Читать книгу Out of Sheer Rage - Geoff Dyer - Страница 7

Looking back it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of D. H. Lawrence; on the other, it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray it was meant to delay and alleviate. Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself. If, I said to myself, if I can apply myself to a sober – I can remember saying that word ‘sober’ to myself, over and over, until it acquired a hysterical, near-demented, ring – if I can apply myself to a sober, academic study of D. H. Lawrence then that will force me to pull myself together. I succeeded in applying myself but what I applied myself to – or so it seems to me now, now that I am lost in the middle of what is already a far cry from the sober academic study I had envisaged – was to pulling apart the thing, the book, that was intended to make me pull myself together.

I had decided years earlier that I would one day write a book about D. H. Lawrence, a homage to the writer who had made me want to become a writer. It was a cherished ambition and as part of my preparation for realising this cherished ambition I had avoided reading anything by Lawrence so that at some point in the future I could go back to him if not afresh then at least not rock-stale. I didn’t want to go back to him passively, didn’t want to pick up a copy of Sons and Lovers aimlessly, to pass the time. I wanted to read him with a purpose. Then, after years of avoiding Lawrence, I moved into the phase of what might be termed pre-preparation. I visited Eastwood, his birthplace, I read biographies, I amassed a hoard of photographs which I kept in a once-new document wallet, blue, on which I had written ‘D.H.L.: Photos’ in determined black ink. I even built up an impressive stack of notes with Lawrence vaguely in mind but these notes, it is obvious to me now, actually served not to prepare for and facilitate the writing of a book about Lawrence but to defer and postpone doing so. There is nothing unusual about this. All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for. My case was more extreme for not only was taking notes about Lawrence a way of putting off writing a study of – and homage to – the writer who had made me want to become a writer, but this study I was putting off writing was itself a way of putting off and postponing another book.

Although I had made up my mind to write a book about Lawrence I had also made up my mind to write a novel, and while the decision to write the book about Lawrence was made later it had not entirely superseded that earlier decision. At first I’d had an overwhelming urge to write both books but these two desires had worn each other down to the point where I had no urge to write either. Writing them both at the same time was inconceivable and so these two equally overwhelming ambitions first wore each other down and then wiped each other out. As soon as I thought about working on the novel I fell to thinking that it would be much more enjoyable to write my study of Lawrence. As soon as I started making notes on Lawrence I realised I was probably sabotaging forever any chance of writing my novel which, more than any other book I had written, had to be written immediately, before another protracted bout of labour came between me and the idea for what I perceived as a rambling, sub-Bernhardian rant of a novel. It was now or never. So I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of this to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either book. All I did was switch between two – empty – files on my computer, one conveniently called C:\DHL, the other C:\NOVEL, and sent myself ping-ponging back and forth between them until, after an hour and a half of this, I would turn off the computer because the worst thing of all, I knew, was to wear myself out in this way. The best thing was to do nothing, to sit calmly, but there was no calm, of course: instead, I felt totally desolate because I realised that I was going to write neither my study of D. H. Lawrence nor my novel.

Eventually, when I could bear it no longer, I threw myself wholeheartedly into my study of Lawrence because, whereas my novel was going to take me further into myself, the Lawrence book – a sober academic study of Lawrence – would have the opposite effect, of taking me out of myself.

I felt happy because I had made up my mind. Now that I had made up my mind to throw myself wholeheartedly into one of the possible books I had been thinking about writing I saw that it didn’t actually matter which book I wrote because books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment. The important thing was to avoid awful paralysing uncertainty and indecision. Anything was better than that. In practice, however, ‘throwing myself wholeheartedly’ into my study of Lawrence meant making notes, meant throwing myself half-heartedly into the Lawrence book. In any case, ‘throwing myself wholeheartedly into my study of Lawrence’ – another phrase which became drained of meaning as it spun round my head – was actually impossible because, in addition to deciding whether or not I was going to write my study of Lawrence, I had to decide where I was going to write it – if I was going to write it. ‘If’ not when because once my initial euphoric resolve had collapsed the possibility of writing the novel made itself felt again as an attractive option. And even if I didn’t decide to write my study of Lawrence I still had to decide where I was going to live because, irrespective of whether or not I was going to write my study of Lawrence, I still had to live somewhere – but if I was going to write a book about Lawrence then that brought in a whole range of variables which I would need to weigh up when considering where to live, even though deciding where to live was already complicated by a massive number of variables.

One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on either the Lawrence book or the novel was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose – but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose. It’s easy to make choices when you have things hampering you – a job, kids’ schools – but when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable.

Even money wasn’t an issue since at this stage I was living in Paris and nowhere could have been more expensive than Paris. The exchange rate got worse by the month and Paris became more expensive by the month. Money was an issue insofar as it made me think I would rather be anywhere than Paris but in terms of where to go next, where to move to, it was almost irrelevant. What the money situation – more exactly, the exchange rate situation – in Paris did was to emphasise that although I thought I had settled in Paris, really I had just been passing through, extremely slowly. That is all anyone English or American can do in Paris: pass through. You may spend ten years passing through but essentially you are still a sightseer, a tourist. You come and go, the waiters remain. The longer I stayed the more powerful it became, this feeling that I was just passing through. I had thought about subscribing to Canal Plus as a way of making myself feel more settled but what was the point in subscribing to Canal Plus when, in all probability, I would be moving on in a few months? Obviously the way to make myself more settled was to acquire some of the trappings of permanence but there never seemed any point acquiring the aptly named trappings of permanence when in a couple of months I might be moving on, might well be moving on, would almost certainly be moving on, because there was nothing to keep me where I was. Had I acquired some of the trappings of permanence I might have stayed put but I never acquired any of the trappings of permanence because I knew that the moment these trappings had been acquired I would be seized with a desire to leave, to move on, and I would then have to free myself from these trappings. And so, lacking any of the trappings of permanence, I was perpetually on the brink of potential departure. That was the only way I could remain anywhere: to be constantly on the brink not of actual but of potential departure. If I felt settled I would want to leave, but if I was on the brink of leaving then I could stay, indefinitely, even though staying would fill me with still further anxiety because, since I appeared to be staying, what was the point in living as though I were not staying but merely passing through?

These were all issues I intended to address, in different ways, either in mediated form in my study of Lawrence or, directly, in my novel, or vice versa, but there was an additional practical complication too. Since I was obliged to spend a certain amount of time away from wherever I lived, and since the rent on my Paris apartment was so high (and, because of the exchange rate, was becoming higher every month) I was frequently obliged to sub-let it (strictly speaking to sub-sub-let it since I was sub-letting it myself) and since, if you are sub-letting your apartment, you do not want to acquire too many valuable or personal items which might get destroyed, it then comes about that you yourself are living in conditions arranged primarily for those sub-letting from you: effectively, you are sub-letting from yourself. That’s what I was doing: sub-letting from myself (strictly speaking, sub-sub-letting), living in an apartment devoid of anything that might have made it my apartment in the sense of my home. I had conspired to arrange for myself the worst of all possible worlds and my days were spent in this unbreakable circle of anxiety, always going over the same ground, again and again, always with some new variable, but never with any change. I had to do something to break this circle and so, when Marie Merisnil from whom I was sub-letting my apartment said that she wanted to give up the apartment because she was marrying the awful Jean-Louis whom I loathed even though he had once lent me a pair of elegant, pale blue pyjamas when I was in hospital for a few days, I decided to sign a contract that would make me the official tenant (as opposed to the illegal sub-tenant). I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to stay in an apartment where I had actually been extremely unhappy for ninety per cent of my stay, where ninety per cent of my stay had been dominated by anxiety about (a) whether I was going to stay and (b) whether I was going to start a novel or start my study of Lawrence, but as soon as the managing agents said that they were unwilling to let the place to me – a foreigner with no job and no steady income, I was a poor prospect in anyone’s eyes, even my own – I became convinced that I had to stay in this apartment where I had been sublimely happy, that there was, in fact, nowhere else on earth where I could hope to be as content. Eventually my rich friend, Hervé Landry (‘Money Landry’, as I liked to call him), owner of several houses, including one on the Greek island of Alonissos, agreed to stand as guarantor. The managing agents relented, and I signed the lease that made me the official locataire.

I was ecstatic. For about five minutes. Then I realised I had taken on an awesome, not to say crippling responsibility. And far from solving the problem of where to live I had actually put a lid on it so that now my uncertainty was boiling away under pressure, threatening to blow me apart. The one thing I could be sure of was that I had to leave this apartment, where I had never known a moment’s peace of mind, as soon as possible. If I stayed here, I saw now, I would fail to write both my novel and my study of Lawrence. That much was obvious. The trouble, the rub, was that I had to give three months’ notice and therefore had to predict how I would be feeling three months hence which was very difficult. It was all very well deciding today that I wanted to leave but what counted was how I was going to be feeling three months from now. You could be perfectly happy today, I would say to myself, and three months from now you could be suicidal, precisely because you will see the enormity of the mistake you made by not renouncing the lease three months earlier. On the other hand, I would say to myself, you could be in utter despair today, convinced that another day in this apartment would kill you, convinced that it would be impossible to make any progress with your novel or your study of Lawrence and in three months’ time you could see that it was only by remaining here that you survived the depression which will undoubtedly engulf you the moment you quit the apartment, as the rash act of renunciation committed three months previously will oblige you to do. Round and round I went, making no progress, resolving one thing one moment and another the next. ‘I can’t bear it any longer,’ I would say to myself in the way that people always say ‘I can’t bear it any longer’ to themselves, as a way, that is, of enabling them to go on bearing the unbearable. Eventually I really could bear it no longer, not for another second, and so I wrote to the agents and officially renounced the flat, claiming that ‘professional’ reasons had obliged me to return to England. The agents wrote back acknowledging my decision to leave the apartment. I wrote back saying that professional reasons now obliged me to remain in Paris. Could I therefore un-renounce my apartment? Relieved to be free of the trouble of re-letting it, the agents agreed to let me remain in the apartment which I had just renounced. And so it went on: I wrote again to renounce the apartment ‘definitively’. They sent a somewhat curt acknowledgement of my decision. I wrote back changing my definitive decision to leave to a definitive decision to stay but it was too late, I had to leave.

