D. H. Lawrence and the Publication of Look! We Have Come Through!

D. H. Lawrence and the Publication of Look! We Have Come Through!

 

 

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Andrew Nash

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초록

 

In 1917 D.H. Lawrence's whole outlook on the social and cultural environment of his country was embodied in his attitude towards the literary marketplace. The suppression of The Rainbow in 1915 and his opposition to the war contributed to his feeling of detachment from what he called ‘the bourgeois world, the world which controls press, publication and all’. Presenting new archival evidence, this article examines the publishing history of the poetry volume Look! We Have Come Through, issued by Chatto & Windus in 1917. Closer examination of the motives of the individual editors involved in the production of the volume reveals why Lawrence was required to make changes to his text but also why the firm were eager to publish a volume that was to have little commercial impact. Issued at a critical moment in Lawrence's relationship with the marketplace, and in the history of literary modernism, the episode shows how, in spite of general hostility to his work, there were forces in the mainstream publishing market that were keen to embrace modern literary forms and take risks with the work of authors whose subject-matter was challenging and potentially dangerous.

 

설명

 

Looking back in 1928, D. H. Lawrence described his condition in wartime England as a moment when ‘the sense of detachment from the bourgeois world, the world which controls press, publication and all, became almost complete’.1 The catalyst for these feelings had been the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915, and throughout the war Lawrence's whole outlook on the social and cultural environment of his country became embodied in his attitude towards the literary marketplace. As Joyce Piell Wexler argues, like other modernists, Lawrence inherited ‘contradictory models of authorship. He was deeply alienated from society yet committed to reforming it. He was contemptuous of the mass audience yet dependent on the income it provided’.2 The ambivalence to publishers and the public sphere was longstanding. Quite apart from the need to write books that would sell, Lawrence's willing response to editorial advice in his early career shows how he looked upon publishers as partners in the process of literary production. As his career developed, however, he found it increasingly difficult to produce the kind of work that, aesthetically and financially, publishers and editors demanded. The author who in 1913 wrote: ‘I don't mind if Duckworth crosses out a hundred shady pages in Sons and Lovers. It's got to sell, I've got to live’3 was by 1917 informing a correspondent: ‘I think there ought to be some system of private publication and private circulation. I disbelieve utterly in the public, in humanity, in the mass’.4 Though he had responded with ‘sadness and grief’5 to Edward Garnett's suggestions for cuts in Sons and Lovers, he allowed the editor to take out what was necessary and, when the novel failed to sell as expected, reserved his ire for other mediators in the book trade — the ‘damned prigs in the libraries and bookshops [who] daren't handle me because they pretend they are delicate skinned and I am hot. May they fry in Hell’.6 As John Worthen argues, in 1913 Lawrence ‘trusted Garnett to know, better than he did, what would be acceptable in the book market’ and his financial position left him with no alternative but to comply.7 By 1917 his attitude had changed.

What generated the shift in attitude was, ironically, Lawrence's decision to adopt a more professional outlook on the market. In 1914 he accepted an offer from the literary agent J. B. Pinker to conduct his affairs. Pinker was well placed to manage Lawrence's income from the American market and the publication of his short stories and poems; he was also able to bring an offer from the major fiction publishing house/publisher Methuen for the future publication of his novels. That Methuen approached Pinker and not Lawrence, before the author had any representation, is an indication of the increasing importance of literary agents in the marketplace, to publishers as well as authors. Methuen's offer of a £300 advance — three times the initial sum paid for Sons and Lovers— and the promise of a contract for two subsequent novels in effect tied Lawrence to a particular market. The fate of The Rainbow, however, not only confirmed Lawrence's inability to produce the kind of commercial writing that would serve that market, it coloured his attitude towards publishers and publishing profoundly. He had told Pinker before the negotiation that Methuen would have to ‘make some fight’ for the novel, yet Algernon Methuen's capitulation in court, and the magistrate's frequent mention of the publishers' good name, left the author, who was unable to defend the book in court, feeling disenfranchised. He announced to Pinker: ‘It is the end of my writing for England. I will try to change my public.8 For some time he had been thinking of emigrating to America — a country he knew to be ‘shocking’ but, whilst not ‘a new world’, had a ‘new sky above it’9 — and throughout this period he was torn between pursuing ideas of private publication and attempting to break through the barriers of the commercial book trade. In February 1916 he discussed plans with Philip Heseltine ‘to start a private publishing concern, by subscription’, which would begin by issuing The Rainbow.10 Leaflets were distributed but the enterprise never got off the ground.

It is in this context that I want to consider the publishing history of Look! We Have Come Through!, the volume of poems Lawrence published through Chatto & Windus in 1917. Untapped evidence in the Chatto & Windus Archive sheds new light on what was a pivotal moment in Lawrence's dealings with the literary marketplace.11 The episode complicates as much as it reinforces what we know about Lawrence's relations with the market in the period immediately after 1915. It has been claimed that after publication of The Rainbow publishers in England ‘no longer much wanted a volume with “D. H. Lawrence” on the title-page.’12 As this essay will show, however, it was the significance of Lawrence's name that attracted Chatto & Windus to Look! We Have Come Through!. The publishing history of the volume demonstrates the importance of viewing the relationship between authors and the marketplace dynamically. The publishing industry in 1917 was not an homogeneous institution; varieties of individuals and firms courted and attracted varieties of types of writing, and the motivations behind the editorial policies and priorities of individual publishers must be considered if we are fully to understand the historical circumstances of literary publishing in this or any other period.

