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KANSAS CITY, MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY
Sex,
Literature,
and Censorship
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
Edited by Harry T. Moore
The Viking Press Neio York
COPYRIGHT 1953, 1959 BY HARRY T. MOORE
COMPASS BOOKS EDITION
ISSUED IN 1959 BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC.
625 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022
THIRD PRINTING NOVEMBER 1966
DISTRIBUTED IN CANADA BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
"Making Love to Music," "Love," and "Introduction to Panstes" from Phoenix:
The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, published by The Viking Press. Copy-
right 1936 by Frieda Lawrence.
"Sex versus Loveliness," "Cocksure Women and Hensure Men," and "The State
of Funk" reprinted from Assorted Articles by D.H.Lawrence, and "Pornography
and Obscenity" from the book of that title, both published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
and reprinted with their permission. Copyright 1928, 1929, 1930, by Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc.
This collection of D. H. Lawrence essays was originally issued by Twaync Publishers.
This Compass edition contains a new preface by Harry T. Moore and Federal Judge
Frederick vanPelt Bryan's decision in the Lady Chatterlcy's Lover case.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY THE COLONIAL PRESS INC.
Contents
PREFACE TO THE COMPASS EDITION J
INTRODUCTION: D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE "CENSOR-MORONS" 9
Love 33
Making Love to Music 39
Cocksure Women and Hensure Men 46
Sex versus Loveliness 49
Introduction to Pansies 54
The State of Funk 58
Pornography and Obscenity 64
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover 82
APPENDIX: UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DECISION ON Lady
Chatterley's Lover 1 12
KANSAS CITY (MO.) PUBLIC LIBRARY
6870598
When Adam went and took Eve, after the apple, he didn't do
any more than he had done many a time before, in act. But in
consciousness he did something very different. So did Eve. Each
of them kept an eye on what they were doing, they watched what
was happening to them. They wanted to KNOW. And that was
the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before
the apple, they had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark.
Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched them-
selves. And they felt uncomfortable after. They felt self-conscious.
So they said, "The act is sin. Let's hide. We've sinned."
D, H. LAWRENCE, Studies in Classic American Literature
Preface to the Compass Edition
BY HARRY T. MOORE
In the thirtieth year after D.H.Lawrence's death, his name
perkily ascended the American best-seller lists, and week after week
it stayed high up there as the nation at last read the unexpurgated
version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. This belated public interest in
Lawrence, or at least in one of his books, followed the rise of his
reputation in literary circles, where after a period of obscurity he
had recently been promoted from a minority writer to an author
of magnitude.
During the first excitement over the American publication of
Lady Chatterley, some intellectuals felt that Lawrence was being
read "for the wrong reasons" : most of the seasoned investigators of
his writings do not consider Lady Chatterley to be among his
finest work. But surely many of the readers attracted to that novel
will become curious about The Rainbow and Women in Love and
other books which the specialists think are among Lawrence's best.
Of course much more than this can be said on the favorable side in
regard to reading the full text of Lady Chatterley. Whatever the
artistic limitations of this novel, it remains a significant and in-
fluential work by a major writer, and it contains an important state-
ment about the human condition. Above all, it is not a "dirty"
book. The essays in the present volume will help readers to under-
stand why all this is true, and why Lawrence is a supremely
important prophetic writer.
The writings collected here range widely over the subjects of
love, sex, art, and censorship; they are rich with the implications of
their themes and marked by a lively variety of tone. In them we
can see Lawrence's good sense in abundance and can understand
why so many of the "daring" things he said have become part of
our heritage and yet remain so fresh. We can also feel the warmth
of Lawrence's humor and, just occasionally, the fierce edge of his
anger.
He invariably gritted his teeth when he spoke of what he called
"the censor-morons," who had plagued him from the beginning of
his career. His troubles with various kinds of censorship are well
known. Yet, despite these vexations, this man being eaten away
by tuberculosis rather amazingly lived halfway into his forty-fifth
year, writing vigorously to the last.
Serious readers soon discover that Lawrence was a profoundly
g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
moral man and that he was obsessed not with sex but with life.
This comes through every line of his writing, through the seeth-
ing colors, the vibrant portraits, and the cadences of a style that
suggests Biblical rhythms blended with the colloquial speech so
often found in the main tradition of English literature. This full
expression of life is often concerned with love, not mere sex: with
love as one of the great oppositions to the mechanization of
humanity. Lawrence, growing up in the Nottinghamshire coal-
field in the decline of the Victorian age, was conditioned by that
era and by the Congregationalism of the miners' bethel of his
childhood. In his later reaction away from the Victorian-puritan
attitude, he saw how its restrictions and hypocrisies united with
the regularizing elements of industrialism to crush out the primary
emotions, particularly love. Lady Chatterley, which treats love
almost sacramentally, was one of Lawrence's last fictional attempts
to deal with these themes.
All the new readers of that book, as well as many of those
already acquainted with it, may want to know more about what
Lawrence was trying to do than is always apparent in this or in
his other novels when they are taken singly. The essays in the
present volume are, among many other things, a vade-mecum for
such readers.
The variety and scope of these selections have already been
mentioned. Some of them are fairly light, though they easily slide
into depths: "Cocksure Women and Hensure Men" is, for example,
a scherzo treatment of the emancipated women of the 19205, but
it contains some still pertinent remarks about relations between
the sexes; "Making Love to Music" is a piquant but far from
shallow examination of erotic dancing, ancient and modern and
so on.
The last two essays, "Pornography and Obscenity" and "A
Propos of Lady Chatterley s Lover" are notable polemics which
provided Judge Frederick vanPelt Bryan with some relevant cita-
tions for his enlightened court opinion (printed as appendix to this
volume), which stated that the Postmaster General had acted
illegally in banning Lady Chatterley from the United States mail.
And certainly these essays are among the most searching and
brilliant discussions of love and literature in relation to the
meddlesomeness of censorship.
My original introduction for this volume, written before the
clearing of Lady Chatterley, is reprinted here without change.
Taos, New Mexico
September 1959
INTRODUCTION:
D. H. Lawrence
and the "Censor-Morons"
BY HARRY T. MOORE
I
Our civilization cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The
censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing
human consciousness. It is our developing and extending consciousness
that he threatens and our consciousness in its newest, most sensitive
activity, its vital growth. To arrest or circumscri^p the vital conscious-
ness is to produce morons, and nothing but a moron would do it.
D. H. Lawrence wrote this to Morris Ernst in an acknowledgment
o Ernst's book, To the Pure. That was in 1928, the year in which
Lawrence began to bombard English-speaking countries with the
Florentine edition of his Lady Chatterley's Lover* Within five years-
Horace Gregory could say, in his Pilgrim of the Apocalypse, that
Lady Chatterley's Lover had won "the half -century fight for sexual
liberation in English writing," and Norman Douglas could remark,
in his autobiographical Looking Bac^ f that Lawrence's "beneficent,
taboo-shattering bomb" had "opened a little window for the
bourgeoisie." Yet, a quarter of a century after Lady Chatterley, no
one can buy the complete text of this novel in Anglo-Saxon coun-
tries except through the black market. Meanwhile, it is ironic that
Ulysses, which Lawrence considered an unclean book, has flourished
these twenty years with legal blessing. Molly Bloom, turning"
drowsily in bed, can publicly rake her unpunctuative consciousness-
for the longest, most notably Fescennine sentence in English; but
poor Connie Chatterley's awakening passion must be hugger-
muggered from the policemen of the mind.
The essays in the present volume cry out for Connie's right to-
liberation. If Lawrence cannot speak to us as he most wanted to
do, through the dramatization of a crucial problem in his novel,
he can at least discuss the matter with us in the essays in the
present volume, which contain his views on love, on its expression
in literature, and on censorship. The most important of these
I0 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
essays, "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover" has long been put
of print in England and has never before been published in America.
Its revival now is a major publishing event.
Anyone who reads the essay will see why: it is clear, it is simple,
it is profound, and it is impassioned. It explores its subject thor-
oughly and presents its conclusions brilliantly. Like the seven essays
which accompany it here, it speaks for itself; it needs no elucida-
tion.
This introduction, then, will confine itself to a discussion of the
background of "A Propos" and of these other essays, which is
also the background of Lawrence's career-long battle with the
"censor-morons."
Actually, his opposition to prudery began even before his first
publication. The friend of his youth, Jessie Chambers the Miriam
of his Sons and Lovers recalled in her reminiscence of Lawrence
that when they read Ibsen's plays aloud in their courtship days,
she couldn't bring herself to utter the phrase, "keeping mistresses";
and Lawrence scolded her for "such evasions." A friend of his later
life, Achsah Brewster, said in her memoir that one of Lawrence's
college instructors had reprimanded him for using the word
"stallion" in a class essay. Mrs. Brewster remembered that when
Lawrence told her and her husband of this incident of years before,
"he hung his head as if in shame for the public who could not face
life."
In his youth Lawrence had to contend, at every level, with the
repressive force of his mother. This former schoolteacher married
to a coal miner was in every way a purist: she not only refused to
learn the Midlands dialect of her husband and of her children's
friends, but she even forbade the children to use it in the house.
As Lawrence said in one of his poems in Pansies,
indoors we called each other you
outside it was tha and thec.
This mother also demanded purity of story. Jessie Chambers
reported in her memoir that when Lawrence in an early draft of
his first novel, The White Peacoc\ t offered up his heroine to a
seduction, Mrs. Lawrence "in a pained voice" lamented to Jessie,
"To think that my son should have written such a story!" Mrs.
Lawrence was too ill to read her advance copy of The White
Peacoc^ and she died a month before its publication in January
1911. But in that book, which contained an idealized portrait that
was a tribute to his mother, Lawrence in some passages wrote so
candidly about love as to offend even his publisher, William Heine-
D. H. LAWRENCE A N I> THE * * C E N S R - M R N S * ' H
mann. In the 1890$ Heinemann had been venturesome enough to
publish Ibsen and Tolstoy, then regarded as "shocking" authors, but
in December 1910, after The White PeacocJ^ had gone to the bindery,
Heinemann's office rushed a copy o page 230 to Lawrence asking
him, as he later recalled, to remove a paragraph which "might be
considered objectionable, and substitute an exactly identical number
of obviously harmless words."
Lawrence complied, in this first bout with censorship. Where
he had written, "God! we were a passionate couple and she
would have me in her bedroom while she drew Greek statues of
me/' he substituted, "Lord! we were an infatuated couple
and she chose to view me in an aesthetic light. I was Greek statues
for her"; and where he had said, "It took her three years to have
a real bellyful of me," he later wrote, "It took her three years to
be really glutted with me."
It didn't take Lawrence long to have a bellyful of or to be
really glutted with bowdlerization, and in the future he was
less willing to compromise with the advance censorship of pub-
lishers. But it was not until his fourth novel, The Rainbow, in
1915, that he awoke public wrath and became a banned author.
II
Some of the reviews of his earlier novels and books of poetry,
however, carried hints of possible trouble. While these volumes
generally received praise in the leading British and American
journals, they almost invariably drew from the critics such epithets
as "sensual," "decadent," "overfrank," "Zolaesque," and so on; and
one reviewer seemed to believe that Lawrence was an English
writer of foreign breeding. But the published work of Lawrence's
which the critics saw was often a modified version of the original,
for when Lawrence refused to cut down his text, the publishers
sometimes did their own trimming. Occasionally they went even
beyond such censorship, as when William Heinemann refused to
publish Sons and Lovers at all. His explanation that this novel was
one of the dirtiest books he had ever read, prompted Lawrence to
remark, a dozen years later, "I should not have thought the deceased
gentleman's reading had been so circumspectly narrow."
Duckworth published Sons and Lovers in 1913, and most of the
reviewers praised it, though a few joined the anonymous critic
of the London Nation, who turned away from the protagonist of
the novel "in fatigued repulsion." Duckworth didn't bring out
Lawrence's next novel, The Rainbow, because an editor of the
firm, Edward Garnett, disliked the book. Garnett had been Law-
J2 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
rence's friend and mentor, but Lawrence refused to rewrite the
manuscript as Garnett suggested. The larger house of Methuen
undertook to publish it.
As Richard Aldington has observed, this book was the product
of a long patience" and "of concentrated writing and rewriting,
and "no man, merely wishing to write a pornographic book, would
dream of wasting so much time and energy " Yet when The Rain-
bow appeared on September 30, 1915, the critics came out screaming:
it was vile and obscene, the filth outweighed the artistry, and the
book was "worse than Zola" an author who stood as a reeking
symbol of pornography in the British mind because his English
publisher had been fined and imprisoned. The cavil against The
Rainbow resulted in the granting of a search warrant, on November
3, to a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard, who seized^ more
than a thousand copies at the publishers' and at the printers'. The
publishers offered no defence and spared Lawrence's feelings by
not notifying him of the proceedings, which took place at Bow
Street Police Court on the 131*1. There a solicitor named Herbert
G. Muskett, "for the Commissioner of Police," read some of the
unfavorable reviews, which he reinforced with his own opinions.
The publisher said he had twice sent the book back to the author
for revisions, which Lawrence made and then "refused to do any-
thing more.'* The publishers admitted they doubtless "acted un-
wisely in not scrutinizing the book more carefully, and they re-
gretted having published it." The magistrate, Sir John Dickinson,
joined in these regrets and criticized the publishers for not having
suppressed the book after they had read the reviews. He ordered
the seized copies "to be destroyed at the expiration of seven days
(in the interim to be impounded) if no appeal," and fined the
publishing house ten guineas' costs. Thus Lawrence, a poor man in
a country at war, a man whose wife was "an enemy alien," became
a writer whom publishers would for a long time try to avoid.
There seems to have been more than a possible violation of
sex morality in this banning. May Sinclair one of the few authors
to stand up for The Rainbow at this time used to say that the
suppression was partly political. As Aldington remembers it, the
prosecution seems to have gone so far as to suggest that the novel's
implied criticisms of imperialism and of the Boer War had begun
to hamper recruiting, which at that time lagged. Another friend
of Lawrence's at the time, Gilbert Cannan, suggested, in an article
in a New York newspaper in 1920, that war hysteria probably
contributed to the suppression of The Rainbow. The present Com-
missioner of Police at New Scotland Yard has, however, said (with-
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE " C E NT S O R - M O R O N S ' * 13
out producing a record of the case), "The proceedings in 1915 were
solely on the grounds of obscenity."
The patriotic-legal-moral criticisms of The Rainbow received at
the time a rather weird corroboration in an article in the Athenaeum
by a writer on popular-science subjects, G. W.de Tunzelmann. He
found that Lawrence's "constant absorption in the material environ-
ment" and "its most conspicuous expression in sexual intercourse . . .
glorified in itself and free from any semblance of restraint*' was
"but one of the many futile attempts to reconcile the facts of
existence with the materialistic pseudo-philosophy which has proved
such a powerful instrument for the debasement of the German
nation." But this was not all, for "many of the humiliating weak-
nesses which have so hampered our action against Germany may
be traced to the too great readiness which has been shown in
accepting some of this same philosophy at the hands of those whom
we are at last united in recognizing as our foes in things spiritual
as well as in things temporal." This was a ponderous burden to
drape across The Rainbow, but George William de Tunzelmann
was rather sensitive in these matters, for he had been born Georg
Wilhelm von Tunzelmann. How sensitive he was to the damage
he did Lawrence is not possible to determine now.
The Author's League promised to battle on behalf of The Rain-
bow, and a few of Lawrence's friends suggested that he take the
matter up legally, but he lacked position and influence. One
friend, however Philip Morrell, husband of Lady Ottoline Morrell
used his status as a Liberal Member of Parliament to ask ques-
tions in the House of Commons about the suppression of the book.
On November 18 he inquired whether the Home Secretary knew
of the action, whether the police had Home Office authority in the
matter, and whether the author "had any opportunity of replying
to the charge made against him." This was easy for Sir John
Simon, Secretary of State for Home Affairs and already one of
the smoothest British diplomats of modern times. He pointed out
that the police had acted "in pursuance of their ordinary duty,"
that they didn't need Home Office backing in the matter, and that
the publishers had been given "the customary opportunity to produce
such evidence as they considered necessary in their defence." And
that was as far as Morrell was able to get. When he tried to defend
the author's rights, Sir John spoke of the publishers as "the owners
of what was seized." When the Home Secretary was unable to
answer MorrelPs question as to whether the magistrate ordering the
suppression had even read the book, another Member joined the
discussion: Sir Henry Craik (Unionist), representing Glasgow,
SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
where the Herald had just dropped a reviewer of ten years' stand-
ing (Lawrence's friend Catherine Carswell) for writing one of the
few favorable notices of The Rainbow. Sir Henry blandly asked
whether "the publishers expressed extreme regret at having been
the means of publishing the book in question/' and Sir John found
it easy to keep that one going: "I believe that is so, and that so far
from resisting the proceedings they said they thought it right that
the order should be issued." At this point an Irish Member inter-
vened, A. A. Lynch (Nationalist) of County Clare. He asked: "Is
there any official censor in these matters, or do these delicate
questions depend on the judgment of one magistrate?" Sir John
Simon closed the discussion by saying that there was no official
censor of literature and that he hoped there never would be one.
Certainly when officials could block an uncomfortable book as
easily as they had blocked The Rainbow, they didn't need an
official censor.
Two weeks later, Philip Morrell returned to the engagement.
On December i he again took up the matter of the rights of the
author, who he felt had been done "a grave injustice." Sir John
Simon was quick to answer, "I do not see that but however it
may be, the provisions of the law were strictly complied with, and
I feel quite certain that the magistrate would not act in a way
which was contrary to the dictates of justice." This prompted
Commander Josiah C Wedgwood (Liberal, subsequently Labour,
and at that time home between battle-service assignments) to ask,
!"Is it not monstrous that a man should have this charge levelled
against him and have no opportunity of defending himself what-
soever?" Sir John Simon, the expert conciliator, suggested that
it should be possible, "if the author thinks he was wrongly treated,
for another copy to be seized by arrangement, in order that he
might defend the book." A moment later, Sir William Byles
(Liberal) asked whether the proceedings had been "taken under
the Defence of the Realm Act" again suggesting a political as
well as a moral censorship. "Is there any opportunity," he con-
tinued, "for the public to know what was suppressed, in order that
they might avoid getting into the clutches of the law?" Sir John
Simon reassured him that the proceedings didn't involve the Defence
of the Realm Act, but "were taken under a Statute which was
passed, I think, about 1860," The Irishman Lynch rushed in again
to ask, "Could these proceedings be taken against a classic author
who may not be living? Would it be competent, on the decision
of a police magistrate, to confiscate the works of Shakespeare,
Rabelais, Swift, and others?" at which point the Speaker called
D . H. LAWRENCE AND THE "CENSOR-MORONS** 15
a halt to the discussion: "I think the Hon. Member had better
give notice of that question." The intrusion of The Rainbow into
Parliament was at an end. The Statute the Home Secretary had
referred to came from deep in the Victorian age: Lord Campbell's
Obscene Publications Act of 1857.
Two days after that second failure in Parliament, Lawrence
told Lady Ottoline Morrell that Catherine Carswell's husband,
Donald, who was a barrister, believed that Lawrence had a clear
case of libel against two of the critics, and that if they acted on
Sir John Simon's suggestion and had another copy seized, they
could then thrash the whole matter out in court. "But my spirit
will not rise to it," he said. "I can't come so near them as to fight
them. I have done with them. I am not going to pay any more out
of my soul, even for the sake of beating them."
He had hoped to escape to America, but he wound up in
Cornwall, where for nearly two years he lived in miserable poverty,
spied upon and suffering other indignities heaped upon the inde-
pendent man. The Rainbow came out in America, bowdlerized,
in 1916, but otherwise no publisher brought out a novel of Law-
rence's until 1920. His poems were published in the interim
(with one of the publishers, Chatto and Windus, making some
excisions), and a "harmless" travel book, but except for the
English Review, which had first printed his work, most of the
magazines shunned him. His opposition to the war, as a useless
waste, increased the antagonism against him, and the fact that
one of his wife's cousins, Manfred von Richthofen, was the great-
est of air aces on the wrong side didn't help either. At last,
in October 1917, the authorities removed Lawrence and his wife
from the coastal area, with orders for them to report regularly to
the police in London. Although Lawrence had a little more
police-spy trouble, he finally discovered he could return to his
native Midlands, where he waited out the rest of the war, still
poor and unpublished; and when he could leave England, a year
after the Armistice, he did so and never again became a permanent
resident there. But he was yet to give the British censors a good
deal of exercise.
His first bout after The Rainbow, however, was with American
Comstockery. A new publisher, Thomas Seltzer, brought out
the sequel to The Rainbow, Women in Love, in a subscribers*
edition in November 1920, after it had gone begging for nearly
four years; then Seltzer published it in the regular way in 1922.
Trouble began one evening when Justice John Ford of the New
York Supreme Court came home to his West 86th Street apart-
I6 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
ment and found his daughter reading Women in Love. The
judge, an expert on protective tariff, decided that another kind
o protection was in order. He organized the Clean Books League,
whose object was to make the law against "obscene" books m
the language of this legal-minded native of Knowlesville, N. Y.,
"horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong." That would stop this
"saturnalia of obscenity"! He persuaded John S. Simmer and his
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to go after Women
in Love, but Sumner's onslaught was a failure. On September 22,
1922, Lawrence, then living in the United States, wrote Earl
Brewster: "Seltzer had a case: the 'Vice' people tried to suppress
Women in Love and other books: Seltzer won completely, and is
now claiming $10,000 damages." The "horse-high, pig-tight" peo-
ple had lost their case ten days before, when Gilbert Seldes, Dor-
othea Brande, Carl Van Doren, and several New York doctors had
defended Women in Love along with a Schnitzler novel and
a book with an introduction by Freud. Magistrate George^ W.
Simpson found that Lawrence was seriously attempting to "dis-
cover the motivating power of life."
And, as the world grew farther away from the conformism of
war, braces relaxed; for a time there was a kind of shaky freedom.
In March 1921, the Oxford University Press regarded Lawrence as
a sufficiently good author to provide them with a textbook, Move-
. ments in European History, but also as a sufficient liability to use
the pseudonym "Lawrence H. Davison" on the title page. The previ-
ous year, however, Martin Seeker had published Lawrence's fifth
novel, The Lost Girl, in London after removing a few passages
and it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize of one hun-
dred pounds, given by Edinburgh University for the "best" novel
of the year. Seeker ventured Women in Love in May 1921, and
then the screaming began again. The loudest was from the loud-
est of the London papers, Horatio Bottomley's John Bull, whose
headline shrieked, "A Book The Police Should Ban," and whose
sub-title shrilled, "Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity Mislead-
ing Youth to Unspeakable Disaster." But by November, Lawrence
could write a chuckling note to Brewster: "Bottomley is in such
a dirty mess himself, having swindled half England . . . and being
on trial for weeks, that he is not going to be allowed to suppress
Women in Love!' And although several of the more "dignified"
journals continued the complaint, no one suppressed the book. The
only threats of trouble came from those who had been cari-
catured in it, among them Philip Heseltine (the composer "Peter
Warlock"), who threatened Seeker with a libel suit on account of
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE * * C E N S O R - M O R O N S " * 17
the portrait of Halliday, and in the next edition Lawrence had to
give this character a wig o another color.
As the twenties swung on, judges became more liberal and fewer
books were legally banned. Flimsy novels such as Jurgen and The
Well of Loneliness won some of the battles waged in their behalf,
and by 1933 the plea of Morris Ernst and the decision of Judge
Woolsey had given a truly significant novel, Ulysses, the right to
be free. By the 19505, cold-war terrors encouraged the censors to
go hunting again, for books both good and bad the difference
to most censors is inconsequential or, in most cases, unrecognized.
Lawrence had trouble with them, however, before the twenties
were over. Some of his battles were private rather than public. In
May 1925, for example, the Oxford University Press issued a new
edition of the European History, at last acknowledging Lawrence
as the author. But in November these publishers asked him to make
some changes for an edition aimed at the Irish school market,
and in a letter from Spotorno, Italy (as yet unpublished), Lawrence
complained to one of the editors of the press about his "mauled
edition." Making the deletions had both amused and infuriated
him, he said: he asked that the copy he had marked be returned
to him, to serve as a stimulus for his bile and as a reminder of the
glory of the human race.
That race had not, incidentally, been altogether neglecting Law-
rence. Although a minority author, little praised by critics an re-
viewers, he had in some years of the 1920$ an annual income of
about $5000 good money in those times, particularly for a frugal
man. His only heavy expenses were for transportation: his restless
travels over the globe in search of health and peace of mind.
On those wanderings he had plenty of opportunity to observe
the human race in all its important manifestations; and he did
not like much of what he saw. But a good part of Lawrence's
criticism of all modern life came out of his earliest experiences.
As a child he had seen how the regimentation of industrialism
could damage individuals and families; and as he was growing up
amid the remnants of Sherwood Forest, he had seen the smoke from
the collieries blemish the landscape that had once been so beautifuL
He had seen too how the mechanization of life had invaded the
province of the emotions and how it was killing them, especially
the most vital, that of love. He sought for remedies, and in the
19205 examined the competing social philosophies of the time
such as fascism and communism and in rejecting them made
some profound and important criticisms of them. He wished at
times to reject democracy, perhaps because he was too involved in
l8 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
that system to realize that only a democracy, "censor-morons" and
all, can make a D.H.Lawrence possible. If democracy seemed to
reject Lawrence, it was at the worst only a partial rejection, for
even though fools may outnumber wise men, it is the latter who
have, in democracy, often prevailed. The survival of Lawrence
helps to prove this: a few of the Old Guard still snipe at him from
what is left of the Victorian shrubbery, but for the most part the
response has changed, and he is almost universally regarded now as
being among the great English authors. Yet, as previously men-
tioned, no one has yet dared to publish Lady Chatterleys Lover in
any of the Anglo-Saxon countries.
That book contains one of the most vital statements of his
message. He had wearied of attempts at "leadership," of theoriz-
ing about politics, and of efforts to set up a Utopian colony; he had
above all discovered, as the title of one of his essays of the time
shows, that We Need One Another." Love was the answer:
passionate love, not willed or mentally controlled love the prod-
uct of a crippling civilization but a love that would burn out
shame and all other hampering elements. Lawrence himself can
best explain these matters, as he does in the essays in the present
volume.
His essays and "philosophy" always came after he had worked
out his ideas in fiction or poetry. As he said in the Foreword to
his Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), "The novels and poems
come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need
which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards
oneself and things in general make one try to abstract some definite
conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and a man."
Did Lady Chatterley's Lover "come unwatched out of [his]
pen?" It did, according to Lawrence's testimony in "A Propos":
"When I created Clifford and Connie, I had no idea what they
were or why they were. They just came, pretty much as they are."
But he changed the character of the gamekeeper, Mellors (orig-
inally Parkin), as he wrote his three drafts of the book, from late
1926 to early 1928. Parkin had been, in the first version, more of
a "social" figure; with Mellors, in the third, the social motif was
implicit rather than direct, thereby emphasizing the love theme
more exclusively.
Lawrence knew he was going to have censor trouble with this
book. His publishers refused even to consider bringing it out and
his agents would not attempt to place it. He finally published it
himself, with the help of the Florentine bookseller Giuseppe
Orioli; they had the book printed in a little shop where the com-
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE ' ' C E N S O R - M O R O N S ' ' 19
positor knew no English and made some typographical howlers
that amused Lawrence: "He writes dind't, did'nt, dnid't, dind't,
didn't like a Bach fugue." Lawrence, as he explains in "A Propos,"
had warned the printer as to what the book said in English, and
the printer had shrugged it off with "O! mal but we do it every
day!" Lawrence knew of the agony that lay ahead; Frieda recalls
that he was "scared," yet had the courage to proceed anyhow.
Lady Chatterley was a profitable venture for Lawrence, for
subscribers soon absorbed the first edition of a thousand copies at
two guineas each. Later editions likewise sold well, though the
pirates cut in on Lawrence's profits, particularly in the United
States. The book had no copyright, and the pirates printed their
own editions; in English-speaking countries Lady Chatterley has
remained a black-market staple.
Even though the book may have helped Lawrence financially,
it damaged his health. It is probable that the strain of Lady
Chatterley' s Lover not so much of the writing as of the fretting
over publication details and over censorship hastened his death.
Lawrence fretted over these small matters, during 1928 and 1929,
when he was ill in the Swiss Alps and on the Mediterranean French
coast. He received letters from all kinds of people about his novel.
Booksellers, critics, and general readers wrote him, most of them
inquiring about Lady Chatterley or complaining because their
orders had gone astray. Lawrence scribbled answers in the margins
or on the backs of their letters and sent these to Orioli for formal
typed reply: it is ironic that one of the most prolifically creative
authors of our time, a sick man, too, should have written more
business letters than any of his peers, except perhaps the insurance
clerk Kafka and the publisher Eliot.
Lawrence during die distribution of Lady Chatterley continued
writing his poems, articles, and stories, and also kept up his abun-
dant correspondence with friends. He particularly had to remain
in close touch with those in England Richard Aldington, S.S.
Koteliansky, Enid Hilton, Brigit Patmore who hid smuggled
copies of Lady Chatterley in their London flats or country cottages,
mailing them to subscribers in England who had sent their orders,
as prescribed, to Florence. The book had poorer luck in America,
not only because of the pirates but also because of the New York
customs officers: Lawrence suspected these men of pretending to
confiscate the copies and then selling them on the sly for twice the
announced cost. Lawrence tried to work out various dodges, such
as having the Florentine printer manufacture some false jackets
(The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler- and so on) and in-
ao SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
strutting Orioli to put those on some of the books and try mailing
them via Galveston and New Orleans. Meanwhile, the old enemy
John Bull in spite of the downfall of Bottomley, continued towage
against Lawrence: "Shameful Book A Landmark in Evil/' the
headlines blared, and an article explained that Lady Chatterley's
Lover was "the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the
literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would
be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness." Most of the
other papers took the same attitude, though not quite the same tone,
Lawrence's official enemies meanwhile sharpened their eyes,
Stanley Baldwin's Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks
("Jix"), believed, although there was still no official censor for
books, that "the Government has a general responsibility for the
moral welfare of the community/' and he spoke of "the duty in-
herent in all Governments of combating such dangers as threaten
the safety or well-being of the State." These platitudes he over-
simplified in his daily activities to signify that Lawrence was one
of the dangers to the safety and well-being of the State; he made
it plain that he was out to "get" Lawrence. Customs officers, postal
clerks, and Scotland Yard inspectors apparently were put on the
alert for his books or manuscripts in the mails.
On January 7, 1929, at Bandol in Southern France, Lawrence
registered the manuscript of his Pansies poems as papiers d'affaires,
No, 587, and mailed them to his agent in London. To the joy of
Jix, these fell into the hands of Scotland Yard. A week later they
also laid hold of the introduction to the volume of Lawrence's
paintings which the Mandrake Press planned to issue in London.
