Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
By Geoff Dyer
4/5
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About this ebook
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
"In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
Geoff Dyer was a talented young writer, full of energy and reverence for the craft, and determined to write a study of D. H. Lawrence. But he was also thinking about a novel, and about leaving Paris, and maybe moving in with his girlfriend in Rome, or perhaps traveling around for a while. Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer's account of his struggle to write the Lawrence book--a portrait of a man tormented, exhilarated, and exhausted. Dyer travels all over the world, grappling not only with his fascinating subject but with all the glorious distractions and needling anxieties that define the life of a writer.
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including The Last Days of Roger Federer, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Zona, See/Saw, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.
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Reviews for Out of Sheer Rage
117 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Amusing, idiosyncratic yet always relatable, Dyer's rants form the basis for this story of writing, procrastination, and depression and search for meaning. I very much like Dyer's writing style, especially his deliberate repetitions. Yet the ending is a bit too pat for me, at least it deserved a few more rants. > If I felt settled I would want to leave, but if I was on the brink of leaving then I could stay, indefinitely> ‘I can’t bear it any longer,’ I would say to myself in the way that people always say ‘I can’t bear it any longer’ to themselves, as a way, that is, of enabling them to go on bearing the unbearable.> I would like a lightweight modern automatic camera, the kind you can slip into a shirt pocket, the sort that doesn’t dig in, but it is too late get one now. In the last five years I have been to all kinds of eminently photographable places but I’ve never had a camera with me. To get a camera now would make a mockery of all those camera-less, unrecorded expeditions.> Faced with the choice I was half tempted to abandon the Lawrence Experience in favour of the Ikea Experience: it’s a recurring problem this urge to abandon what I’ve set out to do in favour of something else, not because this other option is more enjoyable but simply because it is something else. It’s something I have half a mind to address – not just in this book, but now, immediately, even though this ambition is itself symptomatic of the condition it seeks to diagnose, a diversion from the task I’d originally set myself – whatever that was.> Basically I don’t like tea but what else is there? Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes. Compared with cold drinks (beer, fruit juices, sodas, varieties of mineral water) there is a dearth of hot drinks, I thought to myself, sipping my cup of – as it happened – rather nice tea in the White Peacock Café.> And yet, at the same time that I was wishing they would not come to an end, I was hurrying through these books because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end. However much you are enjoying a book you are always flicking to the end, counting to see how many pages are left, looking forward to the time when you can put the book down and have done with it.> This is one of the pleasures of the letters: one has the very first touch of a poem. It is like watching a fire and seeing the first lick of flame along a log: you think it is about to catch but then it vanishes. You watch and wait for the flame to come back. It doesn’t – and then, after you have stopped looking, the flame flickers back again and the log catches.> That’s what I’m doing: shaking my fist at the world. I won’t let even the smallest grievance escape me. I’m going to seize on the most insignificant inconvenience, annoyance, hindrance, set-back, disappointment and am going to focus all my rage, anger, bitterness and frustration on it. ‘I shall turn my head away,’ wrote Nietzsche. ‘Henceforth that will be my sole negation.’ Not me. I’m going to glare right back at it. It? Anything that gets my goat or pisses me off. Nothing will escape me.> ‘Lawrence was angry even in his sleep, Frieda declared, and proved it by taking Mabel in to witness the spectacle of Lawrence mumbling and groaning in his sleep.’ Now this is the Lawrence I love. Frieda too, I suspect.> Nothing is wholesale. The problem of truth is: How can we most deeply live? And the answer is different in every case.’> I cannot accept myself as I am but, ultimately, I am resigned to accepting this inability to accept myself as I am.> Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.> 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.> Lawrence said that one sheds one’s sickness in books; I would say that one sheds one’s interest. Once I have finished this book on Lawrence, depend upon it, I will have no interest in him whatsoever. One begins writing a book about something because one is interested in that subject; one finishes writing a book in order to lose interest in that subject: the book itself is a record of this transition> The more I ponder these questions the more I am persuaded that the real subject of this book, the one that writing it was an attempt to evade, is despair. My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It’s not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing.> Now that dodge – getting out of depression by becoming interested in depression – only works once. I’ve got no interest in depression now. There might be more to learn about it but I’m not interested. The only thing that interests me about depression is staying well clear of it. And since the only way to avoid giving into depression and despair is to do something, even something you hate, anything in fact, I force myself to keep bashing away at something, anything.> Nietzsche wrote that the thought of suicide had got him through many a bad night, and thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded in the rest of a normal lifetime.> Still, at some point, whether it was a good buy or not, I would not simply grow tired of listening to this new CD but would actually become heartily sick of the idea of listening to CDs and would think to myself that sitting around listening to CDs is a much more enjoyable activity, a much more enjoyable inactivity, if it is a relief from something else – anything else. And so, after squandering a day working through this demoralising routine that I have worked through innumerable days before, I would resign myself, would in fact abandon myself to not giving up, to picking up my pen and trying once again, if for no other reason than to render listening to my CDs a little less dispiriting, to make some progress with my study of D. H. Lawrence.> One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Some time ago I picked up an interesting-looking book about Nietzsche, hoping to have my mind changed about him, only to find that not only was I not wrong about Nietzsche but I also disliked the author who was trying to change my mind about him. Now I have had the same experience around D. H. Lawrence. The idea of the book is that Geoff Dyer wants to write a book about Lawrence, but is such a dithering procrastinator that he can only write a book, this book, about his internal struggles to complete any work toward the project at all. Any decision that he makes is instantly counteracted by second thoughts. In search of not just Lawrence, but a way into his task of writing about Lawrence, he moves to Sicily. He moves to Oxford. He moves to Devonshire. He visits America and the mountains of New Mexico. All the while, he is the helpless slave of his self-sabotage. This might be funnier if he allowed himself to show any admirable qualities whatsoever, but he carries English self-deprecation to an extreme. The Woody Allen of “Annie Hall” is a Superman compared to him. He portrays himself as aging, balding, and with pipestem legs, although the author photo shows him to be much better looking than the average guy. It rankles that he seems to have no inkling of the gifts he’s been given in his life. He can live anywhere he wants (“I have a modest private income,” he admits halfway through the book, for anyone who hasn’t figured it out) and his sexy girlfriend will follow him anywhere, but his life is an agony of indecision, frustration, and having to deal with unbearable things like the town of Oxford (which he calls “Dullsford”) and tuna for lunch.Let me just add that Dyer’s prose style, while funny in spots, leans on the same tropes for the entire length of the book. Apparently he thinks that just being on an unreasonable rant is funny, but it wears thin quick. His method for portraying his whirlpool of self-cancelling thoughts is repetition—not just of concept, but of phrase. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a single paragraph—a paragraph which in its totality is only about twice as long as the excerpt:Oxford! Now if there is one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford....If there is one person you cannot write about here, in Oxford, it is Lawrence....he is the one person you cannot write about here, in Oxford; and Oxford is the one place where you cannot write about Lawrence.As it was said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. We get it. Again, a funny thing the first time…not so funny after 180 pages.I did find it interesting the Dyer finds innumerable correspondences between himself and Lawrence. Lawrence is never satisfied, and so is Dyer. Lawrence is cranky and irritable, and so is Dyer. Oddly, I don’t doubt him in this. True or not, it makes it easier for me to wash my hands of both of them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tried to be another Moveable Feast but fell flat. Amusing enough in it's own way but I could never get around to finishing it
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great, frequently hilarious study of the author's procrastination and depression. Worryingly relatable in several sections.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A book purportedly about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage is about Geoff Dyer trying, and failing miserably, to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence. The result is a hilarious account of writer's block, an examination of the process of creation, and-Whoops!- one of the best books written about D.H. Lawrence.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Geoff Dyer loves jazz. I know that because I first discovered his writing through his book BUT BEAUTIFUL, one of my favorite books of the past couple years, which I urge upon any musician or music-lover. I mention this because OUT OF SHEER RAGE reminded me of a lengthy solo jazz improvisation. I'll explain why shortly.As a jazz lover, I was deeply moved by BUT BEAUTIFUL. As a writer, I expected to love even more Dyer's book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence. As one, long, chapterless, meandering memoir of procrastination, it hit home painfully in many places. But ultimately the book only irritated me.The entire first half reminds me of one of those endless, noodling fusion jazz guitar or saxophone solos, with tens of thousands of notes played exquisitely but never quite catching a tune. It's an endless repetition of a two-note theme: "When I prepare to write, I don't feel like writing" and "When I decide not to write, then I feel like writing." I got the joke the first 25 or so times. Afterwards, the notes just blend together into a catty whine.But, consistent with Dyer's theme throughout the book, halfway through, just as I considered throwing it across the room for the cockroaches to make a meal of, at that moment it (sort of) became interesting. The tune changed and moments of brilliance began to appear. Unfortunately, those moments of brilliance are excerpts from Lawrence's (and Rilke's and others') letters. So, to belabor the musical theme, the best parts of the book are the sampled bits.The second half of the book meanders from tune to tune, theme to theme, from travel to having the flu to nude beaches, seamlessly segueing from one to the next, sometimes using a Lawrence quote as a hook, sometimes not.I'll give five stars to Dyer for his daring chutzpah in writing a memoir about procrastination. It's a noble experiment. I also admire, for example, the later works of John Coltrane for their daring experimentation. I also find them mainly unlistenable.I'll give Dyer another chance. He's an exceptional writer. Maybe I'll like everything else of his except this book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Whiny and repetitive.
Okay--Two years later, I realize I am guilty of most of the things he does. It obviously hit too close to home, and that's why I was so mean. And Christmas was coming which always pisses me off. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5“Out of Sheer Rage” is, of course, a book about writing a book about D.H. Lawrence. However, the clever drollness of this conceit belies its real purpose. This is really a self-effacing meditation on the creative process and the ethos (or “nodality”) of action. That the author presents himself as an unlikable protagonist (i.e., curmudgeonly, idle, wracked with existential malaise) comes to serve his story well; he has sacrificed his biography so that he can tease out the causes of his shortcomings, thereby achieving success (i.e., a book). It’s a fun read and worth the brief amount of time it takes to read it. There are also some interesting biographical details about D.H. Lawrence. Overall, however, it’s mostly an odd little morality tale about the animal imperative of actually doing something, regardless of whether or not such endeavor is profitable, worthwhile or necessary.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read this over five days when I was already reading something else (Anna Karenina actually!) I enjoyed it enormously. It purports to be a study of D H Lawrence, but its focus is Dyer himself. I liked the pace of the prose, the humour and the fact that it doesn't fall into any particular genre. I never quite knew where the writer would take me next, but I was always happy to follow the various twists in the book's territory. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, and the human need for activity or occupation. It discusses various aspects of Lawrence's life (with some Rilke) thrown in, but mostly covers the writing process and how Dyer felt while writing the book, which was not shelved under literary criticism but under memoir - which is not what Dyer intended when he set out to write the book initially. I find Dyer funny, but there are probably people who might find his neuroses and tendency to overthink (as written in this book) obnoxious - I just have similar characteristics and so could relate, also I don't think he takes himself entirely seriously. Dyer writes well about places and in this volume he discusses Italy, Mexico, and the United States, both his experiences as well as Lawrence's. The book made me interested in reading some of Lawrence's nonfiction at some point, as well as Rilke.
Book preview
Out of Sheer Rage - Geoff Dyer
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Begin Reading
Notes
Additional Praise for Out of Sheer Rage
Also by Geoff Dyer
About the Author
Copyright
per – you see I can speak Italian – Valeria
‘Out of sheer rage I’ve begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid – queer stuff – but not bad.’
D. H. Lawrence, 5 September, 1914
‘Endless explanations of irrelevancies, and none whatever of things indispensable to the subject.’
Gustave Flaubert on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
‘It must all be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel.’
Roland Barthes
Looking back it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of D. H. Lawrence; on the other, it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray it was meant to delay and alleviate. Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself. If, I said to myself, if I can apply myself to a sober – I can remember saying that word ‘sober’ to myself, over and over, until it acquired a hysterical, near-demented, ring – if I can apply myself to a sober, academic study of D. H. Lawrence then that will force me to pull myself together. I succeeded in applying myself but what I applied myself to – or so it seems to me now, now that I am lost in the middle of what is already a far cry from the sober academic study I had envisaged – was to pulling apart the thing, the book, that was intended to make me pull myself together.
I had decided years earlier that I would one day write a book about D. H. Lawrence, a homage to the writer who had made me want to become a writer. It was a cherished ambition and as part of my preparation for realising this cherished ambition I had avoided reading anything by Lawrence so that at some point in the future I could go back to him if not afresh then at least not rock-stale. I didn’t want to go back to him passively, didn’t want to pick up a copy of Sons and Lovers aimlessly, to pass the time. I wanted to read him with a purpose. Then, after years of avoiding Lawrence, I moved into the phase of what might be termed pre-preparation. I visited Eastwood, his birthplace, I read biographies, I amassed a hoard of photographs which I kept in a once-new document wallet, blue, on which I had written ‘D.H.L.: Photos’ in determined black ink. I even built up an impressive stack of notes with Lawrence vaguely in mind but these notes, it is obvious to me now, actually served not to prepare for and facilitate the writing of a book about Lawrence but to defer and postpone doing so. There is nothing unusual about this. All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for. My case was more extreme for not only was taking notes about Lawrence a way of putting off writing a study of – and homage to – the writer who had made me want to become a writer, but this study I was putting off writing was itself a way of putting off and postponing another book.
Although I had made up my mind to write a book about Lawrence I had also made up my mind to write a novel, and while the decision to write the book about Lawrence was made later it had not entirely superseded that earlier decision. At first I’d had an overwhelming urge to write both books but these two desires had worn each other down to the point where I had no urge to write either. Writing them both at the same time was inconceivable and so these two equally overwhelming ambitions first wore each other down and then wiped each other out. As soon as I thought about working on the novel I fell to thinking that it would be much more enjoyable to write my study of Lawrence. As soon as I started making notes on Lawrence I realised I was probably sabotaging forever any chance of writing my novel which, more than any other book I had written, had to be written immediately, before another protracted bout of labour came between me and the idea for what I perceived as a rambling, sub-Bernhardian rant of a novel. It was now or never. So I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of this to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either book. All I did was switch between two – empty – files on my computer, one conveniently called C: \DHL, the other C: \NOVEL, and sent myself ping-ponging back and forth between them until, after an hour and a half of this, I would turn off the computer because the worst thing of all, I knew, was to wear myself out in this way. The best thing was to do nothing, to sit calmly, but there was no calm, of course: instead, I felt totally desolate because I realised that I was going to write neither my study of D. H. Lawrence nor my novel.
Eventually, when I could bear it no longer, I threw myself wholeheartedly into my study of Lawrence because, whereas my novel was going to take me further into myself, the Lawrence book – a sober academic study of Lawrence – would have the opposite effect, of taking me out of myself.
I felt happy because I had made up my mind. Now that I had made up my mind to throw myself wholeheartedly into one of the possible books I had been thinking about writing I saw that it didn’t actually matter which book I wrote because books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment. The important thing was to avoid awful paralysing uncertainty and indecision. Anything was better than that. In practice, however, ‘throwing myself wholeheartedly’ into my study of Lawrence meant making notes, meant throwing myself half-heartedly into the Lawrence book. In any case, ‘throwing myself wholeheartedly into my study of Lawrence’ – another phrase which became drained of meaning as it spun round my head – was actually impossible because, in addition to deciding whether or not I was going to write my study of Lawrence, I had to decide where I was going to write it – if I was going to write it. ‘If’ not when because once my initial euphoric resolve had collapsed the possibility of writing the novel made itself felt again as an attractive option. And even if I didn’t decide to write my study of Lawrence I still had to decide where I was going to live because, irrespective of whether or not I was going to write my study of Lawrence, I still had to live somewhere – but if I was going to write a book about Lawrence then that brought in a whole range of variables which I would need to weigh up when considering where to live, even though deciding where to live was already complicated by a massive number of variables.
One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on either the Lawrence book or the novel was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose – but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose. It’s easy to make choices when you have things hampering you – a job, kids’ schools – but when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable.
