Cambridge Lawrence

ELT 39 : 4 1996 ous sexuality where no genitals need be revealed, and even a bend in a clothed male body "as if to approximate a vagina." There is sufficient hybridization in Beardsley's figures without stretching the case for sexual cynicism. Further, he rushes to judgment on occasion with utterly no evidence, as when charging the rather cautious if hysterically received Yellow Book with "blatant, demimondaine eroticism." That would have surprised many of its contributors. Do such limitations undermine Snodgrass's analyses? No. But the book is best read for its individual elucidations of the drawings, great and small. It will be an essential resource for those interested in that remarkable artist who was far more than a "dandy of the grotesque" and was far from the peak of his potential when he flickered out. When Max Beerbohm wrote that he belonged "to the Beardsley period," it was a half-truth concealed as jest. Beerbohm's error was that Aubrey Beardsley transcended his period. Stanley Weintraub Pennsylvania State University Cambridge Lawrence D. H. Lawrence. The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. lxv + 488 pp. $89.95 IT USED TO BE that, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a text was a text was a text. No longer. Thanks largely to the Cambridge University Press editions of D. H. Lawrence—which now number some two dozen, apart from the letters—and the Hans Gabler edition of Joyce's Ulysses, what constitutes the text of any given work has come into question. It is one thing to recognize that merely "presuming our texts" (as critic Charles Rossman puts it) ignores the process of establishing editions, diminishes our understanding of the works in question, and may even lead to serious misinterpretation of an author's intentions. It is another thing to agree on the principles used to rediscover and/or reconstitute the "correct" versions. Certainly the controversy generated by the Cambridge editions of Lawrence (as well as Gabler's Joyce) has been composed of equal parts of heat and light. In his "metacommentary on the rhetoric of reviewing the reviewers," contained in the D. H. Lawrence Review for fall 1989, Charles Rossman remarks, 478 BOOK REVIEWS From the sometimes venomous battles over the new Ulysses to the more recent, similarly hostile—if so far more punctilious—exchanges over the Cambridge Women in Love, the conflicts over editorial practices amount to a genuine, albeit verbal war. A great deal is at stake here: competing theories of editing, the egos and reputations of the advocates of a given theory; the very language that constitutes two of our century's major literary texts; those same texts regarded, now more than ever, as commercial properties; and millions of dollars in future sales, royalties, and inheritances. No wonder raw passions so quickly surface. Indeed, a cursory sampling of one year's articles in journals of literary criticism, and topics of study sessions at professional gatherings, reveals the extent to which the Cambridge editions of Lawrence have provided the grist for scholars'mills. In the October 1988 Essays in Criticism, for example, Charles Ross took the editors of Women in Love—and, by extension, all the Cambridge editions—to task for, among other things, their turgid, pedantic notes; failure to credit previous scholarship; undue dismissal of revisions prompted by typists' errors; diminution of Frieda Lawrence's role in helping to shape the text; and conflation of different editions into a "new edition," a practice that has resulted in a strange hybrid never written by Lawrence, and that was designed, so Ross insinuates, as a strategy to secure a new copyright. Ross ended by noting that the 1982 Penguin edition of the novel was perfectly adequate , thank you very much. The editors of the Cambridge Women in Love were quick to counterattack in an April 1989 article in Essays in Criticism. There they lambasted Ross for his failure to point out that he himself had been the editor of the Penguin edition, and rejoined point by point to Ross's criticisms of their work. Paul Eggert jumped into the fray in the D. H. Lawrence Review (numbered fall...