And then, abruptly, there were no more letters. It was the end: oblivion. There were no more letters. If only, I found myself thinking, if only there had been Volumes 8, 9, 10 or 11. I had read four thousand pages of letters by Lawrence and I wanted thousands of pages more. . I wanted them not to end. And yet, at the same time that I was wishing they would not come to an end, I was hurrying through these books because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end. However much you are enjoying a book you are always flicking to the end, counting to see how many pages are left, looking forward to the time when you can put the book down and have done with it. At the back of our minds, however much we are enjoying a book, we come to the end of it and some little voice is always saying, ‘Thank Christ for that!’
Still, better reading than writing. One of the reasons I was enjoying reading the Lawrence letters so much, and the main reason I wished that there were more Lawrence letters to read, was because they were a perfect excuse for not writing my book about Lawrence. Whereas now I had no choice, no choice at all.
It was a terrible prospect since although I had read the Lawrence letters and was therefore obliged to begin writing about Lawrence I had also read his letters in such a way that I was actually in no state to begin writing about Lawrence. Not only had I read them too fast, I’d also read them out of sequence, as they became available at the British Council Library in Rome, so that all sense of chronology, of development had been lost. One moment Lawrence was in New Mexico, the next he was eighteen months younger, in Italy, putting off going to America. If I had done it properly I would have read them sequentially and paced it so that my reading of the letters kept pace with the writing but now a huge six-volume gap had opened between my reading and my writing. I was like an out-of-condition athlete in a race who had lost touch with the front runners and the group in the middle: it was too much of a haul to get back in touch. I was out of the race, finished. The only alternative to giving up was to keep plodding round the track for the sake of finishing, grinding it out, metre by metre, page by page.
Not only had I read the Lawrence letters too fast and out of sequence, I had also failed to take notes. I had intended doing so as I went along, transcribing any particularly important passages and keeping a careful record of where these passages occurred, but I had been in such a hurry to gobble down the letters that, except on a few occasions, I had not done so. Not only that, I realised as I glanced back through the volumes of letters that I had already read, but there were many that, in my eagerness and impatience to get through all seven volumes, I had taken no notice of. The more I looked, the more letters there were that I had no recollection of. I could read the letters again because I had read them so badly the first time around. In fact, I realised with a sinking heart, I was practically obliged to re-read the Lawrence letters which I had longed to go on reading but which, now that I had to go on reading them, I wished to God I was shot of.
In no time at all, though, I was back under their spell. There were actually hundreds of letters which I had not read at all, which I saw for the first time as I re-read them. Like this one from November 1916 when, in the course of a letter to Kot, Lawrence remembered a time when he had seen an adder curled up in the spring sunshine, asleep. The snake was not aware of Lawrence’s presence until he was very close and then ‘she lifted her head like a queen to look’ and moved away. ‘She often comes into my mind, and I think I see her asleep in the sun, like a Princess of the fairy world. It is queer, the intimation of other worlds, which one catches.’
Queer, too, the intimation of future works which one catches so often in the letters. In this case the writing of the famous poem ‘Snake’ was still several years distant but here we have, as it were, a first draft of the experience which will later form the basis of the poem. This is one of the pleasures of the letters: one has the very first touch of a poem. It is like watching a fire and seeing the first lick of flame along a log: you think it is about to catch but then it vanishes. You watch and wait for the flame to come back. It doesn’t — and then, after you have stopped looking, the flame flickers back again and the log catches.
Lawrence began writing his greatest poem, ‘The Ship of Death’, in the autumn of 1929. According to Keith Sagar, the opening image of the poem –
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion
— was suggested by a visit to Rottach in late August when he noticed the ‘apples on tall old apple-trees, dropping so suddenly’. But the first intimation of the poem actually comes as early as New Year’s Eve, 1913, in a letter to Edward Garnett: ‘it is just beginning to look a bit like autumn — acorns and olives falling, and vine leaves going yellow’. I had made a note of that, and of the occasion a few months later when I felt the rhythm of the image pulsing into life long, long before Lawrence began working on the poem: ‘the apples blown down lie almost like green lights in the grass’. It was like a cadential draft of a poem that was nowhere near being written, and as I went through the letters for the second time I noticed more and more pre-echoes like this. As Sagar points out, the immediate source for the image of the ship of death was a ‘little bronze’ one he saw in Cerveteri in April 1927. Already by the summer of 1925, however, the opening image is redolent with the atmosphere of departure and journeying that will make up the poem’s narrative: ‘seems already a bit like autumn, and there is feeling of going away in the air’.
Who can say when a poem begins to stir, to germinate, in the soil of the writer’s mind? There are certain experiences waiting to happen: like the snake at Lawrence’s water trough, the poem is already there, waiting for him. The poem is waiting for circumstance to activate it, to occasion its being written.