the jolly roger
he intended as ‘honest and healthy’. ‘A Propos’ contains some truly memorable passages, such as ‘I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly’ or (and this one I particularly like) ‘Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after gamekeepers for lovers’ (to which he added – and you can almost see the wry smile on his face – ‘Far be it from me to suggest that they should be running after anybody’). But what exercised Lawrence in the essay just as much as the mysteries of sexual fidelity and infidelity was the pirating of his book . By the end of the 1920s he was the celebrated author of Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922) as well as of short story collections such as ‘The Prussian O Y cer and other Stories’ (1914). His publisher Martin Secker feared that publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a step too far: it would lead to prosecution, with damaging consequences for his publishing business. 1 Lawrence was scornful. In March 1928 he wrote to his agent, Pollinger, ‘Of course Secker is a born rabbit 2 ...dammit, do you think the young are going to knock their knees together at the sound of the word penis , in terror! What rot! My novel is perfectly normal, and the phallic part of it is, or should be, part of every man’s life and every woman’s.’ He defied any human being to find Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘ anything but wholesome and natural,’ adding, ‘but the printer is already printing here – and I’ve made my favourite design of the phoenix rising from the nest in flames, for the cover. I nearly put the motto ‘I rise up’ under the bird. But he who runs may read. Avanti!’ A little later he wrote to Secker that his book was ‘frankly a novel about sex, direct sex. I think it’s good, but you may not like it’. He was right, Secker didn’t. Lawrence therefore turned to a friend of his, an Italian bookseller and bibliophile called Pino 1 . Secker was from a German immigrant family and had been born Percy Martin Secker Klingender. The publishing industry in Britain at that time was still quite rigid, socially. Secker, who had published Lawrence’s first book, New Poems , in 1918, was right to feel nervous. 2 . ‘The same could not be said for Lawrence’s publisher in the United States, Thomas Seltzer, who was forced into bankruptcy by his struggles against censorship. He almost worshipped Lawrence and ‘would not let his wife touch Lawrence’s letters without washing her hands.’ (Keith Sagar, The Life of D.H. Lawrence , p. 149)
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