On The Road, Touch And Go, With D.H. Lawrence


                        “There are blows in life, so powerful…I don’t know!”
                                                Cesar Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshelman

I didn’t want to, but for reasons that will become abundantly clear, I’m forced to begin at the beginning, at the sources that gave rise to this writing. In the summer following my mother’s death, with my son for the first time, at the age of sixteen, safely stowed in a summer camp, my wife and I headed to Italy for a breather. Other losses had also occurred. At some point, we were staying in Lazio to be within proximity of both Rome and several Etruscan sites. I began to feel a thickness in my lungs building up. Cats in the courtyard? Except for one respiratory flu in my mid-twenties, I hadn’t had an asthma attack since I was eleven when we moved from Illinois to Utah, and I lingered—and malingered—in the West long enough, as they say, to outgrow it. Outgrow it, but not without fear of its reoccurrence. Everyone has a defining fear having to do with their own mortality, usually connected to childhood illness, and mine is suffocation: not getting enough air in my lungs. After Lazio we headed into the Abruzzi, to a town called Abateggio, as far as possible from “culture” and where the most wonderful dishes were made from rabbits and boars and could be had for less than it cost to eat at the local Cuban-Chinese restaurant in New York City. Pretty soon I would be out hunting rabbits with a bow and arrow like figures in a painting by Paolo Uccello. As night came on, my voice lowered several octaves, my lungs began to thicken, my breathing grew heavy. What could it be? What could have followed me from Lazio to Abateggio?

                                                                          ~

I feel imperiled by the heat and the toxic smoke from the cement factory in Scafa, yet too restless and curious to imitate the lizard’s stillness. The heat of the day is trapped in the valley of Scafa. Turns the port of Pescara into a dead zone. I found the following passage in Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl on November 4, 2004: “It seems that there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country has its potent negative centres, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture. And Alvinia had struck one of them, here on the edge of the Abruzzi.”

The light pattern in the scattered villages reaching from these mountain heights to Pescara, is reminiscent of what it looks like from the hills in miniature, above Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, or Albuquerque; the distance between sustained bands of segments, the abrupt break off into hilly darkness, the disbanding of illumination, is as much an impression, a healing vapor.

And the mystery of the scattered zigzag ablaze in the night is resolved, if not solved, in the twilight: it was like a runway to Pescara, like an unlit pinball machine.

The heat trapped in the Apennines. The refracted possibility that the scarce coolness from the snow-covered peaks will blow over and down. The heat made twilight come early in the Abruzzi one night. The young woman who runs the herboristica in Scafa was tugging on her tee shirt to emphasize the heat. She was amused at my requests for multiple products containing green tea, and when I commented on its proximity to eucalyptus she said she’d been thirteen times to Australia to visit her brother, a professional soccer player, who lived there with his Australian wife, and handed me a koala with an Australian flag. When she learned why I was so avid about green tea, she told me of a secret place “where the mothers take their babies to breathe the vapors.”

Where will this lead lead?

                                                                          ~

No one around, except history. Plaques that inform how this river has provided hydraulic power for five-hundred years. I wade into turquoise shallows. Softer than belief, they grab my feet. And now with quicksand between my ankles and knees I grip a log. Test my weight, haul myself on like mounting a mule, edge onto my back, sit down. Safe, for the time being. It’s an effort to maintain equilibrium: to stay on the log and have my ankles in the water at the same time, shoulders aching from the balancing act— left foot braced against solid, sensuous and mossy rock, right foot embraced by the milky sand.

I lie across the log and try to dip my head into the curative waters. To dip my head and not crack my skull. Impossible. And so to splash acqua fredda on my head I am forced to fill my baseball cap with this sulfurous water—murky and clear and way colder than the legendary waters that assail, jab and pound, Schoodic Point’s imperious granite, far enough north on the Maine coast to know you’re somewhere else, unfamiliar, and real.

                                                                          ~

One night in Pescara, we got the scuttlebutt from a pharmacist. (Pharmacists in Italy are often like what doctors used to be like in the U.S.A., serious, thoughtful, empathetic human beings.) “It is a late spring this year,” he said. His daughter, a girl of thirteen, has been so choked up that they closed all the shutters of the house, and for days she couldn’t leave because she couldn’t breathe, and as far as he knew, she had no history of asthma or allergies. “It’s the late spring,” he said. “The trees are blooming in July when they ought to have bloomed in May, so the entire climate is altered.” He recommended a new drug, a tawny allergy pill the size of a bullet. His main warning about taking it was: wait until night. (I did what he said, and it helped a bit, and when I later showed it to a pharmacist in the U.S.A. she recognized it as instantly as our mega advertised Allegra.) I sought other remedies, including cortisone shots which, once again, pharmacists can administer in emergencies in Italy, but this led to insomnia…

We left Italy a week early, reluctantly. Waiting in the mail was a letter from a professor at the University of Illinois named Gary Adelman. It told of how when he tried to give a course on D.H. Lawrence, his students rebelled. (But did they muster a loathing and detestation worthy of a character in a work by Lawrence?) Now that Lawrence’s reputation, as a novelist, had fallen, in what “they” call the “canon,” he wanted to compile a book called Reclaiming D.H. Lawrence around the responses of poets and novelists to Lawrence’s work. How strange, having just lost myself in wonder at Sketches of Etruscan Places, to have received such a letter at that moment. The next day I fired off a response. Lawrence has been much on my mind ever since.

                                                                          ~

To read D. H. Lawrence is to be revived by the electric current of energy that flows through his words. Lawrence was a living conduit, an electrical force whose existence took the form of a man. I’m sure that others have also noted a certain resemblance of his to that of Van Gogh, the red hair, the beard, the piercing eyes, the spectral intensity—their longing for connectedness.

I think the reason that most of his novels after Women in Love, with the exception of Saint Mawr, fall apart for me is that the electrical current of the poetic impulse is so powerful that it dismantles the narrative and the concept. In St Mawr Lawrence observes that horses’ heads often have “something of a snake in their way of looking around.” The characters pursue pleasure, like Gerald Crich, in a mechanical way. Lawrence’s late prose style, unlike the focused intensity of Women in Love, is a mercurial current that swirls, ignites with unimpeded swiftness, and yet retains accuracy. And yet when I open The Plumed Serpent at the page where I gave up reading it, I feel as if the next paragraph were overhearing my thoughts, offering a silent reproach, and I catch my breath.
The electric light in Sayula was as inconstant as everything else. It would come on at half-past six in the evening, and it might bravely burn till ten at night, when the village went dark with a click. But usually it did no such thing. Often it refused to sputter into being till seven, or half-past, or even eight o’clock. But its worst trick was that of popping out just in the middle of supper, or just when you were writing a letter. All of a sudden, the black Mexican night came down on you with a thud. And then everybody running blindly for matches and candles, with a calling of frightened voices. Why were they always frightened? Then the electric light, like a wounded thing, would try to revive, and a red glow would burn in the bulbs, sinister. All held their breath—was it coming or not? Sometimes it expired for good, sometimes it got its breath back and shone, rather dully, but better than nothing.

Maybe it’s this flickering, as inconstant as everything else, that is more conducive, finally, to a poetry of the present and the Etruscan essays, where his impatience doesn’t impinge on his underdeveloping characters, than fiction. Lawrence pressed language to its limit to convey instantaneous occurrences. Is Lawrence’s imagination prophetic of Teilhard de Chardin’s fantasy that if instantaneous communication would occur globally, through technology, we would have found God? His writings trace the transformation of coal through hydroelectric power. This is reflected in the change from his early rhymed poems to the controlled style of Sons and Lovers to the charged, hyperkinetic prose of Women in Love and many poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers—works which exhibit an almost unprecedented charge.
An enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness. (223, Women in Love)

There are electrical analogies strewn throughout Lawrence’s work like a system of signs. In “Bare Almond-Trees,” he asks,
What are you doing in the December rain?
Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel tips?
Do you feel the air for electric influences
Like some strange magnetic apparatus?
Do you take in messages, in some strange code,
From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that prowls so constantly round Etna?

