Maurice Magnus


Maurice Magnus was an American traveller and author of Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, which exposed the cruelty and depravity of life in that French army unit in 1916–17.

Life and work

Magnus' memoirs, published after his death, were notable for igniting a long-running feud between two of the most distinguished expatriate English authors, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, who had been close friends of his. Both the book and the feud surrounding it touched on homosexuality and bisexuality in a way that could not legally be referenced at the time. More recent revelations have added new insights into Lawrence as the prophet of love.
Magnus was at one point the manager of the dancer Isadora Duncan. ″Isadora later maintained that Magnus had been her secretary, not her manager.″ ″Lawrence used Magnus as a model for his creation of the fictional character Mr. May, the theatrical agent in The Lost Girl.″ Magnus was also the manager of the English theater set designer Edward Gordon Craig.
Just before his suicide, Magnus had made Douglas his literary executor, but the memoirs in their original form 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.