Men and Women in Love

By Paul Gray

MR. NOON by D.H. Lawrence; Cambridge;370pages; $24.95

In the early 1920s, D.H. Lawrence wrote, "I place my immortality in the dark sap of life, stream of eternal blood. And as for my mind and spirit--this book, for example, all my books--I toss them out like so much transient tree-blossom and foliaged leaves, on to the winds of time." A funny thing happened next. The winds of time caught these words and much of the novel in which they appear and blew them into hiding for roughly 50 years. Between the day he abandoned Mr. Noon in midsentence in 1922 and his death in 1930, at 44, Lawrence seems to have forgotten about the book. An opening section of the novel was included in a posthumous collection of stories called A Modern Lover (1934). But the remainder, twice as long, was presumed lost until it resurfaced from a private collection during the 1970s.

Here at last is the whole book (albeit unfinished), its disparate parts meticulously edited and annotated by Professor Lindeth Vasey of the University of Texas at Austin. The prospect of new words from their master has already excited legions of Lawrencians. It will not matter to them that Mr. Noon is not very good.

Lawrence's reputation is now so hallowed, his volatile life so mythologized, that anything he wrote is bound to command reverence or, at the very least, curiosity. Even those who dislike his work cannot, if they profess interest in 20th century tastes and ideas, afford to ignore him.

Unfortunately, the previously published Part I of Mr. Noon positively begs to be dismissed; Lawrence's ability to make a short story long is truly stunning. Gilbert Noon, a dour mathematics teacher in his mid-20s, may or may not have got a local Midlands lass in a family way. The truth, after 90 pages of meandering prose, remains unclear, at which point even the author grows bored with his characters: "Let them go to hell."

But the newly unveiled Part II displays a significant change; Gilbert Noon is now studying for a doctorate in Munich and, more important, he has become a fictional surrogate of D.H. Lawrence.

In the story that unfolds, the author looks back nearly ten years to the time (1912) when he met and fell in love with Mrs. Frieda Weekley (nee Von Richthofen), wife of a Nottingham professor and mother of three children. Lawrence's decision to run away with her to the Continent profoundly affected his life and career, making him a renegade from conventional morality in fact as well as temperament. This whole affair has been narrated many times, by the principals and numerous biographers. Mr. Noon reveals one more shape that this experience came to assume in Lawrence's memory and imagination.

On the same evening that Noon meets Mrs. Johanna Keighley (nee Von Hebenitz), wife of a doctor in Boston and mother of two sons, she invites him into her bed. The next afternoon she does so again. Writes Lawrence: "I am not going to open the door of Johanna's room, not until Mr. Noon opens it himself. I've been caught that way before. I have opened the door for you, and the moment you gave your first squeal in rushed the private detective you had kept in the background." This is a direct reference to the problems of censorship and suppression that had swarmed around The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920). Lawrence here and throughout this long fragment seems more interested in the teller than the tale.

That may be because not much actually happens. Gilbert and Johanna mope around Germany while her aristocratic Prussian parents try to persuade them both of their un conscionable folly. Dead ends are followed by standoffs. In the interims, Lawrence chats: "How a Times critic dropped on me for using the word toney! I'm sure I never knew it wasn't toney any more to say toney." And he preaches, "Let us confess our belief: our deep, our religious belief. The great eternity of creation does not lie in the spirit, in the ideal. It lies in the everlasting and incalculable throb of passion and desire." On their way across the Alps and toward Italy, Johanna has sex with a young man who has temporarily joined their party, just as Frieda did under the same circumstances in 1912. Shortly after this incalculable throb, Mr. Noon abruptly ends.

Why did Lawrence quit? Perhaps be cause he had already used up the fictional possibilities of his union with Frieda in earlier novels, especially Women in Love.

Also, at the time that he worked fitfully on Mr. Noon, Lawrence began to lose his faith in the redemptive power of males and females locked in struggles and sex.

His novels of the mid-1920s, Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), veered toward the worship of supermen, blood-consciousness and dark gods. Only in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), his last novel, did he return to the subject of men and women in love that he had discarded with Mr. Noon. Then, throwing caution to the winds, he opened that bedroom door completely and apparently for good.