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Lawrence, Douglas Goldring, and Plays for a People’s Theatre

Keith Cushman

Résumé

In 1920 Thomas Seltzer published D.H. Lawrence’s Touch and Go and Douglas Goldring’s The Fight for Freedom as Plays for a People’s Theatre by Thomas Seltzer. The contemporary reviewer in Theatre Arts observed that “the phrase ‘people’s theatre’ challenges discussion—infinite and vague. Is it the theatre of an entire nation or a class—the ‘workers’? And who are the workers?” My paper will focus on these two plays, telling the story of how and why Lawrence became connected to Goldring and the People’s Theatre. The Prefaces to the two plays define two very different conceptions of a people’s theatre, and the two plays dramatize those conceptions – both with mixed success. The question of which of the two plays would be published first produced some of Lawrence’s finest invective.
Douglas Goldring is basically unknown to Lawrence scholars apart from the role he played in getting Touch and Go published and failing to get it staged. My paper will include a brief biography of Goldring, who had a varied, fascinating career. He was a subeditor under Ford Madox Hueffer at the English Review and later published reminiscences of Ford and the English Review circle. He fought in World War I, but, after being invalided out of the army, he became a conscientious objector and – for a time – a radical socialist. He published five books of poetry, over a dozen novels, twenty-one travel books, and autobiographies in which Lawrence figures. He connected Lawrence with the American publisher Thomas Seltzer and the English literary agent Curtis Brown. In 1920 he published an essay about Lawrence in Reputations: Essays in Criticism. He helped Lawrence in his effort to get some of Maurice Magnus’s writings published. Fifteen letters from Lawrence to Goldring survive. The complex interaction between Lawrence and Goldring remains an intriguing episode in the history of Lawrence the mostly disappointed playwright.

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1Douglas Goldring’s impact on D.H. Lawrence’s career between the years 1918 and 1921 deserves to be better-known. Goldring – a prolific writer and journalist – had first encountered Lawrence in 1909 when he was working as an assistant editor under Ford Madox Hueffer on the English Review. Goldring “registered” Lawrence as a “thin young man with a reddish ‘quiff,’ a fair moustache, noticeable blue eyes, a very high stiff collar and badly-made clothes.” Hueffer told Goldring that the young schoolteacher was “going to be a remarkable poet” (Goldring 249). S.S. Koteliansky introduced Douglas Goldring to Lawrence in mid-1919. The two men hit it off.

2Goldring admired Lawrence’s writings and was eager to help him. He was “to exert a curiously effective, though evanescent, influence on Lawrence’s development and publications” (3L 5). Serving as Thomas Seltzer’s London agent in 1919, he “succeeded in making [Seltzer] issue ‘Women in Love’ in a limited edition, and pay over £50 in advance.” Seltzer – who “had scarcely heard of Lawrence” (Goldring 252) – became Lawrence’s American publisher until the spring of 1925. The same year Goldring connected Lawrence with Anton Kippenberg, the head of Insel-Verlag, which published German translations of 13 of Lawrence’s books between 1922 and 1934. Goldring arranged for three of the four parts of the essay “Democracy” to be published in The Word (a journal that Lawrence remembered in Kangaroo as “that absurd international paper published at The Hague, that they said absolutely was run by spies and shady people” [110]). In May 1920 Lawrence put Goldring in touch with Maurice Magnus, hoping that he could get some of Magnus’s translations of European plays published. In 1921 after Lawrence had broken with his agent J.B. Pinker, Lawrence accepted Goldring’s advice to select Curtis Brown as his new agent.

3But Douglas Goldring is primarily remembered for another, more complicated intersection with D.H. Lawrence. Goldring played a crucial role in the publication of Lawrence’s seventh play, Touch and Go, as well as Lawrence’s intense desire to get his play staged. Goldring’s own play, The Fight for Freedom, became the first publication in C.W. Daniel’s series, Plays for a People’s Theatre, while Touch and Go was the second: a situation that created ill feeling between Lawrence and Goldring. Despite Goldring’s efforts, Touch and Go would not receive its first performance – by an amateur company – until 1973. These two plays and their Prefaces also raise the question of what Douglas Goldring and D.H. Lawrence meant by “the People.” The answer to the question is clear in The Fight for Freedom but not at all clear in Touch and Go.

