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

Speaking of painters who could not paint, Johnny, at the ‘ freaky ’ hotel, offered to show us Lawrence’s pictures. The plastic tube to Johnny’s nose, we saw now, was about twenty feet long and was connected to a beer-barrel of liquid oxygen. Like an astronaut he trailed this umbilical supply of oxygen into Saki’s image-crammed study. There were dozens of photos of Saki with various celebrities (all signed), and many pictures of Brett and Frieda. Lawrence’s paintings jostled for wall-space along with all the other images. They were far, far worse than reproductions lead one to expect. Ridiculous really, full of leery smiles and lascivious cavorting, but it must have been fun, I suppose, to have painted all that flesh. At various times Saki had offered to ship the paintings back to England in exchange for the Elgin Marbles being returned to Greece but no one in England was interested. In a way it was appropriate that the paintings remain here; they set the low standard that all Taos-based artists sought to emulate.

We ate dinner in a deserted Mexican place with lovely pink walls and blue chairs. It was like eating in a large doll’s house. Pink and blue mariachi music played on a stereo. Laura spoke with the waiter who spoke almost no English. The only other customer was a woman with a baby.

‘ Es un niño o una niña ?’ said Laura, holding the baby’s little finger.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m sorry. Is it a he or a she?’

‘A she,’ said the mother.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Sierra,’ said the mother, a painter, as it happened.

‘ Tiene un niño ?’ the waiter asked Laura.

‘ Estoy gastando toda mi energía en cuidarme del niño ,’ she said, pointing at me.

The food was good but by now we were fed up with eating in restaurants. We’d had our fill of finding places to eat, ordering, waiting, eating, asking for the check, calculating the tip and paying. We had reached that state often observed in couples on holiday: left to ourselves we were beyond conversation. Every five minutes I said, ‘I’m exhausted’ and Laura said, ‘Me too.’ Then we lapsed into silence until, after five minutes, Laura said, ‘I’m so tired.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

After dinner we went to the Taos Inn for drinks where Laura updated her memoirs. Sandwiched between details of our trip she composed a blood-boltered history of the region, stunning in its brevity:

Spanish settlers and soldiers accompanied by priests reached New Mexico in 1598. But in 1680, the Indians revolted and killed many Spanish settlers. Then came the invading Comanches, who terrorised everyone. American Indians won US citizenship & the right to vote in 1924.

While Laura was finishing her memoirs I got talking to Gary, a checked-shirt-wearer in his fifties whose hair was less grey than mine. He had grown up a Catholic in an Italian-American family. Later he married and had five children. Then, in his mid-forties, he had come out of the closet, become a militant gay activist, and moved into the Castro in San Francisco. That, he said, was when he found himself. Next he converted to Judaism and moved to Taos with his lover, Steve. He could have converted to anything and everything as far as I was concerned, but he would always be a Catholic at heart: why else this need to confess to a total stranger? Partly because I am a good listener. People are always telling me their life stories and they always tell me they have done so because I am a good listener. In fact I am a terrible listener, I don’t listen to a word: what I am doing is looking like I am listening while concentrating all my energy on not listening, on finding some refuge beyond what is being said. It is easy to be a good listener in America: all you have to do is not interrupt and it is easy not to interrupt when you are not paying attention. Still, I had listened to this guy enough to be irritated by his story, by the way finding himself meant losing himself in widening circles of group identification. I liked Lawrence’s angry insistence — ‘I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way across these years’ — on being oneself, not a gay man, or a Jew or an Englishman.

Gary’s lover, Steve, showed up and in that friendly American way we got talking to a large group of people. Laura was speaking Spanish while I listened, in English, to Steve telling me about Taos.

‘I feel so at home here,’ he said, ‘something special. You know what I mean?’

‘A kind of nodality?’ I said.

‘You know, do you believe in reincarnation, Jim?’ He had got the idea, as Americans sometimes do, that my name was Jim.

‘Well. .’ I said.

‘Uh-huh. Well you know I have such feeling for this place, had such a feeling for this place the first time I came here. The first time I came here it was like I had been here before. A psychic said I was a Navajo Indian in a previous life.’

‘Well Steve,’ I said reasonably. ‘If there is such a thing as reincarnation, you can be pretty sure that the life you had before was even more boring than this one. For every half-decent life you get you probably have to have a hundred dull ones. The chances are that in your previous life you were a clerk at the IRS or a waiter in a diner at Gallup. If your previous life had anything to do with Taos and the Indians you were probably selling Navajo jewellery in a gift shop.’ Steve took no offence. You can say what you like to a certain kind of American and as long as you don’t say it aggressively or use abusive language it is all the same to them. Just to be on the safe side, though, I bought him a bottle of Anchor Steam. By the time he bought me one my earlier irritation had all but vanished. I was enjoying sitting round the campfire like this, pow-wowing with people I may have known in previous lives — may even have been in previous lives — but whom I had only just got round to meeting in this one.

‘Actually Steve, do you know what I really believe I was in a previous life?’ I said later. I had built up a full head of Anchor Steam and was feeling the sudden surge of borrowed illumination. ‘I believe that I was exactly the same as I am now, in this one. That I lived this life before, in every detail, that everything that happened to me and will happen to me has happened before and will happen again, including this conversation. Now and throughout all eternity.’

‘That’s a scary concept, Jim,’ said Steve.

‘Don’t worry, he’s not himself today,’ said Laura. ‘Come on Lorenzo. Let’s go to bed.’ She had taken to calling me Lorenzo — I liked it — in honour of our arrival in Taos.

Back at the ‘ loony ’ hotel, slumped in a chair, evidently not himself, Saki was waiting for us. He looked like he had minutes left to live. Compared with his boss, Johnny had discovered the secret of eternal middle age. He had traded in his earlier oxygen supply and now had a smaller, portable one on his back, so that he looked less like an astronaut than a scuba diver, albeit one in permanent recovery from a severe bout of the bends. Possessed of a kind of somnolent determination Saki insisted on taking us into his office and showing us the paintings Johnny had shown us earlier in the day. He pointed at the walls and we went through the whole routine Johnny had taken us through a few hours earlier. I believed in the eternal recurrence but I didn’t think things recurred so rapidly. Laura plied Saki with questions and exclaimed with pleased surprise every time he reached into his filing cabinets and pulled out a magazine article about himself and Lawrence’s banned paintings. There were magazines in every language, especially Japanese, and they all featured pictures of Saki in his study surrounded by Lawrence’s paintings. Magazine after magazine, all showing pictures of himself in the room in which I was now standing, looking at magazines.