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Mr Noon
The first annotated paperback publication of Lawrence's autobiographical and strikingly innovative unfinished novel
Begun in 1920, Mr Noon is divided into two distinct parts, the first of which appeared in 1934 and the second of which remained unpublished until the Cambridge edition of 1984, the first publication of the novel in full. Abandoning a promising academic career at Cambridge, Gilbert Noon returns to Whetstone, where he becomes a teacher at the local technical school. His rootlessness leads him into an inept experiment of 'spoony' love with a fellow schoolteacher, Emmie Bostock. The ensuing scandal causes him to flee to Germany, where he finds true passion in his developing relationship with Johanna, the unhappily married wife of an English doctor.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Begun in 1920, Mr Noon is divided into two distinct parts, the first of which appeared in 1934 and the second of which remained unpublished until the Cambridge edition of 1984, the first publication of the novel in full. Abandoning a promising academic career at Cambridge, Gilbert Noon returns to Whetstone, where he becomes a teacher at the local technical school. His rootlessness leads him into an inept experiment of 'spoony' love with a fellow schoolteacher, Emmie Bostock. The ensuing scandal causes him to flee to Germany, where he finds true passion in his developing relationship with Johanna, the unhappily married wife of an English doctor.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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159 people want to read
About the author
D.H. Lawrence
2,084 books4,199 followersDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
July 16, 2011
Mr Noon Was a First Rate Spoon
Found Mr Noon in the second hand bookshop the other day. Oh joy! A DHL I hadn’t read! It is unfinished and unedited (a process he took very seriously), and reading it, I get the feeling that a large part of his editing process involved toning down his wild and surreal silliness. It is full of narrative breaking, fanciful addresses to his reader who he is certain is female, because males are all so frightened of him. Frightened because he eviscerates them so brutally. He has the classic Virgoan ability to dissect and ridicule, and mercurial skills I am quite jealous of. He would have been excellent company, I am sure. This novel is very funny. I rather like him unedited. You get the real man, and this is worth a little disarray. It’s also mostly about the early days of him and Frieda, which makes for fascinating reading. What a unique man he was, most of all in how he saw women. I have never encountered another author so in love with what a woman REALLY is. Not some pious unreachable ideal, but the vital and furious blood magic of her. He is quite stunning really, as a personality, and undoubtedly the most significant author of the 20th century (if also the most misunderstood), as well as being the patron saint of vilified artists. He was a first rate poet as well, which makes his prose shine like the sun, edited or not. I love how he believes that everything worth doing is a fight, a struggle, including his tempestuous marriage. He has the grit of a coal miner and the erudition of an angel. Wonderful combination!
Found Mr Noon in the second hand bookshop the other day. Oh joy! A DHL I hadn’t read! It is unfinished and unedited (a process he took very seriously), and reading it, I get the feeling that a large part of his editing process involved toning down his wild and surreal silliness. It is full of narrative breaking, fanciful addresses to his reader who he is certain is female, because males are all so frightened of him. Frightened because he eviscerates them so brutally. He has the classic Virgoan ability to dissect and ridicule, and mercurial skills I am quite jealous of. He would have been excellent company, I am sure. This novel is very funny. I rather like him unedited. You get the real man, and this is worth a little disarray. It’s also mostly about the early days of him and Frieda, which makes for fascinating reading. What a unique man he was, most of all in how he saw women. I have never encountered another author so in love with what a woman REALLY is. Not some pious unreachable ideal, but the vital and furious blood magic of her. He is quite stunning really, as a personality, and undoubtedly the most significant author of the 20th century (if also the most misunderstood), as well as being the patron saint of vilified artists. He was a first rate poet as well, which makes his prose shine like the sun, edited or not. I love how he believes that everything worth doing is a fight, a struggle, including his tempestuous marriage. He has the grit of a coal miner and the erudition of an angel. Wonderful combination!
