Magnus learned to speak several languages badly, to produce indifferent prose, to mismanage money, to appreciate good food and to keep up appearances. He wanted to be known as a littérateur'' ' ('littérateur!' mocked Lawrence, '—the impossible little pigeon!'), and his adventures in the world of letters can be traced through the curious trail of publications he left behind. In his early twenties Magnus wrote a play called ''Eldyle'' about a visionary who turns his back on the world and builds a monastery to which young and beautiful men can retreat....
''Eldyle'' was published in 1898. In the same year Magnus is credited as a 'translator and compiler' in the ''American Colonial Handbook'', volumes one and two. In 1901 he worked — probably as manager — for a new literary magazine called the ''Smart Set'', which would later publish a number of Lawrence's poems and stories. In 1902 he abandoned the Lutheran church and converted to Catholicism, and by 1903 he had left America for good and was to be found in Berlin, writing articles for the ''Berlin Times'' and ''Florence Herald''. For a brief period, Maurice Magnus was Berlin correspondent for the ''New York Herald''.Minutes before his suicide in Malta (to avoid arrest for debt), Magnus made Douglas his literary executor, but the memoirs in their original form, titled ''Dregs: Experiences of an American in the Foreign Legion'', 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. Lawrence published a letter to the editor in reply. 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.
Bibliography
* * * 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). * 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 1924 Douglas pamphlet and the 20 February 1926 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''. * N.H. Reeve and John Worthen. ''1921-1922: Maurice Magnus'', in D. H. Lawrence, ''Introductions and Reviews'', Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. xl-li. * Frances Wilson. ''Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence'', Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021; ''Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence'', Bloomsbury Circus, 2021. * 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. * Louise E. Wright. ''Maurice Magnus: A Biography'', Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.References
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