Milan Kundera’s faith in the novel is the equal of Lawrence’s but the logic of his apologia for the form actually carries him beyond it. Kundera takes inspiration from the unhindered exuberance of Rabelais and Sterne, before the compulsive realism of the nineteenth century. ‘Their freedom of composition’ set the young Kundera dreaming of ‘creating a work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced — for the sake of form and its dictates — to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him’. Kundera duly achieved this in his own fictions, the famous novels ‘in the form of variations’. In his ‘Notes Inspired by The Sleepwalkers’, meanwhile, Kundera paid tribute to Broch who demonstrated the need for ‘a new art of the specifically novelistic essay’. Novels like Immortality are full of ‘inquiring, hypothetical’ or aphoristic essays like this but compared with these, my favourite passages, I found myself indifferent to Kundera’s characters. After reading Immortality what I wanted from Kundera was a novel composed entirely of essays, stripped of the last rind of novelisation. Kundera duly obliged. His next book, Testaments Betrayed, provided all the pleasures — i.e. all the distractions — of his novels with, so to speak, none of the distractions of character and situation. By Kundera’s own logic this ‘essay in nine parts’ — more accurately, a series of variations in the form of an essay — which has dispensed entirely with the trappings of novelisation, actually represents the most refined, the most extreme, version yet of Kundera’s idea of the novel.
‘A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,’ warned Lawrence and the kind of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels. Which is why the novelists I like best are, with the exception of the last-named, not novelists at alclass="underline" Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard. .
*
Well, it’s been a hectic couple of months. Action-packed. You won’t believe what I’ve done.
Only bought a flat in Oxford. Yes, really. Unbelievable but true. Oxford! Now if there is one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford. You could write a book about plenty of writers in Oxford: Hardy, or Joyce even — people are probably doing just that, even now, dozens of them — but not Lawrence. If there is one person you cannot write a book about here, in Oxford, it is Lawrence. So I have made doubly sure that there is no chance of my finishing my study of Lawrence: he is the one person you cannot write about here, in Oxford; and Oxford is the one place where you cannot write about Lawrence.
When I say you can’t possibly write a book about Lawrence in Oxford that is not to be taken too literally. At this moment, within a few miles of my flat, dozens of people are probably writing books about Lawrence. That tapping I can hear through my open window is probably someone writing a book or a thesis or preparing a lecture, or, at the very least, doing an essay on D. H. Lawrence. It can be done. It can be done — but it can’t be done, it shouldn’t be done. You can’t write a half-decent book about Lawrence in Oxford, can’t write any kind of book about Lawrence without betraying him totally. By doing so you immediately disqualify yourself, render yourself ineligible. It is like spitting on his grave.
So why did I do it? I ask myself. Why did I do it? I had to live somewhere. You have to live somewhere. This is the awful truth, the latest increment of the immense fund of wisdom that I have been building up over the years. You have to live somewhere. Wherever you are, you have to live somewhere. And not Rome, I decided. Oh, I got into a terrible state there. The winter was cold and Rome is one of the worst places to be when it is cold. We were cold at home, cold in cafés, cold in pizzerias and cold on the buses we were forced to take because it was too cold to be on the moped. Staying in was cold, going out was colder. It was uncharacteristically cold, apparently. This is how Romans cope with the cold: every year everyone declares ‘it never gets this cold’ and in this way, even though it gets this cold every year, enough rhetorical heat is generated to get through the unseasonably seasonable cold. You are better off in a seriously cold place like England.
The cold got me thinking about telly. All the time that we were in Rome, listening to people say it never gets this cold, I kept thinking how happy I would be if I were back in England, watching Grandstand, watching Rugby League in near-blizzard conditions while I was indoors watching telly. That’s how I endured the winter in Rome. While everyone else endured the winter by saying ‘it never gets this cold’ I endured it by imagining I was in England watching telly, watching Rugby League. Lawrence was right: ‘One’s native land has a sort of hopeless attraction, when one is away.’ But it was an attraction that was easy for him and Rilke to resist: there wasn’t any telly to tempt them back. Telly, lovely telly. I began buying English papers just to see what I was missing on telly. To be precise, I began buying English papers because I began missing English papers — even though I had never actually read English papers while I was in England — and then I began scrutinising the telly pages of the English papers even though I never used to watch telly in England, even though the papers usually arrived in Rome a day late so that I ended up studying schedules of programmes that had already been broadcast. It wasn’t homesickness, this longing to watch English telly. It may sound like homesickness, may even be one of the classic symptoms of homesickness, but it wasn’t homesickness. I’d left that behind years ago and despised anyone who suffered from it. I didn’t even know what it was any more. No, my telly-sickness was part of a larger anguish, a sickness in search of a home, a free-floating anxiety that could never put down roots and, as a consequence, kept shifting, changing direction and form, one moment manifesting itself as a desire to watch English telly, the next as an overwhelming desire to watch English telly. I’d felt the same thing before, in Paris, but had been able to assuage it by going to the cinema. In Italy, though, it is virtually impossible to go to the cinema because all films are ruined by being dubbed into Italian.
‘Why don’t you learn Italian?’ said Laura. ‘Then we could go to the cinema.’
‘That is not the point,’ I said. ‘The point is that I have a basic respect for the medium and refuse to see it violated. Italy should not even be allowed to show films. All film distributors should boycott Italy until they stop dubbing.’ Actually, on Monday nights, one or two cinemas in Rome do show films in the original language but they ruin them by having intermissions. An Italian can’t go for more than forty minutes without having something sweet, a cornetto or gelato, and so any films which are not already ruined by being dubbed into Italian are ruined by being carved up into forty-minute portions. What children they are, Italians!
I went on and on about this to Laura, about how Italians were a race of children and she became understandably angry, not as angry as she became, though, about actual children. Having children had never been an issue between us but suddenly it was. We had discussed getting a pet a few times (to my great surprise I discovered, at the age of thirty-six, that I was a dog-lover) but children, children! Larkin thought it strange that in his letters, Lawrence, ‘the least reticent of men’, never once alluded to the possibility of having children. Even if that’s true — and I have a feeling it’s not — I find it strange that Larkin was so surprised by this. I like the way Lawrence had no children because I hate children and I hate parents of children: the fact that all anyone did in England was have children was one of the things that drove me out of that crèche of a country, that crèche of a country that I’ve moved back to.