University of Virginia Library

D. H. Lawrence's Progress to Maturity: From Holograph Manuscript to Final Publication of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
by
Brian H. Finney

Lawrence reached literary maturity the year he eloped with Frieda (1912) and finally broke from his dead mother's lingering influence. Already twenty-seven years old, he was a late developer. The psychological reasons for this are well documented in Sons and Lovers, the novel he re-wrote in its final form during that first year with Frieda. He was the first to recognise the difference between Sons and Lovers ('a restrained, somewhat impersonal novel') and his previous two novels, The White Peacock ('a florid prose poem') and The Trespasser ('a decorated idyll running to seed in idealism'[1]). Most critics concur with Lawrence's judgement of these first two novels, but proceed to cite some of his published short stories as early examples of the kind of writing he displayed in novel form in Sons and Lovers. Yet in fact no story written before 1912 shows any more maturity than the two novels of this period.

The cause of such widespread misapprehension is a lack of proper research into the genesis of Lawrence's stories. Amazingly, the evidence has mainly survived in the form of holograph manuscripts and corrected typescripts of the early stories. These are scattered all over England and the United States of America, both in the hands of private collectors and in public and university libraries. Collated, the various versions of Lawrence's early short stories provide a fascinating insight into the way he developed from unexceptional beginnings into one of this century's most powerful writers of fiction.

Lawrence first began writing short stories in the late autumn of 1907 for a Christmas story competition run by the Nottinghamshire Guardian (he won it with 'A Prelude'). From 1910 onwards his stories began appearing in such periodicals as Ford Madox Ford's English Review, the Nation and the New Statesman. In 1914 Duckworth brought out Lawrence's first collection of short stories, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Of the twelve stories included in this book, ten had already appeared in periodicals. With very few exceptions, therefore, there are at least three different versions of each of the stories: a first holograph version, a periodical version and a collected version. Only two of the stories ('The Prussian Officer' and 'The Thorn in the Flesh') were first written after 1912, and

even then Lawrence completely re-wrote the latter story for its appearance in book form.

Two important points emerge from an examination of all the known versions of the twelve stories published in The Prussian Officer in 1914. Firstly every story in it has been written, re-written, or revised in 1913 or 1914. The revisions Lawrence undertook in July 1913 and July 1914[2] were of a sufficiently drastic nature to warrant dating all the stories in his first collection as the work of 1913-14. Secondly this means that The Prussian Officer collection comprises Lawrence's only fiction between Sons and Lovers, a novel in the nineteenth-century tradition, and his next revolutionary, forward-looking book, The Rainbow. The enormous gulf separating these two quite different novels is bridged by the short stories. The Prussian Officer collection with its periodical and manuscript antecedents, then, provides anyone interested in Lawrence's literary growth with a compelling insight into the stages by which he reached the stature we accord him today.

For reasons of space I will confine my attention to three of the stories in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories: 'The White Stocking', 'The Shadow in the Rose Garden' and 'Daughters of the Vicar'. In each case Lawrence's first version of these stories has survived in the form of a holograph manuscript. The early versions are invariably much shorter than the final stories, less than a third the length in the case of 'The Shadow in the Rose Garden', two-fifths in the case of 'The White Stocking'. Conversely, the short early versions often contain far more factual details and events, rely far more heavily on plotting, and tend to cultivate sentimentality in place of genuine emotion.

Take Lawrence's first version of 'The White Stocking', for instance. He wrote this in October 1907 for the Christmas story competition being run by the Nottinghamshire Guardian, and entered it in Louie Burrows' name under the category of 'an Amusing Adventure'.[3] The holograph manuscript of this early version (titled: 'The White Stocking: Amusing'), though not listed in Warren Roberts' Soho Bibliography, has survived in the private collection of Mr. W. H. Clarke, Lawrence's younger nephew, who inherited it from his mother, Lawrence's sister, Ada Lawrence Clarke. The story is written in Lawrence's early handwriting on one side of eighteen pages of a ruled exercise book, and runs to approximately 3,500 words. This must be the version that Jessie Chambers described in her memoir as 'an idealised picture of his mother as a young girl going to a ball at the Castle and drawing out a long white stocking in mistake for a pocket handkerchief'.[4]