Now that I did have to leave I was faced with the terrible prospect of having nowhere to live, of having to decide where to live without delay, and only then did I realise how much this apartment meant to me, how it had actually become my home. Although I’d believed that I had hardly any of my things in this apartment there were actually many of my own things that I now had to find a place for. Over the years I had actually acquired quite a few of the trappings of permanence. I even owned a surprising amount of furniture, some of it rather nice. Where was I going to store it? And what about me? Where was I going to store myself? Rome was a possibility. Laura, my almost-wife, had a lovely apartment in Rome and was always arguing in favour of our settling there but though Rome was an excellent place to spend time, I knew how depressed I always became there after a couple of months, especially during the winter. And even before I became depressed I knew how irritating I always found Rome, essentially because of the irrational closing times of shops, and the way films are dubbed into Italian. Still, Rome was a possibility – or would have been had Laura not sub-let her apartment. She had come to work in Paris for six months, partly to be with me, partly because this nice offer of work had come her way, but now she was back in Rome, sub-letting an apartment from someone else because her own apartment was sub-let. This is the true condition of western society on the brink of the millennium: everyone sub-letting from everyone else, no one quite sure whether they are leaving or staying, torn between being settlers and nomads, ending up as sub-letters. In the next few weeks she had to decide whether to continue to sub-let her flat or to move back in – and that depended in part on what I wanted to do because although we were used to spending a good deal of time apart we both felt that the moment had come when we should spend more time together, should even think about ‘making our lives together’ on a daily as well as an emotional basis. We already had our shared motto, almost shared, more accurately, because whereas Laura’s version was ‘Together Forever’ mine was ‘Together Whenever’. Laura liked the idea of us sticking together ‘through thick and thin’ whereas I opted for the more pessimistic ‘through thin and thinner’. I was more than ready to put these semantic differences aside since if I was ever going to make any progress with my book about Lawrence – and get a reasonable shot at happiness into the bargain – I knew I would have to ‘throw in my lot’ with a woman as Lawrence had done with Frieda. Besides, I had already spent far too much time on my own. If I spent much more time on my own I would end up spending the rest of my life on my own. Even my crippling indecisiveness was primarily a symptom of having spent so much time on my own. In a couple decisions are argued and debated; when you are alone there is no one to argue and debate with. To render my solitude bearable, therefore, I had internalised the dynamic of a couple who spent their time bickering ceaselessly about where to live and what to do. The problem was that the woman with whom I going to throw in my lot was also chronically indecisive and it was only my still greater indecisiveness that led her to believe that she was the kind of woman who knew her own mind and stuck to her guns. Although she often argued in favour of living in Rome, for example, she was always thinking about settling in Paris, her favourite city, and frequently pined for America where she had grown up.

I pined for it too. I thought of New York where I had lived and New Orleans where I had sort of lived, and San Francisco where I would love to live and where Laura had grown up, but even as I thought of these places I knew I would not go to live in any of them, especially New Orleans which I thought of and pined for on an almost daily basis. Even though I had such fond memories of sitting by the Mississippi I knew that I would never live in New Orleans again. Even though at some point in the day I always found myself wishing I was back in New Orleans, sitting by the Mississippi, I knew that I would never live there again and this knowledge made me feel that my life was over with. I am the kind of person, I thought to myself, who will spend the rest of his life saying ‘I lived in New Orleans for a while’ when in fact what I meant was that I had spent three months there, dying of loneliness, banging away at some useless novel simply for the companionship afforded by writing.

So where were we to live? More exactly – habits of solitude and selfishness die hard – where was the best place for me to live in order to make progress with my study of Lawrence? One of the reasons I had become so unsettled in Paris was because it had only a tangential connection with Lawrence. Paris was an excellent place to write a novel, especially a novel set in Paris, but it was not a good place to write a study of Lawrence. He hated Paris, called it, in fact, ‘the city of dreadful night’ or some such (I had the exact phrase in my notes somewhere). If I was to make any progress with my study of Lawrence, if I was to stand any chance of making any progress with my study of Lawrence, I knew that I had to live in a place which had some strong connection with him, a place where I could, so to speak, feel the Lawrentian vibes: Sicily, for example, or New Mexico, Mexico, Australia. The choice was immense because Lawrence couldn’t make up his mind where to live. In the last years of his life he was always writing to friends asking if they had any ideas about where he might live. ‘Where does one want to live? Have you any bright ideas on the subject? Did you get a house west of Marseilles, as you said? How is it there?’ On this occasion he was asking William Gerhardie. A little later it was an ex-neighbour from Florence: ‘Where does one want to live? Tell me if you can! – how do you like London?’ Then it was Ottoline Morrell’s turn: ‘Where does one want to live, finally?’

I had made this list of examples of Lawrence’s anxiety about where to live because it reassured me in my own uncertainty; either it had reassured me or it had led me to become undecided, I was not sure. It was impossible to say. Who can tell? Perhaps the inability to decide where to live which I saw as one of the factors in preventing my making any progress with my study of Lawrence was actually part of my preparation for beginning to write it.

The one place I could be sure I couldn’t write my study of Lawrence was England, which was a shame because I was actually feeling drawn to England. I was thinking of English telly in fact. I had an urge to be back there, watching telly, but moving back to England meant moving back into what, in my notes, I referred to by the Lawrentian phrase ‘the soft centre of my being’. Being abroad – anywhere – meant being at the edge of myself, of what I was capable of. In England, for one thing, I could speak English whereas if I went to Rome I would be linguistically stranded. Not like Lawrence who had fluent Italian. He had a knack for languages (at one point he even began learning Russian from a grammar book) and although he claimed to hate speaking foreign languages, that was late in the day, by which time he had learnt several and had become weary of shifting from one to another. For my part I had not even attempted to learn French for the first six months of my time in Paris because it had seemed inconceivable that I could ever learn a foreign language. During that period my most intense relationships were all with cats and dogs, creatures with whom I could establish a bond of non-verbal sympathy. Since then I had picked up a bit of French, rather a lot actually, enough, certainly, to express grammatically wayward opinions. In fact now, after months of struggling to cope with the most rudimentary situations, now that I was on the brink of leaving, there was nothing I loved more than speaking French. By my standards I was fluent in French and speaking this garbled version of fluent French was one of the great sources of happiness in my life. Unless, that is, I was in a temper – which I was frequently. I could not express anger in French and this made me frustrated and angry and to express this anger and frustration I had to resort to English. In Rome I would be back to square one.

In Rome there was no chance of learning Italian because Laura is bilingual and has even more of a knack for languages than Lawrence. This is one of the things I first loved about Laura. Falling in love with Laura and all her languages was in some ways a premonition of the way that I would myself come to love speaking foreign languages, French specifically. Laura’s method of learning a new language is to watch soap operas in that language. After a couple of episodes she has the simpler tenses off pat and within a week she is fluent. She is consequently a very poor teacher of Italian and I could see that after six months of watching soaps in Rome I would still speak barely a word of Italian because although I love the idea of speaking foreign languages I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort. Over the years I had got out of the habit of doing anything that required any effort whatsoever and so there was no chance of learning Italian and scarcely any prospect of getting on with my study of Lawrence which would require a massive, not to say Herculean labour.

I fretted and wondered. I sold my furniture and each day my apartment became less homely. Laura was pressing me for a decision because she had to make a decision about her apartment. Was I coming to Rome or not? More to the point, why was I even prevaricating like this? I was mad not to go to Rome, Rome was in Italy, the country where the Lawrences had spent more time than any other; it was within easy reach of Sicily where he had lived, and if I was to stand any chance of making any progress with my study of Lawrence it was probably the very best place I could be.

As soon as I arrived I knew I had made the right decision. My mind was made up: I was ready to begin my study of Lawrence. The only trouble was the heat. The heat was tremendous and nowhere in Rome was hotter than Laura’s apartment. She had been so pleased to get back into her own place that she had forgotten how hot it would be. Heat is like that. In the course of winter unbearable heat cools in memory and becomes attractive, desirable. Now it was terribly hot. Even the light was hot. We tried to keep the light at bay, but it drilled through the keyhole, squeezed under the door, levered open the smallest of cracks in the shutters. My mind was made up, I was ready to work – but it was too hot to work. It was so hot we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep. We were in a kind of trance. Then, one infernal night, Hervé called – a bad line – and invited us to spend the summer with him and Mimi on Alonissos, which was where he was calling from. ‘What do you think?’ Laura asked, but her eyes had already decided.

‘I’ll learn Greek,’ she said. She had been eager to get back to her apartment but now she was desperate to leave. From my point of view six weeks on a Greek island, relatively speaking a cool Greek island, seemed a lovely prospect: the perfect time and the perfect place to begin my book on D. H. Lawrence. That’s what I’ll do, I said to myself, I’ll start my study of D. H. Lawrence in Alonissos. It was the perfect place. I had everything I needed except my edition of The Complete Poems which I had left with a friend in Paris. Not that it mattered: just before the British Council Library in Rome had closed for the summer I had taken out several volumes of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters and they would keep me going for a good while. I had a biography to check dates, copies of a few of the novels . . . It was perfect. According to Hervé, Laura and I would have a room to ourselves where, in the mornings, I could begin writing my study of D. H. Lawrence. It was perfect. It would have been helpful to have had my edition of The Complete Poems with me but it was not indispensable to my beginning the study. The important thing was that I had this chunk of uninterrupted time with no distractions. I should have taken out Volume 4 of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters from the British Council Library, but Volumes 2 and 3, which I did get out, were certainly enough to be going on with. I was more concerned about not having my edition of The Complete Poems which, for my purposes, was probably the single most important book of Lawrence’s, without which I would be able to make only very limited progress on my study of Lawrence, such limited progress, in fact, that it would be scarcely worth starting. My copy of The Complete Poems was crammed with notes and annotations and without it I was probably better off relaxing on Alonissos, gathering my strength and marshalling my ideas on Lawrence rather than actually trying to write anything. Suddenly that book of poems which, until two weeks previously, had been by my side constantly for two months and which I hadn’t even opened in that time – hence the decision to leave it in a box at a friend’s house in Paris – seemed indispensable to any progress.

