by A. N. Wilson
By a strange conjunction, monetarist economic policies conjoined with the psychiatric fad of the times, namely that the mentally ill (many of them) did not need residential care. From this was a short step to believing they did not need care at all, or that labelling one person mad and another sane was purely arbitrary.
The most famous charlatan to espouse the anti-psychiatric claptrap in Britain was R. D. Laing (1927–89). The son of working-class Presbyterians, he was born in Glasgow, and, clever product of the grammar school, studied medicine at Glasgow University. His interest in psychological medicine had begun in the army, where he worked in psychiatric units, and in 1956 he joined the Tavistock Clinic in London and himself underwent analysis. From 1962 to 1965 he established a therapeutic clinic at Kingsley Hall, where patients and doctors lived together, and where he experimented with the use of LSD. This group experiment was very much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Critique de la Raison Dialectique was a key text for Laing14 and which influenced Laing’s own bestseller The Divided Self (1960), which sold 400,000 copies in paperback in Britain alone. He openly encouraged female patients to sleep with him, and the ‘clinic’ at Kingsley Hall more resembled a brothel run by lunatics than it did a place of healing.
Laing attacked not only the distinction between madness and sanity, and not only the use of restraint or pharmaceuticals to calm psychotic patients. Much more radically, he attacked any notion of mutual responsibility in relationships. He saw families, or ‘family ghettoes’ as he called them, as a mutual protection racket. Any human relationship which contained within it the anticipation of exchange–whether from wife and husband, parent and child–he regarded as a confidence trick. The only sort of relationship he seemed to sanction was that of worship (frequently turning to hatred) lavished upon him by his female patients. The difficult thing to grasp about Laing, when he is viewed from the safe distance of several decades, is that he was hugely influential. Peter Sedgwick, author of Psycho Politics, wrote in 1982, ‘It is only four years since I walked into a gathering of 30 or 40 postgraduate trainees in social work, to introduce them to two parents of schizophrenic children, both of them activists with me in a local pressure group for the welfare of schizophrenia sufferers. Much to the surprise of the parents and myself, this audience of social-work trainees directed a barrage of hostile questions and comments at us. Was not psychiatric diagnosis just a matter of labelling awkward people, just like in Russia.15
Laing was the prophet, but he was telling the generation now coming to adulthood what they wished to hear. Apollo was dead and Dionysus, with his whooping maenads, had taken control of the madhouse. His own childhood, during which he was beaten by a fierce mother who wanted to keep him from other children, had been replicated throughout Britain across the class system. Privately educated children were caned for the smallest offence, or no offence at all; working-class children were walloped. Discipline, during a period of austerity when there were few toys and food was in short supply, had been repressive to a degree. Laing was one of the prophets who led the way from this bondage to a promised land where there were no rules, no restraints, no commitments; and where all the old rights became wrongs. ‘We are the fallen Sons of Prophecy’, he told his disciplines, ‘who have learned to die in the Spirit and be reborn in the Flesh.’16
If Laing was the Prophet of this first wave of the Age of Self-Indulgence, Sylvia Plath (1932–63) was its Martyr-Saint. Her short life story provided a Hammer Horrors version of the old Henry James theme, the American girl lured into the moral ambiguities of Old Europe. Born to academic parents, Plath attended Smith College, where she had already begun to write poems and stories. She won a Fulbright Scholarship which took her to Newnham College, Cambridge, and it was while in Cambridge that she met a young poet who had lately graduated, Ted Hughes (1930–98). They met in March 1956, and married that June, and were to have six intense years and two children together. He was a tall Heathcliff Yorkshireman, craggy-faced, instantly overpoweringly attractive to women, and incapable, throughout life, of monogamy. She, to all outward appearances, was a pretty, dyed-blonde American Hausfrau of (paternally) German origin. One who met her at this time likened her to a girl in the soap and deodorant advertisements of the 1940s and 1950s.17 Their friend Al Alvarez recollected, ‘Before my second marriage, I had an Australian girlfriend, who knew Ted, and she told me that when she first set eyes on him her knees went weak. “He looked like Jack Palance in Shane,” she said. And I knew another woman, a psychoanalyst, who had such a strong reaction when she first met Ted–she told me this many years later–that she actually went to the bathroom and vomited.’18 Plath was often silent in company. It was only after her melodramatic departure from this world, and the posthumous publication of her Journals, and her violent volume of poems, Ariel, that the nature of her turbulent imagination came to be known to the world. She was preternaturally possessive and jealous. ‘Who knows who Ted’s next book will be dedicated to? His navel. His penis.’19 After one row, ‘I had a sprained thumb, Ted bloody claw-marks for a week, and I remember hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars–for the first time–blinding red and white stars exploding the black void of snarls and bitings…I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself–or I know it now–even kill another.’20
Before she first came to England, Plath had attempted suicide, and had a history of psycho-troubles. When Hughes fell in love with another woman, Assia Wevill, he and Plath separated. Hughes took a small flat in London, while remaining in their Devon farmhouse. Plath took a two-floor duplex flat in the house in 23 Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, which had once been the London residence of W. B. Yeats.
