2 November is the 63rd anniversary of Penguin Books’ victory in the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, and there are plenty of accounts of that around. They all, understandably, tend to feature the prosecution’s not-very-well-judged opening remarks.
There’s Penguin’s own account, for example, which tells us they had 200,000 copies printed, ready — but not by their usual printer, who had refused to work on it
There’s Geoffrey Robertson QC in the Grauniad for the 50th anniversary, who also quotes the prosecution’s Mervyn Griffith-Jones:
The word ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’ appears no less than 30 times … ‘cunt’ 14 times; ‘balls’ 13 times; ‘shit’ and ‘arse’ six times apiece; ‘cock’ four times; ‘piss’ three times, and so on.
…and you can read about the University of Bristol’s acquisition of the judge’s own copy of the paperback — and its
clumsily hand-stitched fabric bag — apparently made not to protect the book but rather the person carrying it by obscuring its title.
But the real question — obviously; I know you’re all asking it — is: how did H G Wells read it in 1928, and why did he scribble dirty pictures on the title page?
(In case it’s not clear, the first image is ‘DHL by himself’: a man shouting “Up Jenkins!” at his huge erection. The second is ‘The real DHL’, showing a slumped, pathetic figure looking down at his flaccid penis with the words “Well, has any other man the equal of it?”)
No British publisher would risk it when the book was first written, so Lawrence had had 1,000 copies printed at his own expense in Italy, and given a copy to Wells — whose 1909 novel Tono-Bungay (no, me neither) Lawrence had called the “best novel Wells has written”.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, Lawrence had also called Wells’ 1926 novel The World of William Clissold “a mouse’s nest”, and Wells was less than perfectly pleased. Still, when that copy went to auction in 2021, the annotations did lift its value. The Guardian said the estimate was £10,000, the Mail £15–25,000.
And — sound the massive digression klaxon — this wasn’t the only little contretemps Wells got himself in. He called George Bernard Shaw “an idiot child screaming in a hospital”, and parodied Henry James (cruelly, if not exactly inaccurately) in 1915 satire Boon:
Mind you, Henry James had named Wells as one of a number of authors who he felt produced “affluents turbid and unrestrained”.
H.G.’s most spectacular falling-out, however, was with George Orwell, who initially thought of Wells as a hero. They became friends, but Orwell’s essay Wells, Hitler, and the World State, criticised the older man’s vision of a world made utopian by science. Orwell said that, without scientists, “the German war machine could never have been built up”.
Then, according to an essay in 1971 book The World of George Orwell, Wells also decided once that Orwell was “saying unkind things about him behind his back”, and ordered him and Eileen (Orwell’s long-suffering wife) out of a flat he’d been letting them use.
They tried to patch things up by inviting him to dinner, to which Wells
replied at once with a warm acceptance and expressed wonder at their having left the flat he had lent them so suddenly and without explanation.
On the night itself, all appeared well…
He turned up full of amiability and began by warning them that he had stomach trouble and could not eat anything rich. ‘Oh dear,’ said Eileen. ‘I’ve cooked a curry.’ ‘I mustn’t touch that’, said Wells. ‘Just give me a very little.’ He ate two huge helpings, as well as drinking plentifully, and chatted away in excellent form. After dinner William Plomer (or was it William Empson?) arrived. It transpired that he had not eaten, and the curry, thanks to Wells’s greed, was finished, so Eileen said: ‘All I can offer you is some plum cake.’ ‘Plum cake?’ said Wells, overhearing this. ‘I don’t think I could manage that.’ ‘I’m not offering it to you, it’s for Bill’, said Eileen, but when it appeared Wells observed that it looked uncommonly good and took two slices. Around midnight they put him into a taxi, in the best of spirits, and as he drove off he cried: ‘Don’t lose touch with me for so long again!”
…until it wasn’t again
They congratulated themselves on having repaired the friendship, but a week later they got a furious letter from Wells saying: ‘You knew I was ill and on a diet, you deliberately plied me with food and drink,’ etc., and declaring that he never wanted to see either of them again. (This must be the letter referred to in Orwell’s diary for 27 March 1942 in which Wells ‘addresses me as “you shit” among other things’.) Apparently Wells had been taken violently ill in the taxi and had had to be rushed to hospital; obviously, they had conspired against him in revenge for (he now remembered) the trouble over the flat. I believe they never did see each other again.
So — and you can sound the digression klaxon again here — quite what he would have made of his mention alongside Anthony Trollope and Hilaire Belloc in this Two Ronnies sketch is anyone’s guess:
