In 1928 Lawrence replied excitedly to a letter from Jessie’s brother, David, declaring that ‘Whatever I forget I shall never forget the Haggs. . whatever else I am I am somewhere still the same Bert who rushed with such joy to the Haggs.’ A few months earlier, following a visit from his sister Emily, he had written: ‘I am not really “our Bert”. Come to that, I never was.’
I had often puzzled over the contradiction contained within these rival claims but as I stood in the drizzle, in the proximity of a place I had been unable to find, had not really looked for, it was obvious that they were both true, that they actually depended on each other for their truth. Taken on their own, individually, both would have been false; the truth lay in the contradiction.
On my next-to-last day in Algeria I travelled to the Roman ruins at Tipasa, fifty miles along the coast. As we began the long curve and haul out of the city, rain spotted the windshield. Difficult not to take the weather personally and on this day, when it was so important that the sun shined, I thought of Camus’s own return to Tipasa: ‘walking through the lonely and rain-soaked countryside’, trying to find the strength ‘which helps me to accept what exists once I have recognised that I cannot change it’. Not like me. I can’t accept anything, especially things I am powerless to change. The only things I can accept are those that I do have the power to change. This, I suppose, is the opposite of wisdom.
We drove through mountains and then out along a dull coast road. We passed half-finished buildings, the inverted roots of reinforcing rods sprouting from concrete columns: the opposite of ruins: a premonition of vile Furci. Then, ten minutes from Tipasa, the clouds were rinsed blue and the sky began to clear. Shadows cast by thin trees yawned and stretched themselves awake. That is the thing about autumn in Algiers: even when it is cloudy there is the promise of sun.
By the time I entered the ruins the sky was blue-gold, stretched taut over the crouched hump of the Chenoua mountains. The ruins were perched right on the edge of the sea: truncated columns, dusty blue-prints of the past. The sea was sea-coloured, the heat had a cold edge to it. I walked through the remnants of ancientness until, close to the cliffs, I came to a brown headstone, shoulder-high, two feet wide. On it, in thin letters, was scratched:
JE COMPRENDS ICI CE
QU’ON APPELLE GLOIRE
LE DROIT D’AIMER SANS
MESURE ALBERT CAMUS
The monument was erected by friends of Camus after his death. Since then his name had been vandalised. The weatherworn inscription from ‘Nuptials at Tipasa’ was already difficult to read. Thirty years from now the words will have been wiped clean by the sun and the sea that inspired them. There was a hollow boom of surf as if some massive object had been chucked into the sea. Waves surfed in on themselves. The horizon was a blue extinction of clouds.
If my trip had a goal then I had reached it. More than anything else it was Camus’s two essays evoking ‘the great free love of nature and the sea’ at Tipasa that made me come to Algeria. What I hadn’t realised then and only understood later, in Rome, was that there was another, self-interested motive for travelling to Algiers and Eastwood: I came to these places, to Camus’s and Lawrence’s places, like Tess to the D’Urbervilles: to claim kin with them, to be guided by them.
I drove back to Cheltenham, glad of the motorways that had ruined the countryside, glad of the car that smudged the air, back to my parents’ house on the semi-detached estate on the edge of town that had played its part in ruining the Cotswolds. I took a detour, past the house in Fairfield Walk where I was born, where my mother used to wait for me to return from school in that smoky room. Like Lawrence’s mother, she was proud of the fact that we had an end terrace. There had been a simple hierarchy of domestic architecture then: terrace, semi-, detached. We moved into a semi-detached house, partly, I think to consolidate my status as a grammar-school boy. Most of the people at grammar school lived in semis. Now the cramped terraced house is worth more than the semi we moved into as part of our move up in the world. These days we aspire to terraced housing. A few doors along from our old house a place was for sale. I had half a mind to call the estate agent: perhaps there would be some doomed fulfilment in ending up in the same street where I was born.
I also thought of knocking on the door of our old house, explaining that I was born there, that I lived there until I was eleven, and wanted to look around. I abandoned the idea as soon as I’d thought of it. Houses have no loyalty. We can live in a place ten years and within a fortnight of moving out it is as if we have never been there. It may still bear the scars of our occupancy, of our botched attempts at DIY, but it vacates itself of our memory as soon as the new people move their stuff in. We want houses to reciprocate our feelings of loss but, like the rectangle of unfaded paint where a favourite mirror once hung, they give us nothing to reflect upon. Often in films someone goes to a house where he once spent happier times and, slowly, the screen is filled with laughing. This convention works so powerfully precisely because, in life, it is not like that. It testifies to the strength of our longing: we want houses to be haunted. They never are.
When I last saw him my father said he was glad to leave our old house because of the view from the front-room window which was actually a view of nothing except other houses. When we were selling the house someone came to see it and said, looking out the window: ‘Not very pretty is it?’ It wasn’t. Better than the view from Walker Street as it now is, not a patch on the view Lawrence evoked — and nothing like the view from the window of Laura’s apartment where I sat looking through the notes I had made in Eastwood, where I am actually sitting, months later, writing this. What could be more lovely? A jumble of fifteenth-century buildings so close together that — Calvino has suggested — a bird might think that these roofs were the surface of the world, that the streets and alleys were canyons, cracks in the red-tiled crust of the earth. Sheets hung out to dry, pairs of jeans running on thin air. Balconies overflowing with plants. Just visible in the distance, the dome of Saint Peter’s. And over all of this, a sky of Camus-blue. .
When Laura came back from her assignment we spent our afternoons under that sky, sunbathing on the roof, and our evenings hanging out at the Calisto. I had a few articles to write, simple things, but time-consuming enough to make me lose what little momentum I had built up on my study of Lawrence. It was because these articles were so simple, in fact, that I stalled on the Lawrence book. What was the point flogging my guts out writing a study of Lawrence that no one would want to read when I could bang out articles that paid extremely well and took only a fraction of the effort? Especially since Lawrence himself felt the same way: ‘I feel I never want to write another book. What’s the good! I can eke out a living on stories and little articles, that don’t cost a tithe of the output a book costs. Why write novels any more!’ He expressed similar sentiments on numerous occasions; at one point he reckoned he was losing his ‘will to write altogether’, meaning, on this occasion, that he no longer even felt like writing letters. I was so heartened by this that my interest in writing about Lawrence revived to the extent that I started in on Rilke’s letters again. By now, I had persuaded myself, reading Rilke was part and parcel of working on my study of Lawrence. ‘Il faut travailler, rien que travailler.’ It was a shame, Rilke thought, that we had so many seductive memories of idleness; if only we had ‘work-memories’ then perhaps, without recourse to compulsion or discipline, it would be possible to find ‘natural contentment’ in work, in ‘that one thing which nothing else touches’. The worst thing, for Rilke, was that he had these two kinds of memory, both these impulses, in himself: a longing, on the one hand, to devote himself to art and, on the other, to set up a simple shop with ‘no thought for the morrow’. Laura’s version of this normal life was — and still is — to run a pensione. She had mentioned it in Taormina and several times since coming back she had talked about the pride she would take in keeping it clean. My version of this was to live in England and watch telly. The ideal situation for us both would have been to have watched a series about an Italian pensione on telly. Rilke did more or less the same thing, reconciling these impulses by making his vision of contentment the subject of a poem, ‘Evening Meal’. More broadly, this tension between life and work remained one of the dominant preoccupations of his life — and work. ‘Either happiness or art,’ he declared, struggling to assimilate the example of Rodin. ‘All the great men have let their lives get overgrown like an old path and have carried everything into their art. Their life is stunted like an organ they no longer use.’ Yeats offered the same choice: perfection of the man or the work.