THE
CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF
THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF
D. H. LAWRENCE

THE WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

EDITORIAL BOARD

GENERAL EDITORS
James T. Boulton
Warren Roberts^†

M. H. Black
John Worthen

INTRODUCTIONS AND REVIEWS

D. H. LAWRENCE

EDITED BY
N. H. REEVE

AND
JOHN WORTHEN

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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© Cambridge University Press 2005

This, the Cambridge Edition of the Introductions and Reviews of D. H. Lawrence, is established from the original sources and first published in 2005, © the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 2005. Introduction and notes © Cambridge University Press 2005. Permission to reproduce this text entire or in part, or to quote from it, can be granted only by the Literary Executor of the Estate, Pollinger Limited, 9 Staple Inn, Holborn, London WC1V 7QH. Permission to reproduce the introduction and notes entire or in part should be requested from Cambridge University Press.

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface EhrhardtMT 10/12 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930.
Introductions and reviews / D. H. Lawrence; edited by N. H. Reeve and John Worthen.
p. cm. -- (The Cambridge edition of the letters and works of D. H. Lawrence)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 83584 4
1. Literature – History and criticism. 2. Books – Reviews. I. Reeve, N. H., 1953-- II Worthen, John. III. Title
PR6023.A93A6 2004b
809 – dc22 2004049221

ISBN 0 521 83584 4 hardback

CONTENTS

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

D. H. Lawrence is one of the great writers of the twentieth century – yet the texts of his writings, whether published during his lifetime or since, are, for the most part, textually corrupt. The extent of the corruption is remarkable; it can derive from every stage of composition and publication. We know from study of his MSS that Lawrence was a careful writer, though not rigidly consistent in matters of minor convention. We know also that he revised at every possible stage. Yet he rarely if ever compared one stage with the previous one, and overlooked the errors of typists or copyists. He was forced to accept, as most authors are, the often stringent house-styling of his printers, which overrode his punctuation and even his sentence-structure and paragraphing. He sometimes overlooked plausible printing errors. More important, as a professional author living by his pen, he had to accept, with more or less good will, stringent editing by a publisher’s reader in his early days, and at all times the results of his publishers’ timidity. So the fear of Grundyish disapproval, or actual legal action, led to bowdlerisation or censorship from the very beginning of his career. Threats of libel suits produced other changes. Sometimes a publisher made more changes than he admitted to Lawrence. On a number of occasions, in dealing with American and British publishers, Lawrence produced texts for both which were not identical. Then there were extraordinary lapses like the occasion when a typist turned over two pages of MS at once, and the result happened to make sense. This whole story can be reconstructed from the introductions to the volumes in this edition; cumulatively they will form a history of Lawrence’s writing career.

   The Cambridge edition aims to provide texts which are as close as can now be determined to those he would have wished to see printed. They have been established by a rigorous collation of extant manuscripts and typescripts, proofs and early printed versions; they restore the words, sentences, even whole pages omitted or falsified by editors or compositors; they are freed from printing-house conventions which were imposed on Lawrence’s style; and interference on the part of frightened publishers has been eliminated. Far from doing violence to the texts Lawrence would have wished to see published, editorial intervention is essential to recover them. Though we have to accept that some cannot now be recovered in their entirety because early states have not survived, we must be glad that so much evidence remains. Paradoxical as it may seem, the outcome of this recension will be texts which differ, often radically and certainly frequently, from those seen by the author himself.

   Editors have adopted the principle that the most authoritative form of the text is to be followed, even if this leads sometimes to a ‘spoken’ or a ‘manuscript’ rather than a ‘printed’ style. We have not wanted to strip off one house-styling in order to impose another. Editorial discretion may be allowed in order to regularise Lawrence’s sometimes wayward spelling and punctuation in accordance with his most frequent practice in a particular text. A detailed record of these and other decisions on textual matters, together with the evidence on which they are based, will be found in the Textual apparatus which records variant readings in manuscripts, typescripts and proofs and printed variants in forms of the text published in Lawrence’s lifetime. We do not record posthumous corruptions, except where first publication was posthumous. Significant MS readings may be found in the occasional Explanatory note.

   In each volume, the editor’s Introduction relates the contents to Lawrence’s life and to his other writings; it gives the history of composition of the text in some detail, for its intrinsic interest, and because this history is essential to the statement of editorial principles followed. It provides an account of publication and reception which will be found to contain a good deal of hitherto unknown information. Where appropriate, Appendices make available extended draft manuscript readings of significance, or important material, sometimes unpublished, associated with a particular work.