                                                                          ~

Lawrence is a coalminer’s son. Every day his father, grimy with soot, carbonized, emerged from the underworld. In other words, his whole existence had been forged from within by an energizing principle, whose palpable form was his family. His mother wanted to curtail his energy, “Don’t go into the mines! You were made for better things!” But he knew to follow the non-verbal message transmitted by his father, that this descent into the underworld was the necessary prerequisite to creation. Wherever he is he obsesses about the condition of coal in England. On the twenty-fourth of June 1926, he writes to Margeret King from Villa Mirenda, Scandicci, Florence: “The beastly coal strike, it sounds too dreary for words. Coal was the making of England, and it looks as if coal were to be the breaking of her too. But one can do nothing, so it’s no good fuming.” (317)

The fiercely Oedipal construction of Sons and Lovers was as new at that moment as the raw and open sexuality of Lady Chatterley’s Lover would be later. But there were also farms and open fields rife with flowers and animals around Nottingham, that provided a critical counterpoint to squalor and left Lawrence unabashed to name his great book of unrhyming poems, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers.
But he left out fruits! And fruits give rise to his most explicitly sexual, usually female, images.
Now in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.
(“Pomegranate”)

Everything conspires to lead him to the Etruscans and the underworld. The descent into the Etruscan tombs must have let him feel he was commingling with his father, father and son consubstantial.

                                                                          ~

Lawrence was a master at making a mess of things, and out of this mess, he forged his imperfect works. He had before him Joseph Joubert’s wisdom: “Everything beautiful is indeterminate.” Before he took on the assignment of writing Sketches of Etruscan Places, he had written a poem that already contained many of the revelations that he had several years afterwards. He was moved to write “Cypresses” after he viewed some fragmentary Etruscan walls in Fiesole. He asks if the Etruscan cypresses contain “the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans/The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans,/Who made so little noise outside the cypress grove?” The Etruscans, the “slender, flickering men of Etruria/Whom Rome called vicious.”
They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again,
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.
.
                                                                          ~

Even though he was a coalminer’s son, Lawrence was under no ordinance to make Gerald Crich in Women in Love the son of the coal baron and a man whose desperate energy and violence would allow him to enact fantastically dramatic scenes and also register his withering. His “way” wears out and when he wanders out into the snowy wastes to die, it is to kill what is already dead inside. Crich can’t change, can’t make the transformation, the leap. His death drive proceeds on a similar course as would his inherited industry, coalmining—though his father had the foresight to use hydroelectric power to light their own house. Gerald Crich’s steely bloody-mindedness makes him an unforgettable character.

                                                                          ~

So many poets and writers have taken an essential impulse from Lawrence. A short list would include Henry Miller (who would never finish his tome on Lawrence, who would never finish his Study on Thomas Hardy... ), then his friends and co-conspirators Lawrence Durrell and Anias Nin (who did complete her elegant study of Lawrence), William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Galway Kinnell (if I leave out Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, it is because their copious use of animals is more specific and doesn’t have a trace of a Lawrence-like energy). And Lawrence himself comes out of a rural English tradition of which an exemplar is John Clare. And there’s an entirely other domain that I won’t attempt to enter at all, the “working class hero” novel, which flourished in the late-fifties and early-sixties, like Allan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and David Storey’s The Sporting Life. All of these novels were translated into breakout films; here Lawrence ignited the radical transformation that occurred in British filmmaking at that time. (I don’t remember anyone who, like me, saw these films in revival houses or on TV a decade or more after they appeared, who felt moved to read the novels. Though we mustn’t lose hope; there may come a time; film is an ephemeral medium…) John Boorman—in my view the most resourceful of the British postwar film directors—on the first page of his autobiography Adventures of a Suburban Boy, speaks of Lawrence and The Lost Girl as an initial source: “In The Lost Girl, D.H. Lawrence describes Nottingham miners watching those early films: while they looked at the live music acts out of the corners of their eyes, embarrassed, uneasy, they stared at the movies, unblinking, mouths agape, like men in a trance, mesmerized.”

There is a striking parallelism between Boorman’s The Emerald Forest filmed on the Amazon and in the rain forest, and Lawrence’s Nottingham, which isn’t far from Sherwood Forest. The film has aspects of Sons and Lovers and recaptures some of the dynamic between Lawrence and his father, Walter. The Emerald Forest is about an engineer who goes into the Amazon to build a dam to harness hydroelectric power to accommodate the usual—industry, urban sprawl, capital. The project spills into the rain forest, and along with it, he and his wife, daughter, and five-year-old son. The boy wanders off, is kidnapped by the Invisible Tribe—it’s based on a true story—and the engineer spends every available moment over the next ten years returning to search for him. Finally he succeeds, but his son, played by the director’s son, Charlie Boorman, loves living in the forest with the Invisible Tribe. His father warns that the dam will bring men who will further impinge on the Emerald Forest and destroy everything. His son calls the dam a “logjam”; he will chant a rain storm out of the sky strong enough to break through the dam. And he does. Father and son are reconciled, though they will never see each other again. The extermination of these Indian tribes—down to a hundred thousand from four million—along with the defenestration of the forest, is the link between Boorman’s film and Lawrence’s ideas about the genocide of the American Indians in Studies in Classic American Literature.
Inevitably, Boorman arrives in Hollywood. Worn down by the post-election day blues, I stare in disbelief at the page as Boorman’s reflections on Christopher Isherwood slide inexorably into my thoughtstream.
Like a crackle of electricity he seems to jump the terminals, short-circuit the mysterious process by which a great writer subsumes his raw material, passes it through the murky acids and leaden depths of the unconscious before it flows out again at an even voltage on to the page. (123)

                                                                          ~

Poets admire Lawrence for all sorts of reasons. Poets, more than novelists, have found in Lawrence’s brilliant and protracted use of birds, beasts, and flowers, a counterpoint to the forces of technology and mechanization that threaten the poetic imagination as well as the earth—and the two are inseparable. Poetry must be autochthonous. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow and Don DeLillo in Underworld can respond to the global predicament with a critical, ironic, satirical edge ideally suited to the novel as a form. Poets are more involved in a salvage operation. Take Theodore Roethke. Roethke has always been identified with John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, but vastly more has been written about these other poets than about Roethke and for the simple reason that critics, deaf to the music of poetry, to what makes a poem a poem, find him limited in range. Once again, how much can be said about birds, beasts, and flowers, and in Roethke’s case, his father’s greenhouse?
What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow’s here.
I’m cold. I’m cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.

What gliding shape
Beckoning through halls,
Stood poised on the stair,
Fell dreamily down?

From the mouths of jugs
Perched on many shelves,
I saw substance flowing
That cold morning.

Like a slither of eels
That watery cheek
As my own tongue kissed
My lips awake.
(“The Lost Son”)

Sylvia Plath took flight from Roethke’s miraculously condensed and staccato lines. It accounts for the decisive, flick of the wrist of her later poems: “Bare-handed, I hand the combs.” (“Stings”) In the 20th century, when global awareness has become instantaneous, a poet’s work has to be read in light of what it leaves out as much as what it leaves in. Lawrence’s animals are expressions of a life-force shorn of the inhibitions, attitudes, and neuroses that infect his characters so often thwarted by willfulness and, to use a word Lawrence favored, perversities, unsuccessful attempts to experience being. The author of “Tortoise Shout” knew that tortoises are not known for spending too many hours on the psychoanalyst’s couch (and probably had not read either of Lawrence’s treatises on the subject, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious) but the very act of confronting and imagining what it is like to be these creatures is a move toward enlightenment. God knows they have a lot to say and can free-associate with the best of us.
His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings,
And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.

A mere obstacle,
He veers round the slow great mound of her—
Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:
“This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg.”

He does not even trouble to answer: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”
He wearily looks the other way,
And she even more wearily looks another way still,
Each with the utmost apathy,
Incognisant,
Unaware,
Nothing.

The creatures behave according to their natures, and if you were to put them all together, all their natures into one human being, you would have characters as tortured and ambivalent as those who populate Lawrence’s novels and whose contradictions overwhelm his narratives. In “Man and Bat,” Lawrence endures a confrontation that would drive other people to murder, but he is able to limit his exasperation at the bat to its inappropriate invasion of his working space. The bat drives him batty, but Lawrence never forgets that it is a bat, and that in ways difficult for a man to fathom, it is behaving according to its nature, staying inside because he hasn’t got sunglasses, much less a sleep-mask.
Something seemed to blow him back from the window
Every time he swerved at it;
Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my room.