4Douglas Goldring spent a year at Oxford before leaving because he lacked the money to continue. Embarking on a career as a writer, he published two books of poetry, a novel, and several travel books before the outbreak of the Great War. He enlisted in August 1914, but acute rheumatism forced him to be invalided out of the army in October. He became an anti-war propagandist, and soon he was on his way to becoming an armchair Socialist revolutionary. He joined the 1917 Club – founded in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution – and he became the secretary of the English branch of Clarté, an international leftist organization. Henri Barbusse, who had, like Goldring, been radicalized by his experience in the Great War, was the author of the powerful anti-war novel Le Feu and one of the founders of Clarté. Barbusse had become a pacifist and subsequently joined the French Communist Party. Goldring’s “revolutionary left-wing play, ‘The Fight for Freedom’” (Goldring 242), was published in England in 1919 and translated into Hungarian and serialized in German in a Berlin Communist monthly. The epigraph of the C.W. Daniel first edition of The Fight for Freedom is a quotation by Bela Kun, the de facto leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Barbusse contributed the Preface to the Seltzer first American edition of Goldring’s play.

5In 1919 Douglas Goldring was a “hectic ‘idealist’ with strong pacifist and ‘internationalist’ convictions.” He “believed the [Socialist] Millennium […] was almost at hand.” With the revolution “gaining ground,” people would soon “be ready for a ‘red’ theatre.” Meanwhile his “Lawrence discipleship, due to the remains of [his] literary instinct, got entangled with all this” (Goldring 253). That discipleship expressed itself in his essay “The Later Work of D.H. Lawrence” (mostly about Look! We Have Come Through!), which he included in Reputations, the collection of critical essays he published in 1920. (Lawrence found the book “very witty and amusing” [3L 573]). The same year he dedicated The Black Curtain – the novel that marked the end of Goldring’s “revolutionary pacifist preaching through the medium of fiction” (Goldring 254) – to Lawrence. He was one of the founders of the People’s Theatre Society, whose main goal was the “production of ‘Dawnist’ plays” (Goldring 253). But he remembered that his “main object in starting [the Society] was to secure the production of one of Lawrence’s plays” (Goldring 248).

6Before I trace Goldring’s entanglement with Lawrence and Touch and Go, I need to introduce you to Goldring’s play for a People’s Theatre, The Fight for Freedom. I will quote from the Seltzer edition (1920) because it includes Henri Barbusse’s Preface. In the Preface Barbusse praises Goldring’s “beautiful drama” that “puts before us the idea that dominates and influences all other ideas—the idea of revolution.” The Fight for Freedom is “written in a style brilliant, concise, profoundly stirring.” “Douglas Goldring’s work is one of those which will help to bring the ideal down to its only fatherland, the earth of human beings” (Fight 3, 4).

7In his Introduction Goldring observes that in some countries in the autumn of 1918 the proletariat was expressing itself in various forms. It did not matter whether the “armies of the Future” were called “Pacifists, Tolstoyans, Communists, Bolshevists, Quakers, Reds, Sinn Feiners, Christians, Spartacists, or Trade Unionists.” Meanwhile England was “able to shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of her men without, apparently, turning a hair,” while John Bull remained the “jaunty optimist,” convinced “that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds!” (Fight 6). It was time for a revolution – with a theatrical revolution leading the way. English “theatrical circles” don’t want “internationalist plays, or plays on political or social themes which reflect the ideas of to-day.” But “large sections of the ‘plain people’ in England” – the proletariat – “want them very badly” (Fight 8). The People’s Theatre will answer that need as it pushes the “God-dam-art crowd […] outside” (9). The people’s theatre will “inevitably be a revolutionary (and hence an internationalist) theatre if it is to be worthy of its name.” The new plays that will be written for the People’s Theatre will aim to express “the spirit of revolutionary idealism and ardent aspiration towards that new day which must dawn before long, even in England” (10). They will help hasten the day “when that red dawn really breaks” (7).

