Sons and Lovers is the autobiographical novel of an
author
whose biography has, since his death, rivalled his art in commanding the
attention of readers and critics. The two years he spent writing his four
drafts of the novel (October 1910 to November 1912) witnessed the most
momentous events in his life: his mother ("my first, great love")[1] died, he left his teaching job for
the risky
experiment of living by his pen, he went to live out of England for the first
time, and he began sharing his life with Frieda Weekley; he also brought
to
an end his long relationship with Jessie Chambers, and was engaged for
fourteen months to Louie Burrows. The four drafts that he wrote in those
two years bore witness to his efforts progressively to understand and face
or
evade the implications of those events while living through them.
Lawrence himself called the work "autobiography"
(Letters, I,
490), but it was no simple record; by writing it he was examining a central
life-problem that was Oedipal in character, and doing so not only before
Freud's theories had made their impact on Europe, but also through the
medium of the novel
rather than the treatise or essay. His method of arriving at his conclusions
was to renew his efforts at interpretation with each successive draft. Thus
the sequence of drafts would show the steps by which he made progress in
the uncharted territory of psychological self-analysis, and how he learned
to
reconceive the potentialities in the novel form for the purpose of such
fictional-biographical exploration. The full drafts would therefore show
more
than developments in style, they would reveal how Lawrence brought into
shape an innovative work of art; in addition, they would document his
oscillations between one interpretation and another as he pondered the
conflicting pressures in his personal history, and they would provide some
insights into the emergence of his verdicts.
Echoes of a conflict between rival viewpoints linger on into the
published novel in the recurrent tones of judgement, accusation and
self-justification. This tendency of the novel to sound like a debate has been
reinforced from without by the existence of Jessie Chambers's rival
interpretation in her memoir, written after Lawrence's death.[2]
All these complexities cause the surviving early drafts to be the
subject
of a more intense and varied curiosity on the part of readers of the novel
than many an author's "foul sheets" would necessarily be. But because each
draft is so intimately bound up with Lawrence's life in those two years, it
is
not enough simply to read and compare different versions; we need to know
as closely as possible when the surviving pages were written.
Alas, not everything has survived, but in addition to the complete
final
manuscript miscellaneous portions from previous drafts are extant. No
serious attempt has been made to date these and discover how they all relate
to each other.
The University of California published in 1977 a beautiful
photographic
facsimile of the Sons and Lovers manuscripts acquired in
1963 and
held at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, which include not only the final
manuscript itself but some rejected sheets from earlier drafts.[3] The editor, Professor Schorer,
labelled these
sheets "Fragments" and divided them up at follows:
| Fragment 1 |
Chapter I |
pp.1-8 |
| 2 |
|
pp.26-36 |
| 3 |
Chapter II |
pp.44-45,46a-49a,46-58 |
| 4 |
|
pp.68-69 |
| 5 |
Chapter III |
pp.68-82 |
| 6 |
Chapter IV |
pp.83-85 |
Fragment 6 is in fact a continuation of Fragment 5: no pages are missing
between the end of chapter III on page 82 and the beginning of chapter IV
on page 83. Professor Schorer registered his surprise (p.[3]) that Fragment
4
contained page-numbers also found in Fragment 5: the answer to this
enigma
is that Fragment 4
belongs to a different period of
composition from
all the other Fragments except the inserted pages 45, 46a-49a of Fragment
3.
Any reader of the facsimile of the final manuscript itself is bound to
notice that it contains long and short sequences of varied paper, some
sections of which have had their page-numbers altered once or even twice.
Did these renumbered sections originally belong to earlier drafts? If so,
which drafts? When were those passages written? How do they relate to the
other, discarded, portions of drafts: the Fragments at Berkeley and the
manuscripts now held at the Humanities Research Center of the University
of Texas at Austin?
It is strange that Professor Schorer made no mention of the latter, for
they had been described in print (albeit not wholly accurately) by Harry T.
Moore;[4] and they were the
only Sons
and Lovers manuscripts listed in the edition available to him of
Warren
Roberts's scholarly and authoritative A Bibliography of D. H.
Lawrence.[5]
The University of Texas H.R.C. has held since the early 1960's a
271-page manuscript of an early draft which is there labelled The
Paul
Morel Manuscript; and in November 1980 the Center also acquired
a
twenty-three-page section from a draft written in Lawrence's hand but
annotated with crititisms and revisions by Jessie Chambers.
It is well known that Lawrence tried to improve his progress with the
writing of this novel by involving in the process of composition at several
stages one of the main participants in the life-history recounted therein,
Jessie Chambers. As a result she wrote for him biographical notes, and
critiques of his drafts, some of which have fortuitously survived. The
existence of her marginalia shows that she also wrote her objections and
criticisms on the manuscript of the novel itself, and the result is a richly
suggestive document. The acquisition of this manuscript completes the
H.R.C.'s holding of the small selection of Jessie's written contributions to
Sons and Lovers known to have survived. The others are
three
episodes and two commentaries, making six manuscript sections in all. It
has
never been satisfactorily established how these Jessie Chambers manuscripts
(labelled the 'Miriam Papers' by Harry T. Moore[6]) relate either to each other
or to the successive drafts of Sons and Lovers.
When my co-editor and I were pondering our microfilms of the
surviving
manuscripts in Cambridge, England, in preparation for a study of the
originals in Berkeley and Austin, and wondering whether it would be
possible to settle some of these unanswered questions, the significance
dawned upon me of a remark in one of Lawrence's letters: "The 112 pages
of Paul are pages such as this on which I write. Am I a newspaper printing
machine to turn out a hundred sheets in half an hour?"
