University of Virginia Library

The Final Manuscript: Final Revision by Lawrence

On 9 March Lawrence believed that he had 'nearly finished the novel ready for the publisher' (Letters i 156). He must have decided to rewrite Part III after this date, for he spent another month finishing the novel. Part III was entirely rewritten on Type F paper; many of the page tears and watermarks match up within quires, and the page numbers are the same colour ink as the main text. There is evidence of rapid composition; the black ink was often not allowed to dry properly before the page was completed and turned over, so that an imprint was left on the back of the preceding page. The new text has incidents which appear to be based on events in Lawrence's life between November 1909 and January 1910 when "Nethermere I" was with Hueffer and Heinemann. Emily's letter from 'Old Brayford', for example, is full of details that suggest it was based on letters from Jessie Chambers after she moved to West Bridgeford in February 1910 (see Note to WP 261:32).

Lawrence also refers to George Moore's Evelyn Innes which he read in November 1909 (Letters i 142).[19]

Helen Corke looked through Lawrence's new pages as she had done with Parts I and II, making corrections and copying out four heavily revised pages, which she numbered. For example, on page 643 she corrected 'Meg and him' to 'Meg and he', and on page 756 she changed '"I can hardly believe it is possible it is you"' to '"I can hardly believe it is really you."' (WP 307:19). Pages 738-749 (quire LXI) were written by an unknown person. The style is similar in places to Lawrence's, but other features, such as a flowery 'Q' on page 739 are very uncharacteristic. Both Corke and Lawrence subsequently made corrections to these pages.

Corke remembered that when pages were copied out neatly by her, 'the original pages were destroyed, and the fair copies were incorporated in the manuscript, which then received the author's final personal revision'.[20] Lawrence's final revision across the whole manuscript was in black ink with a thin nib. There are only a few places where it is possible to confirm Corke's memory that the 'thin' revision followed her own. On page 40, for example, a Corke revision was crossed out by Lawrence in 'thin' style, and on page 752 there are two 'thin' deletions, including one of a phrase which Lawrence had previously revised in pencil and Corke had copied over.

Lawrence described the final revision and rewrite to Heinemann's co-director Sydney Pawling as follows: 'A good deal of it, including the whole of the third part, I have rewritten . . . I think I have removed all the offensive morsels, all the damns, devils and the sweat . . . I am sorry the manuscript is in such scandalous disarray, but I have done my best to keep it tidy. I am sorry, also, that I could not compress it any further. It is a pity, but I could not cut my man to fit your cloth. I have snipped him where I could, and have tried to make him solid' (Letters i 158, 11 April 1910).

Lawrence's account is largely confirmed by the paper analysis. We have seen above that pages were cut or 'snipped', even though this disrupted the page order and meant that the deleted pages had to be left in a disorganised manuscript. 'Offensive morsels' were indeed removed as Heinemann had requested on 20 January. The publisher was probably particularly sensitive to such matters after the decision of the Circulating Libraries' Assocation on 30 November 1909 to censor itself and withdraw 'objectionable' books.[21]

Lawrence changed 'damn' to 'dash', for example, on page 46, and the words 'belly' and 'devil' were deleted on pages 58 and 59. These changes again suggest that Holt wrote her pages (1-76) in October 1909 and that they were corrected by Lawrence in 1910. If Holt copied her pages in 1910, Lawrence would presumably have taken the opportunity to alter 'damn' to 'dash' and so on before she began to copy.

