D. H. Lawrence the adventurer

It is startling to realize that, but for tuberculosis, D. H. Lawrence could have given evidence, in 1960, in the case of Regina v. Penguin Books Limited, in which the defendants were acquitted of publishing “an obscene article,” i.e., Lady Chatterley’s Lover; he would have been only seventy-five. Penguin capitalized on its victory by rushing out a transcript of the proceedings, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, edited by C. H. Rolph, on the heels of the cannily stockpiled novel. Among the eminent names for the defense—the prosecution called no witnesses—that of F. R. Leavis, the author of the pioneering D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955), is notably absent. He had refused to appear, giving his reasons in a review of Rolph’s book, “The Orthodoxy of Enlightenment.”...