The 1907 story is a naively written account of a Christmas party in Nottingham given by Sam Osborne, a middle-aged, flirtatious employer. His attentions to Prissy, the conceited young heroine, a pattern girl in his company, cause a temporary split between her and her sweetheart, Whiston, the firm's commercial traveller. The two men's rivalry surfaces in an angry exchange when Sam Osborne bumps into Whiston who consequently spills hot coffee down his employer's legs. The climax of the story shows Prissy's downfall as she attempts to prolong her moment of triumph in leading off a dance by drawing out her handkerchief which turns out to be a white stocking to the mirth of everyone. The humiliated Prissy flings the stocking at her mocking employer and rushes out of the room. The banal ending should provide the general savour of this version:

The characterisation is crudely over-simplified. The hero, Whiston, is wholly virtuous ('as straight as a die, and as good a man as ever walked the streets'), the villain 'Old Beast Osborne', Prissy's 'unlovely employer', is without any saving graces. Prissy's vanity is over-laboured and the whole story is turned into a psychologically unconvincing exemplum of the old adage 'Pride comes before a fall'. The dialogue at times assumes literary pretensions that drive a wide divide between the character and what he or she is made to say. A factory girl greets Whiston's approach with: 'Oh Mr. Whiston, we had been sighing that Sir Lancelot would come to this lonely Astolat' and proceeds to quote Keats at him. Sam Osborne calls Prissy first Salome, then Medusa. Not even for a moment is there a glimpse of the kind of writing that one associates with Lawrence's mature works.

In January 1910 Lawrence informed Louie Burrows 'I have re-written the White Stocking'.[5] Then again in April 1911 he wrote to her 'I've finished the fourth story—it's the 'White Stocking' written up'.[6] He sent the 1911 version to Austin Harrison, by then editor of the English Review, who rejected what he called a 'wicked' story early in 1912.[7] The story finally appeared in another magazine, The Smart Set, in October 1914, although an unpublished letter to his agent, Pinker, at the University of Texas at Austin shows that it had been accepted by April 22 of that year. Whether Lawrence had revised the 1911 version yet again in July 1913 must remain

in doubt, although its competence suggests this may well have been the case. But the story is now transformed. The 1907 story is told as a flashback. It is flanked each side by events in the present. Whiston is now married to Prissy, re-named Elsie. In the first section we see the two years' married pair on St. Valentine's Day. Elsie receives through the post for the second year running a white stocking with some pearl earrings, obviously from Sam Osborne, now called Sam Adams. Whiston fails to notice the earrings but leaves the house in a temper at her acceptance of the stocking. After the flashback to Sam Adams' Christmas party, the third section recounts the confrontation between husband and wife over her acquiescence to Adams' gallantries, with a final reconciliation. The story ends:

In July 1914 Lawrence extensively revised the story for the fourth or fifth time prior to its appearance in The Prussian Officer volume, published in November 1914.[9] The plot is barely altered. The story has been pruned down a little. The incident of the spilt coffee has been dropped. Sam Adams slyly pockets the white stocking instead of holding it up for ridicule. In the final section the quarrel between husband and wife comes to blows on his part before they become reconciled. But the 1914 story has really left the realm of action for the realm of emotion. Lawrence has transformed it into a psychological drama, in which all the main characters appear compelled to act out unknown parts from unconscious motives. Sentences are left unfinished, and both Whiston and his wife are taken by surprise by the violence of their own unsuspected feelings. The ending of the story gives some idea of the change in technique:

Back in 1907 Lawrence was wholly concerned with the actual story line. By the time he wrote the Smart Set version he was struggling to penetrate beneath his characters' conscious exteriors, but could only achieve this by spelling out for the reader's sake the feelings underlying their overt actions. But by 1914 Lawrence had mastered this problem and was communicating at the level of sub-conscious and unconscious emotion. This becomes apparent if one compares, for example, the three accounts of Sam's dancing with Prissy/Elsie. In 1907 Prissy enjoys dancing with Sam because of the status she acquires in being seen as the centre of her employer's attention.

After her first dance she is 'flushed with triumph'. Her downfall similarly comes because she tries to prolong 'the triumph of the moment' at the centre of the dance-floor. In the periodical version, Sam Adams has a more personal appeal to her, being a superb dancer: That last sentence shows Lawrence having to interpret for the reader the real fascination Elsie finds in Adams.

