Odour of Chrysanthemums a text in process

It began as an English Subject Centre mini-project and grew into a life-changing experience: Sean Matthews reflects on working with manuscripts, building a website and introducing readers to a whole new way of learning and doing criticism.

Sean Matthews is Director
of the DH Lawrence
Research Centre at the
University of Nottingham.
He teaches Lawrence at
all levels of the university
curriculum, and also works
with sixth-formers on
Lawrence's plays and short
stories. His article,
'The Trial of Lady
Chatterley's Lover: The
most thorough and
expensive seminar on
Lawrence's work ever given'
has just been published
in New DH Lawrence ed.
Howard Booth (Manchester
University Press, 2009).

I got through my entire undergraduate and postgraduate career without ever holding a manuscript in anger. Nobody suggested I should and it never came up in any lecture, seminar or tutorial I attended. Actually, I never even looked at a manuscript, much less studied one – except for a letter from James Joyce that my tutor had found in an attic somewhere and we all thought was great, but not strictly relevant to anything we were doing, and a glance at a copy of Household Words in order to confirm that Dickens’s writing ‘conformed to serial publication norms’. Texts, for me – and most other English students, I would guess – were pretty stable entities. There was a role for editors, but it was fairly mundane stuff, after which the serious work of criticism took place. Of course, there are moments where editors’ work comes to centre stage: the obvious bits of Shakespeare which people used to argue about – ‘sullied’ or ‘solid’ flesh and all that sort of thing; Wordsworth’s multiple rewritings of The Prelude and Lawrence’s three Lady Chatterleys; even Auden’s fiddling with the political poems of the 1930s in later editions. But such variants and oddities don’t involve the majority of us in any real manuscript work, and are pretty much served up to us on a plate by the specialists. I did have a grudging respect for those serious types who would totter off to the Rare Books Room while I snuggled down on a sofa with my paperbacks and latte, and I know they thought I wasn’t a proper scholar, but in the end it seemed to me that grubbing through manuscripts was probably both dull and a bit too, well, empirical for me. The interesting stuff in English, at the time, was going on in Theory. We had no time for authors, much less their material traces, and real literary criticism involved an intellectually strenuous attention to the words on the printed page and, according to taste, such things as their sexual, political, ethical or ecological implications.

Appointed to a post which involved work on DH Lawrence, I knew things might have to change. One of the particular benefits of working in D H Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham, after all, is access to the unparalleled Lawrence Collections – people come from all over the world to consult them. Nonetheless, I had rather hoped to retain a critical distance from the two currents which have dominated Lawrence criticism for the past three decades: editing and biography. My own research and teaching had concentrated on Lawrence’s cultural significance, involving things like arguments around his influence and status in the 1950s (he was very important, but for different reasons from the 1930s) and the impact of the Chatterley Trial (considerable, but not very easy to be specific about), and it had never taken me anywhere near a manuscript or archive. My data was all in the public domain, and that seemed very important to me, because I wanted to attend to patterns in our ordinary culture, whereas work on manuscripts seemed necessarily a rather private, even elite, affair. In addition, it’s a lot more straightforward to teach things that your students can actually take home and bring to class. I was grateful for all those details in the comprehensive, three-volume Cambridge biography about the Lawrences’ extraordinary lives, and for the exhaustive precision of the monumental Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s work, a remarkable achievement of recovery and restoration but I still remained to be convinced that, for most of us – and certainly for students – there was anything in those wonderful projects which was central to the everyday work of teaching and learning at an undergraduate level. Another reason I hadn’t had much to do with manuscripts and textual variants was that novels, stories, plays and poems offer quite enough challenge without further complicating the very text we’re trying to read. More to the point, how could one give a lecture cohort of 200 students any meaningful access to the complex detail of autograph manuscripts and corrected proofs? There aren’t even 200 seats in the Rare Books Room.

Then I decided to set up a lecture course on Lawrence’s first collection of tales, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914). In an idle moment, I flicked through the notes to my edition, and learnt that we had most of the manuscripts and proofs for those tales a few hundred yards away, in the library. It seemed rude not to have a look at them – perhaps they would be good for a few anecdotes in my lecture before we got down to the serious business of critical analysis, and it would also give me a little scholarly credibility.

