When Field & Stream Reviewed Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a famous or infamous erotic novel by D.H. Lawrence. He published it privately in 1928. It was banned in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and other nations as obscene. It was scandalous for not only its sexual content (or so I've been told; I've never read it), but because it upended class norms by depicting an affair between an upper-class woman and the lower-class gamekeeper who worked at her estate.

In 1959, the US Supreme Court ruled that the law banning the novel violated the First Amendment to the Constitution. That same year, Field & Stream, an American magazine about hunting and fishing, reviewed Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is, after all, a novel about gamekeeping. Ed Zern wrote the brief review:

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.

Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

Ed Zern, a humorist, is being facetious: there is no such book as Miller's Practical Gamekeeping. But it would make sense that much of Lawrence's novel contains scenes that are extraneous to the needs of hunters.

-via Travis J. I. Corcoran


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Probably not then, John, but later I put that one in the spire of an antique church down in town being used as a health food store, got a phone line, and connected a Radio Shack answering machine that I'd broken to not time out but remain connected live until a caller hung up. The outgoing message ID'd the station with its funny name (Radio *Free Earth, 88.1) and that was that. I did barefaced publicity with posters on bulletin boards and stories in a couple of the local little free papers. People called and read poetry. A little boy miles inland, too far for the signal to even reach him, set up a deejay trip and did a regular show. A bass player called every day and practiced into his phone, and so on, and in between calls, dead air. It ran for exactly a month, day and night, unattended, harming no-one, interfering with no other stations nor aircraft, until someone somewhere heard something he or she didn't like and complained to the FCC, which sent an agent named Weller all the way up from San Francisco to find it and shut it off. He complimented me on my design and workmanship and let me keep everything as a memento with my promise not to power it up again, but the wheels of justice ground and I eventually had to pay a $400 fine for broadcasting on the FM band without a license. Totally worth it.
One more thing-- I almost forgot: While the project was running, a nervous, wiry, surly little man with scars like a baseball seam on his burr-shaved head showed up one day in the restaurant where I was cooking. He claimed to be from NBC. I answered his questions, and he scoffed and left.
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Back in the middle 1980s when I was making little homemade radio projects, I tested transmitters with a scratchy LP record of actors reading from Lady Chatterly's Lover. I'd connect the antenna, turn on the transmitter, put Side 1 or Side 2 on the turntable, and drive around to see how far I could go before the car radio couldn't pull it in anymore. The main line that comes to mind now from that is where the narrator (as L-C's L) says, "What, you think a woman is soft like a fig down there? But I tell you the old rampers have /teeth/ between their legs." And then something with a peeved growl in his voice about how "They like to grind their own coffee."
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