Lawrence's Mr. Noon

425 too like we hate them, and so again we hate most those who are alike ourselves, but if they become unlike enough, we may often be very fond of them." Thomas L. Jeffers Marquette University 3. LAWRENCE'S MR. NOON D. H. Lawrence. Mr. Noon, Lindeth Vasey, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984. $24.95 What might be called the orthodox critical view of Lawrence's development as a novelist during the postwar years has emphasized his turning away from the male-female "love ethic" worked out so arduously in The Rainbow and Women in Love in favor of the stong-male ideal in the "leadership" novels: Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. Most critics have lamented this phase of Lawrence's writings, with their increasingly reactionary political orientation and their often shrill insistence on female submission, and have perforce celebrated the subsequent return to the theme of "tenderness" between men and women in Lady Chatter ley's Lover. What the new Cambridge Mr. Noon does, in effect, is to complicate the picture in ways that should induce a revaluation not only of this work but also of others written at this crucial point in Lawrence's career. Mr. Noon becomes the thirteenth published novel in the Lawrence canon, the seventh in order of composition. Lawrence began writing it in May 1920 and set it aside in February 1921, evidently intending to resume or rewrite it later as he had recently done with The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod, the works between which Mr. Noon uneasily falls. By the autumn of 1922, however, he had lost interest in resuming the roughly half-completed draft, living as he was by this time in New Mexico and being preoccupied with writing his "American novel." The manuscript of Mr. Noon had been deposited for safekeeping with his American publisher, Thomas Seltzer. Seltzer went bankrupt in 1925 and used the manuscript to pay part of his debts. It remained in private hands until obtained by the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in 1972. Meanwhile a truncated version, actually just the brief first part of the narrative, was published in A_ Modern Lover (1934) and reprinted in Phoenix II (1968). The Cambridge edition restores the "complete" novel and provides an authoritative text based on the long-lost manuscript. The relation of the "new" Mr. Noon to The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod is especially suggestive. The Lost Girl has 426 always been something of an anomaly for critics disposed to the orthodox view, for that novel's ambiguous, often comic treatment of the Ciccio-Alvina love-battle seems closer in some ways to that of Birkin and Ursula of Women in Love than to the overtly hieratic machinations of the heroes of the "leadership" novels. Moreover, the quasi-realistic presentation of the Midlands in roughly the first half of The Lost Girl seems an even further throwback; indeed, until recently it was believed that the novel was a sort of loosely hinged diptych joining an abortive manuscript, "The Insurrection of Miss Houghton," written not long after Sons and Lovers, with a conclusion written six years later in Italy. We now know that The Lost Girl was wholly written in a little over eight weeks, March-May 1920. And it was just two days after finishing The Lost Girl that Lawrence noted in his diary: "Began Mr Noon." Meanwhile Aaron's Rod, begun back in November 1917, had been hanging fire. Over the next nine months he worked alternately on Mr^ Noon and Aaron's Rod (as well as revising Studies in Classic American Literature and The Lost Girl and, in January 1921, beginning Sea and Sardinia). Even this brief account will perhaps suffice to show how reductive is the linear model of Lawrence's development. That Mr. Noon was taken up right after The Lost Girl, the work to which it is most closely related in style, theme, and structure, and that it successfully vied for his attention with Aaron's Rod for so long—and was ultimately put aside in favor of Aaron as much because of the publisher's preference for the latter as because...