Books Read November – December 2021

I have been remiss in my blog writing and am now catching up – on the very last day of 2021. Well may we be rid of this year! I’m late writing about these books because for a while I felt in a bit of a hole with my reading – okay books but not great. Then I found two that were rivetting that I loved and which took me back to some classics that enthralled me all over again. So I had no time to blog. Here’s what they were.

Nina Simone’s Gum, Warren Ellis

I’d read a couple of reviews that gave this high praise and it is a beautifully presented book. So I bought it – on one of several enjoyable book browsing expeditions post lock-down. I was keen to buy each time we entered a local bookshop to support them after their difficult year.

This was a highly enjoyable read. I didn’t really know what to expect. The author is from Ballarat and I wonder if he’s related to the Ellis family that we know. He’s been a member of Nick Cave’s band for years and this is a funny sort of memoir built around his taking a souvenir following the last concert Nina Simone ever held in London. Nick Cave organised it. The souvenir – as you should have guessed from the title – is a piece of chewing gum Nina left on the piano.

Strangely this odd memento becomes the fulcrum around which a a great deal of experience is conjured. Life as an obsessive collector, as a practicing musician, as an artistic collaborator, as a son, brother, friend, lover. It is very well written and interesting about all of the above. And the story of the piece of chewing gum becomes quite moving.

I’m not a great music fan but you don’t need to be to enjoy this short book.

The Hummingbird, Sandro Veronesi 

This was on, still is, a number of best books of 2021 lists, including in The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement I think. A well known and prolific Italian author although I have not read him before. I liked how it was written using a variety of techniques – telephone conversations transcribed verbatim, letters, diary entries. Gives an immediacy to what is happening although it takes you a while to work it out, and to work out whether what different characters are saying is truthful or not.

Our protagonist is a dentist. Question is whether he is an honourable man or not. His wife makes a startling allegation. Her therapist alerts the dentist. Is the therapist a good man – despite breaching his patient’s confidentiality. It takes a while but you do finally feel for the characters. Not a lot happens; there is not great drama here. Just one man’s life. I agreed with one review that took issue with the final part of the book which takes us into the near future. A bit farfetched and didactic. But overall an interesting enough tale.

Paul, Daisy Lafarge

Another Guardian recommended book also on the best books of 2021 list. I was annoyed with the main character while reading it but the story has stayed with me longer than I expected. A gormless girl on a working holiday in France allows herself to be taken up by the Paul of the title. He’s older, her employer, and obviously not good for her. This becomes increasingly obvious as the story proceeds until I found myself shouting at her to leave him while she could. But she seems incapable, continuing to accompany him despite his increasingly misogynistic behaviour.

On reflection, that’s the point I suppose – young women find themselves in these situations and find it hard to get out of them. She’s on a French backpacker scheme that links young people to jobs around France. That was interesting. It’s the author’s first book, hitherto she has been known as a poet. And it was nicely written; evoking the young woman’s state of mind as she encounters different people and situations. A bit aggravating really.

The Hero’s Way, Tim Parks

I loved this book. Tim Parks is an Englishman who has lived in Milan for years, working as an academic and translator. He writes essays, novels and travel books. I’ve often enjoyed his essays in the New York Review of Books. And I follow him on Twitter where I loved his daily tweets while undertaking the walk he describes in this book.

He and his wife follow the route taken by Garibaldi following the fall of the Roman republic in 1848. He posted pictures every day and I was able to look at these while reading the book which is terrific. He describes the terrain as Garibaldi and his ragtag army would have experienced it – utilising available historic records, including a detailed diary of one of Garibaldi’s leadership group. And contrasts this with how the area looks now – sometimes very denuded by industrialisation and urbanisation. But often still very beautiful. The walk sometimes sounded pretty horrendous – paths hard to find, sometimes blocked completely, rocky uphill terrain hard to get up and harder to get down, inclement weather – either boiling sun or pelting rain. Not for the fainthearted.

Garibaldi’s escape is a fantastic story and he is indeed depicted as a hero. The historian A.J. P. Taylor called Garibaldi the only truly commendable historic figure. Always on the right side of history – including supporting women’s rights. He was on a hiding to nothing with his bedraggled troops being hounded on all sides by the Spanish, Austrian and Papal armies. He had learned the basics of guerilla warfare in South America – where he was always on the side of reformers and democrats – and he made feints and turns to deceive the enemy armies of his whereabouts and intentions. So he made his way slowly north, making his way to the republic of Venice.

His pregnant wife Anita was with him all the way. She sounds amazing; a fiery South American woman. And his core troops were loyal to him to the end although a lot who had joined him in Rome melted away on the journey north. He was undone at the end by a full moon. Which allowed the Austrian troops to see his getaway boat! But the eel fishers protected him; passing him along a chain of patriots so that he was able to get away. And ultimately to come back in 1861 and lead the unification of Italy.

