Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Parks
Dedication
Title Page
The Fighter: D. H. Lawrence
Gardens and Graveyards: Giorgio Bassani
After the Struggle: Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
The Illusionist: Benito Mussolini
Fear is the Key: Thomas Hardy
The Disenchantment of Translation
Still Stirring: Samuel Beckett
Genius of Bad News: Thomas Bernhard
Let Sleeping Beauties Lie: Elfriede Jelinek
A Polished Pessimism: Emil Cioran
True Scandal: Niccolò Machiavelli
A Model Anomaly
Mad at the Medici: Lorenzo de’ Medici
Love Letter: Fleur Jaeggy
Tales Told by a Computer: Hypertext
Real Dreams: Émile Zola
A Matter of Love and Hate: World Cup Football
Hero Betrayed: Giuseppe Garibaldi
Siege of the Serenissima: 1848
The Superman’s Virgins: Gabriele D’Annunzio
A Pagan in Italy: Lawrence and Italy
Places and dates of first publication
References
Copyright
About the Book
One of Britain’s outstanding novelists, Tim Parks, has published two acclaimed essay collections, Adultery and Other Diversions and Hell and Back. This new volume finds him as provocative and entertaining as ever.
The title piece addresses D.H. Lawrence’s fundamental belligerence and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterized by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict. Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett and Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongst others.
Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Macchiavelli and the Medici. Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on the serious issue of World Cup football.
Above all, these are essays whose ideas and themes call to each other in the most unexpected and ironic ways. From the wide variety of subjects emerges a consistent and convincing picture of a world that forever resists the writer’s embattled attempts to wrap it up in language.
Muscular and energetic, The Fighter is a wonderful display of engagement and judgement.
About the Author
Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives near Verona with his wife and three children. His novel Europa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Destiny and Judge Savage were longlisted in 2000 and 2003.
Also by Tim Parks
Fiction
Tongues of Flame
Loving Roger
Home Thoughts
Family Planning
Goodness
Cara Massimina
Mimi’s Ghost
Shear
Europa
Destiny
Judge Savage
Rapids
Cleaver
Talking About It
Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Non-fiction
Italian Neighbours
An Italian Education
Adultery & Other Diversions
Translating Style
Hell and Back
A Season with Verona
Medici Money
To Bob Silvers and all his team at the NYR
The Fighter
Essays
The Fighter
[D. H. Lawrence]
‘NOW A BOOK lives’, wrote D. H. Lawrence, ‘as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed … once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead.’1
If this is the case, Lawrence need not have feared for his own works. Seventy-seven years after his death they are all in print and the critics continue to debate, often to fight, over what they might mean. The proliferation of biographies is likewise remarkable, this despite the fact that Lawrence had as little desire to have his life ‘fathomed’ as his books: ‘I hate “understanding” people,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘and I hate more still to be understood. Damn understanding more than anything.’2
But if we are not to understand Lawrence, what is our relationship with him to be? Perhaps we can find a clue in the man’s belligerence. Whether dealing with his dog, his doctors, his wife or his closest friends, Lawrence’s relationships were characterised by an alternation between intense intimacy and ferocious conflict. In general, the more important a relationship was to him, the more likely it was to be punctuated by violent, even traumatic battles. The present essay will be nothing more than an attempt to understand if not Lawrence, then at least his literary longevity as a function of his passion for conflict. ‘I’ve just done the last proofs of Lady C [Lady Chatterley’s Lover]’ he wrote in 1928. ‘I hope it’ll make ’em howl – and let ’em do their paltry damnedest, after.’3
As might be expected, the fighting started at home. ‘When I was a small boy, I remember my father shouting at my mother: “I’ll make you tremble at the sound of my footstep!”’ Fourth of five children born to a Nottinghamshire coal-miner in 1885, the young David Herbert was terrified, but also ‘felt it was splendid and right’.4 His mother was not impressed. ‘Which boots will you wear?’5 she asked her husband wryly. The man was deflated. The boy learns that threats without action are empty. Sick in bed in his early thirties, Lawrence wrote to a friend of his relationship with his wife: ‘I suppose I’ll get strong enough again one day to slap Frieda in the eye, in the proper marital fashion. At present I am reduced to vituperation.’6
Any battle can be seen from at least two sides. In the fictionalised version of his parents’ relationship in Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence wrote of a sensitive, middle-class mother obliged to wrest her children’s upbringing from a brutish working-class father. The young writer himself had not been wanted by his parents, was merely the result of Father’s drunken, animal lust. Later in life, he could invert the situation: in some of Lawrence’s writings, the mother is a manipulative snob who imposes her self-righteous, middle-class values on a simple man with honest male instincts, so monopolising the children’s affection that their father becomes an exile in his own home.
For biographers recounting such bitter clashes, it’s hard not to take sides. In D. H. Lawrence: A Biography, Jeffrey Meyers is pleased to quote research that brings new ammunition to the father’s defence: Lawrence’s mother was not it seems, as we all grew up believing, from a higher class than her husband. The myth of her being a schoolteacher was all airs. Slum-bred, Lydia Beardsall was the merest factory worker when she met the handsome miner, Arthur Lawrence.
Meyers, who loves to close his otherwise excellent chapters, always well documented and convincingly told, with dogmatic little summaries, as if one more period of his subject’s life had now been safely stowed away, seems to miss the importance of this discovery. There was no inevitable clash between classes in the Lawrence household. Rather, a spurious class struggle was invented to mask an antagonism of pure wilfulness. ‘Their marriage has been one carnal, bloody fight’7 Lawrence wrote in 1910. Much of his writing would dramatise conflicts between partners – Gudrun’s against Gerald’s in Women in Love, Lou’s against Rico’s in St Mawr – but in such a way as to strip them of social alibis and circumstantial explanations. A typical scene in Women in Love describes Gerald, the industrialist, face down on his bed refusing to speak and Gudrun the bohemian artist determined not to let him escape confrontation in this way: ‘Her mind wondered over his rigid, unloving body. She was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak to her.’8 With this prevalence of the individual will over social setting, the characters in Lawrence’s novels can seem shrill and insubstantial, or, alternatively, they gather the archetypal force of figures in myth. Either way, they are never Dickensian.
Two questions force themselves on biographers: how was it that the son of a coal-miner became one of England’s foremost intellectual and cosmopolitan writers? And what prompted a man brought up in the rigid moral framework of English Methodism, who ‘had the Bible poured every day into my helpless consciousness’,9 to become a prophet of sexual revolution?
Lawrence’s elder brother, William Earnest, the second son and his mother’s favourite, died when Lawrence was sixteen. David Herbert, or Bert as he was called, replaced him, her favourite at last, but only after a rival had been seen off. The boy’s chronic lung problems and general physical frailty made it easier for his mother to draw him away from his father’s world of sweat and coal dust. When Bert proved too weak even for the position of clerk in a surgical appliances manufacturer, he could be sent to train as a teacher.
Thus Lawrence’s education was part of Mother’s struggle against Father. Far from being a neutral quality, heightened consciousness was understood to be in direct opposition to masculine instinct. His sickliness assisted his mother’s project, and so was soon associated with intellectuality. The boy’s choice of friends fitted too. Mother accepted his relationship with Jessie Chambers and her family on a farm outside their mining village because the boy and girl seemed to spend most of their time reading, talking about books and in general procuring themselves an education.
But it wasn’t a sex education, and despite all Lawrence’s learning and frailty, masculine instinct could not be contained. The problem being that Jessie, like Lawrence’s mother, seemed so spiritual. Young Bert was confused. In the event he went off and had sex with another man’s wife, which allowed him, at least in the fictional version in Sons and Lovers, the added pleasure of a very masculine, potentially erotic fight with the wronged husband, a man who in some ways resembled Lawrence’s father. In 1910, long before time and distance might have allowed him to form a less idealised image of her, Lawrence’s mother died of cancer. He was heartbroken: ‘For me everything collapsed, save the mystery of death and the haunting of death in life.’10
Like many people desperately seeking to understand the world but getting nowhere, Lawrence turned out to be an excellent teacher. Between 1908 and 1911 he taught in a working-class school in Croydon, South London. He was full of theories and experimental methods. The pupils were instructed to express themselves freely, but to observe the strictest discipline. Lawrence opposed authority in general, his headmaster observed, except when he himself was imposing it: with the rod. ‘School is a conflict,’ Lawrence wrote to a friend, ‘mean and miserable – and I hate conflicts.’11 Not many years later he would explain why he had run off with another married woman: ‘She [Frieda] is the only possible woman for me, for I must have opposition, something to fight or I shall go under.’12
So Lawrence hated fights but needed them to keep him in form for other fights. With sickness for example. In 1911 he fell desperately ill with pneumonia. Just as a previous illness had got him out of clerking, so this one freed him from teaching. Physically, he was fit for nothing, it seemed, but writing. And that would be one long battle from beginning to end.
Alongside the huge body of work (a dozen long novels, many volumes of shorter fiction and poetry, three plays, four travel books, three full-length critical works and scores of essays), Lawrence also found time in his forty-four years to write literally thousands of letters. He could leave no acquaintance, however casual, alone. He was always ready to invite people to join him in some utopian, conflict-free community, or to curse them for refusing to join him, or for having rejected his work, written a bad review, or in some other way not lived up to his standards. Afterwards, he would write again to make up. One had imagined that the wonderful seven-volume Cambridge University Press collection of these letters was complete. Now an eighth volume of addenda has appeared, with hitherto unpublished material from more or less every period of the author’s life. Far from trivia, we find gems like this as early as page three: responding, in 1909, to a typescript of Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock, Ford Madox Ford, the first literary man to pay the author any attention, writes: ‘As you must probably be aware, the book, with its enormous prolixity of detail, sins against almost every canon of art as I conceive it.’13 But Madox Ford goes on to say that he believes Lawrence has great talents and a great future.
