 | |  |
Notes
Letter to Louie Burrows of 6 December 1910; see The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. I. 1901-1913, ed. James T. Boulton, 1979 (hereafter Letters I) 195.
Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence, a Personal Record by E. T. (1935), reprinted 1980 (hereafter E.T.)
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, a facsimile of the manuscript, ed. Mark Schorer, 1977 (hereafter California facsimile).
Harry T. Moore, "A Postscript", in D. H. Lawrence and 'Sons and Lovers': sources and criticism, ed. E. W. Tedlock, New York (1965), (hereafter Tedlock) 63-65. Moore erroneously described the manuscript as falling into two parts, a description he continued to offer in his biography The Priest of Love (1974), 131.
Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, (1963, 2nd ed., 1982, hereafter Roberts: see Table 2). A number of statements by Wayne Templeton, SB, Vol. 37, perpetuate errors and omissions made by Schorer which could have been corrected with reference to Roberts.
Harry T. Moore, "The Genesis of Sons and Lovers as revealed by the Miriam Papers" in D. H. Lawrence: his Life and Works, Twayne (1964), 365-387 (hereafter Moore); republished in Tedlock 43-62.
We were unable to look at these letters: all were written to Rachel Annand Taylor between 30 September and 3 December 1910, a period from which no manuscripts of the novel appear to have survived. In reply to my query the Rare Books Librarian confirms that the paper does not correspond with any known Sons and Lovers paper.
Letters I (no. 274) written to Martin Secker on 12 June 1912, which we were also unable to go and see. In reply to my query the Curator of Manuscripts confirms that it is most similar to Paper B.
These are modifications of the tests and descriptions suggested in P. Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography (1972). 226-227, 334.
Within this variety certain sequences of watermarked papers occur intermittently, and sometimes their dates overlap; I list here those found during Lawrence's sojourn abroad in the Sons and Lovers period, because although they do not occur in the Sons and Lovers manuscripts, we did find some of them in other manuscripts and this exemplifies the applicability of the paper research beyond the present enquiry: "Friedenau", Frieda's letter-paper used very intermittently by Lawrence (21 May-22 July 1912); "Fortuna Mill Damasce" (13 August-5 September 1912); "Extra Strong Lessiles Mill" (19 November 1912-[?22] March 1913); "Old Mora Mill" used very intermittently (12 January-29 May 1913), a paper also used for New Eve and Old Adam, pages 1-3 and Honour and Arms (i.e. The Prussian Officer) page 10. Both of these manuscripts also contain a paper with continental style rectangular lines, which occurs in one letter: 575, of 13 May 1913 (New Eve pp. 4-14 and Honour and Arms pp. 11-17). The New Eve ms. is at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.
In addition to the changes in page-numbering made by Lawrence in ink when he transferred pages, other changes were made in pencil by Garnett or the printers because of Lawrence's errors in numbering. In the latter case Lawrence's ink numbers are used in this article.
See Lawrence's letter to Louie of 1 June 1911 (no. 273): "I'm glad you like Paul, but doubt whether you tell me 'the truth, the whole truth. . .'"
Page 89 "behind" changed to "at" and p. 208 "about" changed to "at" may both have been by Lawrence (cf. his large deliberately formed correction "it" on page 232). Two slips were corrected by others: p. 199 the omission of "be" and p. 173 "The," in error for "Then,".
Roy Spencer, D. H. Lawrence Country (1979) 29; and the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser 18 March 1900.
Radford is Clara's mother's name in Sons and Lovers; Lawrence's choice of Dawes may have had something to do with a strange running pun in the novel centring on the lugubrious temperaments of Clara and Baxter Dawes, from Paul's nickname (in chapter IX) for Clara: "Mrs the raven that quothed 'Nevermore'." to the nurse's nickname (in chapter XIV) for Baxter: "Jim Crow".
Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: L'Homme et la Genèse de son Œuvre, 2 volumes, Paris, 1969 (hereafter Delavenay). This quotation is given with 'young' omitted, p. 673.
'Miriam Papers' section of chapter IX, p. 208 (Lawrence himself deleted Only and 's soul.) and p. 215.
Cf. Final ms. p. 233 "[Mrs Morel] could feel Paul being drawn away by this girl. And she did not care for Miriam. 'She is one of those who will want to suck a man's soul out till he has none of his own left,' she said to herself, 'and he is just such a gaby as to let himself be absorbed. She will never let him become a man. . .'" and Final ms. p. 279 "[Miriam] despised him, for being blown about by any wind of authority." First English edition pp. 161, 196. There is another passage similar to the first of these on Final ms. pp. 275-276; English ed. 194.
Jessie gave other quotations in E.T., particularly from Lawrence's letters which she claimed to have destroyed, and in many cases her memoir is now the sole source. The fact that here where her quotations can be checked they are found very approximate is disturbing. However, readers of her memoir are probably acutely aware that it was not written as a work of scholarship but as an attempt to put the interpretative record straight in a matter that was still too painfully close to the author for certain kinds of objectivity to be a main concern.
It was also more likely to have been Jessie than Louie who crossed out in pencil the phrase 'sinister as fate' (p. 216), since she was more inclined to stylistic criticisms; and more likely she who queried in pencil an uncorrected use of the name Muriel for Miriam (p. 278), for Louie would have corrected it—if she read that far.
