[In the following essay, Fraser examines the dispute between Douglas and Lawrence over the memoirs of Maurice Magnus, Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (1924), which Douglas wrote about in D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners.]

The cause of the breach between the two novelists whom E. M. Forster called [in Aspects of the Novel, 1962] "a doughty pair of combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like a lot of ladies up in a pavilion," is summed up in two words: Maurice Magnus. The dispute between Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence which arose in 1924, over Magnus' suicide in Malta in 1920, is a curious and unresolved sideshow in modern literary biography. The outline of the story is well known, for each of the combatants has had numerous defenders since the twenties—the staunchest two publishing their memoirs of Douglas simultaneously in 1954. Nancy Cunard, a Douglas supporter, pointed out that the pamphlet Douglas wrote against Lawrence, in answer to Lawrence's Introduction to "M. M.'s" Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (1924), "was a red-hot polemical coal for a long time in the twenties. It is no cinder now—nor ever will be to anyone interested in literary and human integrity as well as literary energy, and also in the utterly opposite characters of Douglas and D. H. Lawrence" [Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas, 1954]. Lawrence's chief supporter, Richard Aldington, has stated quite frankly that "warfare between two such free spirits and great writers as Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence was a misfortune for both literature and themselves" [Pinorman: Personal Recollections of Norman Douglas, Pino Orioli, and Charles Prentice, 1954]. To be sure, without the prominent personalities of Douglas and Lawrence engaged in public debate over the issue of biographical distortion, it is unlikely that such a dispute would have become the minor but rancorous spectacle it did. Yet given its unavoidable interest it seems important to come to a conclusion concerning the dispute which so far no one has convincingly resolved.

This odd story begins with the extraordinary eighty-three page Introduction Lawrence wrote for a manuscript left behind by Magnus. "Introduction" hardly describes what Lawrence's account is, for its relation to the memoirs of the Foreign Legion which follow is somewhat tenuous. Lawrence's Introduction is cast in the form of a narrative, complete with dialogue, and it recounts Lawrence's acquaintance with M—, over a period of twelve months. It is an evocative piece of writing that maintains the precision, even sinisterness, with which it begins: "On a dark, wet, wintry evening in November, 1919, I arrived in Florence, having just got back to Italy for the first time since 1914." Lawrence relates how he first meets M—through the man M—appears to be waiting on hand and foot, but a man who seems to despise him nonetheless, N—D—. M—, once an actor-manager and now a journalist, is described as rather flighty: "He looked a man of about forty, spruce and youngish in his deportment, very pink-faced, and very clean, very natty, very alert, like a sparrow painted to resemble a tom-tit." Later on, after sending M—five pounds, Lawrence tells of a visit he pays to the famous monastery (Monte Cassino) where M—is temporarily residing, in the mountains south of Rome. Subsequently, the fastidious American turns up in Sicily, on the run from the carabinieri who are after him for failing to pay a hotel bill. Lawrence, living in Taormina with Frieda, here discovers that M—expects him to pay for his expenses at a local first-class hotel. Lawrence reluctantly agrees. He also advances M—seven pounds to cover further room and board during the rest of his stay. A week later in Syracuse, coincidentally on the way to Malta himself, Lawrence finds that M—has not yet sailed for the island, and consequently is compelled to pay for his hotel once more. M—, who refuses to live in other than first-class style, continues to run up debts, eventually swallowing poison in Malta (following Lawrence's departure from the island), when police arrive to extradite him for defrauding a hotel in Rome.

Such a summary, I fear, is conspicuously inadequate. Lawrence's Introduction has generally been neglected as literature, in deference to its significance as biography, or, perhaps more importantly, autobiography. Although the essay is an unbroken flow of writing, there are six clearly defined sections: in Florence, where Douglas lives; at the monastery with its magnificent setting which Lawrence renders; in Sicily, both at Taormina and Syracuse; on the ship to Malta where Lawrence and Frieda, travelling second-class, discover Magnus, thanks to their money, parading himself on the first-class deck; in Malta itself—most of which is related in a letter to Lawrence from a Maltese friend of Magnus' about the suicide; and, finally, a section that summarizes Magnus' history and character, of which Lawrence is eloquently and passionately disapproving. The essay pleased Lawrence. It was, he told Catherine Carswell, "the best single piece of writing, as writing, that he had ever done" [Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence 1932].

