A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, by Edward D. McDonald

There doesn’t seem much excuse for me, sitting under a little cedar tree at the foot of the Rockies, looking at the pale desert disappearing westward, with hummocks of shadow rising in the stillness of incipient autumn, this morning, the near pine trees perfectly still, the sunflowers and the purple Michaelmas daisies moving for the first time, this morning, in an invisible breath of breeze, to be writing an introduction to a bibliography.

Books to me are incorporate things, voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn, and visions that don’t blot the sunflowers. What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.

What do I care if “e” is somewhere upside down, or “g” comes from the wrong font? I really don’t.

And when I force myself to remember, what pleasure is there in that? The very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother’s hands when she was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at the title-page, and then at me, with darkening eyes. And though she loved me so much, I think she doubted whether it could be much of a book, since no one more important than I had written it. Somewhere, in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wistful respect for me. But for me in the face of the world, not much. This David would never get a stone across at Goliath. And why try? Let Goliath alone! Anyway, she was beyond reading my first immortal work. It was put aside, and I never wanted to see it again. She never saw it again.

After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been Hottentot.

“And what dun they gi’e thee for that, lad?”

“Fifty pounds, father.”

“Fifty pounds!” He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. “Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.”

I think to this day, he looks upon me as a sort of cleverish swindler, who gets money for nothing: a sort of Ernest Hooley. And my sister says, to my utter amazement: “You always were lucky!”

Somehow, it is the actual corpus and substance, the actual paper and rag volume of any of my works, that calls up these personal feelings and memories. It is the miserable tome itself which somehow delivers me to the vulgar mercies of the world. The voice inside is mine for ever. But the beastly marketable chunk of published volume is a bone which every dog presumes to pick with me.

William Heinemann published The While Peacock. I saw hint once; and then I realized what an immense favour he was doing me. As a matter of fact, he treated me quite well.

I remember at the last minute, when the book was all printed and ready to bind: some even bound: they sent me in great haste a certain page with a marked paragraph. Would I remove this paragraph, as it might be considered “objectionable,” and substitute an exactly identical number of obviously harmless words. Hastily I did so. And later, I noticed that the two pages, on one of which was the altered paragraph, were rather loose, not properly bound into the book. Only my mother’s copy had the paragraph unchanged.

I have wondered often if Heinemann’s just altered the “objectionable” bit in the first little batch of books they sent out, then left the others as first printed. Or whether they changed all but the one copy they sent me ahead.

It was my first experience of the objectionable. Later, William Heinemann said he thought Sons and Lovers one of the dirtiest books he had ever read. He refused to publish it. I should not have thought the deceased gentleman’s reading had been so circumspectly narrow.

I forget the first appearance of The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers. I always hide the fact of publication from myself as far as possible. One writes, even at this moment, to some mysterious presence in the air. If that presence were not there, and one thought of even a single solitary actual reader, the paper would remain for ever white.

But I always remember how, in a cottage by the sea, in Italy, I rewrote almost entirely that play, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, right on the proofs which Mitchell Kennerley had sent me. And he nobly forbore with me.

But then he gave me a nasty slap. He published Sons and Lovers in America, and one day, joyful, arrived a cheque for twenty pounds. Twenty pounds in those days was a little fortune: and as it was a windfall, it was handed over to Madame; the first pin-money she had seen. Alas and alack, there was an alteration in the date of the cheque, and the bank would not cash it. It was returned to Mitchell Kennerley, but that was the end of it. He never made good, and never to this day made any further payment for Sons and Lovers. Till this year of grace 1924, America has had that, my most popular book, for nothing — as far as I am concerned.

* In a letter 10 Mr. Edward Garnett, dated April 2s, 1914. Lawrence acknowledges the receip’ ot £35 trom Mr. Mitchell Kennerley. Letters of D. H. Lawrence p. 191 (American edition).

Then came the first edition of The Rainbow. I’m afraid I set my rainbow in the sky too soon, before, instead of after, the deluge. Methuen published that book, and he almost wept before the magistrate, when he was summoned for bringing out a piece of indecent literature. He said he did not know the dirty thing he had been handling, he had not read the work, his reader had misadvised him-and Peccavi! Peccavil wept the now be-knighted gentleman. Then around me arose such a fussy sort of interest, as when a really scandalous bit of scandal is being whispered about one. In print my fellow- authors kept scrupulously silent, lest a bit of the tar might stick to them. Later Arnold Bennett and May Sinclair raised a kindly protest. But John Galsworthy told me, very calmly and ex cathedra, he thought the book a failure as a work of art. They think as they please. But why not wait till I ask them, before they deliver an opinion to me? Especially as impromptu opinions by elderly authors are apt to damage him who gives as much as him who takes.

There is no more indecency or impropriety in The Rainbow than there is in this autumn morning-I, who say so, ought to know. And when I open my mouth, let no dog bark.

So much for the first edition of The Rainbow. The only copy of any of my books I ever keep is my copy of Methuen’s Rainbow. Because the American editions have all been mutilated. And this is almost my favourite among my novels: this, and Women in Love. And I should really be best pleased if it were never reprinted at all, and only those blue, condemned volumes remained extant.

Since The Rainbow, one submits to the process of publication as to a necessary evil: as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh. The wind bloweth where it listeth. And one must submit to the processes of one’s day. Personally, I have no belief in the vast public. I believe that only the winnowed few can care. But publishers, like thistle, must set innumerable seeds on the wind, knowing most will miscarry.

To the vast public, the autumn morning is only a sort of stage background against which they can display their own mechanical importance. But to some men still the trees stand up and look around at the daylight, having woven the two ends of darkness together into visible being and presence. And soon, they will let go the two ends of darkness again, and disappear. A flower laughs once, and having had his laugh, chuckles off into seed, and is gone. Whence? Whither? Who knows, who cares? That little laugh of achieved being is all.

So it is with books. To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone. First editions or forty-first are only the husks of it.

Yet if it amuses a man to save the husks of the flower that opened once for the first time, one can understand that too. It is like the costumes that men and women used to wear, in their youth, years ago, and which now stand up rather faded in museums. With a jolt they reassemble for us the day-to-day actuality of the bygone people, and we see the trophies once more of man’s eternal fight with inertia.