Men in Love

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 20 · 12 November 1987

From John Worthen

SIR: Paul Delany’s review of the new Cambridge University Press Women in Love (LRB, 3 September), of which I am a co-editor, has just reached me. Some errors need correcting, and Delany’s misunderstanding of the nature of the publication needs pointing out. Delany is not really interested in texts or in textual derivation. This is a handicap, because the Cambridge edition is is primarily important as a new edition of the text. He has not bothered to understand the derivation of the text: i.e. from the heavily corrected second typescript of the novel, which was retyped by a typist employed by the American publisher Thomas Seltzer. Delany has been misled by the extensively corrupt Penguin edition, which does indeed reprint the American edition (along with many of its disastrous misreadings). Furthermore, TSII is not only emended from manuscript, but from two previous typescripts, both heavily revised. Delany’s simple statement is both wrong and misleading. He also comments that Secker’s English edition’s authorial revisions (done at Secker’s request) ‘are relevant to the history of censorship and libel’ but ‘not at all to literary criticism of the novel’. Editors don’t just choose what interests them, or what is relevant to their own literary-critical purposes. The revisions in question were made by Lawrence himself, and no textual edition can ignore them.

When Delany tells his readers what ‘the major editorial crux of Women in Love’ is, he comes up with this: ‘Did Lawrence’s feelings about homoeroticism change from 1916 to 1919, so that the Prologue became out of date and he freely discarded it? Or did he see that the truth revealed in the Prologue would destroy his career, so that he had to settle for a slanted and diluted version of the story he really wanted to tell?’ This is quite extraordinary. By no even extended stretch of the imagination could this be said to be ‘the major editorial crux of Women in Love’. Editorial cruxes are about choices of text, about the validity of certain readings. The Prologue in question was rejected by Lawrence no later than July 1916, and possibly as early as April; the facts are stated quite plainly in the edition. There is no crux, editorially, about it. Of course, what Delany believes is that Lawrence was running away from his own homo-eroticism: slanting and diluting it. He is not discussing editing or text; he is telling us what he believes the novel is about.

When Delany does turn to textual matters it becomes clear that what he wants is a variorum edition of the novel: of all states of the text, and of all deleted readings. In fact, only photographic reproduction of all the textual artifacts could satisfy him – together with an extensive commentary. It’s a splendid idea: thousands of pages of reproduced manuscript and typescript pages. (Does Delany have any idea of what that would cost?) But it has nothing to do with the edition he is reviewing. The Cambridge edition of Women in Love prints Lawrence’s developed and final text. Isn’t this publication of the first accurate text of the novel rather a cause for celebration, than for an insistent demand for material such an edition cannot provide? It’s not Women in Love that Delany wants to read: it is the novel that satisfies his theories about it; and poor Lawrence’s novel goes on being rejected, seventy and more years after its first rejection.

John Worthen
Oberhausen, West Germany

Vol. 9 No. 22 · 10 December 1987

From Paul Delany

SIR: John Worthen (Letters, 12 November) says that the revisions to the first English edition of Women in Love ‘were made by Lawrence himself, and no textual edition can ignore them.’ My point is simply that this rule should apply to the revisions preceding the first printed edition as much as to the ones following it. Indeed, there is far too much material to reproduce in a single volume – which requires the editors to have a clear sense of priorities (based on literary values) and to provide a coherent summary of materials they can’t print in full. This is what Charles Ross’s book does and the Cambridge edition doesn’t.

With regard to the ‘editorial crux’ of Lawrence’s discarded homoerotic Prologue: the OED defines ‘crux’ as ‘a difficulty which it torments or troubles one greatly to interpret’. My review does not say that Lawrence was ‘running away from his own homoeroticism’: it says that in the novel’s development there was a complex mixture of self-censorship and spontaneous emotional evolution – and that the editors should have done more to help Lawrence’s readers understand how Women in Love was shaped by this struggle.

Paul Delany
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia