With one side of him he saw with true imaginative clarity the ruinous course the world was set on—‘as if a whole social form were breaking down, and the human e

With one side of him he saw with true imaginative clarity the ruinous course the world was set on—‘as if a whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese ... so that it seems as though we had created a steel framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between’. But all he had to offer in the way of a solution were the sick phallic fantasies and perversities of quasi-impotence, carried in his last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, to a pitch of absurdity seldom, if ever before, equalled. He was one of those men, tragic and gifted, who work out in themselves the conflicts and dilemmas of their time; who are themselves our own fever and pain. In Lawrence’s case, his sickness became the cult of succeeding generations; Lady Chatterley, sponsored by a motley collection of writers, clerics and miscellaneous intelligentsia, was the progenitor of a torrent of porno-eroticism which her creator would have found deeply abhorrent, and incidentally so enriched her publisher in the process that his shares were quoted on the Stock Exchange as Chatterleys. Malcolm Muggeridge on Lawrence in Chronicles of Wasted Time