8Goldring’s Introduction sounds like a call to arms – or at least an artistic call to arms. With the “God-dam-art crowd” left outside, one might expect The Fight for Freedom to be an exercise in agitprop, unadulterated political propaganda. Instead it is essentially a post-Ibsenite, (very) late Edwardian play in which people in upper-class drawing rooms discuss a social problem. It seems to be written for the “God-dam-art crowd” audience rather than the proletariat.

9The Fight for Freedom is set in August 1918. The play suffers from what Sylvia Sklar has called the “mechanical approach to characterisation” (Sklar 184). The characters are two-dimensional type-characters, and some even have type-names. The Reverend Samuel Slaughter, Dean of Devizes, is a privileged, fatuous, self-important, super-reactionary defender of the status quo. “What an ennobling and purifying effect this war is having on the nation!” (Fight 39-40), the Dean exclaims. Margaret Lambert is revealed as an innocent; she is a lamb in danger of being slaughtered. Unformed and idealistic, she believes that she is a Bolshevik.

10Margaret has broken off her engagement to Michael Henderson, an army captain on-leave from the Front, in order to marry the radical, socially inappropriate Oliver Beeching, who describes himself as a “revolutionary working-class agitator” (Fight 29). Henderson, who has the “eyes of a madman” (33), is nasty, controlling, and egotistical. In the bargain his years in the trenches have further hardened him. He won’t give up Margaret without a fight, “even if [he has] to put a bullet through the neck of this damned thief” (35). He believes that “women, all women, love a master” (38). When Margaret refuses to take him back, Michael, “caught in a sudden gust of sexual ferocity” (46), drugs the glass of champagne that he has given her and then – a real shocker – rapes her (between acts). “Mine […] at last! (48).

11Oliver and Margaret seem destined for one another. But Margaret is distraught over the fact that she has become a “fallen woman.” Her unmarried Aunt Eleanor, a tough, genuine radical who realizes what the revolution will entail, declares that Margaret is talking like a “slave-woman.” She is trapped in those “foolish snares which the world has been setting for women for the past ten thousand years” (Fight 80). The play segues into propaganda as Aunt Margaret expresses her ecstatic confidence that “the Dawn will come rising in its red splendour over this shattered and desolate world.” The coming of the Dawn will be terrible and destructive: “its rays will scorch and stupefy all those who cling unconsciously to the past!” (83). Eleanor tells Oliver that Margaret will “never be able to cross the Rubicon with you—to welcome, with you, the new world that will be built on the ruins of the old” (98). Margaret seems destined to marry Philip Henderson, Michael’s dithering bureaucrat brother, while Michael is now insane. The play concludes with Eleanor and Oliver – not your typical end-of-play couple – singing four lines of “The Red Flag” (a socialist song that emphasizes the sacrifices and solidarity of the international labor movement) as they clasp hands. The editors of the Cambridge University Press edition of Lawrence’s plays remark that “the play’s closing moments (showing the two main characters quietly singing ‘The Red Flag’ together) [are] by any standards inartistic” (Plays lii). But at least The Fight for Freedom arrives at this ideological destination by an interestingly circuitous route.

12To my knowledge The Fight for Freedom has never been staged in either England or the United States, nor will it ever be staged. Its subject matter became dated many decades ago. The Dean and Captain Henderson are cartoonish, and the other characters are plot and ideology devices. Much of the dialogue is theatrical rather than believable. The crucial business about the red Dawn, although obviously heart-felt, doesn’t come close to ringing true. But to its credit, The Fight for Freedom is clearly a play for a people’s theatre (even if it was never staged). The people in question are the proletariat, along with educated people who are ready to join in the ferociously difficult fight to bring about the red Dawn. Meanwhile somewhere in minor writers’ heaven, Douglas Goldring is pleased that I am discussing his play a century after he wrote it.

