Catherine Carswell applauded Lawrence for the way ‘he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did’. Accused, in his poem ‘The Life with a Hole’, of living up to the second half of Carswell’s claim — ‘you’ve always done what you want’ — Larkin grumbles that he has succeeded only in living down to the first: ‘what the old ratbags mean/ Is I’ve never done what I don’t’. For his part, Lawrence felt there had to be more to freedom than doing what one wanted — but how could one be free if one could not do as one wanted? He gnawed away at this constantly, resolving it by elevating the idea of what one wanted not just to a determining principle but to an obligation to one’s self. ‘Elevating’ is perhaps not the right word for this meant fathoming one’s deepest desires — and remaining faithful to them.
One of Lawrence’s most eloquent declarations of personal liberty is expressed in terms of a vehemently indifferent retort: ‘My wife and I have lived on 37 dollars a month before now: and always with sang froid. I doubt if I make more than 400 per annum now — and knock about Europe as I like, and spit in the face of anybody who tries to insult me.’ To take on the world like this is also to test oneself: that, for Lawrence, is the challenge of freedom.
‘The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself,’ he declared, and in the midst of this struggle a man gained a sense of his ‘his inner destiny’. In practice this meant a great deal of chopping and changing, deciding and undeciding — so much so that Lawrence’s own surges and reversals of intent sometimes left him mystified. ‘We had almost booked our passage to America, when suddenly it came over me I must go to Ceylon.’ On occasions doing what one wants actually means pursuing a course that, superficially, one has no wish to. By assenting to these decisions of his as if to an impersonal authority Lawrence gradually and tentatively began to have a sense of a destiny that could be followed only by being forged. The perpetual questions of where to go next, whether to stay or move on, become crucial stations in the itinerary of one’s destiny. In this light Lawrence’s wandering becomes purposeful, and the gap between resignation and active creation almost insignificant. ‘It is my destiny, to wander,’ he claimed on several occasions, resigning himself to the life he had actively created: ‘Really, why does one write! Or why does one write the things I write? I suppose it’s destiny, but on the whole, an unkind one.’
A destiny is not something that awaits us, it is something we have to achieve in the midst of innumerable circumstantial impediments and detours. A character in A Question of Geography by John Berger and Nella Bielski expresses this concisely:
Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility — which is like an aim, or, if you wish, almost like a law. The job of our lives is to become — day by day, year by year, more conscious of that aim so that it can at last be realised.
I would quibble with that ‘at last’: a destiny is not what is finally achieved but the act of incrementally nudging towards it. This reservation aside, Berger and Bielski express a manifesto of destiny. Precisely because of its manifold uncertainties and contradictions, Lawrence’s life shows what this involves on the most practical level imaginable: which buses to take, to where, for how long. .
‘Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow,’ wrote Rilke, ‘if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of our own growth.’ But it is quite possible that what one imagines to be the trail of one’s growth is actually the path of one’s diminution. It can be your destiny, in other words, not to live up to your destiny, to fall short of it, to end up in Dullford.
Needless to say I made no progress with my study of Lawrence after moving to Dullford: I was too busy DIYing. I went at it with a vengeance, painting so furiously that I even had a Kafkaesque dream: that my hands had been transformed into a pair of giant rollers.
I say I made no progress but, in the same way that Rilke wondered if our most idle days might not be our most productive, I wonder if these days spent DIYing might not have been crucial to my work on Lawrence. Lawrence as DIYer might yet turn out to be a major theme of this study. When my agent wrote to see if I was making any progress I simply copied out, by way of reply, a letter Lawrence sent to his publisher. ‘Naturally I don’t write when I slave building the house — my arms feel so heavy, like a navvy’s, though they look as thin as ever.’ My sentiments, my arms, exactly. The difference is that Lawrence was a great DIYer, perhaps the first great DIYer in English literature. ‘I have painted windowframes by the mile, doors by the acre, painted a chest of drawers till it turned into a bureau, and am not through by a long chalk.’ And not just painting. ‘Lawrence was always busy,’ Frieda’s third husband, Angelo Ravagli, remembered, ‘mostly doing housework.’ When he was not building sheds and cupboards, putting up shelves and repairing outhouses he was doing ‘the washing, cooking, floor-cleaning and everything’: making home, in short. Once again I am struck by unexpected felicity, by how appropriate it was that I should have been drawn to Ikea on my way to Eastwood: a prime example, it now seems, of the detour as straight line. Lawrence the prophet of sexual revolution means almost nothing to us, to me, today; what I love is Lawrence the handyman. The perfect photo of Lawrence, the one that best expresses what he means to us now, on the brink of the millennium, would be one showing him hammer in hand, building an Ikea kitchen at the ranch in New Mexico.
If only I liked doing things like that. I love the idea of home improvement but the reality of it is that I am hopeless at it, hate it in fact. The truth is that I have now been to Ikea. Laura and I drove to the one in west London and had an hour of intensive therapy with a kitchen-planning consultant who persuaded us that if we read the instructions carefully and were patient then we could build our own kitchen. Laura was dubious, I was eager, and so we lugged back our selection of flat-packs and got stuck into it the very next day. Two days later we had partially (mis)assembled one unit and our dream kitchen lay stacked up in the living room awaiting the arrival of professional fitters. It was an absurdly ambitious project and so we went for something easier: putting up a cork notice-board. All my life I had dreamed of owning a cork notice-board. For years, having a cork notice-board on which one pinned bills, postcards and concert tickets was the very symbol of a settled life. And when we moved to Dullford I bought one! Putting it up promised to be a simple business except nothing is simple in DIY: the drill went haywire and gouged a crater in the plaster. Already angry I moved a couple of inches to the left and made a neat hole that plunged — BANG! — straight into the electric cable. Complete blackout. Plus I had a terrible shock, namely that I didn’t get any kind of electric shock (some kind of insulation in the drill, I suppose) and, in this disoriented state of shocked unshockedness, took a screwdriver to the notice-board and slashed it to ribbons.
I blame my father. DIYing is all about measuring, checking and re-checking; it’s about patience and precision, and I have none because my father emphasised all these things to me at such an early age that he took all the fun out of DIYing. To put the fun back into it I go at it hammer and tongs and the results are disastrous and not much fun. And still I love the idea of it, love those cathedrals of our self-help era, the home improvement superstores, I mean, especially Do It All where the PR booms out updates on special discounts, each bulletin ending with the assurance that ‘Together We Can Do It All’. And it works, this home-owners’ call to prayer. You hear and you believe. You have faith. Only when you get back to the home you want to improve do you find that, alone, you can do nothing.