Our guest posts on Women in Love opened an admirable exchange of Comments about all sorts of aspects of Lawrence’s work. I think there was a feeling, however, that we were left with an elephant in the room: Lady Chatterley’s Lover… (I had not even read it.)
Shortly afterwards, veteran Calderonia-contributor Damian Grant kindly showed me a paper that he had written in the 1980s, delivered at a meeting of the D.H. Lawrence Society, but not published. It took up Clifford Chatterley’s quotation from The Winter’s Tale in chapter 8 of the novel and related it to wider issues. It seemed to me an excellent way into a discussion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I am delighted to say that it will appear on Calderonia in slightly expanded form on 1 August.
I vividly remember the rush to buy the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover after Penguin Books won the case to publish it in 1960. All the windows of the rather staid bookshop in my home town displayed copies of it (see cover above left). There was a steady stream of people darting out with something in a brown paper bag. The following year, aged thirteen, I bought a copy myself and disguised it in the carefully excised cover of Penguin’s Mr Midshipman Hornblower. I don’t think I got to page 40. However, a list was circulating at school of the ‘best pages’. My most passionate interest at the time was natural history, so I was bowled over by Lawrence’s descriptions of the wood; what went on there actually revolted me. My copy was stolen by someone and I made no attempt to recover it. Strangely enough, my parents’ copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover also disappeared, and I don’t know anyone who still has their copy from the 1960s. I think the reason is that people were desperately curious to read the nearly banned novel, but were so disappointed that they soon passed it on to others, who passed it on to others.
Nevertheless, I do still have my copy of A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Other Essays, which the inside cover tells me I read in 1963. I bought it on the recommendation of our English teacher just down from Cambridge. By the age of fifteen I was much more interested in modern painting than botany and this teacher told me there was a very good essay by Lawrence on Cézanne in this volume. He was right, but the title essay had a very strong effect on me, even though I had not read the novel.
By 1970 I still had not read the novel, but the essay by Mark Schorer in A Propos had acquainted me with the three versions of the novel’s ending and I fancy I had picked up some things Leavis said on this subject, too. It all emboldened me, in an undergraduate essay, to compare the ending of Chekhov’s story ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ with Lawrence’s two rejected endings to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The comparison was unfavourable to Lawrence, as I felt he had aimed to resolve the ending, to close it, whereas Chekhov’s story is famous for ending with the words ‘they could both see that the end was still a long, long way off and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning’ — the future in Chekhov’s version of the roman adultère is left wide open.
I have recently read Lady Chatterley’s Lover twice (2006 cover top right) and perceive the resemblances between it and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ to be profound; far greater than the differences. For a start, Mark Schorer actually wrote back in 1963 that the third, authorised version of the novel (the one I have just read) ‘leaves the end in some uncertainty, which is supremely right’. In other words, it is more Chekhovian; closer to the last sentence of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. Above all, in both works the man’s love is based on compassion and tenderness. ‘There is something pitiful about her’, thinks Gurov after meeting Anna Sergeevna for the first time. ‘He felt compassion towards the life in her, that was so warm and beautiful.’ ‘There was something so mute and forlorn in her’, Lawrence writes of Connie, ‘compassion flamed in his [Mellors’] bowels for her.’ ‘He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman.’ ‘What were they going to do? What[…]? What […]?’ both Mellors and Gurov ask themselves desperately. Both heroines are in their twenties and their lovers at least ten years older. And in both works sex is vital to the relationships that should become a ‘new marriage’. Lawrence famously considered Chekhov ‘a second-rate writer and a Willy wet-leg’, but the first two English translations of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ came out in 1917, they were both by people Lawrence knew well, and it’s rather inconceivable that he never read the story.
I am not going to pursue that theme now, or the twenty-three others that I have noted at the back of my copy of this masterpiece (yes, it really is). I will leave Damian to stir up all that in his fine guest post on 1 August, and I sincerely hope followers will pitch in, preferably by Comment, as with Women in Love.
But there is one question that I can’t help asking. Pretty obviously, in both Chekhov’s story and Lawrence’s novel dogs are surrogate human companions for the heroine and hero respectively. Anna Sergeevna’s dog remains at her husband’s home in the grey, grey town of S. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover what became of Mellors’ dog Flossie?
