D.H. Lawrence - a Biography

Jeffrey Meyers D.H. Lawrence - a Biography (1990)
I picked this one up back in the late nineties during an unusually heavy D.H. Lawrence binge - which is a sentence you don't see every day - along with the biography by Brenda Maddox. I'd already read the Maddox version as a library book, but read it again because I'd enjoyed it and so somehow never got around to this one, having heard it wasn't anywhere near so good as The Married Man. Nosing around online would seem to yield the same opinion expressed many times over, specifically that Meyers didn't do anything like so good a job as Brenda Maddox. It's been a while since I read the Maddox biography but I'm no longer convinced. This one feels pretty fucking thorough to me, and I find it encouraging that Meyers' other biographies seem mostly to be of persons from Lawrence's circle, or at least approximately adjacent - Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad and so on, contrasting with Brenda Maddox having written biographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher; which isn't to say that The Married Man wasn't as great as I seem to remember, only that Jeffrey Meyers wasn't fucking around here.

As biographies go, this one is hardly what you'd call an easy option and becomes distinctly chewy in places. Meyers combines his account of Lawrence's life with a fairly extensive analysis of the autobiographical aspects of the man's writings, meaning there's a degree of zipping back and forth between actual events and the publication of Lawrence's vaguely allegorical reiterations. Progress is therefore occasionally slow, with discussion conducted at an almost archaeological pace, but the book rewards the reader's effort and at no point does it become a slog. In other words - and in response to the naysayers - if all you really want to know is which celebrities he used to hang out with or what his favourite colour was, this probably isn't the biography for you.

For the most part I've generally considered myself moderately knowledgeable regarding the life and works of our Dave - hardly an expert but blessed with at least some understanding of the guy. Meyers' biography has therefore been one hell of an eye opener and positively revelatory in places, not least in confirming hunches which I've felt were probably on the money without quite being able to say why - not least dispelling the notion that he was ever a fascist in any meaningful sense, as distinct from a man prone to expressing an occasionally caustic or otherwise uninformed opinion. It was obviously a fucking nightmare having Lawrence as a friend, but there were reasons for his extraordinarily abrasive personality, and it clearly wasn't all about the thunder clouds. Indeed, Meyers successfully communicates what a joy his companionship could be under the right circumstances and why D.H. inspired such loyalty and devotion. Part of my reason for reading this biography right now was so as to be better armed when tackling The Lost Girl - which is the next one on the Loz pile - and I'm very glad I did.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
I was approaching the point at which it had begun to feel almost embarrassing to admit I'd never read Lord of the Flies. I recall my mother owning a copy with a severed pig's head on the cover but it wasn't among those few titles half-heartedly shunted in our direction at school, and I never saw the movie either; so it seemed like time.

As I'm sure you all know, it's about a bunch of kids getting marooned on an island and acting like wankers - which I believe was actually Golding's original title. Published in 1954 and without bothering to check, it strikes me as likely that it may have been inspired by the populist politics which brought about the second world war, and more specifically how so many people fell hook, line and sinker for all that rabble-rousing tribal bullshit. Lord of the Flies also therefore works fairly well as a commentary upon our own times, and so much so that I'm surprised no point-missing edgelord twat has yet claimed it for a warning against the perils of socialism, as has happened with Orwell's 1984 on a couple of bewildering occasions. It does approximately the same thing as Conrad's Heart of Darkness - positing that we are all capable of acting like wankers - and has the sort of unambiguously direct impact which justifies its reputation as a classic.

All the same, I really didn't enjoy it like I thought I would. Golding's prose is mostly tight and functional with an occasional flourish of admittedly dark poetry, but unfortunately spattered with slightly clumsy passages which cause the narrative to stumble somewhat, such as when Ralph allows the swollen flap of his cheek to close his eye again at the beginning of chapter eleven. He's been in a fight, so I assume he's been punched in the face - although it isn't specifically mentioned so far as I can see - but a flap?

Simon was speaking almost in his ear. Ralph, found that he had rock painfully gripped in both hands, found his body arched, the muscles of his neck stiff, his mouth strained open.

'You'll get back to where you came from.'

Simon nodded as he spoke. He was kneeling on one knee, looking down from a higher rock, which he held with both hands; his other leg stretched down to Ralph's level.

'It's so big, I mean—'

Simon nodded.

What's so big? I can't even tell who has spoken, and although this particular game of Twister is occurring as the lads circumnavigate a cliff face, the activity is implied rather than stated; so from time to time the novel does that thing of omitting some vital piece of information from a sentence, disorientating readers by obliging us to figure it out; so it's a little like reading A.E. van Vogt in places, except Alfred Elton did it on purpose for the sake of atmosphere.

So it's good, and the reputation is probably deserved, but I thought it would be better somehow.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
Purchased back in simpler times when, gripped by a sudden realisation of my having a reading age of about twelve, I thought I'd give this a go because it was the novelisation of Apocalypse Now. You can probably see why I found it a bit chewy first time around.

