From the Pueblos to Cambridge: Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays

Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays provides striking individual examples of the creative process that emerged throughout the work on the Lawrence Cambridge edition – Lawrence’s characteristic method of revising himself through successive writings. (See Paul Eggert’s “Versions and Versioning” elsewhere in this issue.) The recent Cambridge volume brings together all the essays Lawrence wrote in America (and later) about Southwestern and Mexican Indians, allowing a spacious look at this oeuvre. Following the links and the differences from essay to essay reveals another kind of “difference” – that is, Lawrence’s developing ideas on “cultural difference”. Some of these essays have been among his most controversial or overlooked; their texts have often contained editorial corruptions that altered them; and they were scattered for years in Mornings in Mexico, the Phoenix and early letter volumes, and elsewhere, so that readers often viewed them in partial forms and in isolation from each other. But it is important to read them in sequence, following a progression in which Lawrence grows increasingly engaged with his subjects. I focus on a few of these “other essays” and discuss vicissitudes in their publishing history as well as factors that connect them. Nothing, of course, can change Lawrence into a “politically correct” writer: he was too earnest and too outspoken for that. But if he developed a mature sense of “cultural difference” and accommodation with the “other,” as I argue, it was chiefly in New Mexico, as reflected in this collection. My own experience, in researching these essays in Mexico and New Mexico (especially Taos) and elsewhere, leaves me with Lawrence’s words on my tongue: “Never shall I forget …”.