What Are You Reading?

I'm always fascinated by what others are reading.

Right now I've just read or am reading Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal; Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge; Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence by Geoff Dyer; Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; and John Gray's Straw Dogs — an incredible, infuriating, outlook-changing book which will make all your ideas about religion and philosophy, science and 'progress', history and morality, humanism and anthropocentrism fall about your ears like a house of cards. It's essential, provocative reading, with the unmistakeable yet disconcerting ring of truth.

What are you reading at the moment?

Work (3)

DH Lawrence has long been one of my favourite writers. He poured his bohemian soul into so many diverse literary forms: the novel, the short story, the play, the poem, the essay, the travel book. He was also a painter. Unfashionable today, perhaps his uncompromising and idealistic vision for humanity — harnessing instinct, sexuality and the human imagination — will once again be taken seriously. He could not help but write. Not everything he wrote was successful, but there are many, many truths and sublimities to be found in his torrent of words and ideas. Here's a poem of Lawrence's you may not know. I wonder what he would have made of today's technologies?

                                            Work

There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you
like an absorbing game.

If it doesn’t absorb you
if it’s never any fun,
don’t do it.

When a man goes out into his work
he is alive like a tree in spring,
he is living, not merely working.

When the Hindus weave thin wool into long, long lengths of 
        stuff
with their thin dark hands and their wide dark eyes and their 
        still souls absorbed
they are like slender trees putting forth leaves, a long white 
        web of living leaf,
                the tissue they weave,
and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes itself in its 
        own foliage.

As with cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or 
        loaves.
Men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird that 
        leans 
                its breast against its nest, to make it round,
as the turnip models its round root, as the bush makes 
        flowers and gooseberries, 
                putting them forth, not manufacturing them,
and cities might be as once they were, bowers grown out from 
        the busy bodies of people.
And so it will be again, men will smash the machines.

At last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like 
        cloth 
                tissued from his life,
and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver’s 
        nibbled mansion
and drinking from cups that came off his fingers like flowers 
        off their five-fold stem,
he will cancel the machines we have got.

DH LAWRENCE

I love the line arrangement in this poem, and I also love the mix of both 'poetic' and 'awkward' expression Lawrence intentionally employs.

Flame Into Being

DH Lawrence

A few weeks ago I reread Anthony Burgess's excellent critical biography of DH Lawrence, Flame into Being. I borrowed the very same copy from our local library as the one I'd read almost twenty years previously. I know this because I recognised my handwriting on the renewal slip I'd filled in after extending the lending period by phone in 1995. As I reread, I found I remembered the book in quite a lot of detail, so much so that I had the strong illusion it must have been only a few years since I first read it. Such are the tricks of memory. Rather frightening, actually.

Regular readers of this blog will know how much I admire DH Lawrence, and how he was a pivotal influence on my youthful education and my emotional, spiritual and literary life. Though he's unfashionable these days, his reputation tainted by misguided, exaggerated slurs concerning his supposed fascism and sexism, I feel he still has much to tell us about the relationship between man and man, woman and woman, and man and woman, and about our interior lives, and about the spiritually important things in life.

I scribbled down a few notes while rereading the book, so here are some random jottings. Some of these are Burgess's words and thoughts, some are my own, and some are a commingling of the two.

Burgess gets to the core of Lawrence, the man and the writer — both indivisible.

Lawrence (along with Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford) abandoned the conventional novelistic plot and introduced characters of shifting, fragile identities (a more realistic approach, in fact) and brought in aspects of the elemental, the instinctive and the unconscious. The vital thing was visceral conviction, not ratiocination or rational argument; the solar plexus not the cerebral cortex; entity not identity; the dissolution of the self and its fusion with the other, not the iron-clad ego. Fiction became more honest. There was no obligation to like a character; what was important was loving the character, warts and all.

Faults were the spume of identity; reality lay deeper. ANTHONY BURGESS.

In his wild prophecies and subversive proclamations, Lawrence often ran the risk of ridicule; he believed no less than in the complete reform of the individual, of society and of the world — which was the meaning which lay behind his phoenix motif. And you can ignore many of his naive political speculations, which have a shrill and anti-democratic ring. The thing about Lawrence is that you have to consider him and his spontaneous outpourings, the total man and his work, as a whole, in order to discover the sapphires in the mud; and there were a lot of sapphires.