But with the collected version of 1914 Lawrence has found himself. What gives Adams the edge over Whiston is the physical contact that the dancing allows Elsie and himself. Poor Whiston doesn't dance, so that he is temporarily blotted out of Elsie's emotional consciousness by the sheer magnetism of Sam's presence, even though her conscience (prodded by Whiston) struggles to repel the roué she knows him to be. In a battle between mind and body, the body is likely to be the more powerful force in the short run. This complex psychomachia is skilfully conveyed entirely through the action in this final version. There is no narrative intervention this time:

By comparison to this experience, the disapproving Whiston 'had not made himself real to her. He was only a heavy place in her consciousness'. In a way he never becomes real to Elsie in this way until, driven into a paroxysm of rage, he strikes her across the mouth at the climax of the story, restoring the emotional equilibrium between them in the only sphere possible—the physical.

In the final version hero and villain have been replaced by a more subtly balanced characterisation. Sam Adams now has great physical magnetism which is countered by 'the automatic irony of the roué'. Whiston feels ashamed of his own, however necessary, outbreak of violence. Right and wrong in the moral sense are no longer of interest to the mature Lawrence. Instead he focuses attention on emotional needs and their fulfillment. Whiston only defeats Adams at the dance when he makes physical contact with Elsie, just as he defeats Adams' continuing courtship from a distance by the violent blow that erupts from his unconscious. The amorality of nature has replaced the earlier moral codes that forced Lawrence to divide characters into sheep and goats, heroes and villains. Life itself now occupies the centre of the stage—life, irrational, irresistible and as vibrant as the final version of the story itself.

'The Shadow in the Rose Garden' has similarly survived in three separate versions. In its earliest version it must parallel quite closely an actual visit Lawrence made with his sweetheart, Jessie Chambers, to Robin Hood's Bay on the Yorkshire coast in 1907.[10] In 1935 Jessie Chambers confirmed the identification of the location of this story: 'The actual garden he describes I believe is one we visited at Robin Hood's Bay on one of our annual holidays'.[11] Lawrence wrote his first short stories for the Christmas 1907 competition of the Nottinghamshire Guardian and makes no mention of this story.[12] The holograph manuscript of this version, entitled 'The Vicar's Garden,' is at the University of Texas at Austin and, as Tedlock noted,[13] is on identical paper to that used for one of the three stories submitted in the winter of 1907. It is fair to surmise, therefore, that this first version was probably written early in 1908. The manuscript, like that of 'The White Stocking', is written on one side only of seven ruled leaves torn from a notebook. The typescript of this version is now in the library of the University of California at Berkeley.

'The Vicar's Garden' is a brief anecdote running to about 1,500 words. Like the 1907 version of 'The White Stocking', it concentrates on a story line, which this time turns upon the horror underlying the apparent beauty of the vicar's garden. The narrator and his sweetheart chance upon the vicar's garden and, enchanted with its beauty, are allowed to wander round it on their own. On their return to the landlady, she informs them that the vicar's son is now kept in confinement there, having gone mad from a fever he caught fighting abroad. The moral is crudely drawn by contrasting the girl's opening response to the locale with her later frightened reaction on learning the reality of the situation. At the beginning one reads:

The inappropriate resort to allegory highlights Lawrence's concern at this time for a combination of literary allusion and didactic emphasis. The final sentence returns to the banal moral of the anecdote, once the truth has been learnt: 'The honeymoon will not, I fear, be spent by that bonny northern bay'.

It is almost certain that Lawrence re-wrote 'The Vicar's Garden' as 'The Shadow in the Rose Garden' in July 1913, since he was asking his

typist of 1913, Douglas Clayton, for the manuscript and typescript back of this story for further revision in July 1914.[14] The 1913 version is a little over three times the length of the earlier version. Accepted for publication by The Smart Set by December 1913, it appeared in its issue of March 1914.[15] As with 'The White Stocking', the pair are married in the later versions of the story. It is as if Lawrence felt compelled to write about his own situation, once he had eloped with Frieda. The story opens with the couple beginning their first morning's holiday in a state of suppressed conflict. The wife has brought her husband back to the seaside town where she had spent two years as a lady's companion before meeting her husband. Sending her husband out on his own for the morning, she visits the vicarage rose garden, where she meets the vicar's mad son with whom she had been in love during her earlier stay in the town. He fails even to recognise her. She returns shattered. Finally her husband forces her to confess that she and the vicar's son had been lovers, that he had gone off to fight abroad and become insane from some tropical disease, and that she had seen him that morning. The end of the 1913 version still echoes the bathos of the first version: '"We can't stop here then," he said.'

