Banned Again

Lady Chatterly's Lover

By Christopher Glenn

Features Managing Editor, COLORADO DAILY, University of Colorado, Boulder

ady Chatterley's Lover" has yet to win its long struggle for freeaom in the United States. D. H. Lawrence's masterpiece, although generally recognized as one of the finest examples of his fiction, still is considered "obscene" in this country, and cannot use the United States mails.

Postmaster General Summerfield banned the latest edition of the work, the Grove Press edition, from the mails on June 11. Grove Press is appealing the decision In the Federal District Court.

SUMMERFIELD'S DECISION came two weeks after Charles D. Ablard, Judicial Officer for the U.S. Post Office, had declined to rule the boo!: obscene following a hearing held on May 14 to determine the mailability of the book, and referred the decision to the Postmaster General.

Grove Press characterized the banning as "Government censorship in its most powerful, most obnoxious form," and as an

"insult to the public's intelligence." The publisher fundamental

say's, issues of freedom under the Constitution have been raised. These issues are of vital concern to all citizens who refuse to have their reading and thinking controlled for them by Post Office censors."

The postal action began on May 6, when the New York Post Office, at the request of the General Counsel for the U.S. Post Office, impounded 24 packages totaling 164 copies of the book.

Grove Press was notified the following day of this seizure and was asked to appear at a hearing in the General Post Office Building in New York on May 14.

Grove Press has filed suit in the Federal District Court of New York seeking a preliminary Injunction against Mr. Summerfields' ban.

M®

Grove

any editorial comments have appeared in various publications since Press announced they

mattachine REVIEW

would publish the complete and authorized version of "Lady Chatterly's Lover.”

"The question of what the public should and should not be allowed to buy is a serious and difficult one, but we have no difficulty whatever in saying that we'd much rather let even teen-agers read Lawrence's 'good-hearted' and essentially clean-minded celebration of the rain-and-flowerdrenched marriage of St. Thomas and Lady Jane than some of the sneaking, sadistic filth that befouls the best-seller list nowadays." (The Reporter, May 14.)

"Lady Chatterly's Lover is.. the most perfect expression of Lawrence's capabilities. If, by any chance, the censors should decide against its 'legal' publi cation, a great wrong will be done to his genius and to his memory.' (John Chamberlain, New York Herald Tribune Book Re view, May 3.)

"Bowdlerized versions of Lady C. have been available in cheap reprints for many years, yet only the unexpurgated edition revived in the present volume deserves the promise of immortality." (Horace Gregory, The Nation, May 30.)

"For those of us who doubt the moral superiority, let alone keener literary taste, of police chiefs and postal inspectors, the great snare in proceedings of this sort is a kind of surprised tedium. Well, if it is any help, I can report to the Post Office that I have just finished this book and would not be a whit purer if I had not read it." (Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic, May 25.)

S THERE ANYBODY

in America who could still

think of this book as immor-

al, who could miss Lawrence's

Well, That's A Pity

EAST CHICAGO, Ind., June 3 (P) The Rev. David Viera called last night for confessions at a revival meeting held in the Pentecostal Church of God.

Two young girls, one 13 and one 15, stood up and confessed.

The Rev. Mr. Viera, 32, is being held on a charge of rape.

romantic-religious, antinomian, ecstatic faith that sex is holy? Is there some police chief in Boston or Sioux City, some postal official in Washington, who, though he may know little enough of Lawrence's seriousness as an artist, may know even less of the actual effect of such books on the mind and think it dangerous?... This call to the higher powers as reyolutionary instrument is indeed the great purpose of LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER." (Alfred Kazin, The Atlantic, July, 1959.)

"If a case of indecency and corruption can be made against this book, then for dozens of novels published in the past year лe defense at all is possible." (Marsh Maslin, San Call Bulletin, Francisco May 2.)

"The adjustment in class consciousness which Lawrence hoped for has not yet come about least in this country. Nor has the adjustment in sex attitudes which he so boldly proclaimed in 'Lady