September 19, 2022
An incomplete novel exhumed for the delectation of Lawrenceheads. The first part is Lawrence’s attempt at comedy with a sardonic narrator frequently mocking the inanities of his bucolic personnel, like a mad-as-hell Hardy disinclined to take it anymore. As we follow the hapless dalliance of the titular, the tone brings to mind the later novels of Nabokov with his near contemptuous narrator viciously marionetting his unwitting creations around the prongs of the Alps. The second part pivots to an autobiographical travelogue as the fictional Frieda Lawrence and D.H. (as Mr Noon) have a torturous time exploring the grubbiest crevices of the Rhine, the earlier humour replaced with topographical descriptions and excruciating exchanges between Noon and his German lover’s arrogant family. D.H. allows himself the space in this first draft to insult the reader in the stroppiest of terms as the novel meanders aimlessly through an unending chronicle of marital travel, breaking off finally in mid-sentence somewhere in Northern Italy.
December 8, 2021
This isn't a perfect novel; it isn't really a novel at all, but I loved reading it. (Well, maybe the spooning chapter was a bit much.) I liked being called "gentle reader" and sometimes "imbecile reader." At times Lawrence gets sincerely high-flown about love and sex and the life-force and at times he gets silly about it and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. I especially liked when he closes the door on Gilbert and Johanna having sex and tells the reader we can't watch and then goes on and on and on about sensual love and spiritual love as though he talking in real time and then when he's done Gilbert and Johanna are also done. I thought that was brilliant.
July 24, 2015
This is a difficult book to review because it was never finished; it was abandoned in 1921 and found among Lawrence's papers after his death. Also, it doesn't really have a plot as it's more a fictionalised account of the author's travels in Europe and his meeting with Frieda. However, the writing is as wonderfully descriptive as ever with lots of the word inventions that Lawrence does so well:sun-shimmering, dry-souled, bluey-effervescent, dawn-tender. Worth reading.
December 27, 2009
very chatty, Mr. lawrence is awfully mean to his reader.
July 25, 2011
Alas, another unfinished work, but as one of his more autobiographical and personal works, it has a special place on the shelf.
August 17, 2011
Do you love to spoon? There's an entire chapter dedicated to the art in this book.
May 1, 2025
I wonder at Lawrence's honesty in this book-as a self portrait it is deeply unflattering. If you've read Aaron's Rod, this is basically the same peevish little sod of a man. Highly unpolished, even for DH, full of off piste bitchy asides which are so obviously personal observations and bugbears that it is laughable. This is so far from finished you wonder if it should have been published. Lawrence sits so close to the surface, I suppose that's why it is of interest, it's lacking any other real merit. I like a bit of Lawrence but this confirmed my belief that he a bit of a shit.
May 15, 2025
Ah, gentle reader!
December 3, 2020
If you’ve read enough Lawrence, you know how funny he can be, but Mr Noon takes the cake. Here’s a taste of what's in store for you if you read it:
So, darling, don’t look at the nasty book any more: don’t you then: there, there, don’t cry, my pretty.
No one really takes more trouble soothing and patting his critics on the back than I do. But alas, all my critics are troubled with wind.
The notorious “Spoon” chapter alone is worth the price of admission. And boy, are you in for a treat when you get to the narrator’s rhapsodizing on Uplift in chapter 16 (“Detsch”)! But apart from that, Mr Noon also features compelling expansions on ideas you see elsewhere in Lawrence’s writing, such as embracing conflict in relationships and being in touch with one’s “primal soul.” And his descriptions of the two protagonists' journey through the Alps bring the region to life.
By the way, for fans of The Lost Girl, Alvina Houghton makes a cameo appearance.
If you’re into Lawrence at all, don’t write off Mr Noon because of its chronological proximity to the less scintillating of his “leadership” novels, or because it’s unfinished. For what it’s worth, the narrative does end at a satisfactory stopping point, even if the text itself ends with a colon.
So, darling, don’t look at the nasty book any more: don’t you then: there, there, don’t cry, my pretty.
No one really takes more trouble soothing and patting his critics on the back than I do. But alas, all my critics are troubled with wind.
The notorious “Spoon” chapter alone is worth the price of admission. And boy, are you in for a treat when you get to the narrator’s rhapsodizing on Uplift in chapter 16 (“Detsch”)! But apart from that, Mr Noon also features compelling expansions on ideas you see elsewhere in Lawrence’s writing, such as embracing conflict in relationships and being in touch with one’s “primal soul.” And his descriptions of the two protagonists' journey through the Alps bring the region to life.
