OCTOBER 7-OCTOBER 16 (1922)

The revisions Lawrence made in Taos in October 1922 of the first typescript (TS1) of his Thirroul holograph are again extensive (creating TS1R), so much so that they necessitate a second typescript (TS2), so that his two publishers, Secker in the UK and Seltzer in America, had "clean" texts to set and print from. We do not know when the typescript of Kangaroo arrived in Taos, nor how long it took for Lawrence to make his revisions of it. His letters tell us that he is still waiting for it on October 7, but that he finished the revisions by October 16 - a nine-day period. As Dr Steele pointed out, it involved […hundreds of changes to words, phrases and occasionally sentences...]. In some cases it involved whole paragraphs - indeed, whole pages. Steele added: […he rewrote sections of five chapters extensively. Together they amount to some fifty pages of reworked or completely new material…]. Steele goes so far as to say that Lawrence regarded the MS he originally wrote in Thirroul as "a rough draft", to be revised and polished later. That would go some way towards explaining the extensive nature of his Taos revisions. (He earlier told Mountsier that he wanted to go through the MS again.) However, undoubtedly by far the major change is in the last chapter. [...I have made a new last chapter...] Into it he injects an account of the storm that struck the coast of New South Wales on Saturday July 23 - the day the MS went off to America with the Mankura - and which lasts for several days. [...Down it came...the wind broke in volleys from the sea, and the rain poured as if the cyclone were a great bucket of water pouring itself endlessly down…] The storm - the remnants of a tropical cyclone that swept down from the north - immures Lawrence and Frieda in "Wyewurk" for several days. […The house was like a small cave under the water. Rain poured in waves over the dark room…the water swept in, and gurgled under the doors and in at the windows. Tiles were ripped off the verandah roof with a crash, and water splashed more heavily. For the first day there was nothing to do but to sit by the fire…] Their entrapment leads, through the thoughts of Harriett, to Lawrence expressing the feeling that had, apparently, been growing in his consciousness about the negative side of Australia (and, perhaps, the evilness he has stumbled on in Rosenthal and Scott, and their secret organisation). […Then gradually, through the silver glisten of the new freedom came a dull, sinister vibration…the freedom, like everything else, had two sides to it. Sometimes a heavy, reptile-hostility came off the sombre land, something gruesome and infinitely repulsive…It was as if the silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of a reptile, and the horrible paws.…] This "scaly-back, horrible-paws" presentiment is the climactic image in the novel, and Lawrence's ultimate summing up of his Australian experience. (An image, however, somewhat lost on the editor of the 1950 Penguin edition of Kangaroo, who changed Lawrence's word "paws" to "jaws", failing to appreciate that Lawrence was referring, not to a reptile, but an anthropomorphic marsupial.) The storm lasts until Thursday July 27, […On the fourth day the wind had sunk, the rain was only thin, the dark sky was breaking…] during which time the interior of "Wyewurk" is not a happy place. The following weekend the Lawrences had invited (see above) the Forresters and Marchbanks down to "Wyewurk", as Denis Forrester later told Edward Nehls (via Fred Esch): […My memory is that we went down early in the Australian spring…]. (Actually it was the weekend of July 29-30: still officially winter.) They arrive by train from Sydney in time for lunch, and apparently stay overnight ("Wyewurk" could accommodate up to 13 people, at a pinch). On Sunday Lawrence takes them up Bulli Pass, in a car (and driver) he engaged for the occasion, for an excursion into the bush. They enjoy a picnic lunch at Loddon Falls (in the Forrester photo-album there are snaps of them, and the driver, in front of the Falls). Lawrence, according to Forrester, was writing something during their visit (probably his translation of the Verga texts, possibly Cavelleria Rusticana). […D.H. was writing something while we were there, because there would be times when he would leave us because he had work to do…] (One of the Forrester snaps shows Lawrence, seated on the front lawn, leaning against the wall of the verandah, apparently with a notebook on his knees.) The English couples no doubt returned to Sydney by the afternoon train on Sunday. The visit provided Lawrence with another ingredient for the final chapter he later rewrites in Taos. In his revised chapter xviii he describes, evocatively, a "fictional" sulky ride he and Harriett/Frieda take into the bush. […Nothing is lovelier than to drive into the Australian bush in spring…] After they return to "Wyewurk" they deck the interior of the bungalow with wattle. […The flowers there in the room were like angel-presences, something out of heaven. The bush! The wonderful Australia…] A day