The Final Manuscript: Revisions by Lawrence and Corke
in
1910
The order in which various revision styles were made can often be
established only by the evidence on a few pages where several styles occur
and a later style revises an earlier one. There is evidence that Lawrence's
'thick' revisions were made before his 'pencil' ones, and the 'pencil' before
Helen Corke's contribution. Whenever Lawrence made a 'pencil'
correction, Corke later overwrote it with her characteristic blue-black ink
and rounded handwriting. Lawrence replaced '"you have not treated him
kindly of late"' on page 194 with '"I suppose he is paying you back"', in
'thick' black ink. He later crossed this out with a pencil and wrote '"You
have treated him badly"', which Corke then wrote over in blue-black ink
(the phrase was eventually deleted in proof). Pages 213-215 were corrected
in 'thick' black ink and then deleted with diagonal pencil strokes across the
page, after the pages had been numbered. The deletion in pencil was then
confirmed by Corke's blue-black ink (see
WP Notes to 82:33). The deleted pages were not thrown
away
because the deletions occurred after the pages were numbered; the
manuscript would have had a jump in the text from page 212 to 216.
Because of the close relationship between Lawrence's pencil revisions
and Corke's later over-writing, it seems likely that the pencil revisions were
made in February or March 1910. Lawrence rarely used a pencil in his
extant manuscripts from this period. The only other pencil writings occur
in two significant sections of one of his poetry notebooks.[16] An unfinished and untitled poem
may be
found written in pencil inside one fly-leaf. It appears to be Lawrence's first
response to reading Corke's "Freshwater Diary" in February 1910 (see
CY 7). A completed poem (in ink) entitled "A Love
Passage",
found amongst the main body of the text, starts off like the pencil poem but
then changes, indicating that it is a revised version. It is preceded by the
prosepoem "Malade" which is in pencil and was probably written during
Lawrence's illness in February; the poem has the same image of a flapping
tassel of a window-blind as Lawrence's letter of 28
February (Letters i 155). Writings in pencil occur nowhere
else
in Lawrence's poetry notebook. It seems possible that Lawrence used a
pencil when he was lying in bed convalescing (rather than a bottle of ink
which could be spilled), writing the first version of "A Love Passage" and
"Malade", and taking the opportunity to start the final revision of
"Nethermere I", which he had just received from Heinemann. He may have
done this before he thought of asking Helen Corke to look over the
manuscript, or in the three days between asking her and personally
delivering the manuscript to her home.[17]
The poetry notebook has very few poems written in this period of
early 1910, in contrast to the large number that were written or copied into
the
notebook around November 1909, probably in response to a suggestion by
Hueffer that Lawrence should offer a volume of verse for publication
(
Letters i 144). Lawrence had plenty of time to write poetry
through November to January whilst Hueffer was reading "Nethermere I"
and Heinemann was considering it for publication, but had little time in
February/March 1910 because he was intermittently ill and then busy
revising his novel. He worked through the manuscript with Corke, sitting
in her sitting-room in the evenings and 'discussing points of the revision'
(
CY 20).
Corke wrote in corrections and new sentence orderings, presumably
with Lawrence's agreement. She also helped him correct the novel's proofs
in September 1910, and believed that 'Lawrence took reasonable care in the
reading of his proofs, and he would have fiercely resented any inaccuracy
on the part of the compositor'.[18]
Such resentment would presumably have also applied to Corke if she had
tried to correct the manuscript without his permission. Her revisions either
overwrite Lawrence's 'pencil' revisions or re-order sentences, as he had
asked her to look for 'split infinitives and obscurities of phrase'
(CY 50). On page 83, for example, she changed 'I put it
away,
the letter' to 'I put the letter away'. On page 279 she changed '[Marie] is
a little below the fashion' to 'behind the fashion' (WP 108:1)
and, on page 604, 'a jingle of a flat piano' to 'a jingle from an out-of-tune
piano' (WP 247:17). On page 390 she changed the
clumsy sentence 'It was decided that it was an accident' to 'They decided
at the inquest that the death came by misadventure' (WP
154:37).
Corke also copied out a few pages neatly. On the back of page 88
Lawrence wrote some extra sentences in pencil (WP
34:19-26)
to be inserted on page 89. Corke must have decided to copy out page 89
incorporating the new text, although for some reason she chose to leave out
part of one of the new sentences. She began to copy it, and then crossed it
out; the Cambridge Edition uses Lawrence's pencil version.
