Acquitted Book of the Day: How dare D.H. Lawrence actually write the way people talk outside of church?

2016 saw a new BBC production of D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Critics maintained what was fresh about this outing was a hot cast and- novelty among novelties- removal of nearly all the realistically naughty language about sex that got the book banned in Britain and the UK for a quarter of a century:

Director Jed Mercurio, who also wrote the adaptation, maintains that there’s no justification these days for bad language. The words that got the book banned for 30 years have lost their original purpose, which was to de-smut sex. This seems sensible.

And, in a way, it does. When the book was issued in 1930, Lawrence used terminology known to most, but denied by the upper and ruling classes, among whose duties was to try to set- and maintain- standards for the plebs.

In 87 years, life has gone on, and the easily offended have moved one to easy new offenders. But Lawrence’s landmark remains a classic, and deservedly so.

This novel about a woman with the temerity to find a life without sex- 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 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....

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!" On its first day in stores, a week after the verdict, Lady Chatterley's Lover sold two hundred thousand copies.

e.