The remains of Stage IIIb
Only twenty-two pages first introduced into Stage IIIb now survive:
pages 45, 46a-49a, 62, 68-69 on n paper which Lawrence
used for
his letters between 29 June and 18 July 1912, and pages 353-355, 358-362,
370-375 on m paper which he used for letters on 16, 17 and
21 May
1912.
This was the period of Lawrence's sojourn in Germany. He was
abroad
for the first time in his life; his affair with Frieda had produced tumult with
her husband and her family and turmoil within Lawrence himself. After a
week abroad, he went to Waldbröl to stay with his Krenkow
relatives,[32] who had issued the
original
invitation to him to visit Germany. He was in Waldbröl
only from 11-24 May, and on 16 May he settled down to revise his
novel.
His letters from here on 14 and [15] May (nos. 443,444) are on a
26-lined paper which does not appear in the novel, but from [16] to 21 May
(nos. 445, 446, 447) are all on m paper—otherwise he
wrote
postcards, and probably one letter to Jessie. She reported in her memoir
that
he wrote from Germany saying (E.T., 216): "I am going
through
Paul Morel. I'm sorry it turned out as it has. You'll have to
go on
forgiving me."
On m paper he wrote fourteen new pages which he
inserted into
his draft and which survived into Stage IV as parts of chapter XI, "The
Test
on Miriam", some of them very little altered in Stage IV. It is impossible
to
tell whether these new pages contain quite new material or just extensive
revision of Stage IIIa writing, but they are particularly interesting in that
they
convey some of the first of Lawrence's reflections on his relationship with
Jessie under the impact of his very new relationship with Frieda.
Pages 353-355, renumbered 397-399 in Stage IV, contain Paul's
conversation with Miriam when he went back to her, about their
"marrying",
from "'I can't marry you,' he continued slowly" to "As she stood under the
drooping thorn-tree." Pages 358-362, renumbered 402-406 in Stage IV,
contain the cherry-picking sequence followed by the walk in the pinewood,
from "There was a great crop of cherries. . ." to "Instinctively, they all left
him alone." Pages 370-375, renumbered 414-417 and 419-420 in Stage IV,
contain Paul's final breaking-off with Miriam, starting "'Well,' said his
mother, 'I think it will be best,'" and ending "His mother looked at him."
But
this section was altered a great deal at Stage IV, with a whole page inserted
(p. 418) towards the end of the bitter dialogue between Paul and Miriam,
after "never fight you off" and before "He hacked at the earth till she was
fretted to death."
On 23 May he announced that he had "finished all but 10 pages" (no.
453); and the next day he left Waldbröl for Munich and his
"honeymoon" with Frieda. From 1 June for two months they settled in
Alfred Weber's apartment in Icking, near Munich, as Lawrence described
to
his Eastwood friend Mrs Hopkin on 2 June 1912 (no. 457): "Now Frieda
and I are living alone in Professor Weber's flat. It is the top stor[e]y of this
villa—quite small—four rooms beside kitchen. But there's a
balcony,
where we sit out, and have meals, and I write."
It may have been here that Lawrence tinkered with chapter II of his
novel; for he inserted revised pages in chapter II on n paper,
an
extremely transparent cheap paper, rather like grease-proof paper, which
he
also used for Once written between 2 and 29 June, and for
his letters
of 29 June and 3, 8 and 18 July. As this paper is not found outside these
dates, and as Lawrence used different paper for revisions to the end of the
novel, it is likely that he made these changes to the second chapter nearer
those dates. Moreover, he talked on 2 June (no. 458) of sending 'Paul
Morel'
off to Heinemann, but did not send it till 9 June.
On this paper he inserted five new pages between pages 44 and 46 of
his
previous draft (Fragment 3, pages 45, 46a-49a) in which he described
Walter
Morel cleaning up for his wife during the latter part of her pregnancy, and
the gossip between the women and the traders in the alley of the Breach.
He
also tried but did not complete a two-page revision to the end of chapter II
(see Fragment 4, pages 68-69—this explains the reduplicated
numbers
which perplexed Professor Schorer). The only
n page that
lasted into
Stage IV was page 62 (renumbered 64 in the Final manuscript), a one-page
replacement among his IIIa "Court Royal" pages, on which he described
Morel throwing a drawer at his wife.
As these different strata fall into place in the final morphology of the
novel, it is not uncommon for material transferred from earlier stages to be
found at the end of a chapter. This gives the impression that Lawrence
knew
the destination at which he intended each phase of his narrative to arrive but
took time establishing the route. Yet where the different drafts can be
compared intact, Lawrence can be observed copying out again almost
verbatim whole episodes. For example, in the visit of Jerry to Walter
Morel's
sickbed and most of the ensuing twenty pages of overlap between Stages II
and III, the revisions Lawrence introduced as he copied could have been
entered on the original Stage II text without much disorder, and Lawrence
could have transferred the pages, as he later did elsewhere. Thus it would
be
a mistake to suppose when Lawrence rewrote a passage afresh onto new
paper that he was compelled to because of the quantity of revision, or that
it
was entirely new material.
It may be that, particularly as he wrote Stage IV, his zeal for making fair
copies flagged towards the end of a chapter. Nonetheless, it may be
significant that chapter-ends often remained unchanged from Stage III to
Stage IV, and that the surviving sequences of Stage III often had been or
became chapter-ends.
