July 2016

‘We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen’: Reflections on Lady Chatterley and the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.

Last November, I went to visit my mother in the pretty anonymous village in North Liverpool where I grew up. And on remembrance Sunday we stood outside at the local World War One memorial, while children lined the village green in the uniforms of the army and navy cadets. The scouts clutched poppy wreaths and stood to attention. A local veteran held aloft the union flag. There was a hiatus. In the cold, the sizeable crowd looked solemnly to each other and muttered. 

We were waiting for the arrival of the Earl of Derby, who was running a little late. The black Rolls Royce arrived and his car door was opened for him. The children stood to attention and there was silence. Binyon’s famous poem was solemnly intoned. 

“At the going down of the sun we will remember them”.

The bugler played the last post and his Lordship laid his wreath. The children followed suit one by one. Saluting the Earl. Marching behind him. Proud parents recorded the event on their iPhones. After the laying of wreaths was complete, the vicar invited everyone to an evening of patriotic songs in the village hall in memory of the fallen. No thought as to whether patriotic songs might have been part of the problem.

In this centenary year of the Battle of the Somme, what, precisely, I asked myself, were we remembering? The senselessness or war? The sheer scale of the carnage? The heroism of ordinary men and women? The cause that the war was fought for? ‘Our boys’ in peril in foreign parts in 2016, posted there on dubious pretexts? I wasn’t sure.

While directing The Mystery Plays in York Minster recently, I was struck by the huge impact that World War One has on this building. Of all the English wars, and all of the millions of people that have been killed in them while Minster has been standing, why is this conflict writ so large on the fabric of this and other national monuments? Why does it get a whole wall?

Perhaps it’s the existential crisis that World War One represented. The confidence and optimism of the late 19th century – the idea that we’d reached the end of history, that science, industry, technology and commerce would liberate us all and prove that this Europe was the high water mark of human civilisation – gave way to the horror of technology and science being employed to kill seventeen million people, maim a further twenty million, and end the European domination of the world order. For the first time in warfare, bodies were completely obliterated, turned in to red mist by artillery shells. Conscripted soldiers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, witnessed battlefields strewn with dismembered limbs, had their lungs filled with poisonous chemicals and watched as machine guns killed twenty thousand British men on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. While the top brass sat miles behind the front lines in well appointed chateaux ordering the sacrifice of more and more men. These newly crystallised class tensions were then brought back home to England.

The nexus of ideas that made imperialism palatable – that Europe was ‘civilising’ whole swathes of Africa, because science proved that they were superior, and that our leaders knew what they were doing, lay in ruins. Political and social revolutions abounded, the old order and its ideological underpinning lay in tatters, and the men and women of Europe had to build a new world. How? Nothing made any sense any more. DH Lawrence was part of a generation of artists who tried to imagine what might come next. 

In the mid-twenties, he began work on a novel which began: 

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road in to the future: but we go round and scramble over obstacles. We’ve got to live no matter how many skies have fallen”. 

This novel became Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And rather like the Great War itself, this novel remains vividly, troublingly alive in the national consciousness. It stands as one of its most enduring monuments.

I re-read the novel in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the novel’s opening paragraph was like being hit by an arrow. I started sketching out ideas for a stage adaptation. It seemed to be preaching urgently to my generation of thirty-somethings who grew up in the eighties. We also thought that we’d reached the end of history. We thought that international capitalism was a force for good, and that it was going to civilise the world. We assumed our wars were just wars, that we should export our way of life at the barrel of a gun. We believed in the catechism that markets were a natural force that represented natural differences between humans; that, in essence, all political decisions were economic ones responding to the natural rhythms of global capitalism. We could justify the pain caused by the closure of British Industry because the economic model ‘didn’t work’, markets did not deem it efficient. And that despite the grousing of the British working class, the only solution was to ‘get on your bike, mate’. Our participation in the injustices of capitalism could be justified because we were on the road to somewhere. Consumption (greed) had a moral force. 

