| ||
The Manuscript of D. H. Lawrence's
Saga of Siegmund
by
Bruce Steele
D. H. Lawrence's second novel The Trespasser was composed initially in just over three months in mid-1910, and re-worked for publication early in 1912. Based centrally on the diary of Helen Corke's five days at Freshwater, I.O.W. with 'Siegmund', and further stimulated by Lawrence's intimate friendship and conversations with 'Helena', this novel must stand in unique relationship to its 'originals' and their story.[1] Lawrence first heard
At this stage the manuscript was entitled The Saga of Siegmund. During the school holidays it was shown briefly to Jessie Chambers, who had little to say of it (ICI, 184. Cf. ET 181-182; 189), and then passed to Ford Maddox Hueffer, who took it to Germany with him in September—October 1910.[6] Lawrence, after a worrying few weeks, was relieved, on October 18th, to discover that it had safely reached Sydney Pawling of Heinemann's (WT 235; CL 66, 88). However, it lay in Heinemann's office, probably only partly read, for a year.
In October 1911 Lawrence offered to show the work to his new friend and mentor Edward Garnett. It took until December for the manuscript to reach Lawrence from Pawling. He immediately sent it on, unopened, with a covering letter to Garnett (CL 86). Garnett encouraged him to revise and re-write, and this he began on December 30th. The revised work was ready for Duckworth in February 1912, and Lawrence accepted the offer to publish on March 18th (CL 102-103). The first proofs arrived in Eastwood on April 4th (CL 107). The novel was published on May 23rd 1912 with the title The Trespasser in error for A Game of Forfeits (CL 124).
It is clear that work on The Trespasser falls into two clear periods separated by some 16 months during most of which the manuscript was not in Lawrence's possession. The first writing of The Saga of Siegmund, rapid and intense work, could not have been revised or rewritten until the well-documented revision of January-February 1912. Had Lawrence written another quite independent version, some allusion to it in letters would be likely. There is none, but there is plenty of evidence for other works during 1911, in particular Paul Morel. The surviving manuscripts of The Trespasser closely confirm the documentary evidence for two versions.
II
It is our good fortune that so much of the manuscript material of The Trespasser still exists. There are two collections of manuscript pages,[7] now in the possession of the Bancroft Library in the University of California at Berkeley. The first collection, numbered 2A by Powell in 1937[8] and E407 a. by Roberts in 1963,[9] consists of 485 leaves of ruled notebook paper written in ink on one side. It is a complete manuscript in Lawrence's hand, frequently heavily revised, and carrying on page 1 the heading: The Trespasser. A Novel. / by D. H. Lawrence. / 13. Queen's Square. / Eastwood. Notts. The title itself may not be in Lawrence's own hand,[10] but the signature and address are certainly his. Markings and notes within the manuscript make it certain that this was the copy used by Duckworth's printer Billings and Son to set the first edition.[11] The pagination runs 1-487 as observed by both Powell and Tedlock. Tedlock, however, notes that "five pages bear two numbers, reducing the total to 482" (EWT 7). The five leaves so numbered are 55 & 56, 101 & 102, 137 & 138, 212 & 213, 254 & 255. He appears to have overlooked the following leaves: 124A (following 124), 228a (following 228), and two consecutive leaves numbered 261. Thus there are, as an independent count confirms, 485 leaves in all.
This manuscript (hereafter referred to as A) is a composite one, made up of 189 'new' leaves and 296 leaves carefully renumbered from their place in a former sequence and containing varying amounts of revision. The 'new'
The 296 leaves retained from an earlier stage of composition belonged to a sequence numbered [1]-503. In each case the earlier numbering is legible, but the leaves have been given, where necessary, a new number corresponding to their place in the A sequence. Thus 190 leaves numbered originally 314-503 (corresponding to pages 181-292 of the printed novel) are renumbered 298-487 in A. This suggests, inter alia, that although the last third of the novel was revised, often heavily, for publication, it was not at length re-written.