Again Lawrence had defenders: Ellen Wilkinson and other Labour
MP's asked questions in Parliament about the seizure. The Home
Secretary still Jix, who that year became Viscount Brentford
told his inquirers that he didn't "seek literary advice when deciding
if matter was obscene." Eventually he turned the manuscripts over
to the publishers with the recommendation that fourteen of the
poems be omitted; and in July 1929 Martin Seeker published the
book with these poems left out. Lawrence, however, had a friend
print tim a special unexpurgated edition, dated June but not re-
leased till August, of five hundred copies (plus fifty on Japanese
vellum), of which Lawrence signed the verso of the title page.
Pansies was not one of his most important books; the poems were
satiric doggerel, sometimes amusing, sometimes wearying, but Jix
by his tactics helped give them a special reclame, and the venture
apparently brought Lawrence five hundred pounds for the limited
edition alone. That was later reprinted on the Continent, from the
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE * * C E N S O R - M O R O N S * * 21
same plates, in a popular edition. It has never been published in
America; Knopf's New York edition in September 1929 duplicated
the eviscerated Seeker version.
It was in that same year of 1929 that Lawrence's paintings
brought about another wrangle with the censors, less than a year
before his death. After his exhibition of paintings opened at the
Warren Gallery, in Mayfair, Frieda Lawrence went to London to
see the show, while Lawrence visited the Aldous Huxleys in Italy.
The exhibition opened on June 14, coincident with the publication
date of the colored reproductions of Lawrence's pictures, and before
the police closed it on July 5, some twelve thousand people had
come to see the paintings. This time it was the turn of the art critics
to be hostile, as most of them were; like so many of the literary
critics they attacked Lawrence's work on both aesthetic and moral
grounds.
Jix was not the Home Secretary at the time of the closing of
the exhibition, however, for Jix had gone out of office when the
Conservative Government lost the May elections. His Labour
Government successor, John Robert Clynes, was no more helpful.
He was Home Secretary on that July day when two policemen
an inspector and a sergeant expressed horror at what they saw
at the gallery. They came back later in the day, with authority
and reinforcements, and removed thirteen paintings, as well as
four copies of the Mandrake Press's book of reproductions which
they discovered. They also started to make off with a volume of
Blake's drawings, but on learning that this artist had been dead
for a century and two years, they decided not to disturb his book.
Another volume, translated by Louis Aragon into the immoral
French language, looked suspicious, but the policemen decided
not to take it after the owners of the gallery explained to them
that The Hunting of the Snarly was a children's classic. They did,
however, impound a volume of drawings by Georg Grosz thereby
antedating Hitler as an art critic.
The case against the paintings was heard on August 8, at
Marlborough Street police court, before Magistrate Frederick
Mead, aged eighty-two. The Rainbow prosecutor, Herbert G.
Muskett, again appeared, this time to characterize the pictures as
"gross, coarse, hideous, unlovely, and obscene." Experts whom
the defence wished to call Augustus John, Sir William Orpen,
Arnold Bennett, Glyn Philpot, and others were not allowed to
testify. Speaking of the paintings, the ancient magistrate said,
"It is utterly immaterial whether they are works of art or not.
The most splendidly painted picture in the universe might be
22 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
obscene " And obscene pictures should be "put an end to, like any
wild animal which may be dangerous."
Magistrate Mead never exactly pronounced the paintings obscene,
though the warrant had been issued under the same Act of 1857
under which an earlier protector of the people had condemned
The Rainbow. Apparently the seizure of the paintings in 1929
marked the first invocation of that Act in relation to an art gallery.
There was talk of burning the pictures, which were stored in the
cellar of the police station. Frieda Lawrence worried lest the damp-
ness ruin them there, but finally the magistrate allowed the pro-
prietors of the gallery to take them away on condition that they
would not be exhibited again. Lawrence, who had been ill in Italy,
cursed his fellow countrymen, whom he was never to see again on
their own land.
In a volume of stinging little doggerel verses he called Nettles,
Lawrence satirized the art critics, the censors, and the Great Brit-
ish Public. One of his lawyers at the hearing had complained be-
cause a "so-called advanced government" had permitted such
censorship as the seizure of the pictures. Lawrence in his Nettles
poem "Change of Government" found that
Auntie Maud has come to keep house
instead of Auntie Gwendolen,
while in an article in an American magazine, Aldous Huxley
phrased it, "La Grundy est morte. Vive la Grundy!" Huxley's at-
tack on the suppression of the pictures appeared in the November
1929 Vanity Fair, two months after Rebecca West's discussion of
the matter in another American magazine, the Bookman. Rebecca
West, harshly critical of some of the paintings, had praised a few
of them and said that their impounding by the police was "an
appalling indiscretion, considering that Mr. D. H. Lawrence is per-
haps the greatest genius of these times, and so ridiculously sensitive
that this is likely as not to cause a temporary paralysis of his work."
Despite such statements, however, censors and policemen in
America showed as little concern for Lawrence's feelings in the
matter as such people showed elsewhere. The New England Watch
and Ward Society was particularly alert to damage Lawrence, and
that winter they succeeded. One of their agents, whose name actu-
ally seems to have been John T. Slaymaker, pretended that he was
interested in literature and went to Dunster House Bookshop, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked for a copy of Lady Chatterley.
Slaymaker was a man of sixty, and we may imagine his discreet
Bostonian whisper of the speakeasy epoch, as he asked for the for-
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE "CENSOR-MORONS" 23
bidden volume. He was warned that it was on sale for scholars
rather than the general public, and it was as an ostensible scholar
that he purchased the book. He proudly returned to the Watch and
Ward headquarters with his prize. The manager of the bookshop
was called into court on November 25, convicted of selling obscene
literature, fined $800, and sentenced to four months in the House of
Correction; a clerk from the store was fined $200 and sentenced to
two weeks' imprisonment.
They appealed, and their case came up in Superior Court on
December 19 and 20, 1929, before Judge Fosdick. The defense
attorney, Herbert Parker, called the Watch and Ward Society
"deceivers" and "falsifiers" and "depraved and perverted pro-
curers." Since he was defending the booksellers rather than Law-
rence, he made no attempt to defend Lady Chatterley's Lover;
indeed, he and the prosecutor and the judge all agreed that the book
was "obscene." What made the case unusual was the attack the
prosecutor, Robert T. Bushnell, made upon those who had brought
him the evidence:
I want the public to understand that the district attorney does not
endorse the Watch and Ward Society's policy or tactics. I serve warn-
ing here and now that as long as I am district attorney of this district
and the agents of this Society go into a bookstore of good repute and
induce and procure the commission of a crime, I will proceed against
them for criminal conspiracy.
The judge joined the district attorney in censuring the Watch
and Ward Society, but said that under the law the defendants were
guilty and their sentence must stand.
The increasing attacks against Lawrence may have helped crush
the life out of him. The trouble over the pictures left him bitter
and ill, and one day in the South of France not long before his
death in 1930, Lawrence tapped his chest while talking to Earl
Brewster, and said, "The hatred which my books have aroused
comes back at me and gets me here.'*
Ill
The history of Lawrence and the censors does not stop, how-
ever, with his death, for even after all these years the salient
issues have not been settled. Yet, as T. S. Eliot once said, Lawrence
has had more influence on his time than any of his contemporaries.
In 1933, only three years after Lawrence's death, Norman Douglas,
who cared little for Lawrence's work, could say, in a book quoted
at the beginning of this Introduction, "An American friend tells me
2 4 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
that Lawrence's romances have been of incalculable service to
genteel society out there. The same applies to genteel society in
England." And, as also noted earlier, in that same year the American
poet Horace Gregory pointed out that, because o Lady Chatterley's
Lover, "no novelist (or poet) living today finds it necessary to con-
tinue the half-century fight for sexual liberation in English writing."
Yet there is a bad side to the situation, too. In ^blasting open
the road to tolerance, Lawrence accidentally made it possible for
a number of fifth-raters to come skidding along after him. It would
be unfair to blame him for all the shoddy sex novels now available,
for such literature has always been with us he gave it no ancestry.
Nevertheless, some of the sensational covers seen on the paperbound
books in the drugstores of America may, however faintly, derive
somewhat from Lady Chatterley's Lover, if only because their
authors have hoped that they can imitate that book, not realizing
that the essence of Lady Chatterley's Lover is an unflinching candor
rather than the suggestion or suggestiveness apparently indis-
pensable to the pharmacy paperbacks. Regrettably, the title Lady
Chatterleys Lover is among those paperbacks, and it has also ap-
peared in other cheap editions in England and America over the
last twenty years. These editions are "authorized" but not by
Lawrence. He describes in "A Propos" how he tried to cut the book
to please the publishers, but couldn't do so. The publishers "author-
ized" the emasculated version after his death. There was nothing
wrong, however, in the idea of publishing The First Lady Chat-
terley in 1944, for there was respectable literary opinion to the effect
that this version was at least as good as if not better than the third
draft which Lawrence himself had published; but the book-police-
men seemed to think it a bad idea despite its lack of the four-letter
words that had stirred up so much hatred and terror of that previ-
ous edition. On May 9, 1944, the indefatigable Charles S. Sumner
raided the New York office of the Dial Press and seized four hun-
dred copies. Twenty days later a magistrate duly pronounced the
book obscene, but on November 2, two of the three justices in the
Court of Special Sessions declared that there was "reasonable doubt"
as to obscenity and dismissed the case against The First Lady
Chatterley.
Now, twenty years after the legalization of Ulysses, we might
expect a publisher to undertake the genuine Lady Chatterley's
Lover. Ulysses was cleared because it was a work of art it re-
flected life, and if life is sordid at times, art must be also. Lawrence
would never have accepted this defence of Ulysses, which to him
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE "CENSOR-MORONS*' 25
represented a mechanization of the vital forces of life; it appealed
too exclusively to the intellect. Joyce's devices seemed to Lawrence
tiresome and "dirty-minded": how he must have loathed the
elaborate description of Mr. Bloom's early-morning pleasure in his
back-garden reading room, the manifestation of his later tribute to
Gertie McDowell, indeed the entire day's catalogue of voyeurism,
frottage, and various other kinds of aberrant gratification. Law-
rence's horror at this type of literature, at this kind of vision of life,
the reader may find expressed in "Pornography and Obscenity," in
the passage where Lawrence explains how "the sex functions and
the excretory functions in the human body" are "utterly different":
the one is the creative flow, the other is the "flow towards dissolu-
tion, decreation, if we may use such a word." Lawrence pointed
out further that "in the really healthy human being the distinction
between the two is instant. . . . But in the degraded human being
the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become
identical."
That is so clear that it cannot be misunderstood; and of course
the essay in which it appeared is required reading for all who pre-
sume to write on Lawrence. Yet the prejudice against him is deep
in the hearts of those who have determined to set themselves against
him.* A few years ago, in reviewing a book on Lawrence for the
New York Herald Tribune, Professor DeLancey Ferguson said that
Lawrence's "constant preoccupation with the physical mechanisms
of sex and excretion is certainly proof of emotional immaturity."
Frieda Lawrence wrote the Herald Tribune in protest. Part of her
letter appeared in that paper, and it is extremely pertinent:
Lawrence wrote about almost everything under the sun, he also wrote
about sex. Considering sex is the very root of our existence, without it
we could not walk on this earth, it seems worthy of any mature man's
thought as much as any atom bomb. Lawrence tried to raise sex from
a mere animal function to a truly human all-embracing activity. Where
in all Lawrence's work did Professor Ferguson discover any possible
reference to a preoccupation with excrement! It is an ugly invention!
* Some readers only partly familiar with Lawrence's writings may be baffled by
such passages as the one in Lady Chatterlcy's Lover in which the lover celebrates the
beloved because she functions naturally. Such passages are too rare in Lawrence to
constitute an "obsession"; and in any event, Lawrence in that part of his novel was
dramatizing, in a positive way, a point he discusses in the essays in the present
volume: see his references, in his Pansies Introduction and in his "A Propos" essay,
to Swift's poem "To a Lady's Dressing-Room." Lawrence in these references dis-
covers such an obsession in Swift and probes its cause; in Lady Chatterlcy's Lover,
Lawrence attempted to show us how to cure such a condition. But probably those
who only half -read an author's texts will still insist upon their right to misunder-
stand Lawrence. [H.T.M.]
2 $ SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
Mrs. Lawrence added a thought which the newspaper did
not print to the effect that she suspected that Mr. Ferguson was
a young man whose later experience would teach him much
about life, including "a little intelligent respect for his betters."
Mrs. Lawrence of course didn't know that Mr. Ferguson is a well-
known scholar, critic, and editor, author of several books, and
chairman of an English Department.
Pressed to prove his point, he told Irita Van Doren, editor of the
Book Review section of the Herald Tribune, that she would
hardly care to print the texts on which he had "based the re-
mark which has caused most of the shooting and shouting." The
inhibitions of newspapers, he said, would prevent him from de-
fending himself. But what prevented Mr. Ferguson from observ-
ing the usual practices of scholarship in regard to texts which for
reasons of copyright, length, or "obscenity" cannot be reproduced
what prevented him from referring to page and line numbers of
the supposed passages ?
Fortunately, most of Mr, Ferguson's colleagues apparently do not
share his feelings about Lawrence; teachers of literature, many of
them publishing literary critics, have played an important role in
the Lawrence revival. Yet, even though Lady Chatterley may have
\ gained a bit of academic respectability, the book is still subject to
die kind of distortion that William York Tindali mentions in the
Introduction to his excellent anthology, The Later D.H.Lawrence
(1952). Professor Tindali says that "there are tales of couples read-
ing Lawrence on couches: putting him aside to lie on them." But
the essays in the present volume make it plain that Lawrence did
not write his books for the titillation of suburban Paolos and
Francescas nor, as some of his apologists in the recent Lady
Chatterley trial in Japan tried to explain, for the practical encourage-
ment of adulteries under the almond blossoms and cherry trees.
That trial is one of the most interesting chapters in the his-
tory of Lawrence's battle with the censors. Translated into Japa-
nese by Sei Ito of Waseda University, the unexpurgated edition
of Lady Chatterley s Lover appeared in Tokyo in the spring of
1950. Immediately lawyers, publishers, civic leaders, authors, jour-
nalists, professors, and a good many plain readers collaborated to
produce one of the greatest uproars heard in Japan since the end
of the war. Trials in 1952 and 1953 resulted in the conviction and
fining of the publisher, Hisajiro Koyama, against whom the prose-
cution drew up an impressive list of witnesses, including the presi-
dent of the Society for the Reform of Manners, the chairman of
the Committee on the Regulation and Control of Cinema Ethics, the
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE "CENSOR-MORONS** 27
chief of the Diet Library, the presidents of several girls' schools, the
president of the Mothers' Society of Kanda, a Yokohama Medical
College professor and, among others, "Mr. Sinnosuke Abe, a publi-
cist." Those who would point a Gilbert and Sullivan finger at these
proceedings should recall some of those of the Western World, as
previously described. The elder generation of Japanese had been
disturbed, the trial brought out, by "the trend of the times," and
the prosecution of Lady Chatterley was only one among more than
a hundred such cases tried since the war though of course the
most spectacular one. And if the trial had its comic aspects, well, sex
has always been a subject that has thrown people off center even
the poised ancients.
In the modern world Lawrence had discerned and was trying
to correct the present-day imbalance between intellectual and emo-
tional elements, not only in sex but in all other phases of human
life. He stressed passion and the emotions because humanity had so
long neglected them: he was not trying to destroy the intellectual
processes, but merely to bring them into their proper relationship
with the emotions.
Fortunately, everyone has not misunderstood and reviled Law-
rence and his message. One of those who exactly comprehended
what D. H. Lawrence was trying to do was the late T. E. Lawrence
("of Arabia") ; he had on first reading been a bit put off by Lady
Chatterley, but at last he came to the understanding expressed in
his letter of March 3, 1930, to the effect that the meaning of Lady
Chatterley "is that die idea of sex, and the whole strong vital
instinct, being considered indecent causes men to lose what might
be their vital strength and pride of life their integrity. . . .
Ironically, or paradoxically, in a humanity where [in Blake's sense]
'genitals are beauty' there would be a minimum of 'sex' and a maxi-
mum of beauty, or Art. This is what Lawrence means, surely." In
a scientific, philological study of the most famous of all taboo words,
Allen Walker Read's article "An Obscenity Symbol," in American
Speech for December 1934, said: "A courageous attempt to ignore
the taboo was made by D. H. Lawrence in his novel Lady Chatter-
ley's Lover. His use of the word in sincere simplicity differs strik-
ingly from the inverted taboo of those who trade upon sex as a dirty
secret." Professor Read regretted, however, that the taboo words
were still so shocking in their "smirched associations" that Law-
rence's "experiment, admirable in aim," failed with most people
but perhaps that condition now is changing. The words have been
so widely used that they are less shocking today: and if people can
understand Lawrence's use of them, his books will be read at last as
3 g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
they should be read indeed, as many people have begun to read
them. Most recently, Lawrence's old friend Aldous Huxley, in The
Devils of London, published in 1952, made a passing reference to
"the sexuality of Eden and the sexuality of the sewer,' 1 pointing
out that "there is an element in sexuality which is innocent, and
there is an element in sexuality which is morally and aesthetically
squalid. . . . Jean Genet, with horrifying power and copious detail,"
has dealt with the latter, while "D. H. Lawrence has written very
beautifully of the first/' the sexuality of Eden.
IV
The present essays are a by-product of Lawrence's imaginative
writing. As we have seen, creation with him preceded explanation.
Yet if the reprinting of these explanations can bring about the
reprinting of the creations specifically Lady Chatterley's Lover
they will have served a good purpose. Nevertheless they have a
wider application as well, for they are at the top of all discussions
of this perplexing and important subject.
The first of these essays, in order of composition, is "Love."
Its first publication was in the English Review for January 1918.
Lawrence perhaps wrote it during the preceding year, before his
expulsion from Cornwall in October. It is one of the most im-
portant statements he made about love and it was made in the
middle of his career; reproduced in the Phoenix volume, it has
long been out of print in America. In 1925 Lawrence published
several other important essays on love and sex, in Reflections on the
Death of a Porcupine, but since the best of these have recently come
back into print, they are not reprinted in the present collection of
material which has been too long inaccessible.
The second of these essays in point o time, "Making Love to
Music," followed its predecessor by about ten years. The note at
the end of the manuscript April 26, 1927 apparently dates its
composition exactly. The essay first appeared in Phoenix: The
Posthumous Papers of D.H.Lawrence (1936), and like many of
the essays in that volume it has for some years been out of print in
both England and America.
Apparently written about August 1928, "Cocksure Women and
Hensure Men" received first publication the following January in
the Forum (New York), in which Lawrence had previously
ruffled the readers' feathers with the opening section of his novel,
The Escaped Coc\. Lawrence had predicted that the English maga-
zines would reject his "Cocksure" essay, a prophecy which proved
D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE **CENSOR-MORONS'* 2g
true. He put the essay into his Assorted Articles volume, however,
where it appeared in April 1930, a month after his death.
"Sex versus Loveliness" first appeared in the Sunday Dispatch
(London) on November 25, 1928, as "Sex Locked Out," and on
the following July in Vanity Pair (New York) as "Sex Appeal"
a phrase Lawrence disliked. He changed the title to "Sex versus
Loveliness" for Assorted Articles.
The manuscript of the "Introduction to Pansies" Lawrence
dated "Bandol, Christmas 1929." After the seizure of the Pansies
manuscript, Lawrence wrote a new Introduction; in the limited
edition of Pansies the date at the end of this Introduction is
January 1929. A somewhat different preface appeared in the trade
edition. The "limited" Introduction, reprinted in Phoenix and in
the present volume, represents the first expression of some of the
most important thoughts developed in the two longer essays at the
end of this book.
"The State of Funk" was written perhaps in late 1928 or early
1929. It first appeared in print in Assorted Articles. Like the other
two essays reproduced here from that volume, it has long been out
of print in America.
Lawrence wrote "Pornography and Obscenity" at Rottach-am-
Tegernsee, Bavaria, where he stayed from late August to mid-
September of 1929, as guest of Max Mohr, German physician and
playwright, to whom he wrote from Bandol on December 19,
1929: "That Obscenity pamphlet which I wrote at Rottach, at
the Angermeister, has made the old ones hate me still more in
England, but it has sold very well, and had a very good effect, I
think." Lawrence later rejoiced that it considerably outsold the
pamphlet in the same series written by Jix. Faber and Faber had
brought out Lawrence's "Pornography" essay as Number 5 of the
Criterion Miscellany, in London, in November; Knopf issued it in
New York in 1930.
"A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover" is the extension of the
Introduction to the authorized 1929 Paris edition of Lady Chat-
terleys Lover. This Introduction, "My Skirmish with a Jolly
Roger," was issued in a limited edition (of twelve pages) by
Random House, in New York, in July 1929. Later, apparently at
Bandol in the fall of 1929, Lawrence increased its length to some
sixty pages; Mandrake Press published the result, with the tide
used in this volume, in London in June 1930; Heinemann brought
it out a few years later, but its appearance in the present volume
marks its first in America.
As previously stated, these essays do not need explication. Law-
3O SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
rence's views about sex were based on common sense and on the
wisdom of a great writer who looked into the heart of life and
could report his findings brilliantly. And certainly, in these days
of quasi-legal inquisition and of the triumphant braying of all
reactionaries, Lawrence's attacks on the "censor-moron" are more
necessary and important than ever. Taken together, the essays in
this book might be said to comprise a twentieth-century Areo-
pagitica for the literature of love.
Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts
Easter, 1953
Sex,
Literature,
and Censorship
Love
Love is the happiness of the world. But happiness is not the whole
of fulfilment. Love is a coming together. But there can be no coming
together without an equivalent going asunder. In love, all things
unite in a oneness of joy and praise. But they could not unite unless
they were previously apart. And, having united in a whole circle of
unity, they can go no further in love. The motion of love, like a
tide, is fulfilled in this instance; there must be an ebb.
So that the coming together depends on the going apart; the
systole depends on the diastole; the flow depends upon the ebb.
There can never be love universal and unbroken. The sea can
never rise to high tide over all the globe at once. The undisputed
reign of love can never be.
Because love is strictly a travelling. "It is better to travel than to
arrive," somebody has said. This is the essence of unbelief. It is a
belief in absolute love, when love is by nature relative. It is a belief
in the means, but not in the end. It is strictly a belief in force, for
love is a unifying force.
How shall we believe in force? Force is instrumental and func-
tional; it is neither a beginning nor an end. We travel in order
to arrive; we do not travel in order to travel. At least, such travel-
ling is mere futility. We travel in order to arrive.
And love is a travelling, a motion, a speed of coming together.
Love is the force of creation. But all force, spiritual or physical,
has its polarity, its positive and its negative. All things that fall,
fall by gravitation to the earth. But has not the earth, in the
opposite of gravitation, cast ofi the moon and held her at bay in
our heavens during all the aeons of time?
So with love. Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit to-
wards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation. But
if all be united in one bond of love, then there is no more love.
And therefore, for those who are in love with love, to travel is
better than to arrive. For in arriving one passes beyond love, or,
33
34 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
rather, one encompasses love in a new transcendence. To arrive is
the supreme joy after all our travelling.
The bond of love! What worse bondage can we conceive than
the bond of love? It is an attempt to wall in the high ^ tide; it is
a will to arrest the spring, never to let May dissolve into June,
never to let the hawthorn petal fall for the berrying.
This has been our idea of immortality, this infinite of love,
love universal and triumphant. And what is this but a prison and
a bondage? What is eternity but the endless passage of time?
What is infinity but an endless progressing through space ? Eter-
nity, infinity, our great ideas of rest and arrival, what are they
but ideas of endless travelling? Eternity is the endless travelling
through space; no more, however we try to argue it. And immor-
tality, what is it, in our idea, but an endless continuing in the
same sort? A continuing, a living forever, a lasting and enduring
forever what is this but travelling? An assumption into heaven,
a becoming one with God what is the infinite on arrival? The
infinite is no arrival. When we come to find exactly what we mean
by God, by the infinite, by our immortality, it is a meaning of
tndless continuing in the same line and in the same sort, endless
javelling in one direction. This is infinity, endless travelling in one
direction. And the God of Love is our idea of the progression ad
Infinitum of the force of love. Infinity is no arrival. It is as much a
:ul-de-sac as is the bottomless pit. And what is the infinity of love
but a cul-de-sac or a bottomless pit?
Love is a progression towards the goal* Therefore it is a pro-
gression away from the opposite goal. Love travels heavenwards*
What then does love depart from? Hellwards, what is there? Love
is at last a positive infinite. What then is the negative infinite?
Positive and negative infinite are the same, since there is only one
infinite. How then will it matter if we travel heavenwards, ad
infinitum> or in the opposite direction, to infinity? Since the in-
finity obtained is the same in either case, the infinite of pure
homogeneity, which is nothingness, or everythingness, it does not
matter which.
Infinity, the infinite, is no goal. It is a cul-de-sac, or, in another
sense, it is the bottomless pit. To fall down the bottomless pit is to
travel forever. And a pleasant-walled cul-de-sac may be a perfect
heaven. But to arrive in a sheltered, paradisiacal cul-de-sac of peace
and unblemished happiness, this will not satisfy us. And to fall
forever down the bottomless pit of progression, this will not do
either.
Love is not a goal; it is only a travelling. Likewise death is not
LOVE 35
a goal; it is a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from
the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore
death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot.
There is a goal, but the goal is neither love nor death. It is a
goal neither infinite nor eternal. It is the realm of calm delight,
it is the other-kingdom of bliss. We are like a rose, which is a
miracle of pure centrality, pure absolved equilibrium. Balanced in
perfection in the midst of time and space, the rose is perfect in
the realm of perfection, neither temporal nor spatial, but absolved
by the quality of perfection, pure immanence of absolution.
We are creatures of time and space. But we are like a rose;
we accomplish perfection, we arrive in the absolute. We are crea-
tures of time and space. And we are at once creatures of pure
transcendence, absolved from time and space, perfected in the
realm of the absolute, the other-world of bliss.
And love, love is encompassed and surpassed. Love always has
been encompassed and surpassed by the fine lovers. We are like a
rose, a perfect arrival.
Love is manifold, it is not of one sort only. There is the love
between man and woman, sacred and profane. There is Christian
love, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." And there is the
love of God. But always love is a joining together.
Only in the conjunction of man and woman has love kept a
duality of meaning. Sacred love and profane love, they are op-
posed, and yet they are both love. The love between man and
woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will
ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.
The love between man and woman is the perfect heart-beat of
life, systole, diastole.
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves
his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.
But whole love between man and woman is sacred and profane
together. Profane love seeks its own. I seek my own in the be-
loved, I wrestle with her to wrest it from her. We are not clear,
we are mixed and mingled. I am in the beloved also, and she is
in me. Which should not be, for this is confusion and chaos.
Therefore I will gather myself complete and free from the be-
loved, she shall single herself out in utter contradistinction to me.
There is twilight in our souls, neither light nor dark. The light
must draw itself together in purity, the dark must stand on the
other hand; they must be two complete in opposition, neither one
partaking of the other, but each single in its own stead.
We are like a rose. In the pure passion for oneness, in the
3 g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
pure passion for distinctness and separateness, a dual passion of
unutterable separation and lovely conjunction of the two, the new
configuration takes place, the transcendence, the two in their per-
fect singleness, transported into one surpassing heaven of a rose
blossom.
But the love between a man and a woman, when it is whole,
is dual. It is the melting into pure communion, and it is the fric-
tion of sheer sensuality, both. In pure communion I become whole
in love. And in pure, fierce passion of sensuality I am burned into
essentiality. I am driven from the matrix into sheer separate distinc-
tion. I become my single self, inviolable and unique, as the gems
were perhaps once driven into themselves out of the confusion of
earths. The woman and I, we are the confusion of earths. Then in
the fire of their extreme sensual love, in the friction of intense,
destructive flames, I am destroyed and reduced to her essential
otherness. It is a destructive fire, the profane love. But it is the only
fire that will purify us into singleness, fuse us from the chaos into
our own unique gem-like separateness of being.
All whole love between man and woman is thus dual, a love
which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and
a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification
of being burnt down, burnt apart into separate clarity of being;
unthinkable otherness and separateness. But not all love between
man and woman is whole. It may be all gentle, the merging into
oneness, like St. Francis and St. Clare, or Mary of Bethany and
Jesus. There may be no separateness discovered, no singleness
won, no unique otherness admitted. This is a half love, what is
called sacred love. And this is the love which knows the purest
happiness. On the other hand, the love may be all a lovely battle
of sensual gratification, the beautiful but deadly counterposing
of male against female, as Tristan and Isolde. These are the lov-
ers that top the sum of pride, they go with the grandest banners,
they are the gem-like beings, he pure male singled and separated
out in superb jewel-like isolation of arrogant manhood, she purely
woman, a lily balanced in rocking pride of beauty and perfume
of womanhood. This is the profane love, that ends in flamboyant
and lacerating tragedy when the two which are so singled out are
torn finally apart by death. But if profane love ends in piercing
tragedy, none the less the sacred love ends in a poignant yearn-
ing and exquisite submissive grief. St. Francis dies and leaves St.
Clare to her pure sorrow.
There must be two in one, always two in one the sweet love
of communion and the fierce, proud love of sensual fulfilment,
LOVE 37
both together in one love. And then we are like a rose. We sur-
pass even love, love is encompassed and surpassed. We are two
who have a pure connection. We are two, isolated like gems in
our unthinkable otherness. But the rose contains and transcends
us, we are one rose, beyond.
The Christian love, the brotherly love, this is always sacred.
I love my neighbour as myself. What then? I am enlarged, I sur-
pass myself, I become whole in mankind. In the whole of perfect
humanity I am whole. I am the microcosm, the epitome of the
great microcosm. I speak of the perfectibility of man. Man can
be made perfect in love, he can become a creature of love alone.
Then humanity shall be one whole of love. This is the perfect
future for those who love their neighbours as themselves.
But, alas! however much I may be the microcosm, the exem-
plar of brotherly love, there is in me this necessity to separate and
distinguish myself into gem-like singleness, distinct and apart from
all the rest, proud as a lion, isolated as a star. This is a necessity
within me. And this necessity is unfulfilled, it becomes stronger
and stronger and it becomes dominant.
Then I shall hate the self that I am, powerfully and profoundly
shall I hate this microcosm that I have become, this epitome of
mankind. I shall hate myself with madness the more I persist in
adhering to my achieved self of brotherly love. Still I shall persist
in representing a whole loving humanity, until the unfulfilled
passion for singleness drives me into action. Then I shall hate my
neighbour as I hate myself. And then, woe betide my neighbour and
me! Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. And
this is how we become mad, by being impelled into activity by the
subconscious reaction against the self we maintain, without ever
ceasing to maintain this detested self. We are bewildered, dazed.