Not since 1947 had Britain known such a snow-bound, frozen winter as that of 1962–63. Alvarez described it:
The snow began just after Christmas and would not let up. By New Year the whole country had ground to a halt. The trains froze on the tracks, the abandoned trucks froze on the roads. The power stations, overloaded by million upon pathetic million of hopeless electric fires, broke down continually; not that the fires mattered, since the electricians were mostly out on strike. Water pipes froze solid; for a bath you had to scheme and cajole those rare friends with centrally heated houses, who became rarer and less friendly as the weeks dragged on. Doing the dishes became a major operation. The gastric rumble of water in outmoded plumbing was sweeter than the sound of mandolins. Weight for weight, plumbers were as expensive as smoked salmon and harder to find. The gas failed and Sunday roasts were raw. The lights failed and candles, of course, were unobtainable. Nerves failed and marriages crumbled. Finally, the heart failed. It seemed the cold would never end. Nag, nag, nag.21
It was in this cold spell, on 11 February 1963, that Sylvia Plath left a tray of bread and milk in the bedroom of her children, Frieda, almost three, and Nicholas, one. She went into the kitchen and folded a cloth inside the gas oven on which she laid her head. Alvarez maintained that she had intended the suicide to fail. She left a note with the name and telephone of her doctor, John Horder. The nanny who arrived to look after the children on Monday morning was unable to get into the flat, however, and Plath’s downstairs neighbour, Trevor Thomas, had been knocked out by the gas, though he survived.22
In Hughes’s view, or at least the view he developed with hindsight (written in 1986), ‘the key factor in Sylvia’s death, the mechanical factor, was the tranquiliser drug that was being administered to her by Dr Horder. Accounts of her death regularly find no place for this detail, which seems to me fairly important. In the diaries, she describes the terrible interval that came regularly between the point where one pill lost its effect and the next pill took hold–the matter of two hours which fell in the early morning. After her death, I learned from her mother that this particular drug had been tried on S., during her recovery from her first suicide attempt, and that it induced such an extreme suicidal reacti
on, in the gap between doses, that S.’s mother was warned never to allow it to be given to S. under any circumstances. Dr Horder knew nothing about this.’23
Assia Wevill had a daughter, Shura, by Hughes. When that relationship went wrong, Wevill, in imitation of Plath, took her own life, but unlike Plath, she took her daughter with her, murdering the child with sleeping pills before she killed herself.
It did not take long for Plath to be canonised in the campuses, first of America and then of Britain. She became in death what she had not been in life, a feminist and a man-hater. Her extraordinary poems became, for many of her shrill admirers, anti-male manifestos–‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’, as she concluded one of the finest poems of our age.24 Like Yeats in Auden’s poem, Plath’s gift survived it all, as did, eventually, Hughes’s, though for most of his life he carried the burden not only of his private guilt and grief, and his concern for his children, but also the hatred of a whole generation of women who used Plath as a religious focus for their pent-up feelings of rage. The Hausfrau in the soap and deodorant ads had reached for her dagger. It was as if Lucille Ball had suddenly been cast as Medea or Lady Macbeth.
