Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage - Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

‘A common part of literary pilgrimage,’ I said as we walked on, ‘is that you often don’t know which house you’re meant to be visiting. In a sense it doesn’t make any difference but it’s very difficult to return home unless you have absolute proof that you’ve been to the right place. Hence the need, I conclude, for a plaque on the wall: to free us from doubt.’

We walked on. A man was opening his garage and Laura began to ask him about la casa dello scrittore inglese . .

‘ Si, si, ’ he interrupted. ‘ È quella là .’ The pink one. On the other side of the road, approached from a gate at our level but actually perched up on the next contour line — everything in Taormina is perched on everything else. The top floor was painted pink. There were three green shutters, all drawn, and a long, very narrow terrace with black iron railings. The floor below was pale cream, also with a long terrace and three arched Norman windows of a kind often seen in Sicily (I’d never seen them before). To the left, painted yellow, was what looked like an annex or extension. A steep line of steps led down from the house to the locked gate at our level. Laura walked off to see if there was another entrance while I contemplated the house. Laura came back a few minutes later and I followed her up the road which took us behind the house. There were some roadworks going on and the whole area had a Moscow smell of petrol about it. It was obvious now that there were two apartments: the yellow annex and the main house, on the wall of which was a plaque:

D. H. Lawrence

English Author

11.9.1885 — 2.3.1930

We had found it. We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: you look and look and try to summon up feelings which don’t exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, ‘D. H. Lawrence lived here.’ You say, ‘I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw. .’, but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance.

We walked by the side of the house, peered over the fence. It was three in the afternoon, and if there was anyone in the house they were asleep. The only thing to do was to come back later. As we left we saw an old shoe lying on the low wall surrounding the house.

‘Do you think this was Lorenzo’s shoe?’ said Laura. We were true pilgrims now, desperate for relics.

After our expedition to the Villa Fontana Vecchia which was both successful and abortive it was a relief to revert again to some recognisable, easily identifiable feelings: tourist weariness, a longing to be in a hotel, to sleep between sharp white sheets. It was too far to head back to vile Furci and so we had to kill time in a café. We took a cappuccino and then strolled to another café where we took a Coca-Cola, trying to recoup our energy, bored already by the prettiness around us. Forced into tourist mode, we sipped our Cokes and watched the other tourists go by: Italians who always went to Italy for their holidays, Americans who didn’t know a word of Italian, who wore clothes which aspired to some constantly surpassed ideal of hideousness, who looked at gift shops selling nothing but rubbish, shops specialising in things no one in their right mind would ever want to buy. Thank God we were only on a little work-related jaunt, a research trip of sorts, and could leave whenever we wanted and go home. It would have been terrible to have come on a charter, to be condemned to two weeks’ holidaying. Holidays are for people who work whereas we, who worked for ourselves, the last thing we needed was a holiday. For those who set off every day to an office or factory or shop, a holiday might be a nice relief but for us, who passed our time as we pleased, a holiday was an unthinkable burden. I had envied them sometimes, those in work, those with jobs. Especially on a Friday night when, relieved that it was over for another week, they could down tools and look forward to two days of uninterrupted idleness — until the thought of Monday began to intrude so that by Sunday afternoon all they could think of was getting to bed early, not doing anything that might jeopardise their return to the grindstone. Not now though. At this moment both sides of the deal — work and the holidays funded by work — seemed equally intolerable. Sitting here in Taormina, it was my life that I loved because it meant I didn’t have to take holidays, didn’t have to be a tourist even though at the moment I was feeling this exultant emotion I was a tourist, handing over money, paying for time to pass. I thought of Ciccio and his cash register business. I admired the purity of it: selling the means by which people reckoned up their profit. The only way to have got nearer to pure moneymaking would have been to manufacture the banknotes themselves. And what a perfect spot to work this particular hustle! In a town like this, where tourists came precisely to spend money, where every one of the dozens of sandwich bars and restaurants was pulling in money hand over fist, what product could be more in demand than a cash register? The cash registers of Taormina were ringing all day as people killed time, bought useless souvenirs, ate dinners and bought cappuccini to recover from their stroll-fatigue.

We paid for our Cokes, strolled down to the Greek amphitheatre and then strolled back into town, strolling ourselves into a state first of stroll-weariness and then stroll-exhaustion which was more exhausting than anything suffered in a forced march across Dartmoor in a blizzard. We collapsed into a café and then made our weary way back to Lorenzo’s house.

It was six-thirty now, the men doing the roadworks were stowing away their tools for the night. I envied them their feeling of work-tiredness that was so different to our own stroll-fatigue, envied them their feeling of satisfaction and relief now that the working day was over. I even envied their arriving at work tomorrow morning, unlocking their hut and finding everything as they had left it the night before and doing a day’s work in the tree-shadowed sun.

One of the workers knew the man who lived in what I had taken to be the annex of Lorenzo’s house. He knocked on the door and introduced us to a middle-aged woman who listened patiently and showed us in — and immediately we saw that the two apartments were actually one. She introduced us to a man who had just got off the phone: Salvatore Galeano. The whole place was modernised twenty-five years ago, he explained, showing us around, but Lawrence’s desk was still there. And his sofa. He introduced us to his mother who was sitting on a sofa — not Lawrence’s sofa, another one. His mother was in her nineties now, Salvatore explained, but when she was a little girl she had delivered the post to Lawrence.

We went out on to the balcony: a lovely view of the bay, the sea and the sky. We looked at the view. That is exactly what we did; we did not look at the sea and the sky, we looked at the view. Laura took some photos of Salvatore and me together and then we began making our departure. As we were leaving, Salvatore said that someone else had come here about Lawrence. Ernest Weekly? No, Kinkead-Weekes, Professor Kinkead-Weekes had been here. Ah yes, Professor Kinkead-Weekes, I know him, I said, hoping, by this harmless fib (I knew of him), to lend myself a little credibility. By saying names in this way, people like Salvatore vouch for their own authority, their own suitability as custodians of a place, and this is why I too said, ‘Ah, yes, I know him.’ It was all perfectly understandable but it was impossible to imagine anyone saying that I had been here or anywhere else as a way of boosting their own credibility.