Fortunately a friend of that friend was flying from Paris to Rome and he agreed to pick up my copy. We met at the San Calisto, I bought him a coffee and he handed over the book. Simple as that. It was not just a good feeling, being reunited with my copy of The Complete Poems on the night before we were flying to Alonissos: it was an omen, a clear sign that I was meant to start my study of Lawrence that summer.

After retrieving The Complete Poems, Laura and I headed home to pack. With all the books by and about Lawrence my luggage was incredibly heavy. Not just inconveniently so but excess baggagely so. I took out a few books that I didn’t need, which I had only packed because they were thin – Mornings in Mexico, Apocalypse – but these were so light as to make no difference and I put them back in the bag I had just taken them out of. I looked at the copy of The Complete Poems and felt suddenly sure that if I took it to Alonissos it would lie unopened for six weeks just as it had lain unopened in Paris for two months; but if I didn’t take it to Alonissos I was equally sure that, once I was there, in Alonissos, I would decide that it was indispensable and that, without it, I would be unable even to start my book on Lawrence. If I take it I won’t need it; if I don’t take it I will not be able to get by without it, I said to myself as I packed and unpacked my bag, putting in my copy of The Complete Poems and taking it out again. After a while I decided to leave The Complete Poems and pack the Penguin edition of the Selected Poems but that was a ludicrous compromise since the defining characteristic of the Selected Poems was that it contained none of the poems I needed, the ‘Last Poems’, principally, ‘The Ship of Death’ in particular. It was a straight choice – either the immense bulk of The Complete Poems or nothing – and, once I recognised that the real issue had nothing to do with whether or not I would need to refer to The Complete Poems, a very simple one. The value of The Complete Poems was talismanic: if I had it with me I would be able to begin my book; if I didn’t have it with me then, even if I did not need to refer to it, I would keep thinking that I did and would be unable to begin my book about Lawrence. Put like that The Complete Poems was an essential part of my luggage. I had no choice but to bring it with me; whether I referred to it or not was entirely irrelevant. With that I put The Complete Poems on the top of the pile of essential books by and about Lawrence, pulled my rucksack’s cord sphincter as tight as possible, and propped it by the door, ready for our departure first thing in the morning.

In the morning, before setting off, I took out my copy of The Complete Poems and left for Greece without it.

Another good decision, as it turned out. I didn’t need The Complete Poems because once we were installed on Alonissos I had no impulse to begin my study of D. H. Lawrence anyway. It was not the availability or non-availability of books that was the problem, it was Alonissos itself. We always have this ideal image of being on an island but actually being on an island always turns out to be hellish. For what it is worth, Lawrence wasn’t too keen on islands either. ‘I don’t care for islands, especially very small ones,’ he decided on Île de Port Cros. A week later, as if, first time around, he had simply been trying out an opinion, and had now made up his mind, he announced, definitively: ‘I don’t like little islands.’

Me neither. All you can think of when you are on a small island is the impossibility of leaving when you want to, either because the island you are on is too big and you want to go to a smaller one or because the island is too small and you want to go to a bigger one. When we arrived at Alonissos on the Flying Dolphin the island seemed so beautiful that six weeks did not seem long enough to enjoy it to the full. Hervé’s house had a lovely large terrace with a perfect view of sea and sky, the kind of view you see in posters advertising holidays on idyllic Greek islands.

‘This is paradise,’ I said to Laura, sitting on the terrace, surrounded by sea and sky. ‘I wish we were going to be here for six months.’ Then, after a week, even a fortnight seemed intolerable. Except for looking at the brochure-blue sea and sky – which, after the first couple of days, we scarcely even noticed – there was nothing to do and for that reason it was impossible to get any work done. The best circumstances for writing, I realised within days of arriving on Alonissos, were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.

There was no use blaming my inability to get started on having left my copy of The Complete Poems in Rome because I had it beside me in Alonissos. Yes. At the last possible moment, with the taxi rumbling downstairs, I had dashed back up, retrieved my copy and lugged it all the way to Alonissos where, exactly as predicted, it lay unopened by our bed. Instead I found myself reading one of the books Hervé had brought along, a volume of Rilke’s letters.

‘Il faut travailler, rien que travailler.’ Rilke had gone to Paris in 1902 to write a monograph on Rodin and this exhortation of the sculptor’s had a transforming effect on the twenty-seven-year-old poet. In letter after letter he repeated Rodin’s mantra-like injunction. Immerse yourself in your work: let life fall away, dedicate yourself to the great work. Il faut travailler, rien que travailler.

I found myself repeating it the way Rilke did, trying it out, enjoying the simplicity and faithfulness of the formula, luxuriating in it like a hot bath. Dwelling on it like this, however, was an evasion of work, just as my reading of a hefty volume of Rilke’s letters was an indulgence. I should have been working on my study of D. H. Lawrence and instead I was idling over Rodin’s words. Il faut travailler, rien que travailler. I should be writing my book about D. H. Lawrence, I said to myself, everything else should be subordinate to that – but who can tell where that task begins and ends? Some huge benefit may yet accrue from reading Rilke’s letters. The more I read, in fact, the more convinced I became that a better understanding of Rilke was crucial to my understanding of Lawrence. Had I gone to Alonissos to write a book about Rilke then I would, almost certainly, have been sitting on Hervé’s terrace reading books by Lawrence; as it was, the fact that I was meant to be starting my study of D. H. Lawrence meant that I was sitting there reading the letters of Rilke who, though he was seduced by and persuaded of the truth of Rodin’s exhortation to do nothing but work, found it difficult to submit to it in practice: ‘Already I am wavering in my absolute determination to shut myself up daily, wherever I am and in whatever external circumstances, for so-and-so-many hours for my work’s sake.’ He also wavered about whether work and idleness could be so easily counterposed:

I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction . . .

Now that idea immediately took my fancy, that was an idea I liked a lot. So much so that after a few more days the Rilke letters went the way of The Complete Poems and lay unopened on our bedside table. Everything lay unopened in Alonissos, even the cover of my tennis racket. It was impossible to write on Alonissos, it was impossible to read, and it was impossible to play tennis. Laura found it impossible to make any progress with Greek. It was actually impossible to do anything. I had thought that after working on my book about Lawrence in the mornings I would spend the afternoons playing tennis but there were no courts and so, having spent the mornings not writing my book about Lawrence and not reading Rilke, I spent the afternoons not playing tennis. The last time I had been on a Greek island there were regular, ill-tempered matches between the tourists and the locals. Here there was no football and no tennis. In fact there was no anything. All you could do was eat lunch and jump into the jellyfish-infested sea from the snake-infested rocks of the plaka. We saw a snake there on our third day. Laura and I were walking through the little wood before you get to the rocks and we saw it at the same time. All my life I have dreaded seeing a snake and on Alonissos I saw one. We both saw it at the same time, turned on our heels and fled. Lawrence in his white pyjamas had a rendezvous with his snake; we fled from ours. I wasn’t even sure what happened: either we saw it lying motionless and then, as a result of our panic, it suddenly sidled away or it heard us and began darting away and as a result of this movement we saw it. It all happened too fast: it saw us and fled, we saw it and fled; we hoped we never saw it again and it probably felt the same about us. Not exactly sentiments to make a poem out of.

After that we were nervous about being on the rocks of the plaka because although we saw the snake in the woods it was actually on the sun-warmed rocks of the plaka that the snakes, like us – like us before we saw the snake – liked to bask, like sharks. We were nervous about the sea anyway, because of the jellyfish, and now we were nervous about the rocks, because of the snakes. We were also nervous in bed. We lay there and heard slithery, rustling noises suggesting that things were slithering and rustling outside our door. We lay awake talking about what things they might be.

‘I hate slithery things,’ I said.

‘I hate rustling things,’ said Laura.

‘Some things rustle and slither,’ I said. It was an idiotic conversation and on one level I couldn’t believe we were actually having it. On another level . . . on another level I still couldn’t believe we were having it but eventually it wearied us to the point where we could sleep.

In the morning we had breakfast with Hervé and Mimi, an event dominated by buzzing things: wasps, swarms of them. They came for the honey and the jam. Mimi had a live-and-let-live policy. I wanted to slaughter them all – at least it would have been something to do – but Mimi argued that the best policy was to ignore them.

‘Try ignoring them when you’ve been stung in the mouth, your tongue’s swelling up, you’re choking and you’re looking round for someone who knows how to do an emergency tracheotomy,’ I said. Seeing a wasp crawling over my plate I flattened it with a copy of the local, yoghurt-spotted Greek paper. Mimi looked at me. She was wearing a yellow and black head scarf which may be why I had half a mind to take a swipe at her too.

‘Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern,’ I said. ‘Life is more vivid in the wasp than in the dandelion. Life is more vivid in me than the wasp. The wasp can devour the dandelion. I can destroy the wasp.’ With that Laura and I got up to leave. We were so bored on Alonissos that tempers were getting somewhat frayed. There was nothing to do except pick quarrels with each other and drive faster and faster on the moped along the winding roads of the island. Now that was fun! Even though it was only fun because of the condition of almost catatonic boredom in which we found ourselves – and was itself, therefore, contaminated by boredom to some degree – it was still fun to drive round the island at speed. One way of keeping boredom at bay would have been to make a start on my book about Lawrence in much the same way that he had translated Giovanni Verga on the way to Ceylon and Australia, but making a start on Lawrence seemed more boring than doing nothing. Even writing a postcard required more concentration than I could muster. In a matter of days chronic boredom had come to seem the natural condition of existence and the only response to it was the bored one of zooming round the island on a moped.

In Rome Laura travelled by moped the whole time, it was her way of getting around the city, but in Alonissos we drove around just for the hell of it because there was nothing else to do. We sped along the deserted roads, throttle back, sky in our hair. In Rome I had been a nervous passenger and we had quarrelled many times because I was always shouting out warnings, alerting Laura to danger and thereby, she claimed, taking the fun out of one of the activities she most loved in life which was riding through Rome on her moped. Since there was no danger on Alonissos I even did some of the driving, something I never did in Rome. We leaned into curves, swept through bends, glided down the long inclines of hills, engine off. This proved a terrible mistake. The gradient was such that as we glided down one twisting hill, the moped accelerated with every bend until, just as Laura shouted, ‘Careful!’ we smashed into the cliff wall at 20 mph. Crumph! It was unbelievable. I sat on the floor, stunned. Laura was groaning. I just sat there, moaning and groaning, stunned, hearing Laura groaning.

