D.H. Lawrence - This Mortal Coil (1971)

 

My to be read pile has been dominated by D.H. Lawrence for much of the past year because I picked up a whole bunch of his during my first flourish of enthusiasm - back in the nineties, would you believe - then never got around to reading them, mainly because there were so many and very few with spaceships on the cover. Consequently, now that I've made some headway, excepting one fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel, my to be read pile is all D.H. Lawrence; and I'm now onto those published posthumously.

This Mortal Coil is short stories, only one of which I recall having read before, and in a few cases collected for the first time for all I know. Lawrence never wrote a formal autobiography, possibly because his writing was already strongly autobiographical, which This Mortal Coil illustrates with short stories quite clearly drawn from his life reproduced in chronological sequence - from his youth in Nottingham, to Europe, and finally to his deathbed. Lawrence seems to have been a little embarrassed by a couple of these examples (hence my doubts about their having been published more than once while he was alive) presumably due to their juvenile quality - conversely meaning the earlier efforts are fairly breezy, predating the heavy fog of emotional symbolism in which he enveloped the later works. Of these earlier efforts, Adolf is particularly delightful as an account of his pet rabbit - so named before even the first world war should anyone be wondering. Indeed, the stories I enjoyed most were those recording details in the domestic lives of mining families around the turn of the century, these being short but substantial and benefiting from the kind of focus which suggests, at least to me, a sort of written analogy to the paintings of Walter Sickert, or other Post-Impressionists as Lawrence's fixation with flowering plants begins to make its presence felt.

'Your foggy weather of symbolism, as usual,' he said.

'The fog is not of symbols,' she replied, in her metallic voice of displeasure. 'It may be symbols are candles in a fog.'

'I prefer my fog without candles. I'm the fog, eh? Then I'll blow out your candle, and you'll see me better. Your candles of speech, symbols and so forth, only lead you more wrong. I'm going to wander blind, and go by instinct, like a moth that flies and settles on the wooden box his mate is shut up in.'

'Isn't it an ignis fatuus you are flying after, at that rate?' she said.

I've quoted this passage because I enjoy how it describes what Dave was trying to do with both his writing and his life, at least in the later years, while simultaneously presenting a criticism of the same; and which additionally accounts for why the last three or four in the collection are perhaps a little too chewy for their own good, at least in comparison with Adolf, Rex, The Miner at Home and others. Nevertheless, in sheer stylistic scope this may be the broadest collection of Lawrence's short stories that I've read, and accordingly one of the most satisfying.

Justice League of America #228-261 (1987)

 

I gave up on comics at the age of fourteen, having discovered punk rock and decided that I was all grown-up. Specifically I started buying Sounds music paper on a weekly basis, which meant I could no longer afford to keep up with 2000AD comic, which, in any case, seemed to be treading water at the time. Five years later I made the acquaintance of Charlie Adlard and Garreth Roberts* while taking a fine art degree at Maidstone Art College. I was intrigued by the fact that both of them still read comic books, and even American comic books which seemed way beyond anything which could be excused by what turned out to be my first experience of nostalgia for something I'd enjoyed a few years earlier. Just when I thought I was out, as Al Pacino laments in the third Godfather movie, they pull me back in.

Anyway, just like junkies hoping to share their addiction, Garreth attempted to stem my uninformed guffaws by lending me a few things to read, notably the Frank Miller version of Batman, an issue of Micronauts, and Justice League of America #257, from which point on I was hooked, albeit not to those specific titles. The Dark Knight Returns impressed the shit out of me, and I was vaguely familiar with the Micronauts having once been obsessed with the toys, but the Justice League book was bewildering. I had no idea who any of the characters were, and the story, if it was a story, took place in a strange metaphysical landscape inside Zatanna's head - whoever she might be. I spent decades wondering what I'd read in that book, and curiosity eventually got the better of me - nearly forty years later - and what we have here is a complete run of the Justice League of America in their final incarnation before Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis hit the reset button, at least in publishing terms. The fact that this run of the comic seemingly remained almost universally reviled even years after its passing, combined with whatever the hell had happened in issue #257, appealed to my sense of mystery.

The point of the Justice League as I understood it from a distance, was to have Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all your faves in the same comic. Growing up in England and being therefore more familiar with Marvel, this didn't hold much appeal for me. I've since developed an appreciation for the DC aesthetic, when it's done right, which differs significantly from the legacy of Stan Lee, but for many years it seemed dated, stuffy, square, and lacking the dynamism of Marvel; and so my impression of the Justice League would be Superman and his pals up against a guy wearing a giant purple top hat with a question mark on the front who cackles and very much enjoys being the bad guy - more or less Enid Blyton in spandex. Without having read any of the comics, for better or worse, the form struck me as limited.

The comic book hadn't yet quite pow! grown up back in 1984, but I get the impression that DC at least wanted to move the Justice League on from confrontations with anyone wearing a question mark, and so Gerry Conway shook things up, replacing most of the team with characters no-one had heard of. Len Wein had done it with Marvel's X-Men ten years earlier, replacing the perky apple-polishing college freshmen with a menagerie of previously unknown sideshow attractions. If this didn't directly serve as inspiration for the revision of the JLA, it was at least a good argument for what rewards might be reaped from a thorough shake up. Accordingly I'd expected to notice a few more parallels with the X-revision in this run of the Justice League, but Vixen doesn't really have much in common with Wolverine, and Gypsy echoes Kitty Pryde only in being young, and the rest can be attributed to their both being superhero books.

We kick off with a war between Earth and Mars in #228, the stretched point of which is that it might have been a bit less of a clusterfuck had the absentee Superman found time in his busy schedule to lend a hand in punching their big green faces all the way back to their home planet. Therefore the Justice League, despite having won, has let everyone down and we all need to go back to the drawing board. With the League's orbital space station in ruins, they move into a disused factory complex in Detroit - actually a super technological secret headquarters - specifically in one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods. This is where we meet Vibe, a young streetwise Latino with powers of er… vibration, who enjoys breakdancing and probably even smokes whenever Chuck Patton is drawing someone else. We also meet Steel - an angry cyborg, Vixen - an African supermodel with animal powers, and Gypsy - who is never quite explained but just seems to show up. We also meet half the neighborhood, and thus get issues where - in the absence of anyone wearing a purple top hat with a question mark on the front - Steel hunts down some kids who nicked a packet of Toffos from Mr. Papagaulos' corner store while Vixen helps Old Mother Windom find a treasured spoon - a family heirloom - which she could have sworn was in the cabinet in the hallway. Of course, neither of these tales happened, or at least not on screen, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise from the letters pages of subsequent issues. I guess this was the point at which the ratio of regular kids to comic book obsessives reading these things switched, arguably for the worse, to the latter.

The letters were a mix of positive and negative - those enjoying the changes against those who had paid good money for tales of Earth's greatest heroes and now found it very interesting that the same were conspicuously absent from the book and would therefore like to speak with your supervisor - although a substantial minority of the angrier letters would also have liked to know why DC comics were suppressing the deluge of hate mail directed at Vibe, Vixen, Steel and Gypsy, pretending that it didn't exist when it definitely did and was in fact the biggest mountain of complaint in the history of moaning.

Did DC really owe these people yet another fucking title with Superman or Batman punching the purple top hat off that guy's head yet again, given that this was still happening in every other book they published? I don't know, but having read a couple of the earlier issues - and the occasional interlude issues of this run bringing the familiar faces back presumably for the sake of pacifying the worst of the fandom taliban - this version of the JLA was a lot more fun for my money, and a lot more engaging by virtue of the restoration of mystery in characters which could still surprise us. Sure, Vibe was corny as hell in places and Gypsy dressed like Cyndi Lauper, but this was a comic book, not Crime and Punishment, and these were arguably hypocritical objections coming from those demanding the restoration of a rigorously traditional flavour of corn. Was it not enough that they still had to fight an android named Amazo?

For what it my be worth, I'd say Gerry Conway, Chuck Patton, and particularly Luke McDonnell did a great job on this run of comics, keeping things interesting, moving everything along, and without resorting to crowd pleasing clichés; and by the time our guys have to save the world from a three-eyed Godlike alien named Despero, it really begins to feel as though the wrinkles have been ironed out and we've found our feet, and it was as good as anything you would have read in - off the top of my head - an X-Men comic of the time.

Yet it was not to be, which I assume came down to sales. Gerry Conway - who had really shown that he knew how to write this stuff - was suddenly and abruptly absent without even the customary letters page farewell, and J.M. DeMatteis was brought in to perform what felt like a wack job, albeit a poetically loquacious one. Vibe was killed fighting another android built by the guy who created Amazo - thus inadvertently foreshadowing Poochie from that episode of the Simpsons - then Steel was next, with the other two deciding to take long holidays elsewhere as the remaining cast did a huge boo hoo and pretended they couldn't hear the joyful hooting and hollering of the fandom taliban.

The next month's issue was the first of the revival by J.M De Matteis and Keith Giffen, which was great, and which somehow kept the wankers happy without inserting Superman into every other panel or pretending it was still 1956. It's an ill-wind that blows no good, but I still don't see that there was anything wrong with this version of the Justice League; and if there was an ill-wind, it was surely the crowing of a new, profoundly unpleasant generation of comic book fans celebrating the death of a character they didn't like because they'd never heard of him. If it's occurred to you that we can no longer have nice things, I'd say that's one reason why right there.

*: Not to be confused with the former author of Who stuff, as should be obvious from the unusual spelling. Garreth was one of my very best pals for the duration of those art college years, and I have no idea how we managed to lose touch, aside from that he was always a bit on the flaky side. Whenever Charlie and I get together, we always have the inevitable whatever happened to Garreth? conversation.

D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

 

As I said when writing about John Thomas and Lady Jane, the previous draft of Lady Chatterley, I had the wrong idea about Lawrence's final book, having read somewhere that it had been written in anger with Dave, somewhat weary of his novels being described as pornography, deciding to give his critics an extended letter to Fiesta as a sort of fuck you. This may even have come from Lawrence's own letters, in which case he was clearly joking. As we all know, the book was subject to charges of obscenity, which - as I now appreciate - says plenty about the mid-twentieth century and not very much about Lady Chatterley's Lover. Where Lawrence made use of medical terminology such as fuck, cunt, shit, and arse, it appears in short agricultural bursts limited to a few moments of conversation, then back to the kind of language of which my wife's aunt would approve for the next three chapters. That said, there's a whole lot of nobbing going on, most of which is described in Lawrence's usual terms, mapped by means of emotions, symbols of the same, plenty of stuff about flowers - notably woven into pubes at one point - but it really isn't about the sex, or at least it's about a whole lot more than just the sex.

All the while he spoke he exquisitely stroked the rounded tail, till it seemed as if a slippery sort of fire came from it into his hands. And his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire.

'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'

I've a feeling that may have been the passage (no pun intended) which made everyone angry. I'm sure there's been a bongo magazine called Secret Openings at some point but I doubt it could have been easy to find at your local WHSmith.

Anyway, to get to the point, Lady Chatterley's Lover is more or less the same novel as John Thomas and Lady Jane. The same encounters involve the same people, albeit with minor variations, but the emphasis is much expanded. Lawrence was approaching the end of his life to the point of his existence having become defined almost entirely by its termination. Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality, as Clifford writes in a letter. Where the previous version was concerned with class, the relationships between men and women, and the law of diminishing social returns - as were most of his novels - Lady Chatterley imagines a world without the author, that which was to come after his passing and how much worse it would be.

They don't like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing coal, where men always did it before. And they say it's wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there'll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it'll be all machines.

In places, it's the closest Lawrence came to writing science-fiction - which is admittedly not conspicuously close. Brave New World was still four years away, but it seems likely that he'd been discussing some of his concerns with Aldous Huxley.

'I do think sufficient civilisation ought to eliminate a lot of the physical disabilities,' said Clifford. 'All the love-business for example, it might just as well go. I suppose it would if we could breed babies in bottles.'

As with John Thomas and Lady Jane, it's written with a clarity and sense of focus which he seemingly developed during those last five or so years. His arguments are clear without sacrificing the poetry to the kind of pedantic analysis he despised, which is why this novel gets away with doing so much, even breaking new ground for Lawrence; which is why its reputation is so well deserved - here referring to the literary achievement rather than its potential as erotic testimony.

