I believed again in my study of Lawrence, even suspected that it had been my destiny to go to Alonissos, read (a little) Rilke, crash the moped and discover this affinity with Lawrence. According to Huxley, who knew him well, Lawrence’s great responsiveness to the world came from the way his ‘existence was one long convalescence, it was as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life’. In one of the letters I had read on Alonissos, Rilke too, had written of ‘the long convalescence which is my life’. The four of us — Nietzsche, Rilke, Lawrence and I — were bound together by a shared convalescence. Before the crash in Alonissos I had made no progress on my study of Lawrence; now, in the euphoria of convalescence, I was raring to go. The problem was that, apart from the volumes of letters from the British Council Library, I had no books by Lawrence: I had left them all in Alonissos. Hervé had said he would post them on to us but who could say how long that would take? The post between Italy and England was terrible (Lawrence gnashed his teeth about it the whole time) so God alone knew what the post between Alonissos and Italy was like. For all I knew my books could take months to arrive.
This was a real stroke of luck. Because I was unable to consult the books I needed, because, without them, I was in no position to make any progress with my study, I took to leafing through my collection of photos of Lawrence. That’s when I realised I was more interested in photos of Lawrence than in the books he wrote.
‘Michelet wrote nothing about anyone without consulting as many portraits and engravings as he could.’ Imitating his subject’s habit, Roland Barthes obtained all available portraits of Michelet in the course of writing his book about him. Thinking specifically of Auden, Joseph Brodsky said that after reading a certain amount of work by a given writer we become curious to know what he or she looks like. In the case of Lawrence my curiosity had been satisfied before it was even awakened; likewise the Michelet — Barthes practice of accumulating pictures of one’s subject: this task had been carried out unsystematically, randomly, before I got down to the serious business of putting off writing my study of him. It was in Rome, while I was convalescing, leafing through photographs, that I realised that I actually had a collection of photographs of Lawrence. Over the years collecting photos of Lawrence had been one of my many little hobbies, the sum total of which gave me a sense of purpose that counteracted my usual purposelessness. In second-hand shops I was always sniffing around in the Lawrence section, primarily for a copy of the Penguin edition of Phoenix (long out of print) that I had been hunting down for many years, but also for any books with pictures of Lawrence. Whenever I came across a new book about Lawrence, even the kind of dismal academic criticism I would never have dreamed of reading, I flicked through it in case there were some photos I had not seen before, or, ideally, a photo which I had seen before, when I was seventeen, and which I had not seen since.
What I might do, it occurred to me in Rome, was prepare an album of these pictures, arrange them in a fashion that pleased me — interspersing them, when appropriate, with pictures of my family and myself — provide captions (lengthy ones, quite often) and then, late in the day, remove the pictures so that only the captions and the ghosts of photos remained. And not to stop there: to rearrange these captions so that they referred only occasionally to the photographs for which they had been intended, so that they existed, instead, in relation to each other — that, I thought to myself, might not only enable me to get started on my study but even prevent my falling into idleness and depression for a while.
The more I looked at my collection of Lawrence photographs, the more insistent became the feeling that I did not know what Lawrence looked like. The photographs posed exactly the question they proposed to answer: what did D. H. Lawrence look like? By all accounts his beard was red; in photographs it was black. Lawrence himself grumbled about this. ‘I hate photographs and things of myself, which are never me, and I wonder all the time who it can be. Look at this passport photograph I had taken two days ago, some sweet fellow with a black beard I haven’t got.’ Uncertainty regarding the appearance of Lawrence the man as he actually was is counterbalanced by an enduring, iconic image of Lawrence the writer. Hence that strange sense that the painted portraits of the true-to-life, red-bearded man — like the one by Jan Juta on the cover of the Penguin Selected Poems — did not look like D. H. Lawrence.
I’d bought that edition of poems — the one I had not taken to Alonissos and which, consequently, I had with me in Rome — in Blackwells when we were ‘doing’ Lawrence at college. I may have looked very different then but even in 1977, close on twenty years ago, it seems to me, I looked like myself. We all believe this: at every moment in our lives, we look like ourselves; others, whom we have not met, whom we know only through photographs, become fixed at certain intervals. We know them only as they appear in these photographs. As authors continue to publish books the jacket photos are usually updated every few years: a given photograph corresponds to a given book, or a certain phase of work. In the case of dead authors one or two pictures come to stand for the entire life: all of Scott Fitzgerald’s books were written by the fresh-faced, unsozzled Scottie; all of Henry James’s by the bald magister. The longer the life, the greater the output, the more intense the degree of photographic compression: a single photograph of Dickens is sufficient to accommodate thirty years and tens of thousands of pages of work. Such a photograph serves to consolidate — to embody — the idea of the writer whose death was announced in a famous essay of Barthes. Or, to put it in terms consistent with this notion, a photograph of a writer is not really a photograph of a person but an emblem — a colophon — of the works published under his or her name. Inevitably a considerable degree of distortion takes place when a single photograph represents a working life covering several decades.
David Herbert Lawrence began to look like D. H. Lawrence the writer when he grew his beard in the autumn of 1914. ‘I’ve been seedy, and I’ve grown a red beard,’ he wrote, ‘behind which I shall take as much cover henceforth as I can, like a creature under a bush.’ Lawrence may have wanted to hide behind his beard but in doing so he became permanently identified by it, revealed himself in hiding (‘I send a passport photograph of myself, but you’d know us anyhow — my beard’).
Lawrence without his beard was not D. H. Lawrence. In a picture taken for his twentieth birthday — ‘clean-shaven, bright young prig in a high collar like a curate’, as Lawrence himself put it, less than two months before his death, ‘guaranteed to counteract all the dark and sinister effect of all the newspaper photographs’ — he didn’t look like D. H. Lawrence: he looked like the man who would go on to become D. H. Lawrence. He looked properly like D. H. Lawrence only when, in the words of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, it was possible to discern in him the profile of his approaching death. The closer he came to dying the more he looked like D. H. Lawrence. A photograph taken at the Chalet Kesselmatte in 1928 showed him with his sister Emily. Her robustness emphasised his own emaciated, desiccated condition. His clothes hung on him, he was shrinking into them. There was almost no flesh to soften the contact between the bones of his legs and the wooden slats of the bench; the only padding was provided by the trousers which lay in folds around his thighs. The fabric, it seemed, was thicker than the man beneath it. He clutched the wrist of his right arm with his left hand, holding himself together. The face was drying out, like clay. A few months later, in February, writing to Emily from Vence, he harked back to the time of that photograph as if to a period of robust well-being: ‘I had to give in and come — Dr Morland insisted so hard, and I was losing weight so badly, week by week. I only weigh something over six stones — and even in the spring I was over seven, nearly eight.’