To listen to an audio recital of the poem, click here
The Anglo-Saxon world has come, in the last few years, to reject
Lawrence, even to despise him, mostly for the same reason that it spends so
much fatuous endeavour seeking someone else who can be held to have written
Shakespeare’s plays – the middle classes cannot bear the idea that someone from
the urban peasantry or the rural working class should rise to quite such
intellectual and artistic heights. They have to be put back in their place,
which is at the side entrance, by the tradesman’s door. But the simple fact is,
that in the entire annals of Anglo-Saxon creative thought, there are only two
men of true genius, and they are Shakespeare and Lawrence. The prophet is
always without honour in his native land. One day his detractors will
understand that they have something to expiate.
To Be Carved On His Tombstone
(for D. H. Lawrence)
There
was a pile of books on my bedroom floor,
old
books, second-hand books,
picked
up months before
at
bargain prices from a remainder store,
the
pages black with someone’s garbled notes,
some
failed A-level student
trying
to dissect
or
maybe, hopefully, to vivisect this density.
They
were dead things, even when they were first created,
black
tombstone fonts of words
laid
out in rows like cemeteries.
Some
piece of unoiled metal must have ground away for hours
in
the making of them,
metal
grinding over metal,
ink
blocks stamping like soldiers on the road to war,
making
curlicues on letters like the poppies
that
grow up on soldiers’ unmarked graves,
spitting
out scraps of half-price paper
on
which cheap ink’s already blurred,
wrapped
in only slightly thicker cover-paper,
still
not thick enough to shield it
from
the ravages of time and human hand,
someone’s
attempt to mine a profit
out
of the carbon of human personality.
But
dead.
Entirely
dead.
They
can’t help it, of course.
They
don’t mean to be,
but
books are dead things,
inanimate
objects that you fall asleep to,
time-fillers
on the unoiled metal train journeys
into
the dark tunnels of personal schedules and timetables,
the
vicissitudes of solitary crowded ticket queues,
the
landscapes of old battlefields and torn-down crosses
above
that other graveyard of the eternal book.
This
particular pile of books had entirely white covers,
most
of them torn or damaged,
a
cartoon penguin,
a
photograph of no particular relevance to the title,
the
author’s name,
the
title of the book,
and
on the back a blurb, a résumé,
a
photo of the author,
just
like every other book.
And
I found myself thinking again:
dead
words, black mortuary print.
An
emptiness.
But
these were not just any books.
These
were the complete works,
in
paperback,
of
D.H. Lawrence,
every
one of them from The White Peacock
through
his poems essays letters stories,
through
The Rainbow and Women In Love,
through
Lady Chatterley and the Phoenix,
all
the way to The Man Who Died
but
didn’t.
Twenty
three volumes at 60p a time,
or
take the whole lot for a tenner.
Never
in the whole history of literature
has
a man of such exuberance
poured
so much of himself,
so
much that is vital, intense and vigorous,
so
much passion for the joys of life,
for
the colours and the sounds and smells,
the
flowers and the love affairs,
the
snakes and the mountain lions,
the
ancient peoples and the modern peoples,
the
whole gamut of human growth
and
struggle and exasperation,
poured
it and poured himself
perfectly
coherent
even
when the consumption made him cough and splutter,
poured
it like printer’s ink into these white sepulchral volumes
piled
pyramidically upon my bedroom floor.
And
I wondered, trying to capture his voice,
what
he would have made of this,
and
I thought, he can’t have minded,
since
he give his life to making mausoleums such as these.
He
must have known.
He
must have understood.
That
human imagination does not lie in books,
nor
even in the words of books,
but
in the dialogue between the writer and the reader,
the
one inscribing the marble tombstone
so
the other can come by
and
dream
and
resurrect.
And
I understood in that moment that a dead book
is
not different from a dead human being
standing
on the football terrace
with
his life lived vicariously
through
someone’s else glories,
or
vomiting in a pub too drunk even to fantasise
a
night of passion with the woman opposite,
or
rummaging through the barren catacombs
of
some about-to-be-shut-down bookstore
for
someone else’s books,
for
someone else’s life.
And
so I picked up the first volume
and
began to read,
and
for the next several months continued reading
until
I had relived the complete works
that
I had first lived as a student of seventeen,
and
at the very last I re-read Frieda’s terrible biography
with
its gut-wrenching account of his final days,
a
dead book written about a dead man.
“Death
was there”, she said of him, “Lawrence was dead.
So
simple, so small a change
yet
so final, so staggering.
Death!”
Right
there, in mortuary ink
on
white sepulchral paper,
in
a book shaped like a tombstone,
row
upon dead row.
“There
had been the change,
he
belonged somewhere else now,
to
all the elements;
he
was the earth and sky,
but
no longer a living man.
Lawrence,
my Lorenzo,
who
had loved me and I him…
he
was dead…”
But
you were wrong, Frieda, wrong, wrong, wrong.
What
you were describing was not the negative
of
a man descending into death.
Rather
it was the heroic triumph of a demi-god,
ascending
abjectly into immortality.
"To Be Carved On His Tombstone" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
You can find David Prashker at:
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The Argaman Press
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