Look! We Have Come Through! addresses Lawrence's relationship with his wife, Frieda, whom he first met in 1912. He had originally planned to call the volume ‘Man and Woman’ and later ‘Poems of a Married Man’.13 The eventual title captures the theme of conflict and resolution explored in the poems and introduced in the ‘Argument’, which prefaced the volume:

After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness.14

Though inspired by particular moments in Lawrence and Frieda's relationship, the cycle is substantially a work of 1917. Approximately one-third of the poems exist in earlier versions that appeared in the magazines Poetry, the English Review, the Egoist, and the New Statesman. Some of these had in turn been reprinted in two series of anthologies: Some Imagist Poets and Georgian Poetry.15 As Mark Kinkead-Weekes has convincingly shown, however, nearly all of the earlier versions have been ‘substantially rewrit-ten[,] and in many cases transformed, in the light of a later vision’, one that discloses the author of The Rainbow and Women in Love.16 In the preface to his Collected Poems (1928), Lawrence himself underlined the significance of 1917 as the shaping creative moment, urging the reader to fill in the background of the poems, as far as possible, with the place, the time, the circumstance. What was uttered in the cruel spring of 1917 should not be dislocated and heard as if sounding out of the void.17

The ‘cruel spring’ brought to Lawrence the sense of an ending in both his literary career and his life in England. In January Women in Love was rejected by publisher after publisher. Although he professed not to ‘care’ very much whether this ‘masterpiece’ would find a publisher, the rejections left him concluding that ‘nobody will print me nowadays, the public taste is averse from me. It is a nasty quandary’.18 on 29 January 1917 he nevertheless informed Pinker that he was ‘doing out a last book of poems: real poems: my chief poems, and best. This will be the last book of poems I shall have, for years to come’.19 A week later he informed S. S. Koteliansky that it would be ‘my last work for the old world. The next must be for something new’.20 The idea of emigrating to America, where the market was to prove more open to his work, had been in his mind even before the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915, and now became more real. Just four days after writing to Koteliansky, however, he and Frieda learned that the authorities had refused to endorse their passports ‘in the interests of National Service’, leaving Lawrence cursing his country and prophesying ‘I shall die of foul inward poison’.21

It was in this poisonous atmosphere that Look! We Have Come Through! was shaped, and Lawrence's uncertainty about publishing the poems was influenced both by their personal nature — they have been judged ‘nakedly autobiographical’22 — and his opinion of the world in which they would circulate. When he sent the manuscript to Catherine Carswell he wrote: ‘I can't send this to Pinker yet. I loathe him to have it. I loathe it to go to a publisher’.23 He felt ‘bitterly tender’ about the volume, the oxymoron capturing the ambivalent attitude towards publication: the tenderness born of the volume's personal nature, the bitterness of having to expose it to what he believed was a corrupt world. When Austin Harrison enquired about some poems for publication in the English Review, Lawrence stated he would rather send only ‘a selection of the more impersonal poems’.24

Lawrence had always expressed reluctance at publishing works he considered personal or autobiographical. Of his second novel, The Trespasser (1912), he told Edward Garnett: ‘It is so much oneself, one's naked self. I give myself away so much […] that I loathe the book […] I wish [it] were to be issued privately, to a few folk who had understanding’.25 The act of publication always signalled for Lawrence an engagement with an audience and the moment when a private utterance was translated to the public sphere. When The Rainbow was being typed, he declared to Pinker: ‘I always shrink from having my work published. I hate the public to read it’.26 The impact of the war intensified these feelings and in 1917 his opinions about the public sphere were emphatic. In March he told Pinker, in words that echoed his feelings about Women in Love, that the new book of poems was ready but ‘it could not come out just now, the world is far too vile and horrific. Let there be just a little sign of a new dawn’.27 As Worthen argues, however, for all Lawrence's antipathy towards humanity, ‘his behaviour shows that he was determined for almost the whole of the period of the war to go on writing for the very “mankind” he professed to be so detached from’.28 In part this was necessitated by the ‘dreadful and humiliating poverty’29 that beset the author in the final two years of the war. It took him little more than two weeks to decide to send the manuscript to Pinker, though he still spoke with reserve, feeling ‘very unwilling to let it go’ and speaking more urgently about the series of articles he had written entitled ‘The Reality of Peace’.30

Look! We Have Come Through! was rejected first by Collins and then by Duckworth.31 The latter had issued Lawrence's previous volume of poems, Amores, less than twelve months before in July 1916, but its lack of success and Lawrence's disagreement with Garnett over The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) probably influenced the publisher's decision. By the end of June Lawrence's financial position had become perilous. He asked Pinker if any other publishers had been tried:

I am afraid I am coming to the end of my resources. I don't like asking you for advances, when prospects are no brighter than mine at the moment. But you must tell me when you think I have had enough.32

Chatto & Windus received the manuscript on 5 July and took a little over three weeks to reach a decision. on 28 July Pinker reported that the firm would publish the poems on condition that the author make certain modifications. Surprisingly, Lawrence wrote only to his agent: ‘I shall reluctantly consider making any fair alterations in the poems, if you will say what the publishers want’, adding ‘the thought of Chatto & Windus rather pleases me. They seem such nice old-flavoured people. Not that I know anything of them today’.33