I knew nothing about Garibaldi until I read this and it takes you back to the history books to find out what happened to him during his years abroad. Some of it spent in a candle factory, some of it sailing the world, including around southern Australia. There is apparently a township called Garibaldi in Victoria.

Nearly everywhere Tim Parks and his wife went there are statues and plaques dedicated to Garibaldi and often to his wife as well. Garibaldi Squares and Garibaldi Cafés abound. But as he notes in a somewhat crestfallen manner, contemporary Italian locals don’t know or care much about him.

Some time after reading this I saw the film The Leopard and whilst I’ve always loved it – last having seen the full length version at Cinémathèque not so long ago – I got much more of the politics this time around. Thanks to Mr Parks. A great read and thoroughly recommended.

Tenderness, Fiona Macleod

I loved this book and for once the cover blurbs were correct – it filled me with passionate, epic joy and conquered my heart! It’s big – nearly 600 pages – but an easy read. Beautifully written. The title comes from the name D. H. Lawrence originally proposed for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It combines three stories: bits of Lawrence’s life based on truth but as imagined by the author, bits about America in the early 1960’s when Lawrence’s novel was being kept out of America which brings in Jacky Kennedy and J Edgar Hoover and is largely imagined but also based on truth, and finally the story of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial in London which is based almost entirely on the transcripts of the case.

This all sounds a bit strange but it all comes together beautifully. I want to read it again and I will. It starts with Lawrence’s death in Italy and then goes back to different interludes in his life. It shows how he used whatever was happening in his life in his work. And he was always working – when he was ill, when he had no money, when he was travelling, wherever he was. Incredible. These bits made me very keen to know more about him, which I did subsequently with The Burning Man.

The bits about America start with Jacky Kennedy attending the trial of Lawrence’s publisher in America. He was being sued by the Post Master General for importing the obscene Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was a short administrative hearing and Jacky is trying not to be noticed because Jack is starting to be talked about as a possible presidential candidate. But she is noticed – in fact photographed – by an FBI agent down on his luck, desperate to get a better posting, and therefore keen to get in the good books of J Edgar Hoover. And so we get bits about the stultifying life of a candidate’s wife, a Kennedy wife, a lover of literature of modernism in yet to be modern America. The surveillance state presided over by J Edgar Hoover is brilliantly realised.

And then we get the big trial in London. When Penguin had the temerity to propose to publish and unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. It is confirmed in the endnotes that this part is almost completely taken from transcripts of the trial and diaries and notes of the solicitor for Penguin. I found it completely gripping and incredibly emotional – even had a little weep. Beautifully done.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Here’s a review from the Age. I don’t agree that the American sections are weak. I enjoyed it all.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence

And so of course I had to read the novel; never having done so before although this is my copy which I’ve obviously had for a long time. Having been gripped by the description of the trial in Tenderness, the publisher’s dedication made me weep again, after outlining the history of the trial it goes on: This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty”, and thus made D. H. Lawrence’s last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom.

I loved everything about it – except perhaps some of the dialect which I found hard to decipher. But I loved the descriptions of the country, the conversations, the characters. How ridiculous that it aroused so much controversy.

Tenderness concludes with an epilogue imagining the lovers in this novel escaping the confines of England by emigrating to Canada where they live happily ever after. A nice thought. But one that while Lawrence hints at such a solution, was not prepared to confirm.

The Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence, Frances Wilson

Another book where the blurbs are spot on – utterly enthralling and brilliantly unconventional indeed. The author calls this a triptych of self-contained biographical tales of three versions of Lawrence. I wanted to underline something on nearly every page. Like this: Everyone who knew him gold tales about D. H. Lawrence, and D. H. Lawrence told tales about everyone he knew. And Lawrences tales about his friends, who consequently became his enemies, can be found in his fictions. She points out that nearly everyone who knew him or had anything to do with him, often very briefly, wrote a book about him. Four years after his death there had been seventeen books written about him. There would be many more in the years to come. Wilson notes that Memoirs of Lawrence are driven by either love or hate, depending on whether they are written by women or men. Good haters are better company than blind lovers.

She structures her book around Dante’s Divine Comedy naming her three sections as follows. Inferno describes his life in England from 1915 to 1919. Purgatory follows him to Italy from 1919 to 1922 and Paradise finds him in America between 1922 and 1925. She wants to draw attention to his lesser known work, saying that when The Rainbow and Women in Love were described as Great Books by F. R. Leavis he consigned the best of Lawrence to the periphery. A look at Wikipedia confirms the extent of his output – it’s extraordinary – Twelve novels, twelve collections of short stories plus a collected version, fourteen separate books of poems plus three different collections, eight plays, numerous non-fiction books and pamphlets, four travel books and 6 translations of other people’s work.