Suicide as a way out of misery will always remain an option for some. And yet, from the year of Plath’s death until 1977, suicides were reduced by one-third in England and Wales. This very remarkable statistic was no coincidence. It was largely the responsibility of one heroic individual, a clergyman called Chad Varah (1911–2007). Varah was ordained in 1935, and one of his early tasks, as a curate at St Giles’s, Lincoln, was to conduct a funeral in unconsecrated ground, since the dead person was a suicide. It was a thirteen-year-old girl who had killed herself because she had started to bleed between the legs and had thought she was suffering a terrible disease which she could not bring herself to talk about. When the mourners had left, Varah stared at her open grave, and said, ‘Little girl, I never knew you, but you have changed my life. I promise you, that I will teach children what they need to know about sex, even if I get called a dirty old man.’25 As vicar of St Paul’s, Clapham Junction, he heard that there were three suicides a day in London, and he determined to do something about it. He became the vicar of the beautiful Wren church of St Stephen’s Walbrook, in the City of London, a position which gave him in effect a sinecure. It was from this place, which had few parochial duties and no Sunday services, that he was able to launch his life’s work. On 1 November 1953, with the memorable telephone number MAN 9000, he launched what was originally called the Good Samaritans, a helpline for the suicidal. Soon calls were coming in at a rate of one hundred a day. Volunteers were trained, and there was a strict rule that they were not allowed to attempt to convert any caller to any religious or philosophical viewpoint. They were listeners. He was married (to the world President of the Mother’s Union) and he had five children. As well as working with the suicidal he gave himself to the related task of sex therapy. He was a man of his time, and his thinking evolved. In the 1960s, he was still advising homosexuals to meet a sufficiently pretty girl and perhaps undergo psychotherapy in order to be ‘cured’. By the time he retired in 2003, he combined liturgical conservatism, loving the Prayer Book order of 1928, with heterodox opinions. (He was a firm believer, for example, in reincarnation.) He wrote for the sex magazine Forum, and he was a defence witness during the Linda Lovelace obscenity trial in the 1970s. When cross-examined by a barrister who reminded him of the Seventh Commandment, Varah replied, ‘Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?’26 When one thinks of all the damage, some of it intentional, which is inflicted upon the world by politicians, it is refreshing to remember the life of Chad Varah, whose wisdom and kindness can be measured in terms of the dramatic decline in the suicide statistics during the time that the Samaritans began their work.
8
Lady Chatterley and Honest to God
Old Britain was a restricted place, where it was not possible to print, or say, or perform, anything you chose. The Britain coming to birth was a place which took it for granted that Freedom of Expression was not merely an inalienable right, but also one which had been around forever. Yet the Lord Chamberlain, in the first decade of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, still decreed what could or could not be performed on the stage, just as he had done in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Obscenity, a notoriously difficult thing to define, could be prosecuted, and sometimes was, as when Radclyffe Hall’s harmless, and ungraphic, account of lesbian love had been condemned in 1928.
