Lady Chatterley's Revenge

With Dog Days upon us, summer's slow fade into autumn is underway. Slow also describes my summer reading program. My summer resolution was to read classics that I've ignored over the years. I've made some progress, but I keep getting sidetracked by more recent titles.

For example, in Jane Austen's formidable wake, I took up Amy Bloom's novel Away. Ms. Bloom teaches writing at Yale and is best known, so far, for her short stories. If Away is any indication, she's also quite adept at longer formats.

Set in the 1920's, Away chronicles the immigrant odyssey of Lillian Leyb from Russia to New York City, across America, and on to the Alaskan frontier. Lillian flees Russia after her family is killed in a pogrom and settles among Jewish immigrants in New York. When she learns that her three-year-old daughter is alive and living in Siberia, she sets out with little more than a mother's love and determination to find her.

With Away, Bloom hits a trifecta: an unforgettable heroine, a timeless story, and graceful prose.

QUOTABLE:

"Lillian works for a prostitute and is being courted by a pimp, and it is not the worst thing that has ever happened."

"'I think the most important thing in the world is being brave,' Gumdrop says now, in the dark. 'I'd rather be brave than beautiful. Wouldn't you? Hell, I'd settle for acting brave.'"

"We live and we love the world, Lillian thinks, and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back."
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After being diverted by Away, I got back on track with D.H. Lawrence. All things being equal, I likely would have chosen Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. But, my wife already owned a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Advantage: Lady Chatterley.

I wasn't disappointed. Set in 1920s England, the novel follows the extramarital affair between the aristocratic Lady Chatterley and commoner Oliver Mellors, her husband's game-keeper.

Extramarital sex is, of course, universal, but that's not what makes this a classic. Lawrence also tackles universal themes: especially the proper balance between mind and body; nature and reason.

Lawrence finds post-war modernity and industrialization debilitating in its soullessness. His sexually-frustrated heroine Connie Chatterley, whose husband Clifford was left impotent by a wartime injury, only finds redemption when she yields to her physical needs.

While few 21st Century readers will find much to object to here, the novel's sexually-explicit nature and four-letter words caused a scandal when it was published in 1928. Of course, that only added to its appeal.

D.H. LAWRENCE UNCENSORED:

"But, alas, counterfeit love is good cake but bad bread."

"But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may."

"The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea . . . maybe . . . but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring."

"[The mental life] is rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite."

"Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing."

"The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes."

"'It's astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they're nearly all Lesbian.'"

"[T]he mass of women are like this: most of them want a man, but don't want the sex, but they put up with it, as part of the bargain."

"'I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind.'"

"Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older."