SOURCE: "Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence: A Sideshow in Modern Memoirs," in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer, 1976, pp. 283-95.

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...