‘I’ll learn Greek,’ she said. She had been eager to get back to her apartment but now she was desperate to leave. From my point of view six weeks on a Greek island, relatively speaking a cool Greek island, seemed a lovely prospect: the perfect time and the perfect place to begin my book on D. H. Lawrence. That’s what I’ll do, I said to myself, I’ll start my study of D. H. Lawrence in Alonissos. It was the perfect place. I had everything I needed except my edition of The Complete Poems which I had left with a friend in Paris. Not that it mattered: just before the British Council Library in Rome had closed for the summer I had taken out several volumes of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters and they would keep me going for a good while. I had a biography to check dates, copies of a few of the novels. . It was perfect. According to Hervé, Laura and I would have a room to ourselves where, in the mornings, I could begin writing my study of D. H. Lawrence. It was perfect. It would have been helpful to have had my edition of The Complete Poems with me but it was not indispensable to my beginning the study. The important thing was that I had this chunk of uninterrupted time with no distractions. I should have taken out Volume 4 of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters from the British Council Library, but Volumes 2 and 3, which I did get out, were certainly enough to be going on with. I was more concerned about not having my edition of The Complete Poems which, for my purposes, was probably the single most important book of Lawrence’s, without which I would be able to make only very limited progress on my study of Lawrence, such limited progress, in fact, that it would be scarcely worth starting. My copy of The Complete Poems was crammed with notes and annotations and without it I was probably better off relaxing on Alonissos, gathering my strength and marshalling my ideas on Lawrence rather than actually trying to write anything. Suddenly that book of poems which, until two weeks previously, had been by my side constantly for two months and which I hadn’t even opened in that time — hence the decision to leave it in a box at a friend’s house in Paris — seemed indispensable to any progress.
Fortunately a friend of that friend was flying from Paris to Rome and he agreed to pick up my copy. We met at the San Calisto, I bought him a coffee and he handed over the book. Simple as that. It was not just a good feeling, being reunited with my copy of The Complete Poems on the night before we were flying to Alonissos: it was an omen, a clear sign that I was meant to start my study of Lawrence that summer.
After retrieving The Complete Poems, Laura and I headed home to pack. With all the books by and about Lawrence my luggage was incredibly heavy. Not just inconveniently so but excess baggagely so. I took out a few books that I didn’t need, which I had only packed because they were thin — Mornings in Mexico, Apocalypse — but these were so light as to make no difference and I put them back in the bag I had just taken them out of. I looked at the copy of The Complete Poems and felt suddenly sure that if I took it to Alonissos it would lie unopened for six weeks just as it had lain unopened in Paris for two months; but if I didn’t take it to Alonissos I was equally sure that, once I was there, in Alonissos, I would decide that it was indispensable and that, without it, I would be unable even to start my book on Lawrence. If I take it I won’t need it; if I don’t take it I will not be able to get by without it, I said to myself as I packed and unpacked my bag, putting in my copy of The Complete Poems and taking it out again. After a while I decided to leave The Complete Poems and pack the Penguin edition of the Selected Poems but that was a ludicrous compromise since the defining characteristic of the Selected Poems was that it contained none of the poems I needed, the ‘Last Poems’, principally, ‘The Ship of Death’ in particular. It was a straight choice — either the immense bulk of The Complete Poems or nothing — and, once I recognised that the real issue had nothing to do with whether or not I would need to refer to The Complete Poems, a very simple one. The value of The Complete Poems was talismanic: if I had it with me I would be able to begin my book; if I didn’t have it with me then, even if I did not need to refer to it, I would keep thinking that I did and would be unable to begin my book about Lawrence. Put like that The Complete Poems was an essential part of my luggage. I had no choice but to bring it with me; whether I referred to it or not was entirely irrelevant. With that I put The Complete Poems on the top of the pile of essential books by and about Lawrence, pulled my rucksack’s cord sphincter as tight as possible, and propped it by the door, ready for our departure first thing in the morning.
In the morning, before setting off, I took out my copy of The Complete Poems and left for Greece without it.
Another good decision, as it turned out. I didn’t need The Complete Poems because once we were installed on Alonissos I had no impulse to begin my study of D. H. Lawrence anyway. It was not the availability or non-availability of books that was the problem, it was Alonissos itself. We always have this ideal image of being on an island but actually being on an island always turns out to be hellish. For what it is worth, Lawrence wasn’t too keen on islands either. ‘I don’t care for islands, especially very small ones,’ he decided on Île de Port Cros. A week later, as if, first time around, he had simply been trying out an opinion, and had now made up his mind, he announced, definitively: ‘I don’t like little islands.’
Me neither. All you can think of when you are on a small island is the impossibility of leaving when you want to, either because the island you are on is too big and you want to go to a smaller one or because the island is too small and you want to go to a bigger one. When we arrived at Alonissos on the Flying Dolphin the island seemed so beautiful that six weeks did not seem long enough to enjoy it to the full. Hervé’s house had a lovely large terrace with a perfect view of sea and sky, the kind of view you see in posters advertising holidays on idyllic Greek islands.
‘This is paradise,’ I said to Laura, sitting on the terrace, surrounded by sea and sky. ‘I wish we were going to be here for six months.’ Then, after a week, even a fortnight seemed intolerable. Except for looking at the brochure-blue sea and sky — which, after the first couple of days, we scarcely even noticed — there was nothing to do and for that reason it was impossible to get any work done. The best circumstances for writing, I realised within days of arriving on Alonissos, were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.
There was no use blaming my inability to get started on having left my copy of The Complete Poems in Rome because I had it beside me in Alonissos. Yes. At the last possible moment, with the taxi rumbling downstairs, I had dashed back up, retrieved my copy and lugged it all the way to Alonissos where, exactly as predicted, it lay unopened by our bed. Instead I found myself reading one of the books Hervé had brought along, a volume of Rilke’s letters.