13And now let me turn to that other play for a People’s Theatre, Touch and Go by D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence and Frieda lived in increasingly straitened circumstances during the Great War. The Rainbow was banned in 1915, and no publisher would accept the notorious novelist’s Women in Love. In May 1918 Lawrence’s sister Ada Clarke rented a cottage for the Lawrences in Middleton-by-Wirksworth, where they lived for almost a year. Back in his home country, Lawrence visited Eastwood and saw his old friends the Hopkins. Willie Hopkin was an active supporter of the Socialist Democratic Federation and a radical journalist with a weekly column in the Eastwood newspaper. In the last six months of the year Lawrence became “especially aware […] of the tensions in the mining industry” (Plays xlv) and also became more engaged in politics. Touch and Go, the “first product of Lawrence’s return to the coal-mining Midlands” (Kinkead-Weekes 475), grew out of this personal and historical moment. Lawrence and Goldring “met at the very time when Lawrence was seeking an outlet for his political energies” (3L 5).

14Lawrence wrote Touch and Go in October 1918. The play is in some ways indebted to John Galsworthy’s Strife, which Lawrence had seen with Jessie Chambers in 1909. (Lawrence alludes to Strife in his Preface, saying that Galsworthy’s play “sank down towards bathos” [Plays 365]). Touch and Go was Lawrence’s first play since The Daughter-in-Law, which he had written in January 2013. The play revolves around a strike in the mining industry. But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Touch and Go is that Lawrence – perhaps frustrated by his inability to find a publisher for Women in Love – recycles most of the main characters of the novel, transforming them into the mine owners’ family and friends.

15The two main characters in Touch and Go are Gerald Barlow and his girlfriend, the Gudrun character Annabel Wrath, who has returned to the mining village. Gerald Crich, the modernizing mine owners’ son, easily segues into the much harsher, less sympathetic Gerald Barlow, the modernizing mine owners’ son. In the past Annabel Wrath had gone “away with that Norwegian” because she knew that she and Gerald might “have killed one another” (Plays 383). But now, unlike Gudrun, she is trying not to be wrathful and destructive. As in Women in Love, Annabel teaches sculpture to Gerald’s young sister, who is named Winifred in both novel and play. Like Gudrun, Annabel makes “little statuette things” (377). The benevolent Christian Mr. Barlow and his fierce, “half-demented” wife (388) (“I hate the people” [387]) are recycled from the senior Criches in Women in Love. Oliver Turton is the Rupert Birkin character, here ineffectual rather than troubled and oddly wise. Lawrence transforms the characters he has imported from Women in Love in various degrees, and the dynamics between them are mostly different. It is as if he has shaken the characters in a kaleidoscope and produced an intriguingly different version of part of the novel. But for better or worse, it is impossible to relate this substantial, rather novelistic portion of the play to any notion of people’s theatre.

16Touch and Go opens in the “market-place of a large mining village in the Midlands” with the Socialist agitator Willie Houghton (a version of Willie Hopkin) haranguing a “small gang of miners,” telling them that they are “eager […] to be slaves” (Plays 371-72). The union leader, Job Arthur Freer, is not a “red Rag Socialist” (374). Instead, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes has observed, he “seems to stand primarily for patience (like Job’s): for careful negotiation, compromise, gradual improvement, trying to strike a balance good for everyone.” Nevertheless, “this will not make him or the workers ‘Freer’” (Kinkead-Weekes 476). The miners want more money, but beyond that, they want to be treated as human beings. Meanwhile Gerald Barlow, “an embodiment of naked power, intransigence and aggression” (Kinkead-Weekes 476), tells Freer that he “shouldn’t mind bloodshed,” although he has “absolutely no belief in the power of Labour even to bring about anything so positive as bloodshed” (Plays 407).

