When Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, he encountered the same mentality that had so frustrated Hardy. Just as Hardy’s publisher demanded that Hardy rewrite portions of The Return of the Native to make it more acceptable, publisher William Heinemann requested that Lawrence revise page 230 of the novel “to substitute an exactly identical number of obviously harmless words.” For this first published effort, Lawrence agreed. He would not be so compliant in the future.

The same Heinemann could not bring himself to publish the autobiographical Sons and Lovers, which Duckworth brought out in 1913. Lawrence’s early novels, along with his poetry, inspired critical epithets such as “sensual,” “decadent,” “overfrank,” and even “Zolaesque.” Doubts were expressed about Lawrence’s English origins; critics must have wondered how a decent Englishman could write about such a subject in such language. One critic read it “in fatigued repulsion”—a not unfair criticism to those readers who grow weary of Paul Morel and his overbearing mother. Generally, however, Sons and Lovers received critical praise.

Lawrence’s friend Edward Gannett, an editor at Duckworth, did not like The Rainbow, so it was published in 1915 by Metheun. The new novel immediately provoked the comment, “Worse than Zola.” A detective-inspector from Scotland Yard, armed with a search warrant, seized 1,000 copies of the novel from the publisher and printer. Metheun failed to tell the author of the proceedings, partly because Lawrence, poor and married to an “enemy alien” (the German Frieda), lacked influence.

During the ensuing proceedings in the House of Commons, Irish MP A. A. Lynch asked, “Is there any official censor in these matters, or do these delicate questions depend on the judgment of one magistrate?” Lynch’s question revealed a key issue. There was no official censor, and two different magistrates might find the same work to be acceptable and pornographic, each depending on his values and viewpoints.

A bowdlerized version of The Rainbow was published in the United States in 1916. During the ensuing four years, however, Lawrence’s published works were limited to poetry and a travel book—a safe enough subject for an author who by then was feared by most publishers.

In 1920, American publisher Thomas Seltzer issued a subscriber’s edition of Women in Love followed in 1922 by a regular edition. Unfortunately, even the United States had its “one magistrate.” When Justice John Ford of the New York Supreme Court found his daughter engrossed in Women in Love, he formed the Clean Books League to stop the “saturnalia of obscenity.” In Great Britain, a John Bull headline blared, “A Book The Police Should Ban; Loathesome Study of Sex Depravity—Misleading Youth To Unspeakable Disaster.” In Lawrence’s defense, American magistrate George W. Simpson pointed out that the author was seriously attempting to discuss the “motivating power of life.”

Wisely, in 1928 Lawrence decided to self-publish the even more controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover with the help of Florentine bookseller Giuseppe Orioli. The novel was a success, with 1,000 copies selling for two guineas each. It had not been copyrighted, however. Pirates soon cut in on the profits, making Lady Chatterley’s Lover a “black-market staple.” When Sex, Literature, and Censorship, a collection of Lawrence’s essay edited by Harry T. Moore, was published in 1955, Moore noted that “no one can buy the complete text of this novel in Anglo-Saxon countries.” Even so, Horace Gregory announced that Lady Chatterley’s Lover had won “the half-century fight for sexual liberation in English writing.”

Unfortunately, worries about the details of publication and censorship weakened Lawrence’s frail health. Before he died in 1930, Pansies, a book of poetry, suffered a fate similar to that of its predecessors; 14 of the poems were omitted at the direction of the British Home Secretary. In 1929, 12,000 visitors saw an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings at the Warren Gallery in Mayfair before it was closed on July 5 on moral and aesthetic grounds as “dangerous.”

Lawrence’s struggles with censorship did not end with his death; for decades after, there continued to be raids, seizures, and pronouncements about obscenity. As Lawrence had said, however, “Life is sordid at times, art must be also.”

Frieda Lawrence wrote that D. H. Lawrence “tried to raise sex from a mere animal function to a truly human all-embracing activity.” Lawrence, who grew up with an educated, domineering mother and a brutal coal miner father, could not depict the life he knew without both sex and violence. Anything less would not be true to the human nature he saw struggling against the mechanized, dehumanized world of mines, railroads, and industry. For Lawrence, sex was a force that could help to preserve the human spirit in an inhuman world.

In Pornography and Obscenity, Lawrence came back to A. A. Lynch’s point: “ . . . what they are depends, as usual, entirely on the individual. What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.” He added, “The law is a dreary thing, and its judgments have nothing to do with life,” pointing out that Hamlet, acceptable today, was appalling to “Cromwellian Puritans and that some of Aristophanes, acceptable to contemporary Greeks, is shocking today.

Lawrence did not support pornography, which he defined. “But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously . . . you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit.” The common man degrades sex, according to Lawrence, and has “as great a hate and contempt of sex as the greyest Puritan . . . they have the grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow disease of dirt-lust.”

For Lawrence, “Sex is a creative flow”—literally, in every sense. For him, the sex functions and the excrementory functions (dissolution) in degraded humans become identical. “Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex.” To Lawrence, the “only way to stop the terrible mental itch about sex” is no more secrecy. Lawrence, never satisfied with his own creative flow, was notorious for rewriting each novel and short story many times. As Richard Aldington said, “No man, wishing to write a pornographic book, would dream of wasting so much time and energy.”

Today, Lady Chatterley’s Lover would not raise an eyebrow in our era of R- and NR-rated movies widely distributed through cinemas, video stores, and cable, as well as bestsellers like those of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. Although Lawrence appears to have won the battle for “no more secrecy” posthumously, it is not so clear that these modern portrayals of sex represent “creative flow” and therefore art, or whether they are an “insult to the human spirit.” It is up to the magistrate in each of us to decide, case by case—as it should be. Lawrence’s motto is true for each of us: “Art for my sake.”

Further reading: Sex, Literature, and Censorship ed. by Harry T. Moore. Twayne Publishers, New York. 1955.

By day, Diane L. Schirf works as senior marketing and public relations copywriter for a national senior living company based in Chicago. By night,she writes book reviews, essays, poetry, fiction, and whatever else occurs to her.
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