Lawrence believed in the physicality of sex raised to a sacramental level, in the intensity of passion, in the annihilation of the self, in a new covenant with life (as symbolised by the rainbow, connecting heaven and earth, at the end of his eponymous novel) — an idea which he developed in Women in Love, where his characters are close to nature, not merely social beings. Lawrence was always interested in 'naked primitivism', and the 'savage pilgrimage' of his restless wanderings around the world always sought out unindustrialised cultures.

Ezra Pound wrote that the essence of literature and poetry was the charging of language with meaning; that's not meaning in the linguistic and cultural-historical sense, but in the emotional sense. Lawrence agreed with this.

Although, for Lawrence, resonant natural objects such as flowers and fruit were symbols, they were not obvious symbols, and their meanings shifted. He was basically not so much interested in symbols as in essences.

Lawrence witnessed and praised the gorgeousness of the earth, and believed in trying to fulfil the simplest desires in the world: to live, to love and be happy.

Like Ted Hughes after him, Lawrence maintained a strong belief in the necessary and inevitable otherness of animals (ref. his poem Snake.) No sentimentalising or anthropomorphising here. He also recognised the sacredness of animals.

Lawrence is a holistic writer: his (pseudo-) philosophy of life derives from the total output of his numerous poems, novels, essays, short stories, plays, travel writings, letters — not the reverse.

He admired Freud, but thought there was much more to the unconscious than just sex (eg creativity). He admired Jung also, but believed that the unconscious was individual, not collective. He believed in the particular, not the general.

He believed in the multiplicity of separate selfhoods.

Lawrence admitted he was no rigorous scholar, no rigid intellectual — but that he was indebted to scholars and intellectuals. He proceeded by intuition, not logic or methodology.

Aldous Huxley thought that DHL was intensely aware of the mystery of the world, of Wordsworth's  'unknown modes of being', and that this mystery was a numen, a divine awareness of the 'dark presence of otherness beyond the boundaries of man's unconscious mind'. A spiritual world, where there is union with the divine, and which lies outside us, though it's also within us. Otherness is part of us too.

Lawrence stood for Life, as opposed to Art. (Henry James hated Lawrence, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for their formlessness. Need I say which side I'm on?)

Lawrence taught us, among many other things, that literature is subversive, that sex is important and tender, and that we must have courage in our contradictions. Amen to all of this.

The vast marvel is to be alive . . . DH LAWRENCE.

DH Lawrence: A New Consciousness

DH Lawrence at 21 years old (Wikimedia Commons).

I have beside me a stack of books by and about three of my favourite writers: Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence. Right now I've nearly finished DH Lawrence: The Savage Pilgrimage by his friend and admirer Catherine Carswell. It's a fascinating narrative. Through Carswell I feel I've got closer to the character and personality of Lawrence than in any other biography of him I've read.

Lawrence spent some of the happiest times of his relatively short life (he died of complications resulting from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four) in Taos, New Mexico. He identified immediately with Native American culture, joining in at times with ritual Indian dances. Out of this experience, and his trips over the border into Mexico, came the novel The Plumed Serpent. For Lawrence, old pre-Christian ways of life still retained a true consciousness of what it was to be fully human, a primal life-force guided by feeling not intellect — far removed from what he regarded as insipid, sanctimonious, hypocritical western Christian society.

In New Mexico, and for the first time, he found physical relief from the 'cheerful, triumphant success' which was killing the white races with ennui. He became a partaker as well as a spectator. Not by the abnegation of the Christian saint or the Oriental fakir, not by the psychic powers of the yogi, not by the short cut by which a modern world contemplates the conquest of the cosmos by science, not by any victory over matter by either the spirit or the intellect did Lawrence see the possibility of our salvation from boredom and sterility. We were all starving in the midst of plenty. Nothing was needed but for us to perceive religiously that the cosmos itself was alive, and to enter into the richness of that perception. In wrestling with a live cosmos men would immediately become themselves gods of a kind — fallible still, but potent with cosmic energy. Then, and only then, could man properly solve his great problems. But to do so we had to 'destroy our own conception', our accustomed consciousness.

CATHERINE CARSWELL DH Lawrence: The Savage Pilgrimage    

Poetry And Walking

When my sister and only sibling, Elizabeth, died from a brain tumour at the age of 29 in August 1987, I found myself turning to poetry for succour, consolation and a deeper view of things. I called on Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets; I visited Lorca, Levertov and RS Thomas. I also began walking more and more, and further and further. In the simple act of walking, in the natural human activity of placing one foot in front of the other, I encountered a kind of fragile peace; and the sublime scenery I often walked through seemed to provide, at least partly, a benign and numinous response to my unanswerable questions.

I kept a written log of my walking routes from April 1987 to May 2006. Looking at it again recently, I'm reminded that a few weeks after my sister's death Carmen and I stayed for a while in Porthmadog (Wales), where I climbed the little hill of Moel-y-Gest and the mountain of Cnicht, and ascended the Roman Steps from Cwm Bychan. The landscape here in Snowdonia is wild, dramatic and breathtakingly beautiful.

My mother, Joan, died in November 2004, and again I turned to poetry: this time to the poems she'd  transferred to her commonplace books in a painstaking and neat hand, or cut out from magazines with scissors and pasted into her scrapbooks; and also those chosen by WB Yeats for The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Mum had been awarded this book as a prize for 'General Proficiency' at the end of her 1937-8 year at The Municipal High School for Girls in Doncaster, Yorkshire.

Three years later I completed my first Camino, and lit candles in memory of my sister and mum at various significant stages along the Way. Here's the wonderfully crazy signpost at Manjarin in the Spanish Montes de León:

My father, Fred, died in January 2009, and almost exactly one year later I walked the Vía de la Plata. I dedicated this Camino to him. We did not have an easy relationship, but all is now more peaceable. The last words he spoke to me were: 'You know I love you, Robert'.

Dad did not appreciate the finer subtleties of poetry as such, but he did love the words to the Wesleyan hymns he played on the organ each week at the Methodist village chapel. Only the other day I was leafing through his Methodist Hymn Book and alighted on John Bunyan's Who Would True Valour See (from Pilgrim's Progress):

Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There's no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow'd Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.

(The Monk's Gate arrangement by Vaughan Williams, adapted from a traditional English melody.)

Needless to say, he also loved the words of the Bible, and of course the words of the Authorised King James Version are poetry indeed. This is the title page of one of his Bibles:

Poetry and walking have been my salvation in the most challenging of times. There are times when I feel they have actually saved my life, or kept me sane at the very least.

Sorrow

Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,

I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.

DH LAWRENCE

(Collected by WB Yeats in The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935.)

Playing Many Parts: Tentative Notes Towards An Impossible Resolution

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed. DH LAWRENCE

Who am I?

Social man: son, brother, husband, father, friend, acquaintance, colleague. Ducking and diving between these roles, and the expectations inherent in these roles, like a perch trying to outwit a pike.

Walking man: solo pedestrian, pilgrim, ambler, rambler. Gambling on good boots, true maps and fair weather. Risking the lurking terror, the dead-end-street of moribund, lonely thoughts. Oh, that way madness lies. Freedom in solitariness. But 'in solitary' means 'in prison'.

Talking man: sell, sell, sell. Don't see the problem, see the opportunity. Ten per cent inspiration, ninety per cent perspiration. Offer the sweetener, close the deal. Cost, quality, time. Motorway mania. Speed, speed, speed. Eighty, ninety, one hundred miles an hour. Crash and breakdown. (Now can we talk about something more interesting like beechwoods, God or rainbows?)

Working man: employer, employee, self-employed, unemployed, usefully employed, uselessly employed, working for money, working for pleasure, work for work's sake, digging with spade or pen. What is work, anyhow?

Cultural, philosophical, spiritual man: that highbrow, potentially pretentious triumvirate of the aesthetic, the pathetic and the ascetic. Who are these tricksters?

Child-man: the rattle may have been thrown out of the pram, but the baby was not thrown out with the bathwater. To play like a bear cub, a dolphin, or a kitten. Mindless, mindful play.

Sensual man: The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice. DH LAWRENCE

Silent man: Ohhhh ... hhhh ... blissful silence ...

I am or have been all these and many more personae. Yet, mysteriously, none of these. Or perhaps myriad aspects of each.

Who am I?

What am I?

Where am I?

Why am I?  

