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MACDONALD
on the non-sexual nine-tenths. He was disturbed by repetition-
·"Is that gOQ.d writing, to repeat that one word over and over again?"
He was several times assured it was; Mr. Hoggart noted that
·Shakespeare repeated "nothings" five times in one passage. He
.thought the book was not realistic: "The mirror it holds up to
society is like a concave or convex mirror such as you see at a
Battersea fun fair." "Novels often are that way," Mr. Hough
explained.
I think the defense overdid the Lawrence-as-Puritan-Moralist
line. He was indeed a moralist and never more so than in
Lady
Chatterley's Lover-the
relentless preaching, in fact, is why it is
one of his inferior works. But the Puritan morality was one of sexual
repression while Lawrence's was the opposite. Also this line of
defense, however effective as legal tactics by a publisher who stood
to gain a lot by a paperback edition of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
·would almost surely have been repudiated by Lawrence himself,
who wanted to emphasize his clash with conventional morality
rather than to explain it away. It led to comic exchanges like that
between the prosecutor and a young cleric: "Has the word 'phallic'
always had a sacred connotation?" "Among Christians, yes." But
the prosecution's notion of Lawrence's attitude toward sex was so
primitive that it was unable to take advantage of such refinements.
The great moment of the trial, sex-wise, was Mr. Griffith-Jones's
comment, after reading, with his usual dessicated relish, a passage in
which the lovers undress: "Why introduce strip-tease? What is the
point of taking off her nightdress?" According to the Kinsey Report,
it is the lower classes in America who copulate with their clothes on.
It must be different in the household of Mr. Mervyn Griffith-Jones,
Q.C., of Eton, Cambridge and the Coldstream Guards.
But it was perhaps, England being what she is, class rather than
sex that determined the issue. The Crown (and the judge) made
the mistake of overestimating the jury socially and underrating them
culturally.
They assumed that they would agree that a cheap paperback
was much more damaging to "the public good" than a more costly
edition because the lower classes could
be
corrupted by it ("is the
young girl worker in the factory going to get any sociological educa-
. cion. out of this passage?" asked Mr. Griffith-Jones) and also
that,