He could not go out,
I also realized….
It was the light of day which he could not enter,
Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast furnace.

He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window.
It was asking too much of his nature.

Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief
Saying: Out, go out! ...
Was the horror of the white daylight in the window!

So I switched on the electric light, thinking: Now
The outside will seem brown….

But no.
The outside did not seem brown.
And he did not mind the yellow electric light.

Silent!
He was having a silent rest.
But never!
Not in my room.

                                                                          ~

Lawrence’s sensitivity was such that he almost always in the end polarized other people. One illustration of this is Aldous Huxley’s portrait of him in his novel Point Counterpoint. Unfortunately for me, Huxley’s name for the Lawrence character in the novel is Mark Rampian (but this is not nearly as bad as the little boy’s repetition of “redrum” in The Shining, which shivers my spine). Huxley could do no more than portray Lawrence as thin-skinned, irritable and argumentative, all of which is true, but just scratches the surface. He was Lawrence’s loyal friend and advocate, but his Lawrence is almost a cartoon of the man, just as his novel Point Counterpoint is a skeletal rip-off of Andre Gide’s wonderfully weird and innovative novel within a novel Les Faux Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) .

Lawrence found it hard to be around himself—one reason he was always moving around. He was also moving around when he was still, and the world moved around him. Lawrence illustrates Osip Mandelstam’s assertion that “standing still is a variety of accumulated motion.” In his poem “Snake,” it is the snake who seeks out the man, who is lured there by his energy. Even snakes know a receptive and empathetic witness when they sense one. (Scratch “even...”).
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

Creatures find him because he is one of them. He is fully human, but somehow he escaped desensitization. This is what makes Lawrence so popular with creatures often feared and disdained by people.

The Etruscans behaved according to their own nature as well. And then the Romans, the real barbarians, arrived. And the power drive became predominant.
But in the bewildering experience of searching for the Etruscans there is the one steady clue that we can follow: or rather, there are two clues. The first is the peculiar physical or bodily, lively quality of all the art. And this, I take it, is Italian, the result of the Italian soil itself. The Romans got a great deal of their power from resisting this curious Italian physical expressiveness: and for the same reason, in the Roman the salt soon lost its savour, in the true Etruscan, never. (Sketches of Etruscan Places)

                                                                          ~

The copper-skinned woman in the rust-colored dress with her hair still wet who materializes at the bus stop at Largo Argentina: a message from Etruscan Central.

I knew that I had to get to the Etruscan sites, and this had very little to do with Lawrence. When I visited my first Etruscan site, Veio, I hadn’t read a word of what Lawrence had written on the Etruscans. I took it for granted that whatever he wrote would be interesting, though more about Lawrence than the Etruscans. What I remember of the trip to Veio was, as is so often the case, the trip, the long, hot, rackety, hydraulic give and go, bus ride and the interminable wait for the return bus that led to a fight between my wife and me on the subject of public transportation and another hour in the brutal heat without water. There really wasn’t much to see in Veio other than the bare foundations of dwellings. No city, no painted tombs. And this, combined with our ignorance, led to frustration.

What I remember the most about Veio was the flickering tongue of a lizard perched on a rock above the torrent, the rush of water, below. The Tiber took a shortcut. We should have rented a boat.

We must have gone to Veio first, on our first trip to Italy because it was closest to Rome and reachable by public bus. I began to dream about the Villa Giulia, then closed, where the real treasures that were once in Veio are kept.

Lawrence’s Etruscan period coincides with his being diagnosed with tuberculosis. But if his Etruscan period gave him a second life in light of his impinging death, it also lent some resolution to certain inconclusive aspects of Women in Love, and to the poetic gesture that defined him. At the end of Women in Love, Birkin/Lawrence presses on in his persistence that in order to be wholly complete he needs more than the love of a woman; he also needs a man friend with whom he is on intimate terms. His propensity for arguments was useful for dialogical purposes, as part of the novelist’s palate; but as he has cautioned us indelibly: “never trust the teller, trust the tale.” This constant sense of incompleteness, his almost perverse tweaking of existence is somehow resolved in the cathartic moment when he sees the men and the women entwined forever on the lids of the sarcophagi in the Guarnacci Museum in Volterra.

                                                                          ~

It was with great anticipation and trembling that we drove to Cerveteri one morning in July of 2001. I think that people sometimes go to ruins like this with the subconscious hope of being transformed. They are right to feel this way. On the way to Cerveteri, I noticed the turnoff for the town of Cività Vecchia, off the turnoff for Leonardo Di Vinci airport. There is also a beach at Cività Vecchia, and that’s where I wanted to go on the way to Cerveteri. My wife dismissed this as madness. Everyone knew that the beach at Cività Vecchia was crowded and corrupt. There was no reason on earth to go there. But there was, I argued, in my unfailing battle with reality. The beach at Cività Vecchia is where Michel Foucault first read Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy in a downpour of light. I sighed, realizing that fifty years ago Cività Vecchia might have been a different place altogether, and I let it go. I would spare myself what John Boorman encountered on his first visit to Los Angeles in 1965.
After my work with Everson, I went on to LA to meet Christopher Isherwood. I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset Boulevard until I came to the Pacific. And there was the promised sunset in the promised land, sitting in its smog-enhanced glory on the flat oily ocean. I stared at it in lonely wonder. No one to tell. LA caught me unawares: the flimsy facades, the absence of architecture, its shape defined only by neon signs and vast hoardings, tangles of power cables looping across the sky—it all looked so insubstantial and temporary. I could find no purchase, no point of reference. I stayed at the Bow and Arrow Motel in Santa Monica. In the Robin Hood Bar I drank beer and…

As I walked around the Etruscan burial mounds at Cerveteri, I thought of how forward they were in so many ways, in their vision. The stimulation was almost too much, as if it would turn or churn the mind into a volcano, bubbling, percolating, crashing against the barricades of the brain, the skull. They were highly developed in so many ways, subtle, delicate, strong, informed about Greek myths; ok, they traded with the Greeks, there was an Aegean connection, but it’s too much to take in…I stand there—dust stinging my eyes, in a time warp. It’s 700 B.C., and the Etruscans are drawing the labors of Hercules and Odysseus putting out the Cyclops’s eye and there among the tombs, green-headed snakes slither along the sides of the tufa—blown apart by the thought that the Etruscan artists and Bernini, with two thousand years between them, worked with the same underworld image: Persephone, Cerebrus, Bernini’s three-headed marble dog and this tufa-sculpted three-headed dog who resides in the actual imaginary real underworld of Cerveteri. I realize that Ovid wasn’t exiled because The Metamorphoses was too this or that, too erotic or pornographic or political in the wrong way for the regime who sent him off to Tomis, but because he forced the Romans to think hard about these myths again, and their origins, and the destruction of the Etruscans. I realize that the Romans’ attitude to the Etruscans is parallel to ours with regard to the American Indians, and that we carry this oblique, shadowy, invidious guilt about these genocides. Maybe it’s the guilt about the genocides that leads empires to ruin, to slacken, grow fat, and die. The idea comes spontaneously. But how can I escape the truth—that a reading of Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature when I was twenty went straight to my unconscious.

                                                                          ~

Lawrence’s attraction to the Etruscans has an instinctive quality, as if he were beguiled by his unconscious—or the gods—to a world where death is part of a passage, an active force that is consonant with the value of living in the moment, where the moment is everything because in reality existence offers nothing more. This is exemplified by the dance. And what does this dance do if not kindle the quick, electrical connection between people. It is time to study the ways in which people come alive. I wish it would be possible to see what the energy itself looked like between people who are attracted to each other, like those white lines on some of Tinteretto’s paintings that were visible during the time of day when the painting wasn’t meant to be seen.

                                                                          ~

As we get older, as we approach that weighty, nebulous period called “middle age” (which Lawrence didn’t live beyond) our job is to transform ourselves, to reconnect to the energies that came thoughtlessly and spontaneously in youth (and are often eradicated, as if a wall had come down long before people reached thirty). And this accounts for Lawrence’s appeal; his alertness was so acute he was able to change, to metamorphose, continually, with a rapidity which would have awed Ovid, whose metamorphoses were—I often must remind myself—imaginary. Every time Lawrence transformed himself into a horse or a swan, he metamorphosed, became someone who was no longer commensurate with the person he had been before (and who had written those books that only partially revealed what he had to reveal), and a circle of friends who were always the same, condemned to consistency, repetition, death-in-life—only they weren’t aware of it; they were literally creatures of habit like those rendered by Ovid and condemned by Dante. He appeared to quarrel often with people, with almost every friend he made, many of whom were among the best minds of their generation; but what made him so restless, tetchy, and irritable, was the stasis they had embraced for the simple reason that it made their lives easier, less conflicted, less fraught, a spiritual equivalent of tenure. One wonders what stance Lawrence would have taken toward entropy and erosion, all the numerous, negative “facts” about the universe that have put a damper on hope since the time of his death. But how he would have fumed and foamed over the innumerable thoughtless and avoidable disasters that have maimed the planet, from the exhaustion of the earth’s oil to the depletion of the ozone, to a short-sightedness that fueled stasis and short-changed change, and bred something we call terror but is really about power, energy, oil—that which Lawrence, through imagination, transformed, as I have said, into electricity as he followed Whitman’s road and sang the body electric. Poetry has always known this and seems to favor exiles like Ovid, Dante, Lawrence, and Milosz—where there’s a constant external pressure to be alert, attentive, especially to those things that have no inherent “poetic qualities.”

                                                                          ~

How do I really know that I was “twenty?” I have an answer. I can see myself absorbed and riveted by library editions of D.H. Lawrence’s letters in two (finite!) volumes. I returned to them as a guilty pleasure. Here’s why: A single letter by Lawrence often contains nascent poems in casual observations, updates on his physical condition (often severely affected by the weather, especially the cold and rain), reflections on what he’s struggling with as a writer in the practical sense, aesthetic judgments, and announcements of future projects. When he wrote the following letter to Elsa Jaffe on the twenty-sixth of May 1926, he had taken the top half of an old villa about seven miles out of Florence that he might use as a centre to travel to “Bologna and Cortona and Volterra and down to the Maremma to Tarquinia—quite a number of places in Tuscany and Umbria, where the best remains are.” (312)
My dear Else
The Schwiegermutter wrote from Baden that you aren’t well, and had a little operation. That’s bad luck! I do hope you’re better.
It isn’t a good year, anyhow. Here it has rained and rained, till the country is turning yellow with wetness. But these last two days are sunny and warm: but not hot, as it should be….
The country around is pretty—all poderi and pine-woods, and no walls at all. I hope in the autumn, really, you’ll come and stay a while: unless everything goes muddled again. For myself, I struggle to get back into a good humour, but don’t succeed very well. – …
Myself, I am labouring at the moment to type out Frieda’s MS. of the play David. It’s a slowness, I’m no typist. But it just as well for me to go through the MS myself, and it is good for me to learn some German, I suppose. Frieda’s daughter Elsa typed up the first 26 pages—and there are a fair number of alterations. But I shall send you the typescript as soon as it is finished: within a month, pray God!—I am interested, really, to see the play go into German, so much simpler and more direct than in English. English is really very complicated in its meanings. Perhaps the simpler a language becomes in its grammar and syntax, the more subtle and complex it becomes in its suggestions. Anyhow this play seems to me much more direct and dramatic in German, much less poetic and suggestive than in English. I shall be interested to know what you think of it.
I said to myself I would write perhaps a book about the Etruscans: nothing pretentious, but a sort of book for people who will actually be going to Florence and Cortona and Perugia and Volterra and those places, to look at the Etruscan things. They have a great attraction for me: there are lovely things in the Etruscan Museum here…. Mommsen [author of The History of Rome] hated everything Etruscan, said the germ of all degeneracy was in the race. But the bronzes and terra cottas are fascinating, so alive with physical life, with a powerful physicality which surely is a as great, or sacred, ultimately, as the ideal of the Greeks and Germans. Anyhow, the real strength of Italy seems to me in this physicality, which is not at all Roman…. As for the text, I’ve read one or two books, and they’re very dreary, repetition and surmise. It seems amazing that we should know so very very little about a race that lived alongside the Romans. But I can find very little fact…. Italy is so wildly nationalistic, that I think Tuscany feels she may as well go one further back than Rome, and derive herself from Etruria. But they all feel scared, because Etruria was so luxurious and “merely physical.”…
Remember me to Marianne. She’s a young woman now, no longer a mere girl. It’s a strange thing to have a grown-up family: other people!... I hope Alfred is well. – The longer I live the more I realize it would shatter the nerves of an Aristotle or a Socrates, to have to think deeply about this world we’ve gotten ourselves into. It’s no good taking long views: it’s like looking down the crater of Vesuvius, you see nothing and you asphyxiate yourself. Best only tackle little problems and tidy up small corners. A man tears himself to bits grappling with the whole machine. That miserable strike in England looks like the beginning of another end! But there, why think about it! Best go down to Scandicci and buy paint to paint these old doors and window-frames. Carpe diem, quam minimum etc. No good thinking about what’s coming after!

It is slightly staggering, on reflection, to consider how this letter, in its rhythm, phrasing, and constructions, and other subtle and probably unintentional ways, approaches the condition of a work of art. The kid can’t help it. In one letter he recapitulates so many of the issues that formed him and the themes that obsess him and then returns to the blessing of chores. A little fresh paint can’t hurt! It shows how good Lawrence is when he isn’t trying and the note of stridency, his hysteria that no one will understand, is reduced by the intimacy—real or imagined but very much part of the act of letter writing—with the addressee.

                                                                          ~

Cerveteri was fascinating if your idea of heaven is to walk in the wind with the dust blowing in your eyes and mouth while you scramble over mounds and poorly marked paths and clamber down steps to gaze into tombs that house sometimes barely discernable drawings and other relics. This was real work, and I loved it. I loved kneeling and squinting to discern the shapes of horses and ships. It was exhilarating being out in the open air, exploring these burial mounds, which really had earned their name as a ruin. There is no better instance of Lawrence’s assertion that our experience is vastly diminished when we see things torn out of their settings.
What one wants is to be aware. If one looks at an etruscan helmet, then it is better to be fully aware of that helmet, in its own setting, in its own complex of associations, than it is to “look over” a thousand museums of stuff. Any one impression that goes really down into the soul, it is worth a million hasty impressions of a million important things. (34, Sketches).

And much of the charm of Sketches of Etruscan Places comes from Lawrence’s recounting of how he got there and the people he encountered. It gives credibility to a book whose subject is being fully alive.

There were few other people visiting the site that day, among them a couple: an older, thickly-set man with close-cropped, thinning gray hair wearing a black polo shirt and cargo shorts and a spry and shapely woman in her mid-thirties with sandy-brown, shoulder-length hair wearing a tee shirt and shorts and hiking shoes. So yes, they could have been father and daughter, but clearly they were partners with a twenty-year age difference. And from overhearing a bit of their conversation, they shared an obsession, interest and knowledge in Etruscan burial sites; they turned out to be archeologists who intended to visit every known and perhaps unknown Etruscan site on this trip.

As the conversation ensued, the man offered that it was now thought that what Lawrence had written about the Etruscans was more accurate than what the historians had been able to decipher with their measuring rods and aerial, radar photographs of remains that were buried under the earth. Yes, the man said, it turned out that Lawrence’s intuitions were amazingly on the mark. I told him that despite my admiration for Lawrence’s other work I had never considered reading Sketches of Etruscan Places because I had assumed that they would be impressionistic travel sketches, approximations, and it wasn’t my preferred way of reading Lawrence. At this point, the man gave very precise instructions on what edition of Lawrence’s Etruscan writings to get, to stay clear of editions of Lawrence’s work that mixed up a lot of his different writings on Italy. Don’t worry, I didn’t take his advice too soon. I already owned Twilight in Italy and the Sea in Sardinia and had never gotten past a chapter of either. The last thing I wanted was to look at Etruscan places through Lawrence’s eyes.

Enlightenment for Lawrence begins by looking down into the depths of the earth, as his father descended every day into the mine. In Sketches of Etruscan Places, he is shown a non-morbid, even a joyous, entrance into the underworld; the underworld of a people to whom the quick of life, transience, was of paramount importance. That’s why they burned down their straw shelters and left no trace of their dwellings, only their sarcophagi and burial mounds. The Etruscans were aficionados of the afterlife, and this freed them to live in the moment.
There are no Etruscans out-and-out, and there never were any. There were different prehistoric tribes stimulated by contact with different peoples from the eastern Mediterranean, and lifted on the last wave of a dying conception of the living cosmos.
(Sketches of Etruscan Places)

                                                                          ~

Rereading Lawrence’s Italian poems upon returning from Italy, I was of course once again astonished at how he connects the landscape, the trees, animals, and flowers, with the history of the people who lived there. Then I came across a passage in “Sicilian Cyclamens,” stunning in its use of inversion, apposition, and line breaks.
Slow toads, and cyclamen leaves
Stickily glistening with eternal shadow
Keeping to earth.
Cyclamen leaves
Toad-slimy, earth-iridescent
Beautiful
Frost-filigreed
Spumed with mud
Snail-nacreous
Low down.

This shows how much Roethke derived from Lawrence’s use of form as his use of nature. The difference is Lawrence allows himself some broad strokes that Roethke would have nixed to keep his poem neo-critical. Lawrence makes a beautiful mess.

                                                                          ~

And then there is William Carlos Williams, the American poet who was closest to Lawrence in temperament and not quite as impermeable to his influence as his good friend Marianne Moore. And what do the “falls” stand for in Paterson—beyond the actions of that daredevil who goes down them in a barrel, Sam Patch—if not hydroelectric power?

The first move toward harnessing the energy of the Passaic Great Falls was set into action by Alexander Hamilton in 1791, to create a Society For Establishing Useful Manufacturing. “Useful” would prove a profitable qualifier, since a mere forty years later Samuel Colt was able to open a factory where he could manufacture his patented Colt 45 revolver—featuring mother-of-pearl handles—and other “repeating weapons essential in securing the American frontier.” This may be why Williams was so ignited by Lawrence’s insight into a pervasive American guilt over the genocide of the Indians.

Williams is the American writer whose connectedness was closest to that of Lawrence. My conjecture is that Williams owes his restlessness and volatility and receptiveness to his Spanish blood from his mother’s side. Were two books ever more beautifully aligned than Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and Williams’s In the American Grain? They are both priests of imperfection, but for different reasons: Lawrence because he knew he wouldn’t live long, Williams because his doctor job consumed so much of his time he was forced to write on the run, jotting down notes between house calls. And if Williams was liberated from earlier constraints by Lawrence’s essays, he also took Lawrence’s impulses to another plane with regard to the elasticity of this prose. Williams, unlike Lawrence, never really had to leave his continent to revive his poetic energies; and perhaps it is his Spanish blood that allowed him to continue to find America exotic. It was in Williams’s nature, as it was in Lawrence’s, to write a poetry of the senses, of the present tense.
Greep, greep, greep the cricket
chants where the snake
with agate eyes leaned to the water.
Sorrow to the young
that Lawrence has passed
unwanted from England.
And in the gardens forsythia
and in the woods
now the crinkled spice-bush
in flower.
(Williams, “An Elegy for D.H. Lawrence”)

Lawrence places a deliberate emphasis on “the lingering of the voice according to the feeling—it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form.” Unlike Williams, many American writers have been inflicted with a Puritanical streak that acts like an impediment against which they choose to do battle. A cold focus on sex divorced from passion in fiction is a demonstration of this. Doing battle is exactly what Lawrence warns against in his Etruscan essays. What makes him warm to the Etruscans is their sensitivity.

Tarquinia is a site of jubilation: the images in the tombs come alive with banquets, dancers, horse races, don’t play one flute when you can play two and remember now is forever, tomorrow contained within today, paint your skin vermilion, keep it up, up, the joyful sound, the tambourine, a symposium, wine and dancers, thoughts circulating like blood. Looking at the tomb of the painted vases in Tarquinia, Lawrence muses,
Rather gentle and lovely is the way he touches the woman under the chin, with a delicate caress. That again is one of the charms of the etruscan paintings: they really have the sense of touch; the people and the creatures are all really in touch. It is one of the rarest qualities, in life as well as in art. There is plenty of pawing and laying hold, but no real touch. In pictures especially, the people may be in contact, embracing or laying hands on one another. But there is no soft flow of touch. The touch does not come from the middle of the human being. It is merely surfaces, and a juxtaposition of objects. This is what makes so many of the great masters boring, in spite of all their clever composition. Here, in this faded etruscan painting, there is a quiet flow of touch that unites the man and the woman on the couch, the timid boy behind, the dog that lifts his nose, even the garlands that hang from the wall.

This is what attracted him to the Etruscans: what is generated by touch; touch as generator. This is what Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover teaches Connie Chatterley: touch. And one of the songs that has helped me override the supervenient thoughts that crowd in as the war in Iraq escalates and the election nears, through the drafts of this essay is “Wild as the Wind” sung by Chan Marshall in a way that throws stress on the torch singer’s caressing and drawing out of the phrase: “you touched me.” Tennessee Williams was so affected by Lawrence’s story “You Touched Me” his response was to adapt it for the stage. And touch is what Gudrun in Women in Love objects to most about Gerald; she doesn’t like the way he touches her. She certainly for a time likes the way he fucks her, especially on the night of his father’s death. Death is the mother of self-abandonment.

Later, when their relationship is at the point of breaking, this brutal exchange:
‘Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,’ she said, in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone.
The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded at the very quick, made of no account.
‘You mean you don’t want me?’ he said.
‘You are so insistent, and there is so little grace in you, so little fineness.
You are so crude. You break me—you only waste me—it is horrible to me.’

The actor Oliver Reed who played Gerald in the 1969 film had an implosive presence onscreen. He is effective even though he is almost the polar opposite of the emphatically blonde Gerald Crich in the novel. One of the most piercing moments in Lawrence’s writing occurs after this exchange when Gerald forces himself on Gudrun. “Shall I die,” she asks herself. But in the film version of Women in Love, the actress Glenda Jackson, playing Gudrun, utters this line aloud with an emphasis on the last word; she could project an overpowering emotion that went beyond the words themselves, something she may have learned when acting in countries as part of Peter Brooks’s troupe where no one in the audience knew English.

During the last moments of her performance as Vittoria in Edward Bond’s cruelly stylized 1976 adaptation of John Webster’s The White Divel, she delivered her last lines in a way that brought me back to the earlier explosion in the film.
LODOVICO. Strike, strike,
With a Joint motion.
VITTORIA. ‘Twas a manly blow,
The next thou giv’st, murder some sucking Infant,
And then thou wilt be famous.
FLAMINEO. O what blade is’t?
A Toledo, or an English Fox?
I ever thought a Cutler should distinguish
The cause of my death, rather then a Doctor.
Search my wound deeper: tent it with the steele
That made it.
VITTORIA. O my greatest sinne lay in my blood.
Now my blood paies for’t.

She cries out as the sword is thrust between her legs, under her skirt, less we should miss the point, with a violence that immediately brought to mind Gerald/Oliver Reed’s rape of her in the scene in Women in Love when she says, “Shall I die?”
I’d always felt guilty about being subject to extreme vacillations in mood, which shift so much within the smallest sections of time, minutes, seconds, not hours, not days, and Women in Love is the only novel I know that provides relief and reminds me that it is all too human to feel this way. As Lawrence tries to create and define what it is to be a fully alive human being, the creation of Gerald Crich presents the difficulties, the obstacles. In Women in Love, in addition to the hyper-real intensity of certain scenes, set pieces, Lawrence renders the full violence of people’s shifting feelings toward each other from warmth to revulsion within moments. It is as “electric,” as instantaneous, as the interaction between man and bat. This capacity is what made him in the end more of a poet than a novelist, even though he had sufficient gifts and discipline to lead F.R. Leavis, the dominant British critic of his time, to write the book—with what to me was always a mysterious, inscrutable title—that eventually triggered Lawrence’s downfall in the academic canon: D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. Leavis’s book lived in my apartment for many years, and from time to time, I would scrutinize it with a kind of disbelief that this peculiar emphasis on Lawrence as the inheritor of the The Great Tradition (another Leavis title) could have been attached to a poetic spirit such as Lawrence possessed.

In Women in Love it’s crash and burn in every paragraph; the animals still leap out with such ferocity and maniacal fervor that it seems almost inconceivable anyone could render in prose.
And suddenly the rabbit, which had been crouching as if it were a flower, so still and soft, suddenly burst into life. Round and round the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains.

And not to be outdone, in a heightened, rapturous passage Rupert Birkin stones the moon’s reflection in the pond; it scatters; it doesn’t disappear.

                                                                          ~

Lawrence’s change in style didn’t come easily. He felt thwarted and restricted when reworking Sons and Lovers, and during that time he was still shouldering the harness of rhymed poems. He claimed that Sons and Lovers would be the last book that he would attempt in what he called the Flaubertian mode; he had grown impatient with an emphasis on objectivity, precision, and the invisibility of the author. It was like a yoke, a job, a service to be performed. He knew that his readers would resist being shaken up. And he lived mostly on the income from his fiction. The economic prerogative is another constant pressure that gives Lawrence’s work its urgency. The only “tenure” he had was the lease to write about a book a year. Necessity is something that Gary Adelman’s students at the University of Illinois, along with others who from their high chairs deign to pass judgment, might have considered.
In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which work up to culmination. (Lawrence’s “Foreword” to Women in Love)

I would like to add: some points bear repeating. It’s not for any stylistic reasons that Lawrence usually repeats the same ideas in everything that flowed from his pen: his poems, essays, stories, novels, and letters.

Curiously, for W.H. Auden, Lawrence was neither so much the poet nor the novelist as the author of treatises. (One wonders, would W.H. Auden have chosen to use initials instead of his beautiful first name, Wystan, were it not for the example of Lawrence?)
When I first read Lawrence in the late Twenties, it was his message which made the greatest impression on me, so that it was his “think” books like Fantasia on the Unconscious rather than his fiction which I read most avidly. As for his poetry, when I first tried to read it, I did not like it; despite my admiration for him, it offended my notions of what poetry should be.

Auden reminds me of just how many “Lawrences” there are—he’s unique in having been a great writer (and I use the word “great” always with trepidation) in every genre he practiced: novel, short story, poetry, criticism, travel book, letters, and the essay. As late as 1983, Anthony Burgess would write that “Lawrence, or Lorenzo, is mainly known as the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and not as the great poet and original thinker he really was.” (302, “One Man’s Chorus”)

What Lawrence had was vision: he could make us see, like Van Gogh, more vividly—far more vividly than the camera! But this form of seeing is an instantaneous indwelling that engages all the senses.
At a wavering instant the swallows give way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio…
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

In China the bat is symbol of happiness.
Not for me!
(“Bat”)

Lawrence’s urgency, like that of the boys from Liverpool, is inseparable from growing up poor as a coalminer’s son in northern England. Money was always a sore spot: a man is worth only what he is worth. And one theme, one tune, served him well through all his vacillations: “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
Why isn’t anything free, why is it always pay, pay, pay?
A man can’t get any fun out of wife, sweetheart or tart
because of the beastly expense.
Why don’t we do something about the money system?
(“Always this Paying”)

I have always assumed that Lawrence’s intensity in focus was also connected to tuberculosis. Passage after passage in his books and his letters would appear to confirm this:
Birkin smiled to himself as he sat by the fire. When Ursula came down he sat motionless, with his arms on his knees. She saw him, how he was motionless and ageless, like come crouching idol, some image of a deathly religion. He looked round at her, and his face, very pale and unreal, seemed to gleam with a whiteness almost phosphorescent.
“Don’t you feel well?” she asked, in indefinable repulsion.
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“But don’t you know whether you are unwell or not, without thinking about it?” she persisted.
“Not always,” he said coldly.
(Women in Love)

While writing this essay I began to feel queasy about this assumption, and once I began to look into the facts of his life I found it strangely difficult to ascertain whether he was tubercular or not until he was given a “condition terminal” diagnosis in 1925, right before his Etruscan period. Before that he in all likelihood had carried “the tubercle,” and it had made him exceedingly susceptible to illness, with much coughing of blood into his handkerchief. He fervently denied that he had tuberculosis, but I’m sure that the ultimate fragility of his health, despite the stamina that allowed him to walk immense distances, contributed to his low boiling point and consummate irritability. No matter what facts are presented, with regard to illness I will always think of Lawrence much as I do of the equally adventurous, intensely focused and productive poets and novelists, Robert Louis Stevenson and Stephen Crane, because this is how he appears to me.

In a review of Death in Venice, Lawrence shows his repugnance for the amount of repression involved in the Flaubert/Mann method of composition. He has disdain for Mann’s character Aschenbach who “forced himself to write, and kept himself to the work.” As one of the few people I’m aware of who also feels an antipathy toward Death in Venice I felt strangely vindicated when I read Lawrence’s review. In Mann’s other books, he deals with physical sickness, soul-sickness, and madness, but with Death in Venice there is something sick about the book itself. It sounds almost treasonable to dislike a work, The Great Gatsby would be another example, about which there seems to be a consensus that it is beyond reproach, a masterpiece, a classic.
Thomas Mann seems to me the last sick sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed. Physical life is a disordered corruption, against which he can fight with only one weapon, his fine aesthetic sense, his feeling for beauty, for perfection, for a certain fineness which soothes him, and gives him an inner pleasure, however corrupt the stuff of life may be…Already I find Thomas Mann, who, as he says, fights so hard against the banal in his work, somewhat banal. His expression may be very fine. But by now what he expresses is stale. I think we have learned our lesson, to be sufficiently aware of the fulsomeness of life. And even while he has a rhythm in style, yet his work has none of the rhythm of a living thing, the rise of a poppy, then the after uplift of the bud, the shedding of the calyx and the spreading wide of the petals, the falling of the flower and the pride of the seed-head.

I taught a graduate class on the idea of “sources,” and one week used F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Afternoon of the Writer” and Peter Handke’s Afternoon of the Writer. (Handke admits to his fascination with Fitzgerald’s minor story.) At some point in the class, a student introduced a comparison between Handke’s modest novella and Mann’s magisterial Death in Venice, bristling with resentment at being introduced to a book that everyone hadn’t already read. I said that I preferred the Handke to the Mann, at which point he went berserk (others were merely unsettled) and became outraged that I could compare something as casual, as modest and fragile—though I would add subtle, lyrical, flowing—as Handke’s book to a work as unimpeachable, as immortal, as canonized, as Death in Venice (which by the way I once taught using Kenneth Burke’s translation from an issue of The Dial). This led to a lively discussion about questions of the will and ambition in imaginative writing. As one who loves several works by Thomas Mann, a number of the stories (including ones that Lawrence detests), The Magic Mountain, and most of all Dr. Faustus, I felt vaguely guilty about my stance toward Death in Venice until I realized I wasn’t alone. If you think that Lawrence has gone off his head here, let me add that he was just as responsive to a book called In Our Time by an unknown twenty-three-year-old American writer as he was antipathetic to Death in Venice.
“Nothing matters. Everything happens…. Mr. Hemingway’s sketches, for this reason, are excellent: so short, like striking a match, lighting a brief sensational cigarette, and it’s over…. It is really honest. And it explains a great deal of sentimentality. When a thing has gone to hell inside you, your sentimentalism tries to pretend it hasn’t. But Mr. Hemingway is through with the sentimentalism. ‘It isn’t fun any more. I guess I’ll beat it.’ And he beats it, to somewhere else.” (366, Phoenix)