The July 1914 version for the Duckworth collection, like that of 'The White Stocking', makes no major alterations in plot but excavates deeper into the characters' less conscious feelings. The 1908 anecdote revels in sentiment. The girl when in the garden exclaims 'I have never been so happy'. Within half a page she learns the truth from her landlady, who is herself in tears, and clings, terrified, to the narrator's arm. 'Ay, very sad, very sad,' exclaims the landlady, betraying the early Lawrence's lack of confidence in whether he has affected his reader likewise. The intermediate version still has lapses into sheer sentimentality. The wife, observing her mad lover from the past, reacts too like a stage heroine in 1913:

In 1914 Lawrence showed more understanding of the psychological trauma that such an encounter would cause the wife:

Thematically the 1913 and especially the 1914 stories are no longer concerned with drawing facile distinctions between appearance and reality.

The real focus of interest is on the relationship between husband and wife. The wife is held responsible in the 1913 version for the fact that the vicar's son left to fight abroad. Now she is in danger of destroying a second man, her husband. But he is not prepared to be cast aside by her indifference. Especially in the 1914 version he is made to display a surly, stubborn instinct for emotional self-preservation. He insists on having it out with his wife. In the violent release of hatred on both sides, the wife is finally forced to recognise the strength of her husband's personality, while he is made to acknowledge the gulf separating them. The couple are left at the end of the story in a position for the first time in their lives to begin to build that ideal relationship that Lawrence symbolised in his next novel by a rainbow, and in Women in Love by star polarity. The 1914 story ends on a non-event that in itself represents an entirely new basis for married life:

One final development in this story between 1908 and 1914 is of interest. One can trace the growth in Lawrence's use of natural scenery for symbolic purposes. In the first version Lawrence anticipates in muted form the use he is to make of nature in Sons and Lovers as a norm against which characters can be judged. Already the girl in 'The Vicar's Garden' shows a little of the possessiveness towards flowers for which Paul damns Miriam:

The girl then grasps a large spray of roses to her breast. But Lawrence's personally motivated criticism of the Jessie Chambers character has no thematic place in the story, whereas it is of central importance to Sons and Lovers, a novel about encroachment, or dependence and independence.

By 1913 Lawrence is putting the roses to a different and more relevant use. The wife in search of her dead love wanders through the edenic garden of her past, feeling her present self disintegrating before the memory of a more beautiful life she had once shared with the vicar's son:

But the image is still too tinged with self-pity and sentimentality. After all, the end of the story, far from showing the wife dying from this life, shows her being forced into the living present by her husband. By 1914 Lawrence has shed the last vestiges of sentiment and compelled his image to fulfill the symbolic function demanded by the narrative at the end: The rose has been used as a symbol for passion since time immemorial. This short passage now anticipates the later statement that 'she had never really loved him'. The story of 1914 traces her blossoming from past indifference to present awareness of the man she has married.

Partly because of its length, partly because the first two-thirds of the story is already accessible in published form, I want to confine my remarks on 'Daughters of the Vicar' to clearing up a number of misapprehensions. Lawrence first wrote this story as 'Two Marriages' in July 1911.[16] He revised it for typing October 1911.[17] Two incomplete typescripts have survived. One is at the University of California at Berkeley and consists of the first 44 pages of the story (equivalent to the first nine and a half sections of the final published version of the story). This unfinished typescript was obviously used to publish the incomplete version of 'Two Marriages' that appeared posthumously as a supplement to Time and Tide on 24 March 1934.[18] The last third of 'Two Marriages' has survived as 22 pages of holograph manuscript in the private collection of Mr. George Lazarus (there is also one page of holograph manuscript from earlier in the story). The descriptions of Mr. Lazarus' holograph manuscripts and typescripts of 'Daughters of the Vicar' in Warren Roberts' Soho Bibliography have been superseded by the re-ordering of this material by Mr. Lazarus himself.