The second collection, Powell 2B, Roberts E407.b, consists of 182 leaves of similar ruled notebook paper, written in ink on one side in Lawrence's hand. The pagination shows them originally to have belonged to a sequence running [1]-313, but of which 131 leaves are now absent. After page 115 (present in sequence), the extant leaves have been additionally numbered in a new sequence, so that 127 (the next existing leaf) also carried the number 116—and so on through to 313 which is also numbered 207. There is one exception to this: original 129 remains in place as 129 without the addition of 118. It is 132 (the next surviving leaf) which carries the expected revision, 118. Original 171 carries the additional new number 129. It appears that someone has attempted a complete sequential pagination for these fragments, and succeeded in giving the erroneous impression that there are 207 pages in the set.[12] Tedlock, in 1948, makes no reference to this re-numbering, so that it was probably done after the manuscript left Frieda Lawrence's possession. Tedlock's statement, Pages 25-34, 49, 55, 89-90, 116-126, 130-131, 140-146, 148-153, 155-169, 198-201, 203-207, 245-264, 275-276, 279-309, 311-312 (total 119) missing from sequence 13-313 (EWT 11), agrees with the count of 182 extant leaves given here.
Powell in 1937, however, recorded 225 leaves in this collection, or 43 pages more than Tedlock found in 1948. But Powell also noted that leaves 477-84 were missing from A. They were present in Tedlock's count in 1948 and are present today. If we assume that in 1937 these were in fact among the B collection, this reduces Powell's figure to 217—still 35 more than in 1948 and now. It suggests that 35 leaves were removed or lost from the B fragments
Since A is the printer's copy, and the differences between it and the printed text are ascribable to Lawrence's proof corrections, the requirements of house-style, or Duckworth's editor, the B fragments can only represent rejected leaves from an earlier version. They may in fact be remnants of The Saga of Siegmund as Lawrence wrote it in 1910—the version shown to a disapproving Ford Madox Hueffer and submitted to Pawling at Heinemann's. The note on the back of leaf B 180 (138), rightly taken by Tedlock to be in Garnett's hand,[13] indicates that this version was the one submitted to Garnett prior to the re-writing at Bournemouth.
The manuscripts themselves offer further support for this view. The original pagination of the fragments—[1]-313 (Tedlock's 13-313 extended back to 1) can be seen in Table I. It is evident that 25 leaves (1-12, 25-34, 55, 311-312) are missing, believed lost, that 182 leaves are intact in the B collection, and that 106 leaves are absent from the sequence. If we examine the A leaves 48, 95-96, 119-128 (incl. 124A), 131-132, 140-146, 148-153, 155-169 (incl. 161 twice), 192-195, 197-201, 231-250, 259-260, 263-293, we find that these 106 leaves also bear in correct sequence the cancelled numbers from B, shown in the table as leaves transferred.
Furthermore, if we examine the remaining leaves of A, the printer's copy, numbered 298-487 in the present pagination, we discover that they carry complete the cancelled numbers of the sequence 314-503, i.e. 189 pages. It is clear, then, that what documentary evidence points to as the only re-writing of the novel, done with the encouragement and criticism of Edward Garnett early in 1912, was only in part an actual re-writing—189 'new' leaves, in fact. For the rest, 296 leaves were taken over from the earlier version with varying amounts of correction, deletion and re-casting. Of the leaves taken over into A it is not now always possible to determine in every case which alterations were made as "running revisions" or as first-stage corrections, and which belong to the "re-writing" of 1912. When this evidence of the manuscripts is placed beside the documentary evidence it appears highly probable that the originally numbered leaves 1-503 do contain The Saga of Siegmund.
Further corroborative evidence is to be found in some of the handwritten notes on the back of certain leaves of the manuscripts. They are among those recorded by Tedlock (EWT 7, 11). In the B collection the notes refer by number to leaves in that collection, and the passages are identifiable in the manuscript. Those in the present A collection are difficult to make sense of until we first realize that they occur on leaves renumbered from the old sequence, and refer to passages on leaves in that original sequence. A full discussion
On the back of A356 (formerly B372) we find:
In each of these cases (and there are others) it will be seen that notes listed by Tedlock as notes in A, where they indeed now are, refer in fact to B pages, and therefore belong to the period before the A revision when the B or 'Saga' manuscript was still intact. That almost all the notes are in Garnett's hand shows that they date from the period of his reading the Saga in December 1911, immediately before Lawrence's re-writing.