2008 demonstrated all of that to be hooey. 

All economic decisions it turned out were political. As in they relied on a philosophical leap of faith. When the economic model of the rich was found demonstrably not to be working, were they told to get on their bike? On the contrary. They were bailed out to the tune of nearly 1.2 trillion pounds. Class tensions crystallised and hardened. Riots in 2011. Brexit in 2016. All that our religious consumption has done is to leave the planet teetering on the edge of ecological disaster. Here we are on the other side of our very own ‘cataclysm’. 

There aren’t millions dead in fields in France, but a generation of young people is thrown on the economic scrapheap, futures are torched, forests are torched, while faceless oligarchs stockpile fortunes in grotesquely unequal ratios. It turns out it was a rigged game all along. A sense of lying among the ruins of our civilisation abounds. The philosophical underpinning to our way of life has collapsed, it turns out that greed wasn’t good in the end. No-one really preaches about capitalism in utopian terms any more, just mumble about it being a least worse option while crossing their fingers that something worse isn’t just around the corner; all the while peddling black fantasies about threats to our way of life. 

It seems there’s many striking parallels between Lawrence’s England and our own. On re-reading the novel, it seemed that every other page offered a searing j’accuse to our times as well as his own, some passionate invocation to sort it out. “We’ve got to become alive and aware” says a broken Oliver Mellors towards the end of the novel. “Especially the English have got to get in touch with each other, be a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need”. I thought about that line a lot on the morning after the referendum result. I thought it a lot as I wrote the adaptation.

I liked the idea of two naked bodies on a stage, vulnerable, imperfect, beautiful, absurd, ordinary. I loved the idea that the first time they had sex that it wasn’t too successful, but it was lovely because of that very fact. I loved their delicate little lies to one another given like gifts. I loved the idea as sex as metaphor for national regeneration. Female Constance, a sensual aristocrat. Male Mellors, a sensual vassal with his banal little male orgasms. Sex as communion and forgiveness. A sex scene where the authorial gaze wasn’t controlled through the lens of a camera. No soaring strings or sleazy saxophones or plaintiff pianos. 

How innocent mainstream cinema of the eighties felt with its occasional sex scene vaseline round the lens and silhouettes and Take My Breath Away by Berlin. It doesn’t need to be there now. All that stuff’s a click away for us to consume alone. Where to ‘fuck’ becomes to ‘ruin’, becomes to ‘destroy’; where ‘cunt’ is miles from ‘the beauty of thee lass’. I suspect Lawrence would laugh at the idea that ‘everything is so open now’ while we cower, atomised, touching no-one but ourselves behind computer screens. As our unruly and unbiddable sexual desire is expelled from our bodies, like our natural energy on running machines, cocooned in the sound of our iPods.

For Lawrence, England would be saved by tenderness (‘Tenderness’ was the working title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover), touch and “tender hearted fucking”. The way sex and bodies are treated in the novel has to be viewed through the lens of the Great War. The butchery of the bodies on the Somme, the ubiquitous death, is luminously present in the image of Constance’s “strange eurythmic movements” as she dances naked in the rain, in their new Eden. As the working man Mellors fills the womb the of bourgeoise Constance with new life. The future for Constance and Oliver’s baby would be shaped by the tenderness of its parents. Will they have the courage to build this new England? We are given cautious hope at the end of the novel. 

In an age of ‘post-truth’ politics, where we’re ‘sick of experts’, where emotion is king, Lawrence offers us emotions other than fear. In the aftermath of the Great War, he urgently preached tenderness and vulnerability and the sanctity of every human body. So much harder to participate in the worst excesses of capitalism with this idea front and centre in our national consciousness. So much harder to assent to bombing people. Politics / traffic / the economy / social media / the reason this bar is so fucking rammed is down to other people. We’re somehow not part of it. Lawrence puts the power to build a new Eden, in England, in our hands. It’s very liberating. And it might be the finest act of remembrance.

© Phillip Breen