‘Did you hit your head?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ moaned Laura. I just sat there, moaning and groaning. Whatever we didn’t want to happen had already happened. It was already too late to do anything about it. One moment we were about to crash, the next moment we had crashed. The crash was wedged between these two moments. There wasn’t even time for things to go into slow motion as they allegedly do in the build-up to a crash. Laura was lying on the floor, moaning, now she was sitting up and walking. I was sitting, moaning. A taxi stopped.

‘We can take a taxi,’ Laura said, as though we were late for a concert with no bus in sight. I got up. ‘I can’t move,’ I said, moving towards the taxi. Everything was terrible and in the back of the taxi I kept saying sorry to Laura. Through the shock there were different kinds of hurt: the stinging of grazes which was nothing, the pain of cuts which was also almost nothing, the hurt of my hip which was less but worse, an ache in my back and, deeper within, hardly even perceptible as pain yet, there was a very dull ache of something that might be badly wrong. Laura was crying. I kept asking if she had hit her head and she said yes but there was no bump or blood or anything and so I said you can’t have hit your head and she agreed. We got out, the taxi stopped and left. It was terrible, walking into the hospital which was not even a hospital, just a kind of dressing station where there were no doctors to be seen. Then one appeared, a doctor, or at least someone in a white coat, moving unhurriedly. Laura said her ribs hurt and I said, ‘I am so sorry.’ I sat there, on a chair, hurting everywhere, but differently in different places. The doctor-orderly took Laura into a room and she lay down while I sat there, not in the room with her but in the waiting room. I held myself together very carefully, not moving anything. I walked into the room where Laura was lying down because the doctor said her blood pressure was way up or way down because she was in shock, and after waiting a while it came down or went up to normal. Now I sat in the room with the couch or the bed where Laura was lying down and the doctor was cleaning out the cuts on her fingers. The stuff he was putting on her fingers hurt and she kicked her heels up and down on the bed. ‘My ribs hurt,’ she said, ‘I think I’ve hurt my ribs.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said.

Then it was my turn. The doctor did things to my arms, cleaned out some cuts. He began putting stitches in my arm and Laura left the room. I have had so many stitches in my time that they did not worry me at all. Cuts don’t really matter even though they hurt. It was the bits that were broken up inside, like my spleen which might have been ruptured, that worried me. My arm was stitched. I stood up. ‘My hip hurts,’ I said. The doctor took off my trousers and saw my hip was all gouged up and said, ‘We’d better do something about that too.’

After all these repairs we sat and waited awhile. They had no X-rays at this little hospital and so there was nothing to be done about Laura’s ribs which were hurting more and more, or my back which was beginning to hurt strangely. We sat and then we walked back home. A taxi took us back to the moped which I had thought we would ride back home but which turned out to be mangled and unrideable. We walked home and climbed in over the wall to our house. We got into bed, hurting everywhere.

From there on it got worse. As the day wore on the hurt set in. We hurt everywhere and we could not stop replaying the crash even though the thought of it made us both sick. The other thing we could not stop doing was having sex. We were in a terrible state but, for some reason, we were desperate to have sex. It was the shock I suppose. Neither of us could move properly but if we arranged ourselves, carefully, we could make each other come. I lay on my back and Laura moved over my face, saying ‘Ah, my ribs!’ when she came. We took it in turns to come and we took it in turns to say, ‘How was it possible that we didn’t hit our heads?’ We kept saying this because the more we replayed the crash the more it seemed a miracle that we hadn’t killed or paralysed ourselves. I kept saying, too, that I would never get on a moped again, ever, anywhere.

It was my fault, the crash, but Laura never reproached me about it. Had Laura been driving I would have held it against her, I would have nagged her about her reckless driving, how she had been on the brink of getting us killed in Rome and now, in Alonissos, had actually succeeded. As it was, the crash was my fault but at least I had taken the brunt of the impact. I had softened the blow for Laura and the reason my back hurt so much was probably because her head had banged into my spine. The last thing I wanted to think about was the moment of impact but that word ‘impact’ and the phrase ‘the moment of impact’ kept repeating themselves in my head. That’s all I could think of: the impact, the moment, the moment of impact.

The next morning I could not move. I had to be helped out of bed. I couldn’t move. My back, I said, my back and my neck. My hip was murder, my hands and arms smarted, but it was my back that worried me. We went to see the osteopath, an Australian woman whose hands inched up and down my spine, her fingers performing a manual X-ray, feeling her way through the skin to the bones beneath.

‘It can’t be anything too bad,’ she said. ‘If it was, you’d be in agony.’

‘I am in agony,’ I said, but not the kind of agony she had in mind. It was possible I had cracked a vertebra but that was all and even if I had cracked a vertebra there was nothing to be done about it anyway. It was the same with Laura and her ribs: even if her ribs were cracked all she could do was wait for them to get better. Reassured, we shuffled back home, Laura holding her ribs and me with my chin resting in my right hand, supporting it. To everyone else on the island it looked like I was deep in thought, wrestling with philosophical problems, when all I was doing was trying to bear the awful weight of my head – which, on reflection, is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head.

We were keen to leave Alonissos, and Hervé and Mimi were keen to get rid of us. One way and another we had pretty well ruined their stay on the island. Before leaving I tried to negotiate the return of at least part of my deposit from the guy who had rented us the moped. He wouldn’t budge, not by a drachma. He took out great wads of drachmas from his till – mechanic’s money: oil-smeared, disintegrating, held together by grease – and explained how impossible it was to make a living renting mopeds. At one point Lawrence says that ‘the Italians are really rather low-bred swine nowadays’. He should have gone to Greece, should have hired and crashed a moped on Alonissos before making such an insulting generalisation – insulting to the Greeks, I mean, for they pride themselves on being swine.

Hervé and Mimi took us down to the Flying Dolphin. We had a difficult journey in front of us – boat, bus, plane, another plane, train, taxi – but not an impossible one. Luggage was a problem and so I left my copy of The Complete Poems behind, together with many other books by or about Lawrence. I had taken The Complete Poems to Alonissos and now that we were heading back to Rome where I would be housebound for God knew how long I would once again be without it. I didn’t care. There was a curse on that book. I was better off without it.

Back in Rome people were using the word ‘heatwave’ even though it was the middle of August. I had two projects: one was to keep cool, the other not to sneeze. When I sneezed I felt like my spine was about to burst apart. Sneezing was terrifying and now that I could not do it any more I realised that I had always liked sneezing. Sneezing was one of life’s little pleasures, one that I could no longer risk – like sleeping on my side. I had to sleep on my back, I had to try to sleep on my back and, as I lay awake on my back, trying to sleep, I kept thinking what a great pleasure it was to sleep on your side, to sleep first on one side and then, while you were still asleep, to roll over on to the other side. Laura had to lie on her back too and so we lay there, on our backs, thinking about the crash which we no longer thought of as an accident but as a miraculous escape. How could it have happened, how could we have got away with it? How could we have smacked straight into a cliff wall at at least 25 mph and not banged our heads, not broken anything? We were wearing only T-shirts and shorts and yet we broke nothing: we were bruised deeply but our spleens had not ruptured and our bones were not broken. We were not paralysed, we were not cabbages, we were not dead – we just had to lie on our backs and I had to avoid sneezing. It didn’t even matter that we were confined to the apartment. All I had to do to get a feel of the neighbourhood, the quartiere, was hold my hand under the cold tap. First the water was warmish, room temperature, then cooler, then warm, as the pipes climbed down the walls into the apartment, hot as they moved over the sun-baked roof, warm again as they descended on the other side, in shadow, becoming cooler, and then cold, lovely black-cold, as they disappeared below ground, into the past.

Slowly we began to recover. In the evenings we limped to L’Obitorio for a pizza and then to our local bar, the San Calisto, where Fabrizio, the barman, had elevated surliness to the level of a comprehensive world view. With an unrelenting scowl, he abused everything he touched, yanking the lids off the gelato, gouging out the gelato, dumping it in glasses, thumping the glasses on the counter. To perform such simple actions with such aggression was no mean achievement but the truly remarkable thing was that he managed also to imbue them with a rough tenderness. His unfailing curtness – ah, how lovely it was to be on the receiving end of it! – was, likewise, a gesture of welcome. We liked to sit outside and listen to him preparing a cappuccino, hurling the saucer on to the zinc bar, tossing the spoon on to the saucer, chucking milk into the coffee, hurling the cup on to the saucer, and then throwing a hasty ‘prego’ through the clatter and noise of his colleagues. He did this even when the Calisto was empty: it was a way of generating business, like the bell of an icecream van: a call to customers: ‘The cappuccini are good here, we are always busy.’

We even got back on the moped. I had vowed never to get on a moped again but Laura, even in the dark days following the crash, conceded only that, back in Rome, she would be more careful, more alert. Now we were back in Rome she was eager, as she put it, ‘to get back in the saddle’. Laura has a good attitude to life and that, even more than her ability to pick up languages by watching soap operas, is why I love her. I, by contrast, have a very bad attitude to life, an attitude to life that began badly and is getting worse with every passing year, but it was not difficult for Laura to persuade me to get on the moped again. Laura drove, carefully, trying to avoid jolts. In Piazza Venezia we paused to admire il vigile, the white-gloved policeman who directed traffic with movements of hypnotic elegance. From his podium he conducted the traffic like a symphony: beckoning, halting, directing. It was impossible to say where one gesture ended and the next began. ‘Halt’ – clearly stated, unequivocal – merged exquisitely into ‘go’ in one flowing movement. Each gesture was executed with a flourish but this flourish – this elaboration and amplification of what was strictly necessary – added to its clarity, to its geometric precision. So it was with the architectural flourishes of Rome’s great baroque churches. The vigile’s gestures were so clear that he seemed to address cars individually, making drivers almost proud to obey his commands. The traffic responded so promptly it was easy to think he took his cue from their movements, so that his conducting became a form of dance.

