At one point in the letter Lawrence’s anger reaches such a pitch of fury that he abandons language and spits ink at his long-suffering friend: ‘Pfui! — pish, pshaw, prrr!’ After that, in more conciliatory spirit he asks Brewster: ‘So, what’s it like in Ceylon?’ A rhetorical question if ever there was one, for as far as Lawrence is concerned he ‘would rather go to Mars or the Moon. But Ceylon if there’s nothing better. Is everybody there as beshitten there as here? I’ll bet they are. There isn’t any news, so don’t ask for any.’
Lawrence was in Taormina at the time, a place he liked a great deal, more than almost any other — but one of Lawrence’s enduring pleasures was to rant on about the awfulness of wherever he happened to be. Perhaps this is why Italy held such a special place in his affections: it provided constant fuel for his temper: ‘I feel my summer travels didn’t do much more than put me in a perfect fury with everything. But then that’s the effect most things have on me. The older I get, the angrier I become, generally. And Italy is a country to keep you in a temper from day to day: the people, I mean.’
This is from another of the bad-tempered letters he had mentioned to Brewster. Four months later, after much prevaricating about going to America he reneged on his earlier preference for the moon or Mars and went to meet the Brewsters in Ceylon. It was a place with: ‘marvellous air, marvellous sun and sky — strange, vast empty country — hoary unending “bush” with a pre-primeval ghost in it — apples ripe and good, also pears. . but — But — BUT — Well, it’s always an anti-climax of buts. — I just don’t want to stay, that’s all. . But I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.’
Dispatched a decade earlier, another letter expresses this familiar mood of self-generating exasperation. ‘If all goes well I shall probably stay here till the spring, although neither the house nor the climate really agrees with me: this perpetual alternation between bora and sirocco is no good for the nerves, and I exhaust myself by enduring first one and then the other.’
The place in question was the Castle Duino and the author of this authentically Lawrentian moan was Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke stayed in many of the same places as Lawrence and the overlaps of itinerary and tone alert us to the way that Lawrence’s letters — and Larkin’s too, perhaps — place him in the European tradition of the literature of neurasthenia, of anxiety, fretting, complaint. This tradition — more accurately, this strain — culminates in Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer who dedicated book after book to an exhaustive and exhausting catalogue of what Lawrence, writing (appropriately enough) from Austria, termed, ‘the life-exhaustion feeling’. This life-exhaustion feeling in Lawrence is actually very close to that life-affirming quality that he is usually admired for. Likewise, he may have inveighed against America for the way that there was ‘no life of the blood’, only ‘nerves, nerve-vibration, nerve-irritation’ but Lawrence’s famous faith in the religion of the blood often seems a disposition of the nerves.
The resemblance between Lawrence’s nerve-irritation, as revealed in his letters and Bernhard’s fictional neurasthenic rambling, is as striking as it is, at first, surprising. Lawrence shares with Bernhard’s narrators the same chronic prevarication (‘Suddenly that I am on the point of coming to America I feel I can’t come’), intermittently, at least, the same wild misanthropy, the same loathing of their country and countrymen. Both writers display the same abrupt surges and reversals of intent, the perpetual rages that accentuate the ill health — another shared theme — by which they are, in part, generated. Both suffered badly with their lungs and in both there is the same frayed-nerve, end-of-the-tether quality. Some of the classic Bernhard riffs — berating the world for exactly the characteristics he is displaying in the course of his tirades, for example — are prefigured in Lawrence who declared in 1929 that he hated ‘people who rave with unreasonable antipathies’. My favourite example is when he denounces Robert Mountsier as ‘one of those irritating people who have generalised detestations’. One of those. .
Many of the places in Lawrence’s Sardinia sound uncannily like those towns in Austria that elicit Bernhard’s ire. Mandas, for example, a place where, according to some people Lawrence meets, ‘one does nothing. At Mandas one goes to bed when it’s dark, like a chicken. At Mandas one walks down the road like a pig that is going nowhere. At Mandas a goat understands more than the inhabitants understand. At Mandas. .’ At Mandas even the inn is authentically Bernhardian:
We sat at the cold table, and the lamp immediately began to wane. The room — in fact the whole of Sardinia — was stone cold, stone, stone cold. Outside the earth was freezing. Inside there was no thought of any sort of warmth: dungeon stone floors, dungeon stone walls and a dead, corpse-like atmosphere, too heavy and icy to move.
This unexpected affinity between Lawrence and Bernhard — one preoccupied by the hope, as Frieda’s iconic version has it, ‘of more and more life’, the other with suicide and death — illuminates another characteristic that the writers share: they are both very funny. It seems ludicrous to say so but I value Lawrence increasingly if not as a comic writer then certainly as a comic figure — never more so than when he is in one of his tempers — which is most of the time. In Taos, after one of the quarrels that regularly erupted there, Tony Luhan stormed off, leaving his wife Mabel to seek comfort from Frieda. ‘So Mabel thought that she had an angry husband?’ writes a recent biographer. ‘Lawrence was angry even in his sleep, Frieda declared, and proved it by taking Mabel in to witness the spectacle of Lawrence mumbling and groaning in his sleep.’ Now this is the Lawrence I love. Frieda too, I suspect.
Claudio Magris identifies a recurring figure in European literature as the man who records all the little inconveniences life inflicts upon him and, in so doing, triumphs over them. Lawrence keeps saying he doesn’t care about publishers, about money, about Middleton Murry and all the other ‘canaille’ out there in the world but when we compile a list of all the things he doesn’t care about it amounts to a great anthology of grievance and complaint. Then there are the little inconveniences which resist simple solution — things being broken or mislaid or needing to be replaced — and which turn the letters into a vast saga of irritation.
Take the episode of the typewriter ribbon. On 4 July 1916, when he was finishing off Women in Love, Lawrence wrote to Kot asking him to get ‘a black ribbon for a Smith Premier № 2 typewriter’. Kot dutifully obliged but three days later Lawrence is writing to him to say that the ribbon ‘is just twice too wide for my machine, which takes a ribbon not more than half an inch wide. I have never seen a ribbon so wide as this. Ought I to double it, fold it? — or must I send it back and have it changed?’ On 10 July he did exactly that and on the 17th the long-suffering Kot duly sent a new one which turned out to be:
exactly like the last. I can’t possibly put it on my machine. And as it arrived without a word to say who sent it, or anything like that, I am at a loss.
My machine is Lawrence. C. Smith and Bros. Number 2. Perhaps I am wrong in calling it a Smith Premier. It takes a ribbon exactly half an inch wide. What then am I to do with a ribbon one-inch wide? All I want is an ordinary half-inch black ribbon. Can you solve the mystery for me?