D.H. LAWRENCE CAMEO

 

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.

 

Retrospective (Norman Douglas)

Glancing back I note that on this date twenty years ago—namely on Christmas Eve, 1924—I was staying at Syracuse. Twenty years:what can have happened during that long stretch of time? It is a blank at first; a blank, and then a blur. Suddenly the memories crawl out of chaos and disentangle themselves from one another.  Yes, a good deal was crammed into those years—deaths of old friends and the making of some few new ones; trips to Tunis and Greece and Austria, to India and Syria and Tanganyika; the writing of books; a lawsuit or two; that infernal rheumatism.

        In Syracuse the hotel up at the Latomia dei Cappuccini was most comfortable, one of the best, at the moment in the kingdom.  Nothing was lacking, nothing amiss.  And I grudged myself nothing.  If what is meant to be serious work, like the writing of that pamphlet on Maurice Magnus, has to be done, then good food and attentive service are essential;  these and uninterrupted quiet.  Hence the visit to Syracuse where one was a complete stranger.  This day, then, twenty years ago, the booklet was finished and typed on that handy but otherwise unsatisfactory Blick.

From Late Harvest. London, Lindsay Drummond, 1946. 

Reader Note:  Click on images to enlarge.