Lawrence's assertion that 'a good deal' of Parts I and II had been 'rewritten' presents problems however. It seems highly unlikely that the E and B pages analysed in this paper represent freshly written material like Part III. Lawrence may have been referring to the pages copied by Mason and Holt, especially if many of Mason's pages of uncertain dating were in fact copied in March 1910. The material on these pages may conceal extensive revision of the pages they replaced. These uncertainties do not, however, alter the order of events outlined in this paper; they affect only the rate at which those events occurred. If Holt and Mason did make their copies in February 1910, Lawrence would also have had to fit in all the extant layers of 'thick' and 'thin' revision, any revisions on the pages which were eventually copied, and write Part III before 11 April. This would indeed have been a 'labour of Hercules'. He may, admittedly, have been exaggerating the extent of his revision to account for the delay in the return of the manuscript. Another possibility is that he regarded his 'pencil' and 'thin' interlinear revision to Parts I and II as 'rewriting', even though the work was not nearly so extensive as the new Part III. Why might he have felt this? An answer is suggested by a consideration of the context and content of the final revision.

Since September 1909 Lawrence had been growing increasingly intimate with Helen Corke. She told him about the tragic events in her life in the summer of 1909, when her married admirer H. B. Macartney had killed himself. In February 1910 she showed Lawrence some of her writings, including the "Freshwater Diary".[22] Sometime after that Lawrence began to write "The Saga of Siegmund". This new novel was based on Corke's writings and Lawrence's understanding of her and Macartney, and told the story of the fatal passion between the musician Siegmund and the sexually reluctant Sieglinde (also called Helena). Jessie Chambers remembers that Lawrence wrote to her shortly before Easter (27 March) 1910, when he was still revising "Nethermere I": 'I have always believed it was the woman who paid the price in life. But I've made a discovery. It's the man who pays, not the woman' (Letters i 155). This is a discovery he might have made from the story of Siegmund, but it also describes one of the conclusions that could be drawn from the revised novel "Nethermere II". Siegmund kills himself after the failure of a relationship, and George's living-death at the end of "Nethermere II" can be seen as a form of suicide through alcoholism, after the failure of his relationship with Lettie.[23]

The overlap between the material of "The Saga of Siegmund" and "Nethermere II" is also suggested by the fact that Lawrence mistakenly used the name 'Siegmund' for Leslie three times in Part III (see WP, Note to 255:16).

If Lawrence regarded his revisions to Parts I and II as 'rewritings' it would be because he had adjusted the early parts to fit with his revised conception of one of the main themes of his novel. On 23 January 1910 he had believed all he had to do was 'alter in parts', as requested by Heinemann (Letters i 152). By March, however, Part III, which brought together and extended the themes of Parts I and II into the middle-age of the characters, had to be re-written to take account of the discovery that Lawrence had announced to Chambers. In Parts I and II Lettie was made less forward in her encouragement of George's attentions, perhaps to emphasize George's later failure to take the initiative and Lettie's willingness to take the easy route in life, so denying her deepest desires and contributing to George's self-destruction. Despite being told to remove potentially offensive phrases, Lawrence did add some relatively explicit descriptions of George's sensual response to Lettie. For example, in 'thin' revision style he added 'For the first time in his life [George] felt his heart heavy with concentrated passion' (MS 77, WP 29:29), and 'he shivered, so much did he want to take her and crush her bosom up to the hot parched open mouth of his breast' (MS 78, WP 29:35).

Space limitations prevent further analysis of connections between "The Saga of Siegmund" and "Nethermere II", or of the different thematic emphases of "Nethermere I" and "Nethermere II". Such analyses, which may lead to an increased understanding of Lawrence's early literary development, how he shaped his novels and moved between different possibilities and interpretations, cannot be undertaken by reference to any current published text. The general editorial policy of the Cambridge Edition, for example, has been to include variants between previously published texts, the final manuscript and the proofs. As a result, material deleted at earlier revision stages is rarely provided in either Andrew Robertson's edition of The White Peacock or Elizabeth Mansfield's The Trespasser. This article provides insights beyond those made possible by the apparatus of Robertson's edition. It should, one hopes, enable critics to undertake an 'archaeological' exploration of Lawrence's first novel in similar fashion to the possibilities opened up by the articles on The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers by Bruce Steele and Helen Baron, although analysis of these latter two novels will still require access to the texts of "The Saga of Siegmund" and the various versions of "Paul Morel".[24]

The writing of "Nethermere II" may be summarised as follows: