The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence

Brenda Maddox
The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence (1994)
This was a library book I read twice and enjoyed so much that I ended up buying it when they had a clear out of old stock. More recently I've also read Jeffrey Meyers' biography of D.H. Lawrence - to which I felt well-disposed with all the critics having claimed this one to be the superior account, and having noticed that Brenda Maddox had also written biographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher - suggesting a bit of a production line. Having now read this one a third time, I conclude the comparison to Meyers' version isn't fair on either author; and The Married Man remains a nevertheless tremendous piece of work. It differs from Jeffrey Meyers' book in slightly shifting the focus from Lawrence's semi-autobiographical writings to his problematic marriage to Frieda Weekley, which Maddox views as essential to understanding his body of work. However, rather than being some cliched brilliant woman behind the mediocre but more successful man job, Maddox examines Lawrence through his relationships, which makes a lot of sense given their constituting the principal influence on what he wrote.

As a significant part of the equation, Frieda gets at least equal billing here, and thankfully with unflinching honesty. Whilst she was doubtless a force of nature, an inspiration, and ultimately essential to Lawrence's creative process, she was often extremely difficult to live with and, by her own admission, a general pain in the arse - not least in her refusal to be shackled by the convention of not shagging strangers whenever the opportunity arose, much to her husband's annoyance. Of course, he was himself an awkward, argumentative man who routinely alienated friends and acquaintances with bluntly unflattering portraits in his novels. Together, they seemed like a terrible combination, but at the same time it's difficult to imagine a couple better suited to one another, even with all the ranting, raving and dinner plates flying back and forth.

Of the two biographies, Jeffrey Meyers does a better job of communicating that there was more to both Dave and Frieda than just mayhem, and that there were often good reasons why they inspired such loyalty and such warm feelings among their friends - or at least among those they hadn't terminally pissed off. This one is probably marginally more thorough, and hence more depressing.

 

The Dr. Who Annual 1974

Edgar Hodges, Steve Livesey, Paul Crompton & others
The Dr. Who Annual 1974 (1973)
I am aware that nostalgia has informed a fair few of my recent reading choices, and here we are again. I was eight and I can still vividly remember tearing the wrapping from this one that Christmas morning; and of course I thought it was amazing, because television crossing over into the real world, or at least print, didn't seem that common at the time; and if you were obsessed with Who, as I was, there wasn't really much you could do about it when it wasn't actually on the box, aside from eating the choccy bars and impersonating various monsters in the playground. Inevitably my annuals went the way of all childish things, or at least some childish things, leaving me with just memories, and memories which have given me cause to wonder.

Had Listen - the Stars! been anything to do with John Brunner's novella of the same name, and was Menace of the Molags really just Childhood's End with the judicious insertion of Jon Pertwee?

Not quite, is probably the answer to both of those - not that it honestly matters either way - but I've very much enjoyed revisiting this thing, having nabbed a relatively cheap copy from eBay. That said, I'm not even sure I read any of the six text stories back when I was eight, although I definitely enjoyed looking at the pictures, and I read the comic strips over and over. That whole thing about how comic books get kids reading has often struck me as something of an overstatement, although it's doubtless true that it gets them to read more comic strips.

Naturally I found an online review of this annual wherein a man who has probably never had sexual intercourse sneers at stories lacking originality and our cover star repeatedly referred to as Doctor Who, concluding that the 1974 annual seems an unusually childish collection which is unlikely to appeal to mature older readers. Nevertheless, it worked for me when I was eight.

Now that I'm older and wiser, while I concede that it's a bit basic in places, its charm remains undiminished. I've no idea who wrote the stories beyond that it probably wasn't Arthur C. Clarke, but the art of Edgar Hodges and Steve Livesey is gorgeous - vivid and dynamic with just enough of an unsettling tone to match the telly version as it was at the time without giving anyone nightmares. The stories to which this wonderful art is pinned are, as I say, a little basic, mostly setting up weird encounters without quite knowing what to do with them. Old Father Saturn, for one example, introduces us to astronauts from one of the ringed planet's moons, newly revived from many millennia spent trapped in suspended animation at the bottom of our ocean. Unfortunately it turns out that they can't breath Earth's atmosphere, so they turn green and die, and that's the story; but as with most of what we have here, it pushes so many familiar Who buttons and pushes them so well that you don't really care about what shortcomings there may be. At least I didn't.

As with most annuals of the time, this one is padded with factual pieces, brain teasers, puzzles and the like, which is interesting because the spacey stuff and rocketry was offered with the then recent moon landing still very much lodged in the public imagination, and it's clear that readers of 1974 were committed to the idea of the future improving on the present, and that many of them would be living on Mars by the year 2000; and this breezy futurist optimism informs most of the stories too. The Dr. Who Annual was a product, a corporate tie-in, and a means of getting parents to cough up, but the 1974 edition nevertheless seems to have been a labour of some love and as such has more character than can be written off as only the glow of nostalgia.

Mornings in Mexico

D.H. Lawrence Mornings in Mexico (1927)
In which D.H. Loz indulges his penchant for observation, here in the form of travel writing, specifically a series of autobiographical pieces written presumably contemporaneous to The Plumed Serpent. Unfortunately, as with the novel, he demonstrates an infuriatingly perceptive understanding of how indigenous Mexican religion differs from Christianity whilst somehow simultaneously getting it completely fucking wrong, and getting it so wrong that you have to wonder if he actually had a conversation with anybody who wasn't serving him food or carrying his suitcase. Predictably enough, some Goodreads plum describes this garbage as a lovely little gem of a book meant to be read early on a summer morning on the porch with a cup of coffee at hand, having already opined that Lawrence describes the real Mexico - you know, the Mexico us chavs wouldn't understand. Poetic turns of phrase aside, I find this particular summary weird given that our man spends the first sixty pages metaphorically screaming egg and chips at bewildered Mexican waiters, then screaming it again, louder and slower until the dopey fuckers understand. Of course, they won't understand because they're too stupid, shiftless and uncivilised; apart from the few who get to be noble savages near the end of the book once we're back in New Mexico and among white people with the oogah-boogah dancing provided as entertainment rather than just as part of the daily routine.

I know the man suffered what with his lungs and his marriage to a committed monogamyphobe, but this one is miserable beyond description, and does Lawrence no favours given that the real Mexico isn't actually difficult to find.

Asimov's Science Fiction 429/430

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 429/430 (2011)
Finding myself merely whelmed by the previous issue I tackled, this one has come as a very pleasant surprise. It's another double issue so there was a lot to get through here - two novellas, a couple of novelettes, and six short stories - and although not everything pushed the right buttons for me, there was nothing annoying, or that I failed to enjoy on some level. Kit Reed's The Outside Event skates close to being a bit too self-conscious for its own good in occurring at a writers' retreat, but nevertheless gets away with it. I'm not sure if this is a first for me and the digests, but it might be.

Taking a more positive view than competent and not actually annoying, the two novellas are, in particular, exceptional. Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Stealth is space opera which actually bothers to tell a story rather than fixating on either technology or weird physics, and succeeds possibly by virtue of an atmosphere created through posing more questions than it answers. I still didn't really understand what the stealth was supposed to be by the time I finished, but it didn't seem to matter. Even more impressive, and possibly ranking as the best thing I've read in a digest, is Kij Johnson's The Man Who Bridged the Mist. As with Stealth, we're left to fill in a few unexplained gaps without any harm to the integrity of the story, and it may even be this wiggle room which leaves us with such a plausible sense of scale, and by extension reality. The story inhabits a society at late seventeenth century levels of technology, but the mist across which our man must create a suspension bridge suggests a world other than Earth without anything being clearly stated, and we should also take into account that this mostly agrarian society additionally treats the sexes as equal - so at least we know it's not fucking steampunk, and nor does it read like the work of someone in love with flywheels and top hats. As with Ursula LeGuin's writing - of which I am favourably reminded - a lot is said without very much seeming to happen; and so The Man Who Bridged the Mist is about progress, psychological as well as technological, its cost and how it leaves us changed.

 

'We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit—' Rasali said, as if starting a sentence, and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as if she were speaking to herself. 'The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort: tonight, do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry's headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things, right? A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer, because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I'm waiting until I know how I will be changed.'

It's not often a digest features a story of such depth that I'm moved to pick quotes in illustration of its theme, but there were a few which could have served just as well as the above. I'm sure there was a time when a contribution to Asimov's failing to include either robots or spacecraft would have brought in a tidal wave of grumbling, but as a discussion of the consequences of progress The Man Who Bridged the Mist is exactly the sort of thing they should be publishing.

...and while we're here both Eleanor Arnason's My Husband Steinn and A Hundred Hundred Daisies by Nancy Kress are of equivalent excellence, so that's three new names on the list from just one issue.

The Star Beast

Robert Heinlein The Star Beast (1954)
Having got back into the habit of picking up second hand Heinlein if there's something interestingly weird on the cover, I continue to be surprised at how many of them turn out to be juvies. I suppose there might be an argument that most science-fiction is for kids, but it's not an argument I'm interested in having, and at least when Heinlein was writing for the kiddies, he mostly managed to keep the stories free of wife-swapping and the like.

Anyway, I've generally enjoyed his children's books - the only major variance from his regular work usually being the presence of at least one plucky yet studious schoolboy busily having an adventure. This is an odd one in that it's thicker than usual - about one-hundred and twenty pages worth of story expanded to more than twice that length. The Star Beast is a family pet, a sort of eight-legged dinosaur which talks in a voice resembling that of a little girl. His name is Lummox - although he later turns out to be approximately female - seems about as intelligent as a talking canine sidekick in a cartoon, but then turns out to be a stranded representative of an extremely alien and advanced race whose intelligence is of such development that we don't even recognise it. Lummox also eats metal, and gets into trouble as quirky pets tend to do in this sort of story, and all of those pages which we probably didn't need are thus occupied with droning legal conversations about who owns Lummox, how we negotiate with his race, and so on and so forth. Thus something which might have translated fairly well into animated Disney - at least back in the day when Disney had some charm - becomes something of a route march through page after page of barely consequential yacking with so little descriptive seasoning that much of it may as well have been written as a movie script.

Well, whatever you may say about Heinlein, he writes well in lively sentences and is conspicuously capable of spinning a yarn; so it's easier to appreciate what The Star Beast does well than it is to dwell on a few incidences of droning.

The Plumed Serpent

D.H. Lawrence The Plumed Serpent (1926)
In January 1925, responding to an article about him which had appeared in the Milanese Corriere della Sera written by Carlo Linati, Lawrence wrote:

Do you think that books should be sort of toys, nicely built up of observations and sensations, all finished and complete? - I don't. To me, even Synge, whom I admire very much indeed, is a bit too rounded off and, as it were, put on the shelf to be looked at. I can't bear art that you can walk around and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd. People should either run for their lives, or come under the colours, or say how do you do? I hate the actor-and-the-audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering on to some mischief or merriment. That rather cheap seat in the gods where one sits with fellows like Anatole France and benignly looks down on the foibles, follies, and frenzies of so-called fellow-men, just annoys me. After all the world is not a stage - not to me; nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches - like a god with a twenty-lira ticket - and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. - That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and so superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. You need not complain that I don't subject the intensity of my vision - or whatever it is - to some vast and imposing rhythm - by which you mean, isolate it on a stage, so that you can look down on it like a god who has got a ticket to the show. I never will: and you will never have that satisfaction from me. Stick to Synge, Anatole France, Sophocles: they will never kick the footlights even. But whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else.

Dave was in Oaxaca, Mexico, writing The Plumed Serpent, a novel which resolutely refuses to deliver foibles, follies, or frenzies. It was the first Lawrence I read and I thought it was great, but then I was listening to quite a lot of Death In June at the time. I recalled it as being Lawrence's greatest, which was also claimed by its author; but we'll come back to that in a moment.

The Plumed Serpent is set in Mexico, in and around Mexico City in the twenties, with much of the detail drawn from Lawrence having stayed there and not really enjoyed it very much. It describes an uprising of the common man, a popular movement with martial overtones aiming to replace both church and state with the pre-Hispanic faith of Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and all of those guys; and because the aims of this movement come to full fruition near the end of the book - although blink and you'll miss it - it could probably be argued that The Plumed Serpent counts as alternate history if not actually science-fiction.

The first fifty or so pages are, I would argue, among Lawrence's greatest - and possibly also his most unpleasant - after which, we settle into three hundred or so pages of Kate Leslie having conversations about blood in a variety of different settings which may as well be the same place. Lawrence had developed a fairly complex philosophy utilising blood as a metaphor for either the human will or possibly a sort of Platonic ideal humanity from which we seem to have strayed - which is why the world is knackered - and The Plumed Serpent was his most intensely rendered expression of this philosophy to date, which I suspect may be why he regarded it as his greatest, being so close to the enterprise as to be unable to tell the difference between what he wanted it to do and what it actually did. In April, 1925 he wrote to Mollie Skinner:

I got my Quetzalcoatl novel done in Mexico: at a tremendous cost to myself. Feel I don't want ever to see it again. Loathe the thought of having to go over it and prune and correct, in typescript.

