Birthday Book of the Day: "I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets."

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born on this date in 1885. Mostly, today, he is remembered as the author of a book no one reads any more because it isn't scandalous enough:

Lawrence, D. H., Lady Chatterly’s Lover (Grove Press, 1st U.S. ed., “Original Unexpurgated Version”, 1959). “This edition is the third manuscript version, first published by Giuseppe Orioli, Florence, 1928.” With an introduction by Mark Schorer and a preface by Archibald MacLeish. 

This novel about a woman with the temerity to find a life without sex unendurable- her husband was disabled in The Great War- caused decades of fuss and scandal in most of the English-speaking world. Reading it now, it's remarkable to imagine why people got up on their hind legs so about it, and it's pleasing to be able to read it for its considerable literary merit.

In an early instance of congressional Republican literary criticism, Utah Senator Reed Smoot declared in 1930, "I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!" 

The author, suitably photographed against a black background.

The American poet Ogden Nash wrote, in response,

Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)

Is planning a ban on smut.

Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.

And his reverend occiput.

Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut.,

Grit your molars and do your dut.,

Gird up your l__ns,

Smite h_p and th_gh,

We'll all be Kansas

By and by....

Senator Smoot later played a memorable role in the film, Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

At its 1960 obscenity publication trial in the United Kingdom, the prosecutor summed up with the question that would, doubtless, have echoed through the drawing rooms of Downton Abbey: “Is this the sort of book you would wish your wife or servants to read?” 

And the jury, to paraphrase Lawrence, replied "Fuck, yeah!"

Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket. Blue cloth spine over cream-colored paper boards; gilt lettering. Dust jacket very good with light wear along the edging. 8.5” x. 5.25”, 368 pp. HBB price: $175.

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