The trip to the archive turned out to be a Damascus Road experience. I became immersed in the complex textual history of these stories, and I began to realise quite how much of the richness and significance of Lawrence’s writing my students and I were missing. Attention to the genesis, the story, of these stories, to the considerable changes Lawrence (and his editors) made to these texts, powerfully enhances and clarifies the work of more conventional literary and cultural analysis. As the scales fell from my eyes I accepted that I couldn’t lecture on, for instance, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ without making detailed reference to the manuscripts. Over a period of four years Lawrence, as was already his customary practice, substantially revised and reworked this tale on at least four occasions, in the stages of both drafting and page proofs, and then again between the work’s publication in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review (1911), and its appearance in the collection The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914). The University of Nottingham holds, in addition to first editions of the published versions, a set of radically corrected page proofs of the 1911 version, from which James T Boulton reconstructed the unrevised proofs (in 1969). The Nottinghamshire County archives hold a further set of proofs from 1914. Just to complicate matters further, Lawrence also rewrote the story as a play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, between 1910 and 1913, of which, perhaps fortunately, no manuscript survives. Placing these different versions alongside each other generates a wholly new conception of what is going on in the story.

Immediately, however, the old problems reasserted themselves. How was I to share this discovery with the class? Academic researchers and Lawrence enthusiasts have long made use of this treasure trove of manuscripts, but the challenge for any teacher, given the size of many of the groups we face these days (there are indeed 200 students on the first-year Lawrence module), is to find ways of integrating such materials into a regular undergraduate or graduate programme in such a way that all learners not only have equal access, but also appropriate assistance and direction in grasping their significance. It is a question not only of putting manuscripts and other artefacts on show in such a form that, say, those 200 people can view them in and out of class, but also of providing a framework for delivery, a structure of supporting materials and guidance, through which learners might independently come to a better understanding of their material and intellectual importance. I was lucky enough to be able to spend considerable time with these documents, and could call on the advice of such senior Lawrence scholars as John Worthen, Keith Cushman and Keith Sagar, not to mention the extremely knowledgeable archivists in the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at Nottingham, and the dialect expert, Hilary Hillier. I knew that, in the past, the university had made bids to digitise materials, but simply being able to see the manuscripts, however good the reproduction, wasn’t going to take us very far. How could we possibly reproduce, for my first-year lecture course, something of the experience of working with these manuscripts?

Methodological, analytic and theoretical issues which attend work with manuscripts tend only to be introduced very late on in English studies programmes, if at all, and have little impact at the level of learners’ everyday engagement with texts. The magnificent, scholarly print editions of the works of, for instance, Lawrence, Yeats, Orwell or Southey remain the preserve of specialists and postgraduates (there simply aren’t enough copies to go around, even with the smallest groups), and where substantial textual apparatus is available in the cheaper, common editions of an author’s work (as with Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth), the lack of consistency between different editorial objectives and priorities, modes and forms, still make them intimidating reading. The questions presented by the Lawrence manuscripts were, indeed, effectively invisible in the detail of the Cambridge edition’s textual apparatus, yet they are immediately, powerfully apparent when you are faced with the actual pieces of paper. And yet, it’s not simply a question of needing to generate decent facsimiles. The physical, material moves you can make with the papers in front of you, moving backwards and forwards, dwelling on the differences and similarities, bringing in other texts, are obviously less readily available with facsimiles on screen, but for readers altogether new to manuscripts we wanted to create an environment similar to the one I had enjoyed – with a few experts at my elbow helping me to see things, to understand what was important. The experience of coming to know these materials, and to understand how best to utilise them, was an education in itself – an education we wanted to reproduce in the online environment. That was the challenge we set ourselves with ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums: a text in process’.

When you visit the site now, we hope it provides a straightforward but substantial experience of the texts, and supplies the crucial elements of support and direction that anyone new to this kind of work might need. There are facsimiles of all the main versions of the story, but also transcripts with line numbers. It is possible to call up the versions alongside each other in order to trace exactly what changes have taken place – for several passages these changes are highlighted in order to guide the initial analysis. In addition to all this primary material, there are also substantial supporting resources looking at history, dialect, biographical information and geography, as well as reproductions of some famous articles and essays about the story. There is also a section devoted to ‘working with the text’, which suggest a variety of ‘ways in’ to the manuscripts and the issues they raise for textual and ‘genetic’ critics (genetic criticism sounded a terrifying prospect, but as my colleagues explained isn’t in fact frightening at all – see side panel). In its various beta incarnations the site has been used by a number of student groups, and has come a long way from the original ideas that persuaded the Subject Centre to support us, and we intend to continue adding supporting materials so that it remains very much a ‘text in process’…

http://odour.nottingham.ac.uk/index.asp

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Magazine Issue 3 - April 2010

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence by the English Subject Centre - ISSN 2040-6754

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