Douglas' reply, D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners (completed in Syracuse on December 24, 1924), was a damning rebuttal of Lawrence's portrait of Magnus, coming as it did from an eminent fellow author. "Now, at the risk of being long-winded, I will try to straighten this affair out definitely." Breezily dismissing the unflattering portrait of himself, by admitting to it, Douglas accounts for Magnus' servitude (as Lawrence describes it) by calling it a willing fulfillment of a financial obligation, the paying back of a pound and a half Douglas had given Magnus in Capri a decade before. (Evidently Magnus still cherished such an obligation in 1919, even though he had already re-met Douglas in 1917, and had at that time helped Douglas over a difficult period of poverty.) However, Douglas' main and legitimate concern in his pamphlet is with what he calls "the novelist's touch"—this is what Forster was interested in—the novelist's selection of biographical facts which falsify the truth of living or, in Magnus' case, dead acquaintances. This involves "a failure to realize the profundities and complexities of the ordinary human mind.… The facts may be correct so far as they go, but there are too few of them: what the author says may be true, and yet by no means the truth. That is the novelist's touch. It falsifies life." It should perhaps be noted that Douglas isn't entirely consistent in his discussion of the novelist's touch. On the one hand, the hand he emphasizes, the novelist's touch is quite a conscious and deliberate thing. On the other hand, and this is how he describes Lawrence's Introduction, it is "a masterpiece of unconscious misrepresentation." Adamantly Douglas contends, with some justification, that Magnus "was a far more civilized and multifaceted person" than Lawrence depicts. Then he goes on to suggest that the indignation Lawrence reveals in his Introduction, towards Magnus and his suicide, was caused by Lawrence's annoyance at having lost a few pounds, which Magnus owed him. With his Introduction, however, Lawrence will admirably have recouped his losses.

It seems to me [argues Douglas] that even such a writing man should have some manners, some reserve, though his mentality be of the nonhuman order and his ethos immeasurably inferior to that of the butcher or grocer; that if he cannot respect his neighbours, he ought at least to respect himself. But he has forgotten what self-respect means; everything is grist to his mill—including himself; he chronicles your postprandial effusions as rapturously and scrupulously as he chronicles his own nocturnal emissions and it is no use appealing to his better nature, since he has no nature at all; he is a cloaca maxima for the discharge of objectionable personalities.

The pamphlet was reprinted more than once, and anthologized by Douglas in Experiments (1925). Lawrence answered Douglas in 1926. His letter to The New Statesman complains of being slandered, and contradicts a hope expressed by Douglas that he might, as Magnus' literary executor, receive something from the publication of the Memoirs. Lawrence quotes a letter received from Douglas in 1921, telling Lawrence (and this Douglas has italicized) to pocket all the cash himself. In this letter we learn that Douglas had given Lawrence permission to put him (Douglas) into the Introduction; we learn, too, that Douglas was thinking of doing his own memoir of Magnus. Lawrence claims that he might indeed have made a considerable sum of money out of Magnus, had he been willing to sell his Introduction as a separate piece of writing. This he refused to do, shop-ping around for two years—following his completion of the Introduction in 1922—until he found a publisher willing to publish Magnus' Memoirs as part of the package. Then, after paying off Magnus' debt to his Maltese creditor (an obligation Lawrence nevertheless refuses to admit is his, in spite of what the Maltese who befriended Magnus appeared to believe as a result of Lawrence's association with Magnus in Malta), Lawrence declares he may have received as much as he would for selling a short story in America: far short of a thousand dollars. "As for Mr Douglas, he must gather himself haloes where he may" [letter to The New Statesman, 20 February 1976].