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon, 1912
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon c.1901
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
Lady with little dog/Gamekeeper with spaniel
Our guest posts on Women in Love opened an admirable exchange of Comments about all sorts of aspects of Lawrence’s work. I think there was a feeling, however, that we were left with an elephant in the room: Lady Chatterley’s Lover… (I had not even read it.)
Shortly afterwards, veteran Calderonia-contributor Damian Grant kindly showed me a paper that he had written in the 1980s, delivered at a meeting of the D.H. Lawrence Society, but not published. It took up Clifford Chatterley’s quotation from The Winter’s Tale in chapter 8 of the novel and related it to wider issues. It seemed to me an excellent way into a discussion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I am delighted to say that it will appear on Calderonia in slightly expanded form on 1 August.
I vividly remember the rush to buy the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover after Penguin Books won the case to publish it in 1960. All the windows of the rather staid bookshop in my home town displayed copies of it (see cover above left). There was a steady stream of people darting out with something in a brown paper bag. The following year, aged thirteen, I bought a copy myself and disguised it in the carefully excised cover of Penguin’s Mr Midshipman Hornblower. I don’t think I got to page 40. However, a list was circulating at school of the ‘best pages’. My most passionate interest at the time was natural history, so I was bowled over by Lawrence’s descriptions of the wood; what went on there actually revolted me. My copy was stolen by someone and I made no attempt to recover it. Strangely enough, my parents’ copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover also disappeared, and I don’t know anyone who still has their copy from the 1960s. I think the reason is that people were desperately curious to read the nearly banned novel, but were so disappointed that they soon passed it on to others, who passed it on to others.
Nevertheless, I do still have my copy of A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Other Essays, which the inside cover tells me I read in 1963. I bought it on the recommendation of our English teacher just down from Cambridge. By the age of fifteen I was much more interested in modern painting than botany and this teacher told me there was a very good essay by Lawrence on Cézanne in this volume. He was right, but the title essay had a very strong effect on me, even though I had not read the novel.
By 1970 I still had not read the novel, but the essay by Mark Schorer in A Propos had acquainted me with the three versions of the novel’s ending and I fancy I had picked up some things Leavis said on this subject, too. It all emboldened me, in an undergraduate essay, to compare the ending of Chekhov’s story ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ with Lawrence’s two rejected endings to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The comparison was unfavourable to Lawrence, as I felt he had aimed to resolve the ending, to close it, whereas Chekhov’s story is famous for ending with the words ‘they could both see that the end was still a long, long way off and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning’ — the future in Chekhov’s version of the roman adultère is left wide open.
I have recently read Lady Chatterley’s Lover twice (2006 cover top right) and perceive the resemblances between it and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ to be profound; far greater than the differences. For a start, Mark Schorer actually wrote back in 1963 that the third, authorised version of the novel (the one I have just read) ‘leaves the end in some uncertainty, which is supremely right’. In other words, it is more Chekhovian; closer to the last sentence of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. Above all, in both works the man’s love is based on compassion and tenderness. ‘There is something pitiful about her’, thinks Gurov after meeting Anna Sergeevna for the first time. ‘He felt compassion towards the life in her, that was so warm and beautiful.’ ‘There was something so mute and forlorn in her’, Lawrence writes of Connie, ‘compassion flamed in his [Mellors’] bowels for her.’ ‘He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman.’ ‘What were they going to do? What[…]? What […]?’ both Mellors and Gurov ask themselves desperately. Both heroines are in their twenties and their lovers at least ten years older. And in both works sex is vital to the relationships that should become a ‘new marriage’. Lawrence famously considered Chekhov ‘a second-rate writer and a Willy wet-leg’, but the first two English translations of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ came out in 1917, they were both by people Lawrence knew well, and it’s rather inconceivable that he never read the story.
I am not going to pursue that theme now, or the twenty-three others that I have noted at the back of my copy of this masterpiece (yes, it really is). I will leave Damian to stir up all that in his fine guest post on 1 August, and I sincerely hope followers will pitch in, preferably by Comment, as with Women in Love.
But there is one question that I can’t help asking. Pretty obviously, in both Chekhov’s story and Lawrence’s novel dogs are surrogate human companions for the heroine and hero respectively. Anna Sergeevna’s dog remains at her husband’s home in the grey, grey town of S. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover what became of Mellors’ dog Flossie?
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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