In her English section Wilson gives a detailed account of his early life which he uses in his novel Sons and Lovers. She then goes on to the circumstances in which he wrote Women in Love. I’m going to re-read this section after I’ve read the novel. It’s terribly interesting knowing who is based on whom. Lots of people I’ve read about elsewhere are linked to Lawrence which I didn’t know, for instance the poet Hilda Doolittle, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton-Murray, Ottoline Morrell etc. He spent his last years largely with the Huxleys which I did know about although I didn’t know how strongly (or at all) Huxley was influenced by Lawrence’s writings about New Mexico in his novel Brave New World, which I loved. All these connections.

The Italian section focusses on the novel Aaron’s Rod which was published in 1922 – his seventh novel. I’m not interested in reading it. There’s also a long section about meeting and interactions while in Italy with a strange character called Maurice Magnus for whose memoir Lawrence wrote a Foreword. This after Magnus committed suicide; to which Laurence’s refusal to continue to loan him money may have contributed. The Foreword sounds interesting if one could get hold or it. There’s some travel writing referred to here as well. Those Italian monasteries turn up everywhere. Frieda got to this one which was something. I was familiar with the Lawrence poem The Snake and always thought he had written it in Australia – but no it was written in Sicily.

The section on America gives us the worst Lawrence – and the fiction that Kate Millet used to skewer him in her book Sexual Politics published in 1969. Women being raped and sacrificed. But you see how the characters he was meeting and living with inspired these sorts of stories. And the woman who inspired the stories said she liked them. Strange world. In addition to short stories he wrote The Plumed Serpent. Given how they were living – so many people coming and going, so much travelling – it’s amazing he could write anything at all.

There’s so much detail in this book I need to read it again. Here are just a few quotes to give an idea about the breadth of thinking and exposition contained within it.

Lawrence was a different man in every place and after 1912 he was never in the same place for more than a few months.

He was a modernist with an aching nostalgia for the past a sexually repressed Priest of Love, a passionately religious non-believer, a critic of genius who invested in his own worst writing.

The greatest paradox is that he was an intellectual who devalued the intellect, placing his faith in the wisdom of the very body that throughout his life was failing him.

His parents’ conflict was the story of Lawrence’s life, he internalised it, contained it and examined it from every perspective. His mother was all mind, his father all body; his mother was pure will, his father pure instinct. Having identified entirely with his mother he then identified entirely with his father; he mined down into the experience of both and explores as no novelist had done before ‘ the woe that is marriage’.

Leaving home became his great subject. After Lawrence left his father’s house he made it policy never to have a home of his own.

Lawrence wanted a woman behind him not because he desired her sexually but in order to explore her point of view; this is what every woman who ever stood behind Lawrence while he wrote a book would realise, once she had been drained and discarded.

One such woman who’s relationship, and grief, he used in The Trespasser, said ‘I must not confuse the man with the artist: when this work is finished he will see me from another angle’.

Lawrence described The Trespasser which was published in 1912 as ‘a work of fiction upon a frame of actual experience – which might describe all his prose…. The book’s genius, however lies in the title… all novels, as he now understood them, were acts of trespass and all novelists were trespassers. ‘Trespassing’, he explained, is a word invented in Hell’.

Lawrence lived a life of allegory and his works are the comments on it. As Keats said of Shakespeare.

She includes some details about how he wrote which was outside if he could, with the writing pad on his knees or in rooms with good views. But basically anywhere. His handwriting, which is illustrated in the book is beautiful, so tidy, no crossings out at all. Apparently he wrote easily and quickly once he got down to it. He was published in England in the periodical English Review and in America in The Dial. He said himself; I never starved in a garret, nor waited in anguish for the post to bering me an answer from editor or publisher, nor did I struggle in sweat and blood to bring forth might works….

He is a fascinating contrast. He loved and was wonderful with children, was a fine teacher to the few he taught for various friends, did all the domestic work himself – cleaning and cooking – because Frieda didn’t, created gardens – flowers and vegetables – and undertook house renovations wherever he lived. But as soon as he got comfortable, had written his book, he upped and left. Usually leaving behind disgruntled people who’d appeared in his fiction.

All his friends hated Frieda but as Wilson says she stuck with him in their peripatetic lifestyle. Their marriage was seen by others as a catastrophe but this is not how Lawrence saw it… He believed in marriage not because it simplified sexual relationships but because it was so damned hard. Unlike most couples they kept their quiet times to themselves and had their rows – which were violent in the extreme – in public. They always travelled with other people towards the end of their stay in America; he needed an audience for their fights, she needed witnesses. She explained to their travelling companions who saw him punch her for smoking out of the left corner of her mouth that she would never leave him, he was angry because he was sick and she was well and he would be happy once he was writing again. Wilson says of the exchange that Frieda smoked like this to provoke him and that Their smoking number was the best rehearsed act of the Lawrence sideshow. At the end of the book there’s a photo of her smoking just so.