Remembrance Of Things Past

What with the little cyber-wave of interest in DH Lawrence breaking through Blogworld at the moment, and what with the recent two-part TV adaptation of The Rainbow and Women In Love (which wasn't quite as bad as I feared), and what with Mothers' Day coming round recently, I've been meaning to post this incredible poem for a few days - but haven't got round to it till now. It featured in last Saturday's Guardian Review, and forms part of a short collection called Ten Poems About Mothers edited by Jenny Swann and published by Candlestick Press.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

DH LAWRENCE

Lawrence: Firebrand And Feminist

My heart soared when I read Rachel Cusk's eulogy to DH Lawrence in yesterday's Guardian Review. Can  a writer ever have been more reviled, misrepresented and misunderstood? I clearly remember having heated arguments about him with ardent German feminist teachers in the early 1970s (I was a student teacher in Frankfurt at the time). They seemed convinced Lawrence was a filthy-minded male chauvinist pig. Never in history could a particular literary view have been further from the truth. His writing is nearer to the sacred than the smutty. He's male, certainly, but in The Rainbow and Women In Love - his two greatest novels - he reveals himself not as a chauvinist but actually as a proto-feminist.

Long-standing readers of this blog will know how highly I rate Lawrence in my own personal pantheon of artists. Lawrence was a ground-breaking, revolutionary writer in his subject matter, in the way he wrote and in the language which he used. And in The Rainbow he documented the end of the Victorian era and the birth of the modern age in a manner so brilliantly original that no one else, in my opinion, came close to rivalling it.

One of the things I love most about his style is how he juxtaposes the spiritual and the earthy, and marries a kind of ecstatic, Biblical, mystical language with a more modern tone of rawness, exactness, almost brusqueness. He rejects those emblematic, 'universal' characters we encounter so often in Victorian fiction, and champions a more rounded and rough-edged individuality. He rescues the sensual body from its rigidly intellectual Victorian straitjacket and sets it free. He sees the future of women as one of liberation from drudgery, domestication and male domination, and envisions for them a new world of education, meaningful work and independence of thought. Much of his fiction explores this excitingly fresh emotional relationship between men and emancipated women. Though, at the same time, his view about the modern era is complex - for he's also pessimistic about growing industrialisation and our subsequent alienation from nature and agrarian life.

Cusk quotes this passage from the opening pages of The Rainbow. I think it captures well the lyrical muscularity and provocative intensity of Lawrence's writing: They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and inter-relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. Anyone else detect stylistic echoes of the King James Bible here?

It's a term to be used sparingly, but I would have no hesitation in calling Lawrence a 'genius'. One of the things I find most remarkable and inspiring about him is how he achieved artistic greatness from such humble origins: his father was a miner and he was brought up in an ordinary Nottinghamshire mining town. (Pretty much all the leading literary figures of his day - many of whom he later got to know - were from highly educated, upper-middle-class backgrounds.) And instead of disguising or rejecting his working class roots (though it must be said his mother had been a schoolmistress, and was far more educated than his barely literate father), he celebrated them through the vitality and imaginative power of his writing.

Rachel Cusk ends her article like this: But Lawrence possessed the bitter knowledge born of his own experience: that originality and truth will always meet with rejection by the common mind. It was to the individual that he addressed himself, for it is as individuals that we recognise truth, and as individuals that we read. This is why Lawrence was a writer; and why reading him remains a subversive, transformative, life-altering act.

(A two-part adaptation of The Rainbow and Women In Love will be broadcast on BBC4 on Thursday 24 and 31 March.)

Winter-Weary

Ah come, come quickly, spring!
come and lift us towards our culmination, we myriads;
we who have never flowered, like patient cactuses.
Come and lift us to our end, to blossom, bring us to our summer
we who are winter-weary in the winter of the world.

DH LAWRENCE Craving For Spring

I'm sure there's a surge of spring in the air today . . . or could it just be wishful thinking?

Land's End And Beyond

Along the path I often came across ponies grazing the grassy, plant-rich margins between cliff and farmland. Without selective grazing by livestock, invasive species - such as birch trees and brambles - would soon take over, reducing the biodiversity of these beautiful, protected strips...

I walked on past Porthtowan and Portreath to Godrevy Point. Off Godrevy Point lies Godrevy Island. The lighthouse on this island was the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf's introspective, innovative novel, To The Lighthouse. Virginia's family, the Stephens, used to lease a holiday villa (Tallend House) just round the bay in St Ives...

