Lawrence's Non-Fiction

Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 called "Moonshine" and "The Conquering," respectively; "Excurse" was once "Excursion"; "Continental" was once "Snow." Lawrence suggested, perhaps in jest, a subdivision of Chapter 14, "Water-Party," setting off the incident of the double drowning in a new chapter entitled "Under Water." Seeker ignored this suggestion, and this edition relegates it to the notes. The editors do insert the other change rejected by Seeker, however, dividing the long "Continental" chapter into two, entitling the new chapter "Snow." The strategic mid-novel placement of Chapter 17, "The Industrial Magnate," is also interestingly discussed in the notes. Although the textual apparatus lists almost 3000 variants, readers familiar with the current Penguin text are unlikely to find many startling changes. Among the more prominent is the restoration of a character's original name. Minette, the promiscuous barfly at the Pompadour Café in whom Gerald takes a brief interest, is now "the Pussums." Gudrun's death-battle with Gerald in "Snowed Up" is fuelled not merely by a vague rejection of his male ego but, in this formerly censored passage, by a much more specific irritant: "Nothing is so boring as the phallus [Gudrun tells herself], so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited" (463). One of Birkin's and Gerald's exchanges about Blutbrüderschaft, in "Marriage or Not," is clarified by the restoration of a deleted passage concerning the natural basis for love between men as a complement to that between men and women. Other restored passages describe naked flesh in ways no longer shocking but doubtless necessary to a full and immediate experience of Lawrence's vision. Indeed, for students of Lawrence this handsome and authoritative edition of his greatest novel is most welcome. The introduction, map of Eastwood (the novel's "Beldover"), explanatory notes, and textual apparatus provide a treasury of useful information. The prospect of additional Cambridge volumes with heretofore unpublished manuscript materials from "The Sisters" should offer scholars an occasion suitably propitious to recall Lawrence's conviction that his "Brangwensaga" was not only apocalyptic but "the beginning of a new world too." Ronald G. Walker _______________________________Western Illinois University___________ LAWRENCE'S NON-FICTION David Ellis and Howard Mills. D. H. Lawrence's Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. $39.50 This study of Lawrence's non-fiction does not consider his fourteen volumes of letters, his plays, literary and art criticism and Phoenix and 259 Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 Phoenix II, Movements in European History, Studies in Classical American Literature, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, translations from Italian and Russian, Apocalypse and almost all the poetry but Pansies. It contains a weak Introduction and three articles by each author-two of them previously published eleven years ago-which are loosely thrown together and have no clearly focused or controlling argument. There is a considerable amount of quibbling with other critics, but the close readings and interpretations do not yield new or significant meaning. The method of citing the place of publication in the endnotes is extremely peculiar. They sometimes cite an English city, sometimes a shire; and variously cite American places by city, by state, by city and state, and by wrong city in right state ("Lawrence, Nebraska"). It is rather surprising that Cambridge University Press published this work. The book emphasizes "the connection between Lawrence's thought and art" and pointlessly opposes Jessie Chambers's charge, first made in 1935 and repeated by T. S. Eliot throughout the 1930s, that "Lawrence is a superficial and unconvincing thinker"-though this charge was, of course, convincingly refuted by Graham Hough and F. R. Leavis in the 1950s. As the duet concede, in their characteristically crabbed Leavisian language: "This task is complicated by having been so often undertaken before, if not in relation to the formulation Jessie Chambers uses then to one of T. S. Eliot's which his opponents in this matter succeeded in making very well-known." Iris Murdoch definitely dismissed this charge in "T. S. Eliot as a Moralist" (1958), when she quoted Eliot's fatuous statement: "neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking" (that, presumably, was reserved for Eliot himself) and called Eliot's remark...