By the way, for fans of The Lost Girl, Alvina Houghton makes a cameo appearance.
If you’re into Lawrence at all, don’t write off Mr Noon because of its chronological proximity to the less scintillating of his “leadership” novels, or because it’s unfinished. For what it’s worth, the narrative does end at a satisfactory stopping point, even if the text itself ends with a colon.
novels-fondly-remembered
November 12, 2024A hidden gem for all admirerers of D. H. Lawrence! It is unusual to find the author in a lighthearted, even funny mood, as he satirizes the English courting mores, the education system, the German train ticket collectors, his own literary critics - just among others. First published as a whole in 1984, the two parts stand together surprisingly well, and even do not feel unfinished as they round up the hero's Alpine crossing. The second part is a very candid, fictionalized but highly autobiographical, account of the author's elopement with his future wife Frieda. It is interspersed with Lawrence's observations on the nature of relationships, views which he is to develop in his later, better known novels. A real treat!
March 20, 2010
It was fun to read an unfinished work by D.H. Lawrence, especially since the story follows so closely to the author's own life. Passionate, over-the-top, and downright goofy at times, the author by turns abuses and seduces the reader. :-) A refreshing change of pace from the fiction I've been reading of late.
September 21, 2024
Way back in the early 1980s when I was a youngster studying “Sons and Lovers” as an O-Level set text, our literature teacher told us in some excitement that a “new” novel by DH Lawrence had just been published for the first time in its completed form. I remember feeling astonished that a novel had to wait fifty years to be published in full. And now, shamefully, another forty years have passed before I’ve actually got round to reading the novel in question, “Mr Moon”.
Actually, the version I’ve been reading isn’t the completed one, anyway. It’s the 1934 edition that Martin Secker published four years after DH Lawrence’s death, containing six short stories as well as the unfinished “Mr Moon”.
So I guess what I’ve read isn’t really a novel at all. I think I might have titled it “Episodes in the life of Gilbert Noon”, recording (and commenting drily on) Gilbert’s meanderings and dalliances, seemingly a square peg in a round hole wherever he goes.
By DH Lawrence’s rigorous standards of constant revision and editing, the unfinished text seems a little bit uneven and rough around the edges. But the biggest obstacle I found is his deliberately arch and intrusive authorial voice which sometimes gets just a bit too heavy-handed (“Ah, dear reader, I hope you’re not feeling horribly superior. You would never call an umbrella a brolly … ” or “Emmie was now taking the right turning, such as you have taken, gentle reader, you who sit in your comfortable home with this book on your knee”).
He’s as uncomfortably intimate and patronising towards his readers as he is condescending and sometimes quite bitchy towards his own characters (“Let us say it softly, for fear of offending a more-than-sacred institution, he was a bank-clerk.”)
Though rooted in the gritty realism of the mining towns of the Erewash Valley, the novel has an artificial feel and is almost dream-like in places. It’s not so much a story as a series of slightly surreal sequences and situations. These various parodies include:
- Self-satisfied Lewis and Patty Goddard spending cosy Sunday afternoons cocooned in their snug parlour, feasting on vegetarian delicacies.
- The forty year old Patty, securely married and seriously dedicated to her Suffragette cause (“the independent, modern, theorising woman”) fending off (or over-imagining) the advances of the 25 year old Gilbert Noon.
- The heifer aggressively chasing Patty and Gilbert on their Sunday stroll.
- Emmie’s creepy, lecherous father, spying on his daughter and Gilbert as they have “criminal commerce” (as he calls it, aka shagging) in his greenhouse, disturbing the plantpots.
- Emsie dashing off impossibly long and detailed notes to her chum Agatha during the minister’s Sunday sermon - and the subsequent altercation between the choir and the minister.
- Gilbert hauled up in front of the Education Committee with officials described as “lobsters” sitting underwater in lobster-pots and grilling him with their “lobster-voices” about his morals.
There’s a lot more tongue in cheek and ironic comedy than I’d imagined from a writer who’s generally associated with pretty high-minded stuff. Some of the scenes - the intergenerational conflicts, in particular - made me think more of Stella Gibbons’ spoof “Cold comfort Farm” than of the earnest “back to earth” writing that characterises DH Lawrence’s early writing.