This ambivalent response to his work would soon become so familiar to Lawrence that he began to adopt it himself. Presenting his second novel, The Trespasser, to his publisher, he described it as ‘execrable bad art’. Nevertheless he was confident the editor would accept it. ‘Lawrence’, wrote his close friend (but also bitter enemy) the critic Middleton Murry, ‘gave up, deliberately, the pretence of being an artist … His aim was to discover authority, not to create art.’14
‘To discover authority’. What does Murry mean? No novelist has been both so highly praised and so frequently attacked as Lawrence; no literary reputation I can think of is so vast and so compromised. Two new critical introductions to his work, each excellent in its style and scope, The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence and The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence, both feel the need to include chapters on see-sawing critical reactions to the writer over the years. While he was alive his work was met with incomprehension, contempt, censorship and adoration. His ability to convey a sense of place, to have drama explode from the apparently mundane was undisputed. His candour was admirable if disquieting. But his conclusions, and the violence with which he insisted on them, the lecturing tone he assumes, were, to many, completely unacceptable. Immediately after his death, Middleton Murry wrote a book that dismissed his friend as a psychological cripple destroyed by mother love. Aldous Huxley then attacked Murry’s position as ‘a slug’s eye view’.15 T. S. Eliot joined the fray announcing that Lawrence might have been a good writer if only he had had a proper education. As it was, he displayed ‘an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking’.16
Eliot’s authority threatened to settle the quarrel, until F. R. Leavis declared Lawrence the finest and most ‘life-affirming’ novelist of the century. Only Lady Chatterley’s Lover was ‘false’, Leavis thought, and he declined to give evidence when the book’s publisher was tried under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960. Worse than false or obscene, according to Simone de Beauvoir, the novel was irretrievably the work of a male chauvinist. In her book Sexual Politics (1969) Kate Millet elaborated de Beauvoir’s position and condemned Lawrence as hysterically misogynist. Others ran to his defence. From this point on, the number of studies of Lawrence multiplied. Yet however important and brilliant he is considered, every critic has his or her reservations. The novelist Rebecca West, who compares Lawrence to Dante and St Augustine, nevertheless feels that Women in Love was a failure. The biographer Philip Callow greatly admires Women in Love but decides that St Mawr, which Leavis thought Lawrence’s best work, is no more than ‘an assault on the reader by plastering contrived symbolism over the tale with impatient crudeness.’17 Even the English novelist Geoff Dyer, who, in Out of Sheer Rage has written one of the most perceptive, idiosyncratic and affectionate accounts of a reader’s relationship with Lawrence, remarks that ‘some of Lawrence’s works would have benefited from thorough, careful revision.’18
From Madox Ford’s comment on the first typescript right down to the present day, what is remarkable is the critics’ assumption that they know what it means to create art and that their irritation on reading much of Lawrence indicates a shortcoming on his part, a refusal to be the artist. Yet rereading his work today one can’t help feeling that this embattled critical heritage was exactly what Lawrence wanted. Here after all was a man who would start writing spirited responses to the bad reviews he expected even before they appeared. ‘All truth’, he wrote, ‘– and real living is the only truth – has in it the elements of battle and repudiation.’19 A book, for Lawrence, marked the beginning of a fight. Art, in the sense of the tidy, the manageable, the mellifluous, was the bolt-hole of the weak-hearted.
In 1912, recently returned from death’s door, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, née Richthofen, the aristocratic, German-born wife of an English history professor and a mother of three. Six years older than Lawrence, Frieda was bored to death. Less than two months after their meeting, she and the writer ran off together to Germany, then Italy. ‘Can’t you feel how certainly I love you and how certainly we shall be married …’20 he wrote to her. She couldn’t quite, but Lawrence burnt her bridges for her by writing to her husband about the affair. Frieda lost custody of her children. To prove she was a free agent, she betrayed Lawrence immediately and openly. He hung on. So dramatic for both of them was the break with their past, with respectability, with financial common sense, that their relationship and eventual marriage had to be made into a myth to compensate for what both had lost. They were man and woman forged by sex into a couple against the world.
Before meeting Lawrence, Frieda had briefly been the lover of the unorthodox psychoanalyst Otto Gross. She introduced Lawrence to a new range of reading in modern psychology. Over the next five years, under her influence, he wrote his two most substantial novels, The Rainbow, an account of changing marital relations over three generations, marking a transition from traditional to modern mores, and Women in Love, which picks up the story of two of the young women in The Rainbow and brings it into contemporary times. While writing these books Lawrence was formulating the ideas which, with regular variations and volte-faces, would feed his work to the end. They can be crudely summarised thus: the traditional community in which man lived in close relation to the natural world is now for ever gone. The mental life has triumphed over the physical. Freud is the culmination of this disaster, reducing the unconscious as he does to an exclusively mental repository of dirty secrets and simply ignoring the life, conscious and unconscious, of the body.
