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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
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.
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