Howard Jacobson: The English might be free and easy about sex, but we are still so embarrassed by it

Watched the French film Lady Chatterley in an all but empty cinema last Sunday. True, it was an afternoon screening, but even so could there not have been a few more people there? What else was there to do?

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically," is how the version of Lady Chatterley's Lover we all know begins. And here was proof of it. We were all out eating, drinking, watching football.

We English don't deserve our writers. We don't honour them. It's taken the French to see that there's a film in D H Lawrence's most urgently lyrical novel. Not once, but three times. We, of course, are embarrassed by the book. So not much has changed there. It was our embarrassment about things sexual that made Lawrence write it in the first place. That and his conviction that the roof had fallen in on us. "The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins." An apocalypticism which also embarrasses us.

When I say we are embarrassed about things sexual I don't mean only that we are puritanical. Being free and easy in our talk and doings about sex – Ann Summers, The Erotic Review, Channel 4, magazines that teach tots how to give a blow job – is no less a manifestation of that embarrassment.

Lawrence nailed the to and fro between shame and naughtiness in his essay Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover. "From fearing the body, and denying its existence, the advanced young go to the other extreme and treat it as a sort of toy to be played with, a slightly nasty toy, but you still can get some fun out of it, before it lets you down."

If anything, we've gone backwards since then. There's nothing remotely advanced, for example, about what The Times's film critic, Kevin Maher, had to say about the film. "There comes a point," he wrote, when "the sight of our two noble central figures whimpering naked together, slowly discovering each other's bodies and painstakingly exploring the ineffable nature of human intimacy, becomes so infuriating that you want to scream: 'Just shag him already! It's only sex!'"

Why the irony? The lovers don't in fact whimper. Their intimacy is the very opposite of ineffable – they eff it and articulate it voluminously. And the pains they take are the expression of a diffidence and mutual regard there is absolutely no reason to deride. But Kevin Maher is embarrassed. Hence "shag". Shag – gateway to the great British facetiousness about sex. Shag – the shortest route to a guffaw if you're a comedian or Rory Bremner or a panellist on Have I Got News for You. Shag – "it's only sex", as though anything is only sex.

We don't, as a rule, do relationship counselling in this column, but if we did we'd tell anyone whose partner, male or female, asks them for a shag, promises them a shag, or thanks them for a shag, to seek a separation immediately. Nothing good has ever or will ever come of a shag. Better no sex than that "only sex" which is a shag.

Levity. Lawrence had a nose for it. The unbearable lightness of the English. That's another of the reasons we have so much trouble with him. He's so damn serious. Like the French. "Extreme licence wedded with a joking mood is accompanied by a refusal to take the underlying truth of eroticism seriously: by seriously I mean tragically." So said the great French philosopher of eroticism, Georges Bataille. Lawrence would have been made uncomfortable by that word "eroticism", for he too was a puritan of sorts. But otherwise Bataille confirms the seriousness of Lawrence's enterprise. Ours is a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. We say "shag" instead. And in our our rudery – so we delude ourselves – is our salvation.

I'm not an instinctive Francophile in literature. I've hated the Frenchification of Eng Lit that's taken place in our universities. Very interesting, Barthes and Derrida – and more interesting still, Deleuze and Bataille – but to impose them on English writing is to miss what English writing's for. We don't do aesthetic theory. Apart from Coleridge, who wanted to be German, we never have done any sort of theory. Just as we have never done any sort of academy. The glory of our literature is its untheoreticalness. Not a thoughtlessness, far from it; but a breathing pragmatism, awakening, in Shelley's words, "a sort of thought in sense".

Sex, however, is another matter. Just as we haven't done theory or academies in this country, we haven't done sex. Which is also glorious in its way, except that we don't need theory but we do need sex. So I say thank-you to the French for keeping us to the mark, erotically. And thank you to them for this film which we English would never have had the seriousness or courage to make.

The French themselves have festooned Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley with garlands. And American film critics have liked it by and large, while complaining about its length. That's a fair criticism. No film should take three hours whether it's about the Battle of Austerlitz or an orgasm. The only thing that should take three hours is the orgasm itself. It's harder to tell how well it's gone down over here. There's been much appreciation of the lyricism and the prettiness, but lurking behind the appreciation an undisguised grudgingness, not towards the film but towards D H Lawrence.

The Independent's film critic admitted he liked the film against himself, ie in despite of Lawrence. "Faced with three hours of D H Lawrence, I would usually prefer to chew off my own hand." We are not invited to ask why. The amused, educated assumption is that that's how we all feel about Lawrence now, and it isn't necessary to argue the point.

To my mind, the denigration of Lawrence is a low water mark in the intellectual life of this country. The feminists started it, though it's mainly kept alive today by men anxious to curry favour with feminists. The trumped-up charge of "misogyny" is, of course, at the root of it. Trumped-up, in that a male novelist may dislike women if he chooses, just as a woman novelist may dislike men; novels are not obliged to honour prevailing gender proprieties. But trumped-up, too, in that Lawrence is the least misogynistic of writers, unless it's misogynistic to be a man. His critique of "maleness" generally, and in particular in this novel, was devastating; his intuition of Connie Chatterley's chilled loneliness and eventual revival profound. But again it took a French film director to see that. A woman French film director at that.