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On the same evening that Noon meets Mrs. Johanna Keighley (nee Von Hebenitz), wife of a doctor in Boston and mother of two sons, she invites him into her bed. The next afternoon she does so again. Writes Lawrence: "I am not going to open the door of Johanna's room, not until Mr. Noon opens it himself. I've been caught that way before. I have opened the door for you, and the moment you gave your first squeal in rushed the private detective you had kept in the background." This is a direct reference to the problems of censorship and suppression that had swarmed around The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920). Lawrence here and throughout this long fragment seems more interested in the teller than the tale.
That may be because not much actually happens. Gilbert and Johanna mope around Germany while her aristocratic Prussian parents try to persuade them both of their un conscionable folly. Dead ends are followed by standoffs. In the interims, Lawrence chats: "How a Times critic dropped on me for using the word toney! I'm sure I never knew it wasn't toney any more to say toney." And he preaches, "Let us confess our belief: our deep, our religious belief. The great eternity of creation does not lie in the spirit, in the ideal. It lies in the everlasting and incalculable throb of passion and desire." On their way across the Alps and toward Italy, Johanna has sex with a young man who has temporarily joined their party, just as Frieda did under the same circumstances in 1912. Shortly after this incalculable throb, Mr. Noon abruptly ends.
Why did Lawrence quit? Perhaps be cause he had already used up the fictional possibilities of his union with Frieda in earlier novels, especially Women in Love.
Also, at the time that he worked fitfully on Mr. Noon, Lawrence began to lose his faith in the redemptive power of males and females locked in struggles and sex.
His novels of the mid-1920s, Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), veered toward the worship of supermen, blood-consciousness and dark gods. Only in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), his last novel, did he return to the subject of men and women in love that he had discarded with Mr. Noon. Then, throwing caution to the winds, he opened that bedroom door completely and apparently for good.