17The final scene, Act III scene 2, returns to the market-place of Act I scene 1. The miners have been on strike for a week in support of the striking clerks, whom Gerald says are “just greedy, incompetent, stupid. […] They’re like vicious children” (Plays 418). Willie Houghton is now “addressing a large crowd of men” whom he tells that they will be “far less free with Job Arthur for your boss than ever you were with Gerald Barlow.” If the miners are “going to start killing the masters to set yourselves up for bosses—why, kill me along with the masters. For I’d rather die with somebody who has one tiny little spark of decency left.” The striking miners have become nasty brutes: “Shut thy face, Houghton—shut it up—shut him up—hustle the beggar” (424). Oliver, Gerald, and Annabel drive up in an automobile. When it stops, the miners drag Oliver and Gerald from the car. They force them to kneel, and then “they force a lump of newspaper into OLIVER’S mouth, and bear down on GERALD (426). Soon the crowd surges and begins to howl. They have the defiant Gerald spread-eagled on the floor, face down” (427). The maddened miners rub Gerald’s face in the dirt as they shout “Down him—crack the vermin—on top of him—put your foot on the vermin—” The battle between labor and capital has deteriorated into mob violence. Only Annabel’s primitive howling and her thrice-repeated wail that “he’s a man as you are” (428) and then Oliver’s calm intervention cause the men to free Gerald.

18Gerald has treated the workers like “vermin” (Plays 427). When he complains that the miners have “trodden on my face,” Oliver replies that “Job Arthur will easily answer that you’ve trodden on their souls” (428-29). As Kinkead-Weekes has observed, “there is no moral difference between the two acts of violence” (Kinkead-Weekes 477). The mine owner “is portrayed as insensitive, assertive and determined to exercise power, the striking miners appear as unintelligent, brutal and exclusively concerned with money” (3L 6). No red Dawn can be found anywhere on the horizon in Touch and Go. If you are interested in “revolutionary idealism and ardent aspiration,” you must look elsewhere.

19Douglas Goldring was eager to include a play by a writer he greatly admired in “Plays for a People’s Theatre.” Touch and Go was readily available, and after all, Lawrence had “written the play out of my deep and earnest self, fired up my last sparks of hope in the world” (3L 293). When Goldring invited Lawrence on 8 July 1919 to contribute a play to the “Plays for a People’s Theatre,” he immediately responded that the “idea of the ‘People’s Theatre’ is very attractive” and also said that he would like Goldring to “do Touch and Go” (3L 371-72). Two days later he wrote Goldring again, reiterating that he wanted him to stage the play for the People’s Theatre: “I want it to be the first production, and I want it to be a success. It is so very, very rarely I feel sympathy with a new attempt. Now I do” (3L 374). Lawrence proceeded to revise the play and compose a Preface.

20Although “it never occurred to [Goldring] that [he] should have the slightest difficulty in securing the production of one of Lawrence’s plays,” the “theatrical experts” of the People’s Theatre Society decreed that Touch and Go was “impossible of production” (Goldring 255-56) – or so they said. More immediately enraging was the news that Goldring’s The Fight for Freedom had been published as Number One in C.W. Daniel’s Plays for a People’s Theatre series. When Lawrence received a copy of Goldring’s play, he exploded in a letter of 5 February 2020 to Catherine Carswell, complaining that The Fight for Freedom

is a pamphlet play with a detestable and inartistic motive. Goldring got Touch
and Go
out of me, saying it Touch and Go [sic] would be the first of the “Plays for a Peoples Theatre.” Then the sly journalist went and put this offensive Fight for Freedom as the first play – and for sure has damned and doubly damned the lot. (3L 469)

21Three days later he complained to Kot: “A nice thing for my play to be following on the heels of such a shit: especially as, since I was purported to open the series, I have got a little preface on ‘A Peoples Theatre’” (3L 471). If Lawrence fired off an angry letter to the “sly journalist,” that letter has not survived. Perhaps such a letter is one of the “many of Lawrence’s letters” that Goldring lost, “owing to [his] rolling-stone existence” (Goldring 257). But one month later, on 9 March, Lawrence was writing Goldring a cordial letter, suggesting that he would like to see Goldring’s wife Betty, “with her big nose,” play Mrs. Holroyd and expressing his doubt that England would “ever be Clarté’d” (3L 483-84). James Moran’s assertion that “Lawrence’s quarrel with Goldring ended bitterly” (Moran 77) is simply incorrect.