or so later they again travel up to Sydney, probably on Tuesday, August 1. […it was August, and spring was come, it was wattle-day in Sydney, the city full of yellow bloom of mimosa. Richard and Harriet went up to the United States Consul, to the shipping office: everything very easy…] How they spent the next week or so is not known, as all the text tells us is that […in the bungalow gardens, birds flew quickly about in the sun, the morning was quick with spring, the afternoon already hot and drowsy with summer…]. Then it is time to pack up and leave. […the day came to go: to give up the keys, and leave the lonely, bare Coo-ee to the next comers…] In Sydney they cross over the Harbour again, probably to go and see the Hums in Chatswood. We do not know where they spend their last night in Australia, but next morning they are seen off at the wharf, if the text is to believed, by two women, one of whom is probably Lillian Hum, while the other may have been Dorothy Friend - the "Thirroul" Victoria Callcott. […On the last morning Victoria and Jaz's wife came to see the Somers off. The ship sailed at ten…] Lawrence's description of the traditional wharf departure, with streamers being thrown by the departing passengers to their friends onshore, became the inspiration for the cover illustration of the U.S. Seltzer edition of Kangaroo. Lawrence describes the scene: […One by one the streamers broke and fluttered loose and fell bright and dead on the water. The slow crowd, slow as a funeral, was at the end, the far end of the quay, holding the last streamers…The last streamers blowing away, like broken attachments, broken…]. Which is where the new 1994 Cambridge University Press "corrected" edition of Kangaroo, edited by Dr Bruce Steele, ends. But that is not where Lawrence originally concluded the novel. The text he wrote in Taos in October 1922 goes on to describe the passage down the Harbour, past Manly, out through the Heads […ahead was the open gate of the harbour, the low Heads with the South Lighthouse, and the Pacific beyond, breaking white. On the left was Manly, where Harriet had lost her yellow scarf. And then the tram going to Narrabeen, where they had first seen Jaz...] and onward across the Tasman […to New Zealand, across a cold, dark, inhospitable sea.…], those being the final words of earlier UK imprints of Kangaroo (Secker, Heinemann, Penguin, etc). Originally, however, the text went on further to describe a day in Wellington, New Zealand, where inhospitable Customs officials held up Frieda, presumably because of her German ancestry. Lawrence is not pleased, describing New Zealand as […this cold, snobbish, lower middle-class colony of pretentious nobodies…]. The Taos text concludes with Somers and Harriett departing from Tahiti (where, apparently, an American film-crew came aboard, and somewhat scandalised Lawrence with their uninhibited behaviour) and Somers/Lawrence talking on deck with […an American boy…] who had spent […a year or so…] in Australia. He is […A blond, honest lad of twenty-two…] called Norwood, who also […hadn't a very great opinion of Australians…], comparing them unfavourably to America and Americans. We do not know if this reflects an actual meeting on SS Tahiti, but it "rings true". This is the ending that Lawrence sent off to Mountsier in New York in late October 1922 to be retyped to provide the setting-texts (TS2) for Secker in London and Seltzer in New York. However, it was not Lawrence's final say on the text of Kangaroo (which was published just under a year later in the UK and U.S.). Some days after the revised text (TS1R) was posted off, Lawrence again changed his mind about the ending. He apparently sent a telegram from Taos to Mountsier telling him to cut the text at the "UK ending" […It was only four days to New Zealand across a cold, dark, inhospitable sea.…]. However, in doing so, he makes a serious error, which leads to the two texts, British and American, being eventually published with different endings. For instead of telling Mountsier to cut the text at the conclusion of that UK text paragraph, he tells him to cut the text at the end of the last paragraph on TS1R-page 474, for Lawrence retained in Taos a second, revised copy of TS1. (Mountsier had sent him two TS1 scripts, assuming that Lawrence would correct both, and that these would then provide the two setting texts for Secker and Seltzer.) However, due to an inadvertent error - his omission of p466 in his TS1R numbering - the two texts have variant page-numbers, and what is p474 in Lawrence's Taos TS1R is now p475A in Mountsier's retyped TS2 - one page earlier. This leads to the unintended result that what was by then the New York text is different to Lawrence's Taos text, the former ending on what became the Seltzer and CUP/Steele ending [...broken attachments, broken...] while what became UK, Penguin, Viking, etc, texts has Lawrence's amended - and intended - Taos ending […four days to New Zealand across a cold, dark, inhospitable sea.…]. Lawrence, however, has two further opportunities to correct this - not insignificant - anomaly.