From there we walked up the steps to the Campidoglio, Laura’s favourite piazza.

‘So what do you notice about this piazza?’ she asked.

‘It’s full of tourists.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They’re all wearing check trousers.’

‘The piazza.’

‘It’s a perfect square.’

‘And do you know why it’s a perfect square?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Because it’s not,’ said Laura, explaining how Michelangelo had allowed for the foreshortening of perspective by elongating the far side of the square and compressing another part. Before I had time to wonder if a more general truth could be extrapolated from the example of the Campidoglio we were off again, heading to Lungotevere to assume our place among the twenty or thirty mopeds waiting on lights, revving. At first, because of our Attic trauma, we kept to the uncrowded back of the grid and because our moped, a Piaggio Ciao, had very little acceleration we were among the last to crawl away from the lights. As the days went by and Laura became more confident she inched ahead until we were at the front of the grid. I was feeling more confident too.

‘Get ready to go on the G of green,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Laura, revving and roaring. ‘On the D of red.’

After an initial period of silent contrition I was also feeling more confident about criticising Laura’s driving. I once again started yelling out excited, nervous warnings: ‘There’s a bus ahead! Careful, there’s a taxi coming in from the side! Pot-hole! Watch out, car behind!’

‘Of course there’s a car behind, of course there’s a bus ahead,’ said Laura, unperturbed by the metal converging on us from all sides. ‘This is a city, what do you expect?’

The problem with Alonissos, Laura assured me, was that it was not a city, the roads were deserted and this is why it had been so dangerous – whereas riding a moped in Rome was so obviously filled with peril and danger that it was actually quite safe. Which was why, she went on, it was perfectly okay to get stoned and then go for a ride and see the city veer by in a series of near-misses.

It was still blazing hot. The only way to cool down was to stop for a grattachecca near Isola Tiberina. Glasses were crammed with ice-scrapings, and fruit juice poured over the ice. There was always a queue, even at three in the morning. One boy’s job was to scrape away at a vast block of ice. Laura noticed that he had an unappetising plaster on one frozen finger. It was hard to imagine how cold his hands must have been, colder than a fishmonger’s even, but that was how he scraped a living.

There was one other cool place, a building on Via Manunzio that we were drawn to, reluctantly, repeatedly. Everywhere around was boiling hot but this one building gave off an icy chill. On the door someone had written, in English, ‘Undertakers’. We went there often and then accelerated away, spooked, heading somewhere else, happy to be on the moped again.

Everything made us happy. We were getting better. We we were full of ‘the intoxication of convalescence’, full, as Nietzsche said, of ‘reawakened faith in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that were open again, of goals that were permitted again, believed again’.

I believed again in my study of Lawrence, even suspected that it had been my destiny to go to Alonissos, read (a little) Rilke, crash the moped and discover this affinity with Lawrence. According to Huxley, who knew him well, Lawrence’s great responsiveness to the world came from the way his ‘existence was one long convalescence, it was as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life’. In one of the letters I had read on Alonissos, Rilke too, had written of ‘the long convalescence which is my life’. The four of us – Nietzsche, Rilke, Lawrence and I – were bound together by a shared convalescence. Before the crash in Alonissos I had made no progress on my study of Lawrence; now, in the euphoria of convalescence, I was raring to go. The problem was that, apart from the volumes of letters from the British Council Library, I had no books by Lawrence: I had left them all in Alonissos. Hervé had said he would post them on to us but who could say how long that would take? The post between Italy and England was terrible (Lawrence gnashed his teeth about it the whole time) so God alone knew what the post between Alonissos and Italy was like. For all I knew my books could take months to arrive.

This was a real stroke of luck. Because I was unable to consult the books I needed, because, without them, I was in no position to make any progress with my study, I took to leafing through my collection of photos of Lawrence. That’s when I realised I was more interested in photos of Lawrence than in the books he wrote.

‘Michelet wrote nothing about anyone without consulting as many portraits and engravings as he could.’ Imitating his subject’s habit, Roland Barthes obtained all available portraits of Michelet in the course of writing his book about him. Thinking specifically of Auden, Joseph Brodsky said that after reading a certain amount of work by a given writer we become curious to know what he or she looks like. In the case of Lawrence my curiosity had been satisfied before it was even awakened; likewise the Michelet–Barthes practice of accumulating pictures of one’s subject: this task had been carried out unsystematically, randomly, before I got down to the serious business of putting off writing my study of him. It was in Rome, while I was convalescing, leafing through photographs, that I realised that I actually had a collection of photographs of Lawrence. Over the years collecting photos of Lawrence had been one of my many little hobbies, the sum total of which gave me a sense of purpose that counteracted my usual purposelessness. In second-hand shops I was always sniffing around in the Lawrence section, primarily for a copy of the Penguin edition of Phoenix (long out of print) that I had been hunting down for many years, but also for any books with pictures of Lawrence. Whenever I came across a new book about Lawrence, even the kind of dismal academic criticism I would never have dreamed of reading, I flicked through it in case there were some photos I had not seen before, or, ideally, a photo which I had seen before, when I was seventeen, and which I had not seen since.

What I might do, it occurred to me in Rome, was prepare an album of these pictures, arrange them in a fashion that pleased me – interspersing them, when appropriate, with pictures of my family and myself – provide captions (lengthy ones, quite often) and then, late in the day, remove the pictures so that only the captions and the ghosts of photos remained. And not to stop there: to rearrange these captions so that they referred only occasionally to the photographs for which they had been intended, so that they existed, instead, in relation to each other – that, I thought to myself, might not only enable me to get started on my study but even prevent my falling into idleness and depression for a while.

The more I looked at my collection of Lawrence photographs, the more insistent became the feeling that I did not know what Lawrence looked like. The photographs posed exactly the question they proposed to answer: what did D. H. Lawrence look like? By all accounts his beard was red; in photographs it was black. Lawrence himself grumbled about this. ‘I hate photographs and things of myself, which are never me, and I wonder all the time who it can be. Look at this passport photograph I had taken two days ago, some sweet fellow with a black beard I haven’t got.’ Uncertainty regarding the appearance of Lawrence the man as he actually was is counterbalanced by an enduring, iconic image of Lawrence the writer. Hence that strange sense that the painted portraits of the true-to-life, red-bearded man – like the one by Jan Juta on the cover of the Penguin Selected Poems – did not look like D. H. Lawrence.

I’d bought that edition of poems – the one I had not taken to Alonissos and which, consequently, I had with me in Rome – in Blackwells when we were ‘doing’ Lawrence at college. I may have looked very different then but even in 1977, close on twenty years ago, it seems to me, I looked like myself. We all believe this: at every moment in our lives, we look like ourselves; others, whom we have not met, whom we know only through photographs, become fixed at certain intervals. We know them only as they appear in these photographs. As authors continue to publish books the jacket photos are usually updated every few years: a given photograph corresponds to a given book, or a certain phase of work. In the case of dead authors one or two pictures come to stand for the entire life: all of Scott Fitzgerald’s books were written by the fresh-faced, unsozzled Scottie; all of Henry James’s by the bald magister. The longer the life, the greater the output, the more intense the degree of photographic compression: a single photograph of Dickens is sufficient to accommodate thirty years and tens of thousands of pages of work. Such a photograph serves to consolidate – to embody – the idea of the writer whose death was announced in a famous essay of Barthes. Or, to put it in terms consistent with this notion, a photograph of a writer is not really a photograph of a person but an emblem – a colophon – of the works published under his or her name. Inevitably a considerable degree of distortion takes place when a single photograph represents a working life covering several decades.

David Herbert Lawrence began to look like D. H. Lawrence the writer when he grew his beard in the autumn of 1914. ‘I’ve been seedy, and I’ve grown a red beard,’ he wrote, ‘behind which I shall take as much cover henceforth as I can, like a creature under a bush.’ Lawrence may have wanted to hide behind his beard but in doing so he became permanently identified by it, revealed himself in hiding (‘I send a passport photograph of myself, but you’d know us anyhow – my beard’).

Lawrence without his beard was not D. H. Lawrence. In a picture taken for his twentieth birthday – ‘clean-shaven, bright young prig in a high collar like a curate’, as Lawrence himself put it, less than two months before his death, ‘guaranteed to counteract all the dark and sinister effect of all the newspaper photographs’ – he didn’t look like D. H. Lawrence: he looked like the man who would go on to become D. H. Lawrence. He looked properly like D. H. Lawrence only when, in the words of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, it was possible to discern in him the profile of his approaching death. The closer he came to dying the more he looked like D. H. Lawrence. A photograph taken at the Chalet Kesselmatte in 1928 showed him with his sister Emily. Her robustness emphasised his own emaciated, desiccated condition. His clothes hung on him, he was shrinking into them. There was almost no flesh to soften the contact between the bones of his legs and the wooden slats of the bench; the only padding was provided by the trousers which lay in folds around his thighs. The fabric, it seemed, was thicker than the man beneath it. He clutched the wrist of his right arm with his left hand, holding himself together. The face was drying out, like clay. A few months later, in February, writing to Emily from Vence, he harked back to the time of that photograph as if to a period of robust well-being: ‘I had to give in and come – Dr Morland insisted so hard, and I was losing weight so badly, week by week. I only weigh something over six stones – and even in the spring I was over seven, nearly eight.’

In death Lawrence became identical with his canonic image. Death fixed the image, rendered it – and the body of work of which it was the symbolic expression – incapable of further development. That is why Lawrence, like Rilke, hated photographs of himself. To both writers photographs prefigured an end of becoming.

Virtually the final creative act Lawrence was involved in before his death at the sanatorium at Vence was to sit for a bust by the sculptor Jo Davidson. The last photo I had of Lawrence was not of the man but of the living-death mask that resulted from these sessions. ‘Jo Davidson came and made a clay head of me – made me tired,’ Lawrence moaned in a postscript to his very last letter, ‘result in clay mediocre.’ It was anything but that, but it is not surprising that Lawrence responded like this, was reluctant, even at this late stage, to recognise the stark fact of his own mortality: what must it have been like to see his death take shape, to become fully formed, undeniable like this? To have seen a death mask of himself while still – just – alive? ‘What do I care for first or last editions?’ he had asked, rhetorically, years earlier. ‘To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.’ No wonder he was hostile to Davidson’s bust: it anticipated – if only by a few days – the form the loose pages of his life would take when bound and dated.

