LONDON LETTER
255
the
Times
think a sizable proportion of adults have never "experi–
enced" copulation? Or perhaps the editors are thinking only of the
"Top People" who read their paper?] But the more reverently such
an act
is
regarded the less it is talked about. A decent reticence has
been the practice in all classes of society and much will be lost by
the destruction of it.... A great shift in what is permissible legally
has been made. But not morally. Yesterday's verdict is a challenge
to society to resist the changes in its manners and conduct that may
flow from it. It should not be taken as an invitation to succumb.
On November 7 and 8 last, the
Times
published 28 letters from
readers about its editorial, all well written, as is usual over here. The
letters supporting the verdict were not only more thoughtful and
eyen more morally convinced than the others, but there were
almost twice as many of them: the score was 18 to 10. Assuming
the
Times
was not prejudiced in favor of hostile letters, a form of
masochism not common in editorial offices, we may take
it
that the
editorial was repudiated by two out of three of its more articulate
readers. The Top People now dig Lady Chatterley.
The famous jury, whose verdict was unexpected to almost
everybody who sat through the trial, looked bourgeois, respectable
and, with two exceptions, not at all intellectual. They soon devel–
oped the usual jury look, one of stolid resistance to information
and rhetoric, as of Strasbourg geese eyeing the man with the food.
But underneath that unpromising exterior, what passions, what
common sense! (It only took them three hours to acquit.) The
prosecution's strategy, as simple as it was uninspired, must have
helped. It was to have Mr. Griffith-Jones read out the juicier pas–
sages in a dry, upperclass voice and in effect dare the jury to find
literary or moral worth in them. The effect was the reverse-it was
Mr. Griffith-Jones, not Mr. Lawrence, who sounded coarse.
The first defense witness, Mr. Graham Hough, Lecturer in
English and Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, raised a capital
point: "No man in his senses is going to write a book of 330 pages
for 30 pages of sexual matter." (So Trotsky, apropos of the charge
in the Moscow Trials that he had led the October Revolution and
commanded the Red Army as a cover for espionage for the British
foreign office : "You don't erect a skyscraper to hide a dead
mouse.") Mr. Griffith-Jones was, if possible, even more ineffective