On the face of it the case for Lawrence's credibility seems pretty sound. Yet a careful study of the entire dispute is a study in the relativity of biographical truth. E. M. Forster agreed that the novelist's touch, as Douglas defined it, was a bad thing for biography—though not necessarily for the novel ("a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more accurately than Mr Douglas implies"). Since Lawrence was a novelist, as a biographer it might well seem instinctive for him to have sought what may be called substantial, rather than literal, truth. If this is what he did with Magnus, it would appear that Douglas was right: "What the author says may be true, and yet by no means the truth." If so, what were Lawrence's motives in selecting the facts he did about Magnus? Was it merely a good story he wished to tell, one whose suicidal climax sat well with the protagonist's dodgy life-style? Was he, as Douglas alleges, angry at having lost money to Magnus, and consequently avenging himself? Or is it possible that Lawrence's portrait of Magnus is literally true? "The whole circumstances of my acquaintance with Maurice Magnus, and the facts of his death, are told in my introduction as truthfully as a man can tell a thing." We now know that Lawrence's memory was highly developed, and that the precise and vivid Sea and Sardinia, for example, written not long before his Introduction, was written after Lawrence's brief visit to Sardinia, and evidently without notes. Naturally there is no blame to be attached for Magnus' suicide, except of course to the spendthrift Magnus himself. (I shall, however, return to the suicide.) What remains to be decided is whether Lawrence is more nearly correct in what he reveals about Magnus and Douglas, or whether Douglas is closer to the "whole" truth in refuting Lawrence and supporting Magnus. Given that biographical truth—even as "round" as it may be offered—is still relative to the facts selected to describe a man, then I believe Douglas comes out of the dispute more soiled than Lawrence.

Aldington's account of the affair in Pinorman is interesting though incomplete. By sifting through Aldington's evidence, and speculating on evidence never noticed be-fore, one is able with the benefit of hindsight to reach a tentative conclusion about the merits of the conflicting claims over Magnus and his accurate portrayal. Douglas is possibly right in his contention that Lawrence had misrepresented Magnus' character. Even Aldington admits this possibility in his very readable autobiography, Life for Life's Sake (1941). And later in his biography of Lawrence. Portrait of a Genius, But … (1950), Aldington discloses lapses in Lawrence's memory of the affair, with respect to how poor Lawrence actually was. Of course none of this, as Aldington recognized, alters the fact of Lawrence's innocence concerning Magnus' fate. Although Lawrence evidently enjoyed Magnus' company—something he never really accounts for in his Introduction—he found himself paying for this pleasure, either by lending him money, or by helping to find Magnus outlets for his writings. The weakness of Lawrence's portrait of Magnus lies in its obvious antagonism toward Magnus.

Alternatively, there are two charges that can be made to challenge Douglas' apparently disinterested memoir of Magnus. To Douglas' annoyance Aldington made one of these charges in Life for Life's Sake, as he did later and at greater length in Pinorman. The real reason for Douglas' resentment against Lawrence, Aldington contended, was the unflattering portrait of Douglas as Argyle, in Aaron's Rod (1922). Aldington might also have emphasized the equally damaging portrait of Douglas in Lawrence's Introduction to the Memoirs. In spite of Douglas' words to the contrary, both portraits must have smarted; especially since Aldington for one has attested to the vividness of Lawrence's view of the author of South Wind (also a satirist and user of people for fictional purposes). Douglas did nothing to refute the accuracy of either portrait, preferring (probably wisely) to discount them playfully in his pamphlet on Magnus, and in Looking Back (1934), where his final assessment of Lawrence is rather an arrogant one. "He sometimes turned up at the English Review office," recalled Douglas, "with stories like the Prussian Officer written in that impeccable handwriting of his. They had to be cut down for magazine purposes; they were too redundant; and I was charged with the odious task of performing the operation." In the same book he concluded that "Scholars and men of the world will not find much inspiration in… [his] novels. Lawrence opened a little window for the bourgeoisie. That is his life-work." It should be noted that in Looking Back the emphasis of Douglas' thesis falls on Lawrence's "love of scoring off people to whom he is under an obligation." And Douglas uses Aaron's Rod to illustrate this aspect of Lawrence's character, a character unable to accept the burden of patronage without maintaining his independence by striking back. Just how this explains Lawrence's specific use of Douglas in Aaron's Rod, or his treatment of Magnus in the Introduction, is not clear. For certainly if the novelist's touch in the Introduction to Magnus' Memoirs is one of resentment, even Douglas would have had to admit that this resentment could hardly have arisen from Lawrence's being under any obligation to Magnus, financial or otherwise. It may be that, apart from the two days he spent as Magnus' guest at the monastery in Italy, Lawrence accepted from Magnus more hospitality in Malta than he cared to admit. Yet the evidence seems to suggest that Magnus did his best to sponge off Lawrence everywhere, and certainly the fact that he died owing Lawrence money does not argue for Lawrence's feeling resentment against Magnus, because of any obligation he felt himself under. Or does it? Perhaps there was an obligation to clear himself, in his own eyes, of having been made to look a fool by putting up with Magnus.

