Still, I thought to myself as the train pulled into Dullford, thank heaven for small mercies: that’s another of my mottoes these days. At least there’s nothing wrong with the heart, the chest, the lungs. Not like Lawrence who was ill right in the centre of the body, in the core of his being. ‘Don’t for heaven’s sake get into the way of being ill!’ he wrote. ‘That’s what I’ve done — and heaven, I’d give anything to be well.’
No prizes for guessing why I haven’t written anything for the last week. I’ve been in bed with flu. A new, virulent strain of flu that came on while I was in Denmark where I was supposed to give a lecture on Lawrence and Englishness, a subject I had wanted to address for a long time. I hadn’t written out a fully prepared text before leaving, just a few notes to get me going. After that I could improvise. Besides, I had a day and a half free and so I had plenty of time to prepare my talk while I was in Denmark. When not preparing my talk on Lawrence — which was all the time because I did not prepare my talk — I did the only thing you can do in these cold places; I stayed in my hotel and watched telly. Except there was no telly to speak of so I had to go out drinking, out into the cold and back into the warm. That’s all you do in Denmark. You endure the cold and you drink. You go outside into the cold and back inside to the warm. Outside it’s freezing, inside it’s boiling. Coats on, coats off. Freezing, boiling. A recipe for flu. The morning before I was due to present my paper my throat started hurting; by lunchtime I was swallowing balls of hot swarf. By mid-afternoon I had a splitting headache. People often say they have splitting headaches and by this they usually mean they have a slight headache but I had a splitting headache in the sense that my head felt like a log being split by an axe, a knot-infested log that is difficult to split and requires constant bashing. To make matters worse, as the time for my talk approached, I began to get nervous because I knew I had not prepared my talk properly. I had not prepared it properly because it is better to improvise, better to talk without notes if you can talk without notes. The problem for me is that I can’t talk without notes, I am a hopeless speaker and each time I give a talk I resolve that next time I will prepare the text of my lecture perfectly, word for word. But I never do prepare my talks because it is better to improvise and it is only minutes before the talk that I realise I have nothing to say and so I frantically try to organise my talk and realise that it is too late. It is always like this but it was worse in Denmark because in addition to having nothing to say I was also going down with what was clearly a virulent strain of flu, i.e. a very bad cold.
I arrived at the sparsely populated lecture hall and was introduced as someone ‘who has been researching a biography of D. H. Lawrence’. I stood up, explained that I had just gone down with a virulent strain of flu, that I was not quite myself today. I blew my nose, took a gulp of water.
‘D. H. Lawrence,’ I began, ‘David Herbert Lawrence, the same Bert Lawrence who claimed he had never been “our Bert”, was an English writer. A simple statement. But let’s think about the two parts of this, uh, statement. Do we mean he was a writer who was English? Or that he was an Englishman who wrote? Or both? And even when we concentrate on just one of these two terms we discover that that too is made up of two parts: English and man,’ I said, relieved to have scrambled through this thicket of ‘thats’ and ‘twos’. I vaguely remembered a quote by Lawrence, something about being an Englishman, yes, but he was a man before he was an Englishman. In scurrying through my memory like this I lost my drift somewhat. ‘So, um, we have three terms: English, Writer, and Man.’ I looked up: people were taking notes. I blew my nose again. My nose started bleeding. I dabbed at it with a Kleenex, sniffed back the blood which began trickling down my throat. ‘I want to look at the way that these three terms help define and illuminate and elucidate each other. I want to look at each of them in turn and then look at how they coalesce, come together, are embodied in fact in one English man who was a writer, in this case D. H. Lawrence. .’
And so it went on. That was pretty much the sum total of my talk on Lawrence and Englishness. Making a big show of how bad I was feeling — much wiping of nose, sipping of water — I shuttled back and forth between these three words, constructing something that was utterly devoid of substance, totally meaningless, in fact, intent only on getting to the forty-five-minute mark and swallowing back the blood from my nose. My head pounded, my voice grated, and through all this flu-induced discomfort throbbed the even worse pain of unqualified humiliation and disgrace. ‘And so, to sum up,’ I concluded, ‘we can see that not only is this simple statement that Lawrence was an English writer problematic but that each of the two terms — the two terms that actually turn out, on closer examination to be three terms — are in turn problematic. But it is only out of this matrix of ambiguity, contradiction and. . and so forth that the problems inherent in each of these three terms is resolved — resolved in the figure of the English writer-man, D. H. Lawrence. Thank you.’
I wiped my nose and sat down. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the audience or my host, the distinguished professor who had invited me here. I was aware of a silence, stunned at first but with a smirk around the edges. The distinguished professor thanked me for my ‘provocative’ talk and then asked if there were any questions. I coughed some blood from my throat into a wad of Kleenex, hoping by this Lawrentian touch to persuade my audience of the all-consuming bond that existed between the speaker and the subject of his talk. No one noticed and no questions were forthcoming. The distinguished professor thanked me for coming all this way to give a talk, especially since I was evidently not in the best of health. There were titters from the audience and the first patter of faint applause. Going full out for the sympathy vote now, I coughed more blood theatrically into my Kleenex — too much: some of it, semi-congealed, spilled over the tissue on to my hand and shirt. Through the polite applause I heard a groan of disgust. I was devastated. I declined the invitation to dinner on the grounds that I was feeling too ill but really because I was too mortified by my own performance to face anyone. I had never felt worse in my life.