As he did, for example, when making page 309 of Stage III into page 350 of the Final manuscript: he deleted the sentence "Must I write you a birthday letter?" and what follows, because he now wrote them on page 349 of the new draft (Lawrence deleted in straight lines, Garnett in diagonal or wavy lines).
This is interesting in view of the fact that Jessie Chambers believed the figure of Clara in the novel to be a composite of Mrs Dax, Louie Burrows and Helen Corke, see Delavenay 671.
G. H. Neville, A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Carl Baron (1981), (hereafter Neville) 155-156 and 206 n.26.
There are several complicating factors to this discrepancy. One: Neville asserted in his memoir (Neville 44 and Appendix 167-171) that while Lawrence was staying with him in Bradnop he was bringing The Rainbow to completion; this has not been accepted by Lawrenceans, but if Lawrence had 'finished' his latest draft of 'Paul Morel' and left it all behind in Jessie's hands, what was he writing in the daytime while Neville was teaching, and what was the bedroom scene Neville warned him against? Two: Lawrence wrote one letter (no. 407) from Bradnop on a 26-lined paper similar to l, on which he wrote (at least) pages 328-331 of Stage IIIa, the last surviving pages of that version. These pages of the novel concern Clara's return to Jordan's factory, and are not near the end of the novel. Surely Lawrence was not still writing the end of 'Paul Morel' in Bradnop? This would cast severe doubt on Jessie's memoir: for she gave a brief description of the outcome of the plot that indicates that she had read the narrative beyond this point: ". . . at the end Paul Morel calmly hands [Clara] back to her husband, and remains suspended over the abyss of his despair" (E.T., 202). Perhaps Lawrence was writing material for later insertion into his manuscript. Three: E.T. has been found inaccurate in details, and one solution of the discrepancy here would be to doubt it again in favour of the literal truth of Lawrence's letters. But, on the one hand, if Lawrence had only sent Jessie, say, three-quarters of the novel, she must have known she had not read to the end—and the outcome of the plot must have been a burning issue to her at that time. On the other hand, what did Lawrence mean by "finished": "written only" or "written, read through and tidied up"? His letters indicate he had written "two thirds or more" after 1-3 weeks' work (6 March); if he had not written the last third until 11 April, it took him a disproportionate 5 weeks.
An article in which I attempt to explain the relationship of all the 'Miriam Papers' to the novel is due to appear in Archiv (Bonn) in 1985.
See my article "Mrs Morel Ironing", The Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Eastwood, Nottingham, U.K. 1984, where the two surviving manuscript versions of this scene are reproduced and discussed.
Fragment 2, pp. 32-33. It was at the start of Stage IV, I believe, that Lawrence rewrote this passage after "living" thus: "Therefore she nourished the souls of her unborn children on her own dissatisfactions. Her passionate yearning entered into her infants, poisoning, as it were, their naive young spirits. . ." He then deleted the bottom seventeen lines of p. 32, as I describe in the last section of this article. In this chapter, it is noteworthy, too, that the description of Walter Morel which J. C. F. Littlewood praised saying "it must have been inserted at a late stage of revision" (in his valuable pamphlet, D. H. Lawrence I, 1885-1914 in the Writers and Their Works series, 1976, 36), belongs in fact to this spring 1912 Stage IIIa writing and was incorporated into the Final manuscript as page 13: ". . . the dusky, golden softness of his sensuous flame of life, that flowed from off his flesh like the flame from a candle. . ." (These were thoughts Lawrence elevated to a 'religion' in January 1913; see Letters I no. 539.)
See Lawrence's references to William in the letter of 19 November 1912 to Garnett (no. 516) in which he gives a synopsis of the 'idea' the novel 'follows'.
Because these pages are on k paper, and Lawrence may have begun using k paper in Shirebrook, that may explain why Lawrence began posting this part of the novel to Jessie.
Dieter Mehl gives new information about Lawrence's German relatives, in "D. H. Lawrence in Waldbröl," Notes and Queries, Vol. 31, No. 1. 78-81.
The paper is the same type as one which Lawrence wrote to David Garnett on, 23 July 1912 (no. 473).
Ibid., 50: "[From Trento] We took the train to Riva on the Lago di Garda. . . Then we got our trunks." See Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Madison 1959, Vol. I, 178: David Garnett: "Lawrence and Frieda sent off all their worldly possessions in two suitcases by train to Italy." I argue that they left some possessions behind.
There are discernible changes of handwriting throughout these mss., indicating that Lawrence wrote them with breaks. He clearly had a remarkable capacity to write while on the move and while living in strange temporary accommodation. I cite the change in handwriting here not as something extraordinary but because it supports the possibility that my hypothesis is valid.
See Letters I (no. 478). Lawrence certainly left some manuscripts in Bavaria in 1913, but that later occasion would not explain this particular survival.
This article is published with the kind permission of the Cambridge University Press, Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Mrs Frieda Lawrence Ravagli; and with the kind permission of Mrs Ann Howard (Jessie Chambers Mss).
Love Poems ms.: Lawrence had been preparing poems for a book since October 1911 but Love Poems and Others was not published until February 1913. The ms. paper is very mixed, and since the poems include "Bei Hennef", Lawrence must have kept the poems together with more of the same blank paper, and taken the collection abroad with him.
| | |