In the name of brotherly love we rush into stupendous blind ac-
tivities of brotherly hate. We are made mad by the split, the duality
in ourselves. The gods wish to destroy us because we serve them too
well. Which is the end of brotherly love, liberte, fraternite, cgaliti.
How can there be liberty when I am not free to be other than fra-
ternal and equal? I must be free to be separate and unequal in the
finest sense, if I am to be free. Fraternite and tge&itt, these are
tyranny of tyrannies.
There must be brotherly love, a wholeness of humanity. But
there must also be pure, separate individuality, separate and proud
as a lion or a hawk. There must be both. In the duality lies fulfil-
ment. Man must act in concert with man, creatively and happily.
This is greater happiness. But man must also act separately and dis-
3 g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
tinctly, apart from every other man, single and self -responsible and
proud with unquenchable pride, moving for himself without refer-
ence to his neighbour. These two movements are opposite, yet they
do not negate each other. We have understanding. And if we under-
stand, then we balance perfectly between the two motions, we are
single, isolated individuals, we are a great concordant humanity,
both, and then the rose of perfection transcends us, the rose of the
world which has never yet blossomed, but which will blossom from
us when we begin to understand both sides and to live in both
directions, freely and without fear, following the inmost desires of
our body and spirit, which arrive to us out of the unknown.
Lastly, there is the love of God; we become whole with God.
But God as we know Him is either infinite love or infinite pride
and power, always one or the other, Christ or Jehovah, always one .
half excluding the other. Therefore, God is forever jealous. If
we love one God, we must hate this one sooner or later, and
choose the other. This is the tragedy of religious experience. But
the Holy Spirit, the unknowable, is single and perfect for us.
There is that which we cannot love, because it surpasses either
love or hate. There is the unknown and the unknowable which
propounds all creation. This we cannot love, we can only accept
it as a term of our own limitation and ratification. We can only
know that from the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us,
and that the fulfilling of these desires is the fulfilling of creation. We
know that the rose comes to blossom. We know that we are incipi-
ent with blossom. It is our business to go as we are impelled, with
faith and pure spontaneous morality, knowing that the rose blos-
soms, and taking that knowledge for sufficient.
Making Love to Music
"To me, dancing," said Romeo, "is just making love to music."
"That's why you never will dance with me, I suppose," replied
Juliet.
"Well, you know, you are a bit too much of an individual."
It is a curious thing, but the ideas of one generation become
the instincts of the next. We are all of us, largely, the embodied
ideas of our grandmothers, and, without knowing it, we behave as
such. It is odd that the grafting works so quietly, but it seems to.
Let the ideas change rapidly, and there follows a correspondingly
rapid change in humanity. We become what we think. Worse
still, we have become what our grandmothers thought. And our
children's children will become the lamentable things that we
are thinking. Which is the psychological visiting of the sins of the
fathers upon the children. For we do not become just the lofty or
beautiful thoughts of our grandmothers. Alas no! We are the em-
bodiment of title most potent ideas of our progenitors, and these
ideas are mostly private ones, not to be admitted in public, but
to be transmitted as instincts and as the dynamics of behaviour
to the third and fourth generation. Alas for the thing that our
grandmothers brooded over in secret, and willed in private. That
thing are we.
What did they "wish and will? One thing is certain: they
wished to be made love to, to music. They wished man were not
a coarse creature, jumping to his goal, and finished. They wanted
heavenly strains to resound, while he held their hand, and a new
musical movement to burst forth, as he put his arm round their
waist. With infinite variations the music was to soar on, from level
to level of love-making, in a delicious dance, the two things in-
extricable, the two persons likewise.
To end, of course, before the so-called consummation of love-
making, which, to our grandmothers in their dream, and therefore
39
40 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
to us in actuality, is the grand anti-climax. Not a consummation,
but a humiliating anti-climax.
This is the so-called act of love itself, the actual knuckle of
the whole bone of contention: a humiliating anti-climax. The
bone of contention, of course, is sex. Sex is very charming and
very delightful, so long as you make love to music, and you tread
the clouds with Shelley, in a two-step. But to come at last to the
grotesque bathos of capitulation: no sir! Nay-nay!
Even a man like Maupassant, an apparent devotee of sex, says
the same thing: and Maupassant is grandfather, or great-grand-
father, to very many of us. Surely, he says, the act of copulation is
the Creator's cynical joke against us. To have created in us all
these beautiful and noble sentiments of love, to set the nightingale
and all the heavenly spheres singing, merely to throw us into this
grotesque posture, to perform this humiliating act, is a piece o
cynicism worthy, not of a benevolent Creator, but of a mocking
demon.
Poor Maupassant, there is the clue to his own catastrophe! He
wanted to make love to music. And he realized, with rage, that
copulate to music you cannot. So he divided himself against himself,
and damned his eyes in disgust, then copulated all the more.
We, however, his grandchildren, are shrewder. Man must make
love to music, and woman must be made love to, to a string
and saxophone accompaniment. It is our inner necessity. Because
our grandfathers, and especially our great-grandfathers, left the
music most severely out of their copulations. So now we leave the
copulation most severely out of our musical love-making. We
must make love to music: it is our grandmothers' dream, become
an inward necessity in us, an unconscious motive force. Copulate
you cannot, to music. So cut out that part, and solve the problem.
The popular modern dances, far from being "sexual," are dis-
tinctly anti-sexual. But there, again, we must make a distinction.
We should say, the modern jazz and tango and Charleston, far
from being an incitement to copulation, are in direct antagonism
to copulation. Therefore it is all nonsense for the churches to raise
their voice against dancing, against "making love to music." Be-
cause the Church, and society at large, has no particular antagonism
to sex. It would be ridiculous, for sex is so large and all-embracing
that the religious passion itself is largely sexual. But, as they say,
"sublimated." This is the great recipe for sex: only sublimate it!
Imagine the quicksilver heated and passing off in weird, slightly
poisonous vapour, instead of heavily rolling together and fusing:
MAKING LOVE TO MUSIC 4I
and there you have the process: sublimation: making love to music!
Morality has really no quarrel at all with "sublimated" sex. Most
"nice" things are "sublimated sex." What morality hates, what the
Church hates, what modern mankind hates for what, after all, is
"morality" except the instinctive revulsion of the majority? is just
copulation. The modern youth especially just have an instinctive
aversion from copulation. They love sex. But they inwardly loathe
copulation, even when they play at it. As for playing at it, what
else are they to do, given the toys ? But they don't like it. They do
it in a sort of self -spite. And they turn away, with disgust and
relief, from this bed-ridden act, to make love once more to music.
And really, surely this is all to the good. If the young don't
really lify copulation, then they are safe. As for marriage, they
will marry, according to their grandmothers' dream, for quite
other reasons. Our grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, married
crudely and unmusically, for copulation. That was the actuality.
So the dream was all of music. The dream was the mating of two
souls, to the faint chiming of the Seraphim. We, the third and
fourth generation, we are the dream made flesh. They dreamed
of a marriage with all things gross meaning especially copula-
tion left out, and only the pure harmony of equality and inti-
mate companionship remaining. And the young live out the
dream. They marry: they copulate in a perfunctory and half-
disgusted fashion, merely to show they can do it. And so they
have children. But the marriage is made to music, the gramo-
phone and the wireless orchestrate each small domestic art, and
keep up the jazzing jig of connubial felicity, a felicity of com-
panionship, equality, forbearance, and mutual sharing of every-
thing the married couple have in common. Marriage set to music!
The worn-out old serpent in this musical Eden of domesticity is
the last, feeble instinct for copulation, which drives the married
couple to clash upon the boring organic differences in one another,
and prevents them from being twin souls in almost identical bodies.
But we are wise and soon learn to leave the humiliating act out
altogether. It is the only wisdom.
We are such stuff as our grandmothers* dreams were made on,
and our little life is rounded by a band.
The thing you wonder, as you watch the modern dancers mak-
ing love to music, in a dance-hall, is what kind of dances will our
children's children dance? Our mothers' mothers danced quadrilles
and sets of Lancers, and the waltz was almost an indecent thing
to them. Our mothers* mothers' mothers danced minuets and
42 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
Roger de Coverleys, and smart and bouncing country dances which
worked up the blood and danced a man nearer and nearer to
copulation.
But lo! even while she was being whirled round in the dance,
our great-grandmother was dreaming of soft and throbbing music,
and the arms of "one person/' and the throbbing and sliding unison
of this one more elevated person, who would never coarsely bounce
her towards bed and copulation., but would slide on with her
forever, down the dim and sonorous vistas, making love without
end to music without end, and leaving out entirely that disastrous,
music-less full-stop of copulation, the end of ends.
So she dreamed, our great-grandmother, as she crossed hands
and was flung around, and buffeted and busked towards bed, and
the bouncing of the bfte a deux dos. She dreamed of men that
were only embodied souls, not tiresome and gross males, lords and
masters. She dreamed of "one person" who was all men in one,
universal, and beyond narrow individualism.
So that now, the great-granddaughter is made love to by all
men to music as if it were one man. To music, all men, as if
it were one man, make love to her, and she sways in the arms,
not of an individual, but of the modern species. It is wonderful.
And the modern man makes love, to music, to all women, as if
she were one woman. All woman, as if she were one woman! It is
almost like Baudelaire making love to the vast thighs of Dame
Nature herself, except that that dream of our great-grandfather
is still too copulative, though all-embracing.
But what is the dream that is simmering at the bottom of the
soul of the modern young woman as she slides to music across the
floor> in the arms of the species, or as she waggles opposite the
species, in the Charleston? If she is content, there is no dream.
But woman is never content. If she were content, the Charleston
and the Black Bottom would not oust the tango.
She is not content. She is even less content, in the morning
after the night before, than was her great-grandmother, who had
been bounced by copulatory attentions. She is even less content;
therefore her dream, though not risen yet to consciousness, is even
more devouring and more rapidly subversive.
What is her dream, this slender lady just out of her teens,
who is varying the two-step with the Black Bottom? What can her
dream be? Because what her dream is, that her children, and my
children, or children's children, will become. It is the very ovum
of the future soul ? as my dream is the sperm.
There is not much left for her to dream of, because whatever
MAKING LOVE TO MUSIC 43
she wants she can have. All men, or no men, this man or that,
she has the choice, for she has no lord and master. Sliding down
the endless avenues of music, having an endless love endlessly
made to her, she has this too. If she wants to be bounced into
copulation, at a dead end, she can have that too: just to prove how
monkeyish it is, and what a fumbling in the cul-de-sac.
Nothing is denied her, so there is nothing to want. And with-
out desire, even dreams are lame. Lame dreams! Perhaps she has
lame dreams, and wishes, last wish of all, she had no dreams at
all.
But while life lasts, and is an affair of sleeping and waking,
this is the one wish that will never be granted. From dreams no
man escapeth, no woman either. Even the little blonde who is
preferred by gentlemen has a dream somewhere, if she, and we,
and he, did but know it. Even a dream beyond emeralds and
dollars.
What is it? What is the lame and smothered dream of the
lady? Whatever it is, she will never know: not till somebody has
told it to her, and then gradually, and after a great deal of spite-
ful repudiation, she will recognize it, and it will pass into her
wornb.
Myself, I do not know what the frail lady's dream may be. But
depend upon one thing, it will be something very different from
the present business. The dream and the business! an eternal
antipathy. So the dream, whatever it may be, will not be "making
love to music." It will be something else.
Perhaps it will be the recapturing of a dream that started in
mankind, and never finished, was never fully unfolded. The
thought occurred to me suddenly when I was looking at the re-
mains of paintings on the walls of Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia.
There the painted women dance, in their transparent linen with
heavier coloured borders, opposite the naked-limbed men, in a
splendour and an abandon which is not at all abandoned. There
is a great beauty in them, as of life which has not finished. The
dance is Greek, if you like, but not finished off like the Greek
dancing. The beauty is not so pure, if you will, as the Greek
beauty; but also it is more ample, not so narrowed. And there is
not the slight element of abstraction, of inhumanity, which under-
lies all Greek expression, the tragic will.
The Etruscans, at least before the Romans smashed them, do
not seem to have been tangled up with tragedy, as the Greeks
were from the first. There seems to have been a peculiar large
carelessness about them, very human and non-moral. As far as
SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
one can judge, they never said: certain acts are immoral, just be-
cause we say so! They seem to have had a strong feeling tor tak-
ing life sincerely as a pleasant thing. Even death was a gay and
lively affair.
Moralists will say: Divine law wiped them out. The answer to
that is, divine law wipes everything out in time, even itself. And
if the smashing power of the all-trampling Roman is to be identi-
fied with divine law, then all I can do is to look up another divinity.
No, I do believe that the unborn dream at the bottom of the
soul of the shingled, modern young lady is this Etruscan young
woman of mine, dancing with such abandon opposite her &td'
limbed, strongly dancing young man, to the sound of toe double
flute. They are wild with a dance that is heavy and light at the
same time, and not a bit anti-copulative, yet not bouncingly copula-
tive either.
That was another nice thing about the Etruscans: there was
a phallic symbol everywhere, so everybody was used to it, and
they no doubt all offered it small offerings, as the source of in-
spiration. Being part of the everyday life, there was no need to get
it on the brain, as we tend to do.
And apparently the men, the men slaves at least, went gaily
and jauntily round with no clothes on at all, and, being there-
fore of a good brown colour, wore their skin for livery. And the
Etruscan ladies thought nothing of it. Why should they? We
think nothing of a naked cow, and we still refrain from putting
our pet-dogs into pants or petticoats: marvellous to relate: but
then, our ideal is Liberty, after all! So if the slave was stark
naked, who gaily piped to the lady as she danced, and if her
partner was three-parts naked, and herself nothing but a trans-
parency, well, nobody thought anything about it; there was nothing
to shy off from, and all the fun was in the dance.
There it is, the delightful quality of the Etruscan dance. They
are neither making love to music, to avoid copulation, nor are
they bouncing towards copulation with a brass band accompani-
ment. They are just dancing a dance with the elixir of life. And
if they have made a little offering to the stone phallus at the
door, it is because when one is full of life one is full of possibil-
ities, and the phallus gives life. And if they have made an offer-
ing also to the queer ark of the female symbol, at the door of a
woman's tomb, it is because the womb too is the source of life, and
a great fountain of dance-movements.
It is we who have narrowed the dance down to two move-
ments: either bouncing towards copulation, or sliding and shaking
MAKING LOVE TO MUSIC 45
and waggling, to elude it. Surely it is ridiculous to make love to
music, and to music to be made love to! Surely the music is to
dance to! And surely the modern young woman feels this, some-
where deep inside.
To the music one should dance, and dancing, dance. The
Etruscan young woman is going gaily at it, after two thousand
five hundred years. She is not making love to music, nor is the
dark-limbed youth, her partner. She is just dancing her very
soul into existence, having made an offering on one hand to the
lively phallus of man, on the other hand, to the shut womb-symbol
of woman, and put herself on real good terms with both of them.
So she is quite serene, and dancing herself as a very fountain of
motion and of life, the young man opposite her dancing himself
the same, in contrast and balance, with just the double flute to
whistle round their naked heels.
And I believe this is, or will be, the dream of our pathetic, music-
stunned young girl of today, and the substance of her children's
children, unto the third and fourth generation.
Cocksure Women and Hensure Men
It seems to me there are two aspects to women. There is the
demure and the dauntless. Men have loved to dwell, in fiction
at least, on the demure maiden whose inevitable reply is: Oh, yes,
if you please, kind sir! The demure maiden, the demure spouse, the
demure mother this is still the ideal. A few maidens, mistresses,
and mothers arc demure. A few pretend to be. But the vast majority
are not. And they don't pretend to be. We don't expect a girl skil-
fully driving her car to be demure, we expect her to be dauntless.
What good would demure and maidenly Members of Parliament
be, inevitably responding: Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir! Though
of course there are masculine members of that kidney. And a de-
mure telephone girl? Or even a demure stenographer? Demureness,
to be sure, is outwardly becoming, it is an outward mark of
femininity, like bobbed hair. But it goes with inward dauntlessness.
The girl who has got to make her way in life has got to be daunt-
less, and if she has a pretty, demure manner with it, then lucky
girl. She kills two birds with two stones.
With the two kinds of femininity go two kinds of confidence:
there are the women who are cocksure, and the women who are
hensure. A really up-to-date woman is a cocksure woman. She
doesn't have a doubt nor a qualm. She is the modern type. Whereas
the old-fashioned demure woman was sure as a hen is sure, that is,
without knowing anything about it. She went quietly and busily
clucking around, laying the eggs and mothering the chickens in a
kind of anxious dream that still was full of sureness. But not
mental sureness. Her sureness was a physical condition, very sooth-
ing, but a condition out of which she could easily be startled or
frightened.
It is quite amusing to see the two kinds of sureness in chickens.
The cockerel is, naturally, cocksure. He crows because he is certain
it is day. Then the hen peeps out from under her wing. He marches
to the door of the hen-house and pokes out his head assertively:
46
COCKSURE WOMEN AND HENSUHE MEN 47
Ah hal daylight, of course! just as I said! and he majestically
steps down the chicken ladder towards terra firma, knowing that
the hens will step cautiously after him, drawn by his confidence.
So after him, cautiously, step the hens. He crows again: Ha-ha!
here we are! It is indisputable, and the hens accept it entirely. He
marches towards the house. From the house a person ought to ap-
pear, scattering corn. Why does the person not appear? The cock
will see to it. He is cocksure. He gives a loud crow in the doorway,
and the person appears. The hens are suitably impressed, but im-
mediately devote all their henny consciousness to the scattered corn,
pecking absorbedly, while the cock runs and fusses, cocksure that
he is responsible for it all.
So the day goes on. The cock finds a tit-bit, and loudly calls
the hens. They scuffle up in henny surety, and gobble the tit-bit.
But when they find a juicy morsel for themselves, they devour it
in silence, hensure. Unless, of course, there are little chicks, when
they most anxiously call the brood. But in her own dim surety,
the hen is really much surer than the cock, in a different way.
She marches off to lay her egg, she secures obstinately the nest she
wants, she lays her egg at last, then steps forth again with pranc-
ing confidence, and gives that most assured of all sounds, the hen-
sure cackle of a bird who has laid her egg. The cock, who is never
so sure about anything as the hen is about the egg she has laid,
immediately starts to cackle like the female of his species. He is
pining to be hensure, for hensure is so much surer than cock-
sure.
Nevertheless, cocksure is boss. When the chicken-hawk appears
in the sky, loud are the cockerel's calls of alarm. Then the hens
scuffle under the veranda, the cock ruffles his feathers on guard.
The hens are numb with fear, they say: Alas, there is no health
in us! How wonderful to be a cock so bold! And they huddle,
numbed. But their very numbness is hensurety.
Just as the cock can cackle, however, as if he had laid the egg,
so can the hen bird crow. She can more or less assume his cock-
sureness. And yet she is never so easy, cocksure, as she used to be
when she was hensure. Cocksure, she is cocksure, but uneasy. Hen-
sure, she trembles, but is easy.
It seems to me just the same in the vast human farmyard.
Only nowadays all the cocks are cackling and pretending to lay
eggs, and all the hens are crowing and pretending to call the
sun out of bed. If women today are cocksure, men are hensure.
Men are timid, tremulous, rather soft and submissive, easy in
their very henlike tremulousness. They only want to be spoken
4 g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
to gently. So the women step forth with a good loud cod^-a-
doodle-dol
The tragedy about cocksure women is that they are more cocky,
in their assurance, than the cock himself. They never realize that
when the cock gives his loud crow in the morning, he listens
acutely afterwards, to hear if some other wretch of a cock dare
crow defiance, challenge. To the cock, there is always defiance,
challenge, danger, and death on the clear air; or the possibility
thereof.
But alas, when the hen crows, she listens for no defiance or
challenge. When she says cocJ^-a-doodle-do! then it is unanswer-
able. The cock listens for an answer, alert. But the hen knows she
is unanswerable. Cod^-a-doodle-dol and their it is, take it or leave
it!
And it is this that makes the cocksureness of women so danger-
ous, so devastating. It is really out of scheme, it is not in relation
to die rest of things. So we have the tragedy of cocksure women.
They find, so often, that instead of having laid an egg they have
laid a vote, or an empty ink-bottle, or some other absolutely un-
hatchable object, which means nothing to them.
It is the tragedy of the modern woman. She becomes cock-
sure, she puts all her passion and energy and years of her life into
some effort or assertion, without ever listening for the denial
which she ought to take into count. She is cocksure, but she is a
hen all the time. Frightened of her own henny self, she rushes to
mad lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business: she is
marvellous, out-manning the man. But alas, it is all fundamentally
disconnected. It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will
become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And
when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes,
or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency suddenly,
because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn
into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation
to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost her life. The
lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of
every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having
lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness,
she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!
Sex versus Loveliness
It is a pity that sex is such an ugly little word. An ugly little word,
and really almost incomprehensible. What is sex, after all? The
more we think about it the less we know.
Science says it is an instinct; but what is an instinct? Appar-
ently an instinct is an old, old habit that has become ingrained.
But a habit, however old, has to have a beginning. And there is
really no beginning to sex. Where life is, there it is. So sex is no
"habit" that has been formed.
Again, they talk of sex as an appetite, like hunger. An appe-
tite; but for what? An appetite for propagation? It is rather ab-
surd. They say a peacock puts on all his fine feathers to dazzle
the peahen into letting him satisfy his appetite for propagation.
But why should the peahen not put on fine feathers, to dazzle the
peacock, and satisfy her desire for propagation? She has surely
quite as great a desire for eggs and chickens as he has. We cannot
believe that her sex urge is so weak that she needs all that blue
splendour of feathers to rouse her. Not at all.
As for me, I never even saw a peahen so much as look at her
lord's bronze and blue glory. I don't believe she ever sees it. I
don't believe for a moment that she knows the difference between
bronze, blue, brown, or green.
If I had ever seen a peahen gazing with rapt attention on her
lord's flamboyancy, I might believe that he had put on all those
feathers just to "attract" her. But she never looks at him. Only
she seems to get a little perky when he shudders all his quills at
her, like a storm in the trees. Then she does seem to notice, just
casually, his presence.
These theories of sex are amazing. A peacock puts on his glory
for the sake of a wall-eyed peahen who never looks at him. Imagine
a scientist being so naive as to credit the peahen with a profound,
dynamic appreciation of a peacock's colour and pattern. Oh, highly
aesthetic peahen I
49
SEX, LITERATURE, AND- CENSORSHIP
And a nightingale sings to attract his female. Which is mighty
curious, seeing he sings his best when courtship and honeymoon
are over and the female is no longer concerned with him at all, but
with the young. Well, then, if he doesn't sing to attract her, he must
sing to distract her and amuse her while she's sitting.
How delightful, how naive theories are! But there is a hidden
will behind them all. There is a hidden will behind all theories ot
sex, implacable. And that is the will to deny, to wipe out the
mystery of beauty. .
Because beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make
flannel out of it. Well, then, says science, it is just a trick to catch
the female and induce her to propagate. How naive! As it the
female needed inducing. She will propagate in the dark, even
so where, then, is the beauty trick? t
Science has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn t
fit in the cause-and-effect chain. And society has a mysterious hatred
of sex, because it perpetually interferes with the nice money-
making schemes of social man. So the two hatreds made a com-
bine, and sex and beauty are mere propagation appetite.
Now sex and beauty are one thing, like flame and fire. If you
hate sex you hate beauty. If you love living beauty, you have a
reverence far sex. Of course you can love old, dead beauty and hate
sex. But to love living beauty you must have a reverence for sex.
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And
the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of
sex and beauty, is intuition. The great disaster of our civilization
is the morbid hatred of sex. What, for example, could show a more
poisoned hatred of sex than Freudian psychoanalysis ? which
carries with it a morbid fear of beauty, "alive" beauty, and which
causes the atrophy of our intuitive faculty and our intuitive self.
The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the
diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties. There is
a whole world of life that we might know and enjoy by intuition,
and by intuition alone. This is denied us, because we deny sex
and beauty, the source of the intuitive life and of the insouciance
which is so lovely in free animals and in plants.
Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty
the flower. Why is a woman lovely, if ever, in her twenties? It is
the time when sex rises sofdy to her face., as a rose to the top of a
rose bush.
And the appeal is the appeal of beauty. We deny it wherever
we can. We try to make the beauty as shallow and trashy as pos-
SEX VERSUS LOVELINESS 5!
sible. But, first and foremost, sex appeal is the appeal of beauty.
Now beauty is a thing about which we are so uneducated we
can hardly speak of it. We try to pretend it is a fixed arrangement:
straight nose, large eyes, etc. We think a lovely woman must look
like Lillian Gish, a handsome man must look like Rudolph
Valentino. Se we thinJ^.
In actual life we behave quite differently. We say "She's quite
beautiful, but I don't care for her." Which shows we are using
the word beautiful all wrong. We should say: "She has the stereo-
typed attributes of beauty, but she is not beautiful to me."
Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern
or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a
communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is that our sense of
beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.
But to stick to the films there is a greater essential beauty
in Charlie Chaplin's odd face than ever there was in Valentino's.
There is a bit of true beauty in Chaplin's brows and eyes, a gleam
of something pure.
But our sense of beauty is so bruised and clumsy, we don't see
it, and don't know it when we do see it. We can only see the
blatantly obvious, like the so-called beauty of Rudolph Valentino,
which only pleases because it satisfies some ready-made notion of
handsomeness.
But the plainest person can look beautiful, can be beautifuL
It only needs the fire of sex to rise delicately to change an ugly
face to a lovely one. That is really sex appeal: the communicating
of a sense of beauty.
And in the reverse way, no one can be quite so repellent as a
really pretty woman. That is, since beauty is a question of experi-
ence, not of concrete form, no one can be as acutely ugly as a
really pretty woman. When the sex glow is missing, and she
moves in ugly coldness, how hideous she seems, and all the worse
for her externals of prettiness.
What sex is, we don't know, but it must be some sort of fire.
For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And
when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of
beauty.
But the communicating of the warmth, the glow of sex, is
true sex appeal. We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burn-
ing inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies,
we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are un-
fortunately becoming more numerous in the world.
52 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire
o sex has gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom every-
body wants to avoid.
But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns
in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and
stiller, but there it is. We have some control over it; but only par-
tial control. That is why society hates it.
While ever it lives, the fire of sex, which is the source of beauty
and anger, burns in us beyond our understanding. Like actual fire,
while it lives it will burn our fingers if we touch it carelessly. And
so social man, who only wants to be "safe," hates the fire of sex.
Luckily, not many men succeed in being merely social ^men.
The fire of the old Adam smoulders. And one of the qualities of
fire is that it calls to fire. Sex-fire here kindles sex-fire there. It
may only rouse the smoulder into a soft glow. It may call up a
sharp flicker. Or rouse a flame; and then flame leans to flame, and
starts a blaze.
Whenever the sex-fire glows through, it will kindle an answer
somewhere or other. It may only kindle a sense of warmth and
optimism. Then you say: "I like that girl; she's a real good sort."
It may kindle a glow that makes the world look kindlier, and
life feel better. Then you say: "She's an attractive woman. I like
her."
Or she may rouse a flame that lights up her own face first,
before it lights up the universe. Then you say: "She's a lovely
woman. She looks lovely to me."
It takes a rare woman to rouse a real sense of loveliness. It is
not that a woman is born beautiful. We say that to escape our
own poor, bruised, clumsy understanding of beauty. There have
been thousands and thousands of women quite as good-looking
as Diane de Poitiers, or Mrs. Langtry, or any of the famous ones.
There are today thousands and thousands of superbly good-looking
women. But oh, how few lovely women!
And why? Because of the failure of their sex appeal. A good-
looking woman becomes lovely when the fire of sex rouses pure
and fine in her and flickers through her face and touches the fire
in me.
Then she becomes a lovely woman to me, then she is in the
living flesh a lovely woman: not a mere photograph of one. And
how lovely a lovely woman! But, alas! how rare! How bitterly
rare in a world full of unusually handsome girls and women!
Handsome, good-looking, but not lovely, not beautiful. Hand-
some and good-looking women are the women with good features
SEX VERSUS LOVELINESS 53
and the right hair. But a lovely woman is an experience. It is a
question of communicated fire. It is a question of sex appeal in
our poor, dilapidated modern phraseology. Sex appeal applied
to Diane de Poitiers., or even, in the lovely hours, to one's wife
why, it is a libel and a slander in itself. Nowadays, however, in-
stead of the fire of loveliness, it is sex appeal. The two are the
same thing, I suppose, but on vastly different levels.
The business man's pretty and devoted secretary is still chiefly
valuable because of her sex appeal. Which does not imply "im-
moral relations" in the slightest.
Even today a girl with a bit of generosity likes to feel she is
helping a man if the man will take her help. And this desire that
he shall take her help is her sex appeal. It is the genuine fire, if
of a very mediocre heat.
Still, it serves to keep the world of "business" alive. Probably,
but for the introduction of the lady secretary into the business
man's office, the business man would have collapsed entirely by
now. She calls up the sacred fire in her and she communicates it
to her boss. He feels an added flow of energy and optimism, and
business flourishes.
There is, of course, the other side of sex appeal. It can be the
destruction of the one appealed to. When a woman starts using
her sex appeal to her own advantage it is usually a bad moment
for some poor devil. But this side of sex appeal has been over-
worked lately, so it is not nearly as dangerous as it was.
The sex-appealing courtesans who ruined so many men in Balzac
no longer find it smooth running. Men have grown canny. They
fight shy even of the emotional vamp. In fact, men are inclined to
think they smell a rat the moment they feel the touch of feminine
sex appeal today.
Which is a pity, for sex appeal is only a dirty name for a bit
of life-flame. No man works so well and so successfully as when
some woman has kindled a little fire in his veins. No woman does
her housework with real joy unless she is in love and a woman
may go on being quietly in love for fifty years almost without
knowing it.
If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal
flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and
alive, flickering or glowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of
strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all
our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of
zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things. . .
Whereas, what a lot of dead ash Acre is in life now.
Introduction to Pansles
(Unexpurgated Edition)
This little bunch o fragments is offered as a bunch of pensees,
anglice pansies; a handful of thoughts. Or, if you will have the
other derivation of pansy, from panser, to dress or soothe a wound,
these are my tender administrations to the mental and emotional
wounds we suffer from. Or you can have heartsease if you like,
since the modern heart could certainly do with it.
Each little piece is a thought; not a bare idea or an opinion
or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which comes as much
from the heart and the genitals as from the head. A thought, with
its own blood of emotion and instinct running in it like the fire
in a fire-opal, if I may be so bold. Perhaps if you hold up my pan-
sies properly to the light, they may show a running vein of fire.
