LAWRENCE, David Herbert (1885-1930)

LAWRENCE, David Herbert (1885-1930)

Autograph letter signed “DH Lawrence” to George Conway
Hôtel Beau Rivage, Bandol, 29th December 1928, 2 p. in-8°, with envelope
Some tiny ink stains, old paperclip mark on top left margin

Great letter from DH Lawrence about his scandalous book Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Dear Conway,
I am most distressed to learn that your copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have not turned up. They were sent by registered book post long ago – and surely the Mexican govt. would not confiscate them, as the U.S.A. customs do! I will ask Orioli to send you the registration counterfoil, to see if you can trace them. If not you must have others, if any remain. Orioli has very few, I know – they may be all ordered. But one at least I’ll rescue for you. But we must find out what became of the others. The book is selling at $50. in USA- and anything over £5. here in Europe – so you see it is quite a loss.
Your Christmas card came this morning too – and how pretty it is! – and I had a little book from you which I thought was charming.
We have given up the Villa Mirenda, and are at a bit of loose end, wondering where to go and where to live next. I think in about a fortnight we shall go to Spain, and try that. But we might go to New Mexico for the summer, so if ever you are passing, make sure first if we are there and do stop and see us if we are. – I was ill last year but I am much better now and getting to be myself again. Some people were much scandalized by Lady C. but many took it in the right spirit, and remain staunch to me. I do hope you’ll get your copies, and will read it and not be shocked – Mrs Conway too. We have lived too long to be shocked by words any more.
How are you both? I think of you often, and quake sometimes for you, seeing the Mexican news. But you’ll go on forever, I feel, running those trams and deciphering Spanish MS.
Very many greetings from us both
D.H. Lawrence”

When Lawrence and his wife Frieda arrived in Bandol on November 17, 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been off the presses of Florence for less than a year. Written in 1927 in the same city, at the Villa Mirenda, the novel was banned from sale in the United Kingdom on the grounds of “obscene publication”: The explicit erotic scenes, the vocabulary considered crude and the difference in social class between the lovers (a worker and an aristocrat) are as many reasons for the censors to have it banned from publication. The “illicit edition” sold on the black market then met with great success. On January 18, 1929, Lawrence learned from Laurence Pollinger (his literary agent) that 18 books of Lady Chatterly’s Lover had been seized in the United Kingdom. The ban affects the novelist who can only observe and suffer this narrow-minded decision from his native country. It was not until 1960, 30 years after Lawrence’s death, that the book was allowed to be published in the United Kingdom.

George Robert Graham Conway and his wife, Anne Elizabeth, were among D.H. Lawrence’s close friends. They met in New Mexico in 1925. Conway was an engineer specializing in the railroad industry and a great collector of documents relating to Spanish colonization in America.