Lawrence's assessment of the firm was apposite in terms of its history and contemporary reputation. Andrew Chatto, who had taken over the firm of John Camden Hotten in 1873, was a much-respected Victorian publisher, who had excelled at issuing cheap reprints of recent novelists such as Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Mark Twain.34 His firm also published Swinburne and several of Robert Louis Stevenson's titles. With the decline of the three-volume novel, however, and the rise of the royalty system, Chatto fell behind some of his more formidable rivals and by the time he retired in 1911 the firm had lost a considerable amount of its former prestige. Chatto's reluctance to pay royalties had resulted in the best-selling Hall Caine escaping to Heinemann and the same firm was to take over the publication of Swinburne's books in 1918. In 1917 the catalogue was dominated by a lengthy and undistinguished backlist of Victorian and Edwardian fiction with very little poetry. The only significant author was Arnold Bennett, who admitted to his agent Pinker in 1903 that ‘[t]he only drawback of Chatto is that my serious books seem always rather lonely & peculiar in his lists, between Frank Barrett, & Fred Wishaw & Co’.35

In 1917, however, the firm was entering a period of transition and was soon to regain a position of pre-eminence in British publishing. Chiefly responsible for the change were two men, Geoffrey Whitworth (1883–1951) and Frank Swinnerton (1884–1982), who at the time Pinker submitted Lawrence's poems were busily improving the quality of the list. Whitworth was employed as art editor and it was through his influence that the firm published Clive Bell's Art (1913) and later Roger Fry's Vision and Design (1920).36 His role in the firm was considerable. As Swinnerton later recalled: ‘he was much more than art editor; and many of our best books reached the list through his effort’.37 These included Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918. Swinnerton was the firm's reader, sifting through the scores of manuscripts received every week. A young novelist, whose most successful work Nocturne was published in the same year as Look! We Have Come Through!, Swinnerton was a rising figure on the London literary scene. In 1919 he successfully lured Aldous Huxley to the firm. Like Whitworth, his role and influence greatly exceeded his salaried position. Arnold Bennett told Max Beaverbrook in 1921 that Swinnerton had ‘turned Chatto & Windus from a corpse into the liveliest thing of its sort in London’.38 Presiding over these two industrious young men was the much older figure of Percy Spalding, who had assisted Andrew Chatto since 1876 and become senior partner upon his retirement. Swinnerton recalled that Spalding, whose ‘notion of a good book was “a rattling good story”’,39 had ‘a great, even sublime, ignorance of literature, which he never attempted to conceal’.40 For this reason Swinnerton and Whitworth enjoyed ‘exceptional liberty’ in editorial affairs. So long as Spalding was consulted and satisfied, ‘[he] let us do as we wished’.41 It was the contrasting tastes and judgements of these three men that determined the fate of Look! We Have Come Through!.

The editorial dynamics of the firm thus consisted of both conservative and progressive forces. The mixture of old and new — Victorian and modern — manifested itself in a style of publishing that often placed literary concerns before those of business. Swinnerton's role in the firm was especially significant and illustrates an important trend in literary publishing of the period.42 Authors were becoming more actively involved in publishing and more closely engaged with policy-making decisions. For writers like Lawrence this was crucial. Swinnerton was an important advocate for his work. In 1915 he had urged Pinker to support the author following the prosecution of The Rainbow, commenting:

I can't help thinking it is rather gross; but I still believe that Lawrence's power and intensity are without parallel or rival among the younger writers, and I am extremely sorry about the whole squalid prosecution business.43

This assessment had not changed eighteen months later, as his report on Look! We Have Come Through! confirms. Nor had it changed in 1921 when he gave Women in Love its ‘most positive review’.44

The customary procedure for all unsolicited manuscripts sent to the firm was that Swinnerton would write a report — which could amount to anything from a few lines to several pages — and pass it to Spalding who would go through it underlining points and sometimes adding marginal comments.

On occasions, Whitworth would be asked to write a report as well. Swin-nerton's report on Look! We Have Come Through! is reproduced in full together with the underlining added by Spalding:

Mr Lawrence is a poet and novelist with a very distinguished literary reputation. It is true that his last novel was suppressed; but since that time he has published — through Duckworth — three books. one of these was a volume of stories, another a volume of travel sketches called ‘Twilight in Italy’, another a volume of poems called ‘Amores’. To that volume of poems the present is a sequel. Although the poems are sexual, in the sense that they deal with a pair of lovers in many moods (including those of physical exaltation), they do seem to me to be very rarely objectionable. Readers of Lawrence — they are a solid phalanx — will recognise the familiar qualities of his work. I think we might publish at 5/- net, and perhaps sell nearly 1000 copies. Therefore the book would probably be worth doing (on a small advance) for its monetary return. But far more it is worth doing on the ground that Lawrence's name would be valuable to our list. I could not emphasise this point too strongly. Lawrence has a decided following, and his name has a real distinction. I take the offer of this book by Pinker not as a sign that Duckworth is tired of Lawrence (he has been at some pains to take over from Heinemann one novel, and likes to advertise ‘collected editions’ of Lawrence), but as a testimony to our improved status as publishers of belles lettres. I hope, therefore, that Mr Spalding will see his way to make an offer for this book, on a royalty, with a small advance — say £20.45 Mr Whitworth has read the poems; and would, although in general agreement with the above, like to point out to Mr Spalding various passages — not with the idea of suggesting excision in more than two or three instances, but with the desire that, before making any offer, Mr Spalding should be fully apprised of the character of the poems; and also with the desire (in which I concur) that a few slight modifications are extremely to be wished for.46

The report offers an important new perspective on market attitudes to Lawrence's work in this period. Although the author had understandably concluded after Pinker's failure to place Women in Love that ‘nobody will print me nowadays’,47 Swinnerton's comments shows that it was the value of Lawrence's name that made publication not only desirable for Chatto & Windus but, in his view, essential to the firm's present strategy. Swinnerton was not to know that at least two publishers had turned the volume down, but it was important for him to make Spalding aware that receipt of a Lawrence manuscript was in itself an indication that his and Whitworth's endeavours to improve the firm's ‘status as publishers of belles lettres’ were bearing fruit. The publishing policy of Chatto & Windus in this period serves to illustrate that, in spite of the constraints of censorship and wartime production costs, there were forces in mainstream publishing that were keen to embrace modern literary forms and issue the work of authors whose subject-matter was challenging and potentially dangerous and whose popular appeal was small. Swinnerton was careful to predict that the book would conceivably cover its costs but financial considerations were not really at stake.