Oh, and talking about “back to earth”, for a writer who can devote three pages of high-intensity prose to rhapsodising over a violet, there’s surprisingly very little about nature in “Mr Noon”. In fact, the description of the wintry field where the heifer gives chase to Gilbert and Patty is positively perfunctory by Lawrencian standards.
I found the dialogue in “Mr Noon” especially entertaining, with its rich vein of vernacular humour a far cry from some of the more stylised “grim ooop north” dialect of “Sons and Lovers”. Here are a few examples that particularly delighted me with their observational wit and irony:
- “You’re like your Dad; you keep your smiles in the crown of your hat, and only put ‘em on when you’re going out.”
- “It’s like him, though. He’ll pull the house down if the chimney smokes.” (Mrs Bostock of her over-reacting husband)
- “I feel as uncomfortable without a bit of powder on my nose as if I’d forgot to put my stockings on.”
- “People who are no judge generally do the judging.”
- “I tell you what,” he said. “We’ll get married and risk it.”
- “Sit down, some of you, and make a bit of daylight. It’s like being in a wood.”
On the whole, I found the novel, incomplete as it is, interesting and far more readable than I’d imagined. I was surprised by its humour - even moments of bizarre, surreal comedy.
But I didn’t enjoy the unpleasant and entirely unexpected anti-semitism - presumably a middle-class tic that I’d assumed liberal DH Lawrence would have sneered at in others. And talking of sneering, I felt uncomfortable whenever the tone veered from the comic and ironic towards the deeply cynical and embittered which made me rather sad. DHL’s touchy artistic defensiveness - or just a corrosive inferiority complex?
Actually, the version I’ve been reading isn’t the completed one, anyway. It’s the 1934 edition that Martin Secker published four years after DH Lawrence’s death, containing six short stories as well as the unfinished “Mr Moon”.
So I guess what I’ve read isn’t really a novel at all. I think I might have titled it “Episodes in the life of Gilbert Noon”, recording (and commenting drily on) Gilbert’s meanderings and dalliances, seemingly a square peg in a round hole wherever he goes.
By DH Lawrence’s rigorous standards of constant revision and editing, the unfinished text seems a little bit uneven and rough around the edges. But the biggest obstacle I found is his deliberately arch and intrusive authorial voice which sometimes gets just a bit too heavy-handed (“Ah, dear reader, I hope you’re not feeling horribly superior. You would never call an umbrella a brolly … ” or “Emmie was now taking the right turning, such as you have taken, gentle reader, you who sit in your comfortable home with this book on your knee”).
He’s as uncomfortably intimate and patronising towards his readers as he is condescending and sometimes quite bitchy towards his own characters (“Let us say it softly, for fear of offending a more-than-sacred institution, he was a bank-clerk.”)
Though rooted in the gritty realism of the mining towns of the Erewash Valley, the novel has an artificial feel and is almost dream-like in places. It’s not so much a story as a series of slightly surreal sequences and situations. These various parodies include:
- Self-satisfied Lewis and Patty Goddard spending cosy Sunday afternoons cocooned in their snug parlour, feasting on vegetarian delicacies.
- The forty year old Patty, securely married and seriously dedicated to her Suffragette cause (“the independent, modern, theorising woman”) fending off (or over-imagining) the advances of the 25 year old Gilbert Noon.
- The heifer aggressively chasing Patty and Gilbert on their Sunday stroll.
- Emmie’s creepy, lecherous father, spying on his daughter and Gilbert as they have “criminal commerce” (as he calls it, aka shagging) in his greenhouse, disturbing the plantpots.
- Emsie dashing off impossibly long and detailed notes to her chum Agatha during the minister’s Sunday sermon - and the subsequent altercation between the choir and the minister.
- Gilbert hauled up in front of the Education Committee with officials described as “lobsters” sitting underwater in lobster-pots and grilling him with their “lobster-voices” about his morals.
There’s a lot more tongue in cheek and ironic comedy than I’d imagined from a writer who’s generally associated with pretty high-minded stuff. Some of the scenes - the intergenerational conflicts, in particular - made me think more of Stella Gibbons’ spoof “Cold comfort Farm” than of the earnest “back to earth” writing that characterises DH Lawrence’s early writing.
