A detail from Paul Delprat's sketch of a garden party at Garsington, Ottoline's country house outside Oxford (Lawrence is seated to the left of Ottoline)

 

IT STARTED - the long journey that was to finally uncover the truth about DH Lawrence and Kangaroo - in the Fall of 1972.

I say "Fall" because it began in America, at the University of Texas at Austin, where Sandra and I had gone to begin the main research for her biography of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Ottoline's daughter had sold her mother's papers to the Humanities Research Centre in Austin, and I was there to help Sandra read through Ottoline's 8000-plus uncatalogued letters from the likes of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and DH Lawrence. (I was in charge of the lesser celebrities.)

After a month of intensive work, we were about to leave to return to London when the head of the HRC, Dr Warren Roberts, asked us to come and see him.

"What are you going to do after Ottoline?" he inquired. We confessed we had no plans beyond that. "You're Australian," he said. "Why don't you look into the time Lawrence spent in Australia? No one's done much work on that."

Dr Roberts was a Lawrence scholar. He was in fact Lawrence's bibliographer. And the HRC at that time was the largest repository of Lawrence letters and manuscripts in the world (they were just about to acquire the holograph manuscript of Lawrence's Australian novel, Kangaroo).

After clearing up some copyright matters, we completed the work on Ottoline in early 1975, and later that year returned to Sydney, where we started looking into Kangaroo and Lawrence's time in Australia.

(Lawrence and Frieda arrived in Western Australia on May 4, 1922, and departed from Sydney just over 13 weeks later on August 10, 1922.)

Being originally journalists, we decided to start the research in the source-material we knew best - the newspapers of the time. We wanted to get a picture of what sort of place Australia and Sydney were in the late autumn-early winter of 1922, and how that "context" might have impinged on Lawrence, and perhaps influenced Kangaroo.

The more we examined the local Sydney papers, the more it seemed to us that Lawrence was, to a hitherto unsuspected degree, leaning for elements of his text on what was happening around him.

Indeed, it began to look as if he may have been in the process of converting some sort of "daily diary" - accurate down to the tides and weather - into "fiction".

Thus when he said his - clearly autobiographical - "hero", Richard Lovatt Somers, did this, saw that and went there, it appeared likely that this was probably what he himself was doing and seeing - as recently as the previous day.