With nothing natural remaining, society is now divided into the industrialised masses, ‘a poor blind, disconnected people with nothing but politics and bank holidays to satisfy the eternal human need of living in ritual adjustment to the cosmos’,21 and an intellectual elite whose exclusive interest is the cultivation of their arid personalities. ‘Now men are all separate little entities. While kindness is the glib order of the day … underneath this “kindness” we find a coldness of heart … Every man is a menace to every other man … Individualism has triumphed.’22
Lawrence, in short, was anticipating the thinking of those anthropologists (Louis Dumont, for example) who would see the passage from traditional to industrial society as a move to a situation where relationships would inevitably be characterised by conflict. With the old ordering of the world gone, the search was on for some new authority that might transcend mere individual willpower.
Writing in the grim years of World War One, contemplating wholesale slaughter across the Channel, suspected – thanks to his pacifism and his German wife – of being a spy, reduced to poverty, it wasn’t difficult for Lawrence to imagine that doomsday was at hand. A futuristic note began to creep into his work. Old codes of behaviour were irrelevant, or at best a weapon to use against those still gullible enough to respect them. Real authority was conspicuous by its absence. The opening of the novella The Fox (written, though not published, in 1918) is typical: two young women are sitting in their lonely house on the farm that inexplicably and without any experience they have decided to run. Comes a knock at the door. ‘Hello?’ Immediately one of the women picks up a gun: menace, conflict.
In the event, it is only a returning soldier who imagined that his grandfather still owned the place. The women are aware that according to the rules of years ago, the man ought to go and find a bed in the village. Instead they offer to put him up. The villagers will gossip, but who cares? After only a few days the soldier abruptly asks one of the women to marry him. The reader, like the woman, is disoriented by the lack of preamble. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’23 is the man’s constant refrain. There are no rules. He likens his stalking of the woman to his hunt for the fox that has been disturbing the farm animals. Even courtship is conflict.
If English society really was in the state Lawrence described, then of course it had to be saved, or destroyed. Lawrence wasn’t sure which. Saved by being destroyed perhaps. In any event something radical was required and where else could it start but with the one-to-one relationship? Here, sex was crucial. Sex was the single thing that might put man and woman, perhaps man and man too, in touch with the deeper forces of nature. It thus became necessary to narrate sexual encounters in candid detail, to follow the interplay between psychology and sensuality, the surrender, or refusal to surrender, of the frantic individual mind.
Very soon Lawrence began to reverse the biblical sense of the verb ‘to know’ in reference to sex. Rather than ‘knowing’ another, a positive sexual encounter became an ‘unknowing’, a shedding of self in oneness. The values he hated, Lawrence was aware, were encoded in the language. He would have to do battle with that too. ‘Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness’24 he says in Women in Love when one couple’s lovemaking has been nothing more than two wilful individuals rubbing against each other. ‘They could forget perfectly’25 he says of the effect of his preferred kind of sex. Standard syntax and lexical values are attacked, reversed, regenerated. Writing The Rainbow Lawrence declared that it was ‘a novel in a foreign language I don’t know very well.’26
But if the goal was ‘unknowing’, why engage in all this speculation? With Lawrence the intellect is always constructing its own defeat. ‘Don’t ever mind what I say’ he writes in 1913. ‘I’m a great bosher and full of fancies that interest me.’27 The novel, in so far as a story must be grounded in reality, open to incident and multiple interpretation, becomes the vehicle that will disarm his dogmatic theorising, a weapon against himself. ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale’28 he says.
On the other hand, Lawrence really did want to sort out the question of how a man and woman should behave once they had succeeded in shedding their personalities in sex; the problem being that the society around them was not a traditional one in which such relationships might flourish. What was needed then was a favourable micro-community. Again and again, in novels and life, Lawrence mooted the project of ‘a few men with honour and fearlessness’29 sailing the South Seas or working the land. Or, if that couldn’t be arranged – and it never could – he might at least have one male friendship based not on talk and opinions, but on a physical and permanent bond, something that would provide context for the marriage between man and woman. To bemused friends Lawrence proposed a Blutbrüderschaft, an eternal friendship that would survive complete frankness, assert stability despite conflict. But Lawrence’s frankness was notoriously brutal. ‘You are a dirty little worm’30 he wrote to Middleton Murry, perhaps the most serious candidate for blood brother. Not surprisingly, no one came on board.
Meantime, despite their sexual union, man and woman continued to hold different opinions. He would not be bullied, Lawrence yelled at Frieda. She would not be bullied either. They fought bitterly. Lawrence appreciated the comedy in this, the bathos of petty domestic wrangling after the mind-altering sensual experience, the high-flown rhetoric of social regeneration. ‘It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives’31 he decided. By the time he was writing Women in Love this was the rhythm of the novels: the genius lies not in any one scene, and certainly not in the overall form, but in the ‘flow and ebb’,32 the constant shifts of tone, biblical apocalypse, sitting-room knockabout.