Some problems still remain. The missing pages, two groups of them, are puzzling. The first group of 25 pages was classified above as 'missing, believed lost'. A little light is shed on the problem by some bibliographical considerations. It is well known that in his early novels, stories, poems and plays, written during the 'Croydon' period, Lawrence used what he called
The leaves 'missing, believed lost' are 1-12, 25-34, 55, 311-12. Leaves 1-12 clearly belong to one complete quire, 13 bearing the numeral II at its head. Leaves 25-34 belonged to another quire, since 35 has the numeral IV at its head. This quire, presumably bearing the numeral III, must have contained only 10 pages instead of the expected 12, and this is odd. A glance at Table I will show the regularity of apparently complete 12-page quires throughout the manuscript. The apparent abberation of a 10-leaf quire II may—perhaps too neatly?—be compensated by a 14-leaf quire XI. The remainder of the 42 quires, except the last, regularly contain 12 leaves. Speculation in the interests of numerical harmony apart, I assume that the two quires now missing were present at the time of Powell's count in 1937. While it is easy to imagine an entire first quire being removed, mislaid, or inadvertently gathered into some bundle, it is more difficult to account for the first and the third quires being removed—unless III was already out of sequence.[15]
The missing single leaf B55, representing the conclusion of Chapter III of the novel, may, as page 49 was, have been detached for incorporation into A, but was in the end re-written and then discarded. It was the ninth page in quire V, and the disappearance of a single detached leaf is more readily understandable in these circumstances than the disappearance of a whole quire. It is worth noting that the corresponding leaf now in A bears the double number 55 & 56. In terms of the published novel, it is the concluding lines of Chapter III. The passage is close to Helen Corke's Diary and apparently can have been little altered in revision.[16]
A similar case is found in the remaining two missing leaves 311-312. These appear early in what becomes Chapter XXI of the novel, the reaction of Siegmund and Helena to the incident with the launch. In A the passage has been considerably extended and recast: the two missing pages correspond to about four leaves in A. Although 311 and 312 fall between two isolated surviving leaves in B, their disappearance may not be unrelated to the fact that they were the last two leaves of quire XXIV. It may be noted that 313 is the final leaf in the present B collection.
The second group of 'missing' leaves is hypothetical, since the sequential
Indeed the very neatness of the evidence and the case here presented may be an objection. It is in fact possible, even credible, that Lawrence worked in so neat and consistent a manner? Since the question of Lawrence's working methods was recently raised again by Charles L. Ross in his article on some revisions of The Rainbow,[19] consideration of the matter is in order here. Ross takes issue with those who present Lawrence as a 'daimonic' writer. Citing Aldous Huxley and F. R. Leavis, he argues that Lawrence's admirers have misrepresented his actual practice in composition. They would have us believe that "he did not, as most authors do, file, clip, insert, transpose; he rewrote"; that "he went forward rapidly once he had started an enterprise, writing long stretches in remarkably little time as the creative flow carried him on" (p. 277). Ross claims support from Mark Kinkead-Weekes for his view that "The actual practice of Lawrence, as the manuscript drafts reveal, was far more complex than either Huxley or Leavis imply. It was, in one critic's phrase, 'exploratory'—firm of purpose yet sensitive to the medium of fiction and willing to leave the work fluid and adaptable, both in its parts and as a whole, for a surprisingly long period of time" (p. 277). It is clear from the work of both Ross and Kinkead-Weekes that the textual history of The Rainbow is far more complex than that of The Trespasser. There is
Detailed support for this argument is not possible without a scrutiny of the contents of the manuscripts along the lines of Ross's discussion of The Rainbow. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that the 'neatness' of the evidence provided by the present review of the manuscripts is at best an indication of the economy of Lawrence's practice, at worst an illusion for which the complexity of the contents of the manuscripts is the reality.