Swinnerton's was only one voice in the decision process, however. Whit-worth and Spalding had a different outlook on the vital issues of censorship and morality, which all publishers of the period had to consider. Spalding is described in one of Swinnerton's books of memoirs as ‘an irreligious sentimentalist’48 but his reading of Lawrence's manuscript indicates that, as a publisher at least, he was anxious to uphold a sense of religious propriety. Whitworth was even more committed on this point. In spite of his associations with modern artists and intellectuals he was something of a reactionary, described by Swinnerton as ‘a Churchman’ and a ‘Tory’ who was ‘sometimes horrified by jocularities at the expense of Faith and the established order’.49 It was Whitworth who drew to Spalding's attention several questionable passages in Lawrence's manuscript.

Given Spalding's lack of literary pretensions, it is not surprising that his three pages of notes demonstrate a limited appreciation of poetry, especially for the work of a writer like Lawrence whom he found confusingly figurative. He thought ‘Rose of all the World’ — where the images of the rose and the seed are used to explore the themes of consummation and individuation —‘very obscure’. He was ‘quite unable to understand’ ‘People’, which, with its central image of ‘The great gold apples of night […] Dripping their light/on the faces that drift below’ (ll. 1–4), echoes the street poetry of James Thomson and anticipates the ‘Unreal City’ of Eliot's The Waste Land.50 He also questioned the meaning of the last two verses of ‘Elysium’ — perhaps the lines ‘Then I shall know the Elysium/That lies outside the monstrous womb’ (ll. 34–35) confused him — and repeatedly queried whether ‘poetic licence’ could excuse images that he could not grasp, such as ‘Grey Star Sirius’ in ‘Winter Dawn’ (later changed by Lawrence to ‘Green Star Sirius), ‘ice-rotten’ in ‘Frost Flowers’ and ‘rotten globe’ in ‘Craving for Spring’.

Spalding's aesthetic judgement was not at stake, however. It was his assessment of the wholesomeness of Lawrence's volume that had to be considered. Although he was the senior partner, he trusted the critical judgement of his juniors and in some cases was prepared to accede to their opinions over what was morally acceptable as well. He found ‘some objection’ to the last two verses of ‘Lady Wife’ — it was probably the lines ‘Bring forth the sons of your womb then, and put them/Into the fire/Of Sodom […]’ (ll. 41–43) that were in question — but recorded: ‘they did not object, so that majority carried it’. It is clear, however, that the three men were not following a majority rule, although in a number of cases Whitworth's opinions (which were closer to those of Spalding than Swinnerton) were to prove crucial in determining the outcome.

Spalding's objections to the poems were twofold: the sexual imagery and the conflation of love and religion. He wrote at the foot of his notes: ‘I like those of his poems dealing with subjects other than the passions’. Although he found the third, fourth, and fifth sections of ‘Wedlock’ to be ‘over-figurative’, he scribbled the words ‘keep in’, copying the word ‘wedlock’ down for emphasis. Against ‘In the Dark’ he pencilled ‘warning(?) but o.k.’, objecting, perhaps, to lines in the third last stanza — ‘your little breasts/Are bubbles of ice.’ (ll. 37–38). The sequence ‘New Heaven and Earth’ was given close attention. In his note on the seventh verse Spalding responded humorously to the line ‘I touched her, it was I who touched and I who was touched’ (8) by writing: ‘I think the poet is touched’. The eighth verse in this sequence — which was an addition by Lawrence to the version previously published51 — generated the note ‘a line or so delete’. In the subsequent letter Spalding wrote to Pinker, line 13 is singled out. In its modified form it reads: ‘Also she who is the other has strange-mounded breasts and strange sheer slopes, and white levels.’ Disapproval of the word ‘breasts’ was to occur again in Spald ing's assessment of ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’ and was also signalled by Whitworth in the fourth stanza of ‘New Year's Eve’. Spalding was asked specifically to respond to the lines: ‘Your shoulders, your bruised throat!/ Your breasts, your nakedness!/This fiery coat!’ (ll. 10–12) but on this occa sion he found no objection.

Lawrence's use of religious imagery was equally problematic. Spalding considered the poem ‘Candlemas’ (later retitled ‘New Year's Night’), where the beloved is imagined as a sacrificial dove, to be ‘doubtful’ but ‘defended & justified by The Song of Solomon’. The Biblical imagery made the mixing of love and religion acceptable. He highlighted the phrase ‘the horrible God’ (l. 8) in the first poem in the ‘Manifesto’ sequence, but did not explicitly object to it. By contrast, he found the fourth, fifth, and sixth poems in that sequence to be ‘unwholesome even in poetry’. As discussed below, Lawrence was requested to omit lines from two of these verses.

