D. H. Lawrence's Non-Fiction

the publisher's advertisement of "new 6s. novels"—a miscellaneous list including works by Rolland, Galsworthy, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and other less distinguished and forgotten authors-and, placing himself with upraised demonstrative arms beneath it, challenges the reader in a cartoonist's balloon: "But perhaps you would rather read one of these?" But by far the most extravagant of his inventions involve a process he engages in at large as a caricaturist, that of recording not the experiences actually described in his text but those extrapolated or imagined from it. To this group belong the portraits drawn in the manner of other artists—Rowlandson, Spy, and the photographers Mills and Saunders. We have also a number of "visions": Zuleika looking out of place in an orphanage (much like the drawing in The Poets' Corner of Verlaine as an usher in a boarding school in Bournemouth); Zuleika apprehended by the police; Byron in the corpulent complacency of middle age, a drawing entitled "But for Missolonghi." It is through these drawings particularly that we may conjecture what Beerbohm's novel meant to him. While there are doubtless psychological origins to the novel which have yet to be revealed, I believe that Beerbohm's private graphic emendations serve to underscore a conscious intent: to delineate the perpetual clash of romantic myth and commonplace reality. This is considerably less than the definitive interpretation we originally sought, but it is consistent with Beerbohm's approach to artistic invention. We know that Max valued principaUy the purity of the novel's language and that the pathos or reality of the characters' plight was an unexpected bonus. His drawings thus tend to contemplate with wonder his own abUity to create a fiction, just as his caricatures contemplate with wonder the self-creation of a Wilde, George Moore, Edward VII, or Rossetti, to name but a few of his more frequent subjects. Purchasers of this book will own a facsimile of Zuleika Dobson as it appeared in 1911, complete with misprints, though without binding variants. But if the source of value in a first edition resides in its being a replica of the volume actually seen, held, and possessed by the author, then such purchasers will have something better than a first edition: a facsimile of what became of the volume after it actually was in the hands of the author. Professor Hall's introduction, wise and unobtrusive, provides appropriate evaluation of its embellishment. Ira Grushow Franklin & Marshall College 5. D. H. LAWRENCE'S NON-FICTION D. H. Lawrence. Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985. $42.50 In mid-1914, Lawrence agreed to write a short critical study of Hardy for the publisher James Nisbet and Co.; as the writing progressed and the focus changed, Lawrence soon began to think that the appropriate title for his 324 unfinished work should be called Le Gai Savaire. For "Study of Thomas Hardy" developed into a quest to define—or perhaps we should say a performance or— his philosophy. As Steele tells us in his introduction, 'Despite Lawrence's spelling 'Savaire,' which is neither modem French 'savoir' nor a medieval dialect of French 'savair,' the meaning—The Gay Science (or SkiU)—is clear" (p.xxxvi). Since it originaUy was published posthumously in Phoenix (1936) under the title "Study of Thomas Hardy," Steele has rightly decided to use both titles. In his major study The Forked Flame (1965), H. H. Daleski first reaUzed the vast importance of Lawrence's idiosyncratic, digressive, but intermittently brilliant and compelling book-length essay "Study of Thomas Hardy" for understanding Lawrence s major novels, particularly The Rainbow: "The most striking feature of Lawrence's Weltanshauung is its duaUsm; and in the essay on Hardy, Lawrence sets out his concept of duality in terms of the 'male' and 'female' principles, insisting that aU creativity is dependent on the fruitful interaction of the two principles. . . . Lawrence, though beüeving intensely in himself as a male, was fundamentally identified with the female principle as he himself defines it in the essay on Hardy" (Daleski, p. 13). Daleski extrapolated from the "Study" crucial concepts of Lawrence's dualism: "The male Erinciple is...