My mother lent me her copy of Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence when I was 16. She told me all about it before I read it; she told me about Lawrence's turbulent childhood, that his father was a coal miner who could be abusive at times. His mother, a frightful snob, considered herself "a lady," was "cultured," and read a lot. She loaded the heavy weight of her frustration onto the young backs of her sons. They were never "going down into the pit;" they would be gentlemen. They would "carry her color," as knights used to do for their ladies.

I love DH Lawrence for being fiery, painfully honest, a master craftsman, a seer of souls, a planet like Jupiter who attracted many moons into its orbit. Women and men were helplessly drawn to him and sometimes shed their identities when Lawrence set his powerful gaze upon them. Because after spending intimate time with these adoring men and women, Lawrence could and did use these people, spitefully it seemed, as sometimes selfish and foolish characters in his novels and short stories.

The image of Lawrence as a writer of dirty books still lingers. Mud got thrown at him and some of it still sticks. But here is the most important fact to remember about Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is not a book about sex. Physical love-making is part of the language of the book; however in reality Lady Chatterley's Lover is the best anti-war and anti-establishment novel ever written.
Preoccupation with the love-making that takes place between Connie and Mellors reveals that we are as hung up as Lawrence always said we were! We have, as a backdrop to the story, the coal mines and Wragby Hall where Clifford Chatterley's family reigned for generations. The Chatterley family owned the mines. The mines were Lawrence's own "establishment," and World War I was the "war" that he hated so much that it literally drove him insane for a time. Take a look back into the dusty years of that war and you will learn that the great minds of that time, Einstein for one, bitterly opposed WWI. Lady Chatterley's Lover is Lawrence, with all his strength, "giving the war and the establishment the finger" as far up as he could shove it. It was the last novel he wrote before dying at the age of 45, and the only one of Lawrence's where a pregnancy, an expected baby not even born, crowns the ending.

Lawrence has been my guide through the most miserable times of my life. Once, during the year after my father died, I never went anywhere without my ragged copy of St. Mawr and The Man Who Died. They are two novellas; the first, St. Mawr, is about a woman who finds more soul satisfaction and tranquillity in what transpires between the fiery St. Mawr, the stallion, and herself--the other is Lawrence's own treatise on Christianity's great story of betrayal, death, and ressurection.

When I worked as a counselor and visited people in their homes, I had a family where the father committed suicide and the eldest boy, nine years old, discovered his father's body hanging from the ceiling of the garage. What could I say to even approach this child and his family? The only thing the boy liked to do was play a certain video game, and he played it for hours, over and over. One day I sat beside him on the couch and I told him my story of losing my father and reading the same book, over and over, and carrying it with me everywhere. What would Lawrence say? I hope he would like me for saying it to this boy; Lawrence was and always would be of the working class and I think he would like knowing that his work had practical use.