22Goldring explained that C. W. Daniel had merely published the plays in the order in which he had received them, which may have been true. But, as Kinkead-Weekes has pointed out, “whoever made the decision, it probably came from realizing that Lawrence’s preface – and indeed his play – hardly struck the right note on which to open a series with ‘Dawnist’ and Clarté aspirations” (Kinkead-Weekes 559).

23Goldring did not realize until after Lawrence’s death that Lawrence “loathed pacifists, idealists, and all the people at whose feet I was at this time sitting” (Goldring 253). From the beginning he understood that Touch and Go wasn’t a suitable play for the People’s Theatre series. One might add that Lawrence’s Preface to Touch and Go makes it sufficiently clear that, although he loved the play, he recognized that it was a very uncomfortable fit for Goldring’s series.

24The Preface begins by elaborately mocking the very idea of a People’s Theatre:

A nice phrase: “A People’s Theatre.” But what about it? There’s no such thing
in existence as a People’s Theatre: or even on the way to existence, as far as we can tell. (Plays 363)

25He proceeds to point out that “it isn’t The People’s Theatre, but A People’s Theatre.” It’s “not the theatre of Plebs, the proletariat, but the theatre of A People. What people? Quel peuple donc?” Lawrence whimsically concludes that the “major premiss” of a People’s Theatre is that “the seats are cheap.” The “minor premiss”? “The plays are good.” Lawrence hardly seems serious when he declares that “the plays of A People’s Theatre are—oh heaven, what are they? —not popular nor populous nor plebeian nor proletarian nor folk nor parish plays” (Plays 363-64). So much for Douglas Goldring’s People’s Theatre.

26Not surprisingly, the Preface is in no way a call for revolution. Abandoning his mocking manner, Lawrence observes that since “men are men still, Labour v. Capitalism is a tragic struggle” (Plays 365). He argues that in the “strike situation,” all that can result from the battle between “two mechanical forces” – labor and capital – is “the pulling asunder of the fabric of civilisation, and even of life, without any creative issue” (366). As in Touch and Go, “there is no solution” (367)

27Lawrence, who “loathed idealists,” had a powerful idealistic streak of his own. He wishes that the struggle between labor and capital “were a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a climax in the progression toward a new being” (Plays 367). After such visionary verbiage, Lawrence’s abrupt conclusion sounds like an afterthought. The last two sentences of the Preface are unrelated to anything that has come before: “we should have a People’s Theatre. Perhaps it would help us in this hour of confusion better than anything” (368). He never answers the question of who the people in his people’s theatre might be.

28Goldring and his wife stayed with the Lawrences at Chapel Farm Cottage the last weekend before Frieda left for Germany in October 1919. He hoped to see the Goldrings before departing for Italy the next month. In late May 1920 Lawrence – writing from Malta, “a hideous island” – thanked Goldring for the copies of Touch and Go that he had sent and asked about the People’s Theatre: “Hope it goes.” He had read The Black Curtain, Goldring’s novel of “revolutionary pacifist preaching,” with a dedication to Lawrence. Lawrence reported that he found the novel “interesting” (3L 531). In November 1920 Lawrence wrote Goldring that he had asked Secker to send him a copy of The Lost Girl. The penultimate surviving letter of the correspondence dates from early April 1921. As Goldring had suggested, Lawrence planned to hire Curtis Brown as his agent. He hoped to meet Goldring “if you come within reach.” And he agreed with Goldring that Women in Love was his best novel (3L 699-700). That was the last letter between D.H. Lawrence and Douglas Goldring for 8½ years.