Letters
I, no.
264. Did Lawrence's expostulation contain a clue as to where the key to
this
jigsaw-puzzle might be found?
That letter, written on 9 May 1911 to Louie Burrows and now held
at
Nottingham University Library, was written on a 21-lined paper which had
been torn off a pad with the aid of such large perforations that the sheet had
acquired a markedly "serrated" top edge. These same features, 21 lines and
a
serrated top edge, appeared to be present also (as far as one could tell from
a
microfilm) in the first surviving pages, 72-165, of The Paul Morel
Manuscript. Were some of these the pages Lawrence had been
referring
to in that letter? Did he regularly write letters on the same paper that he
was
using for his novel (and stories and poems)? If so, the letters, as
physical
documents, would provide a dated framework for reconstructing the
history of the layered manuscripts and miscellaneous fragments that have
survived.
Preliminary study of the holdings in the library of Nottingham
University
gave me reason to believe that some correlations would be revealed if we
undertook as full a survey as possible of the relevant documents. Nearly all
the extant letters written between October 1910 and November 1912 are
now held in the Nottingham University and County Libraries, the H.R.C.
at
Austin and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Some
comparison of manuscripts of the novel with letters could be made
physically
at Austin, but for identification of paper-types between the various library
holdings some form of sufficient paper-description needed to be
devised.
The comprehensiveness of James T. Boulton's The Letters of
D. H.
Lawrence Vol. I 1901-1913 permitted us the great convenience of
referring to each letter by the enumeration in that volume (which also gave
economical identifications between letters written on the same day and even
to the same recipient). In the larger period September 1910 to May 1913,
that we chose prudentially to cover, there are 402 items in Letters
I
(Nos 178-579). Of these, 83 are postcards and one was written on a concert
programme; 6 survive only in typed copies and 27 as quotations in books,
newspapers or private communications; a further 9 letters are in private
hands; 7 are at UCLA[7] and one at
the
University of Indiana.[8] The
remaining 268
original letters we examined
and described for comparison with the paper-types found in the 882
surviving leaves of manuscripts of the novel.
In this article I report the results of the research, beginning with an
account of the problems encountered, the methods evolved and the picture
that emerged of Lawrence's habits in the use of stationary. The grid of
descriptive questions we assembled reflects the range of paper-types being
covered, and the terminology we settled for reflects the practical rather than
theoretical emphasis of the task. Scholars engaged on similar projects,
whether in relation to further manuscripts of D. H. Lawrence or to other
authors, may perhaps benefit from the information and adapt the techniques
described here.
Then, although a wide range of results flows from the precision in
dating
made possible by the paper research, this article is confined to explaining
the
chronology of composition and interrelations between the surviving portions
of drafts in terms of paper-batches. This information is summarised in two
tables at the end: they provide the essential factual foundations for readers
of
the California facsimile who wish to develop their observations about
Lawrence's revisions.
Lawrence's statements in his letters give an outline composition
history
of Sons and Lovers as follows. It was written, in effect, in
four
stages: Lawrence wrote four drafts starting from the beginning each time
and
he conducted a separate, thorough revision of one draft; but he did not
complete all these four stages. He wrote Stage I (unfinished) from October
to December 1910; Stage II (unfinished) from 13 March to July or October
1911; Stage III he began on 3 November 1911 and continued until perhaps
19 November when he fell ill, and then after convalescing he began again
sometime between 9 and 23 February 1912 and finished on 11 April 1912;
on 3 May he took this IIIa manuscript with him to Germany, and Stage IIIb
was a revision of this version carried out from 16 May to between 2 and 9
June 1912; in September he arrived in northern Italy where he wrote Stage
IV from 7 September to 19 November 1912. The paper research modifies
some of this outline as well as providing
dates within which each sequence of paper was used.
After the completion of the manuscript stages, the novel was further
altered during the ensuing months. First, the publisher's reader at
Duckworth's, Edward Garnett, reduced its length by a tenth by crossing out
passages throughout the final manuscript. Secondly, Garnett sent the edited
manuscript direct to the printer, Billing and Sons in Guildford, where it was
used as copy: the compositors introduced a few substantive variants and
thousands of changes in punctuation. Finally, two rounds of proofs were
revised by Garnett and Lawrence before publication on 29 May
1913.
The change of title from 'Paul Morel' to Sons and
Lovers during
composition is not perfectly reflected now in the labels by which the
surviving manuscripts are known. From his very first mention of the novel
in
October 1910, Lawrence called it Paul Morel, and it was not until
mid-October 1912, when he had written three-fifths of the final manuscript
and only a month before he completed and despatched it, that he used the
title Sons and Lovers.
Therefore all the references in Lawrence's letters during those first two
years, that is for almost all the manuscript stages, are to Paul Morel. But
Paul Morel is the name now given at the H.R.C. to the
271-page
manuscript (largely of Stage II) held there, and Professor Schorer (pp.
[2]-[3]) suggested the title
Paul Morel or
PM3
for the
Fragments at Berkeley. In this article Lawrence's uses of titles in letters
will
be quoted as they are printed in
Letters I; 'Paul Morel' will
be the
form for referring to mention of the novel in the records for that period;
The Paul Morel Manuscript will be used for the H.R.C.
manuscript
of Stage II; the "Final" manuscript for the complete manuscript of Stage
IV,
and "Fragments" for the discarded pages at Berkeley; the "section" of
chapter IX for the twenty-three pages of a draft held at H.R.C.; the
"remains" of Stages IIIa and b for the reconstruction of that draft from the
surviving evidence; and "items" for
the distinct manuscript sequences belonging to the so-called "Miriam
Papers".