At least, they do not pretend to be half -baked lyrics or melodies
in American measure. They are thoughts which run through the
modern mind and body, each having its own separate existence,
yet each of them combining with all the others to make up a
complete state of mind.
It suits the modern temper better to have its state of mind
made up of apparently irrelevant thoughts that scurry in different
directions, yet belong to the same nest; each thought trotting
down the page like an independent creature, each with its own
small head and tail, trotting its own little way, then curling up
to sleep. We prefer it, at least the young seem to prefer it to those
solid blocks of mental pabulum packed like bales in the pages of
a proper heavy book. Even we prefer it to those slightly didactic
opinions and slices of wisdom which are laid horizontally across
the pages of Pascal's Pensees or La Bruyere's Caracteres, separated
only by pattes de mouches, like faint sprigs of parsley. Let every
pensee trot on its own little paws, not be laid like a cutlet trimmed
with a patte de mouche.
Live and let live, and each pansy will tip you its separate wink.
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and
54
INTRODUCTION TO ''PANSIES" 55
manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent
of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness.
Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with
the blue of the morning the black of the corrosive humus. Else the
scent would be just sickly sweet.
So it is: we all have our roots in earth. And it is our roots that
now need a little attention, need the hard soil eased away from
them, and softened so that a little fresh air can come to them,
and they can breathe. For by pretending to have no roots, we
have trodden the earth so hard over them that they are starving
and stifling below the soil. We have roots, and our roots are in
the sensual, instinctive and intuitive body, and it is here we need
fresh air of open consciousness.
I am abused most of all for using the so-called "obscene" words.
Nobody quite knows what the word "obscene" itself means, or
what it is intended to mean: but gradually all the old words that
belong to the body below the navel have come to be judged obscene.
Obscene means today that the policeman thinks he has a right to
arrest you, nothing else.
Myself, I am mystified at this horror over a mere word, a
plain simple word that stands for a plain simple thing. "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word
was with God." If that is true, then we are very far from the be-
ginning. When did the Word "fall"? When did the Word become
unclean "below the navel"? Because today, if you suggest that
the word arse was in the beginning and was God and was with
God, you will just be put in prison at once. Though a doctor
might say the same of the word ischial tuberosity, and all the old
ladies would piously murmur "Quite!" Now that sort of thing is
idiotic and humiliating. Whoever the God was that made us, He
made us complete. He didn't stop at the navel and leave the rest
to the devil. It is too childish. And the same with the Word
which is God. If the Word is God which in the sense of the
human it is then you can't suddenly say that all the words which
belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god
as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at
the waist.
What is obvious is that the words in these cases have been
dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental associations. The words
themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But
the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive
emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is
the mind which is the Augean stables, not language. The word
56 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
arse is clean enough. Even the part of the body it refers to is just
as much me as my hand and my brain are me. It is not for me
to quarrel with my own natural make-up. If I am, I am all that
I am. But the impudent and dirty mind won't have it. It hates
certain parts of the body, and makes the words representing these
parts scapegoats. It pelts them out of the consciousness with filth,
and there they hover, never dying, never dead, slipping into the
consciousness again unawares, and pelted out again with filth,
haunting the margins of the consciousness like jackals or hyenas.
And they refer to parts of our own living bodies, and to our most
essential acts. So that man turns himself into a thing of shame
and horror. And his consciousness shudders with horrors that he
has made for himself.
That sort of thing has got to stop. We can't have the con-
sciousness haunted any longer by repulsive spectres which are no
more than poor simple scapegoat words representing parts of man
himself; words that the cowardly and unclean mind has driven
out into the limbo of the unconscious, whence they return upon
us looming and magnified out of all proportion, frightening us
beyond all reasons. We must put an end to that. It is the self
divided against itself most dangerously. The simple and natural
"obscene" words must be cleaned up of all their depraved fear-
association, and readmitted into the consciousness to take their
natural place. Now they are magnified out of all proportion, so
is the mental fear they represent. We must accept the word arse
as we accept the word face, since arses we have and always shall
have. We can't start cutting off the buttocks of unfortunate man-
kind, like the ladies in the Voltaire story, just to fit the mental
expulsion of the word.
This scapegoat business does the mind itself so much damage.
There is a poem of Swift's which should make us pause. It is
written to Celia, his Celia and every verse ends with the mad,
maddened refrain: "But Celia, Celia, Celia shits!" Now that,
stated baldly, is so ridiculous it is almost funny. But when one
remembers the gnashing insanity to which the great mind of
Swift was reduced by that and similar thoughts, the joke dies
away. Such thoughts poisoned him, like some terrible constipa-
tion. They poisoned his mind. And why, in heaven's name? The
fact cannot have troubled him, since it applied to himself and to
all of us. It was not the fact that Celia shits which so deranged
him, it was the thought. His mind couldn't bear the thought.
Great wit as he was, he could not see how ridiculous his revul-
sions were. His arrogant mind overbore him. He couldn't even
INTRODUCTION TO **PANSIES** 57
see how much worse it would be if Celia didn't shit. His physical
sympathies were too weak, his guts were too cold to sympathize
with poor Celia in her natural functions. His insolent and sicklily
squeamish mind just turned her into a thing of horror, because
she was merely natural and went to the w.c. It is monstrous! One
feels like going back across all the years to poor Celia, to say to
her: It's all right, don't you take any notice of that mental lunatic.
And Swift's form of madness is very common today. Men with
cold guts and over-squeamish minds are always thinking those
things and squirming. Wretched man is the victim of his own
little revulsions, which he magnifies into great horrors and terri-
fying taboos. We are all savages, we all have taboos. The Austral-
ian black may have the kangaroo for his taboo. And then he
will probably die of shock and terror if a kangaroo happens to
touch him. Which is what I would call a purely unnecessary death.
But modern men have even more dangerous taboos. To us,
certain words, certain ideas are taboo, and if they come upon us
and we can't drive them away, we die or go mad with a degraded
sort of terror. Which is what happened to Swift. He was such a
great wit. And the modern mind altogether is falling into this
form of degraded taboo-insanity. I call it a waste of sane human
consciousness. But it is very dangerous, dangerous to the individual
and utterly dangerous to society as a whole. Nothing is so fearful
in a mass civilization like ours as a mass insanity.
The remedy is, of course, the same in both cases: lift off the
taboo. The kangaroo is a harmless animal, the word shit is a
harmless word. Make either into a taboo, and it becomes more
dangerous. The result of taboo is insanity. And insanity, especially
mob insanity, mass insanity, is the fearful danger that threatens our
civilization. There are certain persons with a sort of rabies, who
live only to infect the mass. If the young do not watch out, they
will find themselves, before so very many years are past, engulfed
in a howling manifestation of mob insanity, truly terrifying to
think of. It will be better to be dead than to live to see it. Sanity,
wholeness, is everything. In the name of piety and purity, what a
mass of disgusting insanity is spoken and written. We shall have to
fight the mob, in order to keep sane, and to keep society sane.
The State of Funk
What is the matter with the English, that they are so scared of
everything? They are in a state of blue funk, and they behave
like a lot of mice when somebody stamps on the floor. They are
terrified about money, finance, about ships, about war, about
work, about Labour, about Bolshevism, and, funniest of all, they
are scared stiff of the printed word. Now this is a very strange
and humiliating state of mind, in a people which has always been
so dauntless. And for the nation, it is a very dangerous state of
mind. When a people falls into a state of funk, then God help it.
Because mass funk leads some time or other to mass panic, and
then one can only repeat, God help us.
There is, of course, a certain excuse for fear. The time of
change is upon us. The need for change has taken hold of us.
We are changing, we have got to change, and we can no more
help it than leaves can help going yellow and coming loose in
autumn, or than bulbs can help shoving their little green spikes
out of the ground in spring. We are changing, we are in the
throes of change, and the change will be a great one. Instinctively,
we feel it. Intuitively, we know it. And we are frightened. Be-
cause change hurts. And also, in the periods of serious transition,
everything is uncertain, and living things are most vulnerable.
But what of it? Granted all the pains and dangers and uncertain-
ties, there is no excuse for falling into a state of funk. If we corne
to think of it, every child that is begotten and born is a seed of
change, a danger to its mother, at childbirth a great pain, and, after
birth, a new responsibility, a new change. If we feel in a state of
funk about it, we should cease having children altogether. // we
fall into a state of funk, indeed, the best thing is to have no children.
But why fall into a state of funk?
Why not look things in the face like men, and like women?
A woman who is going to have a child says to herself: Yes, I feel
uncomfortable, sometimes I feel wretched, and I have a time of
58
THE STATE OF FUNK 59
pain and danger ahead of me. But I have a good chance o com-
ing through all right, especially if I am intelligent, and I bring a
new life into the world. Somewhere I feel hopeful, even happy.
So I must take the sour with the sweet. There is no birth without
birth pangs.
It is the business of men, of course, to take the same attitude
towards the birth of new conditions, new ideas, new emotions.
And sorry to say, most modern men don't. They fall into a state
of funk. We all of us know that ahead of us lies a great social
change, a great social readjustment. A few men look it in the face
and try to realize what will be best. We none of us \now what
will be best. There is no ready-made solution. Ready-made solu-
tions are almost the greatest danger of all. A change is a slow
flux, which must happen bit by bit. And it must happen. You
can't drive it like a steam engine. But all the time you can be
alert and intelligent about it, and watch for the next step, and
watch for the direction of the main trend. Patience, alertness, in-
telligence, and a human good will and fearlessness, that is what
you want in a time of change. Not funk.
Now England is on the brink of great changes, radical changes.
Within the next fifty years the whole framework of our social life
will be altered, will be greatly modified. The old world of our
grandfathers is disappearing like thawing snow, and is as likely to
cause a flood. What the world of our grandchildren will be, fifty
years hence, we don't know. But in its social form it will be very
different from our world of today. We've got to change. And in our
power to change, in our capacity to make new intelligent adapta-
tion to new conditions, in our readiness to admit and fulfill new
needs, to give expression to new desires and new feelings, lies our
hope and our health. Courage is the great word. Funk spells sheer
disaster.
There is a great change coming, bound to come. The whole
money arrangement will undergo a change: what, I don't know.
The whole industrial system will undergo a change. Work will
be different and pay will be different. The owning of property
will be different. Class will be different, and human relations will
be modified and perhaps simplified. If we are intelligent, alert,
and undaunted, then life will be much better, more generous, more
spontaneous, more vital, less basely materialistic. If we fall into a
state of funk, impotence, and persecution, then things may be
very much worse than they are now. It is up to us. It is up to
men to be men. While men are courageous and willing to change,
nothing terribly bad can happen. But once men fall into a state
ft) SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
of funk, with the inevitable accompaniment of bullying and re-
pression, then only bad things can happen. To be firm is one thing.
But bullying is another. And bullying of any sort whatsoever can
have nothing but disastrous results. And when the mass falls into
a state of funk, and you have mass bullying, then catastrophe is near.
Change in the whole social system is inevitable not merely
because conditions change though partly for that reason but
because people themselves change. We change, you and I, we
change and change vitally, as the years go on. New feelings arise
in us, old values depreciate, new values arise. Things we thought
we wanted most intensely we realize we don't care about. The
things we built our lives on crumble and disappear, and the process
is painful. But it is not tragic. A tadpole that has so gaily waved
its tail in the water must feel very sick when the tail begins to drop
off and little legs begin to sprout. The tail was its dearest, gayest,
most active member, all its little life was in its tail. And now the
tail must go. It seems rough on the tadpole; but the little green
frog in the grass is a new gem, after all.
As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which
is my real concern. The great social change interests me and troubles
me, but it is not my field. I know a change is coming and I
know we must have a more generous, more human system based
on the life values and not on the money values. That I know. But
what steps to take I don't know. Other men know better.
My field is to know the feelings inside a man, and to make
new feelings conscious. What really torments civilized people is
that they are full of feelings they know nothing about; they can't
realize diem, they can't fulfil them, they can't live them. And so
they are tortured. It is like having energy you can't use it de-
stroys you. And feelings are a form of vital energy.
I am convinced that the majority of people today have good,
generous feelings which they can never know, never experience,
because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people
would be villains, thieves, murderers, and sexual criminals if
they were freed from legal restraint. On the contrary, I think the
vast majority would be much more generous, good-hearted, and
decent if they felt they dared be. I am convinced that people want
to be more decent, more good-hearted than our social system of
money and grab allows them to be. The awful fight for money,
into which we are all forced, hurts our good nature more than we
can bear. I am sure this is true of a vast number of people.
And the same is true of our sexual feelings; only worse. There,
we start all wrong. Consciously, there is supposed to be no such
THE STATE OF FUNK. 6l
thing as sex in the human being. As far as possible, we never
speak of it, never mention it, never, if we can help it, even think
of it. It is disturbing. It is somehow wrong.
The whole trouble with sex is that we daren't speak of it and
think of it naturally. We are not secretly sexual villains. We are
not secretly sexually depraved. We are just human beings with
living sex. We are all right, if we had not this unaccountable and
disastrous fear of sex. I know, when I was a lad of eighteen, I
used to remember with shame and rage in the morning the sex-
ual thoughts and desires I had had the night before. Shame, and
rage, and terror lest anybody else should have to know. And I
hated the self that I had been, the night before.
Most boys are like that, and it is, of course, utterly wrong.
The boy that had excited sexual thoughts and feelings was the
living, warm-hearted, passionate me. The boy that in the morn-
ing remembered these feelings with such fear, shame and rage
was the social mental me: perhaps a little priggish, and certainly
in a state of funk. But the two were divided against one another.
A boy divided against himself; a girl divided against herself; a
people divided against itself; it is a disastrous condition.
And it was a long time before I was able to say to myself:
I am not going to be ashamed of my sexual thoughts and desires,
they are me myself, they are part of my life. I am going to accept
myself sexually as I accept myself mentally and spiritually, and
know that I am one time one thing, one time another, but I am
always myself. My sex is me as my mind is me, and nobody will
make me feel shame about it.
It is long since I came to that decision. But I remember how
much freer I felt, how much warmer and more sympathetic to-
wards people. I had no longer anything to hide from them, no
longer anything to be in a funk about, lest they should find it
out. My sex was me, like my mind and my spirit. And the other
man's sex was him, as his mind was him, and his spirit was him.
And the woman's sex was her, as her mind and spirit were herself
too. And once this quiet admission is made, it is wonderful how
much deeper and more real the human sympathy flows. And it is
wonderful how difficult the admission is to make, for man or
woman: the tacit, natural admission, that allows the natural
warm flow of the blood sympathy, without repression and holding
back.
I remember when I was a very young man I was enraged when
with a woman, if I was reminded of her sexual actuality. I only
wanted to be aware of her personality, her mind and spirit. The
2 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
other had to be fiercely shut out. Some part o the natural sympathy
for a woman had to be shut away, cut off. There was a mutilation
in the relationship all the time.
Now, in spite of the hostility of society, I have learned a little
better. Now I know that a woman is her sexual self too, and I can
feel the normal sex sympathy with her. And this silent sympathy
is utterly different from desire or anything rampant or lurid. If I
can really sympathize with a woman in her sexual self, it is just
a form of warm-heartedness and compassionateness, the most natu-
ral life-flow in the world. And it may be a woman of seventy-
five, or a child of two, it is the same. But our civilization, with its
horrible fear and funk and repression and bullying, has almost
destroyed the natural flow of common sympathy between men and
men, and men and women.
And it is this that I want to restore into life: just the natural
warm flow of common sympathy between man and man, man
and woman. Many people hate it, of course. Many men hate it
that one should tacitly take them for sexual, physical men instead
of mere social and mental personalities. Many women hate it
the same. Some, the worst, are in a state of rabid funk. The
papers call me "lurid" and a "dirty-minded fellow." One woman,
evidently a woman of education and means, wrote to me out of
the blue: "You, who are a mixture of the missing link and the
chimpanzee, etc." and told me my name stank in men's nos-
trils: though, since she was Mrs. Something or other, she might
have said women's nostrils. And these people think they are being
perfectly well-bred and perfectly "right." They are safe inside the
convention, which also agrees that we are sexless creatures and
social beings merely, cold and bossy and assertive, cowards safe
inside a convention.
Now I am one of the least lurid mortals, and I don't at all
mind being likened to a chimpanzee. If there is one thing I don't
like it is cheap and promiscuous sex. If there is one thing I insist
on it is that sex is a delicate, vulnerable, vital thing that you
mustn't fool with. If there is one thing I deplore it is heartless
sex. Sex must be a real flow, a real flow of sympathy, generous and
warm, and not a trick thing, or a moment's excitation, or a mere
bit of bullying.
And if I write a book about the sex relations of a man and a
woman, it is not because I want all men and women to begin
having indiscriminate lovers and love affairs, off the reel. All this
horrid scramble of love affairs and prostitution is only part of the
funk, bravado, and doing it on -purpose. And bravado and doing it
THE STATE OF FUNK 63
on purpose is just as unpleasant and hurtful as repression, just as
much a sign of secret fear.
What you have to do is to get out of the state of funk, sex
funk. And to do so, you've got to be perfectly decent, and you
have to accept sex fully in the consciousness. Accept sex in the
consciousness, and let the normal physical awareness come back,
between you and other people. Be tacitly and simply aware of the
sexual being in every man and woman, child and animal; and
unless the man or woman is a bully, be sympathetically aware.
It is the most important thing just now, this gentle physical
awareness. It keeps us tender and alive at a moment when the
great danger is to go brittle, hard, and in some way dead.
Accept the sexual, physical being of yourself, and of every
other creature. Don't be afraid of it. Don't be afraid of the physical
functions. Don't be afraid of the so-called obscene words. There
is nothing wrong with the words. It is your fear that makes them
bad, your needless fear. It is your fear which cuts you off physically
even from your nearest and dearest. And when men and women
are physically cut off, they become at last dangerous, bullying, cruel.
Conquer the fear of sex, and restore the natural flow. Restore even
the so-called obscene words, which are part of the natural flow.
If you don't, if you don't put back a bit of the old warmth into life,
there is savage disaster ahead.
Pornography and Obscenity
What they are depends, as usual, entirely on the individual. What
is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.
The word itself, we are told, means "pertaining to harlots"
the graph of the harlot. But nowadays, what is a harlot? If she
was a woman who took money from a man in return for going to
bed with him really, most wives sold themselves, in the past,
and plenty of harlots gave themselves, when they felt like it, for
nothing. If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her,
she's a dry stick as a rule. And probably most harlots had some-
where a streak of womanly generosity. Why be so cut and dried?
The law is a dreary thing, and its judgments have nothing to do
with life.
The same with the word "obscene": nobody knows what it
means. Suppose it were derived from obscena: that which might
not be represented on the stage; how much further are you?
None! What is obscene to Tom is not obscene to Lucy or Joe,
and really, the meaning of a word has to wait for majorities to de-
cide it. If a play shocks ten people in an audience, and doesn't
shock the remaining five hundred, then it is obscene to ten and
innocuous to five hundred; hence the play is not obscene, by ma-
jority. But Hamlet shocked all the Cromwellian Puritans, and
shocks nobody today, and some of Aristophanes shocks everybody
today, and didn't galvanize the later Greeks at all, apparently. Man
is a changeable beast, and words change their meanings with him,
and things are not what they seemed, and what's what becomes
what isn't, and if we think we know where we are it's only because
we are so rapidly being translated to somewhere else. We have to
leave everything to the majority, everything to the majority, every-
thing to the mob, the mob, the mob. They know what is obscene
and what isn't, they do. If the lower ten million doesn't know
better than the upper ten men, then there's something wrong with
mathematics. Take a vote on it! Show hands, and prove it by
64
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 65
count! Vox populij vox Dei. Odi profanum vulgus! Profanum
vulgus.
So it comes down to this: if you are talking to the mob, the
meaning of your words is the mob-meaning, decided by majority.
As somebody wrote to me: the American law on obscenity is very
plain, and America is going to enforce the law. Quite, my dear,
quite, quite, quite! The mob knows all about obscenity. Mild
little words that rhyme with spit or farce are the height of ob-
scenity. Supposing a printer put "h" in the place of "p," by mis-
take, in that mere word spit? Then the great American public
knows that this man has committed an obscenity, an indecency,
that his act was lewd, and as a compositor he was pornographical.
You can't tamper with the great public, British or American. Vox
populi, vox Dei, don't you know. If you don't well let you know
it. At the same time, this v ox Dei shouts with praise over moving-
pictures and books and newspaper accounts that seem, to a sinful
nature like mine, completely disgusting and obscene. Like a real
prude and Puritan, I have to look the other way. When obscenity
becomes mawkish, which is its palatable form for the public, and
when the Vox populi, vox Dd, is hoarse with sentimental in-
decency, then I have to steer away, like a Pharisee, afraid of being
contaminated. There is a certain kind of sticky universal pitch that
I refuse to touch.
So again, it comes down to this: you accept the majority, the
mob, and its decisions, or you don't. You bow down before the
Vox populi, vox Dei, or you plug your ears not to hear its obscene
howl. You perform your antics to please the vast public, Deus ex
machina, or you refuse to perform for the public at all, unless now
and then to pull its elephantine and ignominious leg.
When it comes to the meaning of anything, even the simplest
word, then you must pause. Because there are two great categories
of meaning, forever separate. There is mob-meaning, and there is
individual meaning. Take even the word "bread." The mob-
meaning is merely: stuff made with white flour into loaves that you
eat. But take the individual meaning of the word bread: the white,
the brown, the corn-pone, the homemade, the smell of bread just
out of the oven, the crust, the crumb, the unleavened bread, the
shew-bread, the staff of life, sour-dough bread, cottage loaves,
French bread, Viennese bread, black bread, a yesterday's loaf, rye,
Graham, barley, rolls, Bretzdn, Kringeln, scones, damper, matsen
there is no end to it all, and the word bread will take you to the
ends of time and space, and far-off down avenues of memory. But
SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
this is individual. The word bread will take the individual off on
his own journey, and its meaning will be his own meaning, based
on his own genuine imaginative reactions. And when a word comes
to us in its individual character, and starts in us the individual
responses, it is a great pleasure to us. The American advertisers
have discovered this, and some o the cunningest American litera-
ture is to be found in advertisements of soap-suds, for example.
These advertisements are almost prose-poems. They give the word
soap-suds a bubbly, shiny individual meaning, which is very skil-
fully poetic, would, perhaps, be quite poetic to the mind which
could forget that the poetry was bait on a hook.
Business is discovering the individual, dynamic meaning of
words, and poetry is losing it. Poetry more and more tends to far-
fetch its word-meanings, and this results once again in mob-
meanings, which arouse only a mob-reaction in the individual.
For every man has a mob-self and an individual self, in varying
proportions. Some men are almost all mob-self, incapable of im-
aginative individual responses. The worst specimens of mob-self
are usually to be found in the professions, lawyers, professors,
clergymen, and so on. The business man, much maligned, has a
tough outside mob-self, and a scared, floundering, yet still alive
individual self. The public, which is feeble-minded^ like an idiot,
will never be able to preserve its individual reactions from the
tricks of the exploiter. The public is always exploited and always
will be exploited. The methods of exploitation merely vary. To-
day the public is tickled into laying the golden egg. With imag-
inative words and individual meanings it is tricked into giving
the great goose-cackle of mob-acquiescence. Vox populi, vox Dei.
It has always been so, and will always be so. Why? Because the
public has not enough wit to distinguish between mob-meanings
and individual meanings. The mass is forever vulgar, because it
can't distinguish between its own original feelings and feelings
which are diddled into existence by the exploiter. The public is
always profane, because it is controlled from the outside, by the
trickster, and never from the inside, by its own sincerity. The
mob is always obscene, because it is always second-hand.
Which brings us back to our subject of pornography and ob-
scenity. The reaction to any word may be, in any individual,
either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the
individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I
merely reacting from my mob-self?
When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 67
hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction. The first
reaction is almost sure to be mob-reaction, mob-indignation, mob-
condemnation. And the mob gets no further. But the real individual
has second thoughts and says: Am I really shocked? Do I really feel
outraged and indignant? And the answer of any individual is
bound to be: No, I am not shocked, not outraged, nor indignant. I
know the word, and take it for what it is, and I am not going to be
jockeyed into making a mountain out of a mole-hill, not for all the
law in the world.
Now i the use of a few so-called obscene words will startle
man or woman out o a mob-habit into an individual state, well
and good. And word prudery is so universal a mob-habit that it is
time we were startled out of it.
But still we have only tackled obscenity, and the problem of
pornography goes even deeper. When a man is startled into his
individual self, he still may not be able to know, inside himself,
whether Rabelais is or is not pornographic: and over Aretino or
even Boccaccio he may perhaps puzzle in vain, torn between dif-
ferent emotions.
One essay on pornography, I remember, comes to the conclu-
sion that pornography in art is that which is calculated to arouse
sexual desire, or sexual excitement. And stress is laid on the fact,
whether the author or artist intended to arouse sexual feelings.
It is the old vexed question of intention, become so dull today,
when we know how strong and influential our unconscious inten-
tions are. And why a man should be held guilty of his conscious
intentions, and innocent of his unconscious intentions, I don't
know, since every man is more made up of unconscious intentions
than of conscious ones. I am what I am, not merely what I think I
am.
However! We take it, I assume, that pornography is some-
thing base, something unpleasant. In short, we don't like it. And
why don't we like it? Because it arouses sexual feelings?
I think not. No matter how hard we may pretend otherwise,
most of us rather like a moderate rousing of our sex. It warms us,
stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day. After a century or two
of Puritanism, this is still true of most people. Only the mob-
habit of condemning any form of sex is too strong to let us admit
it naturally. And there are, of course, many people who are genu-
inely repelled by the simplest and most natural stirrings of sexual
feeling. But these people are perverts who have fallen into hatred
of their fellow men: thwarted, disappointed, unfulfilled people, of
68 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
whom, alas, our civilization contains so many. And they nearly
always enjoy some unsimple and unnatural form of sex excitement,
secretly.
Even quite advanced art critics would try to make us believe
that any picture or book which had "sex appeal" was if so facto a
bad book or picture. This is just canting hypocrisy. Half the
great poems, pictures, music, stories of the whole world are great
by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal. Titian or Renoir, the
Song of Solomon or Jane Eyre, Mozart or "Annie Laurie," the love-
liness is all interwoven with sex appeal, sex stimulus, call it what
you will. Even Michelangelo, who rather hated sex, can't help
filling the Cornucopia with phallic acorns. Sex is a very power-
ful, beneficial, and necessary stimulus in human life, and we are
all grateful when we feel its warm, natural flow through us, like
a form of sunshine.
So we can dismiss the idea that sex appeal in art is pornog-
raphy. It may be so to the grey Puritan, but the grey Puritan is a
sick man, soul and body sick, so why should we bother about his
hallucinations? Sex appeal, of course, varies enormously. There
are endless different kinds, and endless degrees of each kind. Per-
haps it may be argued that a mild degree of sex appeal is not
pornographical, whereas a high degree is. But this is a fallacy.
Boccaccio at his hottest seems to me less pornographical than
Pamela or Clarissa Harlowe or even Jane Eyre, or a host of mod-
ern books or films which pass uncensored. At the same time
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde seems to me very near to pornography,
and so, even, do some quite popular Christian hymns.
What is it, then? It isn't a question of sex appeal, merely: nor
even a question of deliberate intention on the part of the author or
artist to arouse sexual excitement. Rabelais sometimes had a de-
liberate intention, so, in a different way, did Boccaccio. And I'm
sure poor Charlotte Bronte, or the authoress of The SheiJ^, did not
have any deliberate intention to stimulate sex feelings in the reader.
Yet I find Jane Eyre verging towards pornography and Boccaccio
seems to me always fresh and wholesome.
The late British Home Secretary, who prides himself on being
a very sincere Puritan, grey, grey in every fibre, said with indig-
nant sorrow in one of his outbursts on improper books: " and
these two young people, who had been perfecdy pure up till that
time, after reading this book went and had sexual intercourse to-
gether! ! !" One up to them! is all we can answer. But the grey
Guardian of British Morals seemed to think that if they had
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY
murdered one another, or worn each other to rags o nervous
prostration, it would have been much better. The grey disease!
Then what is pornography, after all this? It isn't sex appeal
or sex stimulus in art. It isn't even a deliberate intention on the
part of the artist to arouse or to excite sexual feelings. There's
nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they
are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex
stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world
grows grey. I would give everybody the gay Renaissance stories to
read, they would help to shake off a lot of grey self-importance,
which is our modern civilized disease.
But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously. It
would not be very difficult. In the first place, genuine pornog-
raphy is almost always underworld, it doesn't come into the open.
In the second, you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invari-
ably, to sex, and to the human spirit.
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is
unpardonable. Take the very lowest instance, the picture post-card
sold underhand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have
seen of them have been of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult
to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly
and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they
make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty.
It is the same with the books they sell in the underworld. They
are either so ugly they make you ill, or so fatuous you can't imagine
anybody but a cretin or a moron reading them, or writing them.
It is the same with the dirty limericks that people tell after
dinner, or the dirty stories one hears commercial travellers telling
each other in a smoke-room. Occasionally there is a really funny
one, that redeems a great deal. But usually they are just ugly and
repellent, and the so-called "humour" is just a trick of doing dirt
on sex.
Now the human nudity of a great many modern people is just
ugly and degraded, and the sexual act between modern people is
just the same, merely ugly and degrading. But this is nothing to
be proud of. It is the catastrophe of our civilization. I am sure no
other civilization, not even the Roman, has showed such a vast
proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid
dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the
underworld, and nudity to the w.c,
The intelligent young, thank Heaven, seem determined to alter
in these two respects. They are rescuing their young nudity from
70 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
the stuffy, pornographical hole-and-corner underworld of their
elders, and they refuse to sneak about the sexual relation. This is a
change the elderly grey ones of course deplore, but it is in fact a very
great change for the better, and a real revolution.
But it is amazing how strong is the will in ordinary, vulgar
people, to do dirt on sex. It was one of my fond illusions, when I
was young, that the ordinary healthy-seeming sort of men, in
railway carriages, or the smoke-room of an hotel or a Pullman, were
healthy in their feelings and had a wholesome rough devil-may-
care attitude towards sex. All wrong! All wrong! Experience teaches
that common individuals of this sort have a disgusting attitude
towards sex, a disgusting contempt of it, a disgusting desire to in-
sult it. If such fellows have intercourse with a woman, they
triumphantly feel that they have done her dirt, and now she is
lower, cheaper, more contemptible than she was before.
It is individuals of this sort that tell dirty stories, carry indecent
picture post-cards, and know the indecent books. This is the great
pornographical class the really common men-in-the-street and
women-in-the-street. They have as great a hate and contempt of
sex as the greyest Puritan, and when an appeal is made to them,
they are always on the side of the angels. They insist that a film-
heroine shall be a neuter, a sexless thing of washed-out purity. They
insist that real sex feeling shall only be shown by the villain or
villainess, low lust. They find a Titian or a Renoir really indecent,
and they don't want their wives and daughters to see it.
