When it comes to reviews and essays in which writers address other writers and other books, on the other hand, it would seem that they are engaged in something indistinguishable from academic criticism. But this formal narrowing of difference in kind enhances the difference in spirit. Brodsky has gone through certain poems of Auden’s with the finest of combs; Nabokov has subjected Pushkin to forensic scrutiny. The difference is that these works of Pushkin’s and Auden’s were not just studied: they were lived through in a way that is anathema to the academic. .
Except this is nonsense of course. Scholars live their work too. Leon Edel — to take one example from hundreds — embraced Henry James’s life and work as perilously intimately as any writer ever has. I withdraw that claim, it’s ludicrous, it won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. I withdraw it unconditionally — but I also want to let it stand, conditionally. Scholarly work on the texts, on preparing lovely editions of Lawrence’s letters is one thing but those critical studies that we read at university. . Research! Research! The very word is like a bell, tolling the death and the imminent turning to dust of whichever poor sod is being researched. Spare me. Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably. While preparing to write Etruscan Places Lawrence thanked a friend for sending an authoritative book on the subject by Roland Fell who was
very thorough in washing out once more the few rags of information we have concerning the Etruscans: but not a thing has he to say. It’s really disheartening: I shall just have to start in and go ahead, and be damned to all authorities! There really is next to nothing to be said,
scientifically
, about the Etruscans. Must take the imaginative line.
That’s why Lawrence is so exciting: he took the imaginative line in all his criticism, in the Study of Thomas Hardy or the Studies in Classic American Literature, or the ‘Introduction to his Paintings’. Each of them is an electrical storm of ideas! Hit and miss, illuminating even when hopelessly wide of the mark (‘the judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got’). Bang! Crash! Lightning flash after lightning flash, searing, unpredictable, dangerous.
In truth I prefer these books to the novels which I have kept putting off re-reading. I re-read The Rainbow in Rome and I could have forced myself to re-read Women in Love, could have forced myself to sit down and peer at every page — or so I like to believe: who knows if, when it came to the crunch, I really had it in me? — but, I thought, why should I? Why should I re-read this book that I not only had no desire to re-read but which I actively wanted not to re-read. I had no desire to re-read The Rainbow but, unwilling to give myself the benefit of the doubt, sat down and re-read it, just to be on the safe side. I re-read the same copy that I had read first time around: part of the uniform Penguin editions of Lawrence with photographs on the cover (roosters or hens in this case) and, on the back, a sepia photo of Lawrence with beard (naturally) and centre parting. When I re-read The Rainbow I had thought I might discover, like a flower pressed between the pages, the dried remains of my younger self preserved within it. In the most literal sense I was there, the underlinings and annotations, made when we did the book at Oxford (i.e. when we read a load of dreary critical studies about it), were still there but in any kind of metaphorical sense — no, there was nothing, no traces of my earlier self, no memories released by the act of re-reading the same page that I had read years before one particular afternoon wherever and whenever that was.
My impressions of the book were more or less unaltered. It remained a book which I had no desire to re-read; as soon as I had finished re-reading The Rainbow it reverted to being what it was before I re-read it: a book which I had read and which I had no desire to re-re-read. It was a closed book: even when it was open and being re-read it was somehow still a closed book. As for Women in Love, I read it in my teens and, as far as I am concerned, it can stay read.
If we’re being utterly frank, I don’t want to re-read any novels by Lawrence. And not only do I not want to re-read some of Lawrence’s books I don’t even want to read all of them. I want to keep some in reserve — I want to know that there are bits and pieces of Lawrence that are still out there, still fresh, waiting to be discovered (by me at least), waiting to be read for the first time.
In this respect I made a serious mistake in Rome, a mistake of such magnitude, in fact, as to jeopardise any chance of going on with — let alone completing — my study of Lawrence. From the start I’d known that I had to write my book as I went along. There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have read everything that there is to read, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately. In the case of Lawrence I knew I’d have to make sure that I finished writing my book at exactly the moment that I had satisfied my curiosity, and to do this the writing had to lag fractionally behind the reading. Especially when it came to Lawrence’s letters. The letters were Lawrence’s life and I knew I had to ration my reading of them, not get too far ahead of myself. They were my main resource, a source so rich I knew I’d squander them if I just burrowed away at them from beginning to end. I knew that I could not be closer to Lawrence than I was while reading his letters for the first time. Ideally, if I were going to spend eighteen months writing my book about D. H. Lawrence I would be reading those letters for sixteen or even seventeen months, for a year at the very least.
But what did I do? I read them, all seven volumes, cover to cover, in two months. It’s my parents’ fault. When I was a child they rationed out my sweets too slowly and so I grew up to be a gobbler. That’s what I did with Lawrence’s letters: I gobbled them all down and in no time at all there were none left, the bag was empty. I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t help it. I loved reading them too much. I read Volume 2, then 3, then 5, then 4, then 6, then 1 (which I had no real interest in, whizzing through it in a day and a half). That left Volume 7. Whatever you do, I said to myself, keep Volume 7 in reserve: under no circumstances read Volume 7 because then you will have nothing left to read. It should have been relatively easy because there were so many other books to read — I could have re-read Women in Love (which I couldn’t face re-reading), or one of the numerous critical books on Lawrence (which I had decided were a waste of anyone’s time to read) or the poems or plays but instead I kept glancing at Volume 7, touching it, holding it, opening a few pages, reading the introduction. Finally I thought I would read just the first few letters even though I knew that reading the first few was exactly what I had to avoid because I would not be able to stop after three or four letters. After three or four I would keep reading another one or two until I had read so many that it would be pointless to stop reading the book and before I knew it I would have read all the Lawrence letters. And so the important thing was to avoid even opening the book: I knew it would be easier to avoid starting to read the book than it would be to stop reading the book once I had started. I knew all this but I opened it anyway, thinking to myself that I would read the first few letters. Which I did. But since these letters were pretty insignificant in themselves, harmless, I read one or two more which were also pretty innocuous and I thought I would keep reading until I came to a significant letter and then stop. It went on like that until I realised with a shock that I was in danger of finishing all of Lawrence’s letters. I read one after another and the more I read the less there were to read and although I knew part of the reason for reading the letters of Lawrence was to put off the moment when I had to write about him I also realised that by reading the letters like this, by failing to moderate my consumption of the letters, I was caught up in the gathering momentum of his death. I was running out of letters to read just as Lawrence was running out of life. The nearer I got to the end of the book the shorter and more insignificant the letters became, little gasps of anger where before there had been long, thousand-word rants, and so the pace of decline accelerated. Even insignificant communications — ‘Blair has been kind as an angel to me. Here is £10 for housekeeping’ — became something to cherish against the coming end.