Out of Sheer Rage. Geoff Dyer

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