More plausible, however, is the likely notion by Lawrence that he had a duty to clear himself of an apparent obligation. The second charge against Douglas, more difficult to prove, is one Aldington only skirts the edges of. It must be suggested, I think, that the reason for Lawrence's very strong distaste expressed for Magnus in his Introduction was his own awareness that he might be accused unjustly of having caused Magnus' death, by having refused to give him "half my money," the lack of which precipitated his suicide. This Douglas declined to accuse Lawrence of, preferring instead to attribute Lawrence's anger to the loss of a few pounds. Is it possible that Douglas adopted this approach because his own hands in the incident were not as clean as his pamphlet would have us believe (nor indeed as Douglas' own letter which Lawrence quotes in The New Statesman suggests: "I'm out of it and, for once in my life, with a clean conscience")? Had Douglas accused Lawrence of precipitating Magnus' suicide, by refusing to lend Magnus money, he himself may well have had to answer the same charge. In fact, this very nearly had been Aldington's allegation against Douglas in Life for Life's Sake: of not helping Magnus, who was his friend and not Lawrence's. A few years later, in Late Harvest (1946), Douglas dragged in a red herring—as Aldington points out in Pinorman—in an unconvincing attempt to refute Aldington's implication by quoting from an article Aldington wrote about Douglas, for Esquire in 1941, in which he refers to Douglas' generosity to old friends.

Yet the important evidence, either never seen or forgotten about by Aldington, is offered in a letter Nancy Cunard innocently quotes in her panegyric Grand Man—in which Douglas, in 1942, attempts to confute Aldington's allegation for the first time.

Speaking of money, and of Aldington's further suggestion that I refused to lend it to Magnus in his distress, I was careful to point out in my pamphlet that I knew nothing of "this particular embarrassment" which was to cost him his life and which the dispatch of money might have removed. Often low-spirited and hard up and full of bitter complaints, like many of his sanguinary temperament, Maurice invariably contrived by hard work to straighten his affairs out again and give his friends a good time. He had done this all his life, and would have done so once more but for the embarrassment—that bolt from the blue which led to his suicide within three minutes. "If only"—so I wrote—"he had told me the complete truth! But he was always shy about disclosing his troubles to me, etc."

Apart from the rather unappealing picture of Magnus, there is in this, one feels, a subtle admission by Douglas that he was indeed asked by Magnus for money before his suicide (as Lawrence admits he himself had been). Is there not also an attempt to conceal this by a general reference to Magnus' frequent and "bitter complaints" which, it would appear. Douglas preferred invariably to let him resolve for himself, before accepting once more from Magnus "a good time"? Douglas tells us that in this particular case, however, he might have done something, had Magnus told him "the complete truth." At this point one wonders whether the letters Douglas claims, in his pamphlet, he sent to Magnus on November 6, 8, 14 and 15 were not in answer to some pretty truthful and naked letters from Magnus, about his financial, if not mental, state. At any rate Magnus evidently came to expect no help from Douglas either. His suicide occurred on November 4, and Douglas' last letters were returned unopened.

