with the essays given that he didn't have to keep referring to his characters or describing a flower halfway through some already rambling discourse. What has struck me most from this collection is that, as Lawrence himself cheerily admits, we're a long way from the essay as practiced by Huxley, Orwell and others. The difference is, as Lawrence himself acknowledges, that his arguments are intuitive, developing organically and drawing on experience rather than theory, so his writing often has as much or more in common with painting than with the work of an essayist who might set out some idea and then go about presenting evidence in its favour. This approach additionally allows for some wiggle room in the possibility that Lawrence knows he may have it arse backwards.

From a London editor and a friend (soi-disant): Perhaps you would understand other people better if you did not think that you were always right. How one learns things about oneself! Or is it really about the other person? I always find that my critics, pretending to criticise me, are analysing themselves. My own private opinion is that I have been, as far as people go, almost every time wrong!

With this in mind, the bombast becomes a little more palatable, should you need it to be. Lawrence tackles more or less everything he's tackled in a novel, but here in much snappier form; and even where I might disagree, I don't see that he gets much wrong, and a lot of it is air-punchingly on point. He writes about class, modernisation, human relationships, art, writing, painting, religion, America, Germany, England and all that we're getting wrong in terms which apply as well today as I presume they did in the previous twenties.

In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part of all existence and of all being. It is not something to lament over, nor something to try to reform.

If you've ever wondered where the man was coming from, then you won't find it spelled out with much greater clarity than here.

*: Who shite, the review of which you'll have to wait for the book if you care that much. I've given up posting reviews of that sort of thing here because it attracts the attention of the sort of person whom I would customarily cross the road to avoid.

Harlan Ellison (editor) - Dangerous Visions (1967)

 

Can there really be anyone wondering why I picked up this collection when I saw it, excepting I suppose those who haven't heard of it? I honestly don't want to think about the kind of person who hasn't heard of this collection or who doesn't know what it was, but anyway, Dangerous Visions was the one that changed everything, according to both Harlan Ellison and its subsequent reputation.

It's an anthology of short stories specifically commissioned for the collection, with nothing reprinted from any previous appearance in one of the digests - as was common practice at the time. Ellison was after the sort of material that might be too weird or edgy for Analog, Galaxy, and the rest, with the intention of bringing readers the cutting edge of science-fiction as it was deemed to be at the time - a parallel and complement to England's new wave showcasing how the genre had begun to vibe with the counterculture, so to speak.

So there's some good stuff here, and some great stuff, and at least a couple of masterpieces; but even with some of the contributions being so short - even shorter than Ellison's lengthy introductions in a couple of cases - five hundred pages is a lot. Dangerous Visions isn't a casual undertaking, and while it may be that one is expected merely to dip in every once in a while, that isn't how I read, and I'm sure it's significant that I drew greater pleasure from the first half of the book with honourable mentions warranted by Dick's Faith of Our Fathers and Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage - even though I had to tackle that one twice before it made sense. Unfortunately, beyond these, there's such quantity here that I haven't retained much beyond a general impression of enjoying most of it, excepting Keith Laumer's Test to Destruction. Ellison's introduction to this one laments Laumer being known mainly for Retief the space detective - adventure yarns which he churned out to pay the bills and which aren't a patch on his lesser known serious work; and lucky for us, Test to Destruction is a fine example of his serious work, even though it's a suspense-filled thriller about space espionage. I gave up after a couple of pages so it may blossom into a masterpiece beyond that point for all I know. Test to Destruction is followed by Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels and Samuel R. Delaney's Aye, and Gomorrah… so I got to those a bit quicker, which was nice; particularly as I hated the previous thing I tried to read by Delany.

I suppose these visions were dangerous at the time, given the percentage of the American population who believed that the Beatles represented Communism. If they seem less obviously dangerous in 2024, they have nevertheless mostly retained a certain spiky quality and have as such aged well.