From here the official path follows an awkward, undulating ridge of sand dunes, but I took the easier option, and simply walked down the long stretch of Towans beach. It seemed miles to Hayle, where, unusually, the route joins a busy road circling the Hayle estuary. I skirted Lelant churchyard, regained the shoreline, then finally entered St Ives. It had been a long day and I was tired. My B&B was quite delightful - a low, stone terraced cottage opposite the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden. It was spotlessly clean and most artistically furnished. It catered for walkers only, and I was the only guest there. Later I strolled along the quay at St Ives' harbour. It was early evening and the tide was out...

The next day I set out to cover the thirteen and a half miles from St Ives to Pendeen. The guide book warned this was the toughest stage of the whole walk. It was right. To make matters worse, it rained for most of the day, and the greasy rocks and hidden depressions underfoot were treacherous. I slipped many times, though not disastrously. At midday I turned inland for half a mile, seeking a rest and some lunch at the Tinners' Arms in Zennor. Big mistake. If you take off your raingear, perch on a comfy stool at the bar of a pub, slurp a huge bowl of home-made soup, then knock back a couple of pints of Cornish bitter... you really don't feel like going back outside again. But, eventually, back outside I went - groaning - into the murk and the drizzle...

DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived here in Zennor during the First World War. Their relationship could be a fiery one. After one quarrel it's documented that Lawrence chased Frieda round the rooms of Higher Tregarthen - the cottage they rented for £5 a year - scattering furniture and shouting 'I'll kill her! I'll kill her!' And, on another occasion, Frieda smashed in fury an earthenware plate over Lawrence's head from behind. Lawrence hardly took pains to endear himself to the Cornish population. He once opined: 'I don't like these people. They are like insects gone cold, living only for money, for dirt. They are foul in this. They all ought to die.' Though he then added, rather lamely: 'Not that I've seen much of them. I've been laid up in bed!' Unsurprisingly, the locals grew more and more wary of this eccentric writer and his German-born wife. Finally their cottage was searched, and the police ordered the couple to leave Cornwall within three days - under suspicion of spying.

I won't go into detail about the rest of the afternoon. Suffice to say, I swore and grumbled and staggered and stumbled my way to Pendeen, where I collapsed with a whimpering sigh onto a big double bed in my room at the North Inn. I don't think I even took off my boots. But much later that night, in the pub bar, I ate one of the best curries I'd ever had in my life. The bar was lively. No canned music, no slot machines - just good conversation. So, unexpectedly, the day did end with some pleasure and satisfaction after all...

It was Wednesday 18 August: a special day. For, that day, I would reach Land's End, and the country's 'corner' would be turned. I raced along like a demon, all the trials and tribulations of yesterday mere blown chaff in the memory. Here I am nearing Cape Cornwall...

... and here I am bidding it farewell just a few moments later! I was keen to reach Land's End, England's most south-westerly point (not its most southerly - that's Lizard Point, on the Lizard Peninsula, which lay further on)...

Beyond Sennen Cove, it was only a few more miles to Land's End. At last!

This is the 'First And Last Refreshment House In England'. I didn't go in. It was packed with day trippers. Disappointingly, the whole area resembled an American theme park. So I quickly left, turned the 'corner', and was soon dancing along the path under airy, blue skies through some of the most spectacular cliff panoramas I'd yet seen...

Beautiful, Scandalous Taormina

After Cefalù we turned Sicily's north-eastern corner and edged down the coast to beautiful Taormina. (Sicily is commonly represented by the three-legged trinacria, a symbol of the island's three 'corners'. The head at its centre is that of the Gorgon Medusa, whose hair was turned into snakes by the goddess Athene. The three legs denote the three coastlines of Sicily - considered as gorgeous as the legs of a beautiful woman. Dante, in Paradiso, refers to Sicily by its original name of Trinacria, calling it la bella Trinacria.)

Like Cefalù, Taormina has long been a place of refuge for artists, writers and musicians. It was particularly attractive to English emigres - more remote than Florence, Naples or even Palermo, so the more dedicated, adventurous and, dare I say, eccentric travellers tended to end up there. It's not hard to see why they liked it so much. Goethe pronounced it a little patch of Paradise...