Among all these photos of Lawrence there was none of him at Fontana Vecchia, the house in Taormina, where he lived, off and on, from 1920–23. We were feeling so much better – Laura’s ribs had healed completely, my back hurt only occasionally – and I was so fired up about my study of Lawrence that we decided to go there and take one.

For someone who has spent so much of her life on the move, Laura is strangely un-blasé about travelling. She packs days in advance, sets off with excess bags of time to spare and arrives at airports way before the check-in desks have opened; on the plane she scrutinises the in-flight safety video like a first-time flyer. On this occasion she was anxious that we had enough to eat on the train, enough crackers to eat on the train. She likes to eat crackers. She is crazy about crackers. Crackers and toffees. I persuaded her to make room for bread and pomodori and then we bickered about her camera. It’s a Nikon, non-automatic, and weighs like something from another, weightier era of technology, which it is. Despite its weight Laura insists on taking it wherever we go – which is fine except that I then have to carry whatever extra weight has built up as a result of the camera. I don’t carry the camera but I end up carrying its equivalent. Still, better that than the camera itself. The camera is the worst thing to carry. It’s heavy and it keeps digging into you; it has about ten sharp angles and they all dig in. It’s awkward as a spade, that camera. I hate it. I would like a lightweight modern automatic camera, the kind you can slip into a shirt pocket, the sort that doesn’t dig in, but it is too late get one now. In the last five years I have been to all kinds of eminently photographable places but I’ve never had a camera with me. To get a camera now would make a mockery of all those camera-less, unrecorded expeditions. I also wonder, superstitiously, if the moment I possess a camera, the moment I buy a camera for the express purpose of recording my travels, I will suddenly cease travelling altogether, will never leave the house and will have to content myself with using my lightweight, automatic, highly portable camera to take pictures of the house I never leave.

In any case Laura has a lovely camera which is too heavy to take anywhere but because it is such a lovely camera she refuses to trade it in for a lightweight automatic which would take excellent pictures. Nine times out of ten we end up leaving the lovely camera behind and buying a disposable one which takes useless pictures. On this occasion, though, she was adamant about taking it.

‘How are we going to take pictures of Lawrence without a camera?’ she asked.

‘I am a camera,’ I said.

The train was as full as a rush-hour tube. Although we had arrived twenty minutes early we were the last to take our seats in our compartment. People were loading on bags and boxes as though it would be six months before we sighted a platform again. There was only just enough room for our bags in the luggage racks. Then a hefty man, the kind of man who, in books, is usually referred to as a ‘fellow’, came and pointed out to another, even heftier fellow that he was in the wrong seat. No, said the fellow who was already sitting, holding his ticket up for the other passenger’s inspection, it was the right seat, and the right compartment . . . Wrong carriage! cried the standing man in vindication. They changed places and all the luggage was taken down again to extract the ousted fellow’s suitcase and make room for his replacement’s. Soon the corridor was so crowded that, to relieve congestion, it was necessary to take some more luggage into our compartment so that everything had to be taken down and loaded again, more rationally this time. We, the men, all stood up. Even if not lifting anything, we kept our arms raised, surrendering ourselves to the task.

A middle-aged couple were banging on the window trying to attract the attention of an adolescent boy in the corridor. He was wearing a Gauguin T-shirt and was embarrassed by the way his parents were making a big fuss about his leaving, waving and mouthing things at him through the window. He was more relieved than any of us when the air-conditioning hummed into life and, a few minutes later, punctual to the second, the train nudged out of Termini. Between us and the sky, the network of overhead wires and cables was so extensive it seemed merely the first stage of a project to put a sun roof over the whole of Italy. An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs. Sheets and towels hung from every balcony. Washing hanging out to dry: that is the real national flag of Italy, emblem and proof of how the fabric of daily life endures.

Soon we were passing the truncated remains of an Ancient Roman viaduct; beyond that was a glimpse of the autostrada so that the essential trajectory of Roman history seemed a straight line, an unwavering determination to get somewhere else as quickly as possible. The mountains in the background were cut from the same cloth as the sky: a slightly darker shade, that was the only difference. Had we the capacity to analyse it there would almost certainly be a geology of the air as well as of rock.

The controllore came by, fining the young Gauguin because he had not stamped his ticket at the station: so that’s what his parents were making such a fuss about. A new ruling this: unstamped, a ticket was now valid for three months which meant that it was advantageous to avoid stamping your ticket – hence the heavy fine for omitting to do so. Everyone felt sorry for the boy and the controllore relented, fining him the smallest possible amount. A great debate ensued about the injustice of this new ruling. The controllore went on checking tickets while all around him the debate – which in no way excluded him: just because he was charged with implementing the new rule did not mean he had to relinquish his right to be an Italian: to join in – became more energetic in spite of the fact that essentially everyone was in agreement. New laws are always being passed but they alter almost nothing. Their real purpose is, precisely, to engender debate, to give the people of Italy a chance to express a lively opposition to the state so unanimous that it actually creates a supportive atmosphere of unity and national well-being. Everyone feels the state is fleecing them, treating them unfairly, so that feeling cheated by the state – and finding some small ways of cheating the state – turns out to be the cement that binds the nation together. In this way the state is sacrificed to the idea of the nation. That’s Italian history, in a nutshell

The controllore rested his elbow on the door, put his foot up on the ashtray (not on the seat of course) so that he was now in the classic Italian discursive attitude: propped up, leaning in such a way as to suggest, as Italians always do, that discussion originated in the simple biological need to come to terms with the heat. Six months from now, he said, taking off his hat to emphasise that he was now speaking ex cathedra, he would be out of a job. The new ticket laws were the first step towards getting rid of controllori. So, the cult of rationalisation had come to Italy – and what a shame it was! In England we had completely absorbed the ethic of cost-efficiency. Cut costs – no matter what the cost! It comes easy to us. Even as we protest against a particular instance of it we accept, somewhere in our empirical English psyche, the principle that this is the way things must be. We can easily forsake the pleasures that come from that which is not strictly necessary – but in Italy, where life is devoted to making life that bit nicer, to providing an extra bit of sweetness in a cornetto (by their pastries ye shall know them!), it goes against the grain utterly. So what if the state is losing money? So what if it is more efficient to have some robotic fraud-proof ticket system? It is nice, fun, to have a handsome controllore come around like this in his pressed blue shirt, checking tickets and joining in the debate about his impending obsolescence.

The debate continued after the controllore had gone on to join in the debate in the next compartment. Not at all like being on a train in England where everyone is tacitly affronted by everyone else, terrified lest their legs touch those of the person opposite. England must be the only country in the world where you plonk yourself down next to someone in a train without saying a word, where the normal form of greeting is to keep your eyes fixed on the ground. Here, though, the six of us were perfectly at home in our little compartment. A railway compartment is actually the Italians’ preferred version of the indoors. Ours was like a tiny piazza, a place to gather and discuss. The democratic ethos of the piazza-compartment is a product, like so much else in southern Italy, of the heat. None of the men was wearing a jacket. We were all in shirts or T-shirts. Madness to wear a tie on a day like this! Hierarchies are difficult to maintain without jackets. In shirts, people are practically equal – the only way to establish a jacket-less hierarchy is by turning the shirt into a uniform. Hence the frequency of military coups in South America, violent attempts to resist the levelling tendency of the shirt.

A drunk shoved open the door, asking for money. None was forthcoming and he threw some soiled abuse into the compartment. The man next to me, a waiter on the ferries, told him to watch his mouth. The drunk lurched out into the corridor and made the slightest, meanest gesture of a throat being cut – not one of those harmless piratical swipes across the whole of the throat, just a tiny slit to indicate that cutting open your neck would mean no more to him than nicking himself shaving. With that he was gone, snaking his way out into the corridor. A few minutes later, from the direction in which he had slithered, came the sound of commotion, or rather a sound over and above the normal commotion of the crowded corridor. The waiter was up on his feet and into the corridor instantly, hitching his jeans up over his stomach, a stomach which at that moment indicated neither sloth nor greed but a ballast of strength and fearlessness, immunity to slashing. He had blue eyes and dark, dark skin. His mere presence in the corridor subdued the throat-cutter who muttered off into the next carriage – first class, as it happened. Now he was really asking for trouble.

To travel is to eat. We were tucking into our lunch, which is to say Laura was munching crackers and I was eating bread and pomodori. These tomatoes tasted nothing like English tomatoes. They tasted tomatoey. I ate them one after another, the taste like a memory of childhood which actually turned out not to be a taste but a smell of taste, the reddening green smell – I had it exactly – of my Uncle Harry’s greenhouse in Shurdington where the air ripened under glass. We offered our food to everyone in the compartment but no one accepted. We were the only ones eating. Everyone else was too busy talking about food to eat. They were all saving themselves for enormous meals tonight (especially the waiter from the ferries who had not seen his wife for two months). After lunch a consensus of silence fell on the compartment and a round of dozing took place.

I read Sea and Sardinia. More accurately, I read the first paragraph of Sea and Sardinia over and over until I felt sleepy. I loved the first sentence, its urgency of intention: ‘Comes over one an absolute desire to move.’ The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun, while I, the diligent reader, was still checking that it had everything it needed to leave, to be a sentence. The whole of the first paragraph was like that, I thought to myself: a train that was moving out fractionally ahead of its appointed time, doors still ajar, leaving the reader running along after it, unsure where it was heading, but convinced of the need to climb aboard before it gathered too much momentum: ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.’ It was only with that quaint ‘whither’ that we had the chance to gather our senses and settle down comfortably in our seats. I love that first paragraph, I thought to myself, sleepily. I resolved to look at it more closely, to discuss it ‘at length’ in my study of Lawrence, the study I was going to Sicily to research. In Rome I’d had that idea of putting together an album of pictures of Lawrence. I still wanted to do that but now, after reading a paragraph of Sea and Sardinia, I also wanted to do a series of travel sketches of places Lawrence had been, an album of travel pictures, I thought, sleepily. Came over me an absolute desire to sleep . . . I opened my eyes once before falling asleep and saw that Laura had fallen asleep, in fact everyone in the compartment was sleeping so that it seemed I was standing guard, falling asleep when I was meant to be keeping watch.