Even money wasn’t an issue since at this stage I was living in Paris and nowhere could have been more expensive than Paris. The exchange rate got worse by the month and Paris became more expensive by the month. Money was an issue insofar as it made me think I would rather be anywhere than Paris but in terms of where to go next, where to move to, it was almost irrelevant. What the money situation – more exactly, the exchange rate situation – in Paris did was to emphasise that although I thought I had settled in Paris, really I had just been passing through, extremely slowly. That is all anyone English or American can do in Paris: pass through. You may spend ten years passing through but essentially you are still a sightseer, a tourist. You come and go, the waiters remain. The longer I stayed the more powerful it became, this feeling that I was just passing through. I had thought about subscribing to Canal Plus as a way of making myself feel more settled but what was the point in subscribing to Canal Plus when, in all probability, I would be moving on in a few months? Obviously the way to make myself more settled was to acquire some of the trappings of permanence but there never seemed any point acquiring the aptly named trappings of permanence when in a couple of months I might be moving on, might well be moving on, would almost certainly be moving on, because there was nothing to keep me where I was. Had I acquired some of the trappings of permanence I might have stayed put but I never acquired any of the trappings of permanence because I knew that the moment these trappings had been acquired I would be seized with a desire to leave, to move on, and I would then have to free myself from these trappings. And so, lacking any of the trappings of permanence, I was perpetually on the brink of potential departure. That was the only way I could remain anywhere: to be constantly on the brink not of actual but of potential departure. If I felt settled I would want to leave, but if I was on the brink of leaving then I could stay, indefinitely, even though staying would fill me with still further anxiety because, since I appeared to be staying, what was the point in living as though I were not staying but merely passing through?
These were all issues I intended to address, in different ways, either in mediated form in my study of Lawrence or, directly, in my novel, or vice versa, but there was an additional practical complication too. Since I was obliged to spend a certain amount of time away from wherever I lived, and since the rent on my Paris apartment was so high (and, because of the exchange rate, was becoming higher every month) I was frequently obliged to sub-let it (strictly speaking to sub-sub-let it since I was sub-letting it myself) and since, if you are sub-letting your apartment, you do not want to acquire too many valuable or personal items which might get destroyed, it then comes about that you yourself are living in conditions arranged primarily for those sub-letting from you: effectively, you are sub-letting from yourself. That’s what I was doing: sub-letting from myself (strictly speaking, sub-sub-letting), living in an apartment devoid of anything that might have made it my apartment in the sense of my home. I had conspired to arrange for myself the worst of all possible worlds and my days were spent in this unbreakable circle of anxiety, always going over the same ground, again and again, always with some new variable, but never with any change. I had to do something to break this circle and so, when Marie Merisnil from whom I was sub-letting my apartment said that she wanted to give up the apartment because she was marrying the awful Jean-Louis whom I loathed even though he had once lent me a pair of elegant, pale blue pyjamas when I was in hospital for a few days, I decided to sign a contract that would make me the official tenant (as opposed to the illegal sub-tenant). I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to stay in an apartment where I had actually been extremely unhappy for ninety per cent of my stay, where ninety per cent of my stay had been dominated by anxiety about (a) whether I was going to stay and (b) whether I was going to start a novel or start my study of Lawrence, but as soon as the managing agents said that they were unwilling to let the place to me – a foreigner with no job and no steady income, I was a poor prospect in anyone’s eyes, even my own – I became convinced that I had to stay in this apartment where I had been sublimely happy, that there was, in fact, nowhere else on earth where I could hope to be as content. Eventually my rich friend, Hervé Landry (‘Money Landry’, as I liked to call him), owner of several houses, including one on the Greek island of Alonissos, agreed to stand as guarantor. The managing agents relented, and I signed the lease that made me the official locataire.
