The Plumed Serpent

Abstract

For all the fervour of self-exploration apparent in Kangaroo, Lawrence’s novels were never simply ‘thought-adventures’; for most of his life they were a major source of his income. So we find him in Australia during July 1922 writing to his American publisher Seltzer: ‘Depressing to have such petty sales always.—I must come to America & try & do a novel there, that’s all’ (18 vii 1922). By 1922 he had suspected for years that his publishing future, so far as it might make him money to live and to travel as he wished, lay in America; and of course, his journey half the way round the world in 1922, on his way there, was the most expensive thing he had ever done. I think we can assume that an American novel was implicit in the very idea of going to America; and, indeed, the novel Lawrence wrote on his first visit there was the only original piece of fiction he wrote between September 1922 and January 1924.