J.R. wrote:michael scuffil wrote:Of all the books in the English literary canon, Lady Chatterly's Lover is probably the one most thoroughly pervaded by Nazi ideology: throw the disabled on the scrapheap, glory in the supremacy of primal urges over civilized behaviour. Not suitable for dormitory reading.
A touch harsh, Michael as it is now rated as a classic
Certainly a classic, and I've no objection to its being read and studied. But one gets the impression that Lady C. & Mellors are role models in Lawrence's eyes, in a way that for example Lolita and Humbert Humbert are certainly not in Nabokov's.
The book was long banned because of the sex, and now it's mostly read because of the sex -- which takes people's mind off the much worse immorality of regarding Clifford Chatterly, a disabled war hero, as a useless and degenerate nuisance, symbolizing the upper classes generally.
Bertrand Russell wrote: 'The world between the wars was attracted to madness. Of this attraction, Nazism was the most emphatic expression. Lawrence was a suitable exponent of this cult of insanity.' (Russell and Lawrence knew each other well.)
Th.B. 27 1955-63