The case that made everyone realise the climate had changed, utterly and irrevocably, was that of Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd, heard in October 1960 at the Old Bailey. For some years, Roy Jenkins, Antony Lambton, Hugh Fraser, A. P. Herbert, Lord Birkett and others had been campaigning for a change in the Obscenity Laws, and in 1959 Roy Jenkins’s Private Members’ Bill was finally forced through Parliament and became law. This killed the Common Law which referred to ‘Obscene Libel’ and required the court, in a case of prosecution, to consider the book ‘as a whole’. There could be no conviction if ‘it is proved that publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern’.1
The Director of Public Prosecutions, since 1944, had been Sir Theobald Mathew (1898–1964). As the new Jenkins law was being drafted, Mathew had been summoned to inform the relevant Select Committee at the House of Commons. He recorded that he strongly disapproved of his department being placed in a position ‘of being a censor of novels or other literary publications’. Mathew is usually cast as a villain by contemporary historians. Under his watch as DPP, for example, there was a colossal increase of prosecution of homosexuals. In the years 1940–44 (the year of Mathew’s appointment) 1,631 men were prosecuted in ‘cases of Unnatural Offences and Indecency with other males’. With Mathew in charge, the number of prosecutions rose to 2,814 in the next four-year period, and so on upwards in a steady spiral curve. In 1952 alone 5,425 men were prosecuted. Investigating the reasons for the sudden increase, Harford Montgomery Hyde, MP for North Belfast and author of Other Love, noted that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Nott-Bower was from 1953 particularly zealous in the application of the law. ‘It is easier and incidentally safer and less troublesome to catch a homosexual than a burglar,’ Hyde noted.2 But he also felt constrained to mention that Sir Theobald Mathew was ‘a devout and conscientious Catholic’.3 One can’t blame Mathew alone for attitudes which seem, from the perspective of a later age, not merely cruel but positively bizarre. After all, Lord Dawson of Penn, President of the Royal College of Physicians and physician in ordinary to every king since Edward VII, told the House of Lords, in July 1937, ‘I am not at all sure that in the future it may not be regarded as an insufficiency disease…The more reasonable view is gradually being accepted that it…has one foot in the realm of disease and it is not wholly in the realm of crime.’ Sir Theobald Mathew was not alone in his belief that it was a good idea to persecute homosexuals, nor in his view, once the Roy Jenkins bill had become law in 1959, that it was his job as Director of Public Prosecutions to suppress ‘feelthy’ literature.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it is pretty generally agreed, was precisely the sort of book the Jenkins Act had hoped to protect from the philistine attentions of police and lawyers. It was transparently a book of aching seriousness, and the love affair which takes place between the wife of an impotent ‘toff’ and her earthy gamekeeper is one of the things, but not the only thing, in the book which demonstrates Lawrence’s creed, which was essentially that of the great Victorian moralists Carlyle and Ruskin: namely, industrialised society, and modern ‘values’, had corrupted people, and that in order to find their true selves they needed to return to nature, and also (a detail more appealing to Lawrence than to Carlyle, it must be said) explore the unashamed enjoyment of sex. But the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, likes to use the word ‘fuck’ and it was this fact, quit
e apart from the number of times he indulges in the activity with her ladyship, which offended not merely the Director of Public Prosecutions, but also the Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (nicknamed Bullying-Manner by Bernard Levin and said to be the original of Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool).
So it was that when Penguin Books, who had published all D. H. Lawrence’s work hitherto, boldly published the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley, they were prosecuted. The senior Treasury Counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC, represented the Crown, and in his opening speech to the jury, before a single witness had been called, he lost his case. ‘You may think that one of the ways in which you can test this book, and test it from the most liberal outlook, is to ask yourselves the question, when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters–because girls can read as well as boys–reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house?’ The clumsy assurance that girls could be as literate as boys was bad enough. But he went on, drawing audible and of course unintended laughter from the jury–‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’4
For the next five days, a succession of worthies from the literary and academic worlds appeared in court, to be coaxed by the intelligent defence counsels–Gerald Gardiner QC and Jeremy Hutchinson QC–to defend Lady Chatterley, or D. H. Lawrence, or both. Graham Hough, Helen Gardner, Rebecca West, E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, Anne Scott-James, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Potter and others all came and offered their testimony. But, really, their work had already been done for them by Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asking whether it was a book which ‘you would even wish your wife or your servants to read.’ The world had spun on a little further than Mr Griffith-Jones, from the confines of his Inn of Court and his club, had quite realised. Few women by this date would have waited for their husband’s permission before reading a book. None would like the suggestion that they would be depraved or corrupted or tempted to commit adultery because of Lawrence’s novel, a work of genius with a number of profoundly ludicrous pages. The majority of British citizens since the Second World War made do without servants.