Fifty years after the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial gave novelists total freedom to explore love and lust, many are finding their sexual imaginations flagging
Tim Adams, The Observer, Sunday 1 August 2010
Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate, had the unenviable task of reading through 138 novels to help determine the longlist for this year's Booker prize, announced last week. Among his conclusions about the state of the British (and Commonwealth) novel was that no one was writing much about sex any more.
He had a theory to explain this. "It's as if they were paranoid about being nominated for the Bad Sex Award," he said, referring to the Literary Review's annual giggle at the most purple description of carnality in the year's fiction. Motion, caricatured during his time in the laureateship as "Pelvic Motion" by the Daily Mail, noted with dismay that "there were a lot of people writing about taking drugs, as if that was a substitute for sex".
Motion's remarks come almost exactly 50 years after the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, covered for this newspaper by Kenneth Tynan, who characterised the celebrated battle for the authorial right to take up residence in the bedroom without the interference of the state as a battle between "life and death". Life was DH Lawrence's thrusting prose, death was the Macmillan government's case that such "filth" was not something "you would wish your wife, or servants to read".
From the courtroom Tynan established the "crucial incident" of the trial in the following terms: "It occurred on the third morning during the testimony of Richard Hoggart," he observed, "who had called Lawrence's novel 'puritanical'. Mr Hoggart is a short, dark, young Midlands teacher of immense scholarship and fierce integrity. From the witness box he uttered a word that we had formerly heard only on the lips of [prosecutor] Mr Griffith-Jones; he pointed out how Lawrence had striven to cleanse it of its furtive, contemptuous and expletive connotations, and to use it 'in the most simple, natural way: one fucks'. There was no reaction of shock in the court, so calmly was the word pronounced, and so literally employed.
"'Does it gain anything,' he was asked, 'by being printed f-?' 'Yes,' said Mr Hoggart, 'it gains a dirty suggestiveness'."
In 1961, the year after Lady Chatterley's Lover was allowed to be published in the UK, the book outsold the Bible, with two million copies bought (200,000 on the first day). Though the appetite for reading that "one fucks" shows no sign of diminishing (witness Apple's censorship last week of the list of its bestselling iPad ebooks that had been headed by Blonde and Wet: The Complete Story) it would appear that the nation's more literary authors have lost the impulse to pursue the hard-won freedoms of 50 years ago. Either that or, if Motion is right, the old British vice of embarrassment has created a new wave of self-censorship.
In part it seems a generational shift. The two English novels I've read this year that couldn't seem to get sex off their minds were Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow and Craig Raine's Heartbreak. Amis is 60, Raine, his one-time Oxford tutor, is 66. Both in their different ways appeared at pains to illuminate Motion's suggestion that for the contemporary writer sex had lost its charge. Amis (again overlooked by the Booker panel) did this with great comic aplomb, setting most of his novel in 1970 and re-imagining a world in which sex was still just about part of a liberation movement rather than a global advertising and entertainment industry, a hedonistic paradise in which "the word fuck was available to both sexes. It was like a sticky toy, and it was there if you wanted it."
Raine, meanwhile, attempted simply to find ways to refresh the well-thumbed lexicon of love – "Francesca's fanny was a glorious irrepressible Afro pompon," he wrote, before turning his attention to "the beautiful blot of her arsehole. A dark-pink peach-stone." Heartbreak was not considered a success.
The full piece at The Observer.
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