Lady Chatterley acquitted

Some books outlive their authors only to fight, decades later, the war their authors lost in life. The writer is gone, his ash carried across an ocean; the book remains, banned in his own country, smuggled past customs in the suitcases of returning travellers. Then one morning, in a courtroom he never saw, twelve strangers are asked whether the thing he wrote thirty years ago is fit for their wives to read, and the answer they give closes an age.

THE COLLIER'S SON

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885, fourth child of a coalminer who could barely read and a former schoolmistress who could. He came up through the King Edward VI scholarship, the Pupil Teacher Centre, the day training college at Nottingham, and out the other side into a literary London that did not quite know what to do with him. By the autumn of 1928 he was forty-two, tubercular, living in a villa above Florence with his German wife Frieda, completing the third and final draft of a novel about a gamekeeper and a baronet's wife. He wanted to call it Tenderness. He settled, in the end, for Lady Chatterley's Lover. The book was printed by a Florentine jobbing printer named Pino Orioli in an edition of a thousand, bound in mulberry paper, signed by the author, and shipped in plain wrappers to subscribers in England and America. His Majesty's customs men opened a great many of those parcels. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence in March 1930. The book outlived him for thirty years before any British publisher dared print it whole.

THE TWELVE COPIES

In the summer of 1960 Penguin Books, under Sir Allen Lane, set up two hundred thousand copies of the unexpurgated text in its Harmondsworth warehouse, packed and labelled for the bookshops. On the sixteenth of August, publication day, the firm sent twelve copies of the book by hand to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and waited. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 had, for the first time in English law, made the literary merit of a work admissible as a defence. Penguin meant to test it; the parcel of twelve was the test. The DPP did what the firm had invited him to do. The case was set down for the Old Bailey, Court Number One, on the twentieth of October. The prosecution would call no expert witnesses. The defence, under Gerald Gardiner QC, would call thirty-five.

A QUESTION ABOUT WIVES AND SERVANTS

It is the first day of the trial. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Senior Treasury Counsel, Eton and Trinity Hall, decorated at Dunkirk, junior prosecutor at Nuremberg, stands in horsehair wig and silk gown and opens his case to the jury of three women and nine men. He puts to them, in the cadence of an Eton classroom, a question which will outlive every other sentence of his career. Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? Several of the jurors laugh. He does not, at the moment, hear the laugh as the sound of his case going. He thinks it is the sound of common sense recognising itself. He has read the book; he has marked the four-letter words and counted them; he has the arithmetic of the indecency in his brief, and he believes the arithmetic will be enough. He calls no novelist, no critic, no clergyman, no schoolmaster. He believes a jury of twelve English men and women will not be persuaded by professors against the evidence of their own eyes.

THE WITNESSES

For six days the defence calls its witnesses. E. M. Forster, white-haired, mild, places Lawrence in the tradition of Bunyan. Richard Hoggart, the Leeds boy from The Uses of Literacy, calls the book puritanical and means it as praise. The Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, then drafting the book that would become Honest to God, tells the jury that Christians ought to read it. The Oxford don Helen Gardner speaks of Lawrence's four-letter words as an attempt to give back to the body its lost vocabulary. Rebecca West speaks. Cecil Day-Lewis speaks. Raymond Williams speaks. Walter Allen speaks. Griffith-Jones cross-examines each in turn, in the polished Etonian manner; each in turn answers him in the tone of a tutor correcting an essay. The jury watches.

TWENTY-FIVE PAST THREE

It is the eleventh day. Closing speeches are done. Mr Justice Byrne has summed up for forty minutes, leaning, in the view of every reporter on the press bench, towards conviction. At twenty-five past three on the afternoon of the second of November 1960 the jury retires. Court Number One empties of the public; the press benches do not. Sir Allen Lane sits at the back in a tweed jacket. Gerald Gardiner, who will be Lord Chancellor inside four years, sits at the front. Griffith-Jones gathers his papers and believes the jury will be three hours; he is not wrong about the time. The clock on the panelled wall above the bench moves, in the way of clocks in empty courtrooms, with a noise out of proportion to its size, and in the long minute between each of its movements the case turns inside the heads of twelve people who have spent eleven days hearing the country's novelists and bishops describe a book to them in language they have never been spoken to in before. They have been called upon, by both sides, to be the conscience of England. They will not give up the part. The voice that opened the trial, the voice that said wife or servants and expected to be agreed with, is, in these three hours, being asked by twelve strangers to step down from the bench it has occupied for a hundred years and take its seat among the rest.

THE FOREMAN

At half past six the jury returns. The foreman is asked the question. He says not guilty. The verdict reaches the back of the court before the press benches have understood it. A cheer goes up. Mr Justice Byrne calls for order. Allen Lane is on his feet. Outside on Newgate Street the evening editions are already being reset. Within forty-eight hours the two hundred thousand copies leave Harmondsworth. The first printing sells out in a day. The reprints come off the press in batches of fifty thousand a week for two months; two million copies are gone by the end of December, three million by the following November. The book has not been out of print in the British Isles since.

THE CHAPEL ABOVE TAOS

Mervyn Griffith-Jones was appointed Common Serjeant of the City of London and died in 1979; nothing else he ever did in court was remembered. The 1959 Act was never again successfully used against a major British publisher. Theatre censorship ended in 1968; the Sexual Offences Act came in 1967; the Obscene Publications Act stayed on the books but its teeth had gone. Helen Gardner became Merton Professor of English at Oxford and was made a Dame, and wrote in later years that the Chatterley case had been the moment a particular upper-class confidence in its own taste lost the right to speak for the country. Lawrence himself had been five years buried in the cemetery at Vence before Frieda had him exhumed and cremated and the ashes brought to New Mexico, where she built for him a small whitewashed shrine on the hillside above Taos with a phoenix carved over the door. The ashes lie inside under a block of concrete poured, by her instruction, around the urn, so that no admirer would ever carry it off. The book the collier's son had wanted to call Tenderness had carried his name back into the centre of the English language, thirty years after his death, on the answer to a question about wives and servants.