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

I pined for it too. I thought of New York where I had lived and New Orleans where I had sort of lived, and San Francisco where I would love to live and where Laura had grown up, but even as I thought of these places I knew I would not go to live in any of them, especially New Orleans which I thought of and pined for on an almost daily basis. Even though I had such fond memories of sitting by the Mississippi I knew that I would never live in New Orleans again. Even though at some point in the day I always found myself wishing I was back in New Orleans, sitting by the Mississippi, I knew that I would never live there again and this knowledge made me feel that my life was over with. I am the kind of person, I thought to myself, who will spend the rest of his life saying ‘I lived in New Orleans for a while’ when in fact what I meant was that I had spent three months there, dying of loneliness, banging away at some useless novel simply for the companionship afforded by writing.

So where were we to live? More exactly — habits of solitude and selfishness die hard — where was the best place for me to live in order to make progress with my study of Lawrence? One of the reasons I had become so unsettled in Paris was because it had only a tangential connection with Lawrence. Paris was an excellent place to write a novel, especially a novel set in Paris, but it was not a good place to write a study of Lawrence. He hated Paris, called it, in fact, ‘the city of dreadful night’ or some such (I had the exact phrase in my notes somewhere). If I was to make any progress with my study of Lawrence, if I was to stand any chance of making any progress with my study of Lawrence, I knew that I had to live in a place which had some strong connection with him, a place where I could, so to speak, feel the Lawrentian vibes: Sicily, for example, or New Mexico, Mexico, Australia. The choice was immense because Lawrence couldn’t make up his mind where to live. In the last years of his life he was always writing to friends asking if they had any ideas about where he might live. ‘ Where does one want to live? Have you any bright ideas on the subject? Did you get a house west of Marseilles, as you said? How is it there?’ On this occasion he was asking William Gerhardie. A little later it was an ex-neighbour from Florence: ‘Where does one want to live? Tell me if you can! — how do you like London?’ Then it was Ottoline Morrell’s turn: ‘Where does one want to live, finally?’

I had made this list of examples of Lawrence’s anxiety about where to live because it reassured me in my own uncertainty; either it had reassured me or it had led me to become undecided, I was not sure. It was impossible to say. Who can tell? Perhaps the inability to decide where to live which I saw as one of the factors in preventing my making any progress with my study of Lawrence was actually part of my preparation for beginning to write it.

The one place I could be sure I couldn’t write my study of Lawrence was England, which was a shame because I was actually feeling drawn to England. I was thinking of English telly in fact. I had an urge to be back there, watching telly, but moving back to England meant moving back into what, in my notes, I referred to by the Lawrentian phrase ‘the soft centre of my being’. Being abroad — anywhere — meant being at the edge of myself, of what I was capable of. In England, for one thing, I could speak English whereas if I went to Rome I would be linguistically stranded. Not like Lawrence who had fluent Italian. He had a knack for languages (at one point he even began learning Russian from a grammar book) and although he claimed to hate speaking foreign languages, that was late in the day, by which time he had learnt several and had become weary of shifting from one to another. For my part I had not even attempted to learn French for the first six months of my time in Paris because it had seemed inconceivable that I could ever learn a foreign language. During that period my most intense relationships were all with cats and dogs, creatures with whom I could establish a bond of non-verbal sympathy. Since then I had picked up a bit of French, rather a lot actually, enough, certainly, to express grammatically wayward opinions. In fact now, after months of struggling to cope with the most rudimentary situations, now that I was on the brink of leaving, there was nothing I loved more than speaking French. By my standards I was fluent in French and speaking this garbled version of fluent French was one of the great sources of happiness in my life. Unless, that is, I was in a temper — which I was frequently. I could not express anger in French and this made me frustrated and angry and to express this anger and frustration I had to resort to English. In Rome I would be back to square one.

In Rome there was no chance of learning Italian because Laura is bilingual and has even more of a knack for languages than Lawrence. This is one of the things I first loved about Laura. Falling in love with Laura and all her languages was in some ways a premonition of the way that I would myself come to love speaking foreign languages, French specifically. Laura’s method of learning a new language is to watch soap operas in that language. After a couple of episodes she has the simpler tenses off pat and within a week she is fluent. She is consequently a very poor teacher of Italian and I could see that after six months of watching soaps in Rome I would still speak barely a word of Italian because although I love the idea of speaking foreign languages I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort. Over the years I had got out of the habit of doing anything that required any effort whatsoever and so there was no chance of learning Italian and scarcely any prospect of getting on with my study of Lawrence which would require a massive, not to say Herculean labour.

I fretted and wondered. I sold my furniture and each day my apartment became less homely. Laura was pressing me for a decision because she had to make a decision about her apartment. Was I coming to Rome or not? More to the point, why was I even prevaricating like this? I was mad not to go to Rome, Rome was in Italy, the country where the Lawrences had spent more time than any other; it was within easy reach of Sicily where he had lived, and if I was to stand any chance of making any progress with my study of Lawrence it was probably the very best place I could be.

As soon as I arrived I knew I had made the right decision. My mind was made up: I was ready to begin my study of Lawrence. The only trouble was the heat. The heat was tremendous and nowhere in Rome was hotter than Laura’s apartment. She had been so pleased to get back into her own place that she had forgotten how hot it would be. Heat is like that. In the course of winter unbearable heat cools in memory and becomes attractive, desirable. Now it was terribly hot. Even the light was hot. We tried to keep the light at bay, but it drilled through the keyhole, squeezed under the door, levered open the smallest of cracks in the shutters. My mind was made up, I was ready to work — but it was too hot to work. It was so hot we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep. We were in a kind of trance. Then, one infernal night, Hervé called — a bad line — and invited us to spend the summer with him and Mimi on Alonissos, which was where he was calling from. ‘What do you think?’ Laura asked, but her eyes had already decided.

‘I’ll learn Greek,’ she said. She had been eager to get back to her apartment but now she was desperate to leave. From my point of view six weeks on a Greek island, relatively speaking a cool Greek island, seemed a lovely prospect: the perfect time and the perfect place to begin my book on D. H. Lawrence. That’s what I’ll do, I said to myself, I’ll start my study of D. H. Lawrence in Alonissos. It was the perfect place. I had everything I needed except my edition of The Complete Poems which I had left with a friend in Paris. Not that it mattered: just before the British Council Library in Rome had closed for the summer I had taken out several volumes of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters and they would keep me going for a good while. I had a biography to check dates, copies of a few of the novels. . It was perfect. According to Hervé, Laura and I would have a room to ourselves where, in the mornings, I could begin writing my study of D. H. Lawrence. It was perfect. It would have been helpful to have had my edition of The Complete Poems with me but it was not indispensable to my beginning the study. The important thing was that I had this chunk of uninterrupted time with no distractions. I should have taken out Volume 4 of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters from the British Council Library, but Volumes 2 and 3, which I did get out, were certainly enough to be going on with. I was more concerned about not having my edition of The Complete Poems which, for my purposes, was probably the single most important book of Lawrence’s, without which I would be able to make only very limited progress on my study of Lawrence, such limited progress, in fact, that it would be scarcely worth starting. My copy of The Complete Poems was crammed with notes and annotations and without it I was probably better off relaxing on Alonissos, gathering my strength and marshalling my ideas on Lawrence rather than actually trying to write anything. Suddenly that book of poems which, until two weeks previously, had been by my side constantly for two months and which I hadn’t even opened in that time — hence the decision to leave it in a box at a friend’s house in Paris — seemed indispensable to any progress.