The two poems that Spalding felt most strongly about were ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’ and ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’. Both were omitted from the volume. It is clear that Whitworth recommended the omission but the final decision was taken by Spalding. ‘I think this should be omitted’, he wrote of ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’, writing the word ‘breasts’ in the margin of his notes and encircling it with a heavy mark of his pencil. Of ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’, he judged: ‘I don't think this will do, much objection would be made to its inclusion. It would offend many readers’. In the version of this poem published in the 1958 Ark Press edition of Look! We Have Come Through! the figure of Christ is introduced in the third stanza, ‘his beautiful young man's body/Has fallen forward on the nails […] with all his pain/Drawn on his mouth’ (ll. 9–12).52 The speaker is ‘ashamed/To gaze any more’ (ll. 14–15) until a passing mule-driver arrests his attention and the Christ figure metamorphoses with his accusing look: ‘a pale dead Christ on the crucifix of his heart/And breathing the frozen memory of his wrong’ (ll. 39–40). The poem's place in the cycle, at a point when the lovers are in conflict and separation, results in a negative ending, where the speaker's sense of betrayal leads him to identify himself with Christ:

And I, as I stand in the cold averted flowers,

Feel the shame that clenches his fists like nails through my own,

Feel the despair on his brow like a crown of thorns

And his frozen anguish turning my heart to stone. (ll. 45–48).

The mule-driver has been identified as Frieda's estranged husband, Ernest Weekley, and the poem has been linked to Lawrence's essay ‘Christs in the Tyrol’ (1913), reworked as ‘The Crucifix Across the Mountains’ in Twilight in Italy (1916).53 The connections would have meant nothing to Spalding, of course, who wrote the word ‘blasphemy’ in the margin of his notes.

On 18 July Spalding wrote to Pinker on behalf of the firm:

We appreciate to the full the quality of Mr Lawrence's work, and it would give us great pleasure to be associated with the publication of this volume of poems. At the same time we consider that some justifiable exception might be taken to certain passages appearing in the MS. as it stands. It is not our desire to suggest an emasculated version of Mr Lawrence's poems, but in view of the general character of the work, we feel that the number of passages referring to purely physical phenomena should be slightly reduced. We have accordingly prepared a short list of deletions which we regard as essential if we are to publish “Look! We [H]ave [C]ome Through!”.54

In addition to requesting the omission of ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’ and ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’, Spalding asked that the thirteenth line in ‘New Heaven and Earth’ be modified or omitted, and two further omissions be made in the ‘Manifesto’ sequence. Additionally he told Pinker: ‘we venture to question the good taste of the titles ‘Candlemas’ and ‘Eve's Mass’ as applied to poems of an amorous character.’ These were changed to ‘Birth Night’ and ‘Valentine's Night’ respectively. Spalding concluded by writing: ‘we have great admiration for the book and do not feel that its quality or its integrity would be in any way impaired by such a process of refinement as we have proposed.’

The requested omission from ‘New Heaven and Earth’ is discussed above. Spalding's letter does not record the full content of the original lines marked for omission in ‘Manifesto’ but it is possible to identify where these were placed in the poems as published. The letter records the following:

[pp.] 126 omission of lines 17–21
‘Even then […]
[…] they pretty’ plus the words in the last line ‘for them’.
128 omission of line 9, ‘plunging […] obscenely’

As noted, Spalding referred to the fourth, fifth, and sixth poems in the ‘Manifesto’ sequence as ‘unwholesome even in poetry’. The line ‘plunging […] obscenely’ must have belonged to the sixth poem in the sequence which, in its modified form, contains the lines: ‘Plunging as I have done, over, over the brink/I have dropped at last headlong into nought, plunging upon sheer hard extinction’; (ll. 9–10). As ‘Manifesto’ was not previously published it is not known what was originally between the words ‘plunging’ and ‘obscenely’. The more extensive omission came in the fourth poem, which contains references to the sort of ‘purely physical phenomena’ that Spalding identified as objectionable. Lawrence's voice is at its most forceful here, fiercely embracing ‘[…] another hunger/very deep, and ravening;/the very body's body crying out’ (ll. 1–3). The section of the poem where the omission was made contains the image of ‘a threatening, torturing, phallic Moloch’, which leads to the line ‘A woman fed that hunger in me at last’ (ll. 18–19). A hint as to the content of these omitted lines might be provided by the requested omission of ‘for them’ in the final line of the poem. The wording in Spalding's letter certainly suggests that the omission of lines 17–21 necessitated the removal of the final two words of the poem. In its original form the final line would have read: ‘being mad with voracious desire for them’, which makes no sense as the poem stands. It would make sense, however, if the original lines 17–21 employed the ‘breasts’ imagery that Spalding found so distasteful elsewhere in the volume.

Swinnerton returned the MS to Pinker on 1 August, asking him to let the firm know ‘definitely about the volume’ as soon as he could.55 When Lawrence learned the substance of the publisher's demands, whatever pleasure he had at the idea of being published by the ‘nice, old-flavoured people’ ceased. ‘Truly the ways and the taste of publishers is mysterious and beyond finding out’, he complained. He agreed to change the titles and alter the lines, even at the expense of ‘spoiling the clarity and precision of the ｅxpression’.56 He was ready to omit ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’ but pressed Pinker to inform Chatto & Windus that it had already been published in The English Review and in an anthology of Georgian Poetry. Were the poem to be omitted, he argued, it would necessitate the omission of any reference in the volume to Georgian Poetry, which Lawrence considered to be ‘a name which I am sure gives a good deal of sanction among a certain class.’ He must have forgotten that ‘Giorno Dei Morti’ had also appeared in a Georgian Poetry anthology (under the earlier title ‘Service of All the Dead’) and Chatto & Windus exploited this and other connections in the published volume.57 Nevertheless scholars have noted that the firm's stand on this poem seems odd in view of its ancestry; it is explicable, however, once the individual tastes of the members of the firm are taken into account.58