In 1915 The Rainbow was banned for obscenity. ‘I curse my country with my soul and body’33 Lawrence announced. America, he decided, was the place for him. And he began to write Studies in Classic American Literature, a book of megalomaniac ambition which offers brilliant insights into, for example, Fennimore Cooper’s wish-fulfilment in fantasised friendships between white and native Americans, or, again, Hawthorne’s ambivalent presentation of moral purity in The Scarlet Letter.
Of course many critics have written perceptively on the literature of another nation without ever visiting it, but what is astonishing about the Studies is Lawrence’s aggressive confidence, already hinted at in the book’s provocative title (many at the time would have seen the collocation of ‘classic’ with ‘American’ as oxymoronic), that living as he then was in a remote Cornish village he could grasp not only the essence of this or that author, but the relationship between their writing and the whole dynamic of American history, in short what made these writers ‘classically’ American.
As always, the book’s style is characterised by Lawrence’s willingness to offend. Opening with a claim that the original American vision of freedom was nothing more than the escaped slave’s eagerness to be rid of a master, he gives us a paragraph that would not seem inappropriate to the present debate about the West’s right to impose democracy on every corner of the world:
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.34
In 1917, just when Lawrence had decided he must go to America to assist in turning this negative freedom of escape to the positive freedom of the ‘believing community’, the British authorities withdrew his passport. He was a possible German sympathiser. In the event it was 1919 before he was able to leave England, never to return except for brief visits.
At this point the writer’s story is picked up in the most attractive of recent Lawrence biographies, Philip Callow’s Body of Truth: D. H. Lawrence – The Nomadic Years, 1919–1930. Despite the rich detail, a pattern rapidly emerges. Always obliged to count the pennies, suffering from pneumonia, malaria, tuberculosis, Lawrence travels from Italy to Ceylon, to Australia, New Mexico and Mexico in search of communities still in touch with the natural world, still observing older hierarchies and accepting traditional authorities. Wherever they go, he and Frieda seek to establish that small benevolent group of like-minded folk that in some modern way might offer the vital sustenance for their marriage that Lawrence feels is unavailable in mechanised, industrial England.
As it turned out, the only thing that did not disappoint was the landscape, the flora and fauna. For however eager he was to be impressed by pre-modern communities, Lawrence’s unsentimental clear-sightedness never failed him. After long observation of the native Indian tribes of New Mexico, he concluded: ‘The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch … And we can understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death of our consciousness.’35 The impasse is dramatised in the story ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, where a dissatisfied American wife rides off to live with an Indian tribe, only to find herself drugged and sacrificed to native gods in a fertility rite.
In Mexico, meanwhile, so abject, as Lawrence saw it, was the fate of the indigenous people under an alien Christianity, that he wrote a novel describing the rise of a new, local religion that might give hope and positive freedom to the Mexicans. The Plumed Serpent mixes Lawrence’s flair for observation and description with a tone that is visionary, even apocalyptic. Depending on what one is after in Lawrence, this is the best or the worst of his books. Certainly it is the one where Murry’s claim that Lawrence’s real aim was ‘to discover authority’ makes most sense.
But the perplexity generated by the peoples he visited was as nothing to Lawrence’s puzzlement with the problems of forming an ideal community of his own. In Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence & Frieda von Richthofen, Michael Squires and his wife Lynn Talbot set out to offer a biography of the marriage. What emerges, though the authors never quite say as much, is Lawrence’s one truly massive blind spot in his personal life: while he and Frieda thought of themselves as building a beneficent micro-community, they were in fact seeking in the company of others the friction necessary for keeping their own relationship alive. Ever since Lawrence had taken his wife away from her first husband, their love always fed on the tension provided by a third and interested party. They almost never lived alone.
Middleton Murry and his wife Katherine Mansfield, the poet Witter Bynner, the painters Esther Andrews and Dorothy Brett and the journalist Mabel Dodge Sterne (later Luhan) were among scores of friends invited to live with or near the Lawrences. Obliged to witness the couple’s savage, often physically violent marital arguments, they soon found themselves taking sides, becoming confidants, combatants, in some cases even imagining themselves possible future partners of one or the other. But no sooner did a third party presume too much, than he or she was brutally dismissed. Very soon they would be reading unflattering descriptions of themselves in Lawrence’s next book. In response, many wrote their own accounts of the experience, all mixing venom, affection and incomprehension. Such was Lawrence’s utopia. As a publicity machine for his work, it was extremely effective.
Accused of clumsy repetition in the prose of Women in Love, Lawrence came up with the famous response that ‘every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to a culmination.’36 But this appeal to the artist’s mimetic function was actually something of an afterthought. Immediately prior to this and rather more belligerently, Lawrence defended his style thus: ‘The only answer is that it is natural to the author.’