He has been able to reassemble the new version of the story Lawrence wrote in 1913 after 'Two Marriages' had been turned down by the American magazine, the Century.[19] Using another typescript identical to that at Berkeley (though complete in the first place), Lawrence proceeded either to correct the typescript or substitute new holograph pages where the typescript needed more drastic revision. The result is a composite manuscript made up of 29 holograph manuscript pages and 30 corrected typescript pages, representing the re-named story, 'Daughters of the Vicar', which he then sent to Douglas Clayton in July 1913 for typing.[20] After he had failed to sell this version of the story to the Northern Syndicate, he once more revised it in July 1914 for inclusion in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, as a comparison of the two texts confirms.[21]

While the 1913 text bears the same reasonably close relationship to the 1914 published version as occurs in the other two stories examined, the 1911 story of 'Two Marriages' (written only a year before the final draft of Sons and Lovers) still suffers from most of the faults discerned in his stories of 1907 and 1908. The plot is much closer to the finished version than is the case in either 'The White Stocking' or 'The Shadow in the Rose Garden'. But just as he allows his relationship to the possessive Jessie Chambers to intrude in 'The Vicar's Garden', so he betrays the continuing hold his mother still had on him a year after her death in Alfred's predicament after his mother has died: 'The pivot and main-spring of his life had been his mother, as a woman usually is, knowingly or unknowingly, the main-spring of a man's life'. This generalisation stands in opposition to one of the main themes of the story, Alfred's liberation from various kinds of external authority, whether from his parents or the navy.

The 1911 version still occasionally contains those by now familiar lapses into sentimentality that mar Lawrence's fiction prior to Sons and Lovers. In the published section of 'Two Marriages' the mother actually offers to leave her son Alfred to Louisa, one of the vicar's daughters, if she'd have him—otherwise he'll go wrong, she claims self-righteously. The proposal scene in the unpublished holograph fragment is painfully unconvincing. Louisa lets Alfred make a fool of himself saying things like 'You've got to marry somebody' until she finally acquiesces, her voice breaks, she takes his head on her bosom, sobs there, and so on. In the finale Alfred Durant asks the vicar and his wife for permission to marry Louisa. The vicar's wife forbids it, but Louisa's married sister, Mary, intervenes for no apparent reason: 'Father, you will reconsider', she commands—and is improbably obeyed. She has to go through the same process to force her father to read the banns. 'Two Marriages' ends rather like a fairy story:

The 1913 version is very much closer to the published story. Alfred now has to make a similar choice between dependence and independence,

as Louisa alone did in 1911. To give some indication of the sort of changes Lawrence made at this stage, one might again look at the final section of the story. In this version Louisa's father stays in character by snobbishly refusing to give his consent to her marrying a coalminer. The couple go off and get married in a registry office, symbolising Louisa's break with the standards of her family, where social class and financial status come before personal fulfillment. But the ending is still too neat and moralistic to be satisfactory:

In the published version Alfred and Louisa are made to face the true consequences of their choice of personal satisfaction at the expense of social conformity. As the vicar's wife puts it, 'if you will have your own way, you must go your own way'. The story ends with Alfred and Louisa planning to get married in a registry office and emigrate to Canada. The demands of love may entail social ostracism, Lawrence has realised by this stage of his own life in exile with Frieda. This conflict between internal and external forms of authority runs through the last two stories to be written for this first collection, 'The Thorn in the Flesh' and 'The Prussian Officer'. It first surfaces as a major theme in his longer fiction in Women in Love, where Birkin and Ursula symbolically write out their letters of resignation before feeling free to explore life unfettered by social or moralistic codes and conventions (including that of traditional marriage).

1912, then, the year Lawrence eloped with Frieda, is a crucial landmark in his development as a writer. Before 1912 his own emotional immaturity (instanced in particular by his letters to Louie Burrows throughout 1911) prevented him from excavating in his fiction beneath the surface of plot and dialogue to uncover the deep emotional currents of the unconscious. By 1913 he was capable of writing 'The Prussian Officer', a story of such power and depth that it deserves to be ranked with The Rainbow and Women in Love. It is in 1913 and 1914 that Lawrence learnt to replace a reliance on plotted events by an emphasis on internal feelings, an appeal

to sentimentality by a sterner regard for psychological realism, and an intrusive use of autobiographical material by narrative objectivity. What was explicit before 1912 becomes implicit after that date. The successive revisions Lawrence made to his first collection of short stories provide an illuminating glimpse into the making of one of this century's foremost writers.

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In view of the duplication that would result with the proposals in the Annual bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries to expand its coverage with the fourth volume, of 1973, the Society's Annual Selective Checklist has been discontinued as of this issue.

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Notes