Then and Now

JOHN THOMAS AND LADY JANE

by D.H. LAWRENCE 372 pages. Viking. $8.95.

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING by ERNEST HEMINGWAY 90 pages. Scribners. $5.95.

Permanent as the printed page may seem, the life of a book is often precarious. Nothing is harder to find than last year's literary flop, and the classics of yesterday seem to drop from view with unsettling regularity. The bottoms of the Great Lakes are said by some to be tiled with the dumped overstock of paperbacks that cannot be obtained anywhere, even in libraries. But there are mysterious cycles of resuscitation too. This fall Viking and Scribners have chosen to revive two marginal but interesting literary remains.

There were three complete versions of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the third being the standard text. John Thomas and Lady Jane was the second, and it has thus far been available only as an English-language paperback in Italy. Arcane as that fact may be, it has a certain poetic fitness, since Lawrence wrote this most lyrical draft in Italy, inspired partly by the sensual "bright and dancing" frescoes in the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. It is substantially longer than the famous version, but no more obscene--which is to say that today it seems about as off-color as a Tiepolo cupid.

During the hullabaloo that accompanied the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in 1959, it was fashionable to say that the book was not dirty, just pretentious. But Lawrence was attempting "an adjustment in consciousness to the basic physical realities." A tall order that, and one that greatly appealed to the author's radical temperament. Unfortunately, it led him into portentous language and situations, and gives an almost hysterical fervor to his advocacy of relaxed frankness between men and women.

Burning Outcries. Because Lady Chatterley's shortcomings are so well known, it is possible to enjoy the unexpected virtues of this version. The most substantial improvement is in the gamekeeper Mellors, who is called Parkin here. Mellors is too good to be true, an ex-officer who keeps books on India, Soviet Russia and the atom in his cottage. Parkin is a rough, laconic collier's son who can understand neither his own mean circumstances nor the sources of Connie's passion for him. Lawrence lacked Thomas Hardy's gift for making the inner lives of simple people eloquent, but at least this Parkin makes the reader aware of the social chasm that Connie Chatterley proposed to cross. Similarly, the ambience of Wragby Hall, dominated by her crippled husband Clifford and his overbred friends, is more fully detailed and becomes one of Lawrence's burning outcries against industrial waste and acquisitiveness.

The florid, much laughed at language is still there; when the lovers adorn each other's bodies with blossoms, Lawrence has added a primrose "poised" in Connie's navel. But descriptions of the woods speak of a lonelier passion and are exquisite examples of an art at least as difficult as writing about sex. If this book does not convince anyone that it should become the accepted version of Lady Chatterley's story, it is at least nothing for Lawrence lovers to be ashamed of.

Hemingway admirers must be unhappy these days, what with the assaults on his character that pour out of other people's memoirs. But if anyone needs to be reminded that Hemingway could dish it out too, Torrents of Spring will do as an example. It is a brutal parody of Sherwood Anderson, a man who influenced Hemingway's prose and helped him materially early in his career.

Ostensibly, Torrents of Spring tells about the dramatic effects of the vernal equinox on the backwater town of Petrosky, Mich. Anderson's lapidary dialogue, his reverence for the little town, the railroad tracks, the "beanery" with its elderly waitress, even his anxious asides to the reader, are lampooned: "Spring was coming. Spring was in the air. (Author's note: This is the same day on which the story starts, back on page three.)"

Gossip has it that Hemingway wrote the parody because he wanted to break his own contract with Boni & Liveright, Anderson's publisher, and go to Scribners. The firm sided with Anderson, and released Hemingway from his contract. Scribners got Torrents and the following year The Sun Also Rises. Anderson had the last word however. "It might have been humorous had Max Beerbohm condensed it to twelve pages," he said--and he was right. .Martha Duffy

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