So what was ‘natural’ to this author? Fighting. ‘Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage’37 Lawrence wrote. Critics take this to mean that he was eager to draw us into the mess of life intensely lived. This is true. But the most urgent scrimmage is between author and reader.
What kind of fight is it and where does it lead? In Women in Love, Birkin, the character who most resembles Lawrence, invites his friend Gerald to enter into a Blutbrüderschaft. Gerald refuses, but he does agree to wrestle, naked, with Birkin. Needless to say, it is Birkin who chooses the form of combat and teaches Gerald how to fight according to his rules. Gerald is physically stronger, but Birkin is subtle, with an iron will. Nobody wins. At the end both men are so exhausted they fall into a trance, ‘quite unconscious’,38 but with Birkin lying on top.
This is the experience Lawrence would like his readers to have at the end of his books. This is the purpose of that rhythmic, seductive, irritatingly repetitive style. It leads us to what can best be described as a catharsis of exhaustion. For the weariness of exhausted combatants is the only oneness, the only brief overcoming of conflict that Lawrence can imagine in the modern world. In her autobiography, Frieda wrote: ‘We fought our battles outright to the bitter end. Then there was peace, such peace.’39
In 1925 Lawrence suffered his first lung haemorrhage in Oaxaca, Mexico. In a fit of combative energy, between 1926 and 1928 he produced three different versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, proud that his last novel was guaranteed to prove a monumental scandal. Meantime, in a desperate effort to impose authority, he refused to admit that he had tuberculosis, as if belligerent denial could determine the truth. Shortly after his death Frieda and the relatives began to fight over the estate. Then there was a tussle over the future of his ashes. To avoid their being stolen Frieda had them set in cement in a little shrine in Taos. An image of the phoenix was placed on top. Lawrence would rise again from the critical conflagration that was about to begin. Art or no art, nothing, life had taught him, is more seductive than a fight.
Gardens and Graveyards
[Giorgio Bassani]
IN THE AUTUMN of 1943, 183 members of the Jewish community of Ferrara, a small town in the north-east of Italy, were rounded up, imprisoned and deported to concentration camps in Germany. Only one returned. This atrocity is the grim premise behind almost all of Giorgio Bassani’s narrative fiction. He was twenty-seven at the time and had grown up in that community.
Yet the Holocaust as such is never the subject of Bassani’s writing, nor is he interested in elaborating a personal denunciation of anti-Semitism or Fascism. There appears to be no political agenda driving his work nor any sensationalism. Rather, his aim is to have life, as he sees it, emerge within the frame of those special circumstances that prevailed in Italy, and in particular in his hometown of Ferrara, in the years of his adolescence and early adulthood.
And life, as Bassani sees it, is complex, rich, comic and very dangerous. Above all, individual psychology and group dynamics can never be neatly superimposed on the great ideological divides of the time. This is the source of the all-pervasive irony in his writing. In ‘A Plaque in Via Mazzini’, a short story that appeared in 1956, Bassani writes about that one Jewish deportee who did return to Ferrara from Nazi Germany. All his close family killed by Fascism and Nazism, his own health destroyed, Geo Josz nevertheless has only contempt for the anti-Fascist partisans who have taken over his lavish palazzo in the town centre, and very little time either for his optimistic Uncle Daniele with his hopes for world democracy and universal brotherhood. No, the only person whom the anguished Geo is eager to see on arriving home is his Uncle Geremia, a man whose business contacts and enthusiastic participation in the Fascist Party have allowed him to go on playing bridge with the local shopkeepers’ association right through the war. The fact is presented more as a mystery than a criticism. Geo, eventually, goes mad with grief.
The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, however, is first and foremost a love story and an achievement of a quite different order from anything else Bassani wrote. The action of this largely autobiographical Bildungsroman is set in the years immediately before the war and since we are told in the opening pages what the later fate of many of the characters will be, and in particular of the tragic end that awaits the story’s beautiful and elusive heroine, Micòl Finzi-Contini, the tension of the novel takes the form of a deepening enigma: how far, the reader is constantly obliged to wonder, is the strange and troubled relationship between the narrator and his beloved Micòl determined by the particular historical situation and how far by the perversities of the characters themselves? How far, that is – and this is the puzzle behind all great narrative fiction – is this unhappiness necessary?
