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

The next morning I felt even worse. Initially because of the shame of the previous day’s ‘lecture’, later because, as the plane descended, I found I couldn’t equalise my right ear. In addition to my still-splitting headache and my swarf throat I also felt like my right ear was going to explode. Strictly speaking the plane wasn’t descending, it was banking and turning in a holding pattern over Heathrow. I asked the flight attendant for a boiled sweet but my ear wouldn’t budge. The pain in my ear was so intense that it eased the pain in my head. ‘My poor ear,’ I kept saying to myself, swallowing and yawning, sucking a sliver of boiled sweet. I’d had an abscess in the same ear when I was a boy. I lay in my mother’s arms, apparently, my ear full of that inexplicable pain of childhood, saying ‘Press, Mummy, press.’ My ear kept popping and my mum kept pressing, I thought to myself as we banked and turned over Heathrow, pressing my ear, swallowing and yawning, trying to unblock my ear. Often in planes I find myself thinking of having sex with the flight attendant: pushing my hand up between her legs as she walks past, fucking in the toilet: standard in-flight porno stuff; now I thought of lying in a flight attendant’s arms saying ‘Press, Mummy, press.’ I was a sickly child. I was off school for so long that the truant officer came round to see what was happening. As well as my terrible eczema I had terrible warts, about fifty of them on my fingers. One day a boy at school told me that they were really good warts, they looked just like real ones. An early example of what I later learned is termed irony. The warts were burned off with dry ice — solidified carbon dioxide? — one day in Gloucester. They turned purple and then vanished. As compensation my parents bought me an outfit for my Action Man: Snow Patrol with white camouflage outfit, skis and green goggles. A strange choice — it was June — but we spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden at home, in the sun. My father took the day off work, or maybe that was another day, when I had some teeth out. After I had the teeth out I spat blood on to the pavement as we walked to the shop to buy an Action Man outfit. My mother said I should use a handkerchief and spit into that — as I had tried to do in the lecture hall in Denmark — instead of on to the pavement. It is possible that the Action Man Snow Patrol outfit was bought as compensation for the teeth not the warts.

I remembered all these things when I was back in England, enduring the flu, and recovering from the ill-fated lecture in Denmark. Writers suffer more from the flu than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers. If you’re going out to an office or a factory every day then there’s always a holiday element in being sick. You might not feel great but you are at least having a few days at home: it’s a rest, a chance to watch afternoon telly. Whereas writers are home all day anyway; they can watch all the afternoon telly they want. What the flu does is stop them working — so there is, albeit in heavily diluted form, a sense of being on some kind of holiday. Whereas for me, even when I was feeling a hundred per cent I rarely got down to any work. I could be in the best of health and all I did was mope around, shuffle around in my slippers, wait for the early-evening news. In terms of what I got up to on a daily basis there was next to no difference between my healthy routine and my flu routine. Basically, I realised when I was laid up with flu, I lived each day as though I was laid up with flu even when I didn’t have flu. Having flu made no difference — except that I felt terrible. As well as feeling terrible from flu I also felt terrible about the way that I squandered my flu-less days — and by squandering my flu-less days I also made the days when I had flu even worse because if I had stuck to a rigid work schedule I could at least have enjoyed flu as a relief from work. As it was, having flu was simply an intensification of everyday misery; all flu did, I realised, was render bearable misery unbearable. But in retrospect even this unbearable misery — I’ve said it before and I might well say it again — turns out to have been bearable. Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.

Just as I was getting over the last stages of flu, my agent called to say that one of Lawrence’s plays was being performed, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd . Did I want to go?

‘When is it?’ I said.

‘Thursday night.’

‘Oh, Thursday I’m going to see Nusrat.’

‘Who?’

‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the qawali singer. That’s a shame. I would like to have come,’ I said, thinking how fortunate it was that they overlapped. I had not been to the Théâtre for twenty years and I had no intention of going again now. It was not even a question of liking or disliking the theatre. The important thing was the pleasure that came from not being interested in the theatre. I am interested in all sorts of things but it is lovely to not be interested in the theatre. Not being interested in the theatre means a whole area of life and culture means nothing to me: there are entire sections of listings magazines that I don’t need to consult, vast areas of conversation I don’t need to take part in, great wads of cash that I don’t need to consider parting with. It is bliss, not being interested in the theatre. Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together. There is a moral here. To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.

Take Nusrat who I was going to see on the same night I had been invited to The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd . He had played twice at the Théâtre de la Ville when I lived in Paris and both times I wanted to see him even though this was next to impossible because everything at the Théâtre de la Ville is sold out months in advance. Both times I called the box office but the phones were always engaged. Both times I turned up at the Théâtre de la Ville in person to have it confirmed that the concerts were sold out. Both times I turned up at the Théâtre de la Ville well before the concerts were due to begin with a little home-made sign reading ‘ Je cherche une place ’, both times I took my place among the dozens of other Nusrat fans who didn’t have tickets and were holding signs saying ‘ Je cherche une place ’. The first time, right up until the concert began, I was hoping that I would be lucky but I was not. I went home, far unhappier, far more disappointed than if I had not turned up with my little home-made sign. The second time I turned up even earlier and did manage to buy a ticket, from a scalper, for twice the official price. I had an hour and a half to kill before the concert and I sat in the Sarah Bernhardt Café thinking about the way I had paid twice the asking price to get into this gig. Once inside I realised I had one of the three or four worst seats in the house, and I spent the first half of the concert thinking how much more I would have enjoyed it from a better vantage point. The second half I spent worrying that this particular concert of Nusrat’s was not nearly as good as the concerts by him that I had already attended. Then, when I got out, all I could think of was the way that, had I not been so preoccupied by the price and location of the seat, I might well have enjoyed this concert as much as the previous ones. Uppermost in my mind, though, was the question that was sure to be uppermost in my mind when I went to see him again on Thursday: why did I keep making such efforts to see Nusrat when I had already seen him play ten or twelve times previously?