The problem of ten missing pages raised by Powell's figures can thus reasonably be ignored. The conclusion from both external testimony in letters and memoirs, and internally from the manuscripts, is that there were only ever two versions of the novel: 1. The Saga of Siegmund written in three months in the spring of 1910, submitted to Hueffer, provisionally accepted for publication by Pawling at Heinemann's and left in his office for 15 months; 2. The Trespasser, revised from The Saga with Garnett's encouragement during December-February 1911-12 and published by Duckworth in
The remaining consideration concerns the substantive differences between the published novel and the printer's copy. There are more than 260 of these, and the large majority are proof corrections of a routine kind; many are consistent with Lawrence's declaration of war on his adjectives (CL 107). A very few are more lengthy cancellations and insertions. Tedlock's conclusion that all "are attributable to revisions made by Lawrence in the proofs" (EWT 10), is probably sound; it does not however allow for last minute changes made either by Garnett or a Duckworth editor. Complete certainty cannot now be reached.[20]
Miss Corke's suggestion "It is probable that the section dealing with 'Beatrice's' widowhood was inserted during the Bournemouth revision" (WT 237) may seem to call in question the conclusion just stated. If the version taken here to be the Saga, on the basis of the older pagination 1-503, contains no break in the sequence from Chapter XXIX to Chapter XXXI, then it may be that this version is not the original Saga as Miss Corke was it in 1910, or that her memory is at fault and the chapter was there all along or that she never in fact saw the complete manuscript. The second possibility seems more plausible since Miss Corke's account was written over 50 years after the event; and this would not be the only occasion on which her memory can be shown to be, understandably, at fault. It is difficult to rule out the third possibility, that she never saw the conclusion. This would account for her memory of the completion of the novel as earlier than in fact it was. In terms of the novel itself, the fact that the house at Highgate, Beatrice's guest-house, has already appeared in Chapter II, where Siegmund's violin lies in the attic, Beatrice already being a widow in the time-scheme, makes Chapter XXX a significant element in the symmetry of the work. It might be argued that Lawrence only became aware of a potential symmetry in retrospect at some period of revision (or composition) now unverifiable. This view could be related to Miss Corke's sense of a change in Lawrence's aesthetics late in their relationship (IOI 200, 214, 216). But such a change belongs rather to the known period of re-writing, which is verified by the manuscript evidence, rather than to a hypothetical revision antecedent to the existing manuscript. That Miss Corke was shown, or particularly noted, only those parts of the novel directly related to her own writing and experience is unlikely, and is contradicted by her account of the entirely fictitious 'stranger' episode. All that can be said is that Miss Corke's 'probability' is unsubstantiated. There is no break in pagination.
A difficulty of another kind may be related to the missing quires I and
There are several possible explanations. Lawrence may have begun with the name Helena (since the character is based on Helen Corke) and then, as he moved into the 'mind' of Siegmund (one of Helen Corke's names for H. B. Macartney), altered the name to the matching Wagnerian 'Sieglinde'. (There is no evidence that Lawrence himself referred to Helen Corke as Sieglinde, although there are letters to her from Jessie Chambers in which she, as 'Muriel', addresses Miss Corke as 'Dear Sieglinde'. It was one of Macartney's names for Helen Corke.)[21] This would be more convincing an explanation if, when the novel returns to the 'present', after Siegmund's death, the name returned to Helena. But this is not so in Chapter XXXI, although it is true that in Chapter XXIX, Olive and Louisa address her in direct speech as 'Helena', and in Chapter XXX, the narrator, taking Vera's part, calls her Helena. But all of these pages are B pages taken into A.
