The Plays of D. H. Lawrence: Addenda

THE PLAYS OF D. H. LAWRENCE: ADDENDA IN THE February, 1960, issue of Modern Drama :(Vol. II, NO.4), a short article appeared in which were discussed the ideas .found in the several plays written at intervals during the literary career of D. H. Lawrence.i In that article there is a mistake about the date· of composition of one of the plays. Further, the author omitted a play which would have added weight to his final conclusion: that the plays show "how a great artist hammered out his thought on several anvils, reshaping and redefining it to fit the specific form-novel, tale, play-to produce the work of art."· Concerning the chronological error, Altitude, which was published in Laughing Horse, a now defunct "little" magazine, in 1938, could not have been written in 1912, as Mr. Waterman states in his article. The characters with which Lawrence concerned himself in this play were people whom he met during his sojourn in New Mexico in 19l15. The play itself evidently grew out of Lawrence's irritation with Mabel Dodge Luhan's habit of shouting "Finet" resoundingly upon every possible conversational opportunity,8 since the first scene consists almost entirely of people wandering around Mabel's kitchen announcing to each other and the world that they feel fine! Mabel Dodge appears in the script under her own name; so does "Spud" Johnson (later the editor of Laughing Horse at the time the play was published), and so do several other members of the Taos group. The incorrect placement of A ltitude in the chronology of Lawrence 's plays neither adds to nor detracts from Mr. Waterman's conclusion, since it would be ridiculous to attach any serious theme to this work. It was obviously scribbled down simply to poke fun at the Taos menage and at the distressing things which they did to Lawrence's ideas when they adopted them and added their own peculiar views toward life. Lawrence probably did not even intend to publish this play since he used the characters' real names. The text is, however, an excellent example of the caustic side of Lawrence's humor. 1 Arthur E. Waterman. "The Plays of D. H. Lawrence," Modem Drama, II (February, 1960). pp. 349'357. 2Ibid., p. S57. 8 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1982), p. 177. 431 432 MODERN DRAMA February The play which was omitted from Mr. Waterman's article was called Keeping Barbara or The Fight For Barbara.4 It was written in 1912 and was eventually published in The Argosy, a British magazine, in December, 1933. Essentially the play reflects the actual life situation of Lawrence and Frieda5 after she had deserted her husband and fled with Lawrence to Italy. The characters are easily recognized as Lawrence, Frieda, and various members of her family. This play is of some importance to Waterman's conclusion since it occasionally touches upon the theme which becomes the entire backbone of Lawrence's later novel, The Rainbow: the idea that fulfillment of the soul grows from complete absorption in the marriage partner. For instance, at the beginning of the third act the leading character soliloquizes: She doesn't want to stick to me-she doesn't want to love meshe won't let herself love me. She wants to save some rotten rag of independence-she's afraid to let herself go and belong to me. However, after this development the idea is complicated and nearly obliterated by an abundance of irrelevant side issues and extraneous domestic squabbles. This confusion effectively keeps the play from being good drama, but cannot hide the fact that this is an early treatment of an idea which was later reworked in a much different form. This addition to Mr. Waterman's article is not intended to question his conclusions. It is meant, rather, to add further evidence to his idea of Lawrence's practice of reshaping and redefining ideas to fit the specific form. HARRY E. MAHNKEN 4 The play was finally published under the title Keeping Barbara. However, Mrs. Frieda Lawrence, in a letter to Professor Lawrence Lee in 1948, referred to the title, The Fight For Babara...