It all began, through a tiny but remembered fluke of fate, during my boyhood. My parents were employing a house painter, a quiet, vigilant, proudly self-educated working man with a book invariably in the pocket of his whites, to do some decorating for them. One day, on my return from school during his tea break, he asked me what books I liked reading. I mentioned Richmal Crompton’s William books and the Arthur Ransome series and Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger. He said that sooner or later I should press on and give DH Lawrence a try - “there’s plenty of good reading in there.”
Time passed, but an opportunity came when I spotted an orange Penguin paperback of Sons and Lovers in my father’s bookcase. Could that form my starting point? It looked like a challenge, but I faced it with interest and progressed to The Rainbow, and then to the enthralling but less famous Aaron’s Rod, the story of a miner who becomes a flautist, walks out on his family, and moves to Italy where he is killed by a bomb.
As a teenager who was on the brink of moving into music, I liked Aaron’s Rod very much. I liked The White Peacock, written earlier, rather less, deeming it too abstract for me, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s last and most notorious novel, was of course still banned in Britain, though I knew of its reputation and bought a Left Bank edition of it while doing my National Service with the RAF in Paris, as well as seeing a French film starring Danielle Darrieux, with Erno Crisa as Mellors and the fine English Shakespearian actor Leo Genn sitting in a wheelchair as the crippled Sir Clifford Chatterley. My Lawrence fixation was clearly gaining strength.
By 1960, after a sensational trial at the Old Bailey, Lady Chatterley finally gained her liberty in a new Penguin edition which sold three million copies. I thought it a better book than it has been traditionally made out to be. But what authority could a young music critic have been said to possess on the subject? I went on reading. Lawrence was a writer who, thirty years after his poignantly early death from tuberculosis in France, really mattered to me because I trusted him and today still respond to him the way I always have.
As Geoff Dyer, author of a modern study of Lawrence entitled Out of Sheer Rage has argued, you do not need to be a rigid literary academic to admire him or hate him. He wrote books about places in Italy and elsewhere which remain relentlessly alive, incessantly restless, unstoppably irascible, with an emphatically vivid vocabulary full of jabbing words which, for me at least, continue to flash and shine in my private firmament.
After crossing the Alps on foot with Frieda, his future wife and maverick cousin of the doomed air-ace Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s “Red Baron,” he began his comprehensive Italian adventure by spending months on Lake Garda before switching to Liguria and Tuscany and from there ever southwards until, for his last three Italian years, he settled in Sicily, financed as always by his writing - as Frieda put it with apparent admiration, “he is just a big fountain pen,” though he was also a more cumbersome typewriter.
During the First World War he travelled unwillingly back to Britain, with periods in London, Kent, Cornwall, but only just dropping in at his native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he loathed, just as he loathed every aspect the war itself, from which, for health reasons, he was never called into.
Yet the Lawrence trail, which ultimately ringed the world, became more and more famous. From the Alps to Taormina, you will always find the long Italian portion of it somewhere along the line and, I hope, it will make you rejoice, even if all you do is read about it.
But read about it anyway. That is how I started, thanks to a literate Edinburgh workman well over half a century ago.
Lawrence’s books remain part of me and, in modern electronic Kindle editions, they travel with me everywhere, weightlessly and occupying no space. It feels good to have them safely in this form, and to have his jagged, darting, prodding prose in versions so easily accessible - and, incidentally, nowadays free to order on line.
7 October 2016
Time passed, but an opportunity came when I spotted an orange Penguin paperback of Sons and Lovers in my father’s bookcase. Could that form my starting point? It looked like a challenge, but I faced it with interest and progressed to The Rainbow, and then to the enthralling but less famous Aaron’s Rod, the story of a miner who becomes a flautist, walks out on his family, and moves to Italy where he is killed by a bomb.
As a teenager who was on the brink of moving into music, I liked Aaron’s Rod very much. I liked The White Peacock, written earlier, rather less, deeming it too abstract for me, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s last and most notorious novel, was of course still banned in Britain, though I knew of its reputation and bought a Left Bank edition of it while doing my National Service with the RAF in Paris, as well as seeing a French film starring Danielle Darrieux, with Erno Crisa as Mellors and the fine English Shakespearian actor Leo Genn sitting in a wheelchair as the crippled Sir Clifford Chatterley. My Lawrence fixation was clearly gaining strength.
By 1960, after a sensational trial at the Old Bailey, Lady Chatterley finally gained her liberty in a new Penguin edition which sold three million copies. I thought it a better book than it has been traditionally made out to be. But what authority could a young music critic have been said to possess on the subject? I went on reading. Lawrence was a writer who, thirty years after his poignantly early death from tuberculosis in France, really mattered to me because I trusted him and today still respond to him the way I always have.
As Geoff Dyer, author of a modern study of Lawrence entitled Out of Sheer Rage has argued, you do not need to be a rigid literary academic to admire him or hate him. He wrote books about places in Italy and elsewhere which remain relentlessly alive, incessantly restless, unstoppably irascible, with an emphatically vivid vocabulary full of jabbing words which, for me at least, continue to flash and shine in my private firmament.
After crossing the Alps on foot with Frieda, his future wife and maverick cousin of the doomed air-ace Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s “Red Baron,” he began his comprehensive Italian adventure by spending months on Lake Garda before switching to Liguria and Tuscany and from there ever southwards until, for his last three Italian years, he settled in Sicily, financed as always by his writing - as Frieda put it with apparent admiration, “he is just a big fountain pen,” though he was also a more cumbersome typewriter.
During the First World War he travelled unwillingly back to Britain, with periods in London, Kent, Cornwall, but only just dropping in at his native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he loathed, just as he loathed every aspect the war itself, from which, for health reasons, he was never called into.
Yet the Lawrence trail, which ultimately ringed the world, became more and more famous. From the Alps to Taormina, you will always find the long Italian portion of it somewhere along the line and, I hope, it will make you rejoice, even if all you do is read about it.
But read about it anyway. That is how I started, thanks to a literate Edinburgh workman well over half a century ago.
Lawrence’s books remain part of me and, in modern electronic Kindle editions, they travel with me everywhere, weightlessly and occupying no space. It feels good to have them safely in this form, and to have his jagged, darting, prodding prose in versions so easily accessible - and, incidentally, nowadays free to order on line.
7 October 2016
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