D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE NOVEL D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE NOVEL

John Worthen

M MACMILLAN ~) John Worthen 1979

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 978-0-333-21706-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1979 Reprinted 1985

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke. Hampshir!' RG21 2XS and London Companies and representativ!'s throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Worthl'n, John D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel I. Lawrence. David Herbert Criticism and interpretation I. Title 823' .9'I2 PR6023.A93Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-03324-9 ISBN 978-1-349-03322-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03322-5 Contents

Preface Vll Acknowledgements IX Abbreviations XI Note on the Text Xlll

I I 2 15 3 26 4 45 5 83 6 105 7 Aaron's Rod 118 8 136 9 152 10 Lady Chatterley's Lover 168 II Lawrence, England and the Novel 183

Notes 185 Index 193 Preface

This is not a book of novel theory. It is a book about the changing way in which Lawrence saw his novels; it is a history of his changing rela• tionship with his audience. There is a widespread belief that, after The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence ceased to write his novels with very much care. I suggest that, on the contrary, he always knew what he wanted to do in them, even if we do not value the result as highly as we do those earlier books. I am frequently concerned with the composition and the publication of Lawrence's novels. Novels are always the productions of a society, never simply the eruptions of ge.nius. I work through the history of each book's composition to establish its identity as Lawrence himself discovered, and modified, it. I would have liked to have discussed the novel , but the full text has not yet been published. 1 Remarks on the published section will be found in Chapters 6 and 7. I have not discussed -the novel by Mollie Skinner which Lawrence rewrote in 1923. Although he may have made it his own by rewriting it, it was not his original conception; and I have chosen to work through from conception to publication. I have often quoted from Lawrence's letters; they were for him what poems, essays and a diary might have been for another man-only, characteristically, he addressed himself to a reader when he wrote them. I hope that this book, however inadequately, shows the truth of Terry Eagleton's remark that the task of criticism is 'to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in its very letter) about which it is necessarily silent'.2

Speke's Valley, 1978 J.W. Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the University College ofSwansea for granting me leave of absence to write this book; the librarians, staff and secretaries of the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; the staff of the Houghton Library, Harvard, the British Library, and the Boston Center for Criminal Justice; F. M. and D. G. Worthen; Lesley Brooksmith, Andrew Brown, 'Tricia Davis, Keith Sagar and Anne Serafin. I am especially grateful to Pat O'Connor and John Turner for their advice. For permission to reprint copyright material, the publisher and I are indebted to the following:

Laurence Pollinger Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the late Mrs Ravagli, and Viking Penguin Inc. for the extracts from the works of D. H. Lawrence. The University ofWisconsin Press for the extracts from D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 Vols, edited by Edward Nehls. Mrs C. Wood and Jonathan Cape Ltd for extracts from D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record.

The following Libraries, and Cambridge University Press, have kindly co-operated in allowing the use of extracts from previously unpublished material: Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, for extracts from manuscripts. The Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a quotation from a D. H. Lawrence manuscript. The Provost and Fellows of King's College, Cambridge, for a quotation from a letter written by D. H. Lawrence to E. M. Forster. Yale University Library for extracts from a letter written by D. H. Lawrence to Catherine Carswell, 31 March 1920, now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lihrary. J.W. Abbreviations

WP The White Peacock ( 1911; rpt. Harmondsworth: , 1950) T The Trespasser ( 1912; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960) SL Sons and Lovers ( 1913; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948) R The Rainbow ( 1915; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949) WL Women in Love ( 1920; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960) LG The Lost Girl ( 1920; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950) AR Aaron's Rod ( 1922; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950) K Kangaroo ( 1923; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950) PS The Plumed Serpent ( 1926; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950) FLC The First Lady Chatterley ( 1944; rpt. Harmondsworth: Pen• guin Books, 1973) JTLJ John Thomas and Lady Jane ( 1972; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) LCL Lady Chatterley's Lover ( 1928; rpt. Harmondsworth: Pen• guin Books, 1960) Fantasia Fantasia of the Unconscious and and the Un• conscious ( 1922 and 1921; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971) Phx Phoenix, ed. E. McDonald (London: , 1936) Phx II Phoenix11I, ed. W. Roberts and H. T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1968) Poems The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. V. de S. Pinto and W. Roberts, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1967) Delavenay Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: L'Homme et La Genese de Son Oeuvre, Les Annees de Formation 188~1919, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969) ET E. T. [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence, A Personal Record (London: Cape, 1935) Xll Abbreviations

Frieda Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. E. W. Tedlock (London: Heinemann, 1961) Nehls Edward Nehls (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1957-9) Ted lock E. W. Tedlock, The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts (Albuquerque: Univ. ofNew Press, 1948) Roberts Warren Roberts, A Bibliography ofD. H. Lawrence (London: Hart-Davis, 1963) Note on the text

Quotations followed by a date are from Lawrence's letters; followed by an abbreviation, are taken from the edition cited in the list of Abbrevia• tions; followed by a superior number, from the edition cited in the Notes.