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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Sex and Paradise

Sex and Paradise

In this book David Holbrook examines Chaucer’s poetry, Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the light of psychoanalytical theory, to deduce the authors’ views of sexual love. Chaucer comes off well; Shakespeare comes off well; but Lawrence gets the horse- whipping due to a cad.

Mr Holbrook is evidently a warm-hearted, chivalrous man, as well as being a capable essayist. His comments on Chaucer are subtle and rewarding. There is less penetration in his analysis of A Winter’s Tale – perhaps because it is a rather dull play.

His comments on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, however, reveal more about Mr Holbrook than they do about Lawrence. I feel that this controversial novel should properly be regarded as a modern idyll, corresponding to the Greek stories of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses, or the first chapters of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass – it expresses the perennial and very human dream of a sexual paradise not in fact to be found east or west of the Bamboo Curtain. One should deal gently with this dream, for without it poetry might vanish from the world. But Mr Holbrook, armed (one suspects) with some dreary marriage manual, bristling with certainty that his own version of the sexual dream is the right one, advances against Apollyon-Lawrence – charging him with infantilism, misanthropy, sadism and several other things. He claims with assurance that Lawrence lacked an understanding of what is shared and mutually exchanged in man-woman relationships. What he does not recognise is the truism that the sexual dream (Lawrence’s or Holbrook’s) begins to expire as soon as either partner regards the other primarily as a person – or, in the Christian sense of the word, a ‘neighbour’. It is all too solemn for me – a heresy trial in the Courts of Love. I enjoy idylls, in particular Lady Chatterley’s Lover, though they very likely do not weigh a straw against the immense fortitude with which ordinary people live and act in a dreamless world.

1965 (342)