Why? Because they have the grey disease of sex hatred, coupled
with the yellow disease of dirt lust. The sex functions and the
excrementory functions in the human body work so close together,
yet they are, so to speak, utterly different in direction. Sex is a crea-
tive flow, the excrementory flow is towards dissolution, decreation,
if we may use such a word. In the really healthy human being the
distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are
perhaps our instincts of opposition between the two flows.
But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone
dead, and then the two flows become identical. This is the secret
of really vulgar and of pornographical people: the sex flow and
the excrement flow is the same thing to them. It happens when the
psyche deteriorates, and the profound controlling instincts collapse.
Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a
playing with dirt, and any sign of sex in a woman becomes a show
of lier dirt. This is the condition of the common, vulgar human
being whose name is legion, and who lifts his voice and it is the
Vox populi, vox Dei. And this is the source of all pornography.
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY
71
And for this reason we must admit that Jane Eyre or Wagner's
Tristan are much nearer to pornography than is Boccaccio. Wagner
and Charlotte Bronte were both in the state where the strongest
instincts have collapsed, and sex has become something slightly ob-
scene, to be wallowed in, but despised. Mr. Rochester's sex passion
is not "respectable" till Mr. Rochester is burned, blinded, disfigured,
and reduced to helpless dependence. Then, thoroughly humbled
and humiliated, it may be merely admitted. All the previous titilla-
tions are slightly indecent, as in Pamela or The Mill on the Floss
or Anna Karenina. As soon as there is sex excitement with a desire
to spite the sexual feeling, to humiliate it and degrade it, the ele-
ment of pornography enters.
For this reason, there is an element of pornography in nearly
all nineteenth-century literature and very many so-called pure
people have a nasty pornographical side to them, and never was
the pornographical appetite stronger than it is today. It is a sign
of a diseased condition of the body politic. But the way to treat
the disease is to come out into the open with sex and sex stimulus.
The real pornographer truly dislikes Boccaccio, because the fresh
healthy naturalness of the Italian story-teller makes the modern
pornographical shrimp feel the dirty worm he is. Today Boc-
caccio should be given to everybody, young or old, to read if they
like. Only a natural fresh openness about sex will do any good,
now we are being swamped by secret or semi-secret pornography.
And perhaps the Renaissance story-tellers, Boccaccio, Lasca, and
the rest, are the best antidote we can find now, just as more plas-
ters of Puritanism are the most harmful remedy we can resort to.
The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of
secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But
secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has
always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate.
Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the
winds, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is
hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones
is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as
you hug your dirty little secret.
This "dirty little secret" has become infinitely precious to the
mob of people today. It is a kind of hidden sore or inflammation
which, when rubbed or scratched, gives off sharp thrills that seem
delicious. So the dirty little secret is rubbed and scratched more
and more, till it becomes more and more secretly inflamed, and
the nervous and psychic health of the individual is more and
more impaired. One might easily say that half the love novels
72 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
and half the love films today depend entirely for their success on
the secret rubbing of the dirty Htde secret. You can call this sex
excitement if you like, but it is sex excitement of a secretive, fur-
tive sort, quite special. The plain and simple excitement, quite
open and wholesome, which you find in some Boccaccio stories
is not for a minute to be confused with the furtive excitement
aroused by rubbing the dirty little secret in all secrecy in modern
best-sellers. This furtive, sneaking, cunning rubbing of an in-
flamed spot in the imagination is the very quick of modern por-
nography, and it is a beasdy and very dangerous thing. You can't
so easily expose it, because of its very furtiveness and its sneaking
cunning. So the cheap and popular modern love novel and love
film flourishes and is even praised by moral guardians, because
you get the sneaking thrill fumbling under all the purity of
dainty underclothes, without one single gross word to let you
know what is happening.
Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But if por-
nography is the result of sneaking secrecy, what is the result of
pornography? What is the effect on the individual?
The effect on the individual is manifold, and always perni-
cious. But one effect is perhaps inevitable. The pornography of
today, whether it be the pornography of the rubber-goods shop
or the pornography of the popular novel, film, and play, is an
invariable stimulant to the vice of self-abuse, onanism, masturba-
tion, call it what you will. In young or old, man or woman, boy
or girl, modern pornography is a direct provocative of masturba-
tion. It cannot be otherwise. When the grey ones wail that the
young man and the young woman went and had sexual inter-
course, they are bewailing the fact that the young man and the
young woman didn't go separately and masturbate. Sex must go
somewhere, especially in young people. So, in our glorious civili-
zation, it goes in masturbation. And the mass of our popular lit-
erature, the bulk of our popular amusements just exists to provoke
masturbation. Masturbation is the one thoroughly secret act of
the human being, more secret even than excrementation. It is
the one functional result of sex secrecy, and it is stimulated and
provoked by our glorious popular literature of pretty pornography,
which rubs on the dirty secret without letting you know what is
happening.
Now I have heard men, teachers and clergymen, commend
masturbation as the solution of an otherwise insoluble sex prob-
lem. This at least is honest. The sex problem is there, and you
can't just will it away. There it is, and under the ban of secrecy
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 73
and taboo in mother and father, teacher, friend, and foe, it has
found its own solution, the solution of masturbation.
But what about the solution? Do we accept it? Do all the grey
ones of this world accept it? If so, they must now accept it openly.
We can none of us pretend any longer to be blind to the fact of
masturbation in young and old, man and woman. The moral
guardians who are prepared to censor all open and plain por-
trayal of sex must now be made to give their only justification: We
prefer that the people shall masturbate. If this preference is open
and declared, then the existing forms of censorship are justified. If
the moral guardians prefer that the people shall masturbate, then
their present behaviour is correct, and popular amusements are as
they should be. If sexual intercourse is deadly sin, and masturbation
is comparatively pure and harmless, then all is well. Let things
continue as they now are.
Is masturbation so harmless, though? Is it even comparatively
pure and harmless? Not to my thinking. In the young, a certain
amount of masturbation is inevitable, but not therefore natural.
I thing there is no boy or girl who masturbates without feeling
a sense of shame, anger, and futility. Following the excitement
comes the shame, anger, humiliation, and the sense of futility.
This sense of futility and humiliation deepens as the years go on,
into a suppressed rage, because of the impossibility of escape.
The one thing that it seems impossible to escape from, once the
habit is formed, is masturbation. It goes on and on, on into old
age, in spite of marriage or love affairs or anything else. And it
always carries this secret feeling of futility and humiliation, futil-
ity and humiliation. And this is, perhaps, the deepest and most
dangerous cancer of our civilization. Instead of being a compara-
tively pure and harmless vice, masturbation is certainly the most
dangerous sexual vice that a society can be afflicted with, in the
long run. Comparatively pure it may be purity being what it
is. But harmless! ! !
The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive
nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new
stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs. Something quite
new is added as the old surcharge is removed. And this is so in
all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in
the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing
but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending
away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a
sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change,
only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not
74 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two
people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce
the null effect of masturbation.
The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to
release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental
energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious
circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of
false and easy sympathy, sentimentalities. The sentimentalism
and the niggling analysis, often self-analysis, of most of our modern
literature, is a sign of self -abuse. It is the manifestation of masturba-
tion, the sort of conscious activity stimulated by masturbation,
whether male or female. The outstanding feature of such conscious-
ness is that there is no real object, there is only subject. This is just
the same whether it be a novel or a work of science. The author
never escapes from himself, he pads along within the vicious circle
of himself. There is hardly a writer living who gets out of the
vicious circle of himself or a painter either. Hence the lack of
creation, and the stupendous amount of production. It is a masturba-
tion result, within the vicious circle of the self. It is self -absorption
made public.
And of course the process is exhaustive. The real masturbation
of Englishmen began only in the nineteenth century. It has con-
tinued with an increasing emptying of the real vitality and the
real being of men, till now people are little more than shells of
people. Most of the responses are dead, most of the awareness
is dead, nearly all the constructive activity is dead, and all that
remains is a sort of shell, a half-empty creature fatally self-
preoccupied and incapable of either giving or taking. Incapable
either of giving or taking, in the vital self. And this is masturba-
tion result. Enclosed within the vicious circle of the self, with no
vital contacts outside, the self becomes emptier and emptier, till
it is almost a nullus, a nothingness.
But null or nothing as it may be, it still hangs on to the dirty
little secret, which it must still secretly rub and inflame. Forever
the vicious circle. And it has a weird, blind will of its own.
One of my most sympathetic critics wrote: "If Mr. Lawrence's
attitude to sex were adopted, then two things would disappear,
the love lyric and the smoking-room story." And this, I think, is
true. But it depends on which love-lyric he means. If it is the:
Who is Sylvia, what is she? then it may just as well disappear.
All that pure and noble and heaven-blessed stuff is only the coun-
terpart to the smoking-room story. Du bist wie eine Blumel
Jawohl! One can see the elderly gentleman laying his hands on
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 75
the head of the pure maiden and praying God to keep her for-
ever so pure, so clean and beautiful. Very nice for him! Just por-
nography! Tickling the dirty little secret and rolling his eyes to
heaven. He knows perfectly well that if God keeps the maiden
so clean and pure and beautiful in his vulgar sense of clean
and pure for a few more years, then she'll be an unhappy old
maid, and not pure nor beautiful at all, only stale and pathetic.
Sentimentality is a sure sign of pornography. Why should "sad-
ness strike through the heart" of the old gentleman, because the
maid was pure and beautiful? Anybody but a masturbator would
have been glad and would have thought: What a lovely bride for
some lucky man! But no, not the self -enclosed, pornographic
masturbator. Sadness has to strike into his beastly heart! Away
with such love-lyrics, we've had too much of their pornographic
poison, tickling the dirty little secret and rolling the eyes to heaven.
But if it is a question of the sound love lyric, My love is li\e
a red, red rose / then we are on other ground. My love is like a
red, red rose only when she's not like a pure, pure lily. And now-
adays the pure, pure lilies are mostly festering, anyhow. Away
with them and their lyrics. Away with the pure, pure lily lyric,
along with the smoking-room story. They are counterparts, and
the one is as pornographic as the other. Du bist wie eine Blume
is really as pornographic as a dirty story: tickling the dirty little
secret and rolling the eyes to heaven. But oh, if only Robert Burns
had been accepted for what he is, then love might still have been
like a red, red rose.
The vicious circle, the vicious circle! The vicious circle of mas-
turbation! The vicious circle of self -consciousness that is never fully
self-conscious, never fully and openly conscious, but always harping
on the dirty little secret. The vicious circle of secrecy, in parents,
teachers, friends everybody. The specially vicious circle of family.
The vast conspiracy of secrecy in the press, and at the same tirhe,
the endless tickling of the dirty little secret. The endless masturba-
tion! and the endless purity! The vicious circle!
How to get out of it? There is only one way: Away with the
secret! No more secrecy! The only way to stop the terrible mental
itch about sex is to come out quite simply and naturally into the
open with it. It is terribly difficult, for the secret is cunning as a
crab. Yet the thing to do is to make a beginning. The man who
said to his exasperating daughter: "My child, the only pleasure I
ever had out of you was the pleasure I had in begetting you"
has already done a great deal to release both himself and her from
the dirty little secret.
^g SEX, LITERATURE, A.ND CENSORSHIP
How to get out of the dirty little secret! It is, as a matter of fact,
extremely difficult for us secretive moderns. You can't do it by
being wise and scientific about it, like Dr. Marie Stopes: though
to be wise and scientific like Dr. Marie Stopes is better than to be
utterly hypocritical, like the grey ones. But by being wise and
scientific in the serious and earnest manner you only tend to
disinfect the dirty little secret, and either kill sex altogether with
too much seriousness and intellect, or else leave it a miserable dis-
infected secret. The unhappy "free and pure" love of so many
people who have taken out the dirty little secret and thoroughly
disinfected it with scientific words is apt to be more pathetic even
than the common run o dirty-little-secret love. The danger is, that
in killing the dirty little secret, you kill dynamic sex altogether,
and leave only the scientific and deliberate mechanism.
This is what happens to many of those who become seriously
"free" in their sex, free and pure. They have mentalized sex till it
is nothing at all, nothing at all but a mental quantity. And the
final result is disaster, every time.
The same is true, in an even greater proportion, of the eman-
cipated bohemians: and very many of the young are bohemian
today, whether they ever set foot in Bohemia or not. But the
bohemian is "sex free." The dirty little secret is no secret either
to him or her. It is, indeed, a most blatandy open question. There
is nothing they don't say: everything that can be revealed is re-
vealed. And they do as they wish.
And then what? They have apparently killed the dirty little
secret, but somehow they have killed everything else too. Some
of the dirt still sticks, perhaps; sex remains still dirty. But the
thrill of secrecy is gone. Hence the terrible dreariness and depres-
sion of modern Bohemia, and the inward dreariness and emptiness
of so many young people of today. They have killed, they imagine,
the dirty little secret. The thrill of secrecy is gone. Some of the dirt
remains* And for the rest, depression, inertia, lack of life. For sex is
the fountain-head of our energetic life, and now the fountain ceases
to flow.
Why? For two reasons. The idealists along the Marie Stopes
line, and the young bohemians of today have killed the dirty little
secret as far as their personal self goes. But they are still under
its dominion socially. In the social world, in the press, in literature,
film, theatre, wireless, everywhere purity and the dirty little secret
reign supreme. At home, at the dinner table, it is just the same.
It is the same wherever you go. The young girl, and the young
woman, is by tacit assumption pure, virgin, sexless. Du hist wic cine
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 77
Blume. She, poor thing, knows quite well that flowers, even lilies,
have tippling yellow anthers and a sticky stigma, sex, rolling sex.
But to the popular mind flowers are sexless things, and when a
girl is told she is like a flower, it means she is sexless and ought to
be sexless. She herself knows quite well she isn't sexless and she
isn't merely like a flower. But how bear up against the great social
lie forced on her? She can't! She succumbs, and the dirty little
secret triumphs. She loses her interest in sex, as far as men are
concerned, but the vicious circle of masturbation and self -conscious-
ness encloses her even still faster.
This is one of the disasters of young life today. Personally, and
among themselves, a great many, perhaps a majority of the young
people of today, have come out into the open with sex and laid
salt on the tail of the dirty little secret. And this is a very good
thing. But in public, in the social world, the young are still
entirely under the shadow of the grey elderly ones. The grey elderly
ones belong to the last century, the eunuch century, the century of
the mealy-mouthed lie, the century that has tried to destroy
humanity, the nineteenth century. All our grey ones are left over
from this century. And they rule us. They rule us with the grey,
mealy-mouthed, canting lie of that great century of lies which,
thank God, we are drifting away from. But they rule us still with
the lie, for the lie, in the name of the lie. And they are too heavy
and too numerous, the grey ones. It doesn't matter what govern-
ment it is. They are all grey ones, left over from the last century,
the century of mealy-mouthed liars, the century of purity and the
dirty little secret.
So there is one cause for the depression of the young: the pub-
lic reign of the mealy-mouthed lie, purity and the dirty little
secret, which they themselves have privately overthrown. Having
killed a good deal of the lie in their own private lives, the young
are still enclosed and imprisoned within the great public lie of
tie grey ones. Hence the excess, the extravagance, the hysteria,
and then the weakness, the feebleness, the pathetic silliness of the
modern youth. They are all in a sort of prison, the prison of a
great lie and a society of elderly liars. And this is one of the
reasons, perhaps the main reason, why the sex flow is dying out
of the young, the real energy is dying away. They are enclosed
within a lie, and the sex won't flow. For the length of a complete
lie is never more than three generations, and the young are the
fourth generation of the nineteenth-century lie.
The second reason why the sex flow is dying is, of course, that
the young, in spite of their emancipation, are still enclosed within
-g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
the vicious circle of self-conscious masturbation. They are thrown
back into it, when they try to escape, by the enclosure of the vast
public lie of purity and the dirty little secret. The most emancipated
bohemians, who swank most about sex, are still utterly ^self-
conscious and enclosed within the Narcissus-masturbation circle.
They have perhaps less sex even than the grey ones. The whole
thing has been driven up into their heads. There isn't even the
lurking hole of a dirty little secret. Their sex is more mental than
their arithmetic; and as vital physical creatures they are more non-
existent than ghosts. The modern bohemian is indeed a kind of
ghost, not even Narcissus, only the image of Narcissus reflected on
the face of the audience. The dirty little secret is most difficult to
kill. You may put it to death publicly a thousand times, and still it
reappears, like a crab, stealthily from under the submerged rocks
of the personality. The French, who are supposed to be so open
about sex, will perhaps be the last to kill the dirty little secret.
Perhaps they don't want to. Anyhow, mere publicity won't do it.
You may parade sex abroad, but you will not kill the dirty little
secret. You may read all the novels of Marcel Proust, with everything
there in all detail. Yet you will not kill the dirty little secret. You
will perhaps only make it more cunning. You may even bring about
a state of utter indifference and sex inertia, still without killing
the dirty little secret. Or you may be the most wispy and enamoured
little Don Juan of modern days, and still the core of your spirit
merely be the dirty litde secret. That is to say, you will still be in
the Narcissus-masturbation circle, the vicious circle of self -enclosure.
For whenever the dirty little secret exists, it exists as the centre of
the vicious circle of masturbation self-enclosure. And whenever
you have the vicious circle of masturbation self-enclosure, you have
at the core the dirty litde secret. And the most high-flown sex-
emancipated young people today are perhaps the most fatally and
nervously enclosed within the masturbation self -enclosure. Nor do
they want to get out of it, for there would be nothing left to come
out.
But some people surely do want to come out of the awful self-
enclosure. Today practically everybody is self-conscious and im-
prisoned in self -consciousness. It is the joyful result of the dirty little
secret. Vast numbers of people don't want to come out of the prison
of their self -consciousness: they have so little left to come out with.
But some people, surely, want to escape this doom of self-enclosure
which is the doom of our civilization. There is surely a proud
minority that wants once and for all to be free of the dirty little
secret.
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 79
And the way to do it is, first, to fight the sentimental lie of
purity and the dirty litde secret wherever you meet it, inside
yourself or in the world outside. Fight the great lie of the nine-
teenth century, which has soaked through our sex and our bones.
It means fighting with almost every breath, for the lie is ubiqui-
tous.
Then secondly, in his adventure of self-consciousness a man
must come to the limits of himself and become aware of some-
thing beyond him. A man must be self-conscious enough to know
his own limits, and to be aware of that which surpasses him. What
surpasses me is the very urge of life that is within me, and this
life urges me to forget myself and to yield to the stirring half-born
impulse to smash up the vast lie of the world, and make a new
world. If my life is merely to go on in a vicious circle of self-
enclosure, masturbating self-consciousness, it is worth nothing to
me. If my individual life is to be enclosed within the huge cor-
rupt lie of society today, purity and the dirty little secret, then
it is worth not much to me. Freedom is a very great reality. But
it means, above all things, freedom from lies. It is first, freedom
from myself, from the lie of myself, from the lie of my all-
importance, even to myself; it is freedom from the self-conscious
masturbating thing I am, self -enclosed. And second, freedom
from the vast lie of the social world, the lie of purity and the
dirty little secret. All the other monstrous lies lurk under the
cloak of this one primary lie. The monstrous lie of money lurks
under the cloak of purity. Kill the purity lie, and the money lie will
be defenceless.
We have to be sufficiendy conscious, and self-conscious, to know
our own limits and to be aware of the greater urge within us and
beyond us. Then we cease to be primarily interested in ourselves.
Then we learn to leave ourselves alone, in all the affective centres:
not to force our feelings in any way, and never to force our sex.
Then we make the great onslaught onto the outside lie, the inside
lie being settled. And that is freedom and the fight for freedom.
The greatest of all lies in the modern world is the lie of purity
and the dirty little secret. The grey ones left over from the
nineteenth century are the embodiment of this lie. They dominate
in society, in the press, in literature, everywhere. And, naturally,
they lead the vast mob of the general public along with them.
Which means, of course, perpetual censorship of anything that
would militate against the lie of purity and the dirty litde secret,
and perpetual encouragement of what may be called permissible
pornography, pure, but tickling the dirty little secret under the
go SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
delicate underclothing. The grey ones will pass and will commend
floods of evasive pornography, and will suppress every outspoken
word.
The law is a mere figment. In his article on the "Censorship or
Books," in the Nineteenth Century, Viscount Brentford, the late
Home Secretary, says: "Let it be remembered that the publishing
of an obscene book, the issue of an obscene post-card or porno-
graphic photograph are all offences against the law of the land,
and the Secretary of State who is the general authority for the
maintenance of law and order most clearly and definitely cannot
discriminate between one offence and another in discharge of his
duty/'
So he winds up, ex cathedra and infallible. But only ten lines
above he has written: "I agree, that if the law were pushed to its
logical conclusion, the printing and publication of such books as
The Decameron, Benvenuto Cellini's Life, and Burton's Arabian
Nights might form the subject of proceedings. But the ultimate
sanction of all law is public opinion, and I do not believe for one
moment that prosecution in respect of books that have been in
circulation for many centuries would command public support."
Ooray then for public opinion! It only needs that a few more
years shall roll. But now we see that the Secretary of State most
clearly and definitely does discriminate between one offence and
another in discharge of his duty. Simple and admitted discrimina-
tion on his part! Yet what is this public opinion? Just more lies
on the part of the grey ones. They would suppress Benvenuto to-
morrow, if they dared. But they would make laughing-stocks of
themselves, because tradition backs up Benvenuto. It isn't public
opinion at all. It is the grey ones afraid of making still bigger
fools of themselves. But the case is simple. If the grey ones are
going to be backed by a general public, then every new book that
would smash the mealy-mouthed lie of the nineteenth century will
be suppressed as it appears. Yet let the grey ones beware. The
general public is nowadays a very unstable affair, and no longer
loves its grey ones so dearly, with their old lie. And there is an-
other public, the small public of the minority, which hates the
lie and the grey ones that perpetuate the lie, and which has its
own dynamic ideas about pornography and obscenity. You can't
fool all the people all the time, even with purity and a dirty little
secret.
And this minority public knows well that the books of many
contemporary writers, both big and lesser fry, are far more porno-
graphical than the liveliest story in The Decameron: because they
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY 8l
tickle the dirty little secret and excite to private masturbation,
which the wholesome Boccaccio never does. And the minority
public knows full well that the most obscene painting on a Greek
vase - "Thou still unravished bride of quietness" is not as por-
nographical as the close-up kisses on the film, which excite men
and women to secret and separate masturbation.
And perhaps one day even the general public will desire to
look the thing in the face, and see for itself the difference between
the sneaking masturbation pornography of the press, the film, and
present-day popular literature, and then the creative portrayals of
the sexual impulse that we have in Boccaccio or the Greek vase-
paintings or some Pompeiian art, and which are necessary for the
fulfilment of our consciousness.
As it is, the public mind is today bewildered on this point,
bewildered almost to idiocy. When the police raided my picture
show, they did not in the least know what to take. So they took
every picture where the smallest bit of the sex organ of either
man or woman showed. Quite regardless of subject or meaning
or anything else: they would allow anything, these dainty police-
men in a picture show, except the actual sight of a fragment of
the human pudenda. This was the police test. The dabbing on
of a postage stamp especially a green one that could be called
a leaf would in most cases have been quite sufficient to satisfy
this "public opinion."
It is, we can only repeat, a condition of idiocy. And if the
purity-with-a-dirty-little-secret lie is kept up much longer, the
mass of society will really be an idiot, and a dangerous idiot at
that. For the public is made up of individuals. And each indi-
vidual has sex, and is pivoted on sex. And if, with purity and
dirty little secrets you drive every individual into the masturba-
tion self -enclosure, and keep him there, then you will produce a
state of general idiocy. For the masturbation self-enclosure pro-
duces idiots. Perhaps if we are all idiots, we shan't know it. But
God preserve us.
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Louer
Owing to the existence of various pirated editions of Lady Chatter-
leys Lover, I brought out in 1929 a cheap popular edition, produced
in France and offered to the public at sixty francs, hoping at least
to meet the European demand. The pirates, in the United States
certainly, were prompt and busy. The first stolen edition was being
sold in New York almost within a month of the arrival in America
of the first genuine copies from Florence. It was a facsimile of the
original, produced by the photographic method, and was sold,
even by reliable booksellers, to the unsuspecting public as if it were
the original first edition. The price was usually fifteen dollars,
whereas the price of the original was ten dollars: and the purchaser
was left in fond ignorance of the fraud.
This gallant attempt was followed by others. I am told there
was still another facsimile edition produced in New York or
Philadelphia: and I myself possess a filthy-looking book bound
in a dull orange cloth, with green label, smearily produced by
photography, and containing my signature forged by the little
boy of the piratical family. It was when this edition appeared in
London, from New York, towards the end of 1928, and was offered
to the public at thirty shillings, that I put out from Florence my
little second edition of two hundred copies, which I offered at a
guinea. I had wanted to save it for a year or more, but had to
launch it against the dirty orange pirate. But the number was too
small. The orange pirate persisted.
Then I have had in my hand a very funereal volume, bound
in black and elongated to look like a Bible or long hymn-book,
gloomy. This time the pirate was not only sober, but earnest. He
has not one but two title-pages, and on each is a vignette represent-
ing the American Eagle, with six stars round his head and lightning
splashing from his paw, all surrounded by a laurel wreath in honour
of his latest exploit in literary robbery. Altogether it is a sinister
82
A P R O P O S OF ''LADY CHATTERLEY's LOVER** 83
volume like Captain Kidd with his face blackened, reading a
sermon to those about to walk the plank. Why the pirate should
have elongated the page, by adding a false page-heading, I don't
know. The effect is peculiarly depressing, sinisterly high-brow. For
of course this book also was produced by the photographic process.
The signature anyhow is omitted. And I am told this lugubrious
tome sells for ten, twenty, thirty, and fifty dollars, according to
the whim of the bookseller and the gullibility of the purchaser.
That makes three pirated editions in the United States for certain.
I have heard mentioned the report of a fourth, another facsimile of
the original. But since I haven't seen it, I want not to believe in it.
There is, however, the European pirated edition of fifteen
hundred, produced by a Paris firm of booksellers, and stamped
Imprimc en Allemagne; Printed in Germany. Whether printed
in Germany or not, it was certainly printed, not photographed,
for some of the spelling errors of the original are corrected. And
it is a very respectable volume, a very close replica of the original,
but lacking the signature, and it gives itself away also by the
green-and-yellow silk edge of the back-binding. This edition is
sold to the trade at one hundred francs, and offered to the public
at three hundred, four hundred, five hundred francs. Very un-
scrupulous booksellers are said to have forged the signature and
offered the book as the original signed edition. Let us hope it is
not true. But it all sounds very black against the "trade." Still
there is some relief. Certain booksellers will not handle the
pirated edition at all. Both sentimental and business scruples
prevent them. Others handle it, but not very warmly. And ap-
parently they would all rather handle the authorized edition. So
that sentiment does genuinely enter in, against the pirates, even if
not strong enough to keep them out altogether.
None of these pirated editions has received any sort of authoriza-
tion from me, and from none of them have I received a penny.
A semi-repentant bookseller of New York did, however, send me
some dollars which were, he said, my 10% royalty on all copies
sold in his shop. "I know," he wrote, "it is but a drop in the
bucket." He meant of course, a drop out of the bucket. And since,
for a drop, it was quite a nice little sum, what a beautiful bucketful
there must have been for the pirates!
I received a belated offer from the European pirates, who found
the booksellers stiff-necked, offering me a royalty on all copies sold
in the past as well as the future, if I would authorize their edition.
Well, I thought to myself, in a world of: Do him or you will be
84 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
done by him why not? When it came to the point, however,
pride rebelled. It is understood that Judas is always ready with a
kiss. But that I should have to kiss him back !
So I managed to get published the little cheap French edition,
photographed down from the original, and offered at sixty francs.
English publishers urge me to make an expurgated edition, prom-
ising large returns, perhaps even a little bucket, one of those
children's sea-side pails! and insisting that I should show the
public that here is a fine novel, apart from all "purple" and all
"words." So I begin to be tempted and start in to expurgate. But
impossible! I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape
with scissors. The book bleeds.
And in spite of all antagonism, I put forth this novel as an
honest, healthy book, necessary for us today. The words that
shock so much at first don't shock at all after a while. Is this be-
cause the mind is depraved by habit? Not a bit. It is that the.
words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at
all. People without minds may go on being shocked, but they
don't matter. People with minds realize that they aren't shocked,
and never really were: and they experience a sense of relief.
And that is the whole point. We are today, as human beings,
evolved and cultured far beyond the taboos which are inherent in
our culture. This is a very important fact to realize. Probably, to
the Crusaders, mere words were potent and evocative to a degree
we can't realize. The evocative power of the so-called obscene
words must have been very dangerous to the dim-minded, obscure,
violent natures of the Middle Ages, and perhaps is still too strong
for slow-minded, half-evoked lower natures today. But real culture
makes us give to a word only those mental and imaginative reac-
tions which belong to the mind, and saves us from violent and
indiscriminate physical reactions which may wreck social decency.
In the past, man was too weak-minded, or crude-minded, to
contemplate his own physical body and physical functions, without
getting all messed up with physical reactions that overpowered
him. It is no longer so. Culture and civilization have taught us
to separate the reactions. We now know the act does not necessarily
follow on the thought. In fact, thought and action, word and deed,
are two separate forms of consciousness, two separate lives which we
lead. We need, very sincerely, to keep a connection. But while we
think, we do not act, and while we act we do not think. The
great necessity is that we should act according to our thoughts,
and think according to our acts. But while we are in thought we
cannot really act, and while we are in action we cannot really think.
A PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER" 85
The two conditions, o thought and action, are mutually exclusive.
Yet they should be related in harmony.
And this is the real point o this book. I want men and women
to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly.
Even if we can't act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us
at least think sexually, complete and clear. All this talk of young
girls and virginity, like a blank white sheet on which nothing is
written, is pure nonsense. A young girl and a young boy is a
tormented tangle, a seething confusion of sexual feelings and sexual
thoughts which only the years will disentangle. Years of honest
thoughts of sex, and years of struggling action in sex will bring us
at last where we want to get, to our real and accomplished chastity,
our completeness, when our sexual act and our sexual thought are
in harmony, and the one does not interfere with the other.
Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running
after gamekeepers for lovers. Far be it from me to suggest that
they should be running after anybody. A great many men and
women today are happiest when they abstain and stay sexually
apart, quite clean: and at the same time, when they understand
and realize sex more fully. Ours is the day of realization rather than
action. There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual
action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a correspond-
ing thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to
realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more
important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the
mind demands to know and know fully. The body is a good deal
in abeyance, really. When people act in sex, nowadays, they are
half the time acting up. They do it because they think it is expected
of them. Whereas as a matter of fact it is the mind which is
interested, and the body has to be provoked. The reason being
that our ancestors have so assiduously acted sex without ever
thinking it or realizing it, that now the act tends to be mechanical,
dull and disappointing, and only fresh mental realization will
freshen up the experience.
The mind has to catch up, in sex: indeed, in all the physical acts,
Mentally, we lag behind in our sexual thought, in a dimness, a
lurking, grovelling fear which belongs to our raw, somewhat
bestial ancestors. In this one respect, sexual and physical, we have
left the mind unevolved. Now we have to catch up, and make a
balance between the consciousness of the body's sensations and
experiences, and these sensations and experiences themselves. Bal-
ance up the consciousness of the act, and the act itself. Get the
two in harmony. It means having a proper reverence for sex, and
g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
a proper awe of the body's strange experience. It means being
able to use the so-called obscene words, because these are a natural
part of the mind's consciousness of the body. Obscenity only
conies in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the
body hates and resists the mind.
When we read of the case of Colonel Barker, we see what is
the matter. Colonel Barker was a woman who masqueraded as a
man. The "Colonel" married a wife, and lived five years with
her in "conjugal happiness/' And the poor wife thought all the
time she was married normally and happUy to a real husband. The
revelation at the end is beyond all thought cruel for the poor
woman. The situation is monstrous. Yet there are thousands of
women today who might be so deceived, and go on being deceived.
Why? Because they know nothing, they can't think sexually at all;
they are morons in this respect. It is better to give all girls this book,
at the age of seventeen.
The same with the case of the venerable schoolmaster and
clergyman, for years utterly "holy and good": and at the age of
sixty-five, tried in the police courts for assaulting little girls. This
happens at the moment when the Home Secretary, himself grow-
ing elderly, is most loudly demanding and enforcing a mealy-
mouthed silence about sexual matters. Doesn't the experience of
that other elderly, most righteous and "pure" gentleman, make
him pause at all ?
But so it is. The mind has an old grovelling fear of the body
and the body's potencies. It is the mind we have to liberate, to
civilize on these points. The mind's terror of the body has prob-
ably driven more men mad than ever could be counted. The insanity
of a great mind like Swift's is at least partly traceable to this cause.
In the poem to his mistress Celia, which has the maddened refrain,
"But Celia, Celia, Celia s***s" (the word rhymes with spits) ,
we see what can happen to a great mind when it falls into panic.
A great wit like Swift could not see how ridiculous he made him-
self. Of course Celia s***s! Who doesn't? And how much worse
if she didn't. It is hopeless. And then think of poor Celia, made to
feel iniquitous about her proper natural function, by her "lover,* 1
It is monstrous. And it comes from having taboo words, and from
not keeping the mind sufficiently developed in physical and sexual
consciousness.
In contrast to the Puritan hush! hush!, which produces the
sexual moron, we have the modern young jazzy and high-brow
person who has gone one better, and won't be hushed in any
respect, and just "does as she likes." From fearing the body, and
A PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER'* 87
denying its existence, the advanced young go to the other extreme
and treat it as a sort of toy to -be played with, a slightly nasty toy,
but still you can get some fun out of it, before it lets you down.
These young people scoff at the importance of sex, take it like a
cocktail, and flout their elders with it. These young ones are
advanced and superior. They despise a book like Lady Chatterley's
Lover. It is much too simple and ordinary for them. The naughty
words they care nothing about, and the attitude to love they find
old-fashioned. Why make a fuss about it? Take it like a cocktail!
The book, they say, shows the mentality of a boy of fourteen. But
perhaps the mentality of a boy of fourteen, who still has a little
natural awe and proper fear in fact of sex, is more wholesome
than the mentality of the young cocktaily person who has no re-
spect for anything and whose mind has nothing to do but play
with the toys of life, sex being one of the chief toys, and who
loses his mind in the process. Heliogabalus, indeed!
So, between the stale grey Puritan who is likely to fall into sexual
indecency in advanced age, and the smart jazzy person of the young
world, who says : "We can do anything. If we can think a thing we
can do it," and then the low uncultured person with a dirty mind,
who looks for dirt this book has hardly a space to turn in. But
to them all I say the same: Keep your perversions if you like
them your perversion of Puritanism, your perversion of smart
licentiousness, your perversion of a dirty mind. But I stick to my
book and my position: Life is only bearable when the mind and
the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between
them, and each has a natural respect for the other.
And it is obvious, there is no balance and no harmony now. The
body is at the best the tool of the mind, at the worst, the toy. The
business man keeps himself "fit," that is, keeps his body in good
working order, for the sake of his business, and the usual young
person who spends much time on keeping fit does so as a ride out
of self-conscious self-absorption, narcissism. The mind has a
stereotyped set of ideas and "feelings," and the body is made to
act up, like a trained dog: to beg for sugar, whether it wants sugar
or whether it doesn't, to shake hands when it would dearly like
to snap the hand it has to shake. The body of men and women
today is just a trained dog. And of no one is this more true than
of the free and emancipated young. Above all, their bodies are the
bodies of trained dogs. And because the dog is trained to do things
the old-fashioned dog never did, they call themselves free, full of
real life, the real thing.
But they know perfectly well it is false. Just as the business man
g g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
knows, somewhere, that he's all wrong. Men and women aren't
really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere
inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent The
body is, in its spontaneous natural self, dead or paralysed. It has
only the secondary life of a circus dog, acting up and showing off:
and then collapsing. .
What life could it have, of itself? The bodys life is the life of
sensations and emotions. The body feels real hunger, real thirst,
real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses
or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real love, real
tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All the
emotions belong to the body, and are only recognized by the
mind. We may hear the most sorrowful piece of news, and only
feel a mental excitement. Then, hours after, perhaps in sleep, the
awareness may reach the bodily centres, and true grief wrings the
heart. _
How different they are, mental feelings and real feelings, lo-
day, many people live and die without having had any real feel-
ingsthough they have had a "rich emotional life" apparently,
having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit. In
magic, one of the so-called "occult" pictures represents a man
standing, apparently, before a flat table mirror, which reflects
him from the waist to the head, so that you have the man from
head to waist, then his reflection downwards from waist to head
again. And whatever it may mean in magic, it means what we are
today, creatures whose active emotional self has no real existence,
but is all reflected downwards from the mind. Our education
from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to
feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelings we allow
ourselves to feel. All the rest is just non-existent. The vulgar criti-
cism of any new good book is: Of course nobody ever felt like
that! People allow themselves to feel a certain number of finished
feelings. So it was in the last century. This feeling only what you
allow yourselves to feel at last kills all capacity for feeling, and in
the higher emotional range you feel nothing at all. This has come
to pass in our present century. The higher emotions are stricdy
dead. They have to be faked.
And by the higher emotions we mean love in all its manifesta-
tions, from genuine desire to tender love, love of our fellow
men, and love of God: we mean love, joy, delight, hope, true
indignant anger, passionate sense of justice and injustice, truth
and untruth, honour and dishonour, and real belief in anything: for
belief is a profound emotion that has the mind's connivance. All
A PR OP OS OF LADY CHATTERLEYS LOVER 9
these things, today, are more or less dead. We have in their place
the loud and sentimental counterfeit of all such emotion.
Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling,
more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own. Sentimentality
and counterfeit feeling have become a sort of game, everybody
trying to outdo his neighbour. The radio and the film are mere
counterfeit emotion all the time, the current press and literature
the same. People wallow in emotion: counterfeit emotion. They
lap it up: they live in it and on it. They ooze with it.
And at times, they seem to get on very well with it all. And
then, more and more, they break down. They go to pieces. You
can fool yourself for a long time about your own feelings. But not
forever. The body itself hits back at you, and hits back remorselessly
in the end.
As for other people you can fool most people all the time, and
all people most of the time, but not all people all the time, with
false feelings. A young couple fall in counterfeit love, and fool
themselves and each other completely. But, alas, counterfeit love
is good cake but bad bread. It produces a fearful emotional indiges-
tion. Then you get a modern marriage, and a still more modern
separation.
The trouble with counterfeit emotion is that nobody is really
happy, nobody is really contented, nobody has any peace. Every-
body keeps on rushing to get away from the counterfeit emotion
which is in themselves worst of all. They rush from the false feel-
ings of Peter to the false feelings of Adrian, from the counterfeit
emotions of Margaret to those of Virginia, from film to radio,
from Eastbourne to Brighton, and the more it changes the more
it is the same thing.
Above all things love is a counterfeit feeling today. Here, above
all things, the young will tell you, is the greatest swindle. That is,
if you take it seriously. Love is all right if you take it lightly, as
an amusement. But if you begin taking it seriously you are let
down with a crash.
There are, the young women say, no reed men to love. And
there are, the young men say, no real girls to fall in love with. So
they go on falling in love with unreal ones, on either side; which
means, if you can't have real feelings, you've got to have counterfeit
ones: since some feelings you've got to have: like falling in love.
There are still some young people who would li\e to have real
feelings, and they are bewildered to death to know why they can't.
Especially in love.
But especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist now-
go SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
adays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally,
from parents downwards, or upwards. Don't trust anybody with
your real emotions: if you've got any: that is the slogan of today.
Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings.
They are bound to trample on them.
I believe there has never been an age of greater mistrust between
persons than ours today: under a superficial but quite genuine
social trust. Very few of my friends would pick my pocket, or let me
sit on a chair where I might hurt myself. But practically all my
friends would turn my real emotions to ridicule. They can't help
it; it's the spirit of the day. So there goes love, and there goes
friendship: for each implies a fundamental emotional sympathy.
And hence, counterfeit love, which there is no escaping.
And with counterfeit emotions there is no real sex at all. Sex
is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of
the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling. Once come down
to sex, and the emotional swindle must collapse. But in all the
approaches to sex, the emotional swindle intensifies more and more.
Till you get there. Then collapse.
Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless,
devastating against false love. The peculiar hatred of people who
have not loved one another, but who have pretended to, even
perhaps have imagined they really did love, is one of the phenomena
of our time. The phenomenon, of course, belongs to all time. But
today it is almost universal. People who thought they loved one
another dearly, dearly, and went on for years, ideal: lo! suddenly
the most profound and vivid hatred appears. If it doesn't come out
fairly young, it saves itself till the happy couple are nearing fifty, the
time of the great sexual change and then cataclysm!
Nothing is more startling. Nothing is more staggering, in our
age, than the intensity of the hatred people, men and women, feel
for one another when they have once "loved" one another. It
breaks out in the most extraordinary ways. And when you know
people intimately, it is almost universal. It is the charwoman as
much as the mistress, and the duchess as much as the policeman's
wife.
And it would be too horrible, if one did not remember that
in all of them, men and women alike, it is the organic reaction
against counterfeit love. All love today is counterfeit. It is a
stereotyped thing. All the young know just how they ought to
feel and how they ought to behave, in love. And they feel and
they behave like that. And it is counterfeit love. So that revenge
will come back at them, ten-fold. The sex, the very sexual organism
A PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER** 91
in man and woman alike accumulates a deadly and desperate rage,
after a certain amount o counterfeit love has been palmed off on
it, even if itself has given nothing but counterfeit love. The element
of counterfeit in love at last maddens, or else kills, sex, the deepest
sex in the individual. But perhaps it would be safe to say that it
always enrages the inner sex, even if at last it kills it. There is
always the period of rage. And the strange thing is, the worst
offenders in the counterfeit-love game fall into the greatest rage.
Those whose love has been a bit sincere are always gender, even
though they have been most swindled.
Now the real tragedy is here: that we are none of us all of a
piece, none of us all counterfeit, or all true love. And in many a
marriage, in among the counterfeit there flickers a little flame of
the true thing, on both sides. The tragedy is, that in an age
peculiarly conscious of counterfeit, peculiarly suspicious of sub-
stitute and swindle in emotion, particularly sexual emotion, the
rage and mistrust against the counterfeit element is likely to over-
whelm and extinguish the small, true flame of real loving com-
munion, which might have made two lives happy. Herein lies the
danger of harping only on the counterfeit and the swindle of
emotion, as most "advanced" writers do. Though they do it, of
course, to counterbalance the hugely greater swindle of the senti-
mental "sweet" writers.
Perhaps I shall have given some notion of my feeling about
sex, for which I have been so monotonously abused. When a
"serious" young man said to me the other day: "I can't believe
in the regeneration of England by sex, you know," I could only
say, "Fm sure you can't." He had no sex, anyhow: poor, self-
conscious, uneasy, narcissus-monk as he was. And he didn't know
what it meant, to have any. To him, people only had minds, or
no minds, mostly no minds, so they were only there to be gibed
at, and he wandered round ineffectively seeking for gibes or for
truth, tight shut in inside his own ego.
Now when brilliant young people like this talk to me about
sex: or scorn to: I say nothing. There is nothing to say. But I
feel a terrible weariness. To them sex means, just plainly and
simply, a lady's underclothing, and the fumbling therewith. They
have read all the love literature, Anna Karenina, all the rest, and
looked at statues and pictures of Aphrodite, all very laudable.
Yet when it comes to actuality, to today, sex means to them
meaningless young women and expensive underthings. Whether
they are young men from Oxford, or working-men, it is the same.
The story from the modish summer resort, where city ladies take
n 2 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
up with young mountaineer "dancing partners" for a season
or less is typical It was end of September, the summer visitors
had almost all gone. Young John, the young mountain farmer,
had said good-bye to his "lady" from the capital, and was loung-
ing about alone. "Ho, John! you'll be missing your lady!" "Nay!"
he said. "Only she had such nice underclothes."
That is all sex means to them: just the trimmings. The re-
generation of England with that? Good God! Poor England, she
will have to regenerate the sex in her young people, before they
do any regenerating of her. It isn't England that needs regenera-
tion, it is her young.
They accuse me of barbarism. I want to drag England down
to the level of savages. But it is this crude stupidity, deadness,
about sex which I find barbaric and savage. The man who finds
a woman's underclothing the most exciting part about her is a
savage. Savages are like that. We read of the woman-savage who
wore three overcoats on top of one another to excite her man:
and did it. That ghastly crudity of seeing in sex nothing but a
functional act and a certain fumbling with clothes is, in my opin-
ion, a low degree of barbarism, savagery. And as far as sex goes,
our white civilization is crude, barbaric, and uglily savage: espe-
cially England and America.
Witness Bernard Shaw, one of the greatest exponents of our
civilization* He says clothes arouse sex and lack of clothes tends
to kill sex speaking of muffled-up women or our present bare-
armed and bare-legged sisters: and scoffs at the Pope for wanting
to cover women up; saying that the last person in the world to
know anything about sex is the Chief Priest of Europe: and that
the one person to ask about it would be the Chief Prostitute of
Europe, if there were such a person.
Here we see the flippancy and vulgarity of our chief thinkers,
at least. The half-naked women of today certainly do not rouse
much sexual feeling in the muffled-up men of today who don't
rouse much sexual feeling in the women, either. But why? Why
does the bare woman of today rouse so much less sexual feeling than
the muffled-up woman of Mr. Shaw's muffled-up eighties? It
would be silly to make it a question of mere muffling.
When a woman's sex is in itself dynamic and alive, then it is
a power in itself, beyond her reason. And of itself it emits its
peculiar spell, drawing men in the first delight of desire. And the
woman has to protect herself, hide herself as much as possible.
She veils herself in timidity and modesty, because her sex is a ,
power in itself, exposing her to the desire of men. If a woman in
A PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER** 93
whom sex was alive and positive were to expose her naked flesh
as women do today, then men would go mad for her. As David
was mad for Bathsheba.
But when a woman's sex has lost its dynamic call, and is in a
sense dead or static, then the woman wants to attract men, for
the simple reason that she finds she no longer does attract them.
So all the activity that used to be unconscious and delightful be-
comes conscious and repellent. The woman exposes her flesh
more and more, and the more she exposes, the more men are
sexually repelled by her. But let us not forget that the men are
socially thrilled, while sexually repelled. The two things are op-
posites, today. Socially, men like the gesture of the half-naked
woman, half-naked in the street. It is chic, it is a declaration of
defiance and independence, it is modern, it is free, it is popular
because it is strictly a-sexual, or anti-sexual. Neither men nor
women want to feel real desire, today. They want the counterfeit,
mental substitute.
But we are very mixed, all of us, and creatures of many diverse
and often opposing desires. The very men who encourage women
to be most daring and sexless complain most bitterly of the sexless-
ness of women. The same with women. The women who adore
men so tremendously for their social smartness and sexlessness as
males, hate them most bitterly for not being "men." In public,
en masse, and socially, everybody today wants counterfeit sex. But
at certain hours in their lives, ail individuals hate counterfeit sex
with deadly and maddened hate, and those who have dealt it out
most perhaps have the wildest hate of it, in the other person or
persons.
The girls of today could muffle themselves up to the eyes, wear
crinolines and chignons and all the rest, and though they would
not, perhaps, have the peculiar hardening effect on the hearts of
men that our half-naked women truly have, neither would they
exert any more real sexual attraction. If there is no sex to muffle
up, it's no good muffling. Or not much good. Man is often willing
to be deceived for a time even by muffled-up nothingness.
The point is, when women are sexually alive and quivering and
helplessly attractive, beyond their will, then they always cover
themselves, and drape themselves with clothes, gracefully. The
extravagance of 1880 bustles and such things was only a forewarn-
ing of approaching sexlessness.
While sex is a power in itself, women try all kinds of fascinating
disguise, and men flaunt. When the Pope insists that women shall
cover their naked flesh in church, it is not sex he is opposing, but
SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
the sexless tricks of female immodesty. The Pope, and the priests,
conclude that the flaunting of naked women's flesh m street and
church produces a bad, "unholy" state o mind both in men and
women. And they are right. But not because the exposure arouses
sexual desire: it doesn't, or very rarely: even Mr. Shaw knows that.
But when women's flesh arouses no sort of desire, something is
specially wrong! Something is sadly wrong. For the naked arms
of women today arouse a feeling of flippancy, cynicism, and vulgarity
which is indeed the very last feeling to go to church with, it you
have any respect for the Church. The bare arms of women in an
Italian church are really a mark of disrespect, given the tradition.
The Catholic Church, especially in the south, is neither anti-
sexual, like the northern Churches, nor a-sexual, like Mr. Shaw
and such social thinkers. The Catholic Church recognizes sex, and
makes of marriage a sacrament based on the sexual communion,
for the purpose of procreation. But procreation in the south is not
the bare and scientific fact, and act, that it is in the north. The
act of procreation is still charged with all the sensual mystery and
importance of the old past. The man is potential creator, and in
this has his splendour. All of which has been stripped away by
the northern Churches and the Shavian logical triviality.
But all this which has gone in the north, the Church has tried
to keep in the south, knowing that it is of basic importance in
life. The sense of being a potential creator and law-giver, as
father and husband, is perhaps essential to the day-by-day life of
a man, if he is to live full and satisfied. The sense of the eternality
of marriage is perhaps necessary to the inward peace, both of men
and women. Even if it carry a sense of doom, it is necessary. The
Catholic Church does not spend its time reminding the people that
in heaven there is no marrying nor giving in marriage. It insists:
if you marry, you marry forever! And the people accept the decree,
the doom, and the dignity of it. To the priest, sex is the clue to
marriage and marriage is the clue to the daily life of the people
and the Church is the clue to the greater life.
So that sexual lure in itself is not deadly to the Church. Much
more deadly is the anti-sexual defiance of bare arms and flippancy,
"freedom/' cynicism, irreverence. Sex may be obscene in church,
or blasphemous, but never cynical and atheist. Potentially, the bare
arms of women today are cynical, atheist, in the dangerous, vulgar
form of atheism. Naturally the Church is against it. The Chief
Priest of Europe knows more about sex than Mr. Shaw does,
anyhow, because he knows more about the essential nature of the
human being. Traditionally, he has a thousand years* experience.
A p R o p o s OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER" 95
Mr. Shaw jumped up in a day. And Mr. Shaw, as a dramatist,
has jumped up to play tricks with the counterfeit sex of the modern
public. No doubt he can do it. So can the cheapest film. But it is
equally obvious that he cannot touch the deeper sex of the real
individual, whose existence he hardly seems to suspect.
And, as a parallel to himself, Mr. Shaw suggests that the Chief
Prostitute of Europe would be the one to consult about sex, not
the Chief Priest. The parallel is just. The Chief Prostitute of
Europe would know truly as much about sex as Mr, Shaw himself
does. Which is, not much. Just like Mr. Shaw, the Chief Prosti-
tute of Europe would know an immense amount about the coun-
terfeit sex of men, the shoddy thing that is worked by tricks. And
just like him, she would know nothing at all about the real sex
in a man, that has the rhythm of the seasons and the years, the
crisis of the winter solstice and the passion of Easter. This the
Chief Prostitute would know nothing about, positively, because
to be a prostitute she would have to have lost it. But even then,
she would know more than Mr. Shaw. She would know that the
profound, rhythmic sex of man's inward life existed. She would
know, because time and again she would have been up against it.
All the literature of the world shows the prostitute's ultimate im-
potence in sex, her inability to keep a man, her rage against the
profound instinct of fidelity in a man, which is, as shown by
world history, just a little deeper and more powerful than his in-
stinct of faithless sexual promiscuity. All the literature of the world
shows how profound is the instinct of fidelity in both man and
woman, how men and women both hanker restlessly after the
satisfaction of this instinct, and fret at their own inability to find
the real mode of fidelity. The instinct of fidelity is perhaps the
deepest instinct in the great complex we call sex. Where there is
real sex there is the underlying passion for fidelity. And the pros-
titute knows this, because she is up against it. She can only keep
men who have no real sex, the counterfeits: and these she de-
spises. The men with real sex leave her inevitably, as unable to
satisfy their real desire.
The Chief Prostitute knows so much. So does the Pope, if he
troubles to think of it, for it is all in the traditional consciousness
of the Church. But the Chief Dramatist knows nothing of it. He
has a curious blank in his make-up. To him, all sex is infidelity
and only infidelity is sex. Marriage is sexless, null. Sex is only
manifested in infidelity, and the queen of sex is the Chief Prosti-
tute. If sex crops up in marriage, it is because one party falls in
love with somebody else, and wants to be unfaithful. Infidelity is
SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
sex, and prostitutes know all about it. Wives know nothing and
are nothing, in that respect.
This is the teaching o the Chief Dramatists and Chief Thinkers
of our generation. And the vulgar public agrees with them entirely.
Sex is a thing you don't have except to be naughty with. Apart
from naughtiness,, that is, apart from infidelity and fornication, sex
doesn't exist. Our chief thinkers, ending in the flippantly cocksure
Mr. Shaw, have taught this trash so thoroughly that it has almost
become a fact. Sex is almost non-existent, apart from the counterfeit
forms of prostitution and shallow fornication. And marriage is
empty, hollow.
Now this question of sex and marriage is of paramount im-
portance. Our social life is established on marriage, and marriage,
the sociologists say, is established upon property. Marriage has
been found the best method of conserving property and stimu-
lating production. Which is all there is to it.
But is it? We are just in the throes of a great revolt against
marriage, a passionate revolt against its ties and restrictions. In
fact, at least three-quarters of the unhappiness of modern life
could be laid at the door of marriage. There are few married
people today, and few unmarried, who have not felt an intense
and vivid hatred against marriage itself, marriage as an institu-
tion and an imposition upon human life. Far greater than the
revolt against governments is this revolt against marriage.
And everybody, pretty well., takes it for granted that as soon
as we can find a possible way out of it, marriage will be abolished.
The Soviet abolishes marriage: or did. If new "modern" states
spring up, -they will almost certainly follow suit. They will try to
find some social substitute for marriage, and abolish the hated
yoke of conjugality. State support of motherhood, State support of
children^ and independence of women. It is on the programme
of every great scheme of reform. And it means, of course, the
abolition of marriage.
The only question to ask ourselves is, do we really want it?
Do we want the absolute independence of women, State support
of motherhood and of children, and consequent doing away with
the necessity of marriage? Do we want it? Because all that mat-
ters is that men and women shall do what they really want to do.
Though here, as everywhere, we must remember that man has a
double set of desires, the shallow and the profound, the personal,
superficial, temporary desires, and the inner, impersonal, great
desires that are fulfilled in long periods of time. The desires of
the moment are easy to recognize, but the others, the deeper ones,
A PKOPOS OF ''LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER" 97
are difficult. It is the business of our Chief Thinkers to tell us of
our deeper desires, not to keep shrilling our little desires in our
ears.
Now the Church is established upon a recognition of some,
at least, of the greatest and deepest desires in man, desires that
take years, or a life-time, or even centuries to fulfil And the
Church, celibate as its priesthood may be, built as it may be upon
the lonely rock of Peter, or of Paul, really rests upon the indis^
solubility of marriage. Make marriage in any serious degree un-
stable, dissoluble, destroy the permanency of marriage, and the
Church falls. Witness the enormous decline of the Church of
England.
The reason being that the Church is established upon the
element of union in mankind. And the first element of union in
the Christian world is the marriage tie. The marriage tie, the
marriage bond, take it which way you like, is the fundamental
connecting link in Christian society. Break it, and you will have
to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which
existed before the Christian era. The Roman State was all-powerful,
the Roman Fathers represented the State, the Roman family
was the father's estate, held more or less in fee for the State itself.
It was the same in Greece, with not so much feeling for the
permanence of property, but rather a dazzling splash of the mo-
ment's possessions. The family was much more insecure in Greece
than in Rome.
But, in either case, the family was the man, as representing the
State. There are States where the family is the woman: or there
have been. There are States where the family hardly exists, priest
States where the priestly control is everything, even functioning
as family control Then there is the Soviet State, where again
family is not supposed to exist, and the State controls every indi-
vidual direct, mechanically, as the great religious States, such as
early Egypt, may have controlled every individual direct, through
priestly surveillance and ritual.
Now the question is, do we want to go back, or forward, to any
of these forms of State control? Do we want to be like the
Romans under the Empire, or even under the Republic? Do we
want to be, as far as our family and our freedom is concerned,
like the Greek citizens of a City State in Hellas? Do we want to
imagine ourselves in the strange priest-controlled, ritual-fulfilled
condition of the earlier Egyptians? Do we want to be bullied by
a Soviet? .
For my part, I have to say NO! every time. And having said
g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
it, we have to come back and consider the famous saying, that
perhaps the greatest contribution to the social life of man made
by Christianity is marriage. Christianity brought marriage into
the world: marriage as we know it. Christianity established the
little autonomy of the family within the greater rule of the State.
Christianity made marriage in some respects inviolate, not to be
violated by the State. It is marriage, perhaps, which has given
man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his
own within the big kingdom of the State, given him his foothold
of independence on which to stand and resist an unjust State.
Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and
a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is mar-
riage. It is a true freedom because it is a true fulfilment, for man,
woman, and children.
Do we, then, want to break marriage? If we do break it, it
means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of
the State. Do we want to fall under the direct sway of the State,
any State? For my part, I don't.
And the Church created marriage by making it a sacrament,
a sacrament of man and woman united in the sex communion,
and never to be separated, except by death. And even when sep-
arated by death, still not freed from the marriage. Marriage, as
far as the individual went, eternal. Marriage, making one com-
plete body out of two incomplete ones, and providing for the
complex development of the man's soul and the woman's soul in
unison, throughout a life-time. Marriage sacred and inviolable,
the great way of earthly fulfilment for man and woman, in unison,
under the spiritual rule of the Church.
This is Christianity's great contribution to the life of man,
and it is only too easily overlooked. Is it, or is it not, a great step
in the direction of life-fulfilment, for men and women? Is it, or
is it not? Is marriage a great help to the fulfilment of man and
woman, or is it a frustration? It is a very important question indeed,
and every man and woman must answer it,
If we are to take the Nonconformist, Protestant idea of our-
selves: that we are all isolated individual souls, and our supreme
business is to save our own souls, then marriage surely is a hin-
drance. If I am only out to save my own soul, I'd better leave
marriage alone. As the monks and hermits knew. But also, if I am
only out to save other people's souls, I had also best leave mar-
riage alone, as the apostles knew, and the preaching saints.
But supposing I am neither bent on saving my own soul nor
other people's souls? Supposing Salvation seems incomprehensi-
A PR OP os OF ''LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER*' 99
ble to me, as I confess it does? "Being saved" seems to me just
jargon, the jargon of self-conceit. Supposing, then, that I cannot
see this Saviour and Salvation stuff, supposing that I see the soul
as something which must be developed and fulfilled throughout
a life-time, sustained and nourished, developed and further ful-
filled, to the very end; what then?
Then I realize that marriage, or something like it, is essential,
and that the old Church knew best the enduring needs of man,
beyond the spasmodic needs of today and yesterday. The Church
established marriage for life, for the fulfilment of tie soul's living
life, not postponing it till the after-death.
The old Church knew that life is here our portion, to be lived,
to be lived in fulfilment. The stern rule of Benedict, the wild
flights of Francis of Assisi, these were coruscations in the steady
heaven of the Church. The rhythm of life itself was preserved by
the Church hour by hour, day by day, season by season, year by
year, epoch by epoch, down among the people, and the wild
coruscations were accommodated to this permanent rhythm. We
feel it, in the south, in the country, when we hear the jangle of the
bells at dawn, at noon, at sunset, marking the hours with the
sound of mass or prayers. It is the rhythm of the daily sun. We
feel it in the festivals, the processions, Christmas, the Three
Kings, Easter, Pentecost, St. John's Day, All Saints, All Souls.
This is the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun
through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the going
of the seasons. And it is the inward rhythm of man and woman,
too, the sadness of Lent, the delight of Easter, the wonder of
Pentecost, the fires of St. John, the candles on the graves of All
Souls, the lit-up tree of Christmas, all representing kindled rhythmic
emotions in the souls of men and women. And men experience the
great rhythni of emotion man-wise, women experience it woman-
wise, and in the unison of men and women it is complete.
Augustine said that God created the universe new every day:
and to the living, emotional soul this is true. Every dawn dawns
upon an entirely new universe, every Easter lights up an entirely
new glory of a new world opening in utterly new flower. And the
soul of man and the soul of woman is new in the same way, with
the infinite delight of life and the ever-newness of life. So a man
and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in
the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year.
Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the at-
traction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attrac-
tion, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long
1QO SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of
the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion ot mid-
summer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness
again, then the sharp stimulus of winter of the long nights. Sex
goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, cease-
lessly 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 of? from the magic con-
nection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the mat-
ter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut oft
from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mock-
ery, 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.
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage
apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the
straying of the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars. Is
not a man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at
sunset? and a woman too? And does not the changing harmony
and discord of their variation make the secret music of life?