In a graduate class at NYU, I once instructed the students to read Look! We Have Come Through! and Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, in a week; to read each separately, in one sitting. I read along with the students and found myself transported, my brain waves altered and alerted as I fell into a hypnagogic trance. The students reported a similar out-of-body experience. They were lifted up without a deus ex machina or a drug to assist them. Many of the individual poems are great, but the books also trace the working out of love against the odds. The two books have both an intensity of focus and a totality that makes them among the best by an English poet, and an equivalent to the books, such as Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce and Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth, <\I> that were waiting to be written, waiting for Lawrence to show them the way to go all out, pull out all the stops, in his earlier appropriations of Whitman. When I opened a recent issue of The American Poetry Review it was as if life was imitating literature: the very quintessence of what I meant in the previous sentence was in the poems by Cesar Vallejo that Clayton Eshelman has translated. This is what I would call a direct hit:
It is an enormous spider that now cannot move;
a colorless spider, whose body,
a head and an abdomen, bleeds.
Today I watched it up close. What with effort
toward every side
it extended its innumerable legs.
~
And I have thought about its eyes
And about its numerous legs…
And I have felt such sorrow for that traveler.
(“The Spider”)

Both Lawrence and William Carlos Williams found themselves confronting what we could call the post-Waste Land sterility in literature, with its maniacal emphasis on form, which rhymed with progress and the accelerating emphasis on technology and Auden. The writers who allow themselves to be enthusiastic about Lawrence, rather than hypercritical to defects to which Lawrence often readily admitted, are writers who allow themselves to be passionate, necessarily imperfect. Lawrence, in his quest to be fully alive, like the Etruscans, rejected the poetry that strove for “all that is complete and consummate…exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end.” As we say today: closure. R. P. Blackmur thought: “I will give that brat a piece of my mind.” And he did in “D.H. Lawrence and Expressive Form.” Auden and Blackmur may be right, but perhaps there is more to things than being right. Lawrence’s apprenticeship to error always allowed him to move on.

Lawrence wanted nothing less than “the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present,” in which there is “no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished.” In his essay “Poetry of the Present,” which served as his introduction to the American edition of New Poems (1918), he called for
mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without dénouement or close. There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the forever incalculable journey of creation: everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things.
This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit. Whitman’s is the best poetry of this kind.

But Lawrence isn’t so much a poet of the present as he is of the instantaneous. Lawrence’s ambitions expressed in this essay would later be echoed by such farsighted practitioners as Osip Mandelstam and Charles Olson, but to ask for something as elemental as awareness in the mid-20th century is easier said than done. It is hard to emphasize without Lawrentian! exclamation points how remote this is from analytical Anglo-American criticism and how closely it approaches what Mandelstam will say fifteen years later in “Conversation About Dante” (finally back in print in Clarence Brown’s translation in the New York Review Books reprint of the Merwin/Brown superlative and shattering versions).
In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding. Semantic satisfaction is equivalent to the feeling of having carried out a command.

The wave signals of meaning disappear once they have done their work: the more powerful they are, the more yielding, and the less prone to linger….

The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell us how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.

I ask myself why Lawrence would share his poetics with a Russian poet; I am reminded that he counted among his closest associates (the word “friends” with Lawrence can too easily convey a more agreeable relationship than the fraught one that usually existed—Lawrence was a world class quarreler!) were his editor Edward Garnett and his wife Constance, who was then actively engaged in bringing the works of the Russians into English. If there is something Dostoyevskian in Lawrence’s polarities, he not only read Dostoyevsky and the other Russians, he was plugged into the source. His dislike of Dostoyevsky, “a reptile,” was so intense it borders on the comical. I wish Lawrence had lived to absorb Mandelstam’s essay.

To look at it from the most extreme point of view, the poet who was most responsive to Lawrence’s call was Sylvia Plath. Even the title of her book, Ariel, recalls Lawrence and his beloved horses. It was as if he had Plath in mind when he wrote this passage in Women in Love:
Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.

But in order to accomplish this, to throw off all her restraints, Plath had to die and unfortunately, it was not the kind of symbolic death that Lawrence’s characters, like Birkin in Women in Love, are often allowed, as a form of regeneration.
He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He also knew how strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times take one’s chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.

Plath’s response to Lawrence, like Roethke’s, was imbued, even infected with a desire for perfection, for a consummate expression of that which was in flux. Here we enter a field riddled with paradoxes. Roethke and Plath wrote Lawrentian poems, but they wrote them better—with greater concision—than Lawrence. The drawback was that they limited the range of material that could be deployed within the poem. What separates Lawrence from poets and novelists he influenced and who, it could be said, improved upon aspects of his work, is that they had a far narrower focus. Lawrence was open to anything that might fly into his poem.
When I went into my room, at mid-morning,
Say ten o’clock…
My room, a crash-box over that great stone rattle
The Via de’ Bardi….

When I went into my room at mid-morning,
Why? …a bird!

A bird
Flying round the room in insane circles.

In insane circles!
…A bat!
(“Man and Bat”)

So, does the built-in imperfection of Lawrence’s poetry diminish it as art? He is among the most generative of writers in every form that he wrote in. The only response to reading a novel or story or poem or essay by D.H. Lawrence, since his works deconstruct themselves as they go along, is to write a novel or story or poem or essay—or play as Tennessee Williams did—of your own in which you look at the world from your own peculiar angle. And of course to have heightened awareness, feel more intensely alive. Lawrence lived his life as an adventure in accordance with Keats’s dictum, “That which is creative must create itself.”

                                                                          ~

I demurred to my wife Madelaine’s rejection of my impulse to turn off and check out the beach at Cività Vecchia. I had gotten my way in another place and the result—since I hadn’t yet read Sketches of Etruscan Places and been forewarned by Lawrence—wasn’t what I hoped. Unwilling to forgo suffering, we had taken our son with us to Italy in the summer of 1995 when he was ten, and on our second day in Rome, giving in to his insistence to go to the nearest MacDonald’s just off the Spanish steps, we met an attractive, blonde American woman with two boys in tow, and we all got to talking; I with the woman and my son with her son who was the same age. It turned out that she was living in Rome reluctantly. She said she was here because her husband was an Italian film producer who specialized in low-budget spectaculars of some sort, and though he was a mere ten years older than she was, he was at that moment lying in the hospital with his heart giving out. His death was imminent. In any case, she warned us against gangs of marauding youths who were experts at severing purses and shoulder bags and running off with your identity if you were willing to risk taking public transportation to various sites. She offered to drive us anywhere we wanted to go, and in this way, her older son and Sam would be entertained. One afternoon we drove to Ostia Antica. The three boys did their best to ruin this trip to this marvelous and meditative ruin, and it closed just in time, but not before I had a few moments to myself in the well-preserved amphitheatre. The boys were really desperate at this point, and Miranda pointed out that we weren’t far from the beach at Ostia, where we could all cool off. This seemed like a fabulous idea, and the charming seaside town of Ostia gave rise to great hopes for a wonderful experience. I had no idea that the beach as Ostia would be so commercialized and was surprised to find that this was the case seventy years prior to our plunge, as noted by Lawrence in Sketches: “the flowers of the new coast-line are miserable bathing places such as Ladispoli and sea-side Ostia, desecration put upon desolation, to the triumphant trump of the mosquito” (28). It wasn’t the sand or sea that was hideous; it was the cabanas and the boardwalk and the concessions and, worst of all, the chips. In addition to screaming that they were “burning” before we arrived at the sea, the boys were now “starving,” and the concession was about to close. Everything in Italy is always about to close. (The next day our crew arrived at the Baths of Caracalla the very instant that it closed, and had the door shut in our faces with a chilling finality, the one day of the week that it closed at noon instead of dusk.) We paid an outrageous entrance fee in order to just be able to sit on our towels. The boys changed into their suits in the car; the women rolled up their skirts and I my pants, so that we could wade in the shallows. It was beautiful to see the three boys run at break-neck speed and jump into the water and grow delirious with joy as they hurled their bodies against each coming wave. There was a family next to us. Young children played in the sand. The mother wore a gold two-piece that rhymed with her gilded hair and showed her buxom breasts and prodigious hips as if she had been the double or stand-in for Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. She had an expression of absent disdain. I couldn’t help but wonder what informed her consciousness. And after listening to her and her kids eat from a crackling bag of white chips for half an hour—knowing that these chips might be the last resort for the starving boys as the concession closed—I asked her what kind of chips they were, what they were made of. She answered peremptorily, almost with a hiss, “Normalissimo.” I found her self-assured obliviousness creepy and haunting while I ran off to the canteen and checked out the possibilities; as far as I could see, they were entirely made from artificial ingredients without even a smidgen of wheat or potato, or corn. This was my first experience of this sort in Italy and led us to stop at a pizzeria in Ostia before heading back to Rome in the demonical traffic, which Miranda handled masterfully, her bracelets radiant with the sun in our faces, left hand on the wheel, right hand on the cell phone, as she drove and talked rapid-fire Italian to her husband breathing his last gasps in the hospital and kept a running commentary in English to clue us in as to his situation and comment on the traffic, as cars swerved ahead of us from the left and right lanes. “The Italians all think that driving is a sport,” she said. We all cracked up. I felt invulnerable in the care of this wild woman who was as adept at multitasking as an octopus.

