The Chatterley affair: was Rebecca West a double agent in the battle for free speech?

On October 27, 1960, Rebecca West was en route to the Old Bailey, gripping her hat in the gusts and clutching a banned paperback. She was about to give evidence in the new decade’s showstopper of a trial: Regina v Penguin Books. For which side?

You might well ask.

Penguin was being brought to book for its latest book: a paperback of the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D H Lawrence’s explicit 1928 novel, the story of Lady C’s extra-marital affair with gamekeeper Oliver Mellors. For the price of 10 cigarettes, Lawrence’s final novel, as he intended it, would be affordable to all, and not only to gentlemen with private libraries. Therein lay the risk.

Heads turned as the “star witness” for the defence, Dame Rebecca West, entered the packed court, wearing a black woollen dress, a double-strand of beads, and large clip-on earrings. Few knew that, at the solicitors’ table, Michael Rubinstein, Penguin’s lawyer, had grounds for concern.

That autumn, Penguin was determined to release the complete Chatterley to Lawrence’s countrymen and women. Its author had published it privately before dying, aged 44, of tuberculosis. He ended his days abroad, under threat of arrest by Scotland Yard for his distribution of “obscenity” through the Royal Mail.

He’d called it his “bomb” of a book. Not only did the shrapnel of his four-letter words, lovingly spoken by Mellors, take lumps out of polite society, the depiction of an upper-class woman choosing her husband’s gamekeeper over her paralysed, war-hero, aristo husband threatened to blow open the status quo.

Lawrence believed the body was the source of “life-force”, “blood-consciousness” and “soul”. In one scene, Connie Chatterley turns a distinctly female gaze upon Mellors’ nudity and is profoundly moved by the sight. Here, sex is the great leveller, and one’s wife might not be the Angel in the House. She might crave sexual-emotional fulfilment – not to mention outdoor coupling and flowers in her pubic hair.

Penguin’s postbags were fat with public outrage. The possibility of a prison sentence for publisher Allen Lane was not ruled out. Suspicions and “intelligence” reports swirled.

Novelist, feminist and political writer, West was, in 1960, a force. As G B Shaw once noted with pithy understatement, she “could handle a pen”. Somerset Maugham ventured that no writer “could hold a candle” to her. In her youth, West had been the radical thinker and lover – not merely the muse – of H G Wells: “I never met anything like her before…”. Her 1918 groundbreaking debut, The Return of the Soldier, offered a powerful portrait of shellshock, and evoked the surreal tragedy of her generation’s war: “‘Help me, old man… I’ve got no legs…’ – ‘I can’t, old man, I’ve got no hands…’”.

She was a single mother by 21, and a committed Fabian until she lost faith in socialism, seeing women excluded from trade union top tables, and the Left increasingly galvanised by Communism. In her childhood, her father had befriended refugee revolutionaries from Soviet Russia – an introduction to totalitarianism, which left a deep impression. Yet, as the Nazi threat loomed, West also decried the Right for its policy of appeasement.

A remarkable body of fiction followed West’s debut, but her masterpiece came in 1941 with Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a non-fiction opus of Yugoslav history and ethnography, with rich seams of myth, psychology, metaphysics, storytelling and political analysis. In 1946, she reported for The Daily Telegraph from the Nuremberg trials. In 1959, she was awarded a DBE for her services as a writer and critic.

West enjoyed an extensive network of distinguished contacts, including friends in the Foreign Office. She socialised with Allen Dulles, director of the CIA. By the early 1950s, she was tracking the anti-Communist investigations in Washington, and refused, notoriously, to join the outcry against McCarthyism. Friend and attorney Sir Theobald Mathew mocked her, privately, as “the high-priestess of Anti-Communism”. On and off the page, she had an abiding interest in matters of loyalty, justice, treason and betrayal.

West was 27 when she met Lawrence in Florence for the first and last time. On that spring day in 1921, she was “entranced”. He was 35 and “opaque white” with TB. On their walk, he “bent over a filemot-coloured flower”,’ she recalled, “and his face grew nearly as tender as a mother bending over her child”. She felt brilliantly alive in his company.

Upon his death in 1930, West was shocked by the obituaries “in which not only was the homage due from the living to the dead genius meanly denied, but the courtesy paid to any corpse was so far as possible withheld.” She blamed Chatterley. “He laid sex and those base words for it on the salver of his art.” Yet she remained loyal: “people like myself are infinitely lesser than Lawrence.”

Why then was her reply to Rubinstein’s request for courtroom support cagey? She claimed her “informants” said Lawrence never wanted the full Chatterley published in Britain. Rubinstein told her that was “inconceivable”. He added, “You will know only too well what an embarrassing position I am placed in with my only information on the matter of this importance in effect anonymous.” Might the claim be “a rumour put in circulation by someone on the other side”?

It was a reasonable question: the DPP was none other than Sir Theobald Mathew, West’s friend and attorney.
West replied hastily: her sources could not “conceivably have any connection with the persons responsible for the prosecution”, and “I think that we had better let the matter drop.” Did these informants exist, or was West uneasy at the prospect of public support for the liberal cause of the year?

She was dedicated to “law and order”, a faith she shared, directly, with J. Edgar Hoover. In 1959, he wrote to congratulate her on her DBE. She replied warmly. According to West’s biographer Carl Rollyson, her FBI file shows that, as early as 1951, she was supplying information to the Bureau and meeting with its London attaché.

West did not believe the liberal-left could counter Communist and fascist incursions. She believed the world needed strong authorities, such as the FBI and Hoover. Hoover and the FBI, however, did not believe the world needed Lady Chatterley. FBI records document its disapproval. The Bureau even offered assistance from afar to Sir Toby’s prosecuting team.
In the end, West’s deep sense of loyalty meant she stepped up to defend both Lawrence and his novel. She gave a superb, if blunt, performance: “A lot of pages in this book are… ludicrous”. But the novel was “a calling, a return of the soul to [a] more intense life”. Vast populations “have lost touch with real life” and therefore can “be taken in any direction… of evil by their obedience to leaders such as Hitler. Lawrence was talking about something quite real.”

Rubinstein wrote to thank her, remarking on the hypocrisy – “almost perversion” – of the prosecution in bringing such a case. Dame Rebecca replied with a rebuke.

Lawrence’s original title for Chatterley was Tenderness. My new novel, Tenderness, follows the story of his “bomb”, his “bright book of life”, from creation to suppression to liberation, offering a lens on the 20th century itself. It also points forward to our century, to today’s questions of censorship, artistic freedom, sexual freedom, surveillance, and the fragility of liberal democracy. In Tenderness, defence witness West has, essentially, a cameo role, but she stands for the complex, contradictory spirit of her times.

No wonder Warren Beatty cast her, two years before her death, in his 1981 film Reds as a “witness” to history. Yet, unlike her appearance in Reds, her star-turn at the 1960 trial ended without applause or flashbulbs. On the evening of the Penguin celebration, West sent a telegram to Allen Lane, crying off: ‘“MANY REGRETS CANNOT COME TONIGHT FOGBOUND”.

Tenderness by Alison Macleod is published on September 14. To To order from the Telegraph, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514