To be fair to the younger version of myself who probably actually would have considered reading charity novelisations [facetious reference to drivel withheld], I knew Heart of Darkness wasn't the novelisation of Apocalypse Now, and even now that I'm marginally less stupid, I still find it a bit on the chewy side. This is probably down to the method of its telling, narrated to the author rather than by him as an anecdote of improbable length which forms a distinctly impressionist version of events dictated by meaning rather than any conventional sequence, so we flash back and forth - as doubtless would an oral account - examining characters before we've met them or even been told who they are as a sort of narrative cubism; but to settle for a definitive painterly analogy, Francisco Goya seems the closest fit with his sepulchral canvases where night and fog conceal the more tangible horrors.

Anyway, for anyone who still cares, despite having been transposed to Vietnam in the sixties, Coppola's adaptation retains almost all of the details which matter with surprising fidelity - even Dennis Hopper. Kurtz here is an ivory trader who has spent just a little too long gazing into the abyss and by whom Conrad's views on colonialism - amongst other evils - are given voice. Kurtz goes into the night, and then becomes the night which, to expand it beyond just the colonial aspect, seems to have been Conrad's view of the headlong rush of progress which gripped his milieu, not as a refutation of its supposed benefits, but representing its casualties from a fully humanist perspective - the minds, bodies, and even cultures sacrificed in our eagerness to embrace the new century.

Heart of Darkness has been dismissed as racist in certain quarters and its true that it reduces Africa to a dark continent of savage and unimaginable horrors, but in its defence, this is from a colonial perspective, and that's our subject here. The reduction of the Congo to something monstrous says more about the intruders than about the Congo itself, so I would argue that the racist flag might be better planted elsewhere, in something which actually commits racism rather than simply fails to cheer on the perceived victim with sufficient enthusiasm - Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lovecraft for example, neither of whom ever wrote anything approaching the depth of this novella.

It's chewy, but it's short, and your brain will thank you if you can make the effort.

Deathlok the Demolisher

Rich Buckler, Doug Moench & others Deathlok the Demolisher (1976)
Excluding English black and white reprints, the first American comics I can recall are Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, and the first issue of Phoenix from the short lived Atlas Comics, dating respectively from November 1973, May 1976, and January 1975. These turned up at some sort of jumble sale held at my school, Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, possibly on more than one occasion. I seem to recall the two Marvel comics being found together, but I'm not sure about Phoenix. Anyway, they were in colour with stories of filmic aspiration spread across a much higher page count than that to which I was accustomed. As science-fiction, they made The Whizzers from Space in the Topper seem slightly ridiculous. They made a huge impression.

Deathlok was a cyborg, and a surprisingly gruesome creation for Marvel, but this was the seventies and America was still trying to process the Vietnam war and the rise of its own counterculture; so Deathlok is a much darker spin on square-jawed Steve Austin. It wasn't quite a case of rebuilding him - seeing as he was actually killed and was therefore a stiff, but they augmented him with robotic parts, put a computer in his head, and reanimated the dead bits with preservative in the hope of slowing his deterioration. Most depressing of all is that having been revived, the computer prevents him from killing himself, leaving him no choice but to serve as a programmable assassin. You can see how it might have left him feeling a bit grumpy.

Deathlok the Demolisher was set in a post-apocalyptic America and is therefore approximately a mash-up of Shelley's Frankenstein, I Am Legend and its big screen reincarnation as The Omega Man, plus a whole load of countercultural ill-will. We're at some distance from truth, justice and the American way.

Deathlok is the warrior let down by his country, the soldier who becomes aware of his own place within an industrial process, and the parallels with those returned or otherwise from the Vietnam war are difficult to miss.

All the places Janice - my wife - and I went to when I was normal! All of it - gone. The restaurants, theaters, everything that was precious to me - gone.

So, as is probably obvious, the Deathlok of Astonishing Tales was one of those strips pitched beyond the traditional Marvel audience, more in the direction of your older brother with his prog rock albums and Farrah Fawcett posters. It was ponderous, vaguely cerebral, and not afraid to unsettle its readership - maybe not Crime and Punishment but certainly a few stages on from Superman's brightly coloured adventures; and most notably, much of issue #35 occurs within a computer generated reality - possibly not quite the first but substantially predating the popularisation of cyberspace by William Gibson and others, and even predating Tom Baker pottering around within the matrix in The Deadly Assassin later that same year.

The only problem with this version of Deathlok is that he exists mainly for the sake of his post-apocalyptic environment and what it said about the present, as was, so he doesn't actually have much to do beyond a series of ambiguous missions, betrayals, and ensuing pontification. Buckler, Moench and others seemingly realised this and tried to jazz the story up with increasingly implausible twists, but only end up muddling things. Deathlok the Demolisher only ever needed to be a hero journey, or rather an antihero journey, in the same way that Heart of Darkness is about the progress more than the destination. Instead we find Deathlok restored to full humanity in a clone of his original body, except the cyborg body remains sentient so that now we have two of them. Then some minor point of continuity demands that this cyborg is only a copy of Deathlok, who has actually been elsewhere all along, following up some mission or other.

They should have quit while they were ahead but inevitably they didn't, so Deathlok returns a couple of years later to have adventures with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, which works about as well as would Frank Miller's Dark Knight travelling back in time to hang out with sixties telly Batman. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making Spiderman better, you're just making Deathlok worse. There were ten good issues before it all turned to shit and contradiction, but those issues were mostly amazing, Keith Pollard notwithstanding, and arguably unlike anything Marvel published before or since. Sometimes, no matter how good your intention, you just can't bring them back.