I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras. No man can overhear ten words of Italian today without two thousand or two million or ten or twenty or two liras flying like venomous mosquitoes round his ears. Liras — liras — liras — nothing else. Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it in like some greasy fog. Behind this greasy fog some people may still see the Italian sun. I find it hard work.
He found it hard work, too, to keep in temper with the various publishers and agents he felt were not treating him honestly (‘Does the return railway fare from New York cost as much as $300?’ he queried Robert Mountsier. ‘You remember you said you would let me pay the railway fare only’). Again and again Lawrence insists that what he wants is to be frank, fair and ‘precise’ in his dealings. ‘I don’t want anything that doesn’t seem to you just and fair,’ he wrote to Martin Secker at the start of their business relationship. ‘But I want you also to treat me justly and fairly’ — something which Lawrence felt happened all too rarely.
Perhaps we should not make too much of Lawrence and money. He was, after all, a genuinely freelance writer in that he lived entirely by his pen (and the odd loan) and freelance writers are notoriously obsessed with money. I am, at any rate. When Flaubert — who, unlike Lawrence (and me), had a modest private income to live off — declared ‘everybody is hard up, starting with me!’ he was not only lamenting his lot, he was also striking the authentic note of literary single-mindedness. Read most writers’ letters and book-writing appears to take a subordinate place to book-keeping. Because at various times he tried to do without an agent and opted, eventually, for self-publishing, it is not surprising that an exceptional amount of the seven volumes of letters comprises Lawrence’s financial wrangles. What is surprising is to find that the parts of the correspondence of a great writer I most like are those which would be edited out if any kind of selection were made, i.e. those having nothing to do with his genius and everything to do with his ordinariness, with the ordinariness he claimed to loathe. The fact that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover means next to nothing to me; what matters is that he paid his way, settled his debts, made nice jam and marmalade, and put up shelves.
All of this is irrelevant — if something can be deemed irrelevant in a book comprised entirely of irrelevancies — except insofar as it confirms something about Lawrence which other people have commented on but which I now see as being literally central to him: he was always in the midst of what he was doing, was able, as Huxley noticed, ‘to absorb himself completely in what he was doing at the moment’. By all accounts, he was incapable of not giving himself wholly to what he was doing: couldn’t read someone else’s manuscript without scribbling all over it or rewriting it, couldn’t clean a floor without making it perfectly clean, couldn’t do a painting without becoming a painter.
Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist’s girlfriend, naked, on the walls. It starts at school, this association of writing with work and art with fun: the classroom is a site of boredom and order, the art room a place to play, to mess around, to make a mess; Double Physics was the low point in the school timetable but Double Art — more even than Games which often involved exposure to harsh weather conditions and the possibility of physical injury — signalled an hour and a half of not having to work. For the writer, work is characterised by the absolute cessation of physical movement (all movement is an evasion of and distraction from the job in hand), by a suspension of life. For the painter work means a more intense physical engagement in life, it begins with carpentry (making stretchers) and ends in glazing, varnishing and framing. Even though it thereby involves labour the painter’s work — or so it seems to the writer — never seems like work. In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business. The artist’s studio, though, is still what it has always been: an erotic space. For the writer the artist’s studio is, essentially, a place where women undress. Van Gogh may have warned that ‘painting and fucking a lot don’t go together’ but the smell of white spirits and paint is suggestive of nothing else so much as afternoon sex. Personally, I would love to have been a painter.
One of the reasons that writers — rather than art critics — have written so well about artists and painting is that they retain these delusions (for such, artists assure me, they are) about picture-making. When writers write about painting they are in a sense on vicarious holiday. Lawrence, of course, went further. He not only produced some of the best writing on art in English — the ‘Introduction to his Paintings’ is a small, mad masterpiece — he also became a painter.
In the last years of his life painting was a greater source of fulfilment, on a day-to-day basis, than writing. What does it matter whether they are any good, these paintings? It never occurred to Lawrence to wonder whether he could paint or not. When, in the ‘Introduction to his Paintings’, he implicitly argued that the tradition of painting culminated in his own work, he was also arguing that an ability to paint was not the most important part of being a painter. Lawrence took his painting seriously, pursued it strenuously, but it always retained something of its idyllic character: ‘Painting is a much more amusing art than writing, and much less to it, costs one less, amuses one more.’ Painting was the absolute fulfilment of his ideals of work: to work to become more himself. In the same way that the photograph of Lawrence sitting by the tree — and not writing — was the idyllic image of the writer then the crowning achievement of his career as a writer was that he became a painter.
According to Huxley, Lawrence possessed ‘an even more remarkable accomplishment’ than an ability to paint: ‘He knew how to do nothing. He could just sit and be perfectly content.’
Not like me. I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing — which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn’t something else I should be getting on with. ‘Being with you is like licking sugar through a glass,’ Laura once said. ‘You’re never quite there.’ When I’m working I’m wishing I was doing nothing and when I’m doing nothing I’m wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I’ve got to do and then, when I’ve got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I’m out, I’m wondering how long it will be before I’m back home.
The moment I finish this study, all books by and about Lawrence will be returned to the shelves that my father and I built. It’s a pleasing prospect. If there’s one thing that keeps me banging away at this study, in fact, it is the knowledge that one day I will be able to put all those books back on the shelf between Larkin and Lessing and, later, hopefully, will be able to put this one up there too. Essentially, I want things over with: I wanted to get the shelf-building over with so that I could get back to writing my book about Lawrence; now I want to get writing my book over with so that I can put it up on the shelves — and start another one.