Postscript to Passion

LADY CHATTERLEY'S SECOND HUSBAND --Jehanne d'Orliac--McBride ($2).

Only those who buy or borrow bootleg books got a chance to read the late D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the most outspoken novel yet written on sexual unhappiness, its cause and cure. Those who read it remember, besides its paeans to physical passion, punctuated by Anglo-Saxon four-letter words and North-country dialect, its Lawrentian plot: how Lady Constance Chatterley, full-blooded young wife to a paralytic peer, sought fulfillment elsewhere and found it with Mellors, her husband's gamekeeper. Author Lawrence, no champion of neat endings, left his lovers looking forward to the beginning of their life together. Author d'Orliac takes up the tale where Lawrence dropped it, reshuffles the cards and, by slipping a Gallic joker into the pack, makes the game come out exactly as she wants it. An implicit criticism of Lawrence's visceral philosophy, Lady Chatterley's Second Husband is no jest but a soberly serious attempt to answer a passionate argument.

Author d'Orliac's thesis: even passion has its postscript. Mellors and Lady Chatterley, after the birth of their child, leave England and settle in the French countryside, where they live for a time in idyllic poverty. Eventually Lady Chatterley's husband agrees to give her a divorce, but Mellors' hell-cat wife will not do likewise. In fact, she pursues him abroad, upbraids and bedevils him until he shoots her. Exit Mellors. Lady Chatterley and her child take refuge with Sylvius, a supersensible Frenchman, half philosopher, half farmer. Lady Chatterley is tired of the passionate daily diet she has had with Mellors and Sylvius is much too cool a character to catch fire. But they grow fond of each other, in a sensible and subdued way, finally get married, look forward to a muted future of reasonable content.

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