Reading Late Lawrence

191 Pages·2003·0.814 MB·English

by  N. H. Reeve (auth.)

Reading Late Lawrence
N.H. Reeve
Reading Late Lawrence
Also by N. H. Reeve
HENRY JAMES – THE SHORTER FICTION: Reassessments
NEARLY TOO MUCH: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne
(with Richard Kerridge)
THE FICTION OF THE 1940s: Stories of Survival
(co-editor with Rod Mengham)
THE NOVELS OF REX WARNER
Reading Late Lawrence
N. H. Reeve
© N. H. Reeve 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003978-1-4039-1596-2
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Reeve, N. H., 1953–
Reading late Lawrence/N. H. Reeve.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PR6023.A93Z8524 2003
823(cid:2).912—dc21
2003040528
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Preface vii
Note on the Texts xii
1 ‘In Love’ 1
2 At Home, at Peace: ‘Glad Ghosts’ 15
3 ‘Sun’ and The Virgin and the Gipsy 49
4 Parkin’s Wedding Photograph 83
5 Strange Women with White Hair: ‘The Lovely
Lady’, ‘Mother and Daughter’, ‘The Blue Moccasins’ 119
Notes 151
Bibliography of Lawrence’s Works 168
Bibliography 170
General Index 174
Index of Lawrence’s Works 177
v
Acknowledgements
Early versions of some of these pieces have appeared in TheCambridge
Quarterly, English, and on the website of the D. H. Lawrence Research
Centre, University of Nottingham. I am grateful to the editors of these
journals for permission to reprint. I am also grateful to Pollinger
Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for permission to
quote from Lawrence’s works. I should like to thank the following for
their comments, their advice, and the trouble they have taken on my
behalf: David Ellis, Maud Ellmann, Tessa Hadley, Andrew Harrison,
Richard Kerridge, Christopher Pollnitz, Peter Preston, the late Tony
Tanner, John Turner, Lindeth Vasey, Geoff Ward, and Sue Wilson.
I should especially like to say how grateful I am to John Worthen,
for all the generous and indefatigable support, encouragement, inspir-
ation and hospitality which he has provided throughout the progress
of this work.
The book itself is for Cheryl, with my love.
vi
Preface
The chapters that follow result from the combination of a conviction
and an opportunity. The conviction is that while much of D. H.
Lawrence’s later fiction, from the period following his final return to
Europe in the autumn of 1925, has received relatively little critical
attention, it contains some of the freshest and most stimulating
writing he ever produced. Stories such as ‘The Lovely Lady’, ‘Sun’,
‘The Blue Moccasins’, and ‘Glad Ghosts’, and the first two versions of
his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, deserve in my view to be much
better known than they are. The opportunity was provided by the
gradual appearance of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s complete
works, successive volumes which not only present complete and
corrected texts for the first time, but which, by gathering together
manuscript and other early or variant versions of the material, enable
readers more easily to follow the compositional process by which
these texts came into being. Lawrence was an inveterate reviser of his
work. His commitment to re-imagining possibilities inside whatever
was apparently foreclosed, to allowing himself to be surprised into
new activity by his own productions, was an essential element of
what he felt himself to be as a writer. Whenever he was engaged with
a work, he was aware, as Paul Eggert has put it, ‘that if he resumed
writing tomorrow, he might well be writing out of a different mood,
and that yesterday’s problem would be inflected differently’;1 each
turn of the road might reveal a new thematic direction, or a prospect
to be deferred for now but with a chance of being reconsidered later.
This almost wilful open-endedness, this ‘process of creative think-
ing...that was only temporarily committed to its conclusions’,2 is
potentially indefinite, as Eggert suggests, only stopped in its tracks by
the demands of publication and making a living – and sometimes
not even then, as in the case of ‘Sun’, which Lawrence completely
revised and offered to the public afresh, two years after it had first
been printed. At the same time, however, such restlessness runs
alongside a counter-urge on Lawrence’s part, to tidy perception up,
sometimes to organise it into a system, to find for his texts the
inevitable destination that was always somehow implicit through
vii
viii Preface
their fits and starts of feeling: a registration in the very manner of his
work of the unresolved dispute within him between the traveller and
the settler, a dispute which constantly refuelled his imagination and
which became if anything more urgent as he grew older.3
In addition, the works discussed in this study demonstrate some-
