My 1st reading experience where the prose gobsmacked me was Tropic of Cancer. Its confessional honesty such as when Miller admits to walking round Paris with a hardon made me laugh aloud and later that month in Paris I told my friend about that detail and he also laughed. We slept in a park all week and as I lay in this waterproof army sleeping bag I'd think but not have the courage to find a prostitute. Anyway. My 2nd reading experience where the prose gobsmacked me was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I related to it. I said to mate: This is my bible. And the 3rd reading experience where the prose gobsmacked me was Women in Love.
With the Lawrence novel, I couldn't relate really to the carnal stuff cos at that time I'd only had sex once. I related to the nature. His vision made my vision clearer as I walked around the North Warwickshire coal belt, full of rolling green fields, woods, country lanes banked with different flowers like fox gloves.
With the Lawrence novel, I couldn't relate really to the carnal stuff cos at that time I'd only had sex once. I related to the nature. His vision made my vision clearer as I walked around the North Warwickshire coal belt, full of rolling green fields, woods, country lanes banked with different flowers like fox gloves.
The year after reading Women in Love I lived for 6 months in Nottingham. DHL Country. Then on the internet a few years later I met an older woman who lived in Derbyshire, which is also DHL Country. We bonded over his work. I posted her I forget which novel of his. And eventually I visited her house for a weekend. I never saw her again though. She said DHL was a snake. And she called her black cat what is a tasteless or let's be almost precise: a racist name. So I ignored her. Then, I think 2 years later, with a girlfriend, we hired a car and went to see my dying mom and then drove up to Eastwood, DHL's birthplace. We visited his now museum of a home on a terraced street. In his old backyard I remember an iron draincover etched with his phoenix design that's on those orange Penguin Classics covers. I photographed it but the image is now lost on some old computer I threw in a dustbin. But anyway. My like of Lawrence waned. I found his style sloppy compared to Joyce's, who I'd read in the Budgeon book on JJ, how he, JJ spent all day arranging the same word order of a sentence. I admired that kind of madness. So we went to Dublin on a JJ pilgrimage, to Martello Tower. And like Leo Bloom, but not on the beach, I pulled my pud. It was on the top deck of an unpopulated tourist bus. My girlfriend encouraged me, I have to add. And at the time I wasn't thinking of Bloom. I just had the throb and wanted to cum, to have fun.
It's been this last 2 years that I have appreciated DHL again, cos his prose is alive. He had the fire. I just sat on the doorstep reading and here it is: The primitive flame of DHL.
The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in full sunshine . . . page 88 in Twilight in Italy, which just reminded me of looking at the stars outside Pisa while I took a long needed piss.