Miss Corke has made a similar suggestion in a letter to the present writer of November 2, 1976. She says "The name Sieglinde probably appears . . . only when Siegmund is speaking, the author uses Helena." Stated thus, the view cannot be substantiated. However, it does suggest again, as the manuscripts themselves do, that Lawrence had originally in mind some separation of the Siegmund and Sieglinde experience, the centre of the novel, from the outer world of Helena and Cecil Byrne after Siegmund's death. In fact there is a passage in Chapter II, leaf B24, which suggests this. Siegmund has returned home from the opera-house, and is alone in his drawing-room. The text, having so far consistently used the name 'Helena' for the girl, continues "He could not free himself from a sense of ['Sieglinde' deleted] Helena-Sieglinde—she haunted the room." From this point on, the name is 'Sieglinde' exclusively, except on the occasions in Chapters XXIX and XXX mentioned above. On page 47 of B, however, the 'Sieglinde' is twice written over a cancelled initial H. Is the 'Helena-Sieglinde' a deliberate change in the novel, directly related to the mind of Siegmund? Or perhaps an idea
A third possibility is that indeed the initial chapter(s) as we have them in B are already a re-writing of the opening of the Saga; that is to say B, with those of its pages taken over into A, is already a composite one, with parts at least interim between lost originals and the final A-version. To hold this view we must also hold that the evidence of pagination, and of the quire-numeration, rests upon a neat coincidence. The only shred of counter-evidence could be in the fact of the missing quire II appearing to have had only 10 leaves.
Nevertheless, related to this speculation is another curious point regarding names. In Chapter XXXI, the character named 'Cecil Byrne' in Chapter I of both A and B, appears as 'Ernest Lambert'. Throughout Chapter XXXI this is corrected to 'Cecil Byrne', though whether at the Saga stage or in the later revision is impossible to determine certainly. I am inclined to think it was the former.
Miss Corke has no recollection of the name 'Lambert' in the version she saw.[22] This makes it less likely that 'Lambert' was ever used in Chapter I, and so that Chapter I as it stands in B is a revision. 'Ernest Lambert' however, is the name of a character (like Byrne, based on Lawrence himself) in the early play A Collier's Friday Night. The transference of the name of a self-portrait in an early unpublished work to a self-portrait in another is understandable, especially since we know that the Saga was completed when Lawrence was considerably fatigued.[23] We may note in passing the similarity of 'Cecil Byrne' to 'Cyril Beardsall', the self-portrait in The White Peacock which Lawrence was correcting with Miss Corke, and discussing with Heinemann at the time of the writing of the Saga. Lawrence frequently changed the names of characters, possibly having as much trouble with them as he did with the titles of his works.[24]
In conclusion, though it may be prudent to maintain the possibility that manuscript B may wholly or in part be a "fair copy" of earlier material now lost, the weight of the evidence considered together here supports the integrity of the present B manuscript together with the renumberd pages in manuscript A as the first version of the novel. It can reasonably be taken to be The Saga of Siegmund.
Fold No. | Pagination | Leaves to A | |
[I] | [1-12] | ||
II | 13-24 | ||
[III] | [25-34]a | ||
IV | 35-46 | ||
V | 47-[55]-58 | 49 | (1) |
VI | 59-70 | ||
VII | 71-82 | ||
VIII | 83-94 | 89-90 | (2) |
IX | 95-106 | ||
X | 107-118 | 116-118 | (3) |
XI | 119-132b | 119-126 130-131 |
(10) |
XII | 133-144 | 140-144 | (5) |
XIII | 145-156 | 145-146 148-153 155-156 |
(10) |
XIV | 157-168 | all | (12) |
XV | 169-180 | 169 | (1) |
XVI | 181-192 | ||
XVII | 193-204 | 198-201 203-204 |
(6) |
XVIII | 205-216 | 205-207 | (3) |
XIX | 217-228 | ||
XX | 229-240 | ||
XXI | 241-252 | 245-252 | (8) |
XXII | 253-264 | all | (12) |
XXIII | 265-276 | 275-276 | (2) |
XXIV | 277-288 | 279-288 | (10) |
XXV | 289-300 | all | (12) |
XXVI | 301-[311-2] | 301-309 | (9) |
XXVII | 313c-324 | 314-324 | (11) |
XXVIII | 325-336 | all | (12) |
XXIX | 337-348 | " | " |
XXX | 349-360 | " | " |
XXXI | 361-372 | " | " |
XXXII | 373-384 | " | " |
XXXIII | 385-396 | " | " |
XXXIV | 397-408 | " | " |
XXXV | 409-420 | " | " |
XXXVI | 421-432 | " | " |
XXXVII | 433-444 | " | " |
XXXVIII | 445-456 | " | " |
XXXIX | 457-468 | " | " |
XL | 469-480 | " | " |
XLI | 481-492 | " | " |
XLII | 493-503d | " | (11) |
[] = missing believed lost. Total leaves to A = 296.
