Scandal

Autographed letter signed "DH Lawrence" to George Conway, Hôtel Beau Rivage, Bandol, December 29, 1928, 2 pages, in-8°, in English. Autographed envelope, stamped and postmarked. A few tiny ink smudges, a very small stain that does not affect the text, old paperclip mark.

A rare letter from the writer concerning his scandalous novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover." "We started making love in 1963, between the end of the 'Chatterley censorship' and the first Beatles record" (Philip Larkin). "Dear Conway, I am distressed to learn that your copies of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' have not reached you. They were sent by registered mail a long time ago - and the Mexican government surely would not confiscate them, as the US customs would!

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, it seems to me - they can all be ordered. But at least I will keep one for you. We need to find out what happened to the others. Here in Europe - you see, it is quite a loss. Your Christmas card arrived this morning too - and how pretty it is!

- I also received a little book from you that I found charming. We have given up the Villa Mirenda, and are a bit at a loss, 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.

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. We have lived too long to be shocked by words anymore. 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 manuscripts. Very many greetings from us both. Lawrence and his wife Frieda arrived in Bandol on November 17, 1928. "Lady Chatterley's Lover" had been off the press in Florence for less than a year. Written in 1927 in the same city, at the Villa Mirenda, the novel was banned for sale in the UK on the grounds of "obscene publication": explicit erotic scenes, language deemed vulgar, and the class difference between the lovers (a worker and an aristocrat) were all reasons for censors to prohibit its publication.

The edition was in fact sold underground. On January 18, 1929, Lawrence learned from his agent Laurence Pollinger that 18 copies of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" had been seized in the UK. The ban affected the novelist deeply.

Suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, he passed away a year later, on March 2, 1930. It wasn't until 1960, 30 years after his death, that the work was allowed publication in the UK. George Robert Graham Conway and his wife, Anne Elizabeth, are among the English friends of the writer. They met him in New Mexico in 1925. Conway, an engineer specialized in the railway transport industry, was one of the greatest collectors of his time of documents on the Spanish colonization of America.