   Though Lawrence is a twentieth-century writer and in many respects remains our contemporary, the idiom of his day is not invariably intelligible now, especially to the many readers who are not native speakers of British English. His use of dialect is another difficulty, and further barriers to full understanding are created by now obscure literary, historical, political or other references and allusions. On these occasions Explanatory notes are supplied by the editor; it is assumed that the reader has access to a good general dictionary and that the editor need not gloss words or expressions that may be found in it. Where Lawrence’s letters are quoted in editorial matter, the reader should assume that his manuscript alone is the source of eccentricities of phrase or spelling.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An award of research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board made possible the completion of this edition.

   We are grateful in particular to the following for their encouragement, advice and support: Michael Black, James T. Boulton, Andrew Brown and Lindeth Vasey.

   We are also grateful to the staff of Cambridge University Press (especially to Linda Bree); to Gerald Pollinger; to Anthony Rota; to Emily Balmages, Madhuri Sudan, Jessica Lemieux and the staff of the Bancroft Library, The University of California at Berkeley; Carol Turley and the staff of the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles; Lori Curtis, Gina Minks and the staff of the Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; Tracy Fleischman and the staff of the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Ruth Carruth and the staff of the Beinecke Library at Yale University; Thelma J. Todd and the staff of the Library of Congress; Nancy Brown Martinez and the staff of the Center for Southwest Research, General Library, The University of New Mexico; Dorothy Johnston and the staff of the Department of Manuscripts, University of Nottingham; Nina Whitcombe and the staff of the Library of the University of Wales, Swansea; the staff of the Rare Books Room at the University Library, Cambridge; the staff of the British Library Newspaper Library.

   We also wish to thank the following for their particular contributions: Keith Cushman, David Ellis, Andrew Harrison, Malcolm Jones, Patrick McGuinness, See-Young Park, Paul Poplawski, Glyn Pursglove, Victoria Reid, Jonathan Smith, M. Wynn Thomas, John Turner, Geoff Wall, Geoffrey Ward and Rhys Williams. Peggy Hung helped enormously by checking the Magnus manuscript. Louise E. Wright saved us from many errors in connection with the life and times of Maurice Magnus, was unstintingly generous in sharing her research with us, and provided the text of Appendix Ⅸ.

CHRONOLOGY

CUE-TITLES

A. Manuscript locations

INTRODUCTION

In the case of another writer, a volume such as this might have been a collection of items brought together almost at random: of introductions, reviews and other pieces composed as professional writers normally create them, as part of their everyday practice of earning a living. What makes this collection of Lawrence’s work distinctive is that it brings into existence, for the first time, a version of a book which Lawrence himself, less than a year before he died, was asked to put together by the publisher Jonathan Cape.

   Cape had for many years been interested in publishing Lawrence. As far back as 1922, he had come close to being the first English publisher of Studies in Classic American Literature,¹ and he had been responsible for the publication of three of Lawrence’s books in the late 1920s: the first edition of the translation of Verga’s Cavalleria Rusticana in February 1928, the first English edition of Lawrence’s translation of Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo in March 1928, and – rather surprisingly – the first American edition of Lawrence’s  Collected Poems in July 1929. Cape had also taken over the American publication of Twilight in Italy. He had first suggested a book of critical work to Lawrence in September 1927, after reading Lawrence’s Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo: ‘ Reading this introduction makes me wonder whether you will consider assembling in one volume some of your critical studies. I should think you would have enough to make a very attractive volume.’² Nothing came of this in 1927, but Cape remained keen to publish whatever of Lawrence’s work he could obtain, and in the spring of 1929 he renewed his suggestion. This time, as Lawrence informed his English agent, ‘Cape has asked for a book of my literary criticisms and introductory essays, and it would make a good book, and I’ll soon have enough’ (ⅶ. 218).³ He was obviously interested in doing it, especially as by that date his strength was barely enough for him to embark on a new book written from scratch. A book compiled from existing materials was an attractive proposition. Sadly, he did not live to work on it; but it would have been a kind of literary companion to his book of non-literary essays Assorted Articles, published posthumously in April 1930 by his usual publisher Martin Secker, from a similar number of previously published magazine pieces.