a. quire of only 10 leaves.
b. quire of 14 leaves.
c. last leaf of present B collation.
d. quire of 11 leaves, being the end of the novel.
Total leaves in B collation = 182.
Notes
The relevant published works by Helen Corke are listed here; those referred to in the text and notes are prefixed with title abbreviations.
- Neutral Ground (London: Arthur Barker, 1933, repr. 1966)
- "D. H. Lawrence as I knew Him", R&MS, 4 (1960), 5-13.
- D. H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1965) reprints other works published separately.
- DW "The Dreaming Woman" (B.B.C. television interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967). A full transcript of this interview is held in the Humanities Research Centre, Austin, Texas, to whom I am indebted for making a copy available to me.
- WT "The Writing of The Trespasser", DHLR, 7 (Fall 1974), 227-239.
- IOI In Our Infancy (Cambridge, C.U.P., 1975). An appendix contains the full text of The Freshwater Diary.
- The standard account remains
- IH Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (London, Heinemann, 1955), 81-87, 98, 107-111, 125-126.
- revised as
- PL The Priest of Love (London, Heinemann, 1975), 97-103, 116, 132-135 etc. This account is, of course, limited by the nature and scope of Moore's comprehensive work.
- EN Ed. Nehls, ed.: D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-1959).
- ED Emile Delavenay: D. H. Lawrence, The Man and His Work (London, Heinemann, 1972).
- ET D. H. Lawrence, A Personal Record by E. T. (Jessie Chambers) (London, Jonathan Cape, 1935).
- CL The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1962).
- HL The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldoux Huxley (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932).
- References to the novel itself are to
- T The Trespasser (London, Duckworth, 1912). This is Duckworth's first edition.
The Surbiton Times 13/8/09 and The Surrey Comet 14/8/09 reported the inquest on the death of Herbert Baldwin Macartney, the original of Siegmund. None of the London papers appear to have noticed the tragedy. It can scarcely have been the "journalistic sensation" claimed by Moore in IH 110, PL 134. Cf. T 265 where Helena buys "a local paper".
See IOI, 178; WT, 233; ET 181-182. In a letter to Pawling 27/4/10 (CL 62) Lawrence says: "I have written about half of another novel . . ." The 'half' I construe as a rough estimate only in view of what follows.
DW 5/5 states ". . . June 1910, the end of June, 1910 . . ." IOI, 184 states "early in July . . ."
Grace Lovat Fraser: In The Days of My Youth (1970), 147. See also p. 144 where Lawrence writes on 1/7/10 "I have just hanged my latest hero . . ." i.e. he has just completed Chapter 27.
These are most fully described in E. W. Tedlock, Jr., D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, A Descriptive Bibliography (1948), 7-12. Hereafter EWT. I here record my gratitude to the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, for permission to consult their manuscripts of The Trespasser, for the excellent microfilms made available for my research, and for the generous co-operation of the staff in answering my queries.
The Manuscripts of D. H. Lawrence, A Descriptive Catalogue compiled by Lawrence Clark Powell (1937), 2. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of Lawrence manuscripts in the Los Angeles Public Library. The discrepant details between Powell's catalogue and Tedlock's bibliography are discussed below.
I think it almost certainly is not; the hand is similar to that in the notes discussed in this paper and therefore Garnett's.
E.g. The pagination at each new gathering of the printed text is indicated, and the manuscript is marked in stints for each of seven named type-setters.