Yet for all its qualities, I still prefer John Thomas and Lady Jane, which is more typical of what Lawrence did, but arguably nails it like no previous book, possibly excepting Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow - neither of which have anything like the concision. Additionally, this retelling closes with a number of letters exchanged between the main characters, which feels a little hurried. Nevertheless, as yet another account of why everything used to be better than it is now - or was in 1928 - it remains difficult to disagree with Lawrence's main objections, and hard to fault his foresight.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Ralph Blum - Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974)

Where vintage UFO literature is concerned, I tend to prefer the weirdly implausible to droning lists of moving lights seen in the sky which, while doubtless unnerving for those who saw them, don't necessarily make for interesting reading. So I'll make exceptions to my preference for the writing of John Keel or Brad Steiger where the author actually claims to have been taken to Venus, but that's about it. Until now, for this was recommended by a person on facebook as dealing extensively with the Pascagoula encounter wherein an angler found himself forcibly interviewed by things which looked like this:

Happily for me, it turns out that Ralph Blum was a legitimate journalist before he was a believer, who came to this subject having been commissioned to write about flying saucers for Cosmopolitan, of all things. So beyond the obligatory cover reference to von Däniken - and its use of the font which launched Eric's shabby efforts - we have a well-written, beautifully argued, and entirely sober account of what happened to Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, extending into a much broader examination of the saucer phenomenon and what it meant in 1974. Blum doesn't bother with any of the overly defensive stuff about how so-called scientists will mock, or - on the other hand - dismissing everything as having been Venus seen through swamp gas; and so we have an account and its analysis which seems very much consistent with present times, given that the US Air Force can no longer be bothered to pretend it ain't happening. The tone is closer to that of political biography than to that of most UFO literature, making allowances for sake of argument and taking the rest from there yet without going full Brad Steiger. I'm inclined to wonder whether a few more of those published taking this approach might have brought about the thawing of officialdom a few years ahead of schedule.

D.H. Lawrence - Selected Essays (1950)

 

This feels a little more stimulating after the above undifferentiated adventure porridge*, and although Lawrence was known to produce his own porridge from time to time, it was mostly in the novels and short stories. We seem to be on safe ground with the essays given that he didn't have to keep referring to his characters or describing a flower halfway through some already rambling discourse. What has struck me most from this collection is that, as Lawrence himself cheerily admits, we're a long way from the essay as practiced by Huxley, Orwell and others. The difference is, as Lawrence himself acknowledges, that his arguments are intuitive, developing organically and drawing on experience rather than theory, so his writing often has as much or more in common with painting than with the work of an essayist who might set out some idea and then go about presenting evidence in its favour. This approach additionally allows for some wiggle room in the possibility that Lawrence knows he may have it arse backwards.

From a London editor and a friend (soi-disant): Perhaps you would understand other people better if you did not think that you were always right. How one learns things about oneself! Or is it really about the other person? I always find that my critics, pretending to criticise me, are analysing themselves. My own private opinion is that I have been, as far as people go, almost every time wrong!

With this in mind, the bombast becomes a little more palatable, should you need it to be. Lawrence tackles more or less everything he's tackled in a novel, but here in much snappier form; and even where I might disagree, I don't see that he gets much wrong, and a lot of it is air-punchingly on point. He writes about class, modernisation, human relationships, art, writing, painting, religion, America, Germany, England and all that we're getting wrong in terms which apply as well today as I presume they did in the previous twenties.

In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part of all existence and of all being. It is not something to lament over, nor something to try to reform.

If you've ever wondered where the man was coming from, then you won't find it spelled out with much greater clarity than here.

*: Who shite, the review of which you'll have to wait for the book if you care that much. I've given up posting reviews of that sort of thing here because it attracts the attention of the sort of person whom I would customarily cross the road to avoid.

Harlan Ellison (editor) - Dangerous Visions (1967)

 

Can there really be anyone wondering why I picked up this collection when I saw it, excepting I suppose those who haven't heard of it? I honestly don't want to think about the kind of person who hasn't heard of this collection or who doesn't know what it was, but anyway, Dangerous Visions was the one that changed everything, according to both Harlan Ellison and its subsequent reputation.