Lawrence pleaded more strongly over the retention of ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’. He thought Chatto & Windus ‘absurd’ and in the foreword to his Collected Poems recalled that the poem was omitted because the publishers ‘objected to mixing love and religion’, specifying the lines: ‘But I hope I shall spend eternity/with my face down buried between/her breasts […]’.59 Several decades later Frieda Lawrence had the same recollection.60 There is reason, however, to doubt the accuracy of this record. There is no corroboratory evidence in the Archive either in the internal communications or the correspondence, and the quoted lines, though they contain a reference to ‘eternity’, are not as explicit in their use of religious language as are several other poems in the collection. Spalding's notes draw attention only to the repeated use of the word ‘breasts’. It is probable that Lawrence was confusing the two omitted poems here. In his letter to Pinker of 3 August 1917, he demanded the reason for Chatto & Windus's request: ‘Can you or anybody tell me why they want it omitted?’. He urged his agent to convince the publisher that the poem was ‘beautiful, necessary, and innocuous as a sprig of mignonette’ and asked: ‘If they still persist, make them say what they object to’. However, in the same letter he also asked Pinker to obtain the reason for the requested omission of ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’: ‘do ask them why they wish it’. The oral discussion that took place between Swinnerton and Pinker is not recorded in the Archive but the response relayed to Lawrence — the mixing of love and religion — applied chiefly to ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’, a poem that employs religious language to a far greater extent, and which Spalding had labelled ‘blasphemous’ in his notes. ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’, by contrast, was probably omitted because of the sexual imagery.

By chance, some of the ensuing negotiation over the volume took place when Spalding was away from the office on holiday. This resulted in the partial documentation in the firm's letter books of the internal discussion about the poems. on 9 August Swinnerton reported to Spalding the substance of his meeting with Pinker:

It was about Lawrence whose letter Pinker showed me. Lawrence is very puzzled at our attitude, particularly over ‘Song of a [M]an who is [L]oved’. This poem was published in ‘The English Review’ and in the book of ‘Georgian [P]oetry’. It has therefore been published twice, and as Georgian [P]oetry has great ‘tone’ Lawrence thinks it would help the book to have in it something which has already received the cachet of appearance in so distinguished an anthology. He is ready to do everything else we want (though wondering at it), but begs that we will reconsider our veto on this poem. He is very emphatic about it, but I gather appeals rather than insists. If we let it go in we can have the book on our terms as already named. If you continue to object to it, then I expect we can still have the book, though Lawrence's heart would bleed. I give no guarantee, one way or the other. Personally I should not object to the poem's inclusion; but I gather that Whitworth is not reconciled to this. Would you please consider this and let Whitworth know your decision, so that he may communicate as soon as may be with Pinker?61

Swinnerton was either confused or being deliberately misleading, for he ought to have known that it was ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’ that had appeared in The English Review and in the anthology of Georgian Poetry. Spalding's reply has not survived, but he must have expressed his intention to stand by his decision, as a letter to him from Whitworth makes clear:

I really think it is just as well that we should stand by the first list of omissions, as it was reduced to a minimum even then, & the poem in question was certainly one of those which we found to be most open to objection. I have written to Pinker in the sense indicated by your letter, & I much hope that Lawrence may be induced to see reason.62

The letter sent by Whitworth to Pinker explained that Spalding had been consulted and that he did not feel he could alter his stance on ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’. Worried, perhaps, that Lawrence might resist and take the volume elsewhere, Whitworth was eager to point out that the firm had already made concessions:

We believe you are aware that the list of poems to be omitted, as given to you, by no means represents the total of those which appeared to us & to our Readers to be questionable. But it has never been our intention to emasculate the volume of all such poems. only, in view of past history, it has seemed desirable from the firm's standpoint that the continuously sexual tone of the volume should be modified. The list as first presented to you represents the minimum of omissions which we believe could safely insure this result, & to that list we are afraid that we must stand.63

There is a certain amount of careful manoeuvring here, since Whitworth was himself one of the ‘Readers’ and the other — Swinnerton — had no objections to ‘Song as a Man who is Loved’. ‘In view of past history’ was obviously a reference to The Rainbow, a subtle reminder that the author was in no position to insist. Lawrence gave in and wrote to Pinker: ‘Publishers are fools, one wants to spit at them — But it is not worth while making a real breach’.64 Financial need and the lingering hope that Women in Love might eventually find a publisher led him to accept that, in instances where publication was possible, compromise was necessary for the good of his literary career. ‘This is a one bright beam in my publishing sky’, he told Amy Lowell, ‘But I shall have to go and look for daylight with a lantern’.65 Lawrence signed the contract on the following day, 31 August 1917. Although this stated that he was to be paid twenty guineas66 on the day of publication in advance of a 15 per cent royalty, Spalding generously sent the money when he returned the firm's copy of the agreement.67

The path to publication was anything but smooth. When he returned the first batch of proofs in mid-September, Lawrence objected to the setting of ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’. He wanted each section of this six-part poem printed on a separate page. Swinnerton, signing from the firm, ‘appreciate[d] the importance of this alteration’ even though it involved ‘overrunning the whole volume’, which was initially designed to consist of 160 pages. The printing industry was severely hit by wartime labour shortages, and whilst he admitted that the volume's printers — The Complete Press, of West Norwood, London — should have ‘queried the style’, Swinnerton explained that they were ‘so short-handed, and in such confusion that they are apt to be arbitrary in such things’.68 Less excusable was the ‘extraordinary omissions’ in ‘Rabbit snared in the Night’69 which prompted the publishers to send the author an additional proof of the whole book, thus delaying publication by several weeks. Lawrence returned this final proof at the beginning of October.70

In spite of the overrun in length, the book has an elegant and expensive design.71 The pages have a wide gutter and deep tail margin, and the paper is of considerable quality given wartime restrictions. The volume was initially advertised as ‘Cr. 8vo. 5s. net’ but in the adverts included in the Spectator and the Nation on 27 October 1917 this changed to ‘Small Fcap. 4to, boards, 5s. net’. In fact the format is double foolscap octavo. The leaves measure 8½×6¾ inches and the boards 8¾×7 inches. It consists of ten gatherings with an additional three pages — making 163 in all — caused by the re-setting of ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’. Page 164 is blank apart from the printer's name. Crown octavo (7½×5 inches) was the standard format for novels and the change to foolscap reflects the firm's effort to market this as a more collectable poetry volume. In 1920 Chatto & Windus published Aldous Huxley's collection Leda in exactly the same format.

