I promised this post in yesterday’s review of Mollie Skinner’s short story, “The hand”, but have since been reminded that Bill (The Australian Legend) has already written about Skinner’s relationship with Lawrence. I’ve decided to continue with my plan, not only because it interests me, but because I hope to add to the discussion.

So, I suggest that you read Bill’s post (linked above), because I plan to avoid repeating what he’s said. However, you do need a little groundwork, and it is this. In 1922 Mollie Skinner was running a guest-house and nursing-home in Darlington, Western Australia, to which the newly arrived DH Lawrence, and his wife Frieda, had gone to stay. The end result of this meeting was the co-written novel, The boy in the bush. (You can read Bill’s review of this, too, on his blog.)

To avoid repeating Bill’s information which uses Paul Eggert’s introduction in the novel’s 1990 edition, I am drawing from – yes, you guessed it – my newspaper research in Trove, where I found some more contemporary commentary to complement Bill’s work. Contemporary commentary comes, of course, with the biases of the time, but is fascinating, both in spite of and because of that. Unfortunately, as is the way with newspapers, not all the articles have bylines.

Having said all this, the first article I’m using is not quite contemporary, having been written in 1973, and does have a byline, Maurice Dunlevy. He is writing because of a new Heinemann edition of the book, and seems to draw his information from Mollie Skinner’s autobiography, The fifth sparrow, which Bill’s Paul Eggert also uses, and from the Heinemann edition’s introduction by Professor Harry T Moore. (There is, it appears, no lack of critical analysis of this work!) Dunlevy notes the existence of previous writings on the pair, but also says that:

We can certainly be more sure of our facts than the reviewers were a half-century ago when they thought that Mollie Skinner was a man.

Presumably this was because she is cited on the book as ML not Mollie Skinner – though it’s pretty clear that she was well-known in her birth state of Western Australia. Interestingly, some editions of the book don’t have her name on the cover at all.

Anyhow, Dunlevy quotes Skinner’s description of Lawrence as:

a man-boy with the little red beard, scarlet lips, strange eyes flashing with amused lights, and an upright body held with dignity.

Dunlevy goes on the describe how the novel came about – Skinner’s showing Lawrence some of her work, his expressing approval of her writing and suggesting she write about a particular topic, and her eventually sending him her manuscript of the novel she called The house of Ellis.

He then reports that:

Lawrence thought the book had “good stuff” in it, but was “without unity or harmony”, “without form, like the world before Creation”. He offered to re-cast it and have it published under their joint names.

This recasting, apparently, included recasting the hero, Jack (who was based on Mollie’s brother) to be “not quite so absolutely blameless an angel”. This included his coming to believe he was entitled to two wives. Dunlevy reports that Mollie cried when she read of this change! He also writes that Lawrence recast what was essentially “a conventional, parochial romance of an English boy sent to Australia for a social gaffe” and who then turns hero, into

a much more complex and universal story, the story of an Englishman responding to the new freedoms, the new challenges, the new possibilities for living an unconventional life on a frontier not bogged down by traditions. It is also one of the few good examples of an “Australian” version of that situation so familiar in American literature: a boy’s initiation into manhood.

Nonetheless, Professor Moore does say:

The writing throughout is distinctly Lawrencean and the book should rank as a Lawrence novel, though Mollie Skinner’s extremely important contribution should be noted”.

But what of more contemporary commentary? As Bill noted, it did tend to be more parochial. Here’s one from a paragraph on Publications Received in Western Australia’s The Great Southern Herald (14 March 1925). The writer suggests that Skinner wrote all the lovely descriptive material, perfectly capturing “the scenery and scents of the bush” about Perth and Fremantle, but:

the narrative itself is a discredit to the Australians it attempts to depict. It is a story of sordidness and immorality with the characters speaking a mixture of Bowery and Cockney slang. The one thing, beyond all others, that the average Australian is remarkable for, is the purity of his diction, in this respect being far above the average Englishman, and it is an insult to characterise him as speaking the awful polygot which appears in “The Boy in the Bush.” The opening chapters of the book grip one with their descriptive power … [and] … stamp the writer as one who knows and loves the West. Of the rest of the story, the less said the better.

I do love the comment about the “average Australian” being “remarkable” for “the purity of his diction.” I’m not sure I’ve heard that said before. Anyhow, the writer concludes that Skinner “will shortly publish The Black Swan, written without collaboration, and which should offer better proof of her literary powers”!

Someone called Norbar, writing a little later in 1938, is a little more even-handed, writing:

STRANGELY different from other West Australian authors is Miss Mollie Skinner. Her work has an elusive character which is difficult to grasp. Its naivete, lack of discipline and neglect of construction have led many to dismiss it as worthless, yet the hypercritical D. H. Lawrence, one of the greatest figures in 20th century English literature, not only praised her first book but collaborated with her in a second and urged her to complete a third. Miss Skinner’s collaboration with Lawrence in “The Boy in the Bush,” however, besides dragging her into the type of controversy which would not normally have been associated with her work, has unduly overshadowed her own originality.

Norbar then says, confirming his criticism at the beginning of this paragraph, that it’s easy to find fault in her books but that “in none of them does she fall into the facile pattern of stock character and situation which fills the lending libraries.” After some further discussion of Skinner’s collaboration with Lawrence, and of some of her later works, s/he concludes with the following assessment, which is a good a place on which to conclude this discussion:

In Miss Skinner’s novels we find her considerable originality, spiritual perception and feeling use of words circumscribed at every turn by almost school-girl conceptions of situation and character, probably an unconscious legacy from a mid-Victorian middleclass sensibility which has lingered among the old families of Australia long after its wane in England. Whatever contempt men like Lawrence might feel for English intellectual aridness, Miss Skinner would have benefited from early introduction into a circle invigorated by the new realism inspired from Scandinavia and France, even if she had had to slough it off afterwards. But literary and spiritual currents had little effect on the respectable classes of Australia and Miss Skinner’s training and traditions were against her turning to the democratic crudity of the working class, the salvation of many Australian writers. She has, consequently, been left high and dry and her work bears the marks of her isolation.

An interesting insight into some thinking of the critics/reviewers of the day, n’est-ce pas? There are some things here worth teasing out another time.