The Best Australian Essays 2014 by Robert Manne

Author:Robert Manne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

Oh Walt, You’re a Leaky Vessel

David Malouf

A good many writers of fiction have also in the course of a busy writing life produced memorable poems, George Meredith for one, Thackeray for another, and several poets have produced single novels that stand as undisputed masterpieces: one thinks immediately of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Mörike’s novella Mozart’s Little Journey to Prague. But few writers have an equal reputation in both fields: Goethe in Germany, Pushkin in Russia, Hugo in France; in England Hardy, maybe Kipling.

D.H. Lawrence is surely one of the few. In a frenetic publishing life, and during many moves – from England to Germany in 1912, and on to Italy; to Australia, Mexico and the United States in the 1920s, and finally to Spain and the South of France – he worked simultaneously, and always at the highest intensity, on novels, poems, travel books, criticism, reviews. There is no time after he began in 1909 when his notebooks are not filled with poems, and no time in his publishing life when he is not between novels and volumes of short stories, either preparing collections of poems or seeing them through the press.

All of this needs careful tracking. There are multiple typescripts. Postage, because of his travels, forms part of the story, and so does accident. So does interference or confiscation by the customs authorities in the cause of public decency. The fact that he was seldom at hand when the poems were being edited means that many of the publications are corrupt, and they may also differ for another reason. Because of Lawrence’s subjects, and the language he uses, many of the poems were at the last moment expurgated by the publisher or withdrawn, not always after consultation with Lawrence (again the matter of distance) and not always with his consent. All this is thoroughly dealt with in this new Cambridge Edition in two volumes: one for the poems and Lawrence’s prefaces to the various collections (this is the first complete and corrected edition of the poems); a second for the vast critical apparatus such an undertaking involves, the variant versions, notes on each poem and on the publication of each book and its reception – even a note on pounds, shillings and pence.

The result is a triumph. Readers of Lawrence who are curious, as we should be, about how these poems came into being – their provenance and history, how each one is related to Lawrence’s circumstances at the moment of his writing and where it stands in the complex development of his thought – have every reason to be grateful, both to Christopher Pollnitz, the editor, and to the press. This is an immense achievement. The information it provides is easy to deal with but also, if the reader wishes, to ignore. The first volume – chronology, introduction, poems – is a beautiful thing to have in one’s hands. The second, equally beautiful, is a useful and reliable one to have close by on a shelf.

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