1993

Lawrence, seemingly, never read the U.S. Seltzer edition, for he never (as far as we know) made any comment about the different endings…which have, unfortunately been mistakenly repeated and perpetuated in the current CUP "corrected", and intended to be definitive, edition, due to - ironically - yet another, and hopefully not final, editing error. Nevertheless, the CUP edition has at least restored Lawrence's final proof corrections, which Secker failed to incorporate into his UK edition - which was the main circulating edition from 1923 to 1993. Yet the final - but perhaps not inappropriate - irony is that the entire CUP re-editing project (which, at the time of writing, is still afoot) was based on the anomaly of the UK and U.S variant endings of Kangaroo, as the original general editor of the CUP editions, Dr Warren Roberts, pointed out in the early 1970s, when arguing for the CUP recension project:

Kangaroo and Women in Love are textually complicated books, and the texts differ in the various editions. Kangaroo, I think, is perhaps more complicated than Women in Love...I don't think there is now a text of Kangaroo in print anywhere with the text he really wanted.

And, irony of ironies - more than 90 years on - there still isn't.

*What was Rosenthal and Scott's reaction when they read Kangaroo? (as they almost certainly did - for Scott was later "ribbed" over his portrayal in Kangaroo - see DHLA Secret Army Research notes 14/5/87 entry). Did they do anything to contact Lawrence after he left Australia? Via Hum - and probably the Friends - they could have found a forwarding address for him in America (or contacted him via his publishers). Yet there is no extant evidence of any contact - though there well may have been some (in a later letter to Mabel Dodge, Lawrence warned her not to identify "real" people in her writing, "Remember," he told her, "other people can be utterly remorseless, if they think you have given them away"). Also, there are several hints that Lawrence later exhibited some concern that the KEA could try to make good the threats made by Scott and Rosenthal before he left Australia. Richard Aldington, for example, thought that Lawrence was worried about something after some officers made some inquiries about him while they were holidaying together in the south of France in the late 1920s (see Rananim vol. 3 no. 2, p9 "The Spy Episode"). He told Aldington that they had to leave the resort they were staying in "immediately". Earlier, when in Chapala, Mexico, Witter Bynner recorded (in Journey with Genius, p160) that one morning Lawrence rushed into Frieda's room shouting "They've come!", and insisted they depart the town at once. On the other hand, Lawrence apparently had no compunction about portraying Rosenthal and Scott again in two later works (admittedly unpublished in his lifetime) - the former as Major Charles Eastwood in The Virgin and the Gypsy, and the latter as Jack Strangeways in the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. (see SA Research Notes 8/8/74, 15/8/74, 23/8/74 & Rananim vol. 5 no. 3, pp 10-19 "A Ruse By Any Other Name").

(This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr Warren Roberts, the distinguished Lawrence scholar, who first put my nose on to the track of Kangaroo.)

 

 

©Robert Darroch 2013