Ifirst came across Lady Chatterley's Lover in the mid1970s, in the incongruous setting of the glass-fronted bookcase that stood at the end of my grandparents' sitting room. The incongruity lay in the fact that my grandfather was a determined lowbrow whose tastes usually ran no further than detective novels borrowed from the library. How had he suddenly found out about DH Lawrence? Inquiry revealed an early Penguin paperback, possibly even the first printing, and confirmed a suspicion that, rather than undergoing some rapt, highbrow conversion, the old smut-hound had picked up a copy in the aftermath of the 1960 obscenity trial to see what all the fuss was about.
The discovery of Constance Chatterley and her gamekeeper paramour nestling on my grandfather's bookshelf, next to Dorothy L Sayers and some pre1914 Sunday-school prizes, is horribly symbolic of what happened to Lawrence's reputation in the years after his death. Written in the late 1920s, when tuberculosis was burning him up, it was the first of his novels to make him any money: most of the £2,400 left in his will came from private editions published quietly on the Continent and in the USA. Authorship of a "banned" novel, kept out of England by the home secretary's prohibition, gave Lawrence an unlooked-for réclame. Some of the last things he wrote were articles for popular newspapers on such topics as "Sex Locked Out".
Even before Lawrence's death in the spring of 1930, Lady Chatterley was fast turning into the novel that would make his name. It was also, most competent judges agree, one of the weakest productions of his short but high-octane career: "Amusing how people disliked Lady C," he wrote in the summer of 1928. "I'm afraid I've lost 9/10 of my few remaining friends." Never mind Connie's high-flown imaginings of the sexual act - where it turns most unconvincing is in the characterisation of its priapic leading man.
Mellors is an ex-army officer, whom Constance instantly marks down as "almost a gentleman", and his vocal tone oscillates queerly between the drawing-room conventions of the day and pungent "eh, lass" Derbyshire dialogue whenever he and his employer's wife are getting down to business. Lawrence clearly felt uncomfortable about "Lieutenant Mellors's" social proximity to Connie. You feel he could only dramatise their relationship by idealising it, turning Mellors into a vehicle for his sermons about sex rather than a believable human being.
Meanwhile, the Lady Chatterley effect would eventually transform Lawrence's literary and commercial standing. Between 1930 and the end of the 1950s, he was revered by the literary-minded young as a free-speaking, sexually liberated idealist. Malcolm Brad-bury, brought up in Nottingham-shire, always thought it a badge of honour that he had published his first short stories in a local paper that, 40 years before, had employed the author of Women in Love. Post1960, in the wake of the Chatterley trial, after which Penguin sold 2m copies of the novel to curious nonliterary spectators like my grandfather, he became "the man who wrote Lady Chatterley". All this worked wonders for his sales, but the consequences for his reputation as a writer were injurious.
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Even the defence witnesses procured for the book's trial at the Old Bailey's number-one court - these ranged from the Provost of King's College, Cambridge, to a recent Newnham graduate - had their doubts about its artistic merits. Richard Hoggart, who contributed a rousing preface to the second paperback edition ("Lady Chatterley's Lover is not a dirty book. It is clean and serious and beautiful") afterwards worried that the defence had overstated the novel's "moral purpose" rather than arguing its right to publication as a work of art.
There was, too, a conspicuous absentee. The critic FR Leavis, who had championed the book 30 years before, pointedly declined to appear. Privately, Leavis thought the procession of eminent literary gentlefolk queuing up outside the Old Bailey resembled something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Professionally, he now regarded the novel as a tract rather than a serious work of literature. But his shrewdest complaint had to do with Lawrence himself. He did not want him to become merely "the author of Lady Chatterley". When Penguin's founder, Allen Lane, sent one of Leavis's books to him for signature, he returned it unmarked, with the comment: "I do not think that Sir Allen Lane did a service to literature, civilisation or Lawrence in the business of Lady Chatterley's Lover."
This was a prophetic remark. As Lawrence's sales skyrocketed in the early 1960s, so did his status as the godfather of the sexual revolution ("Sexual intercourse began in 1963," as Philip Larkin remarked, "Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP") and the prophet of sexual free speech. Each of these roles would have appalled their beneficiary: the man whose name became a byword for four-letter-word free-for-alls approved of the censoring of pornography, on the grounds that it falsified and distorted the realities of sex.
The complex process that turns a writer into a cultural icon has many by-blows, and one of the most depressing is the detachment of the writer from the books he writes. So it was with Lawrence. The sexual revolution came and went. There were other obscenity trials, involving books and magazines far more explicit than Lawrence's. Next to Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn, the man who had written piously of wombs clamouring like sea anemones under the tide faded into sepia. Worse, the feminists had got wind of his view of women. Whatever its context, a remark such as "You have no idea how humiliating it is to beat a woman" was unforgivable in the era of Spare Rib.
Nearly half a century after literary London massed outside the Old Bailey gate in his support, Lawrence exists in a curious half-world, not quite in the literary canon and not quite out of it. A mostly academic Lawrence industry continues to churn out books and articles, but his most recent biographer, John Worthen, spent the preface to his DH Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider lamenting that its subject had "fallen off the map". To the average newspaper reader today, "Lawrentian" means "pornographic", and the book that perpetuates his memory is one of his worst. All of which, unhappily, tends to obscure the point of Lawrence as a writer - the desperate struggle that was his life and the whiff of emotional extremism that is his legacy to the English novel.