548
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
considerable force, and he claimed that this often crippled the
emotional lives of some men and women, which was true. But he
was also a rather fierce Puritan himself, and on monogamy was as
insistent as the Catholic Church. He did not think that the end
of human life was a continuous and ecstatic copulation.
In
A
Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover
he said that for some people
perhaps it would be best if they just did not try to enter into a
sexual relationship. But for anybody a satisfactory sexual relation
was not an end but a beginning for a total reconstruction of
society, for a different and, he thought, better relationship between
man and man and man and the universe he inhabits.
Women In
Love
ends not with the happy lovers, Birkin and Ursula, safely
in bed for eternity, but leaves Birkin, happy as he is with his
love, wondering, "Where do we go from here?" "What kind of
society can I be a part of?" Furthermore, sex in Lawrence is
not just a physical act; it is also a mystique with religious over–
tones. Finally, he had the real Archimedean sense: he could stand
back and look at himself, and laugh; he was aware of the anomaly
that the prophet of silence, of the blood, of un-selfconsciousness
in sexual relations could do nothing but talk about it himself.
On
himself he told the story of the little Italian printer who set up
so badly (he could not read English) the original publication of
Lady Chatterley's Lover.
A newspaper pitied this poor little man
for setting up the book in ignorance. The printer was momentarily
taken aback, thinking he might have set up a political tract or
something out of the way, but when told that the book contained
such-and-such words and described certain things, he replied, re–
lieved, "O!
rna!
but we do it every day!" So much for that.
Mr. Fiedler's book is all about sex, but not in any Lawrencian
sense. So far as I can see, and I have read the book carefully, Mr.
Fiedler's scale of values is fairly simple. There is virginity or
frustration (this is bad) and there is something called "genital
maturity" or "full genital happiness" (this is good). So far as I
can see these are the only values posited, and, for reasons given
above, they are not Lawrencian. This "genital maturity" is never
evidenced in American literature and seldom, evidently, in
American life. But there is a paradox, for this ambiguous situation
produced a great literature, which
is
at the same time "duplic-