I really don’t think I’ve done justice to this wonderful book – maybe this review will encourage you to read it.

Anyway I am pleased that both of these books – Tenderness and Burning Man – have led me back to his novels.

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

I borrowed this from a friend. Such an old copy! Published in 1913, this one a printing in 1961. Jessie, the woman on whom Miriam is based, called an earlier version of this, titled Paul Morel, a lie. Lawrence called it a novel. Thus the pattern for all of his work. She got him to re-write it hoping to see Miriam the victor in the competition between mother and lover. He did re-write it but made the mother’s victory more emphatic!

It feels like his first book, being so autobiographical. Instead it is his third. How autobiographical you realise after reading Burning Man. The fiction is so strongly allied to the life that when I looked back at a family photograph in the biography I couldn’t work out why the father was called Arthur (his real name) instead of Walter (the father in the novel).

I can’t remember if I’ve read it before. I enjoyed it all very much. Fantastic descriptions of the lives of miners: it’s the small details that make it so authentic, the white bodies, the black faces and hands and arms that have to be washed as soon as they get home, the towel warming by the fire.

Beautiful descriptions of the country and of the impact of the mines on the landscape. The black houses and roads, the spirals of steam coming out of the earth. Of the traditions of the mining communities – the women watching for the number of coal carriages waiting, recognising the impact when the men were sent home early. How the weeks earnings were divvied up – no women allowed so they had to go for a walk.

The characters come alive. You feel for them. I hated Mrs Morel and thought Paul a wimp. Mr Morel is barely there.

I’m now started on Women in Love. Which I do remember reading, as well as seeing the film both of which I loved.

POSTSCRIPT

Women in Love

I’ve now finished this having borrowed it from my brother only to find it belonged to my school friend Margy who has inscribed her name at the front along with the date 19-3-74. A mystery how it landed at Terry’s place. I always considered this my favourite Lawrence novel. Not so on a re-reading – it comes after Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I quite enjoyed it, but it’s a bit over-heated. I went straight back to Burning Man to find out who was who. Apparently Ursula was based on Frieda which surprised me and is at odds with much that is written about Lawrence’s feelings for his wife. She is the most sympathetic character in the book. Gudrun, to my intense surprise, was based on Katherine Mansfield. No intelligence on who the blokes were based on.

Re the cover of the book and the movie, I don’t mind films portraying characters from books in different ways, but I do think they should retain the same central characteristic especially hair colour. Alan Bates and Oliver Reed were the two fellows, Rupert was meant to be brown haired and Gerald was blonde!! These two hirsute fellows were both very dark.

The Memoirs of Maurice Magnus

After reading this blog, Joe found the Maurice Magnus book on the internet. The actual paper book now cost around $400 apparently but the ebook is available for nothing on this website.

I read the Introduction and it’ s terrific. Tells you a lot about Lawrence as Frances Wilson noted in Burning Man; about how he travelled and what he thought about people, places and life in general. It’s a good example of his travel writing and quite psychologically penetrating about Mr Magnus. It also reveals a domestic life far from the Sturm und Drang that most people focus on. Worth a look. According to Wilson in Burning Man, George Bernard Shaw was jealous of Lawrence’s capacity for dialogue and you certainly see that in this piece of writing – as well as in the novels. I don’t think I’ll bother with Magnus’ own story.

Before leaving Lawrence, I want to record what Frances Wilson says drew her to him as a teenager and why she remains loyal to him – because I agree with her. Of his fiction: Not all of it was good and not all of it was sane but there was still nothing to compare. He asked the same questions as I did and I liked his fierce certainties: his belief in the novel as ‘the one bright book of life’, his belief in himself as right and the rest of us as wrong, his insistence that the unconscious was an organ like the liver; I liked the fact that his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings.

I remembered the brightly coloured stockings from Women in Love! In middle age, returning to him, Wilson finds complexity and contradictions, but still there’s not much with which to compare him. He didn’t like being called a genius, believing it belied the hard work he put into his writing. But a genius he was.

Postscript

I’ve now read Sybille Bedford’s account of the trial which I’d heard was very good. I got it from the library in this tiny stand alone copy – although it’s usually found in her essay compendiums.

I compared it to the coverage of the trial included in Tenderness. The two versions mostly refer to the same witnesses and often the same quotes from their evidence. There are a few variations. Sybille doesn’t add much extraneous commentary; not as much as in the novel where the author has given more attention to setting the scene. Sybille is more like a conscientious journalist, keen not to muddy the factual account with her opinions (wish we had more journalists like her at the present time – a dying breed). This was quite interesting but didn’t tell me any more than the novel and confirmed the veracity of the novel’s account.