In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

31:3 Book Reviews James. Nonetheless the list provided by Edel and Tintnor is fascinating, suggestive, and in some ways jolting. I suspect that the library of Henry James—with its astonishing richness, Continental bias, and, catholicity—will impress and surprise many readers, and will make modem scholars look at their own libraries with perhaps more than a little alarm. John Auchard University of Maryland LOVE AMONG THE HAYSTACKS AND ELSEWHERE D. H. Lawrence. Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Cloth $59.50 Paper $19.95 R. P. Draper, ed. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Fourth Edition. $65.00 Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories occupies a small comer of the most important publishing project in the history of D. H. Lawrence studies: the Cambridge University Press edition of all of Lawrence's writings and letters in newly edited texts. The present volume brings together the fourteen early stories that Lawrence did not include in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), his first short story collection. In addition two previously unpublished story fragments plus the interesting "Bums Novel" fragment are included as appendixes. This Love Among the Haystacks should not be confused with Love Among the Haystacks and Other Pieces, published posthumously in 1930, though there is overlap. The stories collected in the Cambridge Love Among the Haystacks are not wellknown , and in most cases the author's failure to collect—or even publish—them in his lifetime is understandable. Nevertheless, "A Modem Lover," "The Witch à la Mode," "The Old Adam," and the title story are all stronger than several of the Prussian Officer stories. Come to think of it, even second-line stories by the greatest twentieth century English story writer are worth reading and knowing about. Lawrence was a Nottingham college student in the autumn of 1907 when he wrote the earliest story collected here, the sentimental "A Prelude." He finished "New Eve and Old Adam," the last of the stories to be written, in May 1913, almost a year after his elopement with Frieda, the wife of one of his university professors. Several of the stories reflect Lawrence's experience as an elementary school teacher and ladies' man in the south suburbs of London between October 1908 and Febmary 1912. The stories collected here demonstrate how greatly the young writer's world expanded during these four years. In "The Fly in the Ointment" (1910) he is still speaking preciously about "mauve primroses, slightly weather beaten, and some honeysuckle-twine threaded with grey-green rosettes, and some timid hazel 353 31:3 Book Reviews catkins" (49). By the time of "Once—!" (1912) the mauve primroses have vanished . In this story the Frieda figure recounts an erotic adventure in which she and a young German officer make love all night among a "whole armful of red and pink roses." In the morning there are "crushed, crumpled little roseleaves on [the officer] when he sat up, almost like crimson blood!" (158). Many of these stories—including "Once—!"—focus on sexual initiation. The novella-length "Love Among the Haystacks" is one of Lawrence's most radiant treatments of this theme. Typically, as in "The Witch à la Mode" and "New Eve and Old Adam," characters find themselves locked into relationships in which their love is shadowed by hatred. The volume includes three fictionalized sketches of colliery life ("The Miner at Home," "Her Tum," and "Strike-Pay"), written to capitalize on the national miners' strike of 1912. Lawrence aimed to make these pieces "as journalistic as I can make 'em" (xxxii), but nevertheless they impressively dramatize the tensions at the core of sexual bonding. The notorious corruptness of Lawrence's texts is the major justification for the Cambridge edition. Mistranscription during an often lengthy process of revision, house styling, and bowdlerization by nervous publishers all produced enors. John Worthen, the editor of Love Among the Haystacks, is a whiz: keeneyed , efficient, and knowledgeable. I doubt that anyone knows more about Lawrence's early life and about the dozens of Lawrence manuscripts scattered around America and England. Though Worthen's conections of his various texts...

pdf

Share