The question would be banal if the boy and girl were called Capulet and Montague, if their families were at war, if there were an unbridgeable ideological divide between them. But though Ferrara is only some fifty miles south of Verona, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini is not another Romeo and Juliet. Bassani had written about lovers who must come to terms with both ethnic and class divisions in the story ‘A Stroll Before Dinner’, in which the celebrated Jewish doctor Elia Corcos (a historical figure of Ferrara, like so many of the characters in Bassani’s work) marries a nurse from a family of Catholic peasants. But that is a tale of prejudice successfully overcome, albeit at a price. Instead, in The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, both hero and heroine come from old Jewish families. The Race Laws of 1938 which forbade Jews and Christians from intermarrying would thus seem to make the eventual union of two Jews more, rather than less, ‘convenient’. And yet …
One of the curiosities of Bassani’s writing is that while deploring persecution he actually seems to relish the phenomenon of social division, that fizz of incomprehension that occurs when people of different cultures, backgrounds and pretensions are obliged to live side by side. Without division, after all, there would not be the frisson, for the younger generation, of mixing, the sexual lure across the cultural gap. So the first thing we learn about the Jewish community of Ferrara in the 1930s is that, despite its comprising only a few hundred souls, it is far from compact. On the contrary, it thrives on schism. The main synagogue is divided into a first floor following a German style of worship and a second following an Italian style, while a smaller and very secretive Levantine synagogue remains absolutely distinct. Curiously, awareness of these irrational divisions creates a deep complicity among the town’s Jews, whichever group they happen to belong to. They are privy to mysteries that the wider Italian community can never even begin to understand.
The psychology Bassani uncovers here is immediately relevant for anyone trying to get a grip on today’s multi-ethnic society: ‘It was futile’, the novel’s narrator tells us, ‘to attempt to instruct the others [the Gentiles that is], any of them … even those playmates infinitely more loved (at least in my case) than Jewish acquaintances, in a matter so private. Poor souls! In this regard you couldn’t think of them as anything better than simple plebs, forever condemned to irreparable abysses of ignorance, or rather – as even my father used to say, grinning benignly – “goy niggers”.’1 In this sense it is the Jewish community that excludes the others and not vice versa. Many of the Jewish characters in the novel nourish a superiority complex with regard to goys, a complex actually strengthened when (in 1938) serious persecution begins, if only because that persecution is so evidently brutal and stupid.
The young hero and heroine of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, however, are not only both Jewish but both attend the same synagogue. They are not divided by any sectarian schism. There is no obvious barrier to their relationship. All the same, the positions their families occupy within the Jewish community and with regard to wider Italian society suggest profoundly different attitudes to life, attitudes that will be recognisable in any era or social context.
The narrator of the novel and its main character is never named, but so closely does his biography and family resemble Bassani’s that critics have got into the habit of referring to him as B. B’s father, an optimist, an erstwhile doctor turned administrator of old family property, has always been eager to become part of modern Italy and wishes the same level of assimilation for his family and for the Jewish community as a whole. He thinks of himself simultaneously as a Jew and an Italian and trusts that he will not be obliged to choose between the two. This outlook seems admirable. B’s father is a man who gladly accepts social responsibility. He is president of the committee that maintains the local Jewish cemetery. Yet to participate fully in Italian public life in the 1930s means to become a member of the Fascist Party. In 1933, B’s father is delighted that ninety per cent of Ferrara’s Jews are card-carrying Fascists. And he is furious that Micòl’s father, Ermanno Finzi-Contini, refuses to join the party. When, to spare the rich reclusive man any possible bureaucratic tedium, a membership card is made up for him and taken to his house, the professor – for Ermanno Finzi-Contini is a cultured person, although he holds no university position – tears it up.
The reader will be tempted to side with this refusal to compromise, especially because, on every other occasion, Ermanno is such a gentle, mild-mannered person. Yet his gesture is not the result of a committed anti-Fascist, but part, rather, of a general instinct to isolate himself and his family, not only from wider Italian society, but from the Jewish community as well. So determinedly does he do this, that B’s father will paradoxically accuse the Finzi-Contini of anti-Semitism, this despite the fact that when the two families sit one behind the other at the synagogue it is evident that Ermanno Finzi-Contini speaks Hebrew and can repeat all the prayers of the liturgy, while the narrator’s more Italianised father can barely mutter a word.
The description of the Finzi-Contini family, at once entirely convincing and magnificently enigmatic, is one of the triumphs of Bassani’s literary career. On putting this novel down you feel you could reflect endlessly on the relationship of each family member to the others, on their many contradictions, and above all on what they might or might not represent. To be sure, you will reach no firm conclusions, but all the same the conviction grows that, with the Finzi-Contini, Bassani was seeking to get to grips with a very special product of the modern world, a phenomenon of far wider significance than the structure of society in Ferrara, or even the question of Jewish persecution.
Nevertheless, these people do have to be seen in context. On the annexation of the Papal States into a unified Italy in 1861, the obligation of Ferrara’s Jews to live segregated in the town’s ghetto was ended. To celebrate his newly won rights, Ermanno’s grandfather, Moise Finzi-Contini, a hugely rich man, bought out the property of an impoverished nobleman. The property was large: ten hectares on the edge of town protected by a high wall including a stately home in an advanced state of disrepair. Moise’s son Menotti, Ermanno’s father, rebuilt and extended the house and took his sophisticated wife to live there. Rather than moving out of the ghetto in order to get into Italian society, the Finzi-Contini have moved out of society altogether and begun to cultivate what B’s father sees as absurd pretensions to nobility. (The name Finzi-Contini in Italian might actually suggest ‘fake little counts’, though it should be said that Finzi is the name of a well known Jewish family.)