And DH Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover here - as well as numerous poems, short stories and travel pieces. Lawrence had eloped with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his Nottingham University professors, and embarked on a bohemian life of constant travelling - visiting France, Germany, Italy, South America, Ceylon, Australia, the USA and Mexico. They stayed two years (1920-22) in Taormina, in a house called Fontana Vecchia, which was built in the mid-1600s and is the oldest dwelling on the town's east side. 30 years later Truman Capote also lived here for a while. It's now in private ownership, and you can't really see much, only the back view from the road...

Lawrence probably based the character of Constance Chatterley on a real-life (unmarried) woman from Taormina who took up with a Sicilian farmer. Their naked frolicking in the olive groves apparently shocked the whole town! It seems Lawrence took this germ of a story and from it created his great novel - a book which caused a huge scandal in its day, and for a long time afterwards. Never before had a romantic novel portrayed a sexually liberated woman so explicitly - with hints of a subtle pacifism to boot (Lawrence places Clifford Chatterley in a wheelchair). The novel was finally published in Florence in 1928, but it wasn't until 1960, after a notorious obscenity trial, that it appeared in Britain in its uncensored form.

The other exceptional house in Taormina is the Casa Cuseni, often described as the town's finest residence. It was built in 1905 by the painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson, aided by his friend the artist Frank Brangwyn, who had once been apprenticed to William Morris. Consequently it's a mixture of Sicilian and Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts Movement styles. This is Kitson's own painting of the front, sea-facing view of the house...

Kitson owned the first motor car in Taormina, which he used to ferry the injured during the earthquake of 1908, and the first swimming pool, which he sited to reflect the moonlit slopes of Mount Etna. After his death in 1948 his niece Daphne Phelps took over this delightful villa, opening it up to paying guests - a story she tells in her book, A House In Sicily (Virago, 1999).

When Daphne herself died in January 2006 at the age of 94, family members found it difficult to keep the house going - and I see it's now up for sale. It had many famous visitors over the years: Bertrand Russell, Tennessee Williams, Henry Faulkner, Roald Dahl - and DH Lawrence, of course (whenever his back was turned, Frieda set about the task of seducing much of the male population of Taormina, including passing tradesman etc, whom she was in the habit of greeting at the door in the nude!)

As readers of this blog will know, DH Lawrence is one of my favourite writers (no mean painter either). His four great novels - Sons And Lovers, The Rainbow, Woman In Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover - I still find wonderful. His travel essays are some of the best ever written in the genre (Sea And Sardinia came out of a visit made to Sardinia from Taormina), and his poetry is powerful, muscular and sensual.

I'd like to do more in-depth posts about Lawrence's writings and artistic philosophy at some point, but in the meantime here's a short extract from his poem The Snake. Lawrence is in the garden of Fontana Vecchia - in his pyjamas because of the heat - when a venomous snake comes for a drink at his water trough. After an internal debate about whether to kill it or not, he half-heartedly throws a log at the snake, which then disappears into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front... Lawrence immediately regrets his cowardly action, and ends up despising the voice inside him which had urged him to be a man and kill the snake.

Someone was before me at my water trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On that day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

I know of no other poem about an animal, and about a relationship between a man and an animal, quite as powerful as this one - though some by Ted Hughes come near. It's a quite extraordinary blend of subjective feeling and objective observation.

The Face Behind The Face

Where does it live, the face behind the face?
Everyone ought
To know all there is
About the face that is his.

People often haven't a clue
About their very own I.
Each of us makes his own
Best defence counsel.

Nero, apparently, thought
He was a poet,
Hitler thought that he
Would redeem the world from woe!

The mean man thinks 'I am so generous'.
The shallow man: 'I am profound.'
Sometimes God will sigh: 'I am a worm.'
The worm hisses: 'I am God!'

The worm climbs arrogantly upwards.
The coward rejoices to be in the clouds.
Only the free man
Thinks:
'I am a slave.'

The Face Behind The Face by YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO (Translated by ARTHUR BOYARS and SIMON FRANKLIN)

Have we one face, two faces or many faces?
Which is our real face?
What is our 'very own I'? Have we a clue about it?
Why does only the free man think he is a slave?

D. H. Lawrence, in his essay Democracy, defines two ideas of the self: the egotistical, self-conscious, materialistic, secondary self of the personality (from the Latin 'persona', a player's mask or a character in a play), and the living, creative, spontaneous, primary self of the spirit.

The Country Of My Heart

...continued...

