Nothing New Under the Sons : SONS AND LOVERS, <i> By D.H. Lawrence, Edited by Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge University Press: $24.95; 464 pp.)</i>

“No one ever wished it longer than it is,” Samuel Johnson sourly observed of “Paradise Lost.” If that’s the way you felt about “Sons and Lovers” in college, then I have some bad news.

In 1912, having run away to Italy with the wife of his former professor, D. H. Lawrence, 27, was trying to make a living as a writer. “Sons and Lovers,” his third novel, had already been rejected by one publisher when Lawrence sent it on to Edward Garnett, a reader for Duckworth. Garnett made extensive recommendations, Lawrence rewrote the manuscript for the fourth time, and then Garnett himself cut 10% before its publication in 1913.

In this new edition, part of the monumental and ongoing Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s complete works, Helen Baron and Carl Baron present the 10% solution. All the cuts have been restored, and the editors triumphantly conclude that “the publishing constraints of 1913 no longer hold. The time has come to overturn Garnett’s judgment and print Lawrence’s masterpiece as he wrote it.”

Having opened this can of words, the editors must expect some objections from those who have long considered it to be permanently sealed. Garnett was no ordinary editor: The discoverer of Conrad and Galsworthy, among others, he was a sympathetic and perceptive reader of Lawrence’s manuscript. Lawrence dedicated “Sons and Lovers” to Garnett, just as T. S. Eliot later dedicated “The Waste Land” to Ezra Pound, “the better maker,” after Pound had radically cut the original poem.

Lawrence wrote to Garnett from Italy in a series of letters, saying, “Take out what you think necessary. . . . I don’t much mind what you squash out . . . trim and garnish my stuff I cannot . . . you did the pruning jolly well, and I am grateful. I hope you’ll have a long, long time, to barber up my novels for me before they’re published. I wish I weren’t so profuse--or prolix, or whatever it is.”

The Barons, however, suggest that Lawrence went along with the cuts because he needed money so badly. They contend that Garnett cut the novel simply to make it shorter and more marketable, and also to tighten its structure. But in so doing, they claim, he diminished the role of the eldest son, William; reduced the important fight scenes that help define the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Morel; coyly and intrusively censored sex scenes, and clumsily removed scenes that are referred to later in the novel, causing confusion for the reader.

Others have expressed a higher opinion of Garnett’s skills. In his superb piece of scholarship, “Sons and Lovers: A Facsimile of the Manuscript” (Berkeley, 1977), Mark Schorer concluded that “Every deletion that Garnett made seems to me to have been to the novel’s advantage. Nothing important is lost, ineptitudes disappear, and the novel emerges as tighter and more smoothly paced.”

Like Garth in “Wayne’s World,” most academics fear change, and so it was with a skepticism conditioned by inertia that I compared the new edition with the one I’ve taught from for more than 20 years, marking all the differences, since there’s no apparatus to tell the reader what’s been added or altered. More than 80 passages are restored, ranging from a few words to four pages, and the contextual effects of omission or restoration are subtly varied and complex. Taken as a whole, though, the restored passages have the effect of making the novel longer without essentially altering the characterizations, relationships, and overall dynamics.

I can see why Garnett cut many of the passages. Some, such as where William tries on his kilt, are merely insufferable: “Now how do my knees look!--all right, don’t they? Ripping knees they are--ripping knees--legs altogether!” This goes on for a long time. Or there’s the turgid letter Paul writes to Miriam: “Must I write you a birthday letter?--It seems a pernicious thing to do deliberately, don’t you think? Because I’m sure to get flatulent and sententious.” There followed a certain amount of “flatulence,” which Garnett mercifully spared us.

Other cut passages aren’t badly written, but they repeat what’s already been established, or they overextend a scene and diminish its dramatic power, or they don’t quite fit the context and consequently cause a stutter or stop in the narrative flow. With Lawrence, it was sometimes less a matter of le mot juste than just a few more mots. Too profuse, or prolix, or whatever.

On the other hand, many of the restored passages are not only lively and expressive, they also seem important to the tone and truth of the moment. I don’t know why Garnett cut them when he might have cut dozens of other jarring, incongruous, heavy-handed passages. I can’t quote in bulk, of course, but for example, why cut this lovely and vivid description: “The black swifts . . . darted to and fro like black arrow-heads just above her, veering round the corner of the house, flying in at the broad eaves, then slipping out again and darting down the air with little cries, that seemed to come out of the light, not from the noiseless birds,” and retain this tepid 18th-Century moralizing: “If he drank, and lied, was often a poltroon, sometimes a knave, she wielded the lash unmercifully”?

So in the end, neither edition strikes me as being a clear improvement over the other, in the way that Joyce’s “Portrait” is clearly superior to what remains of “Stephen Hero.” The new edition adds both strengths and flaws, in proportions probably determined by the individual reader. It’s as if the two of them together comprise a do-it-yourself novel kit, with Lawrence supplying all the necessary parts, and then some.

One thing I am clear about: The dust jacket and introduction refer lavishly to the “uncensored” and “unexpurgated” nature of the restored text, and this emphasis is grossly misleading. This high-brow pandering distressingly echoes the popular sense of Lawrence as a writer of “dirty books,” but anyone desperate enough to ransack this text for titillation will soon discover that there’s nothing new under the sons. The “sexual censorship” exercised by Garnett was so utterly minuscule and trivial in relation to what he courageously let stand that it’s hardly worth noting. Furthermore, Lawrence’s distinctive genius as a writer about sex is not based on anatomically detailed descriptions, but springs from his ability to metaphorically and symbolically link the full range of sexual experience with the larger rhythms of nature, as he so powerfully does in so many scenes in “Sons and Lovers.”

Ironically, this new edition comes at a time when Lawrence’s works are in partial eclipse, at least in the academy. There’s been something for every generation to dislike in Lawrence: First he was obscene, then fascist, and for the canon-bashers and new censorians he’s racist and sexist. Moreover, some current critical theory devalues both author and published text, and in this hostile atmosphere, these additions to “Sons and Lovers” might be perceived as just so many angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Still, if you’re as much of a Lawrence fan as I am, the new “Sons and Lovers” lets you play the pleasantly challenging game of Editor, guessing which passages were cut and why, justifying your own choices and preferences over those of Garnett or the Barons or even Lawrence, and in general reminding yourself that a novel is arguably “finished” when a reader closes it, at whatever point, and never opens it again.