I woke up, other people woke up or slept. I read, looked out of the window, slept, read, or dreamed I read and looked out of the window.

At Villa San Giovanni we sat on the train, waiting for the carriages to be loaded on to the ferry. We waited and sat and nothing happened. There was a strike, it turned out, by the men whose job it was to put the carriages on to the ferry. Italy is constantly in the grip of strikes like this, a very loose grip which causes no more than mild inconvenience. These strikes are hardly ever coordinated, never persist for any length of time and are unlikely to achieve their objective – if they even have one. Wild-cat strikes? The term is too fierce. Any disruption caused merges imperceptibly with the general disarray of Italian life. On this occasion it felt like we had arrived at the port at the moment when all relevant staff happened to be taking a protracted, unscheduled lunch break. No sense of a dispute, just a suspension of activity, an industrial siesta. We passengers also fell prey to this atmosphere of drowsiness. The boredom of the journey had turned to torpor. We sat around and waited, too sapped of energy and initiative even to be irritated or to find out what was going to happen.

We needed a leader and one emerged in the shape of a young soldier who had boarded the train at Napoli. He suggested we walk over to the commercial ferry port and catch a ferry there. We went with him, aimlessly, without urgency. A fat woman who was also a late recruit to the compartment said that wherever he was going, that was her destination too. The soldier dissuaded her from tagging along, explaining that it was a long walk and there were far too many stairs to climb. We left her in the compartment, fanning herself with a crossword magazine. We walked for ten minutes and boarded a ferry which left immediately.

The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term ‘awe’. You lean on the rails, looking at the sea and the other ships whose passengers are leaning on the rails looking across at you, thinking about waving but somehow losing heart. The soldier said that the waters here in the Straits of Messina were very dangerous. A terrible undertow. Jump off the boat and you will be sucked under.

People who are separated from the mainland only by a thin strip of water often express pride and love of the sea in this way. Their version of ‘Welcome’ is always to point out that the sea is dangerous, treacherous, unfathomable, awash with currents and rip-tides which pull the unwary beneath the waves. Just because it is a small strip of water does not mean it is not a force to be reckoned with. That the sea is calm, safe, warm or good for bathing is nothing to take pride in; the sea must pose a threat. In England we do not need to make a meal of this because, on the one hand, the Atlantic is so obviously huge and daunting and, on the other, the Channel and the North Sea so blatantly unwelcoming, so obviously treacherous and harm-inducing, as to need no emphasis. But here, where the water was a lovely deep blue, attention had to be directed to the ills lurking below the surface. Maybe the waters were treacherous, I didn’t know, but the soldier’s remark actually had next to nothing to do with the sea, or at least the sea was being appealed to only as a metaphor, as a way of telling us something about the island it surrounded, about Sicily and the treacherous undertow of the Sicilian character.

We walked off the ferry without paying, ‘English style’, as our soldier-friend put it, intending no offence. None of us knew the way to the railway terminal.

‘I’ll ask,’ said Laura who is always happy to ask.

‘Don’t ask,’ said the soldier. ‘Don’t say anything. Let me do the talking.’ Which was fine by me – except his idea of doing the talking involved saying nothing. After five minutes he hadn’t said a word and we had made no progress.

‘He won’t ask the way and he won’t let me ask the way,’ said Laura. ‘He has this code of silence thing.’ Somehow we wound our wordless way to a taxi rank where we learned that the railway station was a good distance off. Of course it was a long way off. The nearest taxi rank is always the furthest distance from the place you want to go. A taxi was ready and waiting but before we climbed in Laura broke rank to ask how much it would cost. The driver went mad: did we doubt his honesty? How much would it be? It would be what it said on the meter. The soldier looked at her, vindicated. She had asked for it.

‘It’s like this in Sicily,’ Laura whispered to me in the back of the taxi. ‘You never know how they are going to react.’ It was true. We were in one of those touchy ‘respect’ cultures where the smallest action can cause enormous offence, where people are relaxed to the point of torpor and, at the same time, ferociously uptight. They slumber and slumber and then, suddenly, they erupt. It probably has something to do with living in close proximity to a volcano. Best to keep quiet, like our soldier said. The driver took advantage of our silence to explain that some taxi-drivers would charge as much as 12,000 lire for the trip, but he put it on the meter, because he was honest.

‘No,’ interjected Laura, ‘Non volevo dire. I didn’t mean to suggest—’

‘What are you interrupting for?’ interrupted the driver. ‘He and I were talking – not you and me.’ Oh yes, touchy as anything but still with a kind of slumbering good-naturedness beneath the fierceness, as if it were all just a joke.

Since the young soldier had helped us out I paid his share as well. ‘Why did you do that?’ he wanted to know, as if by paying for him I had offended him at least as much as I would have done by not offering to do so.

‘Quanto?’ I asked the taxi-driver.

‘12,000 lire.’

The whole performance turned out to have been a pyrrhic one in that we now had to wait for our train – still stranded on the mainland – to catch up with us. Rather than wait we leapt on a local train and waved goodbye to the soldier with whom we had struck up this tense friendship.

Darkness fell on either side of our train. We were running along the coast, a ping-pong moon bouncing along beside us. The light in the compartment was yellowy old. We stood in the corridor, leaning on the window, seeing the sea. The train stopped as frequently as a bus. It was like a little dog, scurrying and panting, tireless. If we’d had time to dash around and look at the front of the locomotive it would surely have had eyes and a willing smile like Thomas the Tank Engine. While the train was moving we seemed to be the only passengers; the stations were deserted too but people got on and off at each stop as if they were using the carriages as a bridge to cross the tracks, stepping on to the right-hand side, getting off at the left and disappearing before the puppy train went panting on its way again, sniffing out the next station.

When we arrived at Taormina there was no sign of Ciccio, Laura’s friend’s mother’s boyfriend, whose house in nearby Furci we were going to be staying in. We were both early and late. Later than the train was scheduled to arrive but earlier than the scheduled train was actually arriving. We phoned Ciccio who was engaged, then phoned Renata – Laura’s friend’s mother – who had just been on the phone to Ciccio who had come and gone and would return to meet our stranded train.

With half an hour to kill we looked for a place to have a beer. Opposite the station was what looked like a restaurant or, more exactly, like a living room in which there happened to be a great surplus of tables. A woman was watching a western dubbed into Italian. I’ll say this for Italian TV: you’re never more than a few channels away from a western. She was watching TV in that way of night porters the world over: they watch for hours but never become so absorbed in anything that they mind being interrupted. Given that there are a finite number of westerns and an infinite number of nights in which to watch them they figure that any gaps can be filled in later. To them each film is really no more than a segment of an epic ur-western spanning thousands if not millions of hours, offering a quantity of material so vast that it can never be edited into a finished form. The western thus takes the place of the great myths of antiquity: shifting glimpses of character and situations, variously recurring, but manifesting through the very fact of their myriad transformations, the existence of some stable, changeless order.

Laura asked if we could have just a drink, nothing to eat, and the woman said no, not just a drink. Then she gestured to us to sit down: she would bring us a drink. They are like that in Sicily, said Laura. Their instinct is to say ‘no’, but once they have established that a thing cannot be done they are happy to do it. In this way serving a bottle of beer takes on a near-miraculous quality. We drank our beer on the balcony of the deserted café, looking across the deserted road at the deserted station, engulfed, periodically, by the thunder of hooves and the whine of ricochets from the television. For the third or fourth time that day a strange, floaty indifference to everything came over me. Since this sensation was utterly unfamiliar and not at all unpleasant I decided that, if experienced again, I would refer to it as contentment.

Ciccio arrived just as our train pulled in. He was stocky, dapper (rare for a Sicilian) and tanned to his bones from fifty years of sun. Had they remained still for any length of time his eyes would have been kind; as it was he looked kind of anxious. He had a perfect, firm handshake, the sort that suggested that the handshake originated here in the south and was then exported north and west. I wondered: did the handshake originate, as I had once read (in a Fantastic Four comic) as a gesture of trust, a way of demonstrating that you had no weapon in your hand? Or was it, from the outset, a compromise, enabling both parties to offer one hand in friendship while keeping the other free for protection, a way of establishing physical contact while maintaining the maximum possible distance? I felt Ciccio would know. There was knowledge in his handshake.

As soon as we had been introduced, Ciccio dashed off to reassure Renata (who had been worrying about a botched rendezvous) that all was well. I folded myself into the back of Ciccio’s small car, sharing the back seat with a cash register. It made the normal meter used in a taxi seem rather paltry, cheap. It was Ciccio’s business, Laura explained. He sold and repaired cash registers.

We wound our way up to Taormina which looked like the most beautiful place imaginable: coves and headlands, sea glittering in the moonlight, lovely old buildings and restaurants. Had we come on holiday we would not have been disappointed at this moment. All the accumulated worry as to whether Taormina had been a good choice would have been dispelled, we would have put our arms around each other and exchanged glances full of love and decisions vindicated. Even in the midst of this realisation, however, part of me was thanking God that we were not on holiday, not playing that game with its stakes that are so low and so high. Ciccio parked and then called Renata from a passing payphone. This time Laura had a word and then we moved on.

To a fine restaurant with a magnificently deserted terrace overlooking the bay. Down below but still part of the same restaurant was another terrace, crowded, overlooking the bay. We had entered the hierarchical topography of tourism where everything, if it has any value, must be overlooking something else. Anything not overlooking something is to be looked down on. The lower terrace was less formal than the upper terrace – so formal, in fact, that there were no people in it – and so we walked down there. The waiter showed us to a table with a view overlooking the bay but Ciccio insisted on a better one, one with an even better view overlooking the bay. A second waiter took our order and a third brought our beer. They all knew Ciccio. We had our beer, Ciccio and I, but there was no sign of Laura’s wine. ‘Hey Franco,’ said Ciccio, addressing a fourth waiter. ‘Portaci del vino. We need to make a toast.’ One way or another Ciccio was keeping the entire staff of the restaurant on their toes.