See! Even without raging malaria having struck him down as he finished the thing, I suspect he knew but had worked so hard on the fucking thing that he was never going to admit the existence of a gap between what he'd tried to write and what he'd actually written. What he'd actually written was, in part, a sort of plea for spiritual honesty, a suggestion that modern man might perhaps shut the fuck up and listen to the eternal truths of his blood; or as Cipriano puts it:

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

So here we have one-hundred-and seventy thousand words on the subject of trusting some instinct more primal than a bunch of men yapping on about nothing. I can forgive the endless frowning and the complete absence of humour, but the lack of self-awareness becomes overpowering.

That said, once we're past the astonishing opening chapters and have accustomed ourselves to the drone, flashes of observational brilliance occur with reasonable frequency - enough so to have kept me reading back in 1997; but very little of the vague philosophical model to which these observations refer connects with what happens in The Plumed Serpent in any meaningful way. Lawrence has essentially decorated his own philosophical aspirations with a few names and places for the sake of local colour, and without any reference to the composition or tradition of that local colour. His desire to hurl the Catholic establishment down the cathedral steps and bring in the lads with the feather headresses is more than a little ridiculous, being based on an assumption of Catholicism and indigenous Mexican belief being at odds with one another. The inconvenient reality which Lawrence either missed or chose to ignore is that, for the most part, Mexico accepted Catholicism on its own terms, and the further you venture from the city, the more difficult it is to identify where one ends and the other begins; so borrowing Mexico for the sake of revising the rise of the mystically inclined far right across Europe as a variation on his own ideas about our relation to the land and its people was always going to be a bit of a non-starter.

The Plumed Serpent has been accused of racism, which seems a little strong, but then it is condescending, and you should maybe ask Mexicans what they think rather than me. Lawrence certainly captures the raging distrust of anything different which white people sometimes experience when surrounded entirely by brown people, and sure - maybe this is the character of Kate Leslie rather than Lawrence himself, but I'm not convinced. The Plumed Serpent aims high, if nothing else, and aims high with approximately noble intentions, but what little it gets right is too easily eclipsed by one own goal after another whilst the manager jumps up and down on the sideline screaming about how this is actually his strategy, and it's working, and if you don't see that then you're an idiot.

Brave New World Revisited

Aldous Huxley Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Orwell's 1984 has frequently been cited as an instruction manual for the present with alarming frequency in recent times, but Huxley's Brave New World seems much closer to the mark with its totalitarian state reinforced by distraction and bullshit rather than brute force. We're living in a world where people have ceased caring about books rather than one in which they're banned, generally speaking.

Here Huxley revisits his Brave New World nearly three decades later to explain his way of thinking and take stock of whether or not he actually predicted anything, at least as of the late fifties, which he did; and were he around today I'd say he'd be ticking off even more boxes. By coincidence, I watched Jen Senko's The Brainwashing of My Dad a few nights ago, a 2015 documentary on the influence of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets which distort the truth or even flat out lie so as to encourage the sort of thinking which translates into money and power for its financial backers; and it was disconcerting to find many of the same arguments made in Brave New World Revisited which, it should be remembered, refers to a world wherein the dissemination of information occurred at a snail's pace compared to today.

Of course, Huxley - by his own admission - didn't manage to predict everything, and before any of the usual suspects feel like chiming in, I don't include his observations on population growth among his oversights. He foresaw it as a major problem, or a major contribution to the problems of life on this planet. Having expressed this view on a previous occasion, I was informed that population growth is not problem, and that the planet has sufficient resources for all of us, so the problem is in the distribution of the same; and in failing to realise this I was exactly like Hitler. I gather this assertion may or may not have derived from something suggested by Karl Marx. I have no strong opinion on Marx, but have grown sceptical of the accusation that to disagree with something he wrote is to agree with everything for which his opponents stand, particularly the ones in the uniforms who have a problem with Judaism. Whilst certain proposals as to what might be done about there being too many humans on our planet may indeed be termed fascist, the same cannot be said of the mere acknowledgement of it being a problem, or even just a potential problem. Diminishing every point with which you disagree as fascist suggests a reactionary devotion to an opposing ideology more than a nuanced understanding of the situation, whatever it may be, just as a pro-choice stance hardly renders one an advocate of eugenics.

So Huxley makes observations which some of us won't want to hear, now that we know fucking everything - not least that unlimited population growth isn't great and that some people, for whatever reason, are a bit thick - but he's essentially a humanist and this is a wonderful and methodically reasoned, if slightly depressing, argument.