The Finzi-Contini vocation for isolation is consolidated in the next generation when Ermanno and his wife, Olga, lose their firstborn son, Guido, at six years old, to meningitis. (The doctor who diagnoses the incurable disease is none other than Dr Corcos of ‘A Stroll Before Dinner’, the man who married down into the most humble strata of Italian society.) Convinced that the death was brought about through contact with others, father and mother decide to have the two children born after Guido, Alberto and Micòl, educated at home and almost entirely segregated from the world. As a result, B will only ever see Micòl when she and her brother come, as private students, to take their annual state exams at school, or, more regularly, at the synagogue.
Bassani is a master of the dramatic set piece that carries, without ever seeming contrived, a profound significance. Week by week, in the synagogue, the young narrator is fascinated by the Finzi-Contini family sitting on the bench behind him. To control his son, B’s father waits for the rabbi to deliver the closing blessing, when each Jewish father drapes his prayer shawl over the heads of his whole family. He then forces his son under the shawl to stop his constant gazing at the family behind. But the shawl is so threadbare that the boy is able to peep through the holes. Charmed by the sound of Ermanno Finzi-Contini chanting the prayers in Hebrew, but with an upper-class Tuscan accent, B exchanges exciting glances with the Finzi-Contini children who seem to be inviting him to come in under their shawl.
So: the father who advocates mixing and assimilation tries in vain to stop his son from mixing with the family who have chosen isolation. Meantime, although the narrator’s family is clearly divided within itself, the son rebelling against the father, the Finzi-Contini, on the other hand and for all their social isolation, seem united in casting a spell over the young man, an aesthetic spell, made up of class and caste, beautiful language, beautiful gestures and a beautiful girl. It is a curious and disturbing characteristic of the Finzi-Contini that they never seem to disagree with each other and, with the exception of their attendance at the synagogue, are never to be seen outside the walls of their huge garden. Friends can be invited into that garden, but, for reasons we never quite understand, they can’t invite a Finzi-Contini to come out.
B’s first invitation into the garden comes on a hot summer day in his early teens. He has just heard that he has failed an exam and is cycling miserably and aimlessly about the town. Astride a high wall, the young Micòl calls to him, suggests he climb over into the garden via a series of footholds. She has placed a ladder on the inside. What do we know about Micòl? That she is blonde and bright-eyed, slim and tall, that her manner is always one of affectionate mockery and that she speaks in a peculiar sing-song, a private language almost, Finzi-Continesque, that she shares with her brother. She is playful, attractive. B is seduced, but scared. Of what? Of the high wall, he says. He would prefer to go into the garden through the main gate. But then the others would know, Micòl objects. At once the boy’s fear shifts to the girl’s sexuality. Segregated from the world, at one with her close-knit but exclusive family, any openness to others on Micòl’s part must be clandestine. What does she want from him? Is it that each member of the family needs occasional victims from outside to make their collective separateness possible? Nervous, the boy fusses over the problem of hiding his bicycle and the moment passes. Inside the garden, Perotti, the gatekeeper, the chauffeur, the butler almost, has spotted the girl on the wall. She must come down.
A word needs to be said here on the wonderfully comic and always sinister figure of Perotti. Employed, together with his wife and children, in the role of family retainer, this ageing factotum of peasant stock has invested even more in the Finzi-Continis’ supposed nobility than they have themselves. Officially a servant, he thus begins to function as a prison warder. Manically assiduous, he polishes the family’s ancient horse carriage, their old American car, their old American lift. If ever a Finzi-Contini shows any signs of slipping from the role of perfect aristocrat, Perotti will be there to prevent him or her from going too far. A strange hint of the gothic pervades the garden of the Finzi-Contini. It is all the more sinister for being a parodied gothic, a modern gothic, where the cloud hanging over the noble house has a terrible historical reality.
But what is there inside this huge, walled garden and why did Bassani make it the title and focus of his book? Having missed his chance, or escaped the trap perhaps, in his teens, B doesn’t get to see beyond the wall until he is in his early twenties. It is the autumn of 1938. The new Race Laws have led to the expulsion of all members of the Jewish community from Ferrara’s tennis club. Suddenly, both Alberto and Micòl Finzi-Contini are phoning the narrator to suggest that he could come to play tennis on the court in their garden. Arriving at the great gate to the property, B finds he is not alone. The family have invited half a dozen others. The story proper can begin.
But why this sudden generosity from the Finzi-Contini, demands B’s father? He senses danger for his son in this liaison. Why this unexpected openness? Various family members offer inadequate explanations: because we have a tennis court and you have nowhere to play; because the Race Laws have now placed all Jews in the same boat; there can no longer be any distinction between us. But there is distinction. It is always the narrator who visits the Finzi-Contini house, never vice versa. The attentive reader smells a rat. What is the reason, then, for this change of attitude?