   We cannot now be sure exactly what Lawrence would have included in such a book of critical essays, but its contents would have been very largely drawn from the materials brought together here, along with a few other items.⁴ It would have been his second published book of literary criticism, following Studies in Classic American Literature of 1923, and some of the critical writing which he did towards the end of his life may well have been undertaken precisely with its compilation in mind. He had, for example, told his agent that he wanted the right to reprint the introduction he had written to Edward Dahlberg’s novel Bottom Dogs (ⅶ. 218) – obviously one of the items he had ear-marked for the critical book; and in September 1929, while asking his friend Charles Lahr to keep a collection of his articles and stories as they came out, he added – ‘Or any really interesting criticism too’ (ⅶ. 499).⁵

   What also makes the collection in this volume unusual is that, although Lawrence was a professional writer, as concerned as any to make his living from his writing, not one of his introductions, forewords and prefaces for the writings of others was written primarily to earn money. Neither were many of his reviews. The greater part of this volume offers a series of insights into Lawrence’s very practical way of using his writing to help his friends and acquaintances, and to assist the publication of work in which he himself believed.

   Mention should also be made of the fact that Lawrence wrote a surprising number of pieces designed to introduce his own work to the reading public; eighteen in all. These have not been included in this volume, as they belong with the individual works they were written to introduce, and that is where they have been (or will be) published. This Introduction will however refer to some of them, where appropriate, in the course of its chronological narrative of the writing of Lawrence’s reviews and introductions of other kinds.⁶

   The vast majority of the contents of this volume come from the 1920s, with just a handful of reviews dating from before the First World War. There is a long gap in his reviewing between 1913 and 1922, and it is possible that other reviews exist which have not been located or identified – for in the aftermath of the Rainbow disaster of November 1915, it is unlikely that any he wrote would have appeared over his own name.⁷ But most of Lawrence’s writing of this kind was only done when he was able to exert some influence on behalf of those he liked, by writing an introduction or preface for their work, or by reviewing their books himself, and he did not occupy that position until the 1920s. It is also true that, in the last years of his life, writing a brief introduction or review demanded far less of him than (for example) writing a short story, and it is not surprising to find that his last recorded piece of writing should have been a book review (of Eric Gill’s Art-Nonsense and Other Essays), written while he sat up in bed in the Ad Astra sanatorium in Vence, only a short while before he died. But more than once he proved able, in the last decade of his writing career, to help into print something which, without his advocacy, would have remained unpublished. Not all his friends are represented here, though many will be mentioned in this Introduction, but this volume stands as a testament to the people he wanted to help, and thought especially worth helping.

   The piece in every sense the most distinguished in this volume, as well as the longest – although not a work of literary criticism – demonstrates the operation of friendship in two different ways. Lawrence wrote his Introduction to Maurice Magnus’s book Dregs,⁸ as he himself later stated, ‘To discharge an obligation I do not admit’ (ⅴ. 396) – that is, to earn money owing to Magnus’s Maltese friend Michael Borg, which Borg had asked Lawrence to help him recover by getting the dead man’s surviving writing into print. Lawrence pursued the problems of its publication for almost three years, in what was, eventually, a successful attempt to have Borg repaid, and also to recover the money which he himself had lent to Magnus. But the piece also stands as Lawrence’s longest and most compelling piece of writing about another person. Magnus was a man whom he both liked and disliked, but also one who touched him deeply in ways he could not forget. The Introduction was written, and in the end published, not just to pay a man’s debts, or even to help Michael Borg, but to commemorate Lawrence’s own feelings towards Magnus; it allowed him to write at length about Magnus’s character – in some ways so similar to, in others so different from, Lawrence’s own.

   This volume also offers an insight into Lawrence as translator: a role demonstrating a very intimate kind of relationship with the writing of those he admired. The items in section B are brought together as Lawrence’s ways of introducing and preparing his reader for his own translations from the Italian; the very first item in section A shows him introducing a volume of translations from the Russian, translations he had himself corrected throughout as an act of friendship.