Because it was one of the few things I knew how to say in Italian, or any other language for that matter, I remarked on the deliciousness of the beer – whereupon Ciccio ordered two more even though we still had a third of a glass each. We were drinking grandi beers not piccole because to have ordered piccole would have suggested some failure of hospitality. The trouble with grandi beers, though, was that we couldn’t drink them fast enough: after a few minutes they were warm as tea and so the table filled up with half-finished glasses of beer which stood there not as waste but as excess, as trophies of hospitality. It was the same with the antipasti. Once I’d eaten my plateful, I asked Ciccio, for want of anything better to say, if we could go up for seconds. We couldn’t, strictly speaking, but Ciccio insisted that I have some more – insisted, rather, that the waiter bring us another tray of bits and pieces. I became wary of mentioning anything lest Ciccio took it upon himself – or on one of the waiters – to provide it. Not for the first time in my life I felt the slightly wearying, not to say utterly exhausting nature of this commitment to hospitality which was always a part of these respect-offence cultures. My own preference was for that busy urban version of hospitality where, if friends of a friend turn up, you have a quick drink at the neighbourhood bar, give them towels and a set of keys, show them how the sofa bed works, say ‘Mi casa es su casa’ and leave them to their own devices for the next four days.

Still, drinking these half grandi and lavishing hospitality appeared to be having a calming effect on Ciccio. He had not phoned Renata for twenty minutes – but what I had taken to be calm actually turned out to be the lull before the telephonic storm. A waiter arrived with a cordless phone: there was a call for Ciccio: Renata. They spoke for ten minutes. Then Laura had a chat – then, although I had never met Renata (who spoke no English), it was my turn. After that we were ready for another round so I handed her back to Ciccio. While he was talking Laura said she would love to open a hotel.

‘Would you?’

‘Well, not a hotel: a pensione. I’d take such pride keeping it clean,’ she said. By now the phone had achieved a position of such unquestioned predominance over our lives in Sicily that by simple virtue of the fact that it had been conducted face to face, in person, this exchange had a quaint, not to say archaic air about it.

Eventually Ciccio got off the phone and gestured for the bill. I offered to pay – English-style, without really expecting to – but Ciccio was already out of his seat, on his way to settle up. On the way out he introduced me to the manager of the restaurant, a guy with curly hair, a little younger than me, smoking a cigar and wearing a gingham jacket which may or may not have been – it was a question of style – too big for him.

‘Ciccio said you were writing an article about the restaurant,’ he said.

‘Well, about Taormina, generally,’ I said, catching on that Ciccio had settled the bill Sicilian-style, by saying I was writing an article for the British Airways in-flight magazine, the kind of piece that would guarantee a queue of customers seven nights a week.

‘This is nice restaurant, we have to have something like this, casual like this, but I have another restaurant, really good restaurant. A high-class restaurant where everything is special. You should go there. Is a special place. I think you would like.’

‘Yes I’m sure I would,’ I said, thinking that if I had an air mile for every time someone had told me I would like something that I felt pretty certain I would hate – for exactly the reason they claimed I would like it – I could have circumnavigated the globe by now. I took a card for the restaurant and a flyer for the disco that he also ran. Before we left, I promised, we would try out both the restaurant and the disco.

Once we were out of the restaurant Ciccio was able to relax totally, in the sense that he was able to head straight to a payphone and call Renata. When he was through talking to her he drove us to Furci where we would be staying. I asked why a red light on the dashboard was flashing.

‘Is to tell me I am not wearing seat belt,’ Ciccio said. An EU ruling meant that all new cars were fitted with this warning device. A stupid and dangerous idea, he thought. The flashing distracted and could make you crash. But there was someone he knew who was going to disconnect the wires so that he could ride in comfort without his seat belt and without this flashing light. Wouldn’t it be easier just to wear the seat belt? I asked, but that was beside the point. The point was that there was a way around this edict. Italians delight in exercising their ingenuity for trivial ends. To use ingenuity for some loftier purpose is somehow to diminish it. The more pointless the end the more vividly the means of achieving it is displayed. The further south you travel, the more extreme this tendency becomes. The ingenuity of the Romans, for example, is as nothing compared to that of the Neapolitans. Ciccio even knew someone who sold T-shirts with a diagonal black band printed across the chest so that the police would be deceived into thinking you were wearing your seat belt.

Furci, we saw the next morning, was a miserable little town with reinforced concrete rods sprouting from unfinished buildings that, for reasons of tax, had no chance of being completed. Ciccio had got up early and so we waited for a bus to take us back into Taormina, passing the time by watching a group of boys rough-housing. Boys in Sicily spend all their time larking around, rough-housing, teasing each other. When they grow up and become men nothing changes – it’s just that the pace of the larking around is scaled down until, by the time they are in their sixties, they do it sitting down, with hardly a word being spoken. Take this guy in a fat yellow T-shirt, waddling past on his bike. At thirteen he had been the fat boy who everyone teased; now, at thirty, he was a grown-up fat boy. His friends teased him and he cycled off, sulking, but then, in the forgiving way of fat boys who cannot bear to be on their own, he came back, ready for more.

On the corner of a street, in the shade, a woman was selling fish, calling out to passing motorists; an old man cycled past, selling oregano; a man shaving in a second-floor window conducted a prolonged conversation with a friend in the street: vivid instances of why – quite apart from the inherent musicality of the language – so many of the great opera singers have been Italian. Opera begins in the market where, over and above the simple demands of competition, of being able to attract customers’ attention, stall holders have to convey the colour and taste of fruit in their voices. The man selling oregano, for example: he called out and the air was fragrant with oregano. His job was not to sell oregano but to fill the air with the sound of its scent. And while Italians are happy to be in close proximity to each other as we were on the train, they enjoy conversing from a great distance, or calling down the street to each other. The popularity of cellular phones is simply the technological manifestation of this inherited cultural trait.

As soon as we arrived in Taormina we began asking for Lawrence’s house, the Villa Fontana Vecchia. No one knew of a Villa Fontana Vecchia but several people knew of a Via Fontana Vecchia. We headed that way while Laura, now that we were no longer bound by the code of silence, stopped almost everyone to ask directions. It was as though we were not seeking guidance so much as canvassing local opinion as to the whereabouts of the Villa Fontana Vecchia. The results of such a survey confirmed our initial impression of Sicilians, for the typical response was to claim that there was no such place and then, once we looked suitably crestfallen, to direct us towards it. We wound our way there and began looking for the exact house. We saw a man reading La Sicilia in the distinctive way that Italians have of reading newspapers, especially the sports pages: he was absorbed in his reading, giving himself totally to the experience but with an expression of furrowed doubt etched into his face. Watching him, it seemed certain that reading the papers each morning had become a substitute for prayer. Reluctant to disturb him in his devotions we spoke to a woman with a limp who thought it might be the first house on the corner. A lovely old place, it turned out, which happened to be for rent. I decided then and there that I would rent it for six months in order to write my book because it was such a clear example of serendipity that the house Lawrence had lived in should be available to rent. The problem was that there was no way of confirming whether or not it was the right house. We asked another woman with an even more pronounced limp (they are great limpers, the Sicilians) who shook her head and said it was definitely not the house of Lawrence, it was her son-in-law’s house.

We walked on and the Via Fontana Vecchia turned into Via David Herbert Lawrence. Ah! We were on the right track. It seemed a shame, though, that it wasn’t called Via Lorenzo which would have fitted in better with the other street names. Laura took my photo – with a newly bought disposable camera: having lugged the Nikon to Sicily, she had left it back in vile Furci – beneath the sign because that was the only way we could think of commemorating this discovery. We asked a man with a walking stick if he knew the house. He replied eagerly, as expected: men with walking sticks are always pleased to give directions: the act of raising the stick and pointing imparts to them something of the character of a prophet. Lawrence’s house was the big place, quite a way off, on the right, the place with mustard-coloured walls. We plodded along the road that clung to the hillside. The sun lurched in and out of clouds, bougainvillaea dulled and burst into purple flame. The road had curled in such a way that we were now behind the houses pointed out by the prophet, and it was impossible to tell which one he had singled out.

‘A common part of literary pilgrimage,’ I said as we walked on, ‘is that you often don’t know which house you’re meant to be visiting. In a sense it doesn’t make any difference but it’s very difficult to return home unless you have absolute proof that you’ve been to the right place. Hence the need, I conclude, for a plaque on the wall: to free us from doubt.’

We walked on. A man was opening his garage and Laura began to ask him about la casa dello scrittore inglese . . .

‘Si, si,’ he interrupted. ‘È quella là.’ The pink one. On the other side of the road, approached from a gate at our level but actually perched up on the next contour line – everything in Taormina is perched on everything else. The top floor was painted pink. There were three green shutters, all drawn, and a long, very narrow terrace with black iron railings. The floor below was pale cream, also with a long terrace and three arched Norman windows of a kind often seen in Sicily (I’d never seen them before). To the left, painted yellow, was what looked like an annex or extension. A steep line of steps led down from the house to the locked gate at our level. Laura walked off to see if there was another entrance while I contemplated the house. Laura came back a few minutes later and I followed her up the road which took us behind the house. There were some roadworks going on and the whole area had a Moscow smell of petrol about it. It was obvious now that there were two apartments: the yellow annex and the main house, on the wall of which was a plaque:

D. H. Lawrence

English Author

11.9.1885 – 2.3.1930

Lived Here

1920 – 1923

We had found it. We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: you look and look and try to summon up feelings which don’t exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, ‘D. H. Lawrence lived here.’ You say, ‘I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw . . .’, but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance.

We walked by the side of the house, peered over the fence. It was three in the afternoon, and if there was anyone in the house they were asleep. The only thing to do was to come back later. As we left we saw an old shoe lying on the low wall surrounding the house.

‘Do you think this was Lorenzo’s shoe?’ said Laura. We were true pilgrims now, desperate for relics.