The publishers kept advertising to a premium. The volume was listed among the forthcoming publications in the Publishers' Circular on 1 October 1917 and also included in the block advertisement placed in the weekly edition of the Times on 12 October. In the following two weeks, however, it disappeared from the firm's announcements, perhaps due to the delay caused by Lawrence having to read an additional proof. It returned on 27 October 1917, when it was included in the advertisements in the Spectator and the Nation mentioned above, before disappearing again until 23 November, three days before the date of publication. Thereafter it was placed in most of the firm's announcements until the end of the year, appearing in the Morning Post, the Manchester Guardian, the Yorkshire Post, Everyman, the Saturday Westminster, and the Scotsman. Unsurprisingly it was excluded from the list printed in the Church Times.72 In most of these adverts the volume was summarized as ‘A New Book of Poetry by the Author of “Sons and Lovers”’. The line ‘A new volume of Love poems’, however, was preferred for the Christmas catalogue of the Army & Navy department store. There is no record of any advertising of the volume in 1918, which indicates that the firm did not envisage the book as having an extended sales period.

The location of the advertisements does not suggest that Chatto & Windus made any significant attempt to market the volume to a specific audience; it is surprising that it was excluded from the announcements posted in the Times Literary Supplement. However, correspondence between Percy Spalding and Frank Ward, the firm's chief traveller, suggest that the book was presented to booksellers in a particular kind of way:

You no doubt are aware of Mr Lawrence's record. As you know, one of his books, “The Rainbow”, had to be withdrawn, and I think quite rightly; but that book was a novel. This is a book of poetry, and we have carefully gone through it; and though the verse is of extremely modern character, I believe that there is nothing in it to which objection can fairly be taken. Mr Lawrence's public is, of course, a special one, but his admirers are very enthusiastic; and we look to a certain, though possibly not very extensive, sale for the book. It appeals essentially to those who are interested in the “latest thing” in literature.73

Spalding went on to explain the dust wrapper:

As to the cover, it is not meant to represent a fire escape, but it is an example of Futurist art. It may seem laughable, but it is certainly appropriate to the contents of the book; and I believe will attract the class of person who is interested in Mr Lawrence's work. The artist tells us that the design represents a man and a woman walking briskly together. Personally, I think that the walking stick held by the gentleman is the best part of the drawing; but as I say, it is not to be judged by ordinary standards, and it certainly achieves its primary purpose of attracting the eye. The drawing has been specially done for the book by an artist who is having a considerable vogue in artistic circles just now. one of his pictures was reproduced the other day in ‘Land and Water’.

The artist was Edward McKnight Kauffer, a member of the Cumberland Market Group and later the short-lived Group X, which included Wyndham Lewis.74 Spalding's response to the cover, which has been described as ‘the most avant garde of Lawrence's jacket designs’,75 is consistent with his response to the poetry. In setting it apart from ‘ordinary standards’, he reveals how he saw Lawrence's book as distinct from the firm's usual publications.

When Lawrence received his twelve complimentary volumes (Chatto & Windus had acceded to his request for an additional six), he told Pinker: ‘on the whole I like them very much — the get up. I love the red, now I see it plainly — and the wrapper isn't so bad, really — though a bit criant.76 The cover certainly attracted the eye of the reviewer in the Sketch, an illustrated weekly newspaper that was not likely to respond favourably to the aesthetic challenge of the jacket design or the poems: ‘[the] incomprehensible Futurist cover-design which looks like a mixture of two broken combs and the fragments of a knife-cleaner, ought to warn you to expect something desperately eccentric’.77 The Glasgow Herald saw something more indicative, remarking:

If the cubist protection-cover represents a windmill succession of skirts, then it has a bearing on the contents of Mr Lawrence's book, which, in a series of verses, formal, free, or inchoate, reveals the ‘intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself’.78

The nominal publishing date was 26 November but the Chatto & Windus Archive records that the first 200 copies were not received back from the binders until 27 November (Lawrence's twelve copies had been returned on 1 November).79 A printing order for 1000 copies was made on 5 October. The total cost of paper and printing, including £3 10s. 0d. for proof corrections was calculated at £30.80 The cost per copy in unbound quires was determined at 1s. 1½d. At a publishing price of 5s. this gave Chatto & Windus little margin for profit, especially when booksellers’ discounts and Lawrence's royalty of 9d. per copy are taken into account. But pursuit of profit was not the motive for publishing the poems. on 12 October 400 copies were sent for binding and by 30 November, 389 of these had been returned with a further four returned in January 1918. This, however, was the extent of the Chatto & Windus edition. Subtracting Lawrence's twelve personal copies, only 381 copies with the Chatto & Windus imprint ever circulated in the market. The £21 royalty advance was never earned. The volume needed to sell 560 copies to reach that stage.81