Oh, and talking about “back to earth”, for a writer who can devote three pages of high-intensity prose to rhapsodising over a violet, there’s surprisingly very little about nature in “Mr Noon”. In fact, the description of the wintry field where the heifer gives chase to Gilbert and Patty is positively perfunctory by Lawrencian standards.
I found the dialogue in “Mr Noon” especially entertaining, with its rich vein of vernacular humour a far cry from some of the more stylised “grim ooop north” dialect of “Sons and Lovers”. Here are a few examples that particularly delighted me with their observational wit and irony:
- “You’re like your Dad; you keep your smiles in the crown of your hat, and only put ‘em on when you’re going out.”
- “It’s like him, though. He’ll pull the house down if the chimney smokes.” (Mrs Bostock of her over-reacting husband)
- “I feel as uncomfortable without a bit of powder on my nose as if I’d forgot to put my stockings on.”
- “People who are no judge generally do the judging.”
- “I tell you what,” he said. “We’ll get married and risk it.”
- “Sit down, some of you, and make a bit of daylight. It’s like being in a wood.”
On the whole, I found the novel, incomplete as it is, interesting and far more readable than I’d imagined. I was surprised by its humour - even moments of bizarre, surreal comedy.
But I didn’t enjoy the unpleasant and entirely unexpected anti-semitism - presumably a middle-class tic that I’d assumed liberal DH Lawrence would have sneered at in others. And talking of sneering, I felt uncomfortable whenever the tone veered from the comic and ironic towards the deeply cynical and embittered which made me rather sad. DHL’s touchy artistic defensiveness - or just a corrosive inferiority complex?
May 28, 2023
Made it halfway through the book.
I did not like the writing style. I can see why others might; the author makes fun of the reader, characters, and the amusing situations the characters find themselves in. It's humorous. That's all well and good, but, to me, it sometimes felt like a "How do you do, fellow kids?" type moment (which could be because this was written quite a while ago, I am aware). The author added words upon words in his monologues which oftentimes just dragged things out and wasted my time.
The stories were also meh, questionable at best. So, that definitely didn't help.
Now, I could be "missing the point" of the book and I am sorry if I am -- please enlighten me -- but I just feel like it didn't really have anything to offer besides questionable stories that don't mean much.
With that I would like to leave by saying: This should have stayed in Lawrence's drafts.
I did not like the writing style. I can see why others might; the author makes fun of the reader, characters, and the amusing situations the characters find themselves in. It's humorous. That's all well and good, but, to me, it sometimes felt like a "How do you do, fellow kids?" type moment (which could be because this was written quite a while ago, I am aware). The author added words upon words in his monologues which oftentimes just dragged things out and wasted my time.
The stories were also meh, questionable at best. So, that definitely didn't help.
Now, I could be "missing the point" of the book and I am sorry if I am -- please enlighten me -- but I just feel like it didn't really have anything to offer besides questionable stories that don't mean much.
With that I would like to leave by saying: This should have stayed in Lawrence's drafts.
April 1, 2020
A somewhat autobiographical piece by D.H. Lawrence, the majority of which was never published in his life and only survives as a draft (cutting off mid-sentence). Trying not to judge this too harshly as it is mostly a draft. Still has some wonderful turns of phrase but Lawrence's asides to the reader and other digressions just seem like a constant assault by someone with a serious persecution complex.
April 3, 2025
2.5
I think I can guess why Lawrence left his book unfinished - it goes nowhere. The novel didn't translated from personal memories to a full fiction.
I think I can guess why Lawrence left his book unfinished - it goes nowhere. The novel didn't translated from personal memories to a full fiction.
August 11, 2012
Worth a look. It's written in a flippant, nudging sort of style that can get a little wearing, but it has a verve and a humour about it that make it entertaining for a while, at least. I can see why he didn't go on to finish it. I was not sorry when it ended. But I'm glad I took a look.
October 8, 2015
This is an engaging book. Lawrence's language is wondrous...better than much
of his other writing. It has a free-flowing sense...often directed to "gentle
reader." There is humor as well as romance in this novel.
of his other writing. It has a free-flowing sense...often directed to "gentle
reader." There is humor as well as romance in this novel.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews