Had we not seen and done all these things we would not be the people we are. To put it even more simply, had we not gone to Taos we would not have come to San Francisco and I would not have found the copy of Phoenix that I had been looking for all those years. Maybe it can be boiled down still further: had I not decided to write a book about Lawrence I would not have gone to Taos and would not have found that copy of Phoenix. Does that mean, in effect, that I had to write this book in order to find my copy of Phoenix? Could such a simple quest really have required such a disproportionate investment of effort? That question begs another, even more difficult one: what to do now, now that I have been to Taos, now that I have found that copy of Phoenix?
The more I ponder these questions the more I am persuaded that the real subject of this book, the one that writing it was an attempt to evade, is despair.
My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It’s not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one’s power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.
Once you are depressed there is almost nothing you can do about it. It is useless trying to snap out of it or buck up because it is impossible to see the point of doing anything. Depression is the complete absence of any interest in anything. You cannot think of a single thing to do, or place to go, or book to read. In his periods of ‘huge stagnation’ Pessoa’s Bernando Soares compared his condition to that of ‘a prisoner deprived of normal freedom of action in an infinite prison cell’.
The first time I became depressed I didn’t even realise it. I knew I wasn’t feeling that great, actually felt pretty terrible, depressed in fact, but since I had no prior experience to go on I didn’t realise that what I was experiencing was depression. Second time around there was a familiar cast to the greyness. The third time, though, in Rome, in the wake of our abortive trip to beastly Oaxaca, I had enough previous experience to know that I was depressed — but because, on those previous occasions, I hadn’t realised that I was depressed I couldn’t remember — nor did I care — how I’d gotten over it. Maybe that’s the nature of the beast. Getting out of depression is like finding a loophole in the law: you use it once and then it is closed up and sealed off so that it can’t be done again.
It went on for a couple of months. Laura went to work while I stayed home and did nothing. I read nothing and did nothing. I spent most of the time watching TV which may not sound so extreme but this was mornings and afternoons, it was Italian TV and — the clincher — the TV wasn’t even turned on. Nothing interested me — and this, in the end, is what saved me. I had no interest in anything, no curiosity. All I felt was: I am depressed, I am depressed. And then, this depression generated its own flicker of recovery. I became interested in depression. Since I was in the grip of something fairly extreme — albeit an extreme state characterised, like the contentment of which it is a negative expression, by the absence of any sense of extremity — I thought I’d look at a couple of books: Darkness Visible by William Styron and Black Sun by Julia Kristeva. (I must have been feeling bad to have read that old trout!) In the latter I read about the overwhelming effect that Holbein’s Dead Christ had had on Dostoevsky. Kristeva quoted a chunk from The Idiot and I thought I’d like to read that passage for myself, outside of quotation marks, as it were. This reactivated a long-dormant interest in the ways that writers have written about paintings: Rilke on Cézanne and Rodin, Lawrence on his own paintings. I became interested in things again. I began to follow things up. I thought I’d like to go to Switzerland to see Holbein’s Dead Christ. I began to look forward to my cornetti integrali whereas for many weeks previously I had plodded to the Farnese and had scarcely cared whether they had any cornetti integrali or not. Now — a sure sign of recovery — I once again became irritated when there were no cornetti integrali left. I started complaining and moaning. Most important of all I began to regret things: that I had never visited the Rodin Museum in Paris, that we had not made it to New Mexico where most of Lawrence’s paintings were on show, that I had wasted these months when I was too depressed to do anything. I was cured.
I was interested in the world again. Before I knew it I was overrun with things that interested me. I was prevented from pursuing some of the things that interested me by other things that interested me more. I began to take pleasure again in the knowledge that there were things, like the theatre, that I had no interest in.
Now that dodge — getting out of depression by becoming interested in depression — only works once. I’ve got no interest in depression now. There might be more to learn about it but I’m not interested. The only thing that interests me about depression is staying well clear of it. And since the only way to avoid giving into depression and despair is to do something, even something you hate, anything in fact, I force myself to keep bashing away at something, anything. Flaubert said it was only thanks to work that he was ‘able to stifle the melancholy’ he was born with. It is a simple choice: work or succumb to melancholia, depression and despair. Like it or not you have to try to do something with your life, you have to keep plugging away.
Besides, the alternatives to giving in and giving up are never as simple as they seem. Believe me, I know. I’ve devoted more of my life to thoughts of giving up than anyone else I can think of. Nietzsche wrote that the thought of suicide had got him through many a bad night, and thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded in the rest of a normal lifetime. Killing yourself is not giving up, it’s more like a catastrophic fast-forwarding, but anything other than suicide imposes an array of disagreeable obligations. All very well to stop living as you do — but then what? Then you have to start living in some other way. Stop doing one thing and you have to start another: something else, something even less agreeable, something which would no doubt have you harking back to the life you’d abandoned in five minutes flat.
Let’s suppose, for example, that I decided — as, I remind you, I am tempted to on a daily if not hourly basis — now that I have my copy of Phoenix, to call it a day, to give up, to abandon any attempt not just at earning a living but at having a life. From this moment on, let’s say, I will no longer be an active participant in my own life. (Ah, what a delicious thought that is, rippling over one like a dream of luxury!) But what then? What would happen next? Within five minutes I’d be thinking about listening to music and would put a CD on the stereo. Five minutes after that I’d be up again because I would have grown fed up with that piece of music and would be scanning the shelves and shelves of CDs, searching in vain for a piece of music that I was not heartily sick of, thinking to myself that if I had more CDs there would surely be one that I would like to listen to. Somewhere on earth, I would say to myself, there must be a CD that I am not yet heartily sick of. . And before I knew it I would be out of the house and on my way to the Megastore, looking for a new CD.