Although in his will Magnus left his manuscripts to Douglas, it was the Maltese friend from whom Magnus borrowed heavily—and into whose hands as creditor Magnus' possessions naturally fell—who refused to send these manuscripts to Douglas. Why? Apparently Borg (Mazzaiba in Lawrence's Introduction) did not trust Douglas, or at least did not feel that Douglas would be willing to reimburse him the fifty-five pounds lent to Magnus. Is it conceivable that Magnus' Maltese friend may have come across earlier letters from Douglas to Magnus, and if in these he saw no financial help was forthcoming at a time prior to the suicide, was hardly likely to feel that Douglas would be willing to help an unknown recover his losses afterwards? Alternatively, Magnus might well have told Borg of his inability to convince his friend in Florence to send money. At least with Lawrence, even if he would have nothing more to do with Magnus' debts, the Maltese had met him. And it was to Lawrence that Borg sent the manuscript of the Foreign Legion, holding it back from Douglas, the literary executor. It was his hope, in due course justified, that Lawrence would be able to sell it to a publisher and so reimburse him his losses.

Now it is less than necessary to point out once more that when it comes to the reason for Magnus' suicide neither Douglas nor Lawrence is to be implicated. Magnus had been so often, as Douglas implies, in debt, or escaping from something, that yet another threat of arrest—such as one he had experienced deserting from the Foreign Legion in France—does not really seem sufficient motivation for such a drastic action as suicide by so enterprising a man. Obviously fear and depression, compounded by the intangible nature of Magnus' homosexuality and parasitism, erupted in some unknowable fission inside the spirit of an intelligent yet self-deceiving man. My own purpose is not to lay blame on either novelist—although both Douglas and Lawrence, as I have shown, seem to have felt it necessary to clear themselves of responsibility for Magnus' misfortune—but simply to decide who of Douglas and Lawrence is biographically more accurate in his memoir of the man who accounted for a good deal of bitterness not only between both novelists but also among those who later wrote their own memoirs and biographies of Lawrence and Douglas.

The two novelists did not remain unreconciled enemies. They met again in Florence when Lady Chatterley's Lover was published by Pino Orioli, in 1928, and they at least buried their hatchets. But evidently Douglas, to judge from his acerbic comments in Looking Back and Late Harvest, never came to think very highly of Lawrence either as a person or a writer. This is rather a pity because biographers of Lawrence such as Aldington, who had long admired Douglas, or others such as Frieda who genuinely responded to Douglas' charm, have been unable to let themselves forget Douglas' attacks on Lawrence, and this has not helped to enhance the reputation of a remarkable, if now increasingly forgotten, author.

So it has been that the case to support either Lawrence or Douglas has often seemed to depend on unequivocal preference rather than the equivocal character of biographical truth. Certainly all the facts about Magnus can never be known, since the ultimate fact of a man's character is invariably subjective. Is one to support Lawrence, whose brilliant Introduction leaves the attractive "wistfulness" (and this word recurs half a dozen times) of Magnus unexplained, in preference for an emphatic account of Magnus' unattractiveness? Is it a legitimate ambivalence, Lawrence's peculiar regard for Magnus' courage in death, but not for his nervous posing in life? Or will one accept Douglas, whose gruff affection for Magnus leaves unexplained his own role with respect to Magnus' poverty, in preference for his disvaluation of Lawrence's creation? Was Douglas perhaps right, as Forster believed, about the novelist's tendency to falsify biography? To read any biographer on either novelist is to have the case resolved staunchly in favour of his subject. Yet biographical truth is relative to the facts one chooses to have at hand—biography as much as fiction requiring a selection and a shaping by the author. In spite of what Forster wrote, the novelist's touch is not really different from the biographer's, since the biographer is as responsible as the novelist for creating a "round" protagonist. Douglas' portrait of Magnus, for all its purported accuracy, is a flat one. That Lawrence's is round—if only in the sense of nuance—not even Douglas would deny. To be sure "truth" is not determined merely by roundness or flatness; as Forster would argue, Mr. Micawber (that other getter-into-debt) is a flat yet truthful portrait. Obviously there is truth in both memoirs of Magnus, even though truth in biography, like truth in fiction, will always be the servant of the author's disposition. In the case of Lawrence and Douglas, each was disposed—considerably more than the "objective" biographer—to put his account in such a way as to place himself, an acquaintance of the suicide, in a favourable light. In the case of Magnus, rather an unusual case, one is forced to decide which light throws fewer shadows of doubt. For all Lawrence's crossness, his enthusiasm for the task—if not for his subject—would seem to burn the more brightly.