Quote:
5 Short Stories I
The chronological relationship between Lawrence's stories and the other early writings is complicated. One quickly finds that each work can be given at least three dates. The date of publication is not in itself significant, since some stories were collected late or even posthumously, and others were published in two forms - an early periodical publication followed by collection in a volume in revised form. At the beginning of the time-scheme is another date: that of the personal experience which Lawrence embodies, transmuted, in the fiction. Between experience and publication there are the stages of first writing and subsequent, often radical, redrafting. These three or four significant dates are interwoven with the dates of other stories and the novels being written at the same period.
The White Peacock was rewritten more than once between 1906 and 1909, and published in 1911. The first version of The Trespasser was written in 1910; in the same year the first version of Sons and Lovers was started, the final version being published in 1913. Between 1907 and 1914, when the volume of collected short stories The Prussian Officer was published, Lawrence wrote, published in magazines, and later rewrote the stories in that volume and others which were collected later or published after his death. I deal with those which seem to me most important in four chapters, one placed before Sons and Lovers and three after. The arrangement is partly thematic, partly chronological.
The first story he ever wrote, 'A Prelude', like 'A Modern Lover, and 'The Shades of Spring’, has obvious affinities with The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers. They are all set at the Haggs Farm and use the Chambers family as characters, or touch on Lawrence's relationship with Jessie. Two later stories, 'Love Among the Haystakes’ and ‘Second Best’, offer a different standpoint or a more mature insight. ‘The Witch a la Mode' is set in the Croydon of Lawrence's teaching days, and has a character obviously based on Helen Corke. 'Daughters of the Vicar' and 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' form a natural pair, not only because they deal with the mining community in or near Eastwood.
The four stories dealt with in later chapters come from a new world. 'The Prussian Officer' and 'The Thorn in the Flesh' are set in Germany, and draw on the military life which Frieda Lawrence's' parents knew, and which Lawrence glimpsed in Metz, Trier, and near Munich in 1913. 'The White Stocking' (among the first stories Lawrence ever started, but radically rewritten later) in one sense belongs to the Nottingham period, but now looked back on with affection from a distance. 'New Eve and Old Adam' is decisively from a new phase, because it is about being married to someone like Frieda, and because Lawrence is therefore embarked on his main life's work.
In The White Peacock the Haggs is used as setting for a plot which places the interest not on the Lawrence-figure but on George Saxton. In Sons and Lovers the centre of interest becomes the Lawrence-figure Paul Morel, and the important person at the Haggs becomes Miriam Leivers, the daughter. Three other early stories are also set at the Haggs: 'Love Among the Haystacks', drafted in 1910 or 1911, perhaps, but so revised in 1913 that it strikes us as a mature piece; 'A Modern Lover', written in 1909-10; and 'The Shades of Spring', drafted in 1911.
The interest of ' A Modern Lover' and 'The Shades of Spring' is that they show Lawrence circling round his own experience, which baffled him. He searches for ways out of his own emotional block by imagining an alter ego, a Lawrence-figure, returning from working in London to Eastwood, older, more mature, and meeting again an older Jessie Chambers. In 'A Modern Lover' he is at last able to make a frank sexual approach to her. In 'The Shades of Spring' he imagines renewing the acquaintance as an older married man, but imagines also that she has replaced him with a lover, a gamekeeper. In both stories the attempt at a new approach fails -- as if Lawrence in honesty could not imagine a way forward, and reverts into bafflement. But in both cases he has also imagined a second alter ego in the same story, a more successful if limited lover. In 'A Modern Lover' it is Tom Vickers, an electrical engineer at the mine; in 'The Shades of Spring' it is Arthur' Pilbeam, the gamekeeper. These two men have succeeded with the Jessie-figure, who seems willing to settle for them as second best, as the character Frances settles for another Tom in the story called 'Second Best'. The Lawrence-figure who is imagined returning home in these is more mature as well as older than Cyril Beardsall in The White Peacock. He has ceased to be the unfocused 'I' who tells that yet cannot present himself from outside. He now becomes a 'he', though he remains the principal centre of consciousness. He worked in the metropolitan south, where Cyril also went; while he was there some maturing process has taken place which makes him to come back to square accounts. The maturing is not only a process of meeting other people, especially women, becoming involved with them; it is also a matter of recognising a special fate or vocation.
Tomorrow I will make some comments on this commentary, but for the most part I think you can get the general idea of how the stories inter-relate and how they reflect Lawrence's own experiences and his desire to work out his thoughts/conflicts in his stories.