thing of the variety of motives Lawrence could have for making his
revisions, and the variety of circumstances in which revision could
occur. With stories such as ‘Glad Ghosts’, ‘The Blue Moccasins’, and
‘In Love’, the numerous variant and discarded passages allow one to
trace Lawrence’s ‘struggle with his material’, as he put it in the poem
‘The Work of Creation’, as he goes along, sometimes labouring or
fidgety, sometimes stirred by sudden inspirations or fortuitous new
stimuli.4On the other hand, as in the case mentioned above of ‘Sun’,
Lawrence was not averse to making changes to a story after as well as
before it had been published. He had done so on several occasions in
the past, rethinking and greatly enlarging works such as ‘England,
My England’ (where the original 1915 text was more than doubled in
length by the 1921 rewriting), ‘The Fox’ (a medium-sized story from
1918 which was transformed into a novella of seventy pages in
1921), and ‘The Thimble’, also of 1915, which he used six years later
as the basis for a new work, ‘The Ladybird’, which as it grew almost
completely obscured its origins.5Now, in 1928, an offer to purchase
the manuscript of ‘Sun’ gave Lawrence the opportunity to reconsider
and, as I shall try to suggest, to alter some of the priorities of a story
which had only relatively recently been published in an ostensibly
finished form. Lady Chatterley’s Loverhad a little of both elements in
its history, although the early forms the novel took had not actually
been published. It was written in full in the autumn of 1926 and
then almost immediately rewritten, turned into something much
longer, in a rapid confrontation with the lines opened up by the first
writing; and then entirely rewritten again, the best part of a year
later, when a new publishing opportunity unexpectedly arose, and
when Lawrence’s attitudes both to his subject-matter and to his
readers had hardened and coarsened. ‘The Lovely Lady’, by contrast,
was heavily cut and revised at the request of the reader who had
commissioned it, Lady Cynthia Asquith, despite the fact that
Lawrence himself had evidently been happy with it as it stood; it was
unusual for him, by this stage in his career, to be subjected to edito-
rial interference, although something similar had happened in the
Preface ix
case of the first, short version of ‘The Fox’.6(A different circumstance
again affected the revision of ‘The Border-Line’, which I have not
included in this study as the original story – from early in 1924 – fell
outside the period I wanted to address. When Lawrence read the
proofs of the collection Martin Secker was about to publish,
The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, in January 1928, he
realised that the closing pages of ‘The Border-Line’ were missing, lost
somewhere between the typist and the printer, and he was obliged,
in considerable haste, to rewrite the ending so that it would fit into
the blank space in the proofs, having nothing at hand to remind him
how the original story had finished – a story he had so completely
forgotten that he thought it belonged to ‘the 1921 atmosphere of
Germany’7rather than to 1924.)
I have attempted to write from a kind of moment-by-moment
engagement with the late works of Lawrence that interest me most,
trying to follow the little undercurrents and stirrings of implication
as they feed in and out of the larger flow. Each of my commentaries
has been prompted by a particular piece of revision, one which seems
to me to reveal something of the textual impulse both in Lawrence’s
original conception and in its subsequent development – a develop-
ment to which, however much the two may differ, only that original
conception could have pointed the way. These pieces of revision
may affect a paragraph, an entire scene, or a single sentence. I am
interested in the phantom imprints, as it were, left by Lawrence’s first
thoughts upon the thoughts that replace them. I am also interested
in watching for signs of this across and between works as well as
within the one work, given that virtually everything Lawrence wrote,
especially in his later years, was a form of re-engagement with some-
thing he had already written – the stories and essays from the period
at Spotorno, in the winter of 1925–26, for example, which comprise
a series of diverse and experimental approaches to essentially the
same set of preoccupations.8
Paul Eggert, in the essay mentioned above, was building on the
fresh attention to Lawrence’s work generated in the 1980s and
early 1990s by the burgeoning interest at that time in Bakhtin, in
theories of the dialogic and the carnivalesque. Eggert implied that a
critical climate was developing in which Lawrence could come to be
read more for the processes than for the outcomes or ostensible
messages of his writing; in a sense more for the continuous drama of