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Show The book was written in 1928. But as I began it, I felt as though it had been written yesterday. Its first paragraph reads: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." The story concerns a titled lady falling in love with a gamekeeper on her husband's estate. It is set in England after the ravages of the First World War, and it is about sexual love. When D.H. Lawrence wrote "Lady Chatterley's Lover" he was blasted by his critics as having produced, among other things, "the foulest book in English literature. ' Lawrence's defense of his novel was explicit: "It is - in the latter half at least - a phallic novel, but tender and delicate... Sex alas is one of the worst phenomena of today: all cerebral reaction, the whole thing worked from mental processes and itch and not a bit of the real phallic insouciance and spontaneity. But in my novel there is." I found it a beautiful book; thought-provoking, sensual, moving. Lawrence writes that mankind has stifled its own best instincts, burying its feelings under the endless jumble of mechanized society. "Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the -roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table." "Is there not, throughout it all, some unseen, unknown interplay of balance, harmony, completion, like some soundless symphony which moves with a rhythm from phase to phase, so different, so very different in the various movements, and yet one symphony, made out of the soundless singing of two strange and incompatible lives, a man's and a woman's? And this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a ; life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity." |