Yes, of course, the passage below is by D. H. Lawrence, and it's the 1st paragraph of his early short story Odour Of Chrysanthemums. Lawrence sent the story to The Literary Review. (Earlier, Lawrence's girlfriend Jesse Chambers had submitted some of his poems to the same journal.) The Review's editor, Ford Madox Ford, scanned this 1st paragraph late one evening after a long day's reading. He placed the manuscript on the acceptance pile. His secretary looked up and said: "You've got another genius?" Replied Ford: "Yes, and it's a big one this time."

And so it proved to be. This resulted in the publisher Heinemann taking Lawrence on board, and led to Lawrence's astonishing, often controversial output of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings and novels. 4 of these novels, in my opinion, will always remain 4 of the finest novels ever written in the 20th century: Sons And Lovers, The Rainbow, Women In Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The photo below shows the restored headstocks of Brinsley Colliery, the colliery mentioned in the extract, and the actual place where Lawrence's father worked as a miner. This lay near the large mining village of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence was born in a small end-of-terrace house at 8a Victoria Street. This is now a museum. I've been there several times - it's little more than an hour from here - and it's fascinating. In fact the whole area round Eastwood and the Erewash Valley and along the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border - just west of the M1 motorway above Nottingham - is extraordinarily evocative of Lawrence and much of his work. So many of his characters, situations and locations were drawn from this small, unexceptional corner of England - the part of England he called 'The Country of my Heart'.

I've got so much to say about Lawrence, who is one of my very favourite writers, if not my best loved writer of all. But I'll do it gradually - I don't want to risk boring everyone to death!

Partners In Time

A Marriage

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

This poem by R. S. Thomas reminds me of this by D. H. Lawrence, the concluding lines of his poem Bei Hennef:

You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fulfilment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else? It is perfect enough.
It is perfectly complete,
You and I,
What more - ?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

And this reminds me of...

...to be continued...

Aeolian

Although it's probably far too early to think about spring being around the corner, in the garden the winter aconites are in flower and the snowdrop, daffodil and crocus shoots are all coming through. Here's a poem I wrote about the coming of last year's spring. We all need a bit of cheering up on this wet and miserable January morning.

aeolian

long months hibernating
then hearing your voice melting snowfall

no axe breaking the frozen sea
but soft wind warming cold river

from dark earth crocus flowers
and cherry blossoms on twisted twigs

black crows strut on black earth
tricking the eye

and coyote howls the world
back into light

Both the the crow and the coyote figure - often as "trickster" characters - in various creation myths. Aeolus is the Greek god of wind. So "aeolian" means "carried by the wind" - new life, or inspiration perhaps. Coleridge mentions the strings of this Aeolian lute in his great ode, Dejection; and Lawrence talks of the wind that blows through me in his poem Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through. The 3rd line is supposed to recall Franz Kafka's idea that a book (art) must be the axe to break the frozen sea within us.

We Are Transmitters

As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.

That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.

Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it's only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Waiting For The Cock To Crow

It's amazing how often we sleep on a problem and the solution is there in the morning. I went to bed last night reflecting on yesterday's poem. I've just woken abruptly - the idea fresh in my mind that Peter denied Christ 3 times and that this is the key to the meaning of the 3 verses with their, if you like, 3 denials. I don't know where this idea came from. I wasn't consciously thinking towards it. I've never read any critical works on Seferis. I hardly know his poetry. It was as if someone had put the idea there. Very strange.

But I suppose this subconscious process, often active while we are sleep, is the basis of much creative thought. Artists, writers, many creative people often feel their work comes from a source "out there" - or, conversely, from somewhere "deep within" - which they are powerless to control. They are simply agents being channelled by a greater force. D. H. Lawrence, in his poem Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through, writes of the wind that blows through me. I've just looked up the poem, reminded myself of it. In it he mentions three strange angels. 3 again!

The human mind is an extraordinary thing. I always like the idea that the mind is a limitless place, that you can travel forever its depths and infinities. That you can go much further "inwards" than the physical body can ever journey "outwards".

But back to the poem Denial by Seferis. Does it mean we are living our lives somehow in the wrong way - though we can't help it since we are human and nature is a force over which we have no control - but we have the power to change? That our passion and desire are somehow misdirected - so the water tastes bad? The poem seems on the surface easy to understand. In fact it's quite mysterious.