I, however, could not see how his explanation could possibly be correct, even though I had originally cleaved to its conclusion.

I found it inconceivable that Lawrence would have wanted - according to Dr Steele - to deliberately end Kangaroo in mid-sentence, thus making (as Steele would have it) a conscious decision to end the novel without that particular paragraph's original last word:

broken attachments, broken heartstrings.

(my emphasis - but note the authorial full-stop).

That final word "heartstrings" was, I thought, the very point of the sentence, referring, as it did, to the breaking of the "streamers" between the ship and well-wishers ashore, as Somers's boat slipped away from the wharf in Sydney.

This led me to re-examine the evidence more closely, and it was then that I was able to deduce what actually had happened, and thus show that the Seltzer mid-sentence ending (contrary to what I had hitherto believed) was incorrect.

I was then able to go on to demonstrate that the longer UK Secker ending was undoubtedly the correct one...that was the way Lawrence had wanted to end his Australian novel, with his concluding words: "It was only four days to New Zealand, across a cold, dark, inhospitable sea."

The words "End of Kangaroo" turned out to be, as the American Lawrence scholar LD Clark suggested to me in a private letter, almost certainly put there by Lawrence on what was in fact the "cover-sheet" for a hand-written page of additional text that had been - I was then able to show - earlier excised in error by Lawrence's U.S. agent, Mountsier...
... and unfortunately perpetuated by Seltzer's printers (who made the same mistake that Steele and I originally did).

For Lawrence's words "End of Kangaroo" referred, not to what went before, but to what followed - the correct Secker ending.

I will not go into my argument for the Secker ending here. For those interested in such things, I would refer them to an article I wrote on this which was published in the DH Lawrence Review in 1996 ["Not the End of the Story" DHLR, vol 26, 1-3].

Earlier that year I had delivered a paper about the incorrect CUP ending at a Lawrence international conference held in Nottingham. The distinguished British Lawrence scholar Dr John Worthen was in the audience.

Afterwards he asked if I had discussed the endings with Dr Steele. "No," I replied, "we have not been on speaking terms for some time."

"Pity," he said.

(However, there would have been little point in discussing this with Steele after he had gone to print with the incorrect Seltzer ending, for it was only after his edition of Kangaroo came out that I realised why both of us were wrong.)