I was ecstatic. For about five minutes. Then I realised I had taken on an awesome, not to say crippling responsibility. And far from solving the problem of where to live I had actually put a lid on it so that now my uncertainty was boiling away under pressure, threatening to blow me apart. The one thing I could be sure of was that I had to leave this apartment, where I had never known a moment’s peace of mind, as soon as possible. If I stayed here, I saw now, I would fail to write both my novel and my study of Lawrence. That much was obvious. The trouble, the rub, was that I had to give three months’ notice and therefore had to predict how I would be feeling three months hence which was very difficult. It was all very well deciding today that I wanted to leave but what counted was how I was going to be feeling three months from now. You could be perfectly happy today, I would say to myself, and three months from now you could be suicidal, precisely because you will see the enormity of the mistake you made by not renouncing the lease three months earlier. On the other hand, I would say to myself, you could be in utter despair today, convinced that another day in this apartment would kill you, convinced that it would be impossible to make any progress with your novel or your study of Lawrence and in three months’ time you could see that it was only by remaining here that you survived the depression which will undoubtedly engulf you the moment you quit the apartment, as the rash act of renunciation committed three months previously will oblige you to do. Round and round I went, making no progress, resolving one thing one moment and another the next. ‘I can’t bear it any longer,’ I would say to myself in the way that people always say ‘I can’t bear it any longer’ to themselves, as a way, that is, of enabling them to go on bearing the unbearable. Eventually I really could bear it no longer, not for another second, and so I wrote to the agents and officially renounced the flat, claiming that ‘professional’ reasons had obliged me to return to England. The agents wrote back acknowledging my decision to leave the apartment. I wrote back saying that professional reasons now obliged me to remain in Paris. Could I therefore un-renounce my apartment? Relieved to be free of the trouble of re-letting it, the agents agreed to let me remain in the apartment which I had just renounced. And so it went on: I wrote again to renounce the apartment ‘definitively’. They sent a somewhat curt acknowledgement of my decision. I wrote back changing my definitive decision to leave to a definitive decision to stay but it was too late, I had to leave.
Now that I did have to leave I was faced with the terrible prospect of having nowhere to live, of having to decide where to live without delay, and only then did I realise how much this apartment meant to me, how it had actually become my home. Although I’d believed that I had hardly any of my things in this apartment there were actually many of my own things that I now had to find a place for. Over the years I had actually acquired quite a few of the trappings of permanence. I even owned a surprising amount of furniture, some of it rather nice. Where was I going to store it? And what about me? Where was I going to store myself? Rome was a possibility. Laura, my almost-wife, had a lovely apartment in Rome and was always arguing in favour of our settling there but though Rome was an excellent place to spend time, I knew how depressed I always became there after a couple of months, especially during the winter. And even before I became depressed I knew how irritating I always found Rome, essentially because of the irrational closing times of shops, and the way films are dubbed into Italian. Still, Rome was a possibility – or would have been had Laura not sub-let her apartment. She had come to work in Paris for six months, partly to be with me, partly because this nice offer of work had come her way, but now she was back in Rome, sub-letting an apartment from someone else because her own apartment was sub-let. This is the true condition of western society on the brink of the millennium: everyone sub-letting from everyone else, no one quite sure whether they are leaving or staying, torn between being settlers and nomads, ending up as sub-letters. In the next few weeks she had to decide whether to continue to sub-let her flat or to move back in – and that depended in part on what I wanted to do because although we were used to spending a good deal of time apart we both felt that the moment had come when we should spend more time together, should even think about ‘making our lives together’ on a daily as well as an emotional basis. We already had our shared motto, almost shared, more accurately, because whereas Laura’s version was ‘Together Forever’ mine was ‘Together Whenever’. Laura liked the idea of us sticking together ‘through thick and thin’ whereas I opted for the more pessimistic ‘through thin and thinner’. I was more than ready to put these semantic differences aside since if I was ever going to make any progress with my book about Lawrence – and get a reasonable shot at happiness into the bargain – I knew I would have to ‘throw in my lot’ with a woman as Lawrence had done with Frieda. Besides, I had already spent far too much time on my own. If I spent much more time on my own I would end up spending the rest of my life on my own. Even my crippling indecisiveness was primarily a symptom of having spent so much time on my own. In a couple decisions are argued and debated; when you are alone there is no one to argue and debate with. To render my solitude bearable, therefore, I had internalised the dynamic of a couple who spent their time bickering ceaselessly about where to live and what to do. The problem was that the woman with whom I going to throw in my lot was also chronically indecisive and it was only my still greater indecisiveness that led her to believe that she was the kind of woman who knew her own mind and stuck to her guns. Although she often argued in favour of living in Rome, for example, she was always thinking about settling in Paris, her favourite city, and frequently pined for America where she had grown up.
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