What I had witnessed on the beach was what Lawrence would call the triumph of the Roman over the Etruscan.

                                                                          ~

I somehow felt that the quest of the Cerveteri couple mirrored my own spiritual and poetic quest, only their journey would occur in physical space and mine in imagination. On a trip into Florence, I was lucky to find Sketches of Etruscan Places and began to read them in a casual way with low expectations in terms of their artistic value. As Billy Strayhorn says in his immemorial song “Lush Life,” “again I was wrong.” The more I read Sketches of Etruscan Places, the more I felt that they were somehow impossibly up there with the best of Lawrence’s work. I wondered how it was possible that this had been kept from me for so long, why nobody had ever mentioned it. And then I had the chance to test this revelation against something far more recalcitrant, the actual Etruscan city of Volterra. The very word sends a chill up my spine. It sounds like a fortress circled by birds of prey. I don’t think I’ve ever entered a place before and felt so immediately transformed, transported into another, tortuous reality. As Lawrence said, “Volterra lies only 1800 feet above the sea, but it is right in the wind, and cold as any alp.” The first thing that struck me on entering Volterra is that everything had changed perspective, or to put it another way, I had entered a city whose contours were those of a pre-perspective Italian painting, streets were too narrow, distances too close, heads too big. An older, heavyset woman with dyed and permed hair whose gigantic head looked far too big for the open window she leaned out of cast her eyes on the street with an ominous expression, as if in warning: don’t venture too close; you’re inside our fortress now, and if you don’t behave, you’ll never get out. More objectively, Volterra was constructed partly as a fortress; some of the arches are made so that you’re sure to knock your head unless you’re stooping down. Volterra was the most conclusive fortress that I’ve ever inhabited, and a lot of this is due to chance, to the hilltop where the Volterrans chose to build it. One of the fascinating things about Volterra, in addition to the fact that it instantly transforms the unconscious of the invader, who was now of course an unsuspecting tourist, unaware that he may be changed, is that unlike other Etruscan sites the most interesting thing is the city itself not the ruins. I felt my mood go down along with the sun, and now the sun was in our faces as we took a long walk down the steep decline to the unmarked, dark, moldy caves filled with lidless sarcophagi platforms and lizards who looked like they were grateful for the company.
A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
and swirl of tail!

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they’d be worth looking at.
(“Lizard”)

I had walked many times this distance in other hilly Italian cities, but my legs had never felt so heavy. It was as if with every footstep I walked against some invisible resistance. The cliffs of Volterra may be legendary, as D’Annunzio and Borges attest, but looking out now over the hills and fields of hay bales in the luminous dusk, I felt as if I had imbibed the sadness of the hilltop town’s history and what it had undergone when all the joy was removed when it was taken over by the Romans. This is possible because Volterra was unique among Etruscan towns in terms of its remoteness and the difficulties it presented in terms of getting up and down, in and out. Most of the ancient treasures had been removed from their sites and are safely stowed in the renowned Guarnacci museum. Strangely, despite his incomparable receptiveness to the slightest vacillation in the atmosphere, Lawrence was not at all spooked by Volterra, but he was making a tour with his friend Baxter of all these Etruscan sites because he was being paid to write a book. The poet in Lawrence was sublimated by the journalist in him in order to accomplish this project and get paid. Lawrence was rejuvenated by the urns in the Guarnacci museum. He makes no mention of the gem of Volterra, a nude male youth in bronze. Dated as early as the 3rd century B.C. it brings to mind a sculpture by Giacometti. D’Annunzio gave it a name that has stuck: “L’ombra della sera.” The art of the Etruscans gave Lawrence the energy that he thought he needed to derive from an unrealistic arrangement in real life.
Lawerence seemed almost relieved to be in a museum, rather than wandering downhill to a dark hole in a rock with a candle in an attempt to decipher barely discernible shapes. For me, the real experience of Volterra was Volterra. The fantastical existence of these rock people, who still existed. I think Lawrence is dead on to say that today’s Romans are mostly Etruscans whose direction was diverted by history, like a boulder that falls into a river and changes its course. People come away from Italy elated because the people are elated. They retain the Etruscan playfulness, the mad delight in living itself, even while talking demonically on cell phones, or driving like daredevils on Vespas. Lawrence enters the Guarnaci Museum,
It is really a very attractive and pleasant museum, but we had struck such a bitter cold April morning, with icy rain falling in the courtyard, that I felt as near to being in the tomb as I have ever done. Yet very soon, in the rooms with those hundreds of little sarcophagi, ash-coffins, or urns, as they are called, the stretch of the old life began to warm one up.

And then there are the gates where three muddy brown heads, triangular, their features effaced by the weather still watch over the city after twenty-five hundred years of wind and rain. Perhaps what I felt in Volterra looking at the heads, which it is said the Romans helped restore, was the sadness of the Roman influence, the victory of power and drive over spontaneity and sensuality.

                                                                          ~

It may be haunting me today because yesterday toward the end of an extremely draining week (and with my nerves on edge because of the gloomily looming presidential election) I forced myself to take a break from what George Eliot would call “duty” and go to the movies—The Motorcycle Diaries, which is not a sequel to such biker movies as The Wild Ones, Wild Angels, or even Easy Rider, but a movie drawn from the diaries of Che Guevara. And I forced myself to go early enough on this dank, gray afternoon so that I could have some empty space around me and relax, as I did in the years before my dreams became responsibilities. I thought Diaries would be good, but I never suspected that it would be as good it is. And it was inspiring for me to hear Che and his friend exchange quotes of Neruda and Lorca and when they reached Peru be handed the works of Cesar Vallejo by a doctor who befriends them. But then something terrible happens. Something as terrible as the impinging, almost strangling sensation, that you get in a city like Volterra as the Roman influence and domination becomes more and more palpable. It is during a scene when the two adventurers have reached Macchu Picchu, and they discuss how civilization has regressed. Their conversation in the heights runs parallel to Lawrence’s discourse on the Etruscans. The Etruscans didn’t have the military prowess to defeat the Roman legions. The Incas, who knew how to perform sophisticated and intricate brain surgery, lacked something that the conquistadors had—gunpowder. But what broke my heart was the next shot. One instant we’re inside Macchu Picchu, and the next instant the camera cuts to a view of the urban sprawl of Lima, which uncannily resembles Los Angeles. And Che comments quietly on the tragedy that civilization has gone from the “heights” of aspiration to the depths of greed and a mindless power drive.
The fleece of the vicuña was carded here
to clothe men’s loves in gold, their tombs and mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.
(“The Heights of Macchu Picchu: VI,” Neruda, trans. Nathaniel Tarn)

The Spanish did with religion what the Romans did with craving for empire, rooted out the sensual quick of the people and made them bow instead to the higher orders of a Christian God and power, acquisitions!, Porsches!, no more broken down motorcycles that are worth more as scrap iron than functioning machines!



October—November 2004, New York City



SOURCES

Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence, Gary Adelman
D. H Lawrence, Complete Poems, Collected and Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts
D.H. Lawrence: Triumph in Exile, 1912—1922, Mark Kinkead Weekes
D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922-1930, David Ellis

NOTES

Clearly there was an element of theater in my exaggerated claims for Handke’s novella. When I looked at it again as I prepared to send this essay in to be printed, I wondered why I had been so taken with it unless it added another dimension—another route—to my desire to write out of, around, and about: walking.