I knew him before his
marriage, in White Peacock days, and still hope that a certain photograph of
him taken at that time may be reproduced somewhere. It was a charming
likeness, with an ethereal
expression in those youthful
features. Then he came to see me with his newly-married wife; I cooked, in her
honour, a
German luncheon.
He sometimes turned up at
the
English Review office with stories like the Prussian
Officer written in that impeccable
handwriting of his. They had to be cut down
for magazine purposes; they were too redundant;
and I was charged with the odious task of performing the operation. Would Lawrence never learn to be more
succinct, and to hold himself in hand a little? No; he never would and he never did; diffuseness is a fault of much of his work. In Women in Love, for example, we find pages and pages of drivel. Those endless and
pointless conversations! That
dreary waste of words! To give your reader a sample of
the chatter of third-rate people is justifiable; ten consecutive pages of such stuff is realism gone crazy.
Norman Douglas, Looking Back – An Autobiographical Excursion, New York,
Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1933.
D.H. Lawrence, Autograph manuscript pages from The Dance of the Sprouting Corn, 1924.
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