The remains of Stage IIIa
Very little of Stage IIIa now survives: 139 pages in seven sequences
on
six different batches of paper (not including the sections of D
paper
transferred towards the end from Stage II). These are pages 1-85, 182-192,
204-226, 272-281, 309-315, 317-318, 328-331 (the D paper
of
Stage II became pages 332-333 and 337-347). The papers are
f to
l, of which f, j and k only are
found in the letters.
The largest sequence is the opening eighty-five pages on
f and
g paper, constituting chapters I-III and the opening of chapter
IV, of
which the first seventy-four pages are the "Court Royal" pages which
Lawrence wrote before his illness. The opening chapters are the part of
Stage IIIa that Lawrence seems to have copied most closely from Stage II,
but because the first 71 pages of Stage II are now lost, and pages 86-181
of
Stage III are also lost, there are now only twenty pages of close overlap
between these two versions: Stage II pp. 72-91 and Stage III pp. 74-85.
However, the fact that certain episodes from the beginning of Stage II are
also found in Stage IV—notably the making of straw fuses and Paul's
interview at Jordan's—means it is very probable that despite the
eventual
divergence of plot, the overlap between Stages II and III continued beyond
what now survives of Stage III.
This is particularly significant because of another curious inaccuracy
in
Jessie Chambers's memoir. In her description of the beginning of this draft,
she selects for praise, as if now written into the novel for the first time, two
passages that she must have read (very little different) in The Paul
Morel
Manuscript (E.T., 197-198):
The early pages delighted me. Here was all that spontaneous flow, the
seemingly effortless translation of life that filled me with admiration. His
descriptions of family life were so vivid, so exact, and so concerned with
everyday things we had never even noticed before. There was Mrs Morel
ready for ironing, lightly spitting on the iron to test its heat, invested with
a
reality and significance hitherto unsuspected. It was his power to transmute
the common experiences into significance that I always felt to be
Lawrence's
greatest gift. He did not distinguish between small and great happenings;
the
common round was full of mystery, awaiting interpretation. Born
and bred of working people, he had the rare gift of seeing them from
within,
and revealing them on their own plane. An incident that particularly pleased
me was where Morel was recovering from an accident at the pit, and his
friend Jerry came to see him. The conversation of the two men and their
tenderness to one another were a revelation to me. I felt that Lawrence was
coming into his true kingdom as a creative artist, and an interpreter of the
people to whom he belonged.
However much one may agree with Jessie's praise here—leaving
aside her
failure to notice Lawrence's ironies at the expense of Jerry and Walter
Morel
(which included that the latter's illness was caused by drink and not by an
accident at the pit)—she implies that it was in this draft, written with
her
advice and moral support that Lawrence first described those everyday
things she had not noticed before. But her examples were both present in
The Paul Morel Manuscript, and the description of Mrs
Morel
ironing (which survives intact amidst radical alterations in the Final
manuscript)
[28] was very probably, like
the
other scene, copied with modest revisions into Stage IIIa. In view of the
fact
that Jessie wrote equally forcefully of the stale, tired writing of Stage II,
her
emphatic praise here must reinforce the suggestion made above that she had
been predisposed against that manuscript.
Chapter I, "Antecedents", has survived complete in its Stage IIIa
form:
pages 1-43 (of which twenty-four pages were eventually retained in Stage
IV). It was similar in outline to the revised chapter I in Stage IV (that is,
largely as published), but Lawrence had not yet introduced the small boy
William's arrival for lunch and visit to the Fair, or Walter Morel's return
home after helping at the public house and his brief conversation with his
wife before the authorial voice resumes the story of her antecedents. In
Stage IIIa, while Mrs Morel waited for her husband to return from his
holiday trip to Nottingham, Lawrence offered some authorial reflections on
her disappointment with her marriage, such as:[29]
Walter Morel had given his wife children, according to the doctrine
of
Schopenhauer. But he would not take from her, and help her to produce,
the
other finer products, blossoms of beautiful living of which he might make
wisdom like honey, and dreams like worship. Therefore she refused him:
also, fearfully, she combated [sic] him. She was too much of
a
woman, too much of the stuff of life, to despair for herself. She was still
fast
producing life, and religion of life for her children.