It's an anthology of short stories specifically commissioned for the collection, with nothing reprinted from any previous appearance in one of the digests - as was common practice at the time. Ellison was after the sort of material that might be too weird or edgy for Analog, Galaxy, and the rest, with the intention of bringing readers the cutting edge of science-fiction as it was deemed to be at the time - a parallel and complement to England's new wave showcasing how the genre had begun to vibe with the counterculture, so to speak.

So there's some good stuff here, and some great stuff, and at least a couple of masterpieces; but even with some of the contributions being so short - even shorter than Ellison's lengthy introductions in a couple of cases - five hundred pages is a lot. Dangerous Visions isn't a casual undertaking, and while it may be that one is expected merely to dip in every once in a while, that isn't how I read, and I'm sure it's significant that I drew greater pleasure from the first half of the book with honourable mentions warranted by Dick's Faith of Our Fathers and Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage - even though I had to tackle that one twice before it made sense. Unfortunately, beyond these, there's such quantity here that I haven't retained much beyond a general impression of enjoying most of it, excepting Keith Laumer's Test to Destruction. Ellison's introduction to this one laments Laumer being known mainly for Retief the space detective - adventure yarns which he churned out to pay the bills and which aren't a patch on his lesser known serious work; and lucky for us, Test to Destruction is a fine example of his serious work, even though it's a suspense-filled thriller about space espionage. I gave up after a couple of pages so it may blossom into a masterpiece beyond that point for all I know. Test to Destruction is followed by Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels and Samuel R. Delaney's Aye, and Gomorrah… so I got to those a bit quicker, which was nice; particularly as I hated the previous thing I tried to read by Delany.

I suppose these visions were dangerous at the time, given the percentage of the American population who believed that the Beatles represented Communism. If they seem less obviously dangerous in 2024, they have nevertheless mostly retained a certain spiky quality and have as such aged well.

Norman Spinrad - Child of Fortune (1975)

 

It's a good job I try to avoid judging books by their covers because the cover of this one may be the worst I've ever seen - so bad it could be something by Douglas Adams. Thankfully I judge Child of Fortune by its author and so picked it up on the grounds of Bug Jack Barron having been exceptional. Child of Fortune probably isn't quite so stellar but is clearly the work of the same guy, thus presenting what may be the widest ever gulf between the greatness of a novel and the shittiness of its cover in publishing history. I see this cover and the only questions I have are 1) why? and 2) what happened to her legwarmers? Glowing praise from Timothy Leary just inside the front cover doesn't seem like much of a recommendation either, but let us have no further distraction.

Child of Fortune squares with Spinrad's observation that science-fiction as a genre could use some futures in which we're better than we are in the present day rather than worse, although his idea of what might constitute better is rooted in sixties counterculture for what that may be worth. It's the tale of a young woman going off on a voyage of self-discovery equivalent to the medieval wanderjahre, hippy pilgrimage, Native American visionquest, or Elizabeth Gilbert going to India to find herself. Being rooted in sixties counterculture, this entails quite a lot of sex and drugs, with the former being of the tantric variety, naturally. On the face of it, this isn't my sort of book at all, and yet excepting that it's possibly about fifty pages too long, I enjoyed it greatly. Child of Fortune is written in a locquacious and ornate prose which never quite overdoes itself so much as to challenge the attention span. With the spacefaring interplanetary setting and the societies encountered by our girl, it actually put me in mind of Peter F. Hamilton but with the influence of Cordwainer Smith supplanting the Jeremy Clarkson factor, so it's a ripping read even given the hallucinogenic pace, overload of images, and endless succession of people off their tits on some futuristic high.

It's about the evolution of its initially naive main character, but Child of Fortune works because it's also an allegory for the death of the dream of sixties counterculture - or at least what became of that dream if you prefer. For all the pleasure taken in a libertine pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, Spinrad never gets entirely swept up in the drippy evangelism of your Terrance McKenna types, presenting an evenly balanced view of the pseudo-spiritual realm it inhabits which, taking an objective stance, offers a significantly more positive statement about what happened in the sixties than anyone mooing amaaaaaaazing with their head stuck inside a bong ever managed.

I gather critics of the day hated this one, but frankly they can fuck off. It's funny, genuinely weird, beautifully written, strangely gripping, and is sort of about everything if you look at it from a certain angle.