1911–1913: Starting a Literary Career

It is perhaps surprising to discover that, in the middle of his enormous productivity in other genres, Lawrence also reviewed at least thirty books in the course of his writing life.⁹ Surprising, since in 1913 he seems to have decided that, in comparison with someone like his friend John Middleton Murry, he was not really a literary critic; in a letter to Murry of 30 August 1913 he remarked: ‘– I liked your review of those poets. You can do it jolly well. I wish I could’ (ⅷ. 7, and n. 1; Murry must have sent him a copy of his review of John Helston, W. H. Davies and Arthur Symons, which would appear in the Daily News on 12 November 1913).¹⁰ But back in 1911, at the very start of his literary career, needing all the experience and reputation that he could obtain, Lawrence had been more than happy to review whatever was offered him. Ford Madox Hueffer had been his crucial means of introduction to serious publication in the English Review in 1909, and Hueffer had printed poems by him as well as accepting a story for publication.¹¹ When Hueffer left the magazine in February 1910, Lawrence was one of his significant legacies to his successor as editor, Austin Harrison, and Harrison continued to print Lawrence’s poems and short stories.¹² In the course of 1911, Lawrence became increasingly determined to embark on a full-time career as a writer, and it is probably not an accident that, on 20 September 1911, he should have been invited out to dinner by Harrison, followed by a visit to the theatre. Lawrence wrote to his fiancée Louie Burrows about the results of this socialising: ‘Harrison is very friendly. He suggests that I do a bit of reviewing for the English. I think I shall. He bids me select from the forthcoming books one I should like to review. What shall it be?’ (ⅰ. 304–5).¹³ We do not know if Louie gave him the advice he asked for, or if his question were merely rhetorical, but the almost immediate result of Harrison’s offer was Lawrence’s review of Contemporary German Poetry, an anthology edited and translated by the energetic young German scholar Jethro Bithell; a review which was printed in the November 1911 issue of the English Review, and which Lawrence presumably wrote during the previous month. It appeared anonymously, the usual practice of the English Review, and is only identifiable today by the coincidence of a remark in a letter which Lawrence wrote to his sister – ‘There is a review by me in the English of this month’ (ⅰ. 324) – and the fact that we know that a book which he mentions at the start of his review (Contemporary Belgian Poetry) was in his possession on 10 November (ⅰ. 325).¹⁴ But Lawrence had clearly impressed either Harrison or the reviews editor with his capacity to deal with German poetry, and when he had recovered a little from the dangerous illness which struck him down in the second half of November (he had pneumonia and nearly died), he received two more German books for review. On 6 December 1911, while still not allowed to sit up in bed, he wrote to a friend, May Holbrook: ‘I am allowed to read. I have got to review a book of German poetry and a book of Minnesinger translations. I like the German poetry, but not the translations’ (ⅰ. 331).¹⁵ He probably wrote the two reviews while still spending most of his time in bed, which is where he also wrote his story ‘The Soiled Rose’, perhaps around 23 December (ⅰ. 343). The reviews appeared in the January 1912 English Review.

   There then apparently followed a brief hiatus in his reviewing, until he went abroad at the start of May 1912. Harrison was well aware of Lawrence’s need to earn money in any way he could, to support the literary career into which his pneumonia had in effect precipitated him (he never went back to teaching). Presumably thinking that Lawrence was still living in Croydon, Harrison asked to see him on 12 February, ‘to know what books I want to review’ (ⅰ. 365). Lawrence had, however, returned to Eastwood on the 9th, and told his literary mentor, Edward Garnett, ‘I’m glad I shan’t have to go to him, to have the fount of my eloquence corked up’.¹⁶ At the same time, he asked Garnett, ‘But what books do I want to review? For the lords sake, tell me’, with a hint of desperation which might suggest that he did rather want to keep up his reviewing. It is possible that his decision not to go down to London to see Harrison meant that he was sent nothing for review: certainly, no identifiable reviews by him would appear in the March, April or May numbers of the magazine, although one of his stories had appeared in the February issue.¹⁷ It is also, however, possible that Garnett advised him not to bother with reviewing. Rewriting Paul Morel for Heinemann, which was what he had set himself to do in Eastwood that spring, was far more important for his career than reviewing, as well as (potentially) more rewarding financially.