followed by descriptions of the stifling kitchen and the relative emotional
states of the two partners that evening before they met and quarrelled, such
as (Fragment 2, p. 34):
It is a question whether she was more intoxicated with suffering than
her
husband with drink. He came at about twenty past eleven. He was not
drunk,
but in that wound up state of intoxication whose precious calm and
equipoise is easily shaken, when a little readjustment is irritating to make,
when real thwarting maddens.
All of this Lawrence dropped at Stage IV in favour of the dramatic
inspiration of having Morel arrive just as his tired and heavily pregnant
wife
is engaged in the effort of pouring hot liquid from a large saucepan.
Chapter II, called "Birth and Death", then "Birth and Horror" and
then
simply "Birth", can also be reconstructed almost intact at Stage IIIa: pages
44, 46-67. This was the only one of the first three chapters that Lawrence
modified at Stage IIIb. Eight pages from Stage III (a and b) were eventually
retained in Stage IV, but the rest of this version of the chapter was only
revised a little as it was copied into the Final manuscript. For example, at
Stage III Lawrence had not yet had the idea of describing Morel working
at
the pit before coming home to discover that Paul had been born; he also
introduced in Stage IV some remarks about the older boy William's distress
at his mother's pain and his dislike of the new baby—but these were
deleted by Garnett when he pruned the Final manuscript. Finally, at Stage
IIIa chapter II had ended with Walter Morel's escape from his family to the
local pub on the Sunday evening following the Saturday night row in which
he had struck his wife
[with a drawer]. (It was at Stage IV that Lawrence added the semi-comical
coda of Morel's half-hearted attempt to leave home with a bundle of
possessions.)
Chapter III, numbered at Stage IIIa pages 68-82 and called first
"Aftermath" and then "Morel Reaps the Whirlwind", was all rejected and
rewritten at Stage IV, and is now entirely found among the Fragments. As
described above, it opens with the causes of Walter Morel's illness, and
continues with a revision of the Stage II version of chapter III: Jerry's visit,
the baby Paul's rôle in disturbing the brief harmony between Mr and
Mrs
Morel during Morel's recuperation (which was re-used in Stage IV but
deleted by Garnett) and finally a severely abbreviated account of the birth
of
Arthur. (A very brief remark at the end of the chapter, on the young life
of
William, was the seed of expansion to many pages in the Final
manuscript—of which Garnett deleted a great deal.)
Chapter IV, "Glimpses of Early Life", of which only three pages now
survive (Fragment 6 pages 83-85) is also a revision of Stage II. It begins
with the successful relationship between the handsome baby Arthur and his
father, contrasted with the sickly and colourless Paul who followed
chattering at his mother's heels all day; and the pages run out at the
familiar
account of Paul's fits of motiveless weeping. All this material occurs in
modified form in chapter III of the Final manuscript, where the chapters are
fewer and longer.
As one looks from the opening three and a bit chapters of Stage IIIa
back to the earlier versions—the overlapping first twenty extant
pages of
The Paul Morel Manuscript (pp. 72-91) and the seven
unnumbered
pages of the abandoned opening—and then forward to the much
revised
final version of the work, certain general impressions emerge. Lawrence's
first inspiration seems to have been the single thread of his mother's jarred
existence in the alien, recently built mining village, with her memories of
her
betrayed youthful and romantic optimism still very vivid to her; and he only
gradually diversified that rather static narration of bitterness with the
dramatic accretions of the lives of other members of the family, particularly
William. Jessie's recommendation with regard to William bore fruit
progressively: aspects of his youth had already been included in Stage II;
his
death was now entered at her suggestion into Stage IIIa (see the account of
h paper below); but
further aspects of his childhood and early manhood were introduced as
Lawrence rewrote the novel. It seems that Lawrence's perception of
William's rôle developed along the lines Jessie had had in mind
slowly,[30] and accumulated
momentum as
he rewrote the novel; and it might be added that Garnett made an error of
perception when he pruned much of that growth in the early pages.