And is it not so throughout life? A man is different at thirty,
at forty, at fifty, at sixty, at seventy: and the woman at his side is
different. But is there not some strange conjunction in their dif-
ferences? Is there not some peculiar harmony, through youth, the
period of child-birth, the period of florescence and young chil-
dren, the period of the woman's change of life, painful yet also
a renewal, the period of waning passion but mellowing delight
of affection, the dim, unequal period of the approach of death,
when the man and woman look at one another with the dim ap-
prehension of separation that is not really a separation: is there
not, throughout it all, some unseen, unknown interplay of bal-
ance, 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 ?
This is marriage, the mystery of marriage, marriage which ful-
fils itself here, in this life. We may well believe that in heaven
there is no marrying or giving in marriage. All this has to be ful-
filled here, and if it is not fulfilled here, it will never be fulfilled.
A. PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER** 101
The great saints only live, even Jesus only lives to add a new
fulfilment and a new beauty to the permanent sacrament o mar-
riage.
B ut an d this but crashes through our heart like a bullet
marriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently
phallic, and that is not linked up with the sun and the earth, the
moon and the fixed stars and the planets, in the rhythm of days,
in the rhythm of months, in the rhythm of quarters, of years, of
decades and of centuries. Marriage is no marriage that is not a
correspondence of blood. For the blood is the substance of the
soul, and of the deepest consciousness. It is by blood that we
are: and it is by the heart and the liver that we live and move
and have our being. In the blood, knowing and being, or feeling,
are one and undivided: no serpent and no apple has caused a
split. So that only when the conjunction is of the blood, is mar-
riage truly marriage. The blood of man and the blood of woman
are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled.
Even scientifically we know it. But therefore they are the two
rivers that encircle the whole of life, and in marriage the circle
is complete, and in sex the two rivers touch and renew one an*
other, without ever commingling or confusing. We know it. The
phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a
woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depths the
great river of female blood yet neither breaks its bounds. It is
the deepest of all communions, as all the religions, in practice,
know. And it is one of the greatest mysteries, in fact, the greatest,
as almost every initiation shows, showing the supreme achieve-
ment of the mystic marriage.
And this is the meaning of the sexual act: this Communion,
this touching on one another of the two rivers, Euphrates and
Tigris to use old jargon and the enclosing of the land of
Mesopotamia, where Paradise was, or the Park of Eden, where
man had his beginning. This is marriage, this circuit of the two
rivers, this communion of the two blood-streams, this, and nothing
else: as all the religions know,
Two rivers of blood, are man and wife, two distinct eternal
streams, that have the power of touching and communing and so
renewing, making new one another, without any breaking of the
subtle confines, any confusing or commingling. And the phallus
is the connecting link between the two rivers, that establishes the
two streams in a oneness, and gives out of their duality a single
circuit, forever. And this, this oneness gradually accomplished
throughout a life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of
IQ2 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and
beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity.
And all we know o the will of God is that He wishes this, this
oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime, this oneness within
the great dual blood-stream of humanity.
Man dies, and woman dies, and perhaps separate the souls go
back to the Creator. Who knows? But we know that the oneness
of the blood-stream of man and woman in marriage completes
the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the stream-
ing of the sun and the flowing of the stars.
There is, of course, the counterpart to all this, the counterfeit.
There is counterfeit marriage, like nearly all marriage today.
Modern people are just personalities, and modern marriage takes
place when two people are "thrilled" by each other's personality:
when they have the same tastes in furniture or books or sport or
amusement, when they love "talking" to one another, when they
admire one another's "minds." Now this, this affinity o mind and
personality is an excellent basis of friendship between the sexes,
but a disastrous basis for marriage. Because marriage inevitably
starts the sex activity, and the sex activity is, and always was and
will be, in some way hostile to the mental, personal relationship
between man and woman. It is almost an axiom that the mar-
riage of two personalities will end in a startling physical hatred.
People who are personally devoted to one another at first end by
hating one another with a hate which they cannot account for,
which they try to hide, for it makes them ashamed, and which is
none the less only too painfully obvious, especially to one another.
In people of strong individual feeling the irritation that accumulates
in marriage increases only too often to a point of rage that is close
akin to madness. And, apparently, all without reason.
But the real reason is, that the exclusive sympathy of nerves
and mind and personal interest is, alas, hostile to blood-sympathy,
in the sexes. The modern cult of personality is excellent for friend-
ship between the sexes, and fatal for marriage. On the whole, it
would be better if modern people didn't marry. They could re-
main so much more true to what they are, to their own personality.
But marriage or no marriage, the fatal thing happens. If you
have only known personal sympathy and personal love, then rage
and hatred will sooner or later take possession of the soul, be-
cause of the frustration and denial of blood-sympathy, blood-
contact. In celibacy, the denial is withering and souring, but in
marriage, the denial produces a sort of rage. And we can no more
avoid this, nowadays, than we can avoid thunder-storms. It is part
A PROPOS OF *'LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER" 103
o the phenomenon of the psyche. The important point is that
sex itself comes to subserve the personality and the personal "love"
entirely, without ever giving sexual satisfaction or fulfilment. In
fact, there is probably far more sexual activity in a "personal" mar-
riage than in a blood-marriage. Woman sighs for a perpetual lover:
and in the personal marriage, relatively, she gets him. And how
she comes to hate him, with his never-ending desire, which never
gets anywhere or fulfils anything!
It is a mistake I have made, talking of sex. I have always in-
ferred that sex meant blood-sympathy and blood-contact. Techni-
cally this is so. But as a matter of fact, nearly all modern sex is a
pure matter of nerves, cold and bloodless. This is personal sex.
And this white, cold, nervous, "poetic" personal sex, which is
practically all the sex that moderns know, has a very peculiar
physiological effect, as well as psychological. The two blood-
streams are brought into contact, in man and woman, just the
same as in the urge of blood-passion and blood-desire. But whereas
the contact in the urge of blood-desire is positive, making a new-
ness in the blood, in the insistence of this nervous, personal desire
the blood-contact becomes frictional and destructive, there is a
resultant whitening and impoverishment of the blood. Personal or
nervous or spiritual sex is destructive to the blood, has a kata-
bolistic activity, whereas coition in warm blood-desire is an activity
of metabolism. The katabolism of "nervous" sex activity may
produce for a time a sort of ecstasy and a heightening o conscious-
ness. But this, like the effect o alcohol or drugs, is the result of the
decomposition of certain corpuscles in the blood, and is a process of
impoverishment. This is one of the many reasons for the failure of
energy in modern people; sexual activity, which ought to be re-
freshing and renewing, becomes exhaustive and debilitating. So that
when the young man fails to believe in the regeneration of England
by sex, I am constrained to agree with him. Since modern sex is
practically all personal and nervous, and, in effect, exhaustive,
disintegrative. The disintegrative effect of modern sex activity is
undeniable. It is only less fatal than the disintegrative effect of
masturbation, which is more deadly still.
So that at last I begin to see the point of my critics* abuse of
rny exalting of sex. They only know one form of sex: in fact, to
them there is only one form of sex: the nervous, personal, dis-
integrative sort, the "white" sex. And this, of course, is something
to be flowery and false about, but nothing to be very hopeful about.
I quite agree. And I quite agree, we can have no hope of the regen-
eration of England from such sort of sex.
104 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
At the same time, I cannot see any hope of regeneration for
a sexless England. An England that has lost its sex seems to me
nothing to feel very hopeful about. And nobody feels very hope-
ful about it. Though I may have been a fool for insisting on sex
where the current sort of sex is just what I don't mean and don't
want, still I can't go back on it all and believe in the regenera-
tion of England by pure sexlessness. A sexless England! it
doesn't ring very hopeful, to me.
And the other, the warm blood-sex that establishes the living and
re-vitalizing connection between man and woman, how are we
to get that back? I don't know. Yet get it back we must: or the
younger ones must, or we are all lost. For the bridge to the future
is the phallus, and there's the end of it. But not the poor, nervous
-counterfeit phallus of modern "nervous" love. Not that.
For the new impulse to life will never come without blood-
contact; the true, positive blood-contact, not the nervous negative
reaction. And the essential blood-contact is between man and
woman, always has been so, always will be. The contact of posi-
tive sex. The homosexual contacts are secondary, even if not merely
substitutes of exasperated reaction from the utterly unsatisfactory
nervous sex between men and women.
If England is to be regenerated to use the phrase of the
young man who seemed to think there was need of regeneration
the very word is his then it will be by the arising of a new
blood-contact, a new touch, and a new marriage. It will be a
phallic rather than a sexual regeneration. For the phallus is only
the great old symbol of godly vitality in a man, and of immediate
contact.
It will also be a renewal of marriage: the true phallic marriage.
And, still further, it will be marriage set again in relationship to
the rhythmic cosmos. The rhythm of the cosmos is something we
cannot get away from, without bitterly impoverishing our lives.
The Early Christians tried to kill the old pagan rhythm of cosmic
ritual, and to some extent succeeded. They killed the planets and
the zodiac, perhaps because astrology had already become debased
to fortune-telling. They wanted to kill the festivals of the year.
But the Church, which knows that man doth not live by man alone,
but by the sun and moon and earth in their revolutions, restored
the sacred days and feasts almost as the pagans had them, and the
Christian peasants went on very much as the pagan peasants had
gone, with the sunrise pause for worship, and the sunset, and noon,
the three great daily moments of the sun: then the new holy-day,
one in the ancient seven-cycle : then Easter and the dying and rising
A FROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLE Y ' s LOVER" 105
of God, Pentecost, Midsummer Fire, the November dead and the
spirits of the grave, then Christmas, then Three Kings. For centuries
the mass of people lived in this rhythm, under the Church. And
it is down in the mass that the roots of religion are eternal. When
the mass of a people loses the religious rhythm, that people is dead,
without hope. But Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the
religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-
conformity almost finished the deed. Now you have a poor, blind,
disconnected people with nothing but politics and bank-holidays
to satisfy the eternal human need of living in ritual adjustment
to the cosmos in its revolutions, in eternal submission to the
greater laws. And marriage, being one of the greater necessities,
has suffered the same from the loss of the sway of the greater
laws, the cosmic rhythms which should sway life always. Man-
kind has got to get back to the rhythm of die cosmos, and the
permanence of marriage.
All this is post-script, or afterthought, to my novel, Lady
Chatterley's Lover. Man has little needs and deeper needs. We
have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till
we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness. There
is a little morality, which concerns persons and the little needs
of man: and this, alas, is the morality we live by. But there is a
deeper morality, which concerns all womanhood, all manhood,
.and nations, and races, and classes of men. This greater morality
affects the destiny of mankind over long stretches of time, applies
to man's greater needs, and is often in conflict with the little
morality of the little needs. The tragic consciousness has taught
us, even, that one of the greater needs of man is a knowledge and
experience of death; every man needs to know death in his own
body. But the greater consciousness of the pre-tragic and post-
tragic epochs teaches us though we have not yet reached the
post-tragic epoch that the greatest need of man is the renewal
forever of the complete rhythm of life and death, the rhythm of
the sun's year, the body's year of a lifetime, and the greater year
of the stars, the soul's year of immortality. This is our need, our
imperative need. It is a need of the mind and soul, body, spirit
and sex: all. It is no use asking for a Word to fulfil such a need.
"No Word, no Logos, no Utterance will ever do it. The Word is
uttered, most of it: we need only pay true attention. But who will
call us to the Deed, the great Deed of the Seasons and the year,
the Deed of the soul's cycle, the Deed of a woman's life at one
with a man's, the little Deed of the moon's wandering, the bigger
Deed of the sun's, and the biggest, of the great still stars? It is
I0 g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
the Deed of life we have now to learn: we are supposed to have
learnt the Word, but, alas, look at us. Word-perfect we may be,
but Deed-demented. Let us prepare now for the death of our
present "little" life, and the re-emergence in a bigger life, in touch
with the moving cosmos.
It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back
into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the
universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awaken-
ing. We must once more practise the ritual of dawn and noon
and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the
ritual of the first breath, and the last. This is an affair of the
individual and the household, a ritual of day. The ritual of the
moon in her phases, of the morning star and the evening star is
for men and women separate. Then the ritual of the seasons, with
the Drama and the Passion of the soul embodied in procession
and dance, this is for the community, an act of men and women,
a whole community, in togetherness. And the ritual of the great
events in the year of stars is for nations and whole peoples. To
these rituals we must return: or we must evolve them to suit our
needs. For the truth is, we are perishing for lack of fulfilment of
our greater needs, we are cut off from the great sources of our
inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally
in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great
uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves
again in the universe.
It means a return to ancient forms. But we shall have to create
these forms again, and it is more difficult than the preaching of
an evangel. 'Hie Gospel came to tell us we were all saved. We
look at the world today and realize that humanity, alas, instead
of being saved from sin, whatever that may be, is almost com-
pletely lost, lost to life, and near to nullity and extermination.
We have to go back, a long way, before the idealist conceptions
begin, before Plato, before tie tragic idea of life arose, to get on
to our feet again. For the gospel of salvation through the Ideals
and escape from the body coincided with the tragic conception
of human life. Salvation and tragedy are the same thing, and they
are now both beside the point.
Back, before the idealist religions and philosophies arose and
started man on the great excursion of tragedy. The last three
thousand years of mankind have been an excursion into ideals,
bodilessness, and tragedy, and now the excursion is over. And it
is like the end of a tragedy in the theatre. The stage is strewn
A PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER'* 107
with dead bodies, worse still, with meaningless bodies, and the
curtain comes down.
But in life, the curtain never comes down on the scene. There
the dead bodies lie, and the inert ones, and somebody has to clear
them away, somebody has to carry on. It is the day after. Today
is already the day after the end of the tragic and idealist epoch.
Utmost inertia falls on the remaining protagonists. Yet we have
to carry on.
Now we have to re-establish the great relationships which the
grand idealists, with their underlying pessimism, their belief that
life is nothing but futile conflict, to be avoided even unto death,
destroyed for us. Buddha, Plato, Jesus, they were all three utter
pessimists as regards life, teaching that the only happiness lay in
abstracting oneself from life, the daily, yearly, seasonal life of
birth and death and fruition, and in living in the "immutable"
or eternal spirit. But now, after almost three thousand years, now
that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of
the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that
such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It
brings null inertia. And the great saviours and teachers only cut
us oflF from life. It was the tragic excursus.
The universe is dead for us, and how is it to come to life
again? "Knowledge" has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas,
with spots; "knowledge" has killed the moon, it is a dead little
earth fretted with extinct craters as with small pox; the machine
has killed the earth for us, making it a surface, more or less
bumpy, that you travel over. How, out of all this, are we to get
back the grand orbs of the soul's heavens, that fill us with un-
speakable joy? How are we to get back Apollo, and Attis, Deme-
ter, Persephone, and the halls of Dis? How even see the star
Hesperus, or Betelgeuse?
We've got to get them back, for they are the world our soul,
our greater consciousness, lives in. The world of reason and sci-
ence, the moon, a dead lump of earth, the sun, so much gas with
spots: this is the dry and sterile little world the abstracted mind
inhabits. The world of our little consciousness, which we know
in our pettifogging apartness. This is how we know the world
when we know it apart from ourselves, in the mean separateness
of everything. When we know the world in togetherness with
ourselves, we know the earth hyacinthine or Plutonic, we know
the moon gives us our body as delight upon us, or steals it away,
we know the purring of the great gold lion of the sun, who licks
I0 g SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
us like a lioness her cubs, making us bold, or else, like the red,
angry lion, dashes at us with open claws. There are many ways
of knowing, there are many sorts of knowledge. But the two ways
of knowing, for man, are knowing in terms of apartness, which is
mental, rational, scientific, and knowing in terms of togetherness,
which is religious and poetic. The Christian religion lost, in Prot-
estantism finally, the togetherness with the universe, the together-
ness of the body, the sex, the emotions, the passions, with the earth
and sun and stars.
But relationship is threefold. First, there is the relation to the
living universe. Then comes the relation of man to woman. Then
comes the relation of man to man. And each is a blood-relationship,
not mere spirit or mind. We have abstracted the universe into Mat-
ter and Force, we have abstracted men and women into separate
personalities personalities being isolated units, incapable of to-
getherness so that all three great relationships are bodiless, dead-
None, however, is quite so dead as the man-to-man relation-
ship. I think, if we came to analyse to the last what men feel about
one another today, we should find that every man feels every
other man as a menace. It is a curious thing, but the more mental
and ideal men are, the more they seem to feel the bodily presence
o any other man a menace, a menace, as it were, to their very
being. Every man that comes near me threatens my very existence:
nay, more, my very being.
This is the ugly fact which underlies our civilization. As the
advertisement of one of the war novels said, it is an epic of
"friendship and hope, mud and blood/' which means, of course^
that the friendship and hope must end in mud and blood.
When the great crusade against sex and the body started in
full blast with Plato, it was a crusade for "ideals," and for this
"spiritual" knowledge in apartness. Sex is the great unifier. In its
big, slower vibration it is the warmth of heart which makes people
happy together, in togetherness. The idealist philosophies and
religions set out deliberately to kill this. And they did it. Now
they have done it. The last great ebullition of friendship and
hope was squashed out in mud and blood. Now men are all sep-
arate little entities. While "kindness" is the glib order of the day
everybody must be "kind" underneath this "kindness" we find
a coldness of heart, a lack of heart, a callousness, that is very dreary.
Every man z> a menace to every other man.
Men only know one another in menace. Individualism has
triumphed. If I am a sheer individual, then every other being,
every other man especially, is over against me as a menace to me^
L PR OP OS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY*S LOVER** IO9
This is the peculiarity of our society today. We are all extremely
sweet and "nice" to one another, because we merely fear one
another.
The sense of isolation, followed by the sense of menace and
of fear, is bound to arise as the feeling of oneness and community
with our fellow men declines, and the feeling of individualism
and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases. The
so-called "cultured" classes are the first to develop "personality"
and individualism, and the first to fall into this state of uncon-
scious menace and fear. The working classes retain the old blood-
warmth of oneness and togetherness some decades longer. Then
they lose it too. And then class-consciousness becomes rampant,
and class-hate. Class-hate and class-consciousness are only a sign
that the old togetherness, the old blood-warmth has collapsed,
and every man is really aware of himself in apartness. Then we
have these hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition,
strife. Civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-assertion.
This, again, is the tragedy of social life today. In the old
England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together.
The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying, and unjust, yet
in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same
blood-stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then, in the
mean Jane Austen, it is gone. Already this old maid typifies
"personality" instead of character, the sharp knowing in apartness
instead of knowing in togetherness, and she is, to my feeling,
thoroughly unpleasant, English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense
of the word, just as Fielding is English in the good, generous sense.
So, in Lady Chatterley's Lover we have a man, Sir Clifford,
who is purely a personality, having lost entirely all connection
with his fellow men and women, except those of usage. All
warmth is gone entirely, the hearth is cold, the heart does not
humanly exist. He is a pure product of our civilization, but he is
the death of the great humanity of the world. He is kind by rule,
but he does not know what warm sympathy means. He is what he
is. And he loses the woman of his choice.
The other man still has the warmth of a man, but he is being
hunted down, destroyed. Even it is a question if the woman who
turns to him will really stand by him and his vital meaning.
I have been asked many times if I intentionally made Clifford
paralysed, if it is symbolic. And literary friends say, it would have
been better to have left him whole and potent, and to have made
the woman leave him nevertheless.
As to whether the "symbolism" is intentional I don't know.
IIO SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
Certainly not in the beginning, when Clifford was created. When
I created Clifford and Connie, I had no idea what they were or
why they were. They just came, pretty much as they are. But the
novel was written, from start to finish, three times. And when I
read the first version, I recognized that the lameness of Clifford
was symbolic of the paralysis, the deeper emotional or passional
paralysis, of most men of his sort and class today. I realized that
it was perhaps taking an unfair advantage of Connie, to paralyse
him technically. It made it so much more vulgar of her to leave
him. Yet the story came as it did, by itself, so I left it alone.
Whether we call it symbolism or not, it is, in the sense of its hap-
pening, inevitable.
And these notes, which I write now almost two years after the
novel was finished, are not intended to explain or expound any-
thing: only to give the emotional beliefs which perhaps are neces-
sary as a background to the book. It is so obviously a book writ-
ten in defiance of convention that perhaps some reason should be
offered for the attitude of defiance: since the silly desire to epater
le bourgeois, to bewilder the commonplace person, is not worth
entertaining. If I use the taboo words, there is a reason. We shall
never free the phallic reality from the "uplift" taint till we give
it its own phallic language, and use the obscene words. The great-
est blasphemy of all against the phallic reality is this "lifting it to
a higher plane.*' Likewise, if the lady marries the gamekeeper
she hasn't done it yet it is not class-spite, but in spite of class.
Finally, there are the correspondents who complain that I de-
scribe the pirated editions some of them but not the orig-
inal. The original first edition, issued in Florence, is bound in
hard covers, dullish mulberry-red paper with my phoenix (sym-
bol of immortality, the bird rising new from the nest of flames)
printed in black on the cover, and a white paper label on the
back. The paper is good, creamy hand-rolled Italian paper, but
the print, though nice, is ordinary, and the binding is just the
usual binding of a little Florentine shop. There is no expert book-
making in it: yet it is a pleasant volume, much more so than many
far "superior" books.
And if there are many spelling errors there are it is be-
cause the book was set up in a little Italian printing shop, such
a family affair, in which nobody knew one word of English. They
none of them knew any English at all, so they were spared all
blushes: and the proofs were terrible. The printer would do fairly
well for a few pages, then he would go drunk, or something. And
then the words danced weird and macabre, but not English, So that
A PROPOS OF "LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER'' in
if still some of the hosts of errors exist, it is a mercy they are not
more.
Then one paper wrote pitying the poor printer who was de-
ceived into printing the book. Not deceived at all. A white-
moustached little man who has just married a second wife, he
was told : Now the book contains such-and-such words, in English,
and it describes certain things. Don't you print it if you think it
will get you into trouble! "What does it describe?" he asked.
And when told, he said, with the short indifference of a Floren-
tine: "O! ma! but we do it every day!" And it seemed, to him,
to settle the matter entirely. Since it was nothing political or out
of the way, there was nothing to think about. Every-day concerns,
commonplace.
But it was a struggle, and the wonder is the book came out as
well as it did. There was just enough type to set up a half of it:
so the half was set up, the thousand copies were printed and, as
a measure of caution, the two hundred on ordinary paper, the
little second edition, as well: then the type was distributed, and
the second half set up.
Then came the struggle of delivery. The book was stopped by
the American customs almost at once. Fortunately in England
there was a delay. So that practically the whole edition at least
eight hundred copies, surely must have gone to England.
Then came the storms of vulgar vituperation. But they were
inevitable. "But we do it every day," says a little Italian printer.
"Monstrous and horrible!" shrieks a section of the British press.
"Thank you for a really sexual book about sex, at last. I am so
tired of a-sexual books," says one of the most distinguished citi-
zens of Florence to me an Italian. "I don't know I don't know
if it's not a bit too strong," says a timid Florentine critic
an Italian. "Listen, Signer Lawrence, you find it really necessary
to say it?" I told him I did, and he pondered. "Well, one of them
was a brainy vamp, and the other was a sexual moron," said an
American woman, referring to the two men in the book "so I'm
afraid Connie had a poor choice as usual!"
APPENDIX
^f ato !t0inri Court
SOUTHEBN DISTRICT OP NEW YORK
GROVE PRESS, INC. and READERS*
SUBSCRIPTION, INC.,
Plaintiffs,
Civil 147-87
OPINION
ROBERT K. CHRISTENBERRY, individually and as Post-
master of the City of New York,
Defendant.
against
BRYAN, District Judge:
These two actions against the Postmaster of New York, now con-
solidated, arise out of die denial of the United States mails to the re-
cently published Grove Press unexpurgated edition of "Lady Chatter-
ley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence.
Plaintiffs seek to restrain the Postmaster from enforcing a decision
of the Post Office Department that the unexpurgated "Lady Chatterley's
Lover/* and circulars announcing its availability, are non-mailable under
the statute barring obscene matter from the mails (18 U. S. C. 1461 ). 1
They also seek a declaratory judgment to the effect (i) that the novel is
not "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent or filthy" in content or charac-
ter, and is not non-mailable under the statute or, in the alternative, (2)
that if the novel be held to fall within the purview of the statute, the
statute is to that extent invalid and violates plaintiffs* rights in contra-
vention of the First and Fifth Amendments.
Grove Press, Inc., one of the plaintiffs, is the publisher of the book.
Readers' Subscription, Inc., the other plaintiff, is a book club which has
rights to distribute it.
1 The relevant portions of 1461 provide:
"Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article * * * and
"Every written or printed * * * circular, * * * or notice of any kind giv-
ing information * * * where, or how, or from whom * * * any of such
* * * articles * * * may be obtained * * *
"Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the
mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier."
The statute provides penalties for violation of up to five years imprisonment and
a maximum fine of $5,000 for a first offense and up to ten years' imprisonment and
a. maximum $10,000 fine for subsequent offenses.
APPENDIX
Defendant has moved and plaintiffs have cross-moved for summary
judgment, pursuant to Rule 56, R R. C. P. There are no disputed
issues of fact. The cases are before me for final determination on the
pleadings, the decision of the Postmaster General, the record before
him and supplemental affidavits ?
On April 30, 1959 the New York Postmaster withheld from dispatch
some 20,000 copies of circulars deposited for mailing by Readers
Subscription, which announced the availability of the new Grove
edition of Lady Chatterley. At about the same time he also detained a
number of copies of the book which had been deposited for mailing by
Grove Press.
On May 8, 1959 letters of complaint issued by the General Counsel
of the Post Office Department were served on Grove and Readers'
Subscription alleging that there was probable cause to believe that these
mailings violated 18 U. S. C. 1461, and advising them of a depart-
mental hearing. The respondents filed answers denying these allega-
tions and a hearing was held before the Judicial Officer of the Post
Office Department on May 14, I959- 3
The General Counsel, as complainant, introduced the Grove edition
and the circulars which had been detained and rested.
The respondents offered (i) testimony as to their reputation and
standing in the book publishing and distribution fields and their pur-
pose in publishing and distributing the novel; (2) reviews of the book
in leading newspapers and literary periodicals throughout the country;
(3) copies of editorials and comments in leading newspapers concern-
ing publication of the book and its anticipated impact; (4) news
articles dealing with the banning of the book by the Post Office; and
(5) expert testimony by two leading literary critics, Malcolm Cowley
and Alfred Kazin, as to the literary stature of the work and its author,
contemporary acceptance of literature dealing with sex and sex relations
and their own opinions as to the effect of the book on its readers. The
editorials and comments and the news articles were excluded.
The Judicial Officer before whom the hearing was held did not
decide the issues. On May 28 he issued an order referring the proceed-
ings to the Postmaster General "for final departmental decision." 4
3 Plaintiffs originally moved for a preliminary injunction but that motion is moot
in the present posture of the case.
8 The Judicial Officer heard the case pursuant to a stipulation between the parties
which had the effect o obviating the requirement that the case be heard by an
independent Hearing Examiner. See Borg-JoAnson Electronics, Inc. v. Cknstenberry ,
D, C. S. D. N. Y., 169 F. Supp. 746.
4 This referral was made pursuant to paragraph in (b) 23 F. R. 2817, which pro-
vides certain "Decisions and orders of the Judicial Officer * * * shall be the final
departmental decision * * * except that the Judicial Officer may refer any proceed-
ing to * * * the Postmaster General * * * for final decision." The order of the
Judicial Officer making the referral said: ,
"The complainant alleges that the book 'Lady Chatterley's Lover is obscene
and nonmailable under 18 U. S. C. 1461 and that the circular of Readers'
Subscription, Inc. gives information as to where obscenity may be obtained. The
SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
On June ir, 1959 the Postmaster General rendered a departmental
decision finding that the Grove edition "is obscene and non-mailable
pursuant to 18 U. S. Code 1461," and that the Readers Subscription
circulars 'give information where obscene material, name y the book
in issue in this case, may be obtained and are non-mailable ^ ^ .
This litigation, which had been commenced prior to the decision, was
then brought on for hearing.
I
The basic question here is whether the unexpurgated "Lady Chatter-
ley's Lover" is obscene within the meaning of 18 U. S. C. 1461, and
is thus excluded from the protections afforded freedom of speech and
the press by the First Amendment. m
However, the defendant takes the position that this question is not
before me for decision. He urges that the determination by the Post-
master General that this novel is obscene and non-mailable is conclusive
upon the court unless it is found to be unsupported by substantial
evidence and is clearly wrong. He argues, therefore, that I may not de-
termine the issue of obscenity de novo. ?
Thus, an initial question is raised as to the scope of the court s power
of review. In the light of the issues presented, the basis of the Post-
master General's decision, and the record before him, this question is
not of substance.
(i) Prior to Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476, the Supreme
Court had "always assumed that obscenity is not protected by the free-
doms of speech and press." However, until then the constitutional ques-
tion had not been directly passed upon by the court. In Roth the
question was squarely posed.
The court held, in accord with its long-standing assumption, that
"obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or
press."* t t .
The court was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand it was re-
quired to eschew any impingement upon the cherished freedoms of
speech and the press guaranteed by the Constitution and so essential
to a free society. On the other hand it was faced with the recognized
social evil presented by the purveyance of pornography.
complainant admits that the novel has literary merit but claims that the obscene
passages outweigh the literary merit.
'The book at issue, which is the unexpurgated version, has for many years
been held to be nonmailable by the Post Office Department and non-importable
by the Bureau of Customs of the Department of the Treasury. To hold the
book to be mailable matter would require a reversal of rulings of long stand-
ing by this Department and to cast doubt on the rulings of a coordinate executive
department." , , . .
6 1 use the word "obscene" as covering the words "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent,
filthy or vile" as used in the statute in so far as they may be applicable to this book.
*The court expressly limited its grant of certiorari to constitutional questions con-
cerning the validity of Section 1461 on its face, and thus was not concerned with the
specific facts of the case. Roth v. United States, 352 U. S. 964.
APPENDIX 115
The opinion o Mr. Justice Brennan for the majority makes it plain
that the area which can be excluded from constitutional protection with-
out impinging upon the free speech and free press guarantees is nar-
rowly limited. He says (p. 484):
"All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance
unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the
prevailing climate of opinion have the full protection of the
guarantees, unless excludable because they encroach upon the
limited area of more important interests."
He gives stern warning that no publication advancing such ideas can
be suppressed under the guise of regulation of public morals or censor-
ship of public reading matter. As he says (p. 488):
"The fundamental freedoms of speech and press have contributed
greatly to the development and well-being of our free society and
are indispensable to its continued growth. Ceaseless vigilance is the
watchword to prevent their erosion by Congress or by the States.
