Lady Chatterley’s Lover

gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one with a great deal more, that these women left out. Once started, Mrs. Bolton was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their affairs, it was wonderful, if just a trifle humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to “talk Tevershall,” as she called it, to Clifford. But once started, it went. Clifford was listening for “material,” and he found it in plenty. Connie realised that his so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs. Bolton, of course, was very warm when she “talked Tevershall.” Carried away, in fact. And it was marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have run to dozens of volumes.

Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally “pure.” Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs. Bolton’s gossip was always on the side of the angels. “And he was such a bad fellow, and she was such a nice woman.” Whereas, as Connie could see even from Mrs. Bolton’s gossip, the woman had been merely a mealymouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a “bad man” of him, and mealymouthedness made a “nice woman” of her, in the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy by Mrs. Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs. Bolton’s talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than English village.

“I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you ever! Miss Allsopp, old James’s daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall: eighty-three, he was, an’ nimble as a lad. An’ then he slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads ’ad made last winter, an’ broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well he left all his money to Tattie: didn’t leave the boys a penny. And Tattie, I know, is five years⁠—yes, she’s fifty-three last autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She taught Sunday School for thirty years, till her father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don’t know if you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock, ’as works in Harison’s woodyard. Well, he’s sixty-five if he’s a day, yet you’d have thought they were a pair of young turtledoves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an’ she sitting on his knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see. And he’s got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old James Allsopp hasn’t risen from his grave, it’s because there is no rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they’re married and gone to live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown from morning to night, a veritable sight. I’m sure it’s awful, the way the old ones go on! Why they’re a lot worse than the young, and a sight more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can’t keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films. Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, the grownups are worse than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they’re having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th’ pits are working so bad, and they haven’t got the money. And the grumbling they do, it’s awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things that’s been given,