In Stage III Lawrence's tone towards Walter Morel was more
lighthearted, Mrs Morel's resentment of her husband was occasionally
alleviated by humour and Lawrence's treatment of both was more
even-handed at the outset of the narrative. Then, although the movement of
the later drafts was less static, had more of the action that Lawrence found
it
so hard to instil, the bitterness became more relentless, the humour more
scornful.
From this point on, the surviving pieces are more fragmentary, and
it is
here that the identification by paper-types is most useful.
Of the two sections of h paper, the first, pages
182-189, narrates
the death of William from the moment of Mrs Morel's arrival at his
bedside,
as far as Paul's subsequent illness. The fact that these pages, written for the
first time now in response to Jessie's advice, were eventually incorporated
into the Final manuscript shows that Lawrence established them largely to
his satisfaction at the first writing. (The narration was completed on three
pages of g paper, 190-192; see Table 2.)
The second sequence on h paper is the twenty-three
page section
of chapter IX, pages 204-226, the whole of the chapter except its opening
pages. This is the longest surviving sequence of Stage IIIa apart from the
first three chapters, and is the equivalent of chapter VII of the published
novel: it relates Paul's teenage friendship with Miriam and was rewritten
because of Jessie's many objections.
The part of Stage IIIa on j paper, pages 272-281, which
constituted the end of a chapter and survives because Lawrence found it
satisfactory enough to transfer bodily into Stage IV to be the end of chapter
VIII, recounts the terrible and pivotal scene of Paul's quarrel and
reconciliation with his mother:
It was not the first time Lawrence had written up this exchange, for he was
here further developing it from
The Paul Morel Manuscript
and
A
Collier's Friday Night (Act III). In other words, this scene was one
of
the foundation episodes present in all the versions of the novel for which
we
have any evidence, and must have been central to Lawrence's
conception.
The two sequences of k paper were numbered 309-315
and
317-318 at this stage. But when Lawrence re-used them in the Final
manuscript he did so in reverse order, renumbering them 350-355 and
345-346. The first, at Stage IIIa, contained Paul's twenty-first-birthday
letter
to Miriam in which he had called her a nun, and his reply to her reply. It
was
his description of Miriam's reaction to the first letter that Jessie had
corrected on page 311. The other, two-page, passage, which at this stage
followed Paul's letters, was the latter part of a scene of partly dare-devil
and
partly passionate flirtation between "Beat" and Arthur Morel. Evidently
Lawrence decided at Stage IV to make the virile portrait of Arthur in this
scene (followed by some sketching of the changes at home after Annie's
marriage and a description of the physical contrast between Clara playing
at
the farm and Miriam standing aloof) lead up to, and so set a pointedly
contrasting tone before, Paul's
precocious-juvenile, intellectual-spiritual letters to Miriam. With the second
of them he then brought chapter IX of the Final manuscript to a close, as
"the end of the first phase of Paul's love affair".[31]
In the four pages of l paper that follow shortly (later
transferred
into chapter X of the Final manuscript) Paul invites Clara to apply for an
overseer's job at Jordan's, and this leads straight into a section of pages
taken
from the Stage II draft, The Paul Morel Manuscript, in which
the
growing friendship between Paul and Clara (her name now changed from
Mrs Frances Radford) is quickened by their walk to the Castle on his
birthday and her subsequent gift. These had been pages 337-351 of Stage
II
and they were renumbered when transferred to Stage IIIa, pages 332-347.
Thus our knowledge of Stage IIIa ends precisely where our knowledge of
Stage II ended.