   At all events, Lawrence did not return to London until the end of April, when once again he rather ominously reported to Garnett that he would be seeing ‘Walter de la Mare, and Harrison, who want to jaw me’ (ⅰ. 384)¹⁸ – presumably about what he ought to be doing to advance his career as a professional writer. He had actually been in correspondence with Harrison, receiving letters from him on 28 March and 2 and 4 April (ⅰ. 377, 381–2), but Harrison had apparently been criticising him for channelling his writing through Edward Garnett, rather than letting the English Review have it direct; Garnett may well have offered the English Review one or more of the pieces about the coal strike which Lawrence had been writing in Eastwood. Lawrence wrote to Harrison, ‘I should be very sorry to think I had lost your favour’ (ⅰ. 377), but there was clearly now some coolness in Harrison’s attitude to him. Lawrence’s late April 1912 visit to London was, anyway, the first (and last) he could make to London (or to Harrison) for over a year; on 3 May he left for Germany with Frieda Weekley. Whatever was said at his meeting with Harrison does not seem to have resulted in an offer of more reviewing, or of much space in the magazine for other pieces; the English Review accepted just one poem by Lawrence between February 1912 and September 1913.¹⁹ But his reputation as an expert on German poetry survived, and early in 1913 he was asked if he would contribute ‘an article on modern German poetry – about 3000 words’ (ⅰ. 513). He did not feel he could do it – ‘I should love doing it myself, if I knew enough about it’ (ⅰ. 514) – but he passed on the idea to Frieda’s sister Else Jaffe (ⅰ. 513–14), with several suggestions as to how it might be done. Nevertheless, nothing by her appeared in the English Review.

   A new contact with literary London, however, made while he was still abroad, led to his writing reviews for a new magazine. At the end of January 1913, Katherine Mansfield²⁰ obtained his address from Edward Garnett, and wrote asking whether he would let Rhythm, the magazine she ran with her partner John Middleton Murry, have a story to print without payment, as they were too poor to pay for it. Lawrence agreed, as an act of kindness to two people who were (as yet) hardly his friends, but on two conditions: first, that they send him a copy of the magazine, which he confessed to never having seen; ‘and second, that you let me have something interesting to review for March – German if you like’ (ⅰ. 508). That, after all, was where his reputation as a reviewer lay, if he had one. Instead, they asked him to review the recently published anthology Georgian Poetry 1911–12, edited by Edward Marsh²¹ (Rhythm’s main financial supporter), who had included one of Lawrence’s own poems (‘Snapdragon’), and had indeed approached Lawrence directly about using it. Lawrence was aware of the oddity of reviewing a volume in which a poem of his own appeared, and pointed out the fact in the first paragraph of the review. His review appeared, however, in the March issue of Rhythm, so he must have set to work very soon; since he almost certainly already had a copy of the book, he may even have started before the review copy arrived from London. He had sent the review to London by 24 February at the latest, when he told a friend ‘You should find some of my stuff in March Rhythm. It’s a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice’ (ⅰ. 519). On 5 March he mentioned the idea of sending his review copy of Georgian Poetry 1911–12 – ‘my copy I had from Rhythm’ – to Arthur McLeod (ⅰ. 524).²²

   We know nothing about the circumstances in which he wrote his other review for Mansfield and Murry in the spring of 1913, but it seems probable that they took him up on his offer to review something ‘German if you like’, and may well have asked him what had recently been published in Germany which might interest English readers. Lawrence and Frieda were back in Germany by the middle of April, living in Irschenhausen near Munich, and he would doubtless have consulted Frieda’s sister and brother-in-law Else and Edgar Jaffe (who lived nearby) on the matter. Alternatively, he may simply have been asked to acquire a copy of the recently published novella by Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, and to send Rhythm a review of it; almost certainly Else or Edgar would have bought the book. There must, however, be some doubts as to whether Lawrence’s German was really good enough at this stage to allow him to read Mann successfully, though he would certainly have been helped by Frieda and Else, and perhaps Edgar. The references to other works by Mann – he quotes Tonio Kröger, for example – and to Flaubert show that he had some access to books and material which probably came from the Jaffes. Neither Edgar nor Else can have checked his final draft, however, or they would have spotted the howler which made both Mann and Aschenbach ‘fifty-three’ (‘drei-und-fünfzig’), while in the novel the character is ‘fünf-und-dreissig’ (thirty-five): the whole review, indeed, is organised around the belief that Mann himself in 1913 was ‘over middle-age’ – at the end of the review this becomes ‘old’ – while ‘we are young’. In fact Mann was only thirty-eight, just ten years older than Lawrence.²³ By the time the review was completed, Rhythm had collapsed, leaving Murry with debts which he could only settle by selling his house; but, nothing daunted, he and Katherine, helped again by Edward Marsh, started another short-lived periodical, the Blue Review, which printed Lawrence’s piece in the July number.