29In 1929 when “chance washed [Goldring] up on the face-powder-and-lipstick-covered shores of the French Riviera,” he got in touch with Lawrence. Goldring’s “old ardour had not in any sense waned.” Lawrence’s reply to Goldring from the Villa Beau Soleil in Bandol on 14 October 1929 “was written in a sadly shaky hand, unlike the lovely bold script of ten years earlier” (Goldring 261). Lawrence said that he had “always asked after you and had bits of your news, so knew all, except the new wife.” After some humorous references to a dinner with Betty and her new husband three years earlier, Lawrence reported that he was “hoping my health will be better – it’s devilish bad. If only I knew what to do about it. – Am miserable.” He and Frieda would write Goldring if they were coming “Nice way – not likely, but you never know” (3L 529). He invited Goldring to visit them in Bandol.

30But Lawrence’s letter “arrived just at a time when my wife and I were passing through one of the worst of our temporary financial crises and hanging on by our eyelashes, thankful if we could even achieve one square meal a day.” If he had had the money “to take me to Bandol and back, I would have hurried there at once to have that talk about old times for which Lawrence himself was evidently eager.” Back in London in early 1930, Goldring had the money to make the journey. He wrote to Lawrence, “telling him our news, and mentioning the day when I would stop off at Bandol in the hope of seeing him.” Before mailing the letter, he bought the evening newspaper and discovered “that Lawrence had been hurried to Vence in a dying condition and that there was no hope of recovery.” Goldring “wrote at once to Frieda Lawrence, the conventional letter to which of course no reply was expected” (Goldring 262).

31The very prolific but forgotten Douglas Goldring published close to 50 books in his lifetime. He published books of poetry, novels, miscellaneous writings, memoirs, and an autobiography. He found a particular niche as a highly productive travel writer; he even wrote a travel book about Sardinia. Douglas Goldring and D.H. Lawrence intersected only briefly with some bona fide professional successes that were shadowed by a grating professional failure: the inability to get Touch and Go staged. But in the end Goldring bid a lovely farewell to Lawrence in his autobiography, Odd Man Out (1935). This was long after his “pacifist and ‘internationalist’ convictions” and his dream of an imminent red Dawn had come to seem “earnest and rather half-baked” (Goldring 257) – and also after Lawrence had died without seeing a performance of Touch and Go, his unlikely contribution to the People’s Theatre:

The Lawrence I knew best and love most to remember was the hard-up, uncompromising, chirpy Lawrence who mocked with cheerful heartiness at all the fashionable “stuffed geese,” the Lawrence who washed up the plates and dishes (preparatory to sitting in the jungly garden at St. James’s Terrace and talking about Indian Mysticism), who “spoffled” at his wife when she annoyed him and caroled German folksongs with her before breakfast, the Lawrence who could turn a mere walk through a wood into one of the most memorable experiences of a life-time. This Lawrence was the most remarkable and certainly the most “exciting” personality I am ever likely to meet, and I am glad to be able to say, with hand on heart, that my loyalty to him never wavered and was never marred by any unfriendly thought or act. (Goldring 266).

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Bibliographie

Goldring, Douglas. Odd Man Out: The Autobiography of a “Propaganda Novelist”. London: Chapman and Hall, 1935.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Lawrence, D.H. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Volume III: 1916-1921. Ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Lawrence, D. H. The Plays. Ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Moran, James. The Theatre of D.H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernism and Theatrical Innovator. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Sklar, Sylvia. The Plays of D.H. Lawrence. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975.

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Keith Cushman, « Lawrence, Douglas Goldring, and Plays for a People’s Theatre »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 54 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 16 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3269 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.3269

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Keith Cushman

Keith Cushman, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has written or edited seven books about Lawrence. He is Past President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America and a recipient of the Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Achievement and Encouragement of D.H. Lawrence Studies.

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