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Lot 84
BATES (H.E.) The autograph manuscript, signed ("H.E. Bates"), of his novel Love for Lydia, [late 1951 to early 1952]
Withdrawn
Amended
11 November 2015, 13:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge£2,000 - £3,000
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BATES (H.E.)
The autograph manuscript, signed ("H.E. Bates"), of his novel Love for Lydia, comprising some 700 numbered pages, written in blue fountain-pen and extensively revised throughout, plus some 80 largely unnumbered pages containing passages subsequently rewritten or dropped altogether, all written on loose sheets housed in a quarter red morocco box made for Bates, the spine labelled 'Love for Lydia/ H.E. Bates/ original manuscript'; with a note from the typists employed by Bates (Ethel Christian Ltd) pinned to the topmost sheet, c.780 pages in all, on loose sheets, paper watermarked 'Royal Charter Extra Strong', one sequence misnumbered but complete, some minor creasing etc., but overall in fine original condition, spine of box sunned, 4to, [late 1951 to early 1952]
Footnotes
THE AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF LOVE FOR LYDIA, WIDELY REGARDED AS H.E. BATES'S FINEST NOVEL; described by Clare L. Taylor in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as 'perhaps his most accomplished' novel; and by Dean R. Baldwin, in H.E. Bates: A Literary Life: 'his best work is Love for Lydia (1952), a novel of the jazz age set in a small midlands town... [It] is far more than a romantic tale, more even than a commentary on the hedonistic mores of the 1920s. It is an artistic working out of problems Bates had struggled with in the four war novels, but this time there is a satisfactory resolution of the ideas and tensions raised by the story itself. This it accomplishes through characters who are fully alive in a setting that complements and enriches the action by providing both a context in which it can take place and a symbolic commentary on it. Love for Lydia is Bates's most satisfying and aesthetically complete novel; thematically it illuminates not only the 1920s but also the whole first half of the twentieth century' (pp. 10 and 187).
Bates himself has left us a description of how he came to write the book, and what it meant to him: 'The novel I had in mind was to reflect, in part at least, my own youth, its ecstasies and uncertainties, its impatient disposition to judge people... its love and love's attendant agonies, its inevitable disillusionments and pain and its final awakening. The theme and spirit of Love for Lydia may perhaps be best expressed in a couple of lines taken from the book itself: "it had not occurred to me that the pain of love might be part of its flowering... With inconceivable stupidity I had not given love to her simply out of fear of being hurt by its acceptance; I had not grasped that I might have made her suffer". I set this tortured piece of self-examination against my native Nene Valley, where I had skated in winter in meadows of frozen water, had wandered in spring and summer with my grandfather, seeing the April unfolding of blackthorn and hawthorn and king-cup and cowslip, watching kingfishers swoop across the river and pike sunning themselves in smooth waters, and had so often wandered alone, trying to escape the drabness of my native boot-and-shoe town, wrestling with ideas for my earliest stories, unable to share with another soul the problems they continually created... Not that the completed book was achieved without much heart-searching. A novel may be autobiographical, either wholly or in part, but this does not at all mean that its execution is merely a question of dipping into memory and fishing out a fact here, an episode there; the birth pangs of imaginative creation have still to be endured, the path of art is still endlessly difficult' (The World in Ripeness, 1972, pp. 117-8).
But, as Bates goes on to remind us, without the putting of pen to paper, without the creation of the manuscript itself, all such literary aspirations mean very little: 'Even at the risk of my seeming to be repetitious on the subject of art's difficulties I feel this may nevertheless be a good moment to point out one of the chief sources, indeed perhaps chief source, of all these difficulties. It is all too often forgotten, I feel, that all art is ultimately a physical act. Art does not consist of merely dreaming dreams, of hearing the music of the spheres or, as Ibsen was fond of repeating, "wearing vine leaves in one's hair". As with love itself the ultimate moment of art's expression is, and must be, physical. This is not merely "a consummation devoutly to be wished" but one which must at all costs be accomplished. Until the writer puts his pen to paper, the artist his brush or pencil to canvas or paper, the sculptor his chisel to stone or wood, until the composer gives his musicians the opportunity of making music physically possible, there is nothing' (p. 118). Our manuscript, quite literally, represents the physical reality of which Bates speaks.
Bates began work in the autumn of 1951, writing to David Garnett that September that he was about to begin a new novel about the Midlands (Baldwin, p. 184). It was published by Michael Joseph in October the following year. Whatever preliminary notes or outlines might have once existed, it seems clear that this is the first and last manuscript of the book. This is attested to by the eighty-or-so pages of rewritten or rejected material that Bates has inserted at the end of the box in which the main manuscript has been housed. Some of these additional pages have been paginated, showing that they were last-minute rejections, but most are not. They include an earlier version of the book's opening, and what can be identified as substantial passages that did not make it to the final version; as for example several pages which originally ran on from the conclusion of Part Two, Chapter II, where the Narrator tells Lydia not to let Alex kiss her again. The manuscript remains in possession of the family.
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Withdrawn.