The door barring federal and state intrusion into this area cannot
be left ajar; it must be kept tightly closed and opened only the
slightest crack necessary to prevent encroachment upon more im-
portant interests."
It was against these constitutional requirements that the Court laid
down general standards for judging obscenity, recognizing that it was
"vital that [such] standards * * * safeguard the protection of freedom
of speech and press for material which does not treat sex" in an obscene
manner. The standards were "whether to the average person, applying
contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the ma-
terial taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest."
The Court did not attempt to apply these standards to a specific set
of facts. It merely circumscribed and limited the excluded area in
general terms.
Plainly application of these standards to specific material may involve
no little difficulty as the court was well aware. Cases involving "hard
core" pornography, or what Judge Woolsey referred to as "dirt for
dirt's sake," 7 purveyed furtively by dealers in smut, are relatively sim-
ple. But works of literary merit present quite a different problem, and
one which the majority in Roth did not reach as such. 8
Chief Justice Warren, concurring in the result, said of this problem
( 354 U. S. p. 476):
"* * * The history of the application of laws designed to suppress
the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of govern-
7 United States v. One Book. Called "Ulysses," D. C. S. D. N. Y., 5 F. Supp. 182,
aif d, 2 Cir., 72 F. 2(1 705.
8 "No issue is presented * * * concerning the obscenity of the material involved."
(Footnote 8, p. 481.)
Il6 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
ment can be invoked under them against great art or literature,
scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of
the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be
considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth
Amendments."
And Mr. Justice Harlan, dissenting, also deeply concerned, had this to
say (pp.497, 498):
"* * * The suppression of a particular writing or other tangible
form of expression is * * * an individual matter, and in the na-
ture of things every such suppression raises an individual constitu-
tional problem, in which a reviewing court must determine for
itself whether the attacked expression is suppressible within con-
stitutional standards. Since those standards do not readily lend
themselves to generalized definitions, the constitutional problem in
the last analysis becomes one of particularized judgments which
appellate courts must make for themselves.
"I do not think that reviewing courts can escape this responsi-
bility by saying that the trier of the facts, be it a jury or a judge,
has labeled the questioned matter as 'obscene/ for, if 'obscenity' is
to be suppressed, the question whether a particular work is of that
character involves not really an issue of fact but a question of
constitutional judgment of the most sensitive and delicate kind."
Mr. Justice Frankfurter, concurring in Kingsley International Pic-
tures Corp. v. Regents, decided on June 29, 1959, 27 L. W. 4492, ex-
pressed a similar view. He pointed out that in determining whether
particular works are entitled to the constitutional protections of freedom
of expression "We cannot escape such instance by instance, case by
case * * * [constitutional adjudication] in all the variety of situations
that come before this Court." And Mr. Justice Harlan, in the same case,
also concurring in the result, speaks of "the necessity for individualized
adjudication. In the very nature of things the problems in this area
are ones of individual cases * * *."
These views are not inconsistent with the decisions of the majority
determining both Roth and Kingsley upon broader constitutional grounds.
It would seem that the Court itself made such "individualized" or
"case by case" adjudications as to the obscenity of specific material in
at least two cases following Roth. In One, Inc. v. Olesen, 355 U. S. 371
and Sunshine Boo^ Co. v. Summer-field, 355 U. S. 372, the courts
below had found in no uncertain terms that the material was obscene
within the meaning of Section 146 1. 9 In each case the Supreme Court
in a one sentence per curiam opinion granted certiorari and reversed
on the authority of Roth.
One, Inc. v. Olesen, and Sunshine Boo^ Co. v. Summer-field, involved
9 One, Inc. v. Olesen, 9 Cir., 241 F. 2d 772; Sunshine Book. Co. v. Summerfield,
D. C. D. C, 128 F. Supp. 564, D. C. Cir., 249 F. 2d 114.
APPENDIX 117
determinations by the Post Office barring material from the mails on
the ground that it was obscene. In both the District Court had found
that the publication was obscene and that the determination of the
Post Office should be upheld. In both the Court of Appeals had
affirmed the findings of the District Court.
Yet in each the Supreme Court, without discussion, summarily
reversed on the authority of Roth. As Judge Desmond of the New
York Court of Appeals said of these cases "Presumably, the court
having looked at those books simply held them not to be obscene." 10
It is no less the duty of this court in the case at bar to scrutinize the
book with great care and to determine for itself whether it is within
the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment, or
whether it may be excluded from those protections because it is obscene
under the Roth tests.
(2) Such review is quite consistent with the Administrative Procedure
Act (5 U. S. C. i oo i , et seq.), assuming that the act is applicable here.
This is not a case where the agency determination under review is
dependent on "a fair estimate of the worth of the testimony of
witnesses or its informed judgment on matters within its special
competence or both." See Universal Camera Corp. v. Labor Board, 340
U. S. 474, 490. Cf. O'Leary v. Brou/n-Pacific-Maxon, 340 U. S. 504;
Goo ding v. Willard, 2 Cir., 209 F. 2d 913.
There were no disputed facts before the Postmaster General. The
facts as to the mailings and the detainer were stipulated and the only
issue before him was whether "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was obscene.
The complainant relied on the text of the novel and nothing more to
establish obscenity. Respondents' evidence was wholly uncontradicted,
and, except for the opinions of the critics Cowley and Kazin as to the
effect of the book upon its readers, it scarcely could have been. The
complainant conceded that the book had literary merit. The views of
the critics as to the place of the novel and its author in twentieth
century English literature have not been questioned.
As the Postmaster General said, he attempted to apply to the book
"the tests which, it is my understanding, the courts have established
for determining questions of obscenity." Thus, all he did was to apply
the statute, as he interpreted it in the light of the decisions, to the
book. His interpretation and application of the statute involved ques-
ions of law, not questions of fact.
The Postmaster General has no special competence or technical
knowledge on this subject which qualifies him to render an informed
judgment entitled to special weight in the courts. There is no parallel
here to determinations of such agencies as the Interstate Commerce
Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National
Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the
Federal Power Commission, or many others on highly technical and
10 Concurring in Matter of Kingsley Corp. v. Regents, 4 N. Y. zd 349, 368.
Jlg SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
complicated subject matter upon which they have specialized knowledge
and are particularly qualified to speak.
No doubt the Postmaster General has similar qualifications on many
questions involving the administration of the Post Office Department,
the handling o the mails, postal rates and other matters. See Bates &
Guild Co. v. Payne, 194 U. S. 106. But he has no special competence
to determine what constitutes obscenity within the meaning of Section
1461, or that "contemporary community standards are not such that
this book should be allowed to be transmitted in the mails or that
the literary merit of the book is outweighed by its pornographic
features, as he found. Such questions involve interpretation^ ot a
statute, which also imposes criminal penalties, and its application to
the allegedly offending material. The determination of such questions
is peculiarly for the courts, particularly in the light of the constitutional
questions implicit in each case. 11 <
It has been suggested that the court cannot interfere with the order
of the Postmaster General unless it finds that he abused his discretion.
But it does not appear that the Postmaster General has been vested
with "discretion" finally to determine whether a book is obscene
within the meaning of the statute. a
It is unnecessary to pass on the questions posed by the plaintiffs as
to whether the Postmaster General has any power to impose prior
restraints upon the mailing of matter allegedly obscene and whether
the enforcement of the statute is limited to criminal proceedings, though
it seems to me that these questions are not free from doubt. 12
Assuming power in the Postmaster General to withhold obscene
matter from dispatch in the mails temporarily, a grant of discretion to
make a final determination as to whether a book is obscene and
should be denied to the public should certainly not be inferred in the
absence of a clear and direct mandate. As the Supreme Court pointed
out under comparable circumstances in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc.,
327 U. S. 146, 151, to vest such power in the Postmaster General
would, in effect, give him the power of censorship and that "is so
abhorrent to our traditions that a purpose to grant it should not be
easily inferred."
No such grant of power to the Postmaster General has been called
** Professor Davis notes in Administrative Law Treatise (1958), Vol. 4, 30.07,
"Substitution of judicial for administrative judgment is often rather clearly desirable,
* * * [on questions] which (i) transcend the single field of the particular agency,
(2) call for interpretation of the common law, * * * (4) are affected substantially
by constitutional considerations, whether or not a constitutional issue is directly pre-
sented, * * * (6) bring into question judge-made law previously developed in the
course of statutory interpretation * * V These criteria are all present here.
"These questions have never been decided by the Supreme Court. The sharply
divided Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, sitting en bane found
that the Postmaster General had such power in Sunshine BooJ^ Co. v. Summerfeld,
tupra. But I find the dissenting opinion persuasive.
APPENDIX 119
to my attention and I have found none. 13 Whatever administrative
functions the Postmaster General has go no further than closing the
mails to material which is obscene within the meaning of the statute.
This is not an area in which the Postmaster General has any "discre-
tion" which is entitled to be given special weight by the courts. 14
The Administrative Procedure Act makes the reviewing court
responsible for determining all relevant questions of law, for inter-
preting and applying all constitutional and statutory provisions and
for setting aside agency action not in accordance with law. (5 U. S. C.
1009.) The question presented here falls within this framework.
Thus, the question presented for decision is whether "Lady Chatter-
ley's Lover" is obscene within the meaning of the statute and thus
excludable from constitutional protections. I will now consider that
question.
II
This unexpurgated edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" has never
before been published either in the United States or England, though
comparatively small editions were published by Lawrence himself in
Italy and authorized for publication in France, and a number of
pirated copies found their way to this country.
Grove Press is a reputable publisher with a good list which includes
a number of distinguished writers and serious works. Before publish-
ing this edition Grove consulted recognized literary critics and au-
thorities on English literature as to the advisability of publication. All
were of the view that the work was of major literary importance and
should be made available to the American public.
No one is naive enough to think that Grove Press did not expect
to profit from the book. Nevertheless the format and composition of
the volume, the advertising and promotional material and the whole
approach to publication, treat the book as a serious work of literature.
The book is distributed through leading bookstores throughout the
country. There has been no attempt by the publisher to appeal to
prurience or the prurient minded.
The Grove edition has a preface by Archibald MacLeish, former
Librarian of Congress, Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of this country's
18 Even under 39 U. S. C. 2592 and 25 9b, which give the Postmaster General
power to withhold incoming mail from a purveyor of obscenity "upon evidence
satisfactory" to him, an application to the District Court is required within twenty
days for a determination, inter alia, as to whether the detention is reasonable or
necessary. This is in contrast to Section 1461, included in the Criminal Code, where
no such statutory scheme is provided.
14 The defendant cites language to indicate that the question of whether material
is obscene is committed to agency discretion. One line of cases deals with "fraud
orders." (39 U. S. C. 259.) Fraud is almost always a question of fact and Section
259 provides that the Postmaster General may deny the mails "upon evidence
satisfactory to him." Such cases as Gottlieb v. Schaffer, D. C. S. D. R Y., 141 F.
f20 SEX, LITERATURE, A N I> CENSORSHIP
most distinguished poets and literary figures, giving his appraisal of
the novel. There follows an introduction by Mark Schorer, Professor
of English Literature at the University of California, a Reading scholar
of D. H. Lawrence and his work. The introduction is a critique of
the novel against the background of Lawrence's life, work and philos-
ophy. At the end of the novel there is a biographical note as to the
circumstances under which it was written and first published. Thus,
the novel is placed in a setting which emphasizes its literary qualities
and its place as a significant work of a major English novelist^
Readers' Subscription has handled the book in the same vein. The
relatively small number of Readers' Subscription subscribers is com-
posed largely of people in academic, literary and scholarly ^ fields. Its list
of books includes works of high literary merit, including books by
and about D. H. Lawrence.
There is nothing of "the leer of the sensualist" 15 in the promotion
or methods of distribution of this book. There is no suggestion of any
attempt to pander to the lewd and lascivious minded for profit. The
facts are all to the contrary.
Publication met with unanimous critical approval. The book was
favorably received by the literary critics of such diverse publications as
the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Call
Bulletin, the New York Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Harpers
and Time, to mention only some. The critics were not agreed upon
their appraisal. Critical comment ranged from acclaim on the one
hand to more restrained views that this was not the best of Lawrence's
writing, and was dated and in parts "wooden." But as MacLeish says
in the preface,
"* * * in spite of these reservations no responsible critic would
deny the book a place as one of the most important works of
fiction of the century, and no reader of any kind could undertake
to express an opinion about the literature of the time or about
Stipp. 7, which apply the substantial evidence test to agency findings of fact under
these circumstances are clearly distinguishable. See, also, Donaldson v. Read Maga-
zine, Inc., 333 U. S. 178.
Other cases cited deal with matters requiring expert judgment in the adminis-
tration of the mails. E.g., Smith v, Hitchcock 226 U. S. 53.
Cases cited involving obscenity while referring to "administrative discretion" con-
sidered the facts. In Bowery Enterprises v. Christcnberry , Civ. 140-233, D. C. S. D,
N. Y., 1958, Judge Dimock found the material clearly obscene. It was "unnecessary
to seek support in the rule that an administrative determination must stand unless
clearly wrong." In Anderson v. Patten, D. C. S. D. N. Y., 247 Fed. 382, the material,
the subject matter and the treatment were salacious. In Roth v. Goldman, 2 Cir.,
172 F. id 788, the materials had "little excuse for being beyond their provocative
obscenity * * *."
Monaft, Inc. v. Christenberry, D. C. S. D. N. Y., 168 F. Supp. 654, was concerned
only with the power of the Post Office.
These cases do not hold that a Post Office determination of obscenity is entitled to
special weight.
15 Woolsey, D. /. in United States v. One Boo% Called "Ulysses" supra.
APPENDIX 121
the spiritual history that literature expresses without making his
peace in one way or another with D. H. Lawrence and with this
work."
Publication of the Grove edition was a major literary event. It was
greeted by editorials in leading newspapers throughout the country
unanimously approving the publication and viewing with alarm
possible attempts to ban the book.
It was against this background that the New York Postmaster
impounded the book and the Postmaster General barred it. The decision
of the Postmaster General, in a brief four pages, relied on three cases,
Roth v. United States, supra, United States v. One Boo\ Called
"Ulysses',' D. C. S. D. N. Y., 5 F. Supp. 182, affd, 2 Cir., 72 F. 2 d
705, and Besig v. United States, 9 Cir., 208 F. 2d 142. While he quotes
from Roth the Postmaster General relies principally on Besig, which
was not reviewed by the Supreme Court. It may be noted that the
Ninth Circuit relied heavily on Besig in One, Inc. v. Olesen, supra,
which was summarily reversed by the Supreme Court on the authority
of Roth.
He refers to the book as "currently withheld from the mails in the
United States and barred from the mails by several other major nations."
His only discussion of its content is as follows:
"The contemporary community standards are not such that this
book should be allowed to be transmitted in the mails.
"The book is replete with descriptions in minute detail of sexual
acts engaged in or discussed by the book's principal characters.
These descriptions utilize filthy, offensive and degrading words and
terms. Any literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by
the pornographic and smutty passages and words, so that the book,
taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work.
"I therefore see no need to modify or reverse the prior rulings
of this Department and the Department of the Treasury with
respect to this edition of this book." 16
This seems to be the first time since the notable opinions of Judge
Woolsey and Judge Augustus Hand in United States v. One BooJ^
Called "Ulysses" supra, in 1934 that a book of comparable literary
stature has come before the federal courts charged with violating the
federal obscenity statutes. That case held that James Joyce's "Ulysses"
which had been seized by the Customs under Section 305 of the Tariff
10 The "rulings" referred to, apparently made even before the Ulysses case, were
not produced at the hearing and it does not appear that they have ever seen the
light of day. There is nothing in the record as to their content, the grounds on
which they were based, whether whatever parties may have been involved were
given a hearing, or what standards were applied. Nor is there any indication as to
what "major nations" have banned the book or whether in such countries there arc
any constitutional or other legal protections afforded speech and press.
I22 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
Act of 1930 was not obscene within the meaning o that statute. It
thoroughly discussed the standards to be applied in determining this
question.
The essence of the Ulysses holding is that a work of literary merit
is not ohscene under federal law merely because it contains passages
and language dealing with sex in a most candid and realistic fashion
and uses many four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. Where a book is written
with honesty and seriousness of purpose, and the portions which might
be considered obscene are relevant to the theme, it is not condemned
by the statute even though "it justly may offend many." "Ulysses" con-
tains numerous passages dealing very frankly with sex and the sex act
and is free in its use of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. Yet both Judge
Woolsey in the District Court, and Judge Hand in the Court of
Appeals, found that it was a sincere and honest book which was not in
any sense "dirt for dirt's sake." 17 They both concluded that "Ulysses"
was a work of high literary merit, written by a gifted and serious
writer, which did not have the dominant effect of promoting lust or
prurience and therefore did not fall within the interdiction of the
statute.
Roth v* United States, supra, decided by the Supreme Court in 1957,
twenty-three years later, unlike the Ulysses case, did not deal with
the application of the obscenity statutes to specific material. It laid
down general tests circumscribing the area in which matter is ex-
cludable from constitutional protections because it is obscene, so as to
avoid impingement on First Amendment guarantees. 18
The court distilled from the prior cases (including the Ulysses case,
which it cited with approval) the standards to be applied 19 "whether
to the average person, applying contemporary community standards,
the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to
prurient interest"
The court saw no significant difference between this expression of
the standards and those in the American Law Institute Model Penal
Code 20 to the effect that
"* * * A thing is obscene if, considered as a whole, its predominant
appeal is to prurient interest, Le., a shameful or morbid interest
in nudity, sex, or excretion, and if it goes substantially beyond
17 As Judge Woolscy said (5 F. Supp. p. 184): "Each word of the book con-
tributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to
construct for his readers."
18 There was no question but that the material involved in Roth was hard core
pornography and that the defendants were engaged "in the commercial exploitation
of the morbid and shameful craving for materials with prurient effect.' 1 (354 U. S.,
p. 496.)
x *For a comprehensive review of the prior material see Judge Frank's provocative
concurring opinion in the Court of Appeals which points to problems in this field
still unresolved. United States v. Roth, 2 Cir., 237 F. 2d 796, 80 1.
* S 207.10(2)3 Tent. Draft No. 6, 1957.
APPENDIX
customary limits of candor in description or representation of such
matters * * *."
These standards are not materially different from those applied in
Ulysses to the literary work considered there. Since the Roth case dealt
with these standards for judging obscenity in general terms and the
Ulysses case dealt with application of such standards to a work of
recognized literary stature, the two should be read together.
A number of factors are involved in the application of these tests.
As Mr. Justice Brennan pointed out in Roth, sex and obscenity are
by no means synonymous and **[t]he portrayal of sex, e.g., in art,
literature and scientific works, is not in itself sufficient reason to deny
material the constitutional protection of freedom of speech and press."
As he said, sex has been "a subject of absorbing interest to mankind
through the ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest and
public concern." The subject may be discussed publicly and truthfully
without previous restraint or fear of subsequent punishment as long as
it does not fall within the narrowly circumscribed interdicted area.
Both cases held that, to be obscene, the dominant effect of the book
must ^ be an appeal to prurient interest that is to say, shameful or
morbid interest in sex. Such a theme must so predominate as to sub-
merge any ideas of "redeeming social importance" which the publica-
tion contains.
It is not the effect upon the irresponsible, the immature or the
sensually minded which is controlling. The material must be judged
in terms of its effect on those it is likely to reach who are conceived of
as the average man of normal sensual impulses, 21 or, as Judge Wooisey
says, "what the French would call Thomme moyen sensuel."
The material must also exceed the limits of tolerance imposed by
current standards of the community with respect to freedom of
expression in matters concerning sex and sex relations. Moreover, a
book is not to be judged by excerpts or individual passages but must
be judged as a whole.
All of these factors must be present before a book can be held
obscene and thus outside constitutional protections.
Judged by these standards, "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is not obscene.
The decision of the Postmaster General that it is obscene and there-
fore non-mailable is contrary to law and clearly erroneous. This is
emphasized when the book is considered against its background and
in the light of its stature as a significant work of a distinguished
English novelist.
D. H. Lawrence is one of the most important novelists writing in
L- T7 _ . ^_1 * 1_ 1 ________ ,.i _ . TTTI .IT- * .
great gifts and of undoubted artistic integrity
L See Volanffy v. United States, 6 Cir., 246 F. ad 842.
I2 4 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
The text of this edition of "Lady Chatterley 's Lover" was written
by Lawrence toward the close of his life and was his third version of
the novel, originally called "Tenderness."
The book is almost as much a polemic as a novel.
In it Lawrence was expressing his deep and bitter dissatisfaction with
what he believed were the stultifying effects of advancing industrializa-
tion and his own somewhat obscure philosophic remedy of a return to
"naturalness." He attacks what he considered to be the evil effects of
industrialization upon the wholesome and natural life of all classes in
England. In his view this was having disastrous consequences on
English society and on the English countryside. It had resulted in
devitalization of the upper classes of society and debasement of the
lower classes. One result, as he saw it, was the corrosion of both the
emotional and physical sides of man as expressed in his sexual rela-
tionships which had become increasingly artificial and unwholesome.
The novel develops the contrasts and conflicts in characters under
these influences.
The plot is relatively simple.
Constance Chatterley is married to a baronet, returned from the first
World War paralyzed from the waist down. She is physically frustrated
and dissatisfied with the artificiality and sterility of her life and of the
society in which she moves. Her husband, immersed in himself, seeks
compensation for his own frustrations in the writing of superficial and
brittle fiction and in the exploitation of his coal mining properties, a
symbol of the creeping industrial blight. Failing to find satisfaction in
an affair with a man in her husband's circle, Constance Chatterley
finds herself increasingly restless and unhappy. Her husband half-
heartedly urges her to have a child by another man whom he will treat
as his heir. Repelled by the suggestion that she casually beget a child,
she is drawn to Mellors, the gamekeeper, sprung from the working
class who, having achieved a measure of spiritual and intellectual
independence, is a prototype of Lawrence's natural man. They establish
a deeply passionate and tender relationship which is described at length
and in detail. At the conclusion she is pregnant and plans to obtain a
divorce and marry the gamekeeper.
This plot serves as a vehicle through which Lawrence develops his
basic theme of contrast between his own philosophy and the sterile and
debased society which he attacks. Most of the characters are proto-
types. The plot and theme are meticulously worked out with honesty
and sincerity.
The book is replete with fine writing and with descriptive passages
of rare beauty. There is no doubt of its literary merit.
It contains a number of passages describing sexual intercourse in
great detail with complete candor and realism. Four-letter Anglo-Saxon
words are used with some frequency.
These passages and this language understandably will shock the
sensitive minded. Be that as it may, these passages are relevant to the
APPENDIX 125
plot and to the development of the characters and of their lives as
Lawrence unfolds them. The language which shocks, except in a rare
instance or two, is not inconsistent with character, situation or theme.
Even if it be assumed that these passages and this language taken in
isolation tend to arouse shameful, morbid and lustful sexual desires
in the average reader, they are an integral, and to the author a neces-
sary 22 part of the development of theme, plot and character. The
dominant theme, purpose and effect of the book as a whole is not an
appeal to prurience or the prurient minded. The book is not "dirt for
dirt's sake." 23 Nor do these passages and this language submerge the
dominant theme so as to make the book obscene even if they could be
considered and found to be obscene in isolation.
What the Postmaster General seems to have done is precisely what
the Supreme Court in Roth and the courts in the Ulysses case said
ought not to be done. He has lifted from the novel individual passages
and language, found them to be obscene in isolation and therefore
condemned the book as a whole. He has disregarded the dominant
theme and effect of the book and has read these passages and this
language as if they were separable and could be taken out of context.
Thus he has "weighed" the isolated passages which he considered
obscene against the remainder of the book and concluded that the
work as a whole must be condemned.
Writing about sex is not in itself pornographic, as the Postmaster
General recognized. Nor does the fact that sex is a major theme of a
book condemn the book as obscene. Neither does the use of "four
letter" words, despite the offense they may give. "Ulysses" was found
not to be obscene despite long passages containing similar descriptions
and language. As Judge Woolsey said there (5 F. Supp. pp. 183, 184):
"The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words
known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are
such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by
M Scc D. H. Lawrence, "Sex, Literature, and Censorship" (Twayne Publishers,
1953)) P- 89. Essay "A Propros of Lady Chatterly's Lover"
As Mr. Justice Frankfurter pointed out in Kingslcy International Pictures Corp.
v. Regents, supra, Lawrence
"knew there was such a thing as pornography, dirt for dirt's sake, or, to be
more accurate, dirt for money's sake. This is what D. H. Lawrence wrote:
" 'But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously. It would not
be very difficult. In the first place, genuine pornography is almost always
underworld, it doesn't come into the open. In the second, you can recognize
it by the insult it offers invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit.
" 'Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is un-
pardonable. Take the very lowest instance, the picture post-card sold under-
hand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them have been
of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to
a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly
and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty.'
(D. H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity, p. 13.) (Collected in Law-
rence, "Sex, Literature, and Censorship," supra, p. 69.)
J2 5 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking
to describe."
Such words "are, almost without exception, of honest Anglo-Saxon
ancestry and were not invented for purely scatological effect." 24
The tests of obscenity are not whether the book or passages from
it are in bad taste or shock or offend the sensibilities of an individual,
or even of a substantial segment of the community. Nor are we con-
cerned with whether the community would approve of Constance
Chatterley's morals. The statute does not purport to regulate the morals
portrayed or the ideas expressed in a novel, whether or not they are
contrary to the accepted moral code, nor could it constitutionally do so.
Kingsley International Pictures v. Regents, supra.
Plainly "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is offensive to the Postmaster
General, and I respect his personal views. As a matter of personal
opinion I disagree with him for I do not personally find the book
offensive.
But the personal views of neither of us are controlling here. The
standards for determining what constitutes obscenity under this statute
have been laid down. These standards must be objectively applied
regardless of personal predilections.
There has been much discussion of the intent and purpose of
Lawrence in writing Lady Chatterley. It is suggested that the intent
and purpose of the author has no relevance to the question as to
whether his work is obscene and must be disregarded.
No doubt an author may write a clearly obscene book in the mistaken
belief that he is serving a high moral purpose. The fact that this is the
author's purpose does not redeem the book from obscenity.
But the sincerity and honesty of purpose of an author as expressed
in the manner in which a book is written and in which his theme and
ideas are developed has a great deal to do with whether it is of literary
and intellectual merit. Here, as in the Ulysses case, there is no question
about Lawrence's honesty and sincerity of purpose, artistic integrity and
lack of intention to appeal to prurient interest.
Thus, this is an honest and sincere novel of literary merit and its
dominant theme and effect, taken as a whole, is not an appeal to the
prurient interest of the average reader.
This would seern to end the matter. However, the Postmaster
General's finding that the book is non-mailable because it offends
contemporary community standards bears some discussion.
I arn unable to ascertain upon what the Postmaster General based
this conclusion. The record before him indicates general acceptance of
the book throughout the country and nothing was shown to the con-
trary. The critics were unanimous. Editorial comment by leading
journals of opinion welcomed the publication and decried any attempts
to ban it.
** Judge Bok in Commonwealth v. Gordon, 66 D. & C. Rep. (Pa.) 101, 114.
APPENDIX
It is true that the editorial comment was excluded by the Judicial
Officer at the hearing. But it seems to me that this was error. These
expressions were relevant and material on the question of whether the
book exceeded the limits of freedom of expression in matters involving
sex and sex relations tolerated by the community at large in these
times.
The contemporary standards of the community and the limits of its
tolerance cannot be measured or ascertained accurately. There is no
poll available to determine such questions. Surely expressions by lead-
ing newspapers, with circulations of millions, are some evidence at
least as to what the limits of tolerance by present day community
standards are, if we must embark upon a journey of exploration into
such uncharted territory.
Quite apart from this, the broadening of freedom of expression and
of the frankness with which sex and sex relations are dealt with at the
present time require no discussion. In one best selling novel after an-
other frank descriptions of the sex act and "four-letter" words appear
with frequency. These trends appear in all media of public expression,
in the kind of language used and the subjects discussed in polite
society, in pictures, advertisements and dress, and in other ways
familiar to all. Much of what is now accepted would have shocked the
community to the core a generation ago. Today such things are gen-
erally tolerated whether we approve or not.
I hold that, at this stage in the development of our society, this
major English novel does not exceed the outer limits of the tolerance
which the community as a whole gives to writing about sex and sex
relations.
One final word about the constitutional problem implicit here.
It is essential to the maintenance of a free society that the severest
restrictions be placed upon restraints which may tend to prevent the
dissemination of ideas. 25 It matters not whether such ideas be ex-
pressed in political pamphlets or works of political, economic or social
theory or criticism, or through artistic media. All such expressions must
be freely available.
A work of literature published and distributed through normal
channels by a reputable publisher stands on quite a different footing
from hard core pornography furtively sold for the purpose of profiting
by the titillation of the dirty minded. The courts have been deeply
and properly concerned about the use of obscenity statutes to suppress
great works of art or literature. As Judge Augustus Hand said in
Ulysses (72, F, zd p. 708) :
* * * pj lc foolish judgments of Lord Eldon about one hundred
years ago, proscribing the works of Byron and Southey, and the
25 It should be noted that if the book is obscene within 1461 and thus barred
from the mails it is a crime to ship it by express or in interstate commerce gen-
erally under 18 U. S. C. 1462, 1465, and it would be subject to seizure by the
customs authorities if imported for sale. (19 U. S. C. 1305.)
I2 8 SEX, LITERATURE, AND CENSORSHIP
finding by the jury under a charge by Lord Denman that the
publication of Shelley's 'Queen Mab* was an indictable offense
are a warning to all who have to determine the limits of the field
within which authors may exercise themselves."
To exclude this book from the mails on the grounds of obscenity
would fashion a rule which could be applied to a substantial portion
of the classics of our literature. Such a rule would be inimical to a free
society. To interpret the obscenity statute so as to bar "Lady Chatter-
ley's Lover" from the mails would render the statute unconstitutional
in its application, in violation of the guarantees of freedom of speech
and the press contained in the First Amendment.
It may be, as the plaintiffs urge, that if a work is found to be of
literary stature, and not "hard core" pornography, it is a fortiori
within the protections of the First Amendment. But I do not reach
that question here. For I find that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is not
obscene within the meaning of 18 U. S. C. 1461, and is entitled to
the protections guaranteed to freedoms of speech and press by the
First Amendment. I therefore hold that the order of the Postmaster
General is illegal and void and violates plaintiffs' rights in contra-
vention of the Constitution.
Defendant's motion for summary judgment is denied. Plaintiff's
cross-motions for summary judgment are granted. An order will issue
permanently restraining the defendant from denying the mails to this
book or to the circulars announcing its availability.
Settle order on notice.
Dated, New York, N. Y,
July 21, 1959
FREDERICK VANPELT BRYAN
U. S. D. J.
112181
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