When I thought of the ideal conditions for working, in other words, I looked at things from the perspective of someone not working, of someone on holiday, of a tourist in Taormina. I always had in mind the view that my desk would overlook, thereby overlooking the fact that the view from the desk is invisible when you are actually working, and forgetting that of the many genres of sentence I dislike there is none that I despise more than ones which proceed along the lines of ‘If I look up from my desk. .’ The ideal conditions for working were actually the worst possible conditions for working.
And in any case maybe all this fuss about the conditions for working was irrelevant. After all, did it matter so much where you lived? The important thing, surely, was to find some little niche where you could work; to settle into a groove and get your work done. Logically, yes, but once, in north London, I had found myself walking along the road where Julian Barnes lived. I didn’t see him but I knew that in one of these large, comfortable houses Julian Barnes was sitting at his desk, working, as he did every day. It seemed an intolerable waste of a life, of a writer’s life especially, to sit at a desk in this nice, dull street in north London. It seemed, curiously, a betrayal of the idea of the writer. It made me think of a picture of Lawrence, sitting by a tree in the blazing afternoon, surrounded by the sizzle of cicadas, notebook on his knees, writing: an image of the ideal condition of the writer.
Or so it had appeared in memory. When I actually dug it out it turned out that there was no notebook on his knees. Lawrence is not writing, he is just sitting there: which is why, presumably, it is such an idyllic image of the writer.
He is wearing a white shirt, sitting with his back to a tree. (What kind of tree? Had he been looking at a photograph of someone else sitting there, Lawrence would have been able to identify it immediately. He was one of those writers who knew the names of trees.) Everything is still, but, sculpted by the absent wind, the branches record its passing. A hot, hot day. Lawrence sitting by the tree, the fingers of both hands laced together over his left knee. Schiele fingers. Thin wrists, thick trousers. Freshly laundered, pressed, his white shirt is full of the sun in which it has dried. Like the shirt of the prisoner facing execution in Goya’s The Third of May 1808, it is the bright focus of all the light — and there is a lot of light — in the photograph.
Lawrence’s jacket is rolled up beside him on the grass. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled down, buttoned around his bony wrists, lending a formal quality to the picture. By the 1920s photographs no longer required the interminable exposure times of the Victorian era (when heads and limbs had to be clamped in place to prevent blurring), but they were nearer to that unwieldy stage of photographic culture than to the Instamatic images of the post-war era. In early portraits, as part of the preparation for having a photograph taken, people focused their lives ‘in the moment rather than hurrying past it’. Here, too, there is a strong sense of Lawrence sitting for a photograph. As far as formality is concerned the final touch is provided by the way that Lawrence’s shirt is buttoned up to the collar. Why does that collar hold not just Lawrence’s shirt but the photograph itself together?
Because even here, in the midst of this audible heat, Lawrence has to be careful to keep warm. He feels the cold, has to be careful not to catch a chill (the thick jacket is close to hand). His mother’s concern for the sickly child — years of being told to keep warm, to keep his jacket on — have been internalised. By now, in the heat, it is second nature to cover up his skinniness, to keep himself warm.
His feet are invisible, buried in the grass, creating the impression — emphasised by the way that his body was surrounded by the trunk of the tree (‘the tree’s life penetrates my life, and my life the tree’s’) — that Lawrence is growing out of the ground. ‘Thank God I am not free,’ he wrote from Taos in 1922, ‘any more than a rooted tree is free.’ This line caused Larkin some astonishment. ‘It is hard to see how he could have been less encumbered in the affairs of life,’ he wrote from Leicester almost thirty years later. ‘Put him down in salaried employment or with a growing family or an ageing one — why, he didn’t even own a house & furniture!’
This is not strictly true: Lawrence did own some furniture (Brodsky was right: there is ‘no life without furniture’), much of which he made himself. And while he may not have owned a house, the Lawrences’ constant moving obliged them to keep making home. It is typical of Lawrence that, on the one hand, he became more and more anxious about finding a place to settle and, on the other, achieved the ideal condition of being at home anywhere: ‘I feel a great stranger, but have got used to that feeling, and prefer it to feeling “homely”. After all, one is a stranger, nowhere so hopelessly as at home.’ That was from Taos in 1922; three years later the emphasis had changed: ‘One can no longer say: I’m a stranger everywhere, only “everywhere I’m at home”.’
He had found a home within himself and in what he did, in his being. Rilke had admired the same thing in Rodin who lived in a house that ‘meant nothing to him’ [Rodin] because ‘deep within him he bore the darkness, peace and shelter of a house and he himself had become the sky above it and the wood around it and the distance and the great river that always flowed past’. Lawrence had likened himself to a rooted tree; sunk in himself, Rodin, according to Rilke, was ‘fuller of sap than an old tree in autumn’. He had ‘grown deep’. This idea, of being at home in yourself as a way of being at home in the world, was to receive its most exalted expression in the final lines of the last of the Sonnets to Orpheus:
Whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
I’d torn the photo of Lawrence by the tree out of a biography published by the University of New Mexico Press. Before doing so I had tried to find where and when it was taken but there was no information. It was the only uncaptioned photo in the book. Had there been a caption I might have felt more reluctant about committing that small act of bibliographical vandalism. As it was, there had been no text to anchor the photo to the book, nothing to keep it in place. It seemed apposite that this, the only uncaptioned image in the book, was now free of the only context — the physical one of the book — available. If the bust made by Jo Davidson showed Lawrence what he would become in death, when — as suggested earlier — the loose pages of his life were bound and dated, then this picture showed Lawrence unbound, alive.
A photograph’s meaning is bound up closely with its caption. As the photograph frames the subject, so the caption frames the photograph. Without a caption a photograph is not quite developed, its meaning not fixed. With a little research I could have found out — could still find out — where and when it was taken but I preferred, and prefer, not to: it seemed fitting that this photograph of Lawrence sitting there, ‘happy as a cicada’, should elude place and time. Like this it was a photo of Lawrence in the state evoked by Rilke in his sonnet; like this I could identify the tree: it is a photo of Lawrence sitting by a bho tree.
Buddha was sitting under a bho tree when he achieved enlightenment and in the spring of 1926 Lawrence told Brewster that he was ‘convinced that every man needs a bho tree of some sort in his life. What ails us is, we have cut down all our bho trees. . Still, here and there in the world a solitary bho tree must be standing. . And I’m going to sit right down under one, to be American about it, when I come across one.’1