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 checkin 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 to the task.
A middle-aged couple were banging on the window trying to attract the attention of an adolescent boy in the corridor. He was wearing a Gauguin T-shirt and was embarrassed by the way his parents were making a big fuss about his leaving, waving and mouthing things at him through the window. He was more relieved than any of us when the air-conditioning hummed into life and, a few minutes later, punctual to the second, the train nudged out of Termini. Between us and the sky, the network of overhead wires and cables was so extensive it seemed merely the first stage of a project to put a sun roof over the whole of Italy. An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs. Sheets and towels hung from every balcony. Washing hanging out to dry: that is the real national flag of Italy, emblem and proof of how the fabric of daily life endures.
Soon we were passing the truncated remains of an Ancient Roman viaduct; beyond that was a glimpse of the autostrada so that the essential trajectory of Roman history seemed a straight line, an unwavering determination to get somewhere else as quickly as possible. The mountains in the background were cut from the same cloth as the sky: a slightly darker shade, that was the only difference. Had we the capacity to analyse it there would almost certainly be a geology of the air as well as of rock.
The controllore came by, fining the young Gauguin because he had not stamped his ticket at the station: so that’s what his parents were making such a fuss about. A new ruling this: unstamped, a ticket was now valid for three months which meant that it was advantageous to avoid stamping your ticket — hence the heavy fine for omitting to do so. Everyone felt sorry for the boy and the controllore relented, fining him the smallest possible amount. A great debate ensued about the injustice of this new ruling. The controllore went on checking tickets while all around him the debate — which in no way excluded him: just because he was charged with implementing the new rule did not mean he had to relinquish his right to be an Italian: to join in — became more energetic in spite of the fact that essentially everyone was in agreement. New laws are always being passed but they alter almost nothing. Their real purpose is, precisely, to engender debate, to give the people of Italy a chance to express a lively opposition to the state so unanimous that it actually creates a supportive atmosphere of unity and national well-being. Everyone feels the state is fleecing them, treating them unfairly, so that feeling cheated by the state — and finding some small ways of cheating the state — turns out to be the cement that binds the nation together. In this way the state is sacrificed to the idea of the nation. That’s Italian history, in a nutshell