The discrepancy between 207, and the 182 actual leaves can be accounted for, in the light of the argument presented in this paper, by consulting the table. After the transfer of 296 leaves from B to A there should indeed be 207 remaining from the original 503; but the 25 lost leaves (1-12; 25-34; 55; 311-312) reduce the total to 182. However the secondary numeration in B arrives at its end figure of 207 quite coincidentally as follows. The original numeration runs to 115, of which 23 leaves are lost, and three have gone to A—a loss of 26 reduces 115 to 89. To this we must add the unrevised leaf 129, thus making 90. Add to this the 92 leaves from secondary numbers 116-207 (recalling that 311-312 are lost and so not renumbered) and the 182 total of existing leaves is the result.
Confirmed in a letter from David Garnett to the author 28/6/77. Other notes in the same hand appear on the back of leaves A238, A260, A272, A365, B216 (165) and B228 (177).
Tedlock (EWT 7) significantly misreads the word as 'Bravios', which is meaningless. Presumably he checked with A272 and, of course, found nothing. The passage on B272 reads: "Her life of life she gave to Bromios, in mystic ritual. She had confused, for long enough, Siegmund with Bromios, her man with her God, as women will, until she had cried aloud to Bromios and Siegmund and failed to answer, when she repulsed him." Cf. Euripides The Bacchae, trans. Gilbert Murray (1904) pages 10-11, etc. I wish to thank Laurence Pollinger and the Estate of the late Frieda Lawrence for permission to quote from The Trespasser manuscripts.
However, we have already noted that leaves A477-84 were misplaced at the time of Powell's count in 1937.
A's page 55 & 56 contains only the concluding half of what must have been B55. It is likely that Lawrence intended to use B55 in A by cancelling the material he had already re-written into A54 and finally decided it was preferable to complete a re-writing, and so he discarded B55.
Lawrence appears to have worked very economically. That he probably could not afford to waste paper may account for the state of some leaves, especially in the latter half of A, which went to the printer with numerous deletions and interlinear revisions. The leaf numbered 55 & 56 in A contains the text on the verso of a discarded recto numbered 43. Lawrence had written 8 lines on this new page 43 in course of re-writing B43, but appears to have found it unsatisfactorily close to B. (The problem was the behaviour of Helena and Siegmund as they alight from the train at Freshwater.) He set aside this leaf and began again on the present leaf A43. The interim 43 was not discarded; its verso was used for A55. This, however, is the only surviving evidence of such economy.
This is suggested independently in a letter to me from the Head of the Manuscripts Division of The Bancroft Library (February 10th 1977).
The effect of house-style on the spelling and other accidentals of the printed text can be shown. On this and other points I am indebted to Elizabeth Mansfield, the editor of the forthcoming edition of The Trespasser for C.U.P. Her criticism of an earlier form of this paper was generous and constructive.
Since Siegmund was her name for Macartney and Sieglinde was his name for her, Lawrence may have first adopted Sieglinde as fitting for his 'Saga' and altered it as he became more objective towards the novel, and more involved himself with Helen Corke. See below. The letters of Jessie Chambers to Helen Corke are in the D. H. Lawrence Collection in the Library of the University of Nottingham, to whom I am indebted for permission to consult them.
Letter, Nov. 2, 1976. As stated earlier, it is possible that Miss Corke had never in fact seen the conclusion of the novel in manuscript.
Siegmund and Helena's landlady on the Isle of Wight, named Mrs. Curtiss in T, was variously Mrs. Thorn, Mrs. Gunn and Mrs. Brinton during stages of composition. Siegmund's children, Vera, Frank and Marjorie in T are Maud, William and Millicent in manuscript—the latter is also Minna. Readers of T will notice a strange 'Irene' who appears once only, at the close of Chapter II, and an 'Elsa' has been deleted from the story in manuscript. Beatrice MacNair was formerly Mrs. Fitzpatrick in manuscript, and 'Alice', is twice deleted in favour of Beatrice. Miss Corke informs me that Alice was the actual name of Mrs. Macartney. A full discussion of this problem on names and its bearing on the composition of the novel is forthcoming.
| ||