The remainder of the 1000 copies printed were circulated in America. on 14 June 1918, Chatto & Windus shipped 300 copies in flat sheets to the New York firm of B. W. Huebsch, which had published The Rainbow and Amores in America. Huebsch paid 1s. 4d. per copy (£20 in total), having agreed a separate royalty arrangement with the author.82 Taking into account the recorded cost per copy in quires of 1s. 1½d., Chatto & Windus was barely recovering its outlay through this bargain, an indication that it was already looking to cut its losses on the volume. Indeed, Benjamin Huebsch was originally offered 500 copies (half the print run) but decided to be cautious.83 In May 1919 however, the American firm made a second order. A further 309 copies were shipped at 1s. 6d. per copy. A total of 609 copies were thus sent to America, over two hundred more than ever circulated in Britain.84

The comparison gives some indication of the relative demand for Lawrence's work in the two countries. Four months later Benjamin Huebsch mooted the possibility of publishing the book himself and selling sheets to Chatto & Windus if the British firm desired. This was when he was trying to arrange American issue of Lawrence's New Poems (published in Britain in 1918 but not issued by Huebsch until 1920). Anticipating a ‘continuing demand’ for the earlier volume, he wanted to avoid ‘the delay and expense of renewing my supply from London’.85 Chatto & Windus referred the matter to Pinker but nothing came from the idea. Lawrence at this time was attempting to deal directly with Huebsch and so ‘steal a march on his agent’.86 It was clear that the market for his works in America was much more promising than in Britain and in the ensuing decade he began to work ‘quite consciously as a writer for the American market’, striking up a positive relationship with Thomas Seltzer.87

The poor sales of Look! We Have Come Through! ended Chatto & Windus's association with Lawrence, though not before the firm had deliberated at length over the manuscript of ‘At the Gates’, the now lost volume of philosophy that emerged from the ‘Reality of Peace’ articles published in the English Review. This text was afforded close consideration when it was received on 24 September 1917, shortly after the contract for Look! We Have Come Through! was signed. Both Swinnerton and Whitworth provided extensive reports but, like all other publishers, Chatto & Windus eventually found the manuscript too baffling and risky to publish.88 The following year, the firm perused the manuscript of New Poems, presented under the title ‘Coming Awake’, but declined Pinker's offer of publication, commenting: ‘The sole reason we are doing so is that we did not do very well with his previous volume, and we are afraid that, with all the increasing difficulties of publication, we should be unable to make the present collection remunerative’.89 There is no report on the manuscript in the Archive, which suggests that the decision was purely financial and taken on the basis of the failure of Look! We Have Come Through!. The firm had suspended financial considerations once, but saw no reason to do so again.

In the ensuing years Lawrence's antipathy towards the public sphere led him to become increasingly hostile towards publishers and the British book trade. After the publication of New Poems in 1918 he issued his next poetry volume, Bay (1919), in a ‘small press’ edition through the London printer and bookseller Cyril Beaumont. The volume appeared simultaneously in three formats priced at 12s. 6d., 21s. and 30s.90 Frustration and suspicion led to an acrimonious break with Pinker in 1920 and thereafter Lawrence focused his energies on the American market. Two days before Seltzer issued the short poetry volume Tortoises (1921), Lawrence wrote to Chatto & Windus enquiring about sales of Look! We Have Come Through! and requesting that a copy be sent to him in Sicily.91 The firm replied that the book was out of print and that no stock was left over.92 In January Lawrence's new agent, Curtis Brown, wrote asking if Chatto & Windus intended reprinting the book. In reply the firm gave no information, stating that it had dealt with the book through Pinker. on 12 January 1922 Lawrence himself wrote in an angry tone, complaining about the publisher's discourtesy.93 The publishers were not to know that Lawrence had transferred agency and, in apology, stated that there was no intention of reprinting the volume.94 The rights reverted to Lawrence. The cycle was included in the Collected Poems published by Secker in 1928 where Lawrence added two poems issued in other collections and reinstated ‘Song of a Man who is Loved’ but chose not to restore ‘Meeting Among the Mountains’.95 This did not appear as part of the cycle until The Ark Press edition of 1958 and the Complete Poems of 1964.96

The importance of the archival evidence discussed in this essay extends to the history of literary publishing as well as to the development of Lawrence's career. Look! We Have Come Through! was issued at a critical moment in the development of literary modernism, appearing in the same year as Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations and in the year immediately after Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Recent work on the relationship between modernism and the marketplace has shown how the work of writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Pound was both constrained and facilitated by forces of commodification and the commercial structures of the literary market.97 Lawrence's position in this argument is not straightforward, because his position in relation to literary movements is complicated in itself.98 Nevertheless the episode shows how there were forces in mainstream publishing that were prepared to publish and market the work of writers who sought to break with accepted aesthetic and moral conventions in literature. But only up to a point. Those conventions could still dictate an individual publisher's sense of what was morally acceptable and financially viable. Competing forces were at work. Chatto & Windus could easily have cited high production costs brought on by the war as a valid reason for not experimenting with Lawrence's poems — as they did his New Poems — but in 1917 the firm was looking for precisely the sort of challenging modern literature that Lawrence provided. Closer attention to archival evidence allows us to get away from generalizations about the publishing industry in this period and identify the actual details that informed individual policy decisions. Market issues (of which the fear of censorship and wartime production costs were important aspects) helped determine the way Look! We Have Come Through! was published, but the roles of individual editors and publishers’ readers also played their part. Publishing decisions may reflect general trends in cultural history, and be seen as a response to them, but they are motivated also by the personal tastes of those making the decisions. Where more than one individual is involved, those tastes are likely to impact significantly on the final form of a literary text in often contradictory ways.