Centrepiece

Consecrating Lawrence

Colin Welch

It is often overlooked how many of Auberon Waugh's most startling effects are produced by bald statements of literal

truths unfamiliar, widely denied or politely ignored. Take for instance his recent ful-

minations against the ludicrous proposal to put up a plaque for D.H. Lawrence in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. His chief objection was not to Lawrence's humourlessness. It was rather to the fact that Lawrence was 'a militant, proselytis- ing pagan, bitterly opposed to everything which Christianity has to teach'. An exag- geration? A tease? Not at all: surely the literal truth, only startling to those who have not read Lady Chatterley's Lover and other pagan Lawrence writings, only pro- vocative to those who, having read them, fail to understand them or, for occult reasons, lie about them.

Vividly do I recall, having written about it at the time in Encounter, the swelling tide of Christian misunderstanding or men- dacity on which Lady Chatterley was laun- ched, at its famous trial, into Penguin propriety. If the Poets' Corner proposal is resisted as it should be, a like flood of nonsense will presumably be unleashed in Lawrence's defence.

At the trial an impressive array of holy and mandarin figures was wheeled out on Lawrence's behalf. The then Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Honest-to-God Robin- son, testified that Lady Chatterley was a book that Christians ought to read, in which Lawrence had tried to portray sexual intercourse 'as in a real sense [my italics, though more might be excusable] an act of holy communion'. Mr Norman St John- Stevas recommended the book to every Catholic priest and moralist; 'undoubtedly a moral book', in his view. Mr Richard Hoggart declared the book 'puritanical' (a key word this, with its owlish Leavisite echoes), belonging `to the tradition of British puritanism', which he defined as 'an intense sense of responsibility for one's conscience'. The rector of Eastwood, Lawrence's birthplace, thought the book might be 'given to young people about to be married as a guide in love and mar- riage'.

The book in fact rhapsodises about a doubly adulterous affair, which caused the clergymen some embarrassment, and would perhaps have caused more if they had realised what a careful reading re- vealed to Warden Sparrow: that buggery marks its climax. The bishop conceded that the book 'portrays the love of a•woman in an immoral relationship, so far as adultery is an immoral relationship', but declared that it did not advocate 'adultery for its

own sake'. Perhaps not exactly: but it would be a great mistake to regard, as most of the witnesses seemed to do, the adultery as incidental or irrelevant. This is to overlook the book's main negative pur- pose, which is to undermine or destroy the Christian attitude to sex, love and mar- riage. Lawrence's contention is that, be- side sex, marriage is but an empty form, meaningless in itself, and that, wherever the claims of sex and marriage are in conflict, those of sex must prevail. How could the priority of sex over all have been so clearly established if Connie and Mel- lors had been free to marry at once? The adulterous nature of their union is essential to the plot and message, as is the disgusting character of Mellors's marriage and the arid emptiness of Connie's. All combine to make marriage seem ridiculous, nauseating and trivial compared with pure sexuality.

The attitude of Connie and Mellors to their spouses is significantly devoid of pity, kindness, shame, sympathy and remorse. Connie treats the astonished Sir Clifford to wild dithyrambs about her rebirth in adul- tery, about the body, killed off by Jesus, 'rising from the tomb': 'whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts . . . . like dawn.' Mellors vilely insults Sir Clif- ford, impotent from a war injury: 'It's not for a man i' the shape you're in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for me havin' a cod atween my legs,' An odd guide to marriage this, which even regards it as 'a wrong and bitter thing' to have children. What about love, then? A strange love indeed is here celebrated, far removed from that unearthly love or charity of which earthly loves sometimes give us mortals a glimpse, totally devoid, too of those smiling, generous and life- enhancing qualities which may give even to illicit love an undeniable grace.

Mellors's hatred for his wife Bertha and for Sir Clifford spreads like poison gas, encompassing finally the whole human race, which should be 'exterminated'. He wishes he had shot Bertha like a stoat, 'a raving doomed thing', and all the Cliffords and Berthas, • the legion of life-frustraters (he means presumably all sad, maimed or unfulfilled people) to whom death should be sweet — 'and I ought to be allowed to shoot them'. In his bloodthirsty mono- logues Mellors foams at whole classes, the middle classes, lady-like snipe', the work- ing classes 'just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted'. Mellors, agreed, pur- ports to be a character in a novel; but the resemblance between his own ravings and those of his creator gives him rather the status of a mouthpiece. Lawrence himself 'hated men', wanted to kill 'a million Germans, two millions', craved 'a deadly revolution very soon', cared only for 'the

death struggle', 'believed [his italics] in

wrath and gnashing of teeth and crunching of cowards' bones' and 'in fear and pain

and oh, such a lot of sorrow'. No wonder Jesus became ever 'more un-sympatisch' the longer he lived.

If we look in vain in Lady Chatterley for guidance in love and marriage, we might

yet find in it Mr Hoggart's puritanism, an intense responsibility for one's conscience, a puritanism which relies of course on the

uninstructed conscience, without reference

to God's teaching in the Holy Bible. We might call it black puritanism, puritanism without the Prince, or the puritanism of the justified sinner. Mellors, however, like his creator explicitly condemns conscience of any kind as 'chiefly fear of society'. Society is 'a malevolent partly-insane beast . . . ready to destroy whatever does not con- form', and onto the shoulders of this beast may be shuffled responsibility for whatever goes ill. Mellors was assumed by Mr Hoggart to have assumed at some point 'responsibility' for Connie. No such assumption is visible to me, only dire predictions of pain and doom, that 'they' (i.e. society) will do her in, and regrets for his own lost privacy.

'In a real sense an act of holy commun- ion': here, I fancy, the bishop, though proceeding backwards blindfold, may have stumbled nearer the truth. The language of the book is exaltedly biblical, in the plot are loud echoes of the New Testament. An essential clue is afforded by Tommy Dukes, whose racy prophetic utterances make him the phallus's clubman John the Baptist. 'Our show will come flop,' he cries, civilisation will fall 'down the chasm', across which the phallus will be the only bridge. Mankind will be regenerated by the phallus, by 'a resurrection of the body'. 'Something echoes inside Connie': she is 'waiting' for the promised one, the saviour, the phallus. Something strange, supernatu- ral or pseudo-mystical is going on here, something outside the tittering secular ken of modern bishops. What? Not holy com- munion, to be sure, but a sort of witchcraft or black mass, phallus worship, a malign parody which could deceive only modern churchmen.

'With an odd intentness', which Connie could not yet understand, Mellors adorns his pubic hair and hers with flowers. Some are charmed, others snigger; but is this not the solemn moment at which the priest decks his idols with all the bounty of nature in token of worship, gratitude, dependence and self-abasement?

Humourless as he may have been, even Lawrence might have laughed to find himself in Westminster Abbey and to hear the solemn idiocies which will presumably accompany his consecration. Perhaps another thunderbolt will descend. If so, which God will have dispatched it, our own God, or Lawrence's protozoic God?