Maurice Magnus

Magnus' memoirs, published after his death, were notable for igniting a long-running feud between two of the most distinguished expatriate English authors, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, who had been close friends of his. Both the book and the feud surrounding it touched on homosexuality and bisexuality in a way that could not legally be referenced at the time. More recent revelations have added new insights into Lawrence as the prophet of love.[3]

Magnus was at one point the manager of the dancer Isadora Duncan.[1] ″Isadora later maintained that Magnus had been her secretary, not her manager.″[4] ″Lawrence used Magnus as a model for his creation of the fictional character Mr. May, the theatrical agent in The Lost Girl.″[5] Magnus was also the manager of the English theater set designer Edward Gordon Craig.[6]

Just before his suicide (to avoid arrest for debt), Magnus had made Douglas his literary executor, but the memoirs in their original form were unpublishable. They duly appeared, in edited form, with a long introduction by Lawrence, whose name helped to sell the work. Douglas protested that Lawrence had maligned Magnus as an unprincipled spendthrift, and had exaggerated Lawrence's own generosity towards him.[7] Lawrence published a letter to the editor in reply.[8] As Lawrence seldom ventured into biography, Douglas said he detected the fiction-writer's touch in this introduction. An early draft of the introduction in manuscript, now in the possession of the University of Nottingham, shows that Lawrence had intended an even more savage denunciation of Magnus.[9]

• Louise E. Wright, Maurice Magnus: A Biography, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
• Louise E. Wright, Disputed Dregs: D.H. Lawrence and the Publication of Maurice Magnus' Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, The Journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society (1996), pp. 57–73.
• Louise E. Wright, The Death of Maurice Magnus, in D.H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 419–428.
• N.H. Reeve and John Worthen, 1921-1922: Maurice Magnus, in D.H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. xl-li.
• Keath Fraser, Norman Douglas and D.H. Lawrence: A Sideshow in Modern Memoirs, The D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 283-295 (1976).
• Lawrence, D.H. (1987). Keith Cushman (ed.). Memoir of Maurice Magnus. Black Sparrow Press. ISBN 978-0-87685-716-8. This book includes the unexpurgated version of Lawrence's introduction to Magnus's Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (Lawrence's discussion of Magnus's homosexuality had been cut in the original), as well as the Douglas pamphlet and the Lawrence letter listed below under ″References.″ It also includes two excerpts from the typescript of Magnus's Dregs: Experiences of an American in the Foreign Legion, which was Magnus's title of his book. The first excerpt had not been included in the 1924 and 1925 published editions of Memoirs of the Foreign Legion; the second excerpt had been.
• D.H. Lawrence, Accumulated Mail, in The Borzoi 1925: Being a sort of record of ten years of publishing (New York: Knopf, 1925), pp. 119-128; reprinted in D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, 1936, pp. 799–805, and in D.H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 237–245. Two paragraphs in the essay, on pp. 120–121 in The Borzoi 1925, p. 800 in Phoenix, and p. 240 in Reflections, discuss Lawrence's Introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion.
• Norman Douglas, Late Harvest, London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946, pp. 52–53.
• Richard Aldington, Life for Life's Sake, New York: The Viking Press, 1941, pp. 375–376.