Harumphing fails to hold back novel

In this series, Mike Houlahan looks back at how the Otago Daily Times reacted to significant events. Today, he looks at the eventual publication of D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Some called it "most damnable", others said that no-one ever wrote better about sex than its author, D.H. Lawrence.

Whatever side of the debate you favour, there is no disputing that Lady Chatterley's Lover is English writer D.H. Lawrence’s best-known work, mostly because it was banned for decades.

And a good thing, too, thought the Otago Daily Times, referring to it in 1934 as "a pathetic excursion into Elizabethan frankness".

Lawrence’s few-holds-barred account of the affair between Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors had been privately published in Italy six years before that, Lawrence being entirely confident that it would be banned by the censors in his native England.

As indeed it was, and as in so many things in that era, where Britain went, New Zealand went too ... although that publication ban did not stop that many people from getting hold of a copy if they truly wanted to. Most were pirated, and in many cases the printers had expurgated sections of the book themselves to try to avoid prosecution.

At the time what literature could and could not be imported to New Zealand was at the discretion of the Customs Department, which was entitled to prohibit entry of any indecent or obscene articles: those terms were not defined in the relevant legislation, so everything from medieval poetry to contraception guides had fallen foul of it.

Eventually Customs, tired of being asked to judge whether books were literary or licentious, set up an advisory committee, a forerunner of the Indecent Publications Tribunal (IPT).

Eventually in 1959 a complete, unedited hardcover edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in England, and the following year, in a celebrated trial, Penguin successfully fought a prosecution for publishing a paperback version.

Naturally, it was not long before New Zealand publishers sought to follow suit. As far as a hardcover edition went, that was an easy task: Cabinet took the unusual step of approving that for sale in its final meeting of the year.

"Although there have been a few inquiries for the book in Dunedin, city booksellers will be ordering stocks," a nervous ODT reported.

As for the paperback edition, that was left to the IPT, and it wrestled with the thorny question during 1965.

The tribunal "had no hesitation in holding the book unsuitable for juveniles" as "mentally immature minors" would not appreciate Lawrence’s themes and purpose but finally, after a 3-2 vote, decided that the less well-off could indeed buy a paperback edition of the book.

That cost differential, the ODT thought in an editorial published a few days later under the title "Sex In Hard Covers", might just keep its provocative prose out of the hands of those unprepared for its lurid contents.

"A book with a hard cover selling at a substantial price should tend to ‘censor’ itself, at least with that section of the public drawn to buy their reading material on the basis of a suggestive cover illustration," the leader writer sniffed disapprovingly.

"It could mean that books with literary merit will not be denied to those interested in the value of such publications merely because the books may contain sections with a possible ‘corruptive influence’ for what is a largely disinterested section of the population."

Like it or not, Lawrence’s corruptive book was on the shelves in Dunedin. Despite misgivings at the time, the city seems to have survived all right.