What did my father do for Mrs. Chatelet?
Paul Hogart/Text
Kong Ruicai / Translation
In the famous obscene trial of 1960, Paul Hoggart's father, Richard Hogart, played an important role. Now BBC's new drama has reshaped the situation at that time.
I was probably just out of the tardis time machine. When I arrived at an abandoned courthouse in Kingston, south-west London, I came face-to-face with Doctor Who, who was dressed up as my father! This was my father in 1960, when I was only 8 years old! Doctor Who (aka David Tennant) is placed in a small group of actors playing lawyers and the public, all dressed in perfect costumes from 1960. He practiced my father's accent and intonation by visually mapping out some archival videos, imitating them beautifully. He has long teddy man's sideburns on his face (which is part of Doctor Who's dress, which father never had such a beard). Even so, everything is quite weird.
We are located on the filming location of The Lady Chatterley Affair, a new drama by Andrew Davies for BBC4 that focuses on the trial of Mrs. Chatelet's Lover, a famous case of Roy Jenkins' Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Davis mixed real court records with fictional dramas from two jurors. Two jurors — played by Louise Delamere and Rafe Spall , respectively — were inspired by the book to have a relationship.
Poster of Madame Chatelet's Lover
The trial has become a pivotal moment in the rise of a "tolerant society". Philip Larkin has a classic counterpoint to such a society: "Sexual intercourse began in 1963... Between Mrs. Chatelet's unbanning and the Beatles' first vinyl. The subtitle ending to the new drama describes it as "the first collapse of the dam of hypocritical repression." Others call it the opening of Pandora's box.
My father, Richard Hoggart, was a witness to the defense. He was summoned because Penguin Publishers founder Allen Lane took a liking to his father's 1957 book On the Life and Culture of the Working Class, The Use of Literacy, adding him to an informal team of consultants. My father was a senior lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, and he was also a senior lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. H. Fervent admirer of Lawrence, all of which were very helpful in the case.
The Uses of Literacy
More than 50 "expert witnesses" in the defence were called, including Bishop Woolwich, E.m.Forster, Norman St John Stevas, Helen Gardner, Cecil Day-Lewis, Raymond Williams, Noel annan... But according to Davis, my father became a "star witness." This, of course, is just anecdotal, mainly because his testimony is surprising.
Prosecution lawyer Mervyn Griffith-Jones has painstakingly studied Lawrence's insistence on reusing "four-letter [obscene] words." He read a long list of such words, struggling painfully in the Nottingham dialect, which inadvertently brought a comedic effect. My father asserted that Lawrence wanted to restore all these often abused words to their proper, original meanings. His assessment of Lawrence may be correct, though this effort to purify the language was not very successful. My father also never used these words at home. I bet he and his mom didn't use it in private either.
But the really wonderful moment of performance was when the father insisted that the book was "Puritanic," even in naked depictions of sex, because the whole moral framework of the book belonged to the English Puritan tradition of adhering to a true conscience. Robin, the son of the prosecution lawyer, pointed out that the lawyers had taken on a series of such cases at that time and were completely tired of it, but the case was very novel. Griffith-Jones (played by Pip Torrance, whose brilliantly responsive performance should have awarded him the BAFTA Award) doesn't believe his father's words and fights back with great contempt.
Richard Hogart
At this point, my father said he knew he had gone too far, but he would never back down. Davis said witnesses before his father "have fallen into self-contradiction" under cross-examination. But Dad was a rebellious working-class lad. I believe that he fully stimulated the drama of the time in this moment. He would never be bullied by an arrogant barrister and therefore unswervingly stood by his point of view.
People sometimes think that Dad's evidence led to a turn in the trial, and I have a hard time believing that. In his presentation at the opening, Griffith-Jones famously asked jurors, including three women, to consider whether it was a "book you want your wife or servant to read."
According to Robin, as soon as he sat down and heard the featureless improvisation, he thought his father might have ruined the odds. Either way, it's clear that the ten jurors had already felt lawrence innocent before the trial began. But their debate was very useful for the media obsessed with chatelei's case. In Davis's play, all these deliberative trade-offs sparked heated discussion among jurors.
An introduction to the event can easily fall into the trap, especially when couples use the book as a fairly orthodox "lover's guide." In fact, this introductory part is very witty and sharp. Davis was a teacher at the time, and he vividly remembers the scene — he was "a little angry" at Lawrence's acquittal because he had fetched an unabridged version from Paris at a high price, which was now cheaply available on the market. In the play, he uses jurors' reactions to subtly explore shifts in people's attitudes toward sex and authority.
Davis said he was very nervous about the sex scenes in the play. "These scenes are very rugged, and it's unusual to have a character talk about sex when they get into sex."
Griffith-Jones ended up reading a passage about anal sex that was barely covered up, though not directly saying some naked parts. Robin said, "He must have thought it was very indecent. Most people in the room, including my father, probably ignored this detail. But Davis' heroine, Helena, doesn't ignore it, as she convinces Keith, played by Rafi Spoo, to give it a try. Davis said, "It's hard to see something like this on TV. I just adapted Alan Hollinghurst's Beautiful Curves and today is really my year of anal sex. ”
Inevitably, my recollections of the trial were sketchy. I remember someone stopping me on the street and saying that my father was discussing "that obscene book" in the newspaper. My brother Simon and sister Nikolai were ridiculed. Simon remembers being both gently ridiculed and secretly admired at school. I said, I don't understand why people make such a fuss about a four-word word. I use them all the time: "door", "coat", "road"... People don't tell us about hate letters or excrement we received at the post office. Dad refused to be invited to defend other books, such as Black Street in Brooklyn. He said he did not want to be a professional witness.
In 1992, he wrote down his mixed feelings about the event, when a large amount of obscene reading was already circulating freely on the market. Is the cost of artistic freedom too high? These doubts still exist today, despite his own testimony about Lawrence's use of the language and its Puritan characteristics in Britain.
Perhaps the strangest effect Davis had in recreating the situation was that, in any case, many of the issues raised at the trial remain today and have not yet been resolved once and for all.
"Can I?" David Tennant asked nervously after playing a clip of his father in court. "Very good," I said, "you played really well. That's exactly what I wanted to say to him and my father.
Translated from: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/what-my-dad-did-for-lady-chatterley-ktdz6lwkpl8
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