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

In the earlier letters England was lodged precisely within the confines of the aristocratic house. There is no acknowledgement of Eastwood — of his own experience and history — being a part of this essential England. In the last letter, however, the world ‘beyond’, ‘that lies sunken in gloom’ is acknowledged, distantly. At this stage in the letter the house is evoked in terms of the architecture of its own soul (‘the perfect old intervention of fitted stone’ etc.); the spirit of the house is talking but, as we move through successive variations, this ‘vision of a drowning man’ becomes Lawrence’s own vision ‘of all that I am, all I have become, and ceased to be. It is me, generations and generations of me, every complex, gleaming fibre of me, every lucid pang of my coming into being. And oh, my God, I cannot bear it.’ Effectively, Lawrence imaginatively claims the house as his own. He fuses absolutely with the house and the surrounding landscape so that what is really coming to an end here — or what is coming to consummation — is Lawrence the English writer. It is not only the most vivid example imaginable of West’s point, it also shows us — at a moment of supreme tension in Lawrence’s life — the process at work, as it is happening. Notes flare into writing, writing smoulders into notes, resulting in one of the most intense and revelatory passages Lawrence ever wrote.

If this book aspires to the condition of notes that is because, for me, Lawrence’s prose is at its best when it comes closest to notes.

In Sea and Sardinia , for example, Lawrence made no notes during the ten-day trip but dashed off a book in a few weeks shortly afterwards. The lack of notes, in other words, accounts for the book’s note-like immediacy. Notes taken at the time, on the move, and referred to later — as I referred later to the notes I had made in Eastwood — would have come between the experience and the writing. As it is, everything is written — rather than noted and then written — as experienced. The experience is created in the writing rather than re-created from notes. Reading it, you are drenched in a spray of ideas that never lets up. Impressions are experienced as ideas, ideas are glimpsed like fields through a train window, one after another. Opinions erupt into ideas, argument is conveyed as sensation, sensations are felt as argument. This immediacy is inscribed in the writing of the book. The transformation from ‘notes’ to ‘prose’ often takes place within the course of a sentence. We have to wait a long time for the pronoun that transforms the writing from diary-like jottings to finished prose. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Experience and sensation are rarely reined into shape until the last possible moment.

Would it be too silly — would it destroy any vestige of critical credibility this study might have — to claim that Sea and Sardinia is Lawrence’s best book? Well it’s my favourite at any rate (‘the judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got’), with Studies in Classic American Literature, Twilight in Italy and — if they count as a book — the posthumously published ‘Last Poems’ coming close behind. Best of all, though, are the letters: they show Lawrence at his most modern, his least dated. Unlike the thunderhead prose of the Garsington letters, Lawrence’s later style of note-writing is unelaborated, spare. It is seen at its most minimal — so to speak — in the stunned letters dashed off soon after he arrived in Australia, a country he considered ‘not so much new as non-existent’:

The land is here: sky high and blue and new, as if no one had ever taken a breath from it; and the air is new,

strong, fresh as silver; and the land is terribly big and empty, still uninhabited. . it is

too

new, you see: too vast. It needs hundreds of years yet before it can live. This is the land where the unborn souls, strange and not to be known, which shall be born in 500 years, live. A grey foreign spirit. And the people who are here, are not really here: only like ducks that swim on the surface of the pond: but the land has a ‘fourth dimension’ and the white people swim like shadows over the surface of it.

Bruce Chatwin doesn’t even get near to that kind of responsiveness and suggestiveness in the three hundred pages of The Songlines.

‘Have you noticed how often a writer’s letters are superior to the rest of his work?’ wonders Comtesse d’Arpajon in Remembrance of Things Past. She had in mind Flaubert (though his name escaped her at the time). I tend not only to agree but to wonder if this remark might not be prophetic. Could my own preference for writers’ — not just Lawrence’s — notes and letters be part of a general, historical drift away from the novel? For Lawrence the novel was ‘the one bright book of life’, ‘the highest form of human expression so far attained’. Nowadays most novels are copies of other novels but, for Lawrence, the novel still contained these massive potentialities. Marguerite Yourcenar offers an important qualification to this idea when, in her notes on the composition of Memoirs of Hadrian (a text of far greater interest, to me, than the novel to which it is appended), she writes that ‘In our time the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.’ No more. Increasingly, the process of novelisation goes hand in hand with a strait-jacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching authors’ sensations and thoughts get novelised, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression.

Of course good, even great, novels continue to be written but — as someone remarks every twenty years or so — the moment of the form’s historical urgency has passed. Part of the excitement of reading Lawrence comes from our sense of how the potentialities of the form are being expanded, forced forwards. That feeling is now almost wholly absent from our reading of contemporary novels. If the form advances at all it is by increments, not by the great surges of the heyday of modernism.

Milan Kundera’s faith in the novel is the equal of Lawrence’s but the logic of his apologia for the form actually carries him beyond it. Kundera takes inspiration from the unhindered exuberance of Rabelais and Sterne, before the compulsive realism of the nineteenth century. ‘Their freedom of composition’ set the young Kundera dreaming of ‘creating a work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced — for the sake of form and its dictates — to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him’. Kundera duly achieved this in his own fictions, the famous novels ‘in the form of variations’. In his ‘Notes Inspired by The Sleepwalkers ’, meanwhile, Kundera paid tribute to Broch who demonstrated the need for ‘a new art of the specifically novelistic essay ’. Novels like Immortality are full of ‘inquiring, hypothetical’ or aphoristic essays like this but compared with these, my favourite passages, I found myself indifferent to Kundera’s characters. After reading Immortality what I wanted from Kundera was a novel composed entirely of essays, stripped of the last rind of novelisation. Kundera duly obliged. His next book, Testaments Betrayed, provided all the pleasures — i.e. all the distractions — of his novels with, so to speak, none of the distractions of character and situation. By Kundera’s own logic this ‘essay in nine parts’ — more accurately, a series of variations in the form of an essay — which has dispensed entirely